50th Anniversary of Soweto Youth Uprising New York Performances

At Dizzy’s Club, pianist-composer Bokani Dyer brings his trio to a program marking 50 years since the Soweto Youth Uprising, a watershed moment in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. Dyer, a Motswana–South African artist, works from a jazz foundation while drawing on electronic production, R&B, salsa, and classical language, shaping the trio as both band and archive. The set functions as commemoration rather than reenactment, tracing how political memory lives in sound. In New York, the context matters: this music arrives as testimony within a city’s ongoing dialogue with the global history of resistance.