This second edition of Marabi Nights is a collation of Christopher Ballantine's earlier writings on the social history of South African jazz from the 1920s to the 1950s. Accompanied by a CD of 25 representative tracks digitally re-mastered from old 78 rpm shellac records, it also includes an appendix that comments on these recorded selections, and a brief afterword that appraises the state of South African jazz in the early twenty-first century.

Ballantine's decision in the 1980s to research the early history of South African jazz was motivated by a paradox. Excited by Eric Hobsbawm's description of South Africa as ‘probably … the most flourishing centre of creative jazz outside America’ (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm2014 [1959], p. 37), Ballantine was dismayed to discover that nobody except for a tiny, mostly forgotten and rapidly expiring generation of elderly musicians had any knowledge of the country's black popular music prior to the 1950s. Who, he wondered, were the South African equivalents of Louis Armstrong or Count Basie? Where was the music performed and what did it mean to its makers and listeners?

Answering these questions was not easy. There were no preexisting archives that could be consulted except for those of the print media. Gallo Records kept no copies of the thousands of recordings of urban black music it made and sold before the 1950s, while the South African Broadcasting Corporation had simply dumped its collections of this music when it relocated to new headquarters in the 1970s because it believed these recordings were no longer of any interest to anyone. Oral history research was complicated by the fact that the few surviving veterans of the early jazz scenes were largely forgotten and difficult to track down.

Despite these constraints Ballantine has written an empirically rich and evocative account of the early history of South African jazz. A vibrantly polyphonic text, Marabi Nights gives voice to the makers and original fans of the music by quoting liberally from archival sources and oral history interviews. As the South African jazz and classical singer Sibongile Khumalo puts it in her excellent Foreword, Ballantine ‘captures beyond academic pursuance, the “feel” of how township jazz evolved’ (p. xv).

Marabi Nights' primary strength is its brevity and impeccable clarity. In fewer than 4500 words, Ballantine spells out in the Introduction the urgent necessity of his recuperative project, explains the centrality of South Africa's early jazzing tradition to the subsequent development of the country's ‘rich panoply of black urban popular music traditions’ (p. 1), provides an informative overview of marabi, early jazz and vaudeville, mbaqanga, kwela and their offshoots, and describes the theoretical underpinnings of his work.

The opening Concert and Dance chapter is a virtual portal to the world of the all-night variety shows and dances in which the music developed and thrived in the 1920s and 1930s. It is jam-packed with references to popular venues, influential performers, iconic recordings, important critics, respected teachers and the complex and subtle class and race politics that attended the performance and reception of early black jazz and vaudeville. It also establishes a theme that is sustained throughout the book: the extraordinarily creative agency of urban black musicians and their audiences in the face of the devastating structures of state-sanctioned race, class and gender oppression.

The Music and Emancipation chapter that follows is a gem. Here, Ballantine presents an incisive yet nuanced analysis of how liberal and radical producers and receivers of the music variously interpreted the social role of black jazz and vaudeville.

The Music and Repression chapter details the myriad ways in which increasing state hostility towards black South Africans particularly afflicted marabi culture. Addressing the ways in which marabi culture was vilified by petit bourgeois and elite blacks – particularly in the 1920s – the second part of the chapter considers the internal forms of class and gender oppression that were ‘a consequence of incipient class divisions within the urban black community itself’ (p. 99). By the 1940s, however, as increasing state racism impelled elite blacks to ‘align downwards’ with their proletarian brethren and as jazz gained respectability internationally and locally, the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic flavours of marabi came to dominate the sound of South African jazz. Many of these dynamics seem to find poignant sonic expression on certain tracks on the accompanying CD (notably track 14, W.P. Zikali's 1933 version of ‘Ntebejana’), but Ballantine leaves his readers to ponder such issues on their own and offers no analyses of how the musical sounds themselves might reflect and refract their social contexts.

Ballantine pays closer attention to the idea of music as social record in the final two chapters by focusing on the music of the Manhattan Brothers, a close harmony vocal group of the 1950s modelled after the Mills Brothers. In Looking to the USA, he describes the unpredictable and contradictory politics of globalisation and localisation that attended the production and critical reception of the Manhattan Brothers' songs. Initially famed for their faithful mimicry of recordings by groups like the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers, the group moved on to writing and performing Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho versions of popular American hits. Later, the group focused on performing an indigenous repertoire before eventually creating English versions of that repertoire for an international audience.

In the final Gender and Migrancy chapter, Ballantine considers the overlapping effects of race, class and gender oppression and the ways these multiply impacted on women performers. In both chapters he presents poignant analyses of the lyrical content of the Manhattan Brothers' songs that show how a complex sociopolitical history manifested at the level of aesthetic production. However, for me at least, his analyses of the musical sounds themselves feel vague and evasive.

For example, where he reports on his interview with music critic Doc Bikitsha, a passionate and astute commentator on the jazz of the 1950s – Ballantine misses a valuable opportunity to show how some of the Manhattan Brothers' songs refer to the panoply of indigenous Southern African musics that that suffused the soundscape of early twentieth century Johannesburg's mine compounds and black townships:

It seems easy to believe that many of Ballantine's other interviewees will have similarly broken into song as they reminisced about the early decades of South African jazz and it is a pity that these are not included in the interview quotations or at least included on the accompanying CD.

This gripe aside, the second edition of Marabi Nights, like the first, is a classic text that is empirically original, theoretically astute and epistemologically pioneering in the way it combines aspects of popular music studies, social history, critical musicology and ethnomusicology. It is a must-read for general readers interested in jazz and/or South African history as well as for undergraduate, postgraduate and professional scholars of Southern Africa, jazz, popular music, musicology and ethnomusicology.