To the underworlds
changemakers like Msaki (she makes a guest appearance on Modes of Communication); Linda Sikhakhane and Ndabo Zulu, who form the horn section together with United Statesbased saxophonist Logan Richardson; and Umle, whose isi-xhosa town fellow twist Makhathini describes as “speaking to abantu ekasi”.
Makhathini was a session musician before his solo exploits writ large his buoyant compositional abilities. His early years in Jo’burg were spent earning income as a studio session musician and, at one point, as a member of Lebo Mathosa’s band. He also spent time at bra Zim Ngqawana’s Zimology Institute, and got to tour and appear on a number of recordings by the bandleader. He is the one playing piano on arguably the most important recording of our time: Bra Herbie Tsoaeli’s African Time.
‘The ideas of a commercial world are problematic when you’re dealing with these kinds of themes,” Makhathini says in reference to creating work beyond commercial imperatives. “This further speaks to some of the ideas around major record labels, for instance, being with [the Universal Music Group] and the kind of language used. I’m basically creating an archive, and the archive doesn’t need commercial success. When the San people were making rock art, they didn’t think about commercial success. They were documenting a story; they were creating an archive. So in terms of ‘How do I then live through my craft?’, the ancestors take care of that. The kind of light that has been shining towards the work for [the past 10 years] has been special. I have enough.”
Another figure who features on most of Makhathini’s albums and in his live performances is Ayanda Sikade, the Mdantsane-born drummer with whom he connected in the early 2000s while still a student at Technikon Natal (now the Durban University of Technology).
During his two-day run at the Market Theatre in June last year, when he chose material from ubab’ ubheki Mseleku’s songbook, Makhathini narrated a story about how Sikhakhane and Zulu admired how Sikade and himself complemented one another musically. Seventeen years of playing together will do that.
This camaraderie extends beyond the bandstand. They communicate emotions through grunts and halfcompleted nothings. Sikade’s methods and mannerisms are exacting, domineering, while Makhathini plays off of that emotive tempo, filling in the grunts with knowing stares, shaking his head as though solving a taxing problem during the village imbizo at the local chief’s kraal. A “whoooo”, often followed by lively, heartfelt laughter, is never far off when the music slaps hard enough.
In between recording sessions, the band convene in the listening room for a playback of what they’ve just laid down. Sometimes discussions are about what can be improved on for the current take of a song; other times, after a democratic decision to move on, the discussions are about the form that the song will take. Beneath the Earth, with Msaki, inspires a monologue about transcendence and life on “the other side”.
“When I did Shwele from Icilongo, yaz’ iyangkhalisa because this is a code to a very ancient time, this scale,” he says, referring to the part he’s just sung on the song. “If you can go too deep, you might not come back, even. It might be the last thing you sing in your life. Kuthiwa, ‘Wa vele wathula; akaphindanga wakhuluma, akaphindanga wakhip’ ivoice’. What if that world opens? Will there be a need to sing? Will there be a need to play? There won’t be. I’m always willing to really let go and not come back. We talk about it with Sikhakhane. Someday we’ll be on the bandstand and we’re playing, and we’ll be gone. The audience will be sitting there, watching, and there’ll be no one on the bandstand.”
He’s deadly serious. Yet within that seriousness, within that perceptible ingenuity, within that broad academic scope underpinned by even broader ancestral messaging, Makhathini is an underrated comedian. It’s in the raucous moments following his innocuous declarations, when laughter wants to let loose, that true learning occurs. This ability to activate broad touch points to communicate one idea is what makes him a leader in this current era, and a figurehead of the generations that he’s inspiring. But, as he told Safm’s Michelle Constant, the morning after his Market Theatre showcase, during which he read an excerpt from his thesis on the late, great master pianist Bheki Mseleku, he is not interested in being thought of as a leader.
“When ubab’ umseleku was around at Technikon Natal, he was not one of the contract lecturers there. But he was a master, and we were his disciples. I think that somehow, as a disciple, you carry a bigger responsibility. So it’s beyond yourself. In terms of the jazz culture, even in the US, it’s important to always echo the voice of the ancestor. But it also connects me with a lot of what I believe as well about us drawing from the ancestry realm, and ubab’ umseleku is definitely one of the ancestors that shone so much light to this music, and I draw a lot from him,” he said.
He deems it an honour whenever someone picks up Mccoy Tyner, or Bheki Mseleku, or even Moses Molelekwa in his playing.
Musicians give the notes character. The vocalists give the lyrics meaning, through how they inflect, how they direct us the listeners through the notes — fraught with intense, layered, complex messages — and force us to appreciate the nuances. They simplify and decode as much as they build, complicate, solidify.
The music is also a dance: it’s Nduduzo dancing is’pantsula as he waves his hands in a moment of deep meditation, caught as he ever is in a revolving cast of differentshaped bones. The keys, the ebony and the ivory, represent ritualistic codes presented before the ancestors. The ancient spirits. The ones before before, when time was but a construct, and reality a continuum; a conversation between the living, the dead, the living-dead, and the liminal space that Makhathini (the healer), chooses to navigate through this music.
Modes of Communication is experimentalism through the pedagogical definition of a jazz that is free. Seeking. Finding. Erasing. Restructuring. It’s performative, as performative as the writing you are reading, the set of words on paper, arranged to please, to sway to the music and the thinking behind it. To obey and dictate at once. Then again, it’s collaboration: the letting down, the giving in, the contributing to. The selflessness is a given, almost. There are no prearranged notions, assumed outcomes, even if that’s what the notation may suggest.
Gontse Makhene joined the recording as a late addition, on the morning the record was being completed. He arrived bearing gifts, toys. He also came with a storied past. He shared these stories, he communed, he feasted, retrofitted into the scope that had been crafted, and brought out its more nuanced elements, until, eventually, all the modes and the nodes, all the notes had a solid base and a constant guide beyond the root of La Pere’s bass and the stroke of Sikade’s tough skins.
Sikade: you should see how he moved in the listening room; how his own contributions seemed, to him at least, meagre in comparison to the giants he was inadvertently guiding as the time-keeper. But keeping time isn’t what Sikade is preoccupied with. He’s like Max Roach in that way. His playing, distinctive and assertive, also functions as the cheerleader by the roadside, urging marathon runners — the horn section — to soldier on; to reach their highest heights, to surpass everything they knew up until that point.
What Makhathini does is to take all these contributions and guide them through the assembly line. He does this with grace and lets the finished product swallow us whole.
The mythical underworld and the cosmic interplanetary are in constant communication. These are the modes we speak of when speaking about this offering.
“Let’s go straight to the gig; we’ll do sound check as rehearsal,” are the words Makhathini says before heading back to Soweto for a show at Just Badela.