Nduduzo Makhathini Is Turning Jazz Into a Spiritual Language

Nduduzo Makhathini doesn’t just play music — he summons memory.

Each note feels like an offering, a conversation with those who came before him.

He is a pianist and composer, a healer, a vessel trained to listen to the whispers of ancestors and translate them into sound.

When Makhathini sits at the piano, the boundaries fall away — between artist and audience, body and spirit, sound and silence. He rejects the idea of performance and audience. For him, music is a collective act, where everyone present becomes part of the experience. “The potency of sound tells people how to experience it,” he says. “It doesn’t belong to race or place; it belongs to something greater.”

This weekend, Friday, October 24, and Saturday, October 25, the musician and traditional healer, who was born and raised in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, will be joined by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center to honor the legacy of his mentor, the late Bheki Mseleku, another spiritual visionary of South African jazz.

It’s a full-circle moment: one healer playing the work of another, both tracing their lineage through sound, ritual, and faith.

OkayAfrica caught up with Makhathini, who was in Heidelberg, Germany, after a tour there, to talk about ancestors, healing through music, and what it means to carry Zulu spirituality into global spaces that were never built to hold it.

“Who are the Makhathinis?” — the ones from space

Ask Makhathini where he comes from, and he begins with language.

“The word Makhathini basically means ‘the ones from emkhathini (space) or the ones who live in space,’” he says. “Our origin cosmologically is in the stars. AmaZulu are people who originate from the heavens.”

His ancestors speak to him through umsamo, a sacred space of prayer and worship, through dreams, and through composition. A childhood marked by visions slowly found shape in adulthood. In his dreams as a young boy, he traveled; by morning, blisters appeared where the journey had “touched” him, a physical echo of the night before. For years, he ignored it, choosing not to probe. In 2012, a health crisis forced a decision.

 “I would lose my eyesight for a few hours every day,” he says. Specialists found nothing wrong. He stepped into initiation to become a traditional healer. “That’s when I accepted the gift. My work as an artist is to reveal messages of other worlds.”

Christianity, pushback, and the work of seeing

Most of Black South Africa is deeply Christian. While a large part of the younger generation is increasingly curious about their heritage and African spirituality, traditional practices are still often cast as sinful and even demonic. The openness of his spirituality has drawn some criticism.

“I don’t take it as a personal attack,” he says. “It’s the work of post-colonial moments — restoration after brokenness.”

He shares a story from 2015, when fans began leaving water bottles on stage during performances of Listening to the Ground. “They believed the music would record healing into the water,” he says. One mother used those drops while bathing her child with eczema and later wrote to him that the skin cleared. “I wasn’t healing people, but the potency was there.”

Some called it a cult, so he asked fans to keep the bottles in their bags during shows. He grew up Christian, and the point, he says, isn’t to argue theology. It’s to help people see themselves. “Sawubona (the Zulu greeting) means I see you. We have to work on seeing the self, so the collective can appear. When we see ourselves, our ancestors can be acknowledged.”

From curriculum to calling

Makhathini didn’t set out to study jazz. He arrived at what was then Technikon Natal and is now known as the Durban University of Technology “by chance,” only realizing months into his studies what the program was. The genre confused him at first. He had grown up with music tied to life events — births, rainmaking, funerals — not repertoire lists.

Meeting Bheki Mseleku changed everything. “He wasn’t a campus lecturer in the formal sense,” Makhathini says. “He offered an alternative pedagogy — life, philosophy, spirituality. He helped me understand modal music and its closeness to the Civil Rights movement. He gave me context.”

He describes their bond as master and disciple, not teacher and student. “A master teaches by doing. A disciple carries the responsibility to echo the message to the next generation.” That duty shaped Makhathini’s master’s degree and PhD research, which centered on Mseleku. “Playing Bheki Mseleku’s music is tapping into his library of consciousness and inviting people to move around that library.”

What did he inherit from Mseleku? “Humility. Selflessness. Intuition,” he says. Mseleku gave money away on the street. He prized silence so he could hear ancestral whispers. “I try to live that, but I am married and have children. My wife reminds me about practical things,” he adds, laughing, “but possession doesn’t interest me.”

