Deep in Africa – Almost exactly in the middle of the second set, Nduduzo Makhathini and his band reached dreamlike heights.
Over the course of the concert, the three musicians grew together into a unit in which the usual jazz sequences and boundaries between theme, solo, and improvisation disappeared.
Melodious, song-like passages, cluster-like chords, racing bass lines, and completely free drumming that simultaneously follows an inner rhythm – everything seems to happen simultaneously, leading into dreamlike spheres.
A band plays with impressive and playful intimacy. Glances pass back and forth; this trio is a wide-awake, vibrant organism, highly focused, deeply relaxed, and in constant communication.
This phase of the concert followed one of the two announcements with which Nduduzo Makhathini addressed the Sudhaus audience.
The South African-born pianist, now also a university professor, explained why he has refrained from announcing pieces, or even mentioning the titles of songs, for some time now.
The songs he plays, he said, change over time, going their own way. But the songs are so friendly that they allow them, the musicians, to play them. But that’s why it’s also difficult to name them, to capture them, so to speak.
The songs, the songs, wander, he laughs, are perhaps the same ones that centuries earlier – perhaps in a different guise – had already migrated from the west coast of Africa to America on the slave ships.
They became spirituals, gospel, blues, and jazz. Songs that also remained in Africa, in South Africa, for example, where they were sung separately, by mothers who had to stay alone with their children and by fathers who had left home to work in the mines.
Source of Music – In addition to the music, it is also these impressive words with which Nduduzo Makhathini leads the Sudhaus audience to the source of his music.
Africa, and the history of this continent and its people. ‘Land,’ including landscapes, are very important here. Land that has been repeatedly taken away from those who actually lived and live there throughout the history of southern Africa, has been denied to them, but continues to live on in music.
While question marks and thoughts swirl in our heads about how little we actually know about the history of Africa and the global struggles for distribution that continue to bring new suffering and horror to the land and its people, Nduduzo Makhathini has long since returned to the piano, letting his fingers glide over the keys, playing powerful chords, singing, calling out, lamenting into the microphone, and continuing the mystical African journey with his two companions.
Bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere lives in the USA and has South African roots. Drummer Francisco Mela is from Cuba. Neither of them is a backup musician; together with Nduduzo Makhatini, they are more like explorers or adventurers, constantly exploring new things.
And this trio line-up is ideal for this. Spontaneity and mutual interaction are possible more directly and immediately than in larger ensembles and more complex arrangements.
The band’s music sometimes develops from a short sequence of notes, from a melodic fragment. Soundscapes emerge, almost impressionistic landscape paintings, or abstract chord sequences marked with charcoal strokes, and complex rhythmic structures. The band in shared, collective improvisation.
A striking image towards the end of the first set: bass and drums have settled into a trance-like groove. Nduduzo Makhathini stands up and begins to dance in the background of the stage with expansive movements.
Legs, arms, his entire body in the flow of the music. In an online biography, he is quoted as saying: “As someone who started playing jazz very late, I had always been looking for a kind of playing that could mirror or evoke the way my people danced, sang, and spoke…”
And the gesture at the very end, as an encore, is beautiful: By now, laughs Makhatini into the brewhouse hall, by now, the dividing line between the audience and the performers should have disappeared.
What works in Kenya and Zimbabwe should work here too, said the (sound) magician from South Africa… And then we sang together, or at least tried…
