SIBUSILE XABA – OPEN LETTER TO ADONIAH

“This music is extraordinary” – Gilles Peterson (BBC 6)

“This is an astonishing debut, from a unique talent” Guardian ★★★★

‘Open Letter To Adoniah’ is one half of the debut double album by Sibusile Xaba, which was released in South Africa on 1 May 2017 and internationally on 4 August 2017.

We recorded it primarily in the mountains of Magaliesberg on 26 & 27 June 2016, with a few tracks being recorded live at U – The Space, Sunnyside on 29 January 2016 and  at the Tabane household, Mamelodi on 10 April 2016.

A lynchpin in South Africa’s new generation of jazz musicians, KwaZulu-Natal-born guitarist and vocalist Sibusile Xaba has all the makings of an acoustic guitar master. With a vocal style that is part dreamscaping and part ancestral invocation, Xaba divines as opposed to plainly singing. Combined with a guitar style that is rooted in expressive picking, Xaba’s music shatters the confines of genre, taking only the fundamentals from mentors such as Madala Kunene and Dr Philip Tabane and imbuing these with a mythology and improvisational intensity all of his own.

‘Open Letter to Adoniah’ is an album reverent of life and its connectedness to a higher source. The music emanates from dreams revealed to Xaba over consecutive days. With percussionists Thabang Tabane and Dennis Moanganei Magagula, the trio coalesces both geographic and spiritual influences, hinting at Maskandi (a music style dominant in Xaba’s native KwaZulu-Natal) and the improvisational culture of South Africa’s jazz avant garde. Collectively, the musicians remold these influences, situating them within rhythms that span the African Continent. Thabang Tabane’s influence over the project gives it a spiritual sensibility allusive to the malombo music his father, the legendary Dr Philip Tabane, originated in the early 1960s.