Gabi Motuba and the sound of sacred resistance

The rediscovery of territory, the breaching of the voice, the strain on the body, the musical gaze of the subject, the subject becoming musical space, the state of mere suspension; this is the orbit Gabi Motuba dwells in — a world of eternal singing and swinging. Gabi’s sound refuses to sit on the surface of time or at the bottom of language. She sings, she swings, which is to say she resocialises a survival melody to propel a feeling, a freedom sentiment into the universe.

Let us contemplate the musical imagination and sonic flourishes of this vocal savant. For the Pretoria-born jazz vocalist, composer and educator — and 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for Jazz — the recognition feels fitting. In South Africa, musical innovation has always been bound up with resistance.

The novelty of the award lies in its reverence of artists who have produced distinctive works thatare shaping the artistic and cultural terrain. For the current temperate jazz world and cultural milieu, Gabi’s work might appear as bombastic and assaulting to the senses due to its unflinching aesthetical attitude and boldness. She also strikes a curious presence with an ever-expanding corpus that declares itself timeous in the work of grieving the otherwise devalued life.

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This is where one should pause and listen to her injunction. In Gabi’s unravelling sonic arc, experienced in three distinctive works —Sanctum Sanctorium(2016), her collaboration with her life partner Tumi Mogorosi,Tefiti — Goddess of Creation(2018) and its corollaryThe Sabbath(2024) — we encounter a musical eclecticism that essentially calls itself jazz, that is classical in posture and characterised by voice, strings, reeds, drums, combative breathing and dense silences. But dig this: as a voice pedagogue, spirit, auteur, improviser, bluesopher, chiaroscurist, architect of themise-en-scèneof the sacred and the lamentable, Gabi is neither peerless in formal register nor in political inclination.

It is true that she evidences a sophisticated command of diverse singing styles and vocal techniques such as scatting, screaming, humming, growling, non-lyrical singing and wordless vocables that augur a defiant phonation with strange sonic shapes. Hence, when she conjures the breathy onset or shifts from falsettos to raspy, guttural sounds of fury thrown into the ether, into memory, she inevitably calls Thandiswa Mazwai, Cécile McLorin Salvant and indeed, Siya Makhuzeni, “Big Sis”. And yet, as an inheritor of a long, blues, tradition, Gabi also confesses a truth to Billie Holiday and Abbey Lincoln: that the modern jazz vocal form rests on precarious ground so long as it forgets to revel in the logic of the scream whose physiognomy is as burdened as the black lives it mourns.

On our way to being corpses, we are confronted with countless encounters that insinuate death — be it physical, civic or social — and so our interpretations of ourselves and our world become defined by a finitude, the Heideggerian type that intimates our dissolution as flesh and spirit. Gabi’s response to this devastation:The Sabbath.

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