Nduduzo Makhathini is not playing alone

Nduduzo Makhathinihas been back in Durban for only a day when we speak. Two months on the road — Princeton, Houston, Phoenix, Seattle, Berkeley, London, Antwerp and points between — and now home, which he says with the particular relief of someone who means it. “Man,” he says, settling into the word.

“It really does feel good. After two months. It really does.” But even in the exhale of homecoming, his mind is moving.

It moves the way it always does: restlessly, laterally, pulling threads between centuries and continents, between a greeting in KwaZulu-Natal and the technology of the stars. He is, by the evidence of an hour’s conversation, less a musician who thinks deeply than a philosopher who happens to express himself through a piano. At 26 years in the industry, he has earned the title of jazz elder, though what becomes clear quickly is that he wears his elderhood less as a crown than as a responsibility.

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The tour, he says, was really five projects compressed into one stretch. His own trio on dates across the US. A collaboration in London with cellist Abel Selaocoe, vocalist Mbuso Khoza and choreographer Mthuthuzeli November.

A performance with the Espinho Jazz Orchestra in Portugal and another with the WDR Big Band in Germany. And then, at the end, something intimate and enormous: sharing the stage with Black Coffee at the O2 Arena, the largest venue in London, alongside artists like Msaki and Nakhane. “It was huge,” he says.

There’s genuine weight in the word. But his mind doesn’t rest on the spectacle. It moves, as it tends to, towards what the moment means — what it ought to be made to mean, before it slips away.

“I wonder if South Africa is going to write about this moment,” he says. “Just for Black Coffee and what it means for him. I know in the UK they’re going to do it.

But I won’t be surprised if there’s not a single article about this in South Africa.” He pauses. “And that’s really my critique. Because it is a historic moment.

The biggest venue in London, headlined by South African artists, with South African artists in support. That’s remarkable. And we let remarkable things pass us by.” “The problem of temporality,” he calls it. “It’s not permanent there.”

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