Home » Jazz Articles » Interview » Nduduzo Makhathini: Jazz Is a Shared Memory
Nduduzo Makhathini: Jazz Is a Shared Memory
I wondered what legacy I could leave with my kids, and I felt one thing I could leave is identity.
—Nduduzo Makhathini
A onetime musical disciple of the late legends
Bheki Mseleku
piano1955 - 2008
Zim Ngqawana
saxophone1959 - 2011
All About Jazz: Growing up in KwaZulu-Natal, in a musical family, what were some of your earliest experiences?
Nduduzo Makhathini: Growing up, I heard a lot traditional Zulu music. It was based on some of the ceremonies and rituals I attended as a child. As a young man I became involved in isicathamiya and other various acapella music. But the biggest influence for me initially was the Zionist Church, and their use of the drum, meditative chants and prophecy. The Zionist Church incorporated Christianity and ancestral beliefs. So I was introduced to music as a mode for spirituality. It was only later, when I went to study music, that I really came to learn the people were getting paid, and that kind of thing! So my background links to African spiritualism in music. My dad played guitar, and my mom played keys. It was beautiful to see them play and sing together. Later on, I became attracted to the idea of how improvised music could be a way of promoting healthy communities. It's something I think I've always had in my subconscious, from seeing my parents playing together. I think about that a lot, and the role of music in cultivating that.
AAJ: You've mentioned in other interviews that, while in university, you came across
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
NM: You can imagine, I was seventeen, and I'm introduced to BeBop, to
Charlie Parker
saxophone, alto1920 - 1955
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Wayne Shorter
saxophone1933 - 2023
So transcribing through music in the curriculum and trying to find my way, I was looking for something I could instantly relate to. I remember one time I was frustrated by not understanding things, and so I went to the music library and I found this album. I read through the liner notes and saw Coltrane's prayer, and learned about this artist who was coming from a Christian background. For the first time, I started seeing these things as linked to spirituality. Before even listening to A Love Supreme by
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
What attracted me to the record was this meditation aspect, his use of pentatonic scales, and also
McCoy Tyner
piano1938 - 2020
Soon after that, I met
Bheki Mseleku
piano1955 - 2008
AAJ: You mentioned
Bheki Mseleku
piano1955 - 2008
Zim Ngqawana
saxophone1959 - 2011
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
NM: With Mseleku, it was based on the
McCoy Tyner
piano1938 - 2020
Now, Mseleku had more structured forms. His music has improvisation, but it's based on really structured, composed music where you can find a scientific formulation in the music. He was really attracted to cycles. I think it comes from Coltrane's work in the late 1950s on things like Giant Steps, where he was exploring cycles in music while also exploring his religious beliefs. When I started playing with Bra Zim it was a more abstract thing. He was a composer, but his take was that he composed music that allowed him to improvise. He wanted to use shorter themes that would trigger something within his deeper need to improvise. Bra Zim was also inspired by
Sun Ra
piano1914 - 1993
What's interesting to me is that for both Bra Zim and Mseleku, is that towards the ends of their lives, they were both moving towards trying to extract themselves from the Zulu nation in Mseleku's case, and the Xhosa nation in Bra Zim's case. They were trying to disown the idea of being a Xhosa or a Zulu music; they felt the tags were limiting and restricting them from a universality. I find them to be really interesting people.
AAJ: Listening to Zim's work in particular, "Qula Kwedini" is on one of his earliest albums. Later, like on the live album from the Cape Town Jazz Festival, he's moved into a very free space. You can hear in his music what you're describing.
NM: It has to do with trying to deconstruct these aspects I was describing earlier. Things like him being a Xhosa person and thinking around the memories of his upbringing. He wanted, maybe not to disconnect, but to go beyond that, and it comes through in his improvisation. I don't know if you've heard the live recording from Linder Auditorium [50th Birthday Celebration], which is completely abstract, but you can feel connection to the hymnals he drew from
Abdullah Ibrahim
pianob.1934
Matthew Shipp
pianob.1960
AAJ: It seems that with South Africa's Jazz history, there's a navigation of the roots an artist comes from, versus a question of universality. It ebbs and flows, and changes with different artists.
