I have extraordinarily vivid memories of hearing South African musicians Sathima Bea Benjamin and Abdullah Ibrahim in two specific live performances in the United States. The first occasion was the JVC Jazz Festival in New York City in c. 1990. Abdullah performed a solo piano concert in the Weill Recital Room at Carnegie Hall. The second was a performance by Sathima at the Kennedy Center's Women in Jazz series held in Washington DC more than a decade later. Neither occasion was the first or only time I heard the couple perform. Nevertheless, these two events stand out in my memory for the profound way in which the sounds emanating from the grand piano, and those carried by the human voice, evoked a full-bodied, multi-sensory response in me. In the first moment, it seemed as if I could see, smell, feel, and hear the Bo-Kaap district of central Cape Town. The second moment elicited a deep sense of longing, an aching in my body for the space called ‘Africa’ that Sathima sang about. These utterances were musical echoes in diaspora, and probably I had been away from South Africa far too long.

Though I was born in Cape Town, and spent my childhood in South Africa, what I heard in those moments were not the actual memories of sounds and places I had experienced earlier in my life. Rather, these were poetic invocations expressed out of a longing to return home that I felt in the music of the two South Africans. In each performance the voice and instrumental sounds made contact with me as an audience member, acoustically generating images of faraway places for a fellow South African in America.