On stage, South African pianist/vocalist Nduduzo Makhathini is less interested in playing music than in repairing the world, performing sonic rituals that nurture, heal and transform audiences and musicians alike.
Off stage, a conversation with Makhathini can feel like a graduate seminar as he deploys the lexicon of metaphysics and post-colonial theory in describing his artistic goals and vision. He’s clearly thought deeply about what it means to be an African jazz artist, but it’s the simmering lyricism and distilled emotional intensity of Makhathini’s music that makes his performances spiritually charged encounters.
His trio performs around the region in the coming days, with concerts at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage on Nov. 1; Half Moon Bay’s Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society on Nov. 3; and Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center Nov. 4. Focusing on music from his third album for Blue Note Records, “uNomkhubulwane,” Makhathini presents a three-movement suite conceived as an homage to the titular Zulu goddess of rain, nature, and fertility.
The protean deity serves as an antidote to “suffocating” Western attitudes towards Africa that focus on scarcity rather than abundance, that see the continent and think only, “How can I help?”
“On the contrary, almost everything, minerals, philosophies, mathematics, really emerged from this part of the world,” said Makhathini, 42, in a recent video call from his home in Durban.
“That’s how I came up with uNomkhubulwane, a rain goddess who regulates abundance and all creation of the world. In the Zulu creation story our god is genderless, the one who appeared first, and that changes how we think of maternal energy.”
More than a conceptual framework, maternal energy fed his creative process as the suite evolved out of a “mother song” Makhathini experienced while being initiated as a healer. Immersed in water to encounter uNomkhubulwane, he heard the song and shaped the first movement of the suite as an expression of “collective Black memory within a state of protest against ongoing oppression and mourning that has made us lose our voices,” he said.
In many ways his musical practice centers on reconstituting those voices. When he started studying jazz piano at Durban University of Technology, Makhathini was disconcerted that the pedagogy avoided any mention of healing and spirituality. In his upbringing music and medicine were inextricably linked via his grandmother, a sangoma , or traditional Zulu healer.
“Healing isn’t something we bring to the music,” he said. “It’s a holistic ecosystem that has always functioned in this way, so I was disoriented by that experience at university, where there was no connection between spirituality and sound.”
The new album reflects his evolving understanding of the relationship between healing and sound, as he’s come to see rehearsal as a transformational act itself rather than something “that leads to something greater, a grand moment or performance,” he said. “This allows us to see this moment as being important, where forgiveness could be derived from the very idea we’re part of a rehearsal.”
Makhathini’s ideas may sound esoteric, but in practice his music is grounded in the rich soil of John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner, Abdullah Ibrahim and Bheki Mseleku, the Durban multi-instrumentalist who became a key mentor. When he encountered Mseleku, a saxophonist, guitarist, vocalist and pianist, Makhathini had no idea that the humble self-taught teacher had performed and recorded with jazz legends Charlie Haden, Joe Henderson, Abbey Lincoln and Elvin Jones.
“We didn’t know he had such a deep connection to the history,” Makhathini said. “He was so simple and all about reading Eastern mysticism. Bheki Mseleku introduced me not just to playing the piano but to a modality of spirituality. Soon I would learn this is one of the greatest pianists who ever walked on earth.”
It was through Mseleku that he heard the direct connection between Coltrane and Africa, particularly through the classic 1965 album “A Love Supreme,” which was the first recording he ever purchased for himself. Listening to the saxophonist’s spiritual suite, “I couldn’t stop making connections between Mseleku and McCoy Tyner,” he said, referring to the Coltrane Quartet’s longtime pianist. “I’m currently writing a paper exploring what is this thing evoking this deep sense of memory, which points us back to some kind of folksiness.”
The trio Makhathini brings to the West Coast features two young South African musicians now living in the US, with New York drummer Kabelo Mokhatla and New Haven-reared bassist Zwelkahe Duma Bell le Pere, “someone I mentored since he was quite young,” he he said. “Now he ranks as one of the my favorite musicians.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
When & where: 8 pm Nov. 1 at Freight & Salvage, Berkeley; $39-$44; thefreight.org; 4:30 pm Nov. 3 at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay; $45 (livestream $10); bachddsoc.org; 7 pm Nov. 4 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $42; www.kuumbwajazz.org