NM: I've been thinking about the South African Jazz aesthetic that developed in exile. It was using these musical memories and imaginations to try and create this connection with South Africa, but from a far-away land. It's interesting how the Blue Notes came from a mbaqanga foundation, and later in exile you see them gravitating to this robust proteus-like music. Jazz was always a music that could reflect people's pain, but in the Blues Notes' music, and
Louis Moholo-Moholo
drums1940 - 2025
Louis Moholo-Moholo
drums1940 - 2025
There are debates about what I'm trying to explain. There are people who didn't leave—
Salim Washington
saxophone, tenor
Winston Mankunku Ngozi
saxophone1943 - 2009
Abdullah Ibrahim
pianob.1934
Dudu Pukwana
saxophoneb.1938
Johnny Dyani
bass1945 - 1986
My own thinking is in between what many of these artists had to think about. But also mine is directly linked with the idea of healing. We don't put enough emphasis on that in Jazz in South Africa. Someone like Philip Tabane with Malombo does directly try to channel that healing energy in music, but I think in general Jazz focuses too heavily on the intellectual side.
AAJ: Let's look at how you synthesize all of this in your music. In a very short span of time, you have released eight albums, all of them very different from one another. Albums like Icilongo certainly reflect your idea of music as healing, while Inner Dimensions explores questions of identity in very fascinating and profound ways. Can we walk through your different projects?
NM: My first two albums were Sketches of Tomorrow and Mother Tongue, which were released at the same time. With Sketches of Tomorrow, it was the idea borrowed from Ornette Coleman's Tomorrow Is the Question and The Shape of Jazz to Come. How do we look at the shape of Jazz to come within a South African context? And Sketches of Tomorrow borrows from amahubo, which is pre-Colonial music popularized by Princess Magogo. Amahubo are really praise songs, and if you look at Sketches of Tomorrow, it starts off with a praise song to Shaka Zulu. Sketches of Tomorrow is trying to look into what South Africa Jazz might look like in the future. I was also thinking about legacy. I started a family quite early, and was thinking about having three kids and my wife, and had all these questions about identity as a South African. I wondered what legacy I could leave with my kids, and I felt one thing I could leave is identity. So I was working on connecting with my Zulu-ness in that first song. But there is also a song towards the end that features the poet MoAfrika, and she talks about these borders that restrict us from seeing the oneness of this continent. There are a lot of things that are projected on that album.
Mother Tongue tries to look at first language. It's a tribute to my mother, as someone who introduced me to sound as my first language. My grandmother relates a story to me that I took a long time to start speaking as a kid, to the point that my mother used a lot of songs to get me to grasp words. So the album looks into that in a child-like way, looking into the language of music to understand words. I get into other things too—"Echoes of You" is a tribute to Mseleku—and so Mother Tongue looks into people who helped to shape my concept of language.
What followed that was Listening to the Ground. Looking to this idea of the Colonial Period, the British brought Christianity and introduced it as the only mode of spiritualism. And so people started to forget about ubuNgoma and other forms of spiritualism that are ancient in South Africa. Listening to the Ground came when I temporarily lost my sight. I had gone to eye specialists, all of whom said my eyes were fine, but sometimes I would be partially blind. My uncle told me that my losing my sight had to do with the gift of ubuNgoma that I had been given, but had ignored. I had to do work to connect with it and open these channels of dreams to be guided by the ancestors, and give them room to talk to me. I did as he suggested, and all the repertoire started coming to me. The songs came through dreams and visions, and looks at how we can—in the post-1994 South Africa—reconnect with our pre-Colonial ancestry. It's also connected to my new album Ikhambi, of how we repackage ubuNgoma in this modern space, and how we bring them closer to the people.
