Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz, a book jointly written by Carol Ann Muller and Sathima Bea Benjamin (both born in South Africa), takes readers on a journey through South Africa's apartheid structure and its impact on jazz, with the personal experiences of Benjamin and Muller guiding that journey. Its title is borrowed from Benjamin's 2006 album Musical Echoes, which, like this book, is a map of Benjamin's life – the album takes listeners to Africa with its rhythmic ‘Falling in Love’ and to her first meeting with Duke Ellington in the fast-paced ‘Caravan’. Writes Robin D.G. Kelley in his review of the album, Benjamin ‘ought to share company with the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter. … So how come most people including serious jazz fans, have never heard of Sathima Bea Benjamin? Why is it that … Benjamin can't get a club date in New York?’ (2006). This book stands at least in part as an answer to Kelley's questions, resolutely ‘written in response to the persistent confusion listeners and musicians express in terms of who she is, where she comes from, and what she chooses to sing’ (p. 10).

Benjamin suggests reasons why she did not easily find fame. Classified as Coloured in post-war Cape Town, she complains that audiences ‘expected a more African sound or a darker complexion’ (p. 9) when they met or heard her. Being defined as Coloured was an ‘impossible position under apartheid’ (p. 36), Benjamin remembers, recalling Cape Coloureds being accused of ‘hav[ing] no culture of their own’ (ibid.). Duke Ellington, a musician who ‘was real and present for many in South Africa across all racial categories' (p. 105), supported her, even recording with her and helping her settle into the New York City jazz scene. Yet his death in the early 1970s left Benjamin again facing musical isolation. ‘[N]ot everyone in the world of jazz has had Ellington's breadth of vision and understanding of the ties between the old and new African diasporas or of the global spread of jazz’ (p. 279).

With this book, Muller and Benjamin fill the gaps not only in Benjamin's life, but also in the fields of jazz women and Cape jazz more generally. ‘Sathima's [life] is a characteristically South African musical story’ (p. 9). Yet Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz is more than just a book on music – like its title, the book echoes with a relevance that crosses into other disciplines, from geography to race and history. ‘At the heart of [Benjamin's] struggle as a jazz singer has been, on the one hand, the lack of recognition by some that South Africans could be jazz musicians and creators of their own improvised music; and, on the other, the perceived problem that she didn't look or sound African enough in her body or articulation of musical style’ (p. 279). Telling Benjamin's story draws upon issues of race and class, authenticity and place, migration and identity, producing a book that allows for new ways to view the movement of people and circulation of ideas and music.

An ‘echo’ is defined in the book as the ‘persistence of a sound after its source has stopped’ (p. 275). It is a theme recalled throughout, with each chapter divided into a call and a response – the call meant to introduce Benjamin's life story, echoed by a response that places her life story within larger contextual themes. The book resonates with the importance oral histories bring to historical perspectives, providing readers not only with neglected women's viewpoints on jazz, but also with a richness in knowledge few other historical sources could provide. Benjamin's death on 20 August 2013 also echoes with the timeliness of this project, further reminding us of the urgency of documenting oral histories before they are lost or forgotten. ‘It is clear we cannot simply write a linear narrative, one that starts in one place and basically travels in a circumscribed national or geopolitical area,’ Muller and Benjamin write (p. 294).

Benjamin travelled with pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (to whom she was married for many years) to Europe in 1962, two years following the violence of the Sharpeville massacre. From thenceforth they spent their lives on the move, travelling between Europe, the USA and South Africa. In 1977, having declared their support for the African National Congress (ANC), Benjamin and Ibrahim lived in exile in New York City, where they continued to promote awareness for antiapartheid campaigns. Benjamin's life is like the music she produces and like ‘the image … the acoustical echo illustrates' (ibid.): born in one place but moving to another and another, ‘each rearticulation send[ing] out one echo after another – waves of sound that have consequences in the places of transmissions' (ibid.).

Providing a brief synopsis, Chapter 2 outlines Benjamin's early life in Cape Town (1936–1962), and introduces a city where ‘music [was] everywhere’, where ‘people [were] just using their voices naturally’ (p. 13). Benjamin became interested in American jazz ‘because it provided a space for the individual voice in a collective fabric, for expressive freedom, and for her growing political consciousness of the plight of people of colour in South Africa and the world at large’ (p. 9). Her story is told against Muller's own memories of growing up in Cape Town as a white South African, and of attending University of (KwaZulu) Natal in Durban during a time when listening to jazz was defined by the government as a ‘devious act’.

