QRadio, a new Web site slated to launch in March, aims to introduce global audiences to musicians rarely heard outside their countries of origin. The site will begin by presenting the new sounds boiling out of South Africa - a cultural renaissance energized by the end of apartheid and the return of exiled musicians to their homeland.
The project will have a musical visionary of its own at its helm: impresario Quincy Jones, whose wide-ranging contributions to recording, film, and TV have earned Jones ("Q" to his friends) 76 Grammy nominations, 7 Oscar nominations, and an Emmy.
In 1996, Jones made a foray into multimedia with a CD-ROM history of African-American musicmaking called Q's Juke Joint. By adding QRadio to a package of media outlets that includes a record label, a broadcasting company, and Vibe magazine - among dozens of other properties, many co-owned with Time-Warner - Jones is advancing his phalanx into a new medium.
QRadio president Don Brown says that Jones is hoping to use the Net to open new markets for the musicians featured on the site, which will add an online commerce area in the next few weeks. "One of the frustrations for Quincy has been that a lot of great music never made it to America because of the way artists are promoted in traditional media," Brown says. "This is one of those projects that the Web was made for."
QRadio will be a "connoisseur's site," Brown says, offering rarely exported artists in online jam sessions and interviews, and broadcasts streamed in RealAudio from South Africa's largest radio network, the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Loaded with audio samples and beefed up with critical perspectives on the music and history by African culture-watchers like Maria McCloy, QRadio will function as an educational resource as well an an entertainment center.
There will be an extensive online database compiled by Rob Allingham, an archivist and noted authority on the evolution of African music from folk forms to urban jive to bubblegum. The executive producer of the site will be Caiphus Semenya, who returned to South Africa in 1991. Twenty-five years earlier, he'd been threatened with imprisonment, and fled the country to work as a producer and composer with Harry Belafonte, Lou Rawls, Nina Simone, and Miriam Makeba.
Spanning a half-century - from bebop to hip-hop via the producer's chair for Michael Jackson's Thriller - Jones' career has been distinguished by an eagerness to foster fruitful hybridization between trends and cultures. QRadio president Don Brown says that Jones is hoping to spark a similar synergy on the Web.
"Quincy is a guy who has experimented with a lot of different media to create fusions," Brown says. "We're hoping this will not just be a channel for distributing music from one place to another... but a way to change listening patterns, a place where styles will mix, and the world of music will open up."
Even without the Net, the music of the region is changing now, Brown observes. Some of the music heard on QRadio, especially from musicians in rural areas, will sound much as it sounded for hundreds of years; but the township-pop bubbling out of the urban centers is a musical polyglot, with jazz, reggae, and hip-hop elements transforming the traditional sounds and rhythms.
In South Africa, radio still commands a larger audience than TV. Sixty percent of the rural schoolhouses in the region don't have electricity, and African teenagers keep their ears tuned to battery-powered radios to hear performers like Vusi Mahlasela, Sibongile Khumalo, Boom Shaka, Abashante, and Chippa-s. On 5 December, QRadio funneled its first broadcast to the Web, from station Ukhozi FM. Radio Metro from Johannesburg was added to the site shortly afterward, with 16 more SABC stations to follow.
Brown explains that though QRadio will add the music of other cultures to its online offerings eventually, the site is "focusing on South Africa to begin with because Quincy has a long commitment to South Africa."
Jones told Nelson Mandela that he felt that entertainment would be "one of the main engines" driving the economic success of the region in the post-apartheid era, says Brown.
