Nduduzo Makhathini Trio

Nduduzo Makathini is a South African pianist, composer, improviser and healer. His musical influences are John Coltrane, Bheki Mseleku, McCoy Tyner, and Abdullah Ibrahim, which you can hear back in his own music. Makhathini draws on his background in Zulu traditions “I'm grappling with these cosmological ideas as a way of situating jazz in our context,” he says. 

He is a member of Shabaka Hutchings’ band Shabaka and the Ancestors appearing on their 2016 album Wisdom of Elders, and has also collaborated with artists including Logan Richardson, Nasheet Waits, Tarus Mateen, Stefon Harris, Billy Harper, Azar Lawrence, Ernest Dawkins, Hamilton de Holanda.
 
In 2022, for his thenth studio album ‘In the Spirit of Ntu’, he assembled a band consisting of some of South Africa’s most exciting young musicians, including saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane, trumpeter Robin Fassie Kock, vibraphonist Dylan Tabisher, bassist Stephen de Souza, percussionist Gontse Makhene, and drummer Dane Paris. The album was released on Blue Note Records, which released some of the most famous jazz albums of all time. 
 
In much the same way as Makhathini builds upon the sonic universes he has previously created within his own cannon; he utilizes the ideas, practices, and experiences of pre-colonial Africa to fashion new modes of hearing, feeling, or being. “I'm drawing from things that reside as part of memory - until they get to the point of revealing something new,” he says. “My improvisation is searching for that moment of revelation... or in the African context; a moment of divination.”