Fresh Listen - Nduduzo Makhathini, Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds (Blue Note Records, 2020)
(Great records crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us superpowers from their sweetly poisoned stingers. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of music that has changed us.)
The waves came in on my left, a double bass and snare drum rumbling as the foaming water fell over itself up the slope of the crescent beach at Malaekahana, hissing like a soft ride cymbal when it retreated. I was plodding through the damp sand barefoot, unsuccessfully trying to outrun a storm cloud that had quickly blown in from the ocean. In some quiet space between the waves, the rain, and my labored breathing, Nduduzo Makhathiniʻs Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds played in my head, via waterlogged earbuds that were already losing function.
The great earth respired through its sea and weather changes, a rhythm and sway that defined, on a fundamental level, biological life in process. But in this I also understood that where I was and what I observed transcended any kind of rational rendering of the wet, hammered space, in the midst of its reforging by the elements. It was an expansive mindspace through which Makhathini and his band could explore. For there is an inherently elemental quality to Makhathini’s exhorting of his bandmates, fellow travelers all. While at times leaning into what we listeners might consider conventional jazz, the band does not abide by preordained tics of expression, nor the rigid expectations of the machine and the metronome.
In his compelling liner notes to Makhathini’s album, UK musician Shabaka Hutchings repeatedly proposes that Modes of Communication be internalized and appreciated as something greater than the latest release by some hot-shit so-and-so. Hutchings’s refrain “This is not a performance. It is ritual!!!” offers the listener an opportunity to acknowledge that the music Makhathini expresses has a deeper intention than to perpetuate a groove, or to simply suffuse the air with a new spectrum of harmonies. At the same time, such a position may intimidate the casual listener, assuming that the experience of Modes of Communication and its effort to enhance “alternate modes of perception” may very well be beyond their ability, that they may never to come to grips with the totality of Makhathini’s vision. After reading the liner notes, I did feel pressured, as limited as I am, to approach the music with a foundation of like academic, spiritual, and aesthetic principles, informed by a rich South African ontology. “Makhathini’s insistence,” Hutchings writes, “that the functionality of his music be considered within this mode of perception supplants and subverts the capitalist framework associated most readily with ʻjazzʻ music, borne under the gaze of colonial/racist categorization systems regarding black modes of production.”
Nevertheless, I confidently write that Modes of Communication, far from being rigidly aligned with Hutchings’s acute critical rendering, is very much a “jazz” album, both in spite and because of the traditions it incorporates into its musical proposal. It swings, it rolls, it hustles, it breathes, it prays--it is in fact exemplary, in the best way, of much of the jazz music recorded and released in the latter half of the 20th Century.
Featuring Omagugu Makhathini’s powerful lead, “YehlisanʻuMoya” proves that the art of singing requires so much more than a “good voice,” as broadcast TV viewers have been convinced to believe, over years of pointless vocal contests. Omagugu transmits a vestige of her being deep within the track, pulling strength not only from the air in her abdomen, but from her neck and head as well, each line out from her rattling with a soulful wind at the back of her teeth. It is a manner of expressing self nakedly, without calculated ornamentation, with the primacy of oneʻs own human energy. Many mainstream American singers, confused as they are about what singing should even accomplish, would hesitate to present a song so viscerally.
In this early song, the instrumentalists begin to distinguish themselves. Nduduzo Makhathini with his open-handed chords and runs reminiscent of McCoy Tyner laying the firmament above one’s head while he plays; American saxophonist Logan Richardson and South African counterpart Linda Sikhakhane, whose exploratory lines--sometimes shovels, sometimes daggers, sometimes silken ropes drawing upwards--perform the heavy lifting of improvisatory solos throughout; and what seems to me the true revelation, drummer Ayanda Sikade, the transmission of the unit, sliding between gears effortlessly, loose and just-in-time. It’s an organic, unhurried rhythm that rolls like waves, like how the old masters used to create beautiful spaces for their soloists to populate with shades and colors. With so many beats in music programmed to an unabiding, predictable pattern, Sikande’s style almost comes across as folky, yet naked and undiminished.
Reverent and slightly wobbly with a sentiment that seems to draw from a New Orleans funeral, “Saziwa Nguwe” shambles by with an almost Tom Waits-ian flair. There is a shakiness in the the arrangement that may be found both in heavy drinking and strong emotion: raw and unprocessed feelings manifested as musical breaths and beats. That each musician accesses the same palette of feeling makes a convincing performance; it is evident they are not faking, relying more on a collective empathy than showmanship.
“Beneath the Earth” is a bit of a sonic outlier, a jazz-lite ballad, what some listeners might consider the most accessible track on a jazz record, punctuated by prayers or lamentations that transition to brief improvisations by Makhathini and Richardson. Eventually, a Kamasi Washington-esque chorus takes up the melody, carrying the refrain. And like a Kamasi Washington track, the musicians build up the intensity of the refrain to the conclusion.
There is one part of the be-bop influenced “Unyazi,” with its alternating time dynamics, that encapsulates why jazz music is so powerful to me. At an early point of the song, the saxophonist hits a kind of ugly phrase, but instead of skipping past into further heights of virtuosity, which a more self-conscious player might try, he hangs on to the phrase, repeating it, bludgeoning himself into the phrase, as if he might identify there the spark of creation. In jazz, many soloists race through the measures to cover as much ground, explore as many harmonic relationships as they can in their allotted time, before checking out. When I hear a soloist lock in and wring out as much as he can from a series of notes, I hear someone somehow digging below the foundation of a song, to reveal something deeper about the process of music.
Sparkling piano runs by Makhathini lead in “Isithunywa,” a piece highly evocative of John Coltrane’s “Naima.” Structurally, they are very close, though Sikade’s drums add a bit of firepower that more closely recalls Elvin Jones’s interpretation of the song. The inspirational source of “Isithuywa,” like “Naima,” is a joyous, fiercely disciplined conversation with the soul.
After the magisterial opening of “Umlotha,” Makhathini’s band settles into a groove powered by the pianist’s strong chords, over which Richardson and Sikhakhane exchange thoughts that are propelled higher over the proceedings by the flaming exhaust of drum beats that do not simply mirror Makhathini’s groove, but expand time around it.
“Shine” is gospel tinged R’n’B as interpreted by jazz players in total command, while in “On the Other Side” singer Omagugu rides the band’s arrangement like a torch singer in a nightclub where the smell of cashed cigarettes remains in the seat cushions and the curtains around the stage.
Indigenous percussion leads “Umyalez’oPhuthumayo”into a spirited jam that almost makes the songs preceding it come across as too careful. Here, the band members take deep breaths and blow and beat loud and fast into their instruments. “Emaphusheni” closes Modes of Communication with a sign-off by the band that never quite ends, but disappears.
The spirits of those who came before are evident in Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds. Nduduzo Makhathini and his band sift through an old aesthetic (jazz) whom many believe lost its relevance a long time ago. But Makhathini’s intent is not simply to reanimate jazz. Modes of Communication is meant to be a living testatment to the art, proving that jazz and the energies that inform it are alive. Jazz is not a hallowed hall behind a brick wall at the end of a hedge labyrinth. It is a house with infinite rooms, accommodating all who wish to enter.
