Creative Improvised Spiritual Soundz
March 2020
A day before the implementation of a hard lockdown on March 26th in South Africa, the pianist, composer and academic Nduduzo Makhathini booked the Johannesburg-based live music venue, the Untitled Basement, for the purpose of filming an interpretation of the great master John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme Pt. 1 — Acknowledgement” with his band for an overseas-based organization.
News of the healer, artist and spiritual being Credo Mutwa’s transition from earth arrived during sound check. The band wasted no time; they immediately broke into song.
It wasn’t papa ‘Trane’s, but one from Makhathini’s own catalogue. The space was transformed as soon as “Umthakathi — 1st Movement” and “Shwele” were complete. It was the unconventional send-off that no one had asked for, but in any case needed.
uBaba uVusamazulu (one who awakens the heavens) Credo Mutwa, the author of the seminal spirit portal that is Indaba, My Children (1964), had dedicated his entire life to teaching black people in Mzansi, and throughout the African continent, about our genealogical association to the cosmos. He suffered for it; he suffered because of his teachings, which went against conventional wisdom.
To the colonizer and the neo-colonist, our continent is doomed to remain within the limited imaginary of imposed-upon conventions, treaties, agreements, and whatever else machinations are designed to aid the forgetfulness project. It is through recalling that our own belief systems pre-date colonial-era capture that we can rise; that we can untangle ourselves from spiritual shackles, to paraphrase the effervescent elder, Bob Marley.
To this end, a system that is not designed to cater for such — to cater for non-people, essentially — shall remain relentless in destroying any attempts at recalling. Hence, memory becomes a weapon. Improvisation, like the throwing of bones to a Sangoma, becomes the mode through which this weapon regenerates.
If we begin to think of creative improvisation as the unending quest to inch past the known in order to reach the unknown, then we can start to see why jazz and the blues are great tools to retain pieces of our dismembered selves. We are sky people and sun people and star people; we cry, we sing, we dance.
“[Our] sound repertoires have been built around events that are closely connected to cosmological changes,” writes Makhathini about his teacher Bheki Mseleku’s posthumous solo piano offering, Beyond the Stars (2021). He continues to observe that our ancestors had sonic repertoires for every occasion. He asserts that the context within which those songs and instruments were played and performed involved connecting with the spirit world. This practice, he argues, “adds another layer to the communal aspects of music-making.”
By saying this, Makhathini makes a crucial observation whose parallel can be found in the great healer’s book. uBaba Mutwa writes, in Indaba, My Children, that “…the beat of the drums can cure what no medication can cure; it can heal the ills of the mind — it can heal the very soul.”
June 2020
Three months-removed from that March 2020 date at the Untitled Basement, the recording of the Indaba Is compilation, currently out on Brownswood Recordings, started in earnest at a farm-cum-recording studio on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The affair was communion for a community of artists in need, banished and left out in the blizzard of pandemic dispossession by their government. For four days, over fifty musicians gathered to sing, to politik, to laugh, to forget, to celebrate.
A joyous and momentous occasion, the recording sessions became, briefly, an escape from the bondage of lingering sadness and overwhelming loss. Theirs were definitely not Mutwa’s “faces yet unmarked by furrows of bitterness, ill-health and anger”. The environment still invigorated a zeal which had lay dormant, however. This zeal is resurrected in the music.
Indaba Is, is a continuing celebration of cultural workers’ unending drive. It’s a way to speak truth to authority; to demonstrate that community shall remain greater than the sum of its parts. Over eight songs, divergent sonic palates coalesce into a unified unit. Album opener “Ke Nako”, a Bokani Dyer composition, is about unity.
As he explains: “It’s looking at how, if we combine our forces together in unity, we can build the nation that we want to see. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in my writing process recently; I’m looking at ways that people can take ownership of the future they want to see.”
The Wretched’s “What Is History” speaks to the black skins in white masks; the state-endorsed apparatchik who placed self-interest above public service; whose greed knows no bounds, whose bodies know no shame, whose actions remain above the law. “We find our humanity on the other side of death and despair/ the settler’s world is a hostile world,” proclaims vocalist Gabi Motuba at the beginning of the track.
“In terms of being a jazz artist, I was critiquing this standardized, traditional sense of ‘jazz artistry’, ‘jazz vocalists’, ‘a jazz singer’, [and] the aspect of scat music. I was pulling away from that and trying to explore other avenues, and trying to see where jazz would lead me. The electronic world, I just bumped into it by sheer coincidence; through listening to my peers and being inspired by [them],” says Gabi.
“For a long time, traditional jazz has really been acknowledged as this elephant in the room; this kind of thing that we can’t really dissect. We learn it from school, and it’s just supposed to stay like that in this corner, and we’re all supposed to just walk through it in this very narrow-viewed way. There was this kind of pulling away from being content with that — with that realization, with that acknowledgement.”
Thandi Ntuli and her septet remind us that ‘dikeledi tsa badimo ha di wele fatshe’ (translation: The ancestors’ pleas don’t fall on deaf ears) on “Dikeledi”. It’s a grounding mantra, and it exudes righteous poise of assured wisdom. The violence enacted upon the working class heroes who ascend and become our ancestors shall, through the passing of time, be quelled by the forthright acts of their offspring.
The cast of Indaba Is, are that offspring.
“The working title that [Siya Mthembu, frontman for The Brother Moves On] had put together also came with a suggestion of artists, and it came from a place of having followed those artists, understanding their work from knowing them, following their work and seeing the trajectory of the conversations that we have. We limited it to people within the Johannesburg scene because I think it’s a bit of a mammoth task to try and represent what’s happening all over the country. And even then, focusing on Johannesburg was a bit of a nightmare, to try and fit eight people when there were so many people saying so much with their music,” says Thandi.
“The wildcard was Iphupho L’ka Biko, which is a band that hadn’t recorded yet. But even in the name of the band, which translates to Biko’s dream — anyone who would read that on a programme as a band name would already be drawn to the idea of Black Consciousness, just from understanding Biko’s work.”
Iphupho L’ka Biko and Kinsmen are valiant on the album closer “Abaphezulu” (translation: the ones from the heavens). The title itself obfuscates the intention; it’s left up in air who these ones from top are, if our general understanding of ancestors is that they reside in what Makhathini calls the underworlds.
Indigenous Knowledge Systems are crucial in that they defy logic, time, and space. And this is exactly what jazz is: a knowledge system of multiple possibilities, occurring concurrently, on a mission towards a singular vision.
February 2021
A month following the compilation’s January 2021 release, Sibusile Xaba sat on a panel with the trans disciplinary researcher and chair of the Credo Mutwa Foundation, Rutendo Ngara, to talk about aspects of the healer’s teachings. They discuss the cosmos’ relation to the seasons; the concept of Ubuntu; and the teachings of Credo Mutwa.
“If there’s one person in this world who travelled everywhere; physically, and spiritually, and soulfully…it was isanusi Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa […] He’d been reminding us, for decades, that a time is coming; a time of change, and a time of shift, and a time when you need to remember who you are, because that is how you will manage the time that is coming. He reminded us by drawing connections between this realm and this world, and the world of the stars,” said Ngara.
In the same manner, and as demonstrated on Indaba Is, improvisation can be used to connect disparate worlds in order to channel a singular sonic vibration. That vibration, properly utilized, can propel African people towards dreaming and realizing true freedom.
- This story was made possible by Africa No Filter’s Kekere Storytellers Fund, which I received in 2021.
