Paper short abstract:

The paper uses East London jazz musician Eric Nomvete's Pondo Blues together with the International Library of African Music archive of 'indigenous' recording Ndinovalo ndinomingi mingi to consider the limitations of thinking with rural and urban dichotomies when it comes to music and sound.

Paper long abstract:

The International Library of African Music one of the oldest established music archives frames the kinds of sounds and the ways in which we think about what Indigenous music is. In this paper I use a Jazz song Pondo blues/Ndinovalo Ndinomingimingi by Eric Nomvete and a recording of Ndinovalo Ndinomingi a traditional rendition found at ILAM to suggest a possible way out of limited frames of indigenous as rural and jazz as urban. I suggest that the urban/rural dichotomies are problematic when it comes to thinking about sound and music as being fluid . It also points to the limitation of archive as repository in capturing those fluidities and nuances and helps us to t of the archive as think with the notion of archive as a song.