Spirit of Ntu: South African piano maestro Nduduzo Makhathini on his 10th album

Nduduzo Makhathini is a prolific South African pianist, improviser, healer, educator, scholar and storyteller. He possesses a gift that enables him to articulate a distinct and rich identity and genealogy. His sound signifies a deep rootedness in his ethnic identity in the Zulu culture, and an internationalism embodying it. In the Spirit of Ntu is his tenth offering, and his second release under premier US jazz label Blue Note Records and the newly founded Blue Note Africa.

The philosophy of Ntu (stemming from the philosophy of ubuntu) speaks to the merging of the physical and spiritual and so, in conversation with Makhathini, I have sought to understand how he continues to bridge the artistic, the cultural and the spiritual through song and narrative. My point of departure for our conversation was something he had said in a previous interview:

"I want to try to get the piano to speak the language of my people, and by the language of my people I mean isiZulu … the melodic structures of the language … that filters into how my people sing … drawing parallels between the piano and some of the traditional music that we grew up listening to."

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Phuti Sepuru: How does In the Spirit of Ntu speak the language of your people?

Nduduzo Makhathini: I’ve been struggling with this whole idea of what really counts as indigenous when everything has been diluted? Also, what counts as indigenous when so much has been taken away? Like the many years of erasure and the various moments of the slave trade, settler coloniality, apartheid. Do we still really have something that is indigenous to a particular group of people? A sound that is not contaminated; a thought that is not contaminated?

So, that is how I arrived at Ntu. I borrow a particular sensibility from jazz music, but there are other histories that are pre the arrival of jazz that are useful for me to think about what counts as the sound of my people. Then I started thinking about separating between jazz and the jazziness. When I speak about jazz, it’s of course the transatlantic stories, but when I speak about the jazziness I’m speaking about syncopation, swing, improvisation. These are things that have always been there; they did not come with the arrival of jazz in South Africa in the 1930s.

I’m particularly attracted to (Rwandan poet and philosopher Alexis) Kagame’s thinking about it. He speaks about the four categories: umuntu, which contains the spirit aspect – divinities, the ancestors; kintu; hantu is about time and space; and kuntu is about aesthetics and beauty. Given these categories, I realised that for these sounds to make sense, we need to start creating homes for them. For me, cosmology is a pursuit – where are these sounds enunciating from? What are these homes? What do they look like? The sound of my people is also about conflict. It’s also about disparity – not being able to touch in concrete ways, the things that are important to us. It’s also about collective memory, the diasporas. In South Africa, particularly, the exile and inxile discourse and how jazz has always been emerging out of this moment of displacement.

Phuti Sepuru: In what way did the 2021 Durban unrest and riots serve as the ‘canvas’ for this work?

Nduduzo Makhathini: I was meant to record in the US, and of course, I couldn’t get that organised. Then I asked Jaleel (Shaw), Nasheet Waits, and all these guys who were meant to be on the record if they were keen on coming to South Africa. Jaleel was like, ‘Bro, given these riots and burning, I don’t think so.’ So, these are the underpinning themes and events that were taking place and I started thinking that we always think about ‘76 (the Soweto uprising) to the ‘80s (apartheid violence), about (South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim’s track)