Music for the people: Composer and pianist Sibusiso Mashiloane does not believe he should be locked into any one tradition of jazz. Photo: Rogan Ward
The album hearkened to that futurist streak apparent in the work of Herbie Hancock and newer disciples such as Mark de Clive-Lowe. Vocals featured strongly as did frenetic beats that sometimes opened up to ecstatic solos. On its cover Mashiloane was surrounded by synthesizers, his hands tinkering with a Nord synth lead.
“I did what I felt then,” he says of his entrée. “I was listening to modern stuff, contemporary stuff and everybody was expecting a serious album because everybody takes me as a serious jazz player. At the end of the day, I’m an artist and I believe I don’t have to lock myself into a genre.”
The philosophy extended to Unlocked Keys, an outfit Mashiloane worked with at the time, which sought to “create music without limits”. Perhaps, in a sense, Mashiloane’s second album, Rotha: A Tribute to Mama, was a response to the criticism. Purposefully, it is a more academic approach, which reflects his time spent studying jazz at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the school of music at Rowan University in the United States.
But even in it, Mashiloane shows signs of straining against the jazz tradition, as on the song Niza, which is, rhythmically speaking, part swinging jazz number and part divination ceremony. For all his wide understanding of music, the drawcard for Mashiloane is still his persona on the live stage, where he is both conductor and virtuoso player, almost falling off his stool as he burrows into a groove.
He majored in performance for his master’s and is working towards a PhD on the characteristics of South African jazz. “The way my masters was constructed, it had several elements: the historical part of performance, from New Orleans starting from the Forties; the other part was looking at the modern age of performance, from the Seventies, the Eighties and a compilation of recitals. The other part was Coltrane. To master Coltrane is like separating yourself from being a boy to a man.”
One doesn’t have to look far for clues of Coltrane’s influence in Mashiloane’s oeuvre. He described Rotha as an album “mostly sharing Coltrane’s harmonic movements with African influences within the melody”. He has a theme he explores from different angles titled Mr SJ, based on Coltrane’s Mr PC, and he has his own version of a popular Coltrane song, Naima, which he infuses with the experience of being an urban South African in love.
Mashiloane’s version of Naima, initially felt as if it had the same ethereal qualities as 4Hero’s chiming drums and subtle strings on first listen. After closer listening, Mashiloane’s version has a subdued, dance-ready bassline and percussion for a drum track. More significantly, it is a vocal affair, with a poem in its middle and a saxophone melody being hummed by a vocal ensemble.
“With the groove, I was just imagining a house version, but I didn’t want to move it to too much of a house thing. I just wanted to retain the mood that uColtrane ayidlale ngayo, and I thought let me leave it to breathe a bit.”
Mashiloane’s Naima, found on his third album, Closer to Home, shares space with a few other remakes, such as Miles Davis’s All Blues, in which the interplay between the piano, the drums and the percussion give the song a downbeat accent, which transforms it. “Kuyagidwa laphaya,” he says excitedly. “I draw a lot of inspiration from people like Busi Mhlongo, especially the album Urban Zulu.”
Perhaps to a more subtle extent, these are the dynamics at play as Mashiloane tackles the gigantic standard that is Yakhal’Inkomo.
“If you listen to Mankunku’s [Winston Ngozi] bridge, it swings, which means he was borrowing from America. If you listen to my bridge, you hear a choir there, and the choir is an anchor, those elements that sound like home. It reminds me of church singing, especially those older churches, and not [necessarily] people singing in unison but with everybody singing in their own way.”
Tlale Makhene plays percussion on this and various other songs on Closer to Home. Incidentally, he also has his own version of Yakhal’Inkomo, a meandering thing, which pays homage to his African and Cuban influences. It has a shifting axis that takes on cha cha, mambo and other styles.
Talking about Mashiloane’s approach to the song, Makhene says, in the arrangement and the philosophy around it, he took the original and gave it “a 20th-century treatment but still with a backlash of what it meant then”.
Although Makhene’s is an exuberant, slow-building volcano, Mashiloane’s lives up to its premise, as if giving space to some of the lyrical influences that have bearing on the song without relinquishing the political impetus beneath Mankunku’s original.
“It takes one to know oneself,” says Makhene. “To know where you come from and what exactly are you influenced by. I love jazz and I love roots music. But as much as I love roots music, which is music of my people, jazz comes after. So at the end of the day, it comes down to you wanting to express you before anything else, which can be simple but difficult.”
Although Rotha is brimming with dedications, the approach on Closer to Home seems rooted in channelling, as on the mesmeric Moses Molelekwa tribute Molelekwa Spirit, in which Mashiloane captures Moses’s many moods on the piano, from sombre to playful, youthful to old soul, all without additional accompaniment.
“I just related not only to the textures that he brought out when he sat on that piano, but also the social problems that I probably share coming from elokishini,” he says.
It’s a touching moment that reminds one that, more than any other thing, jazz (piano) is a relay.
“Sibu’s belief is that music is to be shared with other people,” says singer and frequent collaborator Zoe the Seed. “Sibu is educated, meaning he has a master’s in music, but it also means he has studied and listened to and appreciated a lot of pianists out there who have other albums before him. He could have made very complex and academic music but he totally chose to allow people to sing rather than for it to be complicated. It’s melodic and African and meant for people to enjoy.”
Mashiloane says: “I have to make sure that there is verbal singing because we hear the music more if it sung by voice rather than played by the instrument,” he says. “If you listen to the likes of Thandiswa, I can play those melodies but there is a sense that they resonate more when sung.”
Currently on his second national tour, Mashiloane believes the real magic happens on stage. “Every stage is different. Some people I have to work harder to travel with them. Sometimes, I don’t even talk in between songs because it becomes a completely different environment. Like right now, I’m preparing the repertoire for Cape Town, just to be safe, but I know that it might not even work that day.”
For information on Mashiloane’s tour dates, visit sibumash.com