The Myth We Chose, the entrancing new album by South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini, foregrounds hope and healing, and a conviction in the redemptive power of connection. It’s a song-forward statement for Makhathini, who is also a composer, vocalist, and philosopher, as well as an ambassador for the Global South. This summer he brought his trio to Solar Myth before an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival; on the first of two nights, he joined Josh Jackson for an onstage conversation about ritual, responsibility, and the reason he prefers the term “encounter” to “discovery” when it comes to a person’s formative contact with improvised music.
Watch the interview here:
Interview highlights
On musicality as something deeper than music
"For me, [music and musicality] would be two kind of related entities, but not identical. The music would be a thing that comes as a result of sounding something, but the musicality is more an organizing principle. In my language, they would say something like — if I'm translating — 'This child is not musical.' So when you do something that's out of tune with the morals and ethics, they will invoke musicality. So musicality in this sense happens without sound. Musicality is an organizing principle that holds the universe together."
On rehearsing in order to let go
"Where I come from, a village, study is a way of trying to come to mastery, but through a different idea — not that of possession, but that of emptying... [In my book, An Ongoing Rehearsal,] I argue that rehearsing is towards mastery, but you should rehearse and master this enough to let it go. So when I'm with my band and rehearsing, the idea is that we have to rehearse this material so much that we don't do the same thing on stage. So we're rehearsing as a way of emptying ourselves of these ideas, to open up for something else that is in the moment."
On why "jazziness" is older than jazz
"I would move away from the word discover. I would say encounter... In the histories of coloniality, the word discover is quite a violent word, because there's an assumption that something doesn't exist before you see it... I always say there's jazz and there's jazziness. And I always say jazziness is older than jazz, 'cause jazziness was really about the ways of harmonizing a society and how we organize ourself to be obedient to environment. When something is jazzy for me, it holds well together. And of course, jazz deals with protest — when things don't hold together, the necessity to challenge towards some kind of harmonization."
On improvising when freedom seems impossible
"What does it mean to hope when freedom seems impossible? This is the very idea of how I think about my practice. I always say improvisation is impossible, but then to improvise is to do it anyway. So there is this kind of thing about jazz in South Africa, that it was the doing it anyway. There were a lot of people — Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, Sathima Bea Benjamin — they were in exile because at one point, this music was banned in South Africa. And people did it anyway, found places and pockets where they did it."
On hearing his grandmother's dance in A Love Supreme
"When I eventually went to [the University of KwaZulu-Natal] to study music, my idea was, I didn't wanna lose my grandma's dance, or the dance of the village. For me, that was fundamental. And so Coltrane's A Love Supreme kind of had that dance, and I was like, 'Man, my grandmother would dance to this.' So I don't really care if it was jazz or not. This is folk music. If I can dance to it the same way that I dance in the village, then it's folk music."
On teaching machines to speak isiZulu
"I started using this [sampler] 'cause I just felt like in this insurgence of indigenous knowledge systems, we should also bring the glimpses of the archive that survived this erasure... For us, we don't see an archive as a kind of space that doesn't move. The archive follows us. We are part of the archive. And then here I'm speaking this language, isiZulu, and the vocoder was not, of course, designed to hear that. So that's just me teaching modern technologies to speak indigenous languages."
