Over the last decade, pianist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini has become one of the most important personalities in South Africa’s music scene. The artist’s soul is old, but rooted in the present, and his mission is to preserve the rich heritage of his homeland and at the same time create sounds that appeal to the world of the 21st century.

Makhathini was born in 1982 in uMgungundlovu; his parents are musicians. He was a member of various church choirs and, he says, during his adolescence he visited various churches to which he was drawn by music. His mother gave him his first piano lessons, and by the time he was in high school, he was totally immersed in this instrument, and in early 2001 he chose music at Durban University of Technology. His first great inspiration was Bheki Mseleku, a brilliant pianist, who escaped from the apartheid regime in the early 1980s and spent most of his career in London, where he died in 2008 at the age of fifty-three. Soon after, Makhathini met and began to admire the works of Moses Molelekwe and Abdullah Ibrahim. Equally important was the discovery of John Coltrane’s music, the influence of which can still be heard in the artist’s playing.

In 2017, Makhathini released the album Ikhambi, which brought him international fame. The album is an extremely intense combination of modal jazz and spiritual jazz as well as traditional music from South Africa. The recording won the South African Music Award in 2018 as Best Jazz Record, and the pianist became the first South African artist to sign a contract with Blue Note Records. In 2020, the label released his thrilling album Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds, and earlier this year he recorded another album, In the Spirit of Ntu. On this special tour, Makhathini leads a new quartet with two musicians with whom he has worked in the past: Logan Richardson, an outstanding and versatile saxophonist, who breaks down the lines between post-bop, rock and soul, and New York double bass player Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere. For the first time, the pianist will be working with the drummer from Philadelphia Chad Taylor, a trusted collaborator of such musicians as cornetist Rob Mazurek, saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and double bass player Luke Stewart.