{"id":92950,"date":"2021-11-24T13:13:28","date_gmt":"2021-11-24T11:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/?p=92950"},"modified":"2021-11-24T19:34:12","modified_gmt":"2021-11-24T17:34:12","slug":"malcolm-jiyane-s-spell-on-umdali","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/malcolm-jiyane-s-spell-on-umdali\/","title":{"rendered":"South African jazz blooms under Malcolm Jiyane\u2019s spell on UMDALI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The press release for South African trombonist, multi-instrumentalist and painter, Malcolm Jiyane<\/a>\u2019s album titled UMDALI <\/em>slowly concludes where I would like to begin, with an acknowledgement of the conditions that produce this exemplary album, both the personal triumphs and the truth about the community logic that it takes for people like Jiyane to take up the space that they deserve. Mushroom Hour writes that “Jiyane’s own path to the realisation of\u00a0UMDALI\u00a0is nothing if not fraught with tests along the way. But his generosity of spirit means that the offering is more than merely one individual’s breakthrough<\/em>.” This has been one of the most important messages from this album. The second message has to do with the importance of valuing vulnerability and feelings. Jiyane\u2019s sonic proficiency isn\u2019t simply in the technicalities of music making but also\u00a0 in the intentional disavowal of any obsession with precision. Instead, he has redefined a sort of perfection that is anchored in simplicity, displaying a profound confidence in our listening and our ability to centre our feelings and make space for whatever the music pulls out of us. The challenge is to choose this over the square tendencies that characterise how people sometimes listen to music and the obsession with the externalities of technique, structure and form, all of which, in true Jiyane genius, are never lost in spite of the music\u2019s appeal for us to make space. I think about Jiyane\u2019s music and the personal anecdotes about his life in the liner notes in the context of what type of performance arises when people are also given space to be complicated. Steve Kwena Mokoena refers to Jiyane as a painter in the liner notes and how his work has often expressed and held space for contradictions. He could paint “hunger, violence, and suffering<\/em>” alongside the sentiment of “children playing, lovers kissing, people making love, people dancing at weddings<\/em>\u2026” Visual art and music seem to have been one of his ways of studying the world, of knowing both its tender and harsh realities. In all of this, the takeaway is space. He is not only celebrated for how he holds space as a visual artist but how this is extended in his music. He makes space for his bandmates to reach their own interpretations and he makes space for the listeners to do the same in his quiet yet felt presence.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My favourite track on this album is \u201cLife esidimeni\u201d for sonic and humanising pursuits. It references the traumatic death of approximately 143 people at a government psychiatric facility in Gauteng, South Africa, causes of death included starvation and neglect. Jiyane aptly sings “lendaba ibuhlungu<\/em>” (this story is painful) most of us have probably felt this way about the disarming violence that unfolds in this country every day \u2013 a sort of numbing anaesthetic violence that black poor people are constantly subjected to. Even in the deprived responses or in moments of complete inability to process the tongue tying magnitude of pain, the body always remembers that harm was done. The body is a site of memory, it is present in the music and it speaks \u2013 by this I mean that sometimes people make music that brings into the world, the memory of sites often intentionally negated, cast away into the ether of nonexistence. Sometimes, songs like this are simply about the recognition of subjectivity and life, and are also attempts to reckon with the idea that we have lost the innocence of living as a result of the constant denial of the title of life and dignity. In isiXhosa language, “esidimeni” means “a place of dignity” \u2013 quite the opposite experience for those people with names and lives that ought to have mattered enough for them to be here with us today. For Africans, the naming of people and places is always a symbolic gesture  of the hope for the existence of people and the trajectory of places. Life esidimeni is one of those places that has failed to live up to the hope of dignity, much like South Africa, a country with no name that continues to break the hearts of black people through neglect and structurally embodied starvation. It\u2019s hard to listen to this track without feeling a loss of appetite, almost as if the heart is endlessly spilling into the stomach, filling it with grief \u2013 the kind of grief that the families, friends and communities of Life Esidimeni\u2019s deceased patients feel every waking day, as the country goes on \u2013 trampling once again on the worn chests of poor black people. Jiyane gives dignity to this violation and generously consoles us through impossible tragedy. His compositional register picks through and adds on to stylistically South African harmonies and melodies \u2013 the familiarity of this sound feels like the gentle presence of comforters entering the home of the deceased to sing that one song that can arrest the pain of losing a loved one for just one moment. Credit is also due to the beautiful choral-like horn section with Brandon Ruiters on trumpet, Nhlanhla Mahlangu on alto saxophone and Tebogo Seitei on trumpet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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