Curling lips, speaking tongues — Thandiswa Mazwai in tune at 40, writes Lindokuhle Nkosi.
The rest is always and everywhere is silence
In the words of the “more brilliant than the sun” Kodwo Eshun: “Light music does heavy lifting.” We are able to place weight upon pace, breakbeats and bars — upon betrayal and conquest. Weight on the sonic, the spaces and silences, centuries of oppression and resistance. Light music deadlifts the dust of revolt and revolution. We load into the gaps of history a blackness that tells its story on this side of this ocean and the other.
It’s a language so ancient that few have the means and meaning to curl their lips and tongues around it. So pure, so dignified that the sullied lack the capacity to listen.
Take, for example, the Afro–horn. The mythical instrument is forged from matchless metal found only in South America and Africa, and is an invention of Ancient Egypt and, according to them, a direct conduit of the gods. Only three exist in the world: one in a museum in Europe, one in a guarded indigenous community on the West Coast of Mexico and one in the private collection of deceased American multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The Afro-horn can cause serious damage to the uninitiated listener.
Take, for example, Sandile Dikeni’s Queenstown. According to the author, it was once South Africa’s official necklace murder capital, and the only town (so small, so where?) that housed two mental institutions. Story has it that in Queenstown and surrounds, the healers are initiated through harmonics and art. Music is a higher vocation, a divine calling. Music is the purest medicine of the gods.
Take for example, Thandiswa Mazwai, 21 years in tune. Harmony and healing. She and I are doing that thing where we pretend we’ve known each other for years so that we can have this conversation. We travel in time to 1995. To kwaito group Jackknife. To a student at the University of Witwatersrand who accompanies a friend to a record studio one day and the next hears a song she recorded, rattling shaky metal sliding doors on a passing taxi.
Read article by Lindokuhle Nkosi in the Mail & Guardian
Jazz classics: Thandiswa Mazwai at the launch of her album Belede. (See Photo above: Siphiwe Mhlambi) Belede is available on iTunes and in music stores nationwide
