AWARD-WINNING pianist Nduduzo Makhathini has a busy schedule with a new album coming and international performances.
The 39-year-old jazz musician is currently on tour in the USA and he just dropped a single from his upcoming album.
The single titled Amathongo is the second one from the album titled In The Spirit of Ntu, which will drop on 27 May.
“Nguni people or even Bantu tribes take dreams seriously. This is due to their Ntu cosmology that views the world in a triangle: the living, the living-dead (ancestors) and the ones not yet born. Thus, dreams and rituals become a site for parallel existence in all three planes all at once,” said Nduduzo.
“A great Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa explains ubuthongo, sleep in Zulu, as the moment of being one with the star gods. Amathongo is thus an acknowledgment of the star gods that see the future. It is a deep surrender and agreement with the greater wholeness of being,” he continued.
Speaking about the album, which will be his 10th, Nduduzo said it is a level up from his previous albums.
“I’m grappling with these cosmological ideas as a way of situating jazz in our context. I put out Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds using the letter as a metaphor for the sounds coming from the underworlds.
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Previously, I had released Listening to the Ground, which encored into this idea of listening as knowing. In the Spirit of Ntu is living in that paradigm of listening to the things that emerge from the ground.
“Ntu is an ancient African philosophy from which the idea of ubuntu stems out,” he said.
He performed at Mr Musichead, an art gallery in Los Angeles, last week and will be heading to New York on Friday and Saturday, 29 and 30 April. Then he’ll be heading to Missouri, Massachusetts and Vermont in the US.
He will then go on to Europe, Netherlands, France, Italy and Sweden.
