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Makhathini was recently awarded the Deutscher Jazzpreis, the German Jazz Prize, in the Live Act of the Year International category.
Makhathini was recently awarded the Deutscher Jazzpreis, the German Jazz Prize, in the Live Act of the Year International category. Picture: Supplied (Robert Winter)
South African artist Nduduzo Makhathini is one of the world’s most recognised pianists, composers and live performers.
His live performances are capable of taking you on both a spiritual and artistic journey. He is calm, soft-spoken and quite unassuming.
Like Rihanna, he is appreciated at home and beyond the borders of his home country. But like an unknown session musician, he has the humility to remain in the background while simultaneously contributing to some renowned bodies of work, without making a fuss about it.
Makhathini was recently awarded the Deutscher Jazzpreis, the German Jazz Prize, in the Live Act of the Year International category.
The awards shine the spotlight on the diversity and creativity of the German and international jazz scene.
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Modest Makhathini
However, in his acquisition of these accolades, Makhathini has remained modest, saying Ubuntu informs this.
“I feel very strongly that when we get these rewards, they are responding to moments that have really past for us artistically,” says the 42-year-old.
“…they give me a sense of humility and acceptance that all things we are doing now can only be seen or acknowledged much later and some of it when we’re not in this world and that just gives me so much humility.”
Makhathini is the first South African artist to be signed to revered international Blue Note Records.
Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds, his debut album under Blue Note Records, was named one of the best Jazz Albums of 2020 by The New York Times.
He has won the South African Music Awards (Sama), a Metro FM award, and a slew of other accolades.
The award-winning musician is a former Head of the Music Department at Fort Hare University and left the role in 2023 to join the University of KwaZulu-Natal as an educator and researcher.
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Makhathini’s musicality
He says all of his work is anchored in spiritual understandings.
“It’s just really a way of making sense of the intangibility of sound and music and the fact that it is something that we feel [or] sense but do not really see or can even touch. That for me is enough to suggest that music has a transcendental quality.”
This transcendental quality, he says, is what people are sensing all around the world.
“So I feel very honoured to receive an award for something that resides within the realms of the intangible, which makes a confirmation that it is really something that is felt and people gather around it all around the world,” he shared.
Makhathini has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, including both young and established artists, such as the late Zim Ngqawana, Thandiswa Mazwai, and the younger Tumi Mogorosi.
“I’ve been blessed to collaborate with some of the best musicians from around the world,” says Makhathini. He mentions names like Wynton Marsalis and Billy Harper.
Collaboration is fundamental to jazz music, and most acts are comprised of a band, which necessitates collective effort.
“Collaboration is very fundamental in jazz, this music in itself originated as communal music and communal because it was a musical of displacement, a music of homelessness and music of protest during catastrophic moments where people were commodified as slaves,” shares Makhathini.
Live at Untitled
On Friday, he will share the stage with South African trumpeter Ndabo Zulu and the Soweto Central Chorus.
He says the show is part of a project he’s been working on, where he challenges himself as an artist to break new sonic barriers.
“I challenged myself by stepping into unfamiliar territory by way of configuration, by way of sound, by way of repertoire,” he says.
“So this is one of those, and I’m really excited to keep going with this idea of an ongoing rehearsal because it liberates the ways we think about being in the world, forgiveness, continuity, space and time concepts and expanded notions of being in the world.”
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