I never had the pleasure of seeing Busi Mhlongo perform while she was on this earthly plane. But for those who did it was a memorable experience.
As Niren Tolsi once wrote in the pages of this publication: "Mhlongo's music nourished every audience she played for. I'd like to hope that it sometimes nourished her too … for often it felt like her demons were never far away. It must have, because those connections between Busi Mhlongo and her audiences truly were singular experiences."
Victoria Busisiwe Mhlongo emerged from Inanda, north of Durban, raised in the home where her mother worked as a housekeeper. She was a Drum pin-up going by the name Vicky. As a teenager, she found herself swept into Alfred Herbert's African Jazz and Variety revues. She'd had a continental hit before her career had properly begun, remaking My Boy Lollipop for the Gallo Record Company.
In 1968, she left for Portugal. She married Early Mabuse, Abdullah Ibrahim's drummer, and had a daughter, Nompumelelo.
But tragedy caught up with her overseas when Mabuse was stabbed to death soon after she'd gone. Mhlongo wasn't allowed to attend the funeral because she was in exile. It was a wound that never closed.
By the time she returned to South Africa in the 1980s, the townships were alight with revolution and repression and what she witnessed stayed with her.
But it was here, finally, that her music found its full voice. Her 1991 debut, Babhemu, cut with her band Twasa, took maskandi and hauled it, kicking and glorious, into new territory, threading it through with R&B and jazz.
Her 1999 follow-up, Urban Zulu, produced by Will Mowat, scooped three South African Music Awards and is spoken of as one of the great albums this continent has produced.
Mhlongo kept singing even as breast cancer, first diagnosed back in 1978, kept returning, refusing to leave the stage at her final show at Durban's Rainbow nightclub even as her body gave out beneath her.
She died on 15 June 2010, aged 62.
This weekend at the Standard Bank Joy of Jazz festival, three female vocalists will take the stage in unison to honour Mhlongo 16 years after her departure. The Zulu troubadour might no longer be with us but her legacy is easy to hear in the voices of her descendants, the many musicians she inspired.
Zawadi Yamungu, Xolisa Dlamini and Buhlebendalo are three such singers who have come together to pay tribute to Mhlongo.
This won't be the first time they perform their tribute. The first time was at the 20th anniversary of the MTN Bushfire festival in the hills of Eswatini in May of this year.
The tribute wasn't anyone's grand masterplan. It was Jess White of Akum Agency who pulled the threads together.
"He called me and he was like: 'Hey, Zawadi, I'm doing this tribute to Mam'Busi,'" Yamungu remembers. "He was like: 'I'm still trying to reach out to other people.'"
When the group finally landed on its final three, Yamungu knew Dlamini through Durban's music circuit, though the two had never shared a song. Working alongside someone who had known Mhlongo, she says, "was also beautiful, you know, to interact with someone that really knows Busi Mhlongo's energy, not just knowing her from the imagination".
For Buhlebendalo, the youngest of the three, the invitation landed somewhere between dream and disbelief. "This feels like one of those dreams to catch as a young musician," she says.
"Being identified amongst Xolisa Dlamini and Zawadi Yamungu is unbelievable. I'm yet to find words to describe how honoured I am."
Each of the three came to Mhlongo differently. Yamungu first properly encountered her sound in 2018, while training at an artist incubation space in Durban.
"When I got a chance to really get into her sound, it was such a great feeling. Listening to something that says this is good music without even trying hard to find what is good about it."
Buhlebendalo's introduction came later, in matric, the moment crystallising around a single song. "The first time I heard Ntandane, I was so moved, how she managed to capture and reiterate the spirit and importance of community in her storytelling."
Dlamini's relationship runs deeper. She recorded and toured with Mhlongo in real life.
"What I remember most vividly is her presence," she says.
"Busi was one of those artists who did not have to force herself into a room, you felt her presence before she even started singing."
Dlamini remembers a woman who "never separated the person from the artist. They were one" — and a vocal teacher, of sorts, who taught her to listen for music in the every day.
"She could listen to the wind, birds, flowing water and the sounds around her and translate those textures into the voice."
Yamungu describes something close to possession when Mhlongo performed. "She transcends into a different realm. She opens different portals."
It's a feeling Yamungu recognises in her own performances too, one she can't fully explain to fans who tell her she makes them cry. "I don't even have to struggle for that. It's just a gift that was given to us."
All three return, in their own words, to the same idea: Mhlongo never had to choose between being rooted and being fearless.
"You can put it in jazz but you can also put it in Maskandi," Yamungu says of Mhlongo's sound. "Each time you're listening to sounds and all the instruments within the band, they always give you a feeling of home."
She points to Mhlongo's willingness to sing about gender-based violence decades before it dominated public conversation as proof of something rarer than talent: courage.
"It is said that we are the gatekeepers of the truth as artists," Yamungu says. "You can't be next to God and don't tell the truth."
Dlamini frames it in terms of permission. "Busi affirmed something I felt deeply: our roots do not limit us, they give us a foundation from which we can explore the world. We don't have to choose between being African and being contemporary. We can be deeply rooted and still be excitingly contemporary."
For Buhlebendalo, it comes down to space. The space Mhlongo carved out by refusing to shrink. "The legacy Mam'Busi created has taught me that there is space big enough for all of us to occupy."
How do you divide a catalogue like that between three singers with three different voices? Democratically, it turns out. "We are all given a chance to take individual songs just so that you do your own interpretation," Yamungu explains.
Each has claimed two songs of their own, plus a handful performed together. "No one has done it like that. Our different voices fit perfectly in the song. We all sing together. We all pour out our hearts." Even the band carries the lineage. Some of the musicians on stage this weekend played behind Mhlongo.
Dlamini is adamant the point isn't imitation. "We have not approached the music from the perspective of trying to reproduce Busi's voice," she says. "The question becomes: Which song speaks naturally to this particular artist? Who can tell that story truthfully?"
Buhlebendalo isn't giving much away about the set list. "Mam'Busi is in control. You will have to be there to experience it."
Ask any of the three what they want from the room this weekend and the language shifts from performance to something closer to ritual.
"I want people to feel, to be revived," Yamungu says. "I want them to relive the moments, to feel the energy in the room and then obviously to heal from that."
Buhlebendalo puts it more simply: "Her spirit. Her dlozi. Her essence."
Dlamini, who knew the woman as well as the myth, puts it best: "Legacy is not something we put in a museum. Legacy is something we keep alive by carrying it forward. We are hoping to do that, not imitate Busi Mhlongo but allow her music, her spirit and her message to continue speaking through our voices."
Sixteen years on and the connection Tolsi once described between Mhlongo and her audiences hasn't gone anywhere. It's just found three new voices to travel through.