—Press Release
Heir to South Africa’s malombo legacy, Thabang Tabane takes a single-minded approach: he hones an insistent, enchanting sense of groove.
The debut album Matjale sees Thabang Tabane take his rightful place in an illustrious lineage. Releasing a long-overdue debut album, he’s a percussionist and deep musical obsessive who shows the indelible influence of his father’s music. The son of the now late Philip Tabane, his father is a legendary guitarist regarded as the architect of South Africa’s malombo style. Thabang is guided by a fiercely independent ethos, informed by the African spiritual perspective which became malombo music. Releasing it on newly-founded, independent South African label Mushroom Hour Half Hour, he works with labelmate Sibusile Xaba (who released 2017’s Unlearning / Open Letter to Adoniah) to pick up that musical baton: charting new, divergent directions for independent music made in a South African image.
As an album, it’s carried through with a loping, instinctive sense of groove. In ‘Ngawananga’, for instance, simplicity is key: the steadily-repeated, insistent melody is mirrored between guitar and bass, with rhythm attentively attuned to the drums’ twists and turns. And in ‘Bengekho’, too, the playing might be fiercer, the tempo higher, but the approach – resting on lyrical, repeated phrases and close ties between melody and percussion – is similarly, and beautifully, straightforward.
Going back to the beginning, it all started out with his father Philip Tabane and his group, The Malombo Jazzmen. In the Mamelodi township, neighbouring Pretoria, in the early ‘60s, they honed their newly-formed approach over the course of a few years. Defiantly independent, it was an implicit retort to the Apartheid system which was then still long from being overturned. The name derived from the malombo drums which, instead of the kit drums typical to jazz, were introduced as the bedrock of the music’s rhythm. The Malombo is also tshiVenda for “Spirit”.
It’s a tradition that, whilst it might have flown under-the-radar, has nonetheless sent out worldwide ripples of influence. Band line-ups later changed and mutated, with different disciples (in particular, the Malombo Jazz Makers) spreading the word to London and other pockets of Europe. During the few years Philip spent in the USA, too, it saw the likes of Miles Davis queueing up to play with him – when, as most South Africans know, Philip turned down the offer!
Until his death at the age of 84 on Friday the 18th of May, 2018, Thabang shared space with his father in the Mamelodi township that’s become the de facto home of malombo. Describing his relationship with his family, he describes their unspoken creative understanding. “We've never sat and spoke about music,” he says. “ We just connect spiritually. For me, it was always like that. My father, my mother, my granny – who was a healer – we always connected on the spiritual level.”
While Thabang has been playing music professionally since he was eight years old, it has taken him several years to find a vehicle – in Mushroom Hour Half Hour – to release his music. Thinking back to some of his previous experiences in the music industry, he recalls how a disinterested, commercially-minded perspective has made for bruising encounters. “You get to a studio, and a person doesn't know your music: he doesn't know how you feel about your music, he doesn't connect with you,” he says. “And then he just wants to start and say, ‘No, this song must go like this.’”
Now returning to producing his own music after a hiatus that saw him heavily involved in collaborative projects, it’s Sibusile Xaba who encouraged him to move past those previous negative experiences. Sibusile, whose 2017 double-album was acclaimed by The Guardian ( “a kind of weightless, free-floating global jazz that’s pitched somewhere between John Martyn’s Solid Air, Brazilian Tropicalia and the Violent Femmes”), has forged a close relationship with Thabang over the past four years. It’s seen Sibusile contribute the addictive, repeated guitar lines of Matjale, with Thabang providing the loose, percussive bedrock of Sibusile’s two-part opus’ first half.
They first met when Sibusile sought out Philip Tabane as a mentor, but – with Philip now being older, and not necessarily in a position to do so – it ended up with Thabang taking up that tutorial role. Sibusile has reciprocated by connecting him with South Africa’s burgeoning new generation of independent musicians. Taking up with newly-founded, Johannesburg-based label Mushroom Hour Half Hour (who also released Sibusile’s record), they brought their mobile studio to the Tabane home and gave him the creative freedom to make the album he wanted.
“Malombo” is a word drawn from the Venda language, one of 11 spoken in South Africa. It’s used to talk about spirits or the sacred. Channelling both a deep-rooted sense of spirituality, allied with a long-studied appreciation of his musical forebears, it’s an idea which runs through Thabang’s whole approach to music.
He explains how his granny Matjale (who lends her name to album’s title) showed him a broader, more collectivist sensibility toward creating music. “For me, music is not about what you play,” he explains. “My granny was a musician, but she didn't play any kind of instrument. But in a way of saying things to you, you could hear music. That story, if you have the ear for music, you could relate and do music through that.”
Listening to the softly-sung, lilting ballad of ‘Ke Mmone’, or the steady-driving rhythm of ‘Thuli (Mama)’, they carry the echoes of whole generations. He channels the creative undercurrents which have passed through Mamelodi, the home in which he’s lived in his whole life. Unpacking the philosophy that underpins his music, he says, “In order to connect with the world, we must come with what we know.”