Nduduzo Makhathi

 

 

Nduduzo Makhathini’s music has always intrigued me since my first encounter with his sound at The Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2015, when he, together with Tumi Mogorosi, Mthunzi Mvubu, Robin Fasciae Kock, Ariel Zamonsky mesmerised music loveers with compositions and renditions which reinvigorated by belief in the hauntingly unrequited quality of South African Jazz. 

Over the course of the following years, I witnessed a serene evolution that embraced spirituality in all its sonic metaphors that linger to soften even the staunch hearts of those who denigrate African virtuosity. 

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And in the tradition of sounds that merges the uneasy traumas of our collective past with the present, the IKHAMBI sessions at The Pan African Station in 2017 struck a chord in my soul that left me bereft of breath. It conjured up a a pervasive sense of interrupted transmissions from the spiritual, navigating the plane of the flesh.

 

Music that brings the mystical into the suspended space of memory, perfectly crafted yet imperfectly translated through nuanced flaws, broken scales irregular in form, with proportions that lend an uncanny effect of improvisation and mishaps.

What is spirituality in this case, because often this seance with the unknowable is relegated into realms of mystery, but here I infer to the living soul of a song that knows a language forgotten, melodies that seem like chords struck from primordial keys embedded in genes of current listeners.

I recall an artist inferring that we enter the world through our eyes, and it enters our inner worlds through our ears, and listening to Nduduzo’s Ikhambi felt akin to a reawakening, whence my inner contemplation is invaded by a foreign entity pent on inducing visions and memories buried with a thousand murdered ancestors. 

Compelled to the unthinkable splendours of imagined utopias of the soul, the song in its compositional complexity is unwoven by The Cure cCollective in ways that can only be deemed ingeniously mature for these young musos at play.

And though obscuring their intended catharsis, they narrow their improvisational excursion to a minimum, allowing for each instrumentalist to reinterpret and invigorate new meanings to the composition, guided by Makhathini’s pianistic elegance cognisant of the gravity of the proverb in their song.

Ikhambi left me amused by its eccentricity which roused my personal dissonance of feelings suspended between two worlds,  furthered through and located in the disorienting headspace between the two, hence I found myself intreating its essence through video art.