Where do they differ? “Since about 2015, I’ve pushed into my own corners. Not a divergence, an expansion.”

Is South African jazz changing?

Makhathini won’t crown himself a trailblazer, but he’s clear about his purpose. “I’m proposing something else,” he says. “I was in an interview a couple of weeks ago, and this interviewer was talking about how I've influenced people to consider practice and research, for instance. And this was not an obvious thing for (elder musicians,) at least not in an academic sense.” 

People hear connections to the canon — the likes of legendary pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who celebrated his 91st birthday earlier this month with a two-night run at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and late great trumpeter Hugh Masekela — “but they also say the space feels more expanded,” Makhathini says. 

He worries about one loss in South African jazz: context. “The relationship between music and the reason for music. I think that's been eliminated, and it's such a painful thing to witness,” he says. “But many are restoring it.” He names younger peers he mentors, such as trumpeter Ndabo Zulu and saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane, artists updating heritage signifiers, and musicians guided by Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and philosopher whose work explored race, colonialism, and the liberation of Black consciousness. “There’s pain, but there’s also motion.”

Blue Note, Tiny Desk, and Making Western Spaces Listen

Signing with American jazz record label Blue Note Records in 2018, then releasing on Blue Note Africa, raised questions about whether the label expected Makhathini to alter his sound and image. He didn’t bend. “Those kinds of limitations don’t work for me because the work comes from another place,” he says. “Even my album covers don’t look like traditional Blue Note covers. I’m at a point in my life where I’m not willing to suffocate my ancestors for anything.”

The U.S. keeps calling him back, from NPR’s Tiny Desk in August this year to repeat runs with Jazz at Lincoln Center and other jazz joints around New York City. He prepares himself for performances on global stages the same way he does for performances at home. He says the sound does the translation. 

What has surprised him about U.S. audiences is the communality of reactions to his music. “I don’t think people listen to me as an outsider. There’s a shared protest, a shared memory,” he says. “Jazz points to a common Black origin — a meeting place across the Atlantic. It’s music that spoke when people were forbidden to speak a common language.”

His bond with Marsalis reflects that. “He's like a mentor to me. I don’t even see him as just an African American elder. I see him as uBaba (a father), the same way I saw Bheki Mseleku. For me, he is uBaba that speaks wisdom the whole time to me.”

What Lincoln Center will sound like

The Lincoln Center program places Makhathini inside Mseleku’s archive — with fresh arrangements, new works, and South African New York-based jazz vocalist Vuyo Sotashe’s voice threading through.

“It will be a journey through important parts of the South African jazz archive,” he says. “We’ll be locating these moments and thinking about what gets lost.”

He uses the metaphor of umlilo (fire) to describe it. “Our elders lived difficult lives. They burned bright, they healed us, they raised our consciousness. But when they’re gone, we start to forget. The archive gets broken, torn apart. This concert is about these ashes, and how they can sound the fires back.”

He pauses, searching for the right framing, then adds, “It will be an invocation of collective memory, of remembering not just through memory, but by bringing broken parts back together. Ukuhlangana kwamathambo — the coming together of bones.”

A book that writes in seasons

Between tours, Makhathini is writing An Ongoing Rehearsal into Sonicities, a book that treats music as “a cosmic equation,” not entertainment. He composes the manuscript in seasons, the way he composes sound — intense stretches, then quiet, then a return.

“It asks what is musical about being, and what happens when the world loses musicality. And looking at current catastrophes all around the world, and thinking of that as a lack of musicality,” he says. The term sonicities lets him think about displacement, exile, diaspora, and how Black collective memory travels. “It’s an invitation into rehearsal, to live as if we’re always listening.”

Even over the phone, Makhathini’s voice carries the same calm, meditative energy that fills his music. You can hear the pauses between his words — not hesitation, but listening. For him, the ancestors are never far.

Music, he says, isn’t about escape or applause. It’s devotion, a bridge between the living and the unseen. And as he carries the sound of home to the world’s grandest stages, Makhathini reminds us that jazz, like prayer, is only powerful when it remembers where it comes from.