THE BIG READ

Jazz pianist and vocalist Thandi Ntuli’s music is on the move. Tseliso Monaheng goes along for the trip

Get syncopated with Thandi Ntuli

Thandi Ntuli is fresh off tour. She took her quartet to Mozambique and Swaziland, where they played wellreceived shows, made new friends who showed them new tricks, and returned with a gang of unsuitable-for-print stories. There was also a Jozi stop-over at DJ Kenzhero’s new spot in Braamfontein. Thandi, along with Benjamin Jephta and Sphelelo Mazibuko, on bass and drums respectively — and a horn section courtesy of the sax-trumpet-trombone collective H3 — are in Rebirth of Cool with grandaddy mcswank, Kenzhero.

A gig as the musical director during Simphiwe Dana’s Cape Town International Jazz Festival headliner performances followed and, as of writing, Thandi was set to launch her sophomore album Exiled this month and play a gig with American musician Georgia Anne Muldrow.

Thandi, pianist, composer and vocalist is active in a music scene that is at a crossroads in many ways. Globally, it’s the question of how musicians are finding new ways to earn a living in the age of streaming; locally, it’s the proposed amendment to the Copyright Bill and, even closer to home, thinking hard about other directions the music can take, and what other dimensions —besides the constricting “jazz” label — it can occupy. It’s in many ways a response to a call-to-action instituted and transmuted through the trans-Atlantic and the global South by ancestral thinkers who’ve long called for our multiplicities as Africans to reflect us, to centre our tales, contemporary and folkloric.

As Thandi’s music travels, this piece necessitates that we journey alongside her.

September 2017

Pretoria-born Thandi moved to Joburg from Cape Town, where she had been studying jazz since 2007, to join Thandiswa Mazwai’s all-woman band in 2012. This stage in her transition to solo artist-hood carried with it the self-doubt all great creators experience.

She reminisced about that period when we spoke following the release of her debut The Offering: “What I realised when I was doing a lot of shows was that people would come to me, like ‘I love that song, where can I get it?’ and you’re like, ‘Eish, I don’t have an album yet.’ The fact that there are people that appreciate what you do was actually very important for me to stop thinking about my own issues.”

Critically acclaimed, that album was made more special by the communal effort to see it into existence. To finance its recording and release, Thandi reached out to The Orbit, which gladly offered dates at its venue for a fundraising gig. Billed as an album launch — without copies of the actual album, yes — the memorable night’s standout moments included when, during the very last song, the audience got up to sing along to the melody of Spha Mdlalose and the horn section of Sisonke Xonti and Mthunzi Mvubu on The Offering opener

Lonely Heart, the band’s last song of the night. “Do/ ti la so re mi/ do so” sang everyone, amid a chorus of applause that infected the entire first floor of the twostorey establishment.

The band felt compelled, after their symbolic bow-out, to pick up their instruments and accompany the attendees’ visible joy for a few more bars.

Established a few months before that night, The Orbit celebrated its fourth birthday with a string of gigs this March, of which one was the reunion of Voice, a project that features one of Thandi’s inspirations, bra Andile Yenana.

August 2016

The first time I got to interview Thandi was at a video shoot. I asked her about her influences:

“I started playing the piano when I was four years old, doing classical piano. But I only decided to study music at the end of high school. I’m not sure who inspired me in terms of the decision to do music; it was a mix of different people. But as I was learning jazz, [the South African pianists] that really influenced me would be Andile Yenana, Afrika Mkhize, Moses Molelekwa and Bheki Mseleku. Those are probably the four guys that hit a nerve with me,” she said.

Then, at a later time: “The relationship

with jazz, I think, subconsciously, was because of the parents. I didn’t actually realise that I was listening to jazz when I grew up. And of course there’s always that neighbour who, on every Sunday, blasts his music. Sounds of trumpets and saxophones.

“The most instrumental influence in terms of me deciding to go the jazz route was when I met this guy who was improvising. And I had a classical background, so improvising was just like, How do you do that? I always used to read music off scores and, when I saw someone just playing I’m like ‘What are you doing?’ and he’s like ‘I’m improvising.’ And he told me a bit about jazz. Then that jazz thing comes back, and only then do you realise, ‘Oh, I’ve actually been listening to this stuff my whole life!’”