Chapter 3 delves more specifically into Cape jazz. ‘While South African jazz seemed to have moved from the sounds of marabi and so-called African jazz made in the townships near Johannesburg toward Cape Town and its interracial community, there was no conception of a specific brand of jazz belonging to the Cape or even to the Coloured community in Cape Town’ (p. 53). Readers are introduced to various Cape Town bands that catered to Coloured audiences, including Ed Samuels Orchestra and Jimmy Adams's Swing Band. These bands performed in the World War II entertainment units or were trained by those who had returned to Cape Town to start Coloured dance bands, adapting stringed sounds to brass and wind instruments (p. 61). Influenced by the music recordings, radio programmes and films from the USA, Cape jazz began to transform with ‘the kinds of bonds that many South Africans imagined between themselves and African Americans in the postwar period’ (pp. 98–9).

Chapter 4 concentrates on Benjamin and Ibrahim's departure from South Africa, and their move to Zurich, Paris, London and, finally, New York City. ‘In contrast to the narratives about Cape jazz, which circulated around a specific geographic location and historical moment’, this chapter introduces ‘a period of jazz migrancy [that] has fluctuated between place, country and community, and [that] has moved in and out of a range of histories and political contexts' (p. 162). Benjamin's approach to jazz changed significantly while living abroad, influenced by the new places, sounds and people that she encountered. By adopting these divergent influences, however, questions of authenticity began to circulate around Benjamin's musical approach, with critics complaining that she did not sound ‘African’ enough. Yet her commitment to her African past strengthened while abroad, her song ‘Africa’, written during this period, meant to represent ‘the desire to hear and express the sounds of home … to sound less like American copies and more like South African originals' (p. 170).

Chapter 5 concentrates on Benjamin's life in New York. It was here that she and Ibrahim launched their own record label Ekapa (translated as ‘at or from the Cape’). While in New York, the couple further ‘reinforc[ed] the idea of their music as a reflection of their South African home’ (p. 199). Although living in exile ‘was a defining way of being in the world’ (p. 292), the music that Benjamin and Ibrahim played while in exile depicted the ‘sounds of excruciating longing and loneliness’ (ibid.). It encapsulated ‘the sounds of home … made a very long way from the place in which they were born and raised’ (ibid.).

Chapter 6, in contrast, discusses Benjamin's return to South Africa, specifically interrogating what it means to come back home musically. ‘To participate in the present is to lay the foundations of future representations of the past, of histories that will be written in the future’ (p. 262), the authors argue, using the recording session for the album Cape Town Love as a case study. A compilation of classic American jazz standards that include ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’, ‘Body and Soul’ and ‘I'll Be Seeing You’, Cape Town Love well represents the book's theme of jazz and movement, poignantly juxtaposed against Benjamin's own global claim on both Cape Town and New York City.

Chapter 7, which serves as a conclusion, argues for a ‘radical refiguring’ of jazz studies more generally (p. 294). The authors argue that the study of jazz should support a ‘vision and understanding of the ties between the old and new African diasporas’ (ibid.); it should take into better account the global development of jazz, which has ‘put jazz cultures in dialogue with each other’ (p. xviii). By establishing ‘new, emergent flights or lines of inquiry’ (p. 294) that speak to the movements of ideas and musical influences, a better understanding of Benjamin's musical life emerges, as well as a host of other musicians who may not typically fit the jazz canon.

The book provides a thorough memoir of Benjamin's life, and builds a convincing narrative about the diverging complexities of being a musician living in exile. It reminds us that musical movement is not one-directional; that jazz musicians – like Benjamin – who relocate and travel within and outside their home countries acquire musical knowledges and experiences that are continually transformed by their repeated movements and journeys. What is less understood is the nature of the collaboration between Benjamin and Muller in the writing of this book. The book reads more like a biography, albeit written in close partnership between Muller and Benjamin. Nonetheless, the candid and valuable insights into Benjamin's life remain invaluable here. Benjamin's life ‘challenges the contours of ownership, categorisation, and place held by the Untied States in jazz and popular music history. Instead of imagining history inside the geopolitical borders of America, one must necessarily set the sounds of jazz in motion well beyond the closed confines of jazz clubs and concert halls in the USA, imagining them traveling quite literally across the globe’ (p. 283).