Yonela Mnana
Pianist
A Yonela Mnana gig is an unpredictable affair. That’s not to suggest that the singer and pianist is erratic but to illustrate the sum of influences that he draws from.
This is an artist rooted in jazz as much as he is in other musics of the black experience. Immediately clear is that he is an artist who finds the notion of genre tiresome. Having said that, there are deep traces of the avant-garde tradition in his work; impassioned bursts of emotion, original vocal phrasing and an invigorating rawness to his playing.
While Mnana may profess to have been raised on kwaito and R&B — soul, in his hand, is a roughly hewn diamond, a direct channel to the listener’s heart that almost bypasses the need for lyrics. The fact that Mnana cannot see means that he channels sound without the filter of sight.
Speaking about the title track of his 2016 album, Baba, Mnana waxes philosophical, saying it represents a three-pronged search for family, political leadership and spirituality — emotively encapsulating South Africa’s sociopolitical quagmire.
This year, Mnana is planning to produce an album for Soul Tee, a trio of voices he is mentoring, as well as master and mix his second album, a two-
disc project whose recording he has almost completed. “The double album will be a solo album on one side, and the other, a trio album,” he says.
Of his trio, which includes Ariel Zamonsky on double bass and Siphiwe Shiburi on drums, he says: “We navigate all around but we still have this jazz tag on us. It informs us, in a way, it’s our point of departure.”
The solo side of the album was inspired by the work and outlook of Dumile Feni. In 2015, Mnana produced the score to accompany a series of Feni’s scrolls exhibited at the Wits Arts Museum. “I had to do a lot
of research and I found out that he’d sacrificed a lot to paint in the United Kingdom in very chilly weather,” says Mnana. “And after the effort he wouldn’t even want to sell the painting, which meant that it was a very expressive approach, than just a commercial thing, which is the very same thing I’m saying that jazz is straddling — these two aspects [the commercial and the expressive].”