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Back to the future 3 band11/13/2022 ![]() The author, an Australian musician who taught in the Faculty of Arts (FAC) at UPNG (the successor of the original NAS) from 1992 until 2000, interviewed members of the original band, including Tony Subum and Thomas Komboi, as well as former NAS faculty member Les McLaren and others who had taught them. The very name of the band-Sanguma-the Tok Pisin word for supernatural “poison” or magic, evoked both ancestral power and the potency of music to transport the listener to another reality. How the music of Sanguma- based on a fusion of traditional PNG musical forms and progressive jazz performed on both traditional and Western instruments by musicians in traditional PNG bilas (feather headdresses and pig’s tusk ornaments)-encapsulated those hopes and created a style that reflected that ethos is the subject of Crowdy’s book. The members of the original band were students at the newly established NAS and came from many different regions across PNG, facts that were important to both the band’s musical style and its ethos. ![]() The broadest importance of the book is its evocation of that nascent period in the country’s history and the role Sanguma-and the National Arts School-played in it. So too does his analysis of the factors-most significantly, local forms of neoliberal capitalism- that contributed to the band’s eventual demise. Crowdy’s historical and musical analysis of Sanguma provides a welcome and compelling case study from a Pacific nation of this concept. That idea provides the thesis for Crowdy’s book as well as his argument for the role music can play in national identity, a concept prevalent in ethnomusicology today (think of the role of reggae in Jamaica or calypso in Trinidad). ![]() The band Sanguma and its distinctive fusion style were very much products of that post-independence moment that gave birth to the young nation’s hopes for a new pan-Papua New Guinea national identity. I was also transported “back to the future”-1975, when Papua New Guinea achieved independence and the nation’s future as it was envisioned in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the historical period that Crowdy analyzes in Hearing the Future. Listening to the ethereal sounds of Sepik bamboo flutes alternating with jazz riffs played on trumpet and keyboard transported me back to my first visit to Port Moresby, the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), and the National Arts School (NAS), where I had purchased the cassette en route to fieldwork on Manam Island. ![]() I then had to find a cassette player, buried away in the garage, on which to play it. Reading Denis Crowdy’s book, Hearing the Future: The Music and Magic of the Sanguma Bandabout the internationally acclaimed Papua New Guinea band popular during the 1980s, led me to dig out my copy of their first cassette, the eponymously titled Sanguma, that I had bought when I first arrived in PNG in 1978. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific. ![]()
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