All of these albums ultimately are connected. Matunda Ya Kwanza Vol. 1 looks at the celebration of the first words. Icilongo was based on my grandmother's teachings through Christianity and the Bible, and how that plays within my identity. Seventeen years of going to church and absorbing the repertoire, it's a part of me that I can never disown, but can always return to and give it new meanings.
AAJ: Can you speak on how you reconciled your Christian upbringing with this revelation and gift of ubuNgoma in your teens? On Inner Dimensions you wrote about both ancestors and of God. How did these two worlds reconcile?
NM: This idea comes from what I've been questioning. This idea that Christianity almost was an introduction to spirituality in Africa, I think is wrong. I don't think there's a disconnect between ancestry and believing in a higher being. Inner Dimensions looked into that. In Zulu culture, we refer to God as Umvelinqangi . So this is an ancient concept that connects with Egyptology and the idea that we came from the North, and follows the movement of people as they went South from Egypt. So I'm trying to connect Zuluness with Egyptology.
Sun Ra
piano1914 - 1993
There was no point at which ancestry was an isolated idea from an idea of a God. This was distorted by Colonization. When people were colonized, their cultures were colonized too, and they were made to feel that there was something wrong with their way of believing.
I am trying to crystallize an idea of Blackness, and Inner Dimensions looks into that. I'm trying to find these connections of navigating beliefs in ancestry and messengers. If you think of Christianity as using angels as our messengers to God, it's almost the way African spiritualism uses ancestors as messengers. We believe that people don't actually die; the body may die, but the spirit lives. This is not a new idea anywhere around the world. It's believed in South Africa that you can either believe in Christianity through Christ, or you can believe in ancestors, but you cannot believe in both. For me, this is a twisted idea, as it refuses ancestry a link to a god.
Inner Dimensions uses a hymnal idea, as well. Abdullah Ibrahim embraces the hymnal in such a beautiful way, too. You hear a unique South African aesthetic in the way we articulate the influence of hymnals in our music. If you listen to "Mannenberg," I don't think there is anywhere else in the world where Jazz is approached that way. So there is this drive within me to try to define what South African Jazz is all about. There is such a huge culture, and a broad repertoire, but I don't think we have a vocabulary yet to define it. These humble takes I'm trying to develop for myself are my way of trying to articulate a language we have.
AAJ: When you mention Abdullah's influence, that raises your solo piano album Reflections. On that, there are echoes of
Abdullah Ibrahim
pianob.1934
Bheki Mseleku
piano1955 - 2008
NM: That's what I was trying to do. It is Reflections on repertoire of my upbringing. When I reflect on that, Abdullah looms large, as does Mseleku. If you think of solo piano records, we don't have that many. Abdullah did some, Tete Mbambisa did Black Heroes, and we have several others, but it is limited. Reflections is a letter to Mseleku and his notion of a home and his celebration of friendships. On his Home at Last album we see him play with artists like Morabo Morojele for the first time, and celebrating this idea of a South African Jazz community.
Regarding Mseleku's right-hand articulation, that is something that has always fascinated me about his playing. I know it comes from
McCoy Tyner
piano1938 - 2020
Bheki Mseleku
piano1955 - 2008
But I also have other piano influences.
Randy Weston
piano1926 - 2018
Randy Weston
piano1926 - 2018
Rodney Kendrick
pianob.1960
I think of contemporaries of mine, Kyle Shepherd, Afrika Mkhize, and in a way we are all disciples of Mseleku, trying to define this idea of the African Piano. Although the piano is a Western-derived instrument, I think of things like the mbira or the kalimba. For me it's not a mistake that we sometimes call the mbira a thumb piano. In terms of how it is built, and how it is used, you can tell that the Western piano derives some of its mechanism from it.
