“The ear allows us into the world of aesthetics, but the heart allows us into the world of soul.”
– Nduduzo Makhathini
Written by Hlengiwe Mkwayi
Funemployment has its perks: like waking up on an otherwise ordinary Monday morning, to catch an exclusive live screening of Nduduzo Makhathini’s NPR Tiny Desk performance. Not a bad way to start the week, if you ask me. The screening event took place at the Standard Bank Art Lab which was apt not only because back in 2015, Makhathini was honoured with the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in the Jazz category, but also because the space itself is designed as an active and evolving platform that encourages artistic experimentation, community engagement, and cross-disciplinary explorations.
Following the screening, Makhathini took to the stage, not to play the keys or sing this time, but to sit in a warm and inspiring conversation with Mam’ Brenda Sisane, and discuss his experience of being invited to perform at Tiny Desk. We got to hear about what inspired his suite structure, and the complexities of translating African languages while preserving cultural nuances.
The journey leading up to Makhathini’s Tiny Desk was a long one, with close to seven years of invitations and near misses. But it was a quiet moment of resonance that finally impelled him forward. When his bassist, Zwelakhe-Duma sent him Abdullah Ibrahim’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, what Makhathini heard was a summon.
“It was no longer about the platform or its global reach,” he reflected. “It became about how one responds when a master has spoken.” In that spirit, he settled on offering his performance as a direct conversation with Ibrahim’s. The decision freed him. Ibrahim had skilfully carved out a space of contemplation, braiding storytelling and sound. Makhathini followed in that lineage, shaping his suite with the same sensibility, letting reflection guide the form.
The Ntu Sonicities Devotion Suite in Five Movements
Makhathini titling his offering for Tiny Desk as The Ntu Sonicities Devotion Suite in Five Movements, speaks to a carefully woven structure of five movements that function more like a ritual than a setlist. He states that the idea of coherence, of a presentation as a kind of wholeness, is what drives him to shape music in suites rather than in isolated compositions.
The pianist and Zulu healer draws from two places: the African lineage of ancestral invocation and Black spiritual practice, and the influence of maestros like Zim Ngqawana and Bheki Mseleku, who thought about albums as “ensembles of thoughts” rather than disconnected songs. In this headspace, the suite is both music and philosophy. It is a cosmology of sound where translation is resisted, where Zulu words, sounds, and gestures remain unbroken, and where space itself is orchestrated as intentionally as any note.
The Ntu Sonicities Devotion Suite in Five Movements unfolds where it begins in the stillness and raw cry through Kuzodlula, holding both emptiness and grief. It then deepens with Omnyama, which is an invocation of Blackness that wrestles with the weight of history as one seeks liberation. Right after, we hear Equidistant Passage, that situates the music as ritual, study, and a space of rehearsal and reflection rather than conclusion.
The mood lifts in Izinkonjana, where grace becomes transcendence, rising into a state of weightless beauty. Finally, the suite gathers in Imvunge, a collective celebration that transforms protest into victory and closes as a blessing upon all who journeyed through the sound.
"Abdullah Ibrahim’s Tiny Desk (Home) performance brought something else entirely. His solo piano was woven with storytelling and it redefined the space. That inspired how I shaped my own suite: by studying his approach and reflecting deeply on how I might respond."
