When Louis Armstrong met August Musarurwa.

Anybody Can, in Your History with Me: The Films of Penny Siopis, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Duke University Press, 2024).

“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’s music.” — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.

1.

The African Dance Band of the Cold Storage Commission of Southern Rhodesia – it was the band with the longest name in the world. The words appear as faded images flicker across the screen: tobacco auctions, tourist cruises on the Zambezi river. A languorous saxophone plays.

So begins Penny Siopis’s ‘Welcome Visitors!’, a filmic reimagining of the life and music of August Musarurwa. Musarurwa was a bandleader and saxophonist who learned the instrument while working as a police interpreter in Bulawayo in the 1940s. The torrents and cataracts of the Zambezi keep unspooling as we hear the tune that made him famous: ‘Skokiaan’. The crackle of old vinyl joins the mottled footage – of farm labour, dance performances and colonial officials with awkward body language – and the original begins to play. Some quick-strumming banjos mark out a carnival rhythm, then comes a long, bending note on Musarurwa’s sax, sliding down to a riff that everyone knows.