Studio sessions

News that Thandi had been selected as the 2018 Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz came a full year and some months from the first studio date of Exiled’s recording in August 2016. The location was Downtown Studios, legendary for the sheer breadth of top-shelf musicians it has hosted, from Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens to Lucky Dube and more. Jazz composer, musician and educator Hotep Idris Galeta’s image is part of the collage on the walls. Thandi’s uncle and former Harari band member Selby Ntuli, guitarist, would’ve been a frequent visitor. Legend has it that, on a silent night like this, a Sunday, if you pay close attention, you’ll be able to relive that early-morning session when Hotstix stumbled upon the chords to Burn Out.

Those days are long gone. Musicians of different persuasions, from those with a live-instrument approach to those who like their offerings purely electronic, don’t have the record label support of a Gallo or some such equivalent to carry their craft, to turn them into superstars, as per the parlance and outlook of those early days.

Today’s session has Sisonke, Mthunzi, Keenan, Sphelelo, Benjamin, Marcus Wyatt (trumpet) and Justin Sasman (trombone); there was a miscommunication with master percussionist Tlale Makhene, so he won’t be around when one of Exiled’s many standout moments, Abyssinia, is laid down (Tlale’s parts will be recorded later, during a second recording date at Downtown). Cosmic Light is among the songs Thandi and the band record that night. It will go on to be the album’s lead single, and one of the two songs — alongside Lonely Heart from The Offering — handpicked by Spike Lee for the Netflix-commissioned adaptation of his seminal ’86 movie She’s Gotta Have It.

A call for healing

Bongo Muffin legend Jah Seed has left by the time poet and performance artist Lebo Mashile arrives. She has just over an hour to spare before her yoga session, a discipline Thandi has also embraced of late. Studio engineer Kholofelo Sewela plays the music on loop while the two ladies, trailblazers in their respective fields, chat it up.

“The album is called Exiled, so I feel like I don’t think anyone is gonna take the album expecting to dance,” says Thandi to Lebo. That doesn’t mean there aren’t songs to groove to. One could tango to Umthandazo Womzali, reworked from Umthandazo on her debut; cha-cha to It’s Complicated featuring music college schoolmate, the New York-based delight Vuyo Sotashe; or go full-on ndlamu in time to Tlale’s decadent percussive groove on Abyssinia.

The options are plenty.

Deeper into the session, the conversation shifts to the black people and the black family unit, and how apartheid and its recent manifestations — in case you missed it, jack shit has changed for black women — served as a divide-and-conquer mechanism, ingenious in its implementation.

Kholo, the engineer, chips in: “Men are not naturally men, [we] are not given that chance to be,” and asks, later: “Families, has it become a man’s failure or?”

Reasons Thandi: “No, it’s not a man’s failure, but there are parts of it that men have to show up for.”

Lebo takes the baton: “Migrant labour [was not] black men’s fault. It’s not our fault that we had to be ripped away from our land; had to send our men into cities to go and work; the women had to follow, [and] what that did to black families — that is not black men’s fault.

“But the way that that frustration and violence that black men experience[d] translates into them being more violent on black women; taking out their frustrations on black women — it’s convenient.

“I don’t even think that black men don’t know. It’s just that it’s the easy thing to do; it’s the darn thing to do. It’s like women are there for that — women are there for free emotional labour, free sexual labour, to create a home and safe space for black families, but that very same home is not safe for black women,” she says, impassioned.

Lebo’s ready to unleash the full wrath of her words, in literary form, by the time she steps into the booth, with lines like:

What happens to boys who are unwanted?

What happens to boys who learnt to die inside their skins the day they learn what their fathers have done to their mothers?

What their mothers have done to themselves.

All I can do is hope that the tears welling up in my eyes won’t flow and flood the listening room, causing damage to Kholo’s equipment.

When Thandi started thinking around this album, she arrived at different conclusions, springing from different vantage points. The personal was as important as the political; the mundane as significant as the spectacular. It would therefore be unjust to summarise it into one thing, but these words, part of her thinking around the album’s liner notes, make an attempt, somewhat: “This is a call for healing . . . not just of all the disparities we see in our society, but of the world within each of us, the world where all things are born, all seeds anchored, and from which all things truly emanate.”

’Exiled’ is out now