The Jazz River — Wakanda Forever

A personal story and a look behind the curtain: I organize my shows by using iTunes. I have a very large personal collection and iTunes is a very useful tool with which to build my weekly shows. When uploading CDs into it there are automatic default genres such as jazz, blues, rock, and Arabic. You can also create your own. Because I have so much international music I have a lot of different genres. I say all this as background for a weird story. I have about 70+ recordings from Africa that I uploaded. However, sometime back when I was searching for some specific tracks I noticed that all my African music had vanished. No other genre was affected. So I re-entered them and again, after some time, they disappeared once again. Was there some sort of algorithmic prejudice at work? This time I reached out to Apple and after lengthy conversations with tech support and unhelpful suggestions such as deleting my entire catalogue and starting over I was no closer to understanding what happened or why.

So once again, left to my own devices, rather than risk the same outcome, I uploaded all my African music only this time I decided to change the genre’s name to Wakanda and I can report that over a year has passed and they are happy in their new home. Hence, this week’s program that is a cross-section of African music — North, South, Central, East, and West is all from Wakanda.

[Note: those who don’t know, Wakanda is the mythical nation invented by the Marvel Comics Universe that gave us the superhero the Black Panther.]

Tune in on Sunday, January 30, at 5 pm when The Jazz River heads back to Africa for the 6th time where it all began, and a program–Wakanda Forever! Only on KUVO JAZZ.

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Image credit: Vector Art at Vecteezy