AAJ:
Randy Weston
piano1926 - 2018
NM: I've been researching where mbiras came from. I know ethnomusicologists dismiss this story as myth, and indeed a lot of African stories are dismissed and disregarded as myths. But older people in Zimbabwe tell the story that mbiras were not invented in a way that they were built by people, but rather they were brought by mermaids to the river banks of Zimbabwe, and that is how people discovered them. They go on to talk about the formulation of the mbira's tonal system, as representing a community. The low keys represent the elders, the wise men of the tribe. The higher tones represent the younger people that are excited and learning. Later, when I think about improvisation, I think about the right hand, always in search of new things. But I think of the left hand, composed and definite in what it's trying to do. Everything we play in our right hand is derived from our roots. And so when I play I think about the mbira and its story.
AAJ: All of these threads on the differing approaches to South African music and identities also play into your role as a producer. You've overseen a diverse set of projects by Sisa Sopazi,
Tumi Mogorosi
drumsNM: I believe that Jazz is a shared memory. It brings me closer to other people's projects. Whatever they are trying to say is something I can relate to, because it's something we share as suggested by the music itself. When I am being called to produce these records, I don't know that I bring much beyond bringing myself into it to help try to crystallize the ideas that the artist have already.
I can relate to many of their stories. For example, in Images and Figures by Sisa Sopazi, Sisa came to Jazz later in life. He didn't really have any background within Jazz, and he so he referred to images, people like
Andile Yenana
pianob.1968
Ultimately, it's a celebration of friendships. It's also an idea that
Salim Washington
saxophone, tenorAAJ: How do we tie all of these concepts together and build a framework for understanding your latest album, Ikhambi?
NM: Well Ikhambi is also a search for identity, a restoration of crucial elements of my cultures and histories that have been forgotten. My core idea here is finding alternative ways of thinking through and about Jazz in South Africa within ancient African knowledge systems, towards a 'new' language. So I situate the themes and concepts mentioned earlier in what I do, as a tool to creating a familiar context for my music drawing from my upbringing. But most importantly what links all my work are the healing properties of music and Ikhambi is a more intentional effort to channel that vibration.
Selected Discography:
Nduduzo Makhathini, Mother Tongue, (Gundu Entertainment, 2014)
Nduduzo Makhathini, Sketches of Tomorrow, (Gundu Entertainment, 2014)
Nduduzo Makhathini, Listening to the Ground, (Gundu Entertainment, 2015)
Nduduzo Makhathini, Matunda Ya Kwanza, (Gundu Entertainment, 2015)
Nduduzo Makhathini, Icilongo: The African Peace Suite (Gundu Entertainment, 2016)
Nduduzo Makhathini, Inner Dimensions, (Gundu Entertainment, 2016)
Nduduzo Makhathini, Reflections, (Gundu Entertainment, 2017)
Nduduzo Makhathini, Ikhambi, (Universal Music, 2017).
Tags
Interview
Nduduzo Makhathini
Seton Hawkins
South Africa
Nduduzo Makhathini
Bheki Mseleku
Zim Ngqawana
Charlie Parker
John Coltrane
Wayne Shorter
McCoy Tyner
Sun Ra
abdullah ibrahim
Matthew Shipp
Blue Notes
Blues Notes
Louis Moholo
Salim Washington
Winston Mankunku Ngozi
Tete Mbambisa
Dudu Pukwana
Johnny Dyani
Philip Tabane
Abdullah Ibrahim
Morabo Morojele
Randy Weston
Rodney Kendrick
Kyle Shepherd
Afrika Mkhize
Sisa Sopazi
Tumi Mogorosi
Lindiwe Maxolo
Andile Yenana
Herbie Tsoaeli
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Nduduzo Makhathini Concerts
Mar
9
Mon
NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
Athenee Theatre Louis-jouvetParis, France
Apr
16
Thu
Coltrane 100: Both Directions At Once
Mondavi Center for the Performing ArtsDavis, CA
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