NDUDUZO MAKHATINI is an extraordinary pianist. Born in Umgungundlovu, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa in 1982, his musical universe carries the spirits of his Zulu ancestry, engendered through his piano studies at Durban University of Technology and his doctoral research at the University of Stellenbosch.

His new album, Unomkhubalwane, delves into his people’s spiritual history. Its title is the name of the rain goddess and symbol of creation and fertility. 

With him are bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bell Le Pere, born and raised in the US, whose father and grandfather (an ex-secretary of the African National Congress) were steeped in the liberation movement, and the veteran Cuban drummer Francisco Mela, born in Bayamo in 1968 and a virtuoso who has played with such US jazz luminaries as pianists McCoy Tyner and Kenny Barron, and saxophonist Joe Lovano.

What are his musical roots? “I was born into a musical family and village,” says Makhatini. “Growing up, I was introduced to various styles of Zulu indigenous music, mostly within the context of ritual ceremonies. My mother Nomajerusalema was my first piano teacher and my greatest musical inspiration, period. Then I started playing professionally in 2001, when I studied music at the University of KwaZulu, Natal.”

How has his music sought to overcome the scars of Apartheid? “My music responds to all forms of dehumanisation,” he explains, “by focusing on transcendent strategies that allow for the break with the metaphysical, as a way to rise above the normative oppressions that engulf humanity.”

“Unomkhubalwane stands as a symbol to remind us that Africa is the mother of creation and all ancient civilisations. Using the language of water, she reminds us of our own freedoms.” A sad reflection on our own polluted and sewage-filled rivers. “Essentially,” he says, “the album’s music seeks to enunciate from a place of text, myth and discourse, to bring our attention to creation principles that can save the humanity project that has gone so wrong. This album is an invitation to a kind of rebirth.”

Some commission this, from the classic Blue Note label that seven decades ago gave us the beginnings of Miles, Coltrane, Blakey and Rollins. For the trio of Unomkhubulwane irrigate the now-times soundscape with their balmy, liberating notes and there is no timbral aridity about their music. Le Pere’s bass dances and flows, and Mela’s drums gush with Caribbean springs and streams. Nduduzo’s piano — sometimes like Abdullah Ibrahim in libation tracks like Uxolo or the water spirits of Izinkonjama, and at other times splashing down their very own cataracts and cascades of sound — waters the soul with their freshness.

I ask him about Mela’s Cuban drumming, a Cuito Cuanavale of revolutionary sound, reminding listeners of Cuba’s contribution to finally defeating the South African Apartheid army in Angola in 1987/88. “Those connections are definitely there,” he asserts. “But more than anything we are looking at spiritual affinities and how these liberate and at the same time transcend the political. We are concerned with modalities of healing black lives and moving towards collective memory.”

And such memory embraces the great generation of hugely influential South African musicians who came to Europe to escape from and continually defy Apartheid from the 1960s onwards: Ibrahim, the Blue Notes, Harry Miller, Claude Deppa, Nchuks Bonga. “I feel grateful to be part of such an important history and lineage of South African jazz, both in our country and in ‘exile’ discourses that emerged in London and elsewhere in Europe during Apartheid.”

“And there is definitely a generation of musicians now in South Africa that shares with the earlier musicians in building consciousness which would help to liberate the nation from postcolonialism. This is expressed in current jazz music through musical memories and connections with the past.”

Unomkhubulwane as an album is a progenitor of this musical discourse. It’s a beautiful listen to a new Africa in fluid sound, and a statement of a defiant past in the present too.
    
UNOMKHUBULWANE is released by Blue Note Records