Khaya Records

Malombo | Sangoma
Available online and in-store at khayarecords.com

Deep Sounds from South Africa brought to us by Matsuli.

"Afro-jazz ancestral healing at the crossroads of tradition and tomorrow

Philip Tabane (1934–2018), the mercurial guitar genius of South African music, forged a sound that was as rooted in the spirit world as it was in daily life. With the Malombo Jazzmen of the 1960s, Tabane disrupted Western notions of “jazz,” bringing the resonant rhythm of cowhide malombo drums into the foreground. While outsiders and the uninitiated often reached for labels like “primitive yet sophisticated,” Tabane and his collaborators named it more truthfully: “music of the spirit.”

By the time of Sangoma, Tabane stood at a crossroads. Fresh from a period of three years’ touring in the United States where he graced the Newport Jazz Festