Part of the ongoing Archival Access and Collective Memory series, The Communion of Jazz is a profound sonic and intellectual dialogue exploring the role of jazz not just as music, but as memory, archive, and resistance.

This session, presented in collaboration with ILAM (International Library of African Music), is a space where sound becomes story and intergenerational reflection becomes action. The centerpiece of this gathering is a conversation with Mlungisi Gegana, a maestro and pioneer in South African jazz, whose decades of experience embody both the brilliance and burden of Black musical history.

Alongside younger musicians and cultural thinkers, the discussion will explore how jazz—as an improvisational, ancestral, and liberatory form—holds space for African narratives that have long been misrepresented, silenced, or erased.

From sonic inheritance to cultural reclamation, The Communion of Jazz invites us to consider how lived experience and archived sound come together to shape not only how we remember, but how we imagine new futures. This is a space of reflection, reverence, and rhythm. A communion of memory and meaning.

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