Nduduzo Makhathini was speaking at the screening of his Tiny Desk Concert on Monday at the Standard Bank Art Lab.
Renowned Jazz music Nduduzo Makhathini said his peers in the academic world scolded him for being on the Mac G podcast.
“I got quite a bit of criticism from my scholarly world. Just even doing it, before it was published or before they could hear what the contents were,” said the pianist, speaking at the screening of his Tiny Desk Concert on Monday at the Standard Bank Art Lab in Sandton.
The Tiny Desk performance was released on Monday. As an alumnus of the bank’s Young Artist Award, Makhathini’s screening was hosted at the Art Lab.
His performance on Tiny Desk comes more than a year after Thandiswa Mazwai made her debut on the platform.
After Mazwai, Mzansi cellist and singer Abel Selaocoe presented a captivating performance in his appearance on the US performance platform in March this year.
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Makathini’s frustration with exclusivity
Makathini was a guest on MacG’s Podcast and Chill in late 2024, where he discussed South African jazz and issues of spirituality among other topics.
The podcast, which is the biggest on the continent, is a platform where some of the biggest names in South African pop culture appear to speak on a variety of topics.
The show’s hosts are the ones who tend to guide the conversation on the most frivolous topics, independent of the guest.
Makathini said peers in the academic world were advising him not to go into such a space because they said to him, “We represent something else.”
“And I got frustrated by this idea of ‘something else’ and it’s an idea that lives in jazz as well sometimes,” he shared in a conversation with Kaya FM’s broadcaster Brenda Sisane after the screening of his Tiny Desk concert.
“This exclusivity… ‘we are doing something else, you’re not gonna get it and it’s okay if you don’t’. I’m on the other side [of that]. It’s not okay if people don’t get what we do,” he said to applause from the room.
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Being with the people
He shared how he also fell into this thinking after completing his Master’s dissertation a few years ago when his mother wanted to see his work.
“My mom came to visit, we were still in East London at the time and I had it printed and I invited her to celebrate this moment. ‘This is what I did/achieved’ and thinking that was gonna be enough, but she says ‘where’s the thing you were writing’ and I thought she was kidding.”
“Eventually she insisted that I pull it out and she started reading. She said it’s good and she had specific things she was thinking about particular subjects.
“So, in essence, I’m trying to say that there’s a great opportunity to utilise social media to do something else.”
A friend of his and fellow musician, Mbuso Khoza, was recently a guest on MacG’s podcast, and Makhathini shared how he watched the episode and noticed how people interacted with its content.
“And seeing how you know, the views and everything… people are watching,” he said.
“So there is an opportunity to do something else. But it starts from understanding that we don’t sprout/shoot out from rocks. We belong… so if we don’t sprout/shoot out from rocks, there is then the responsibility to represent where we actually come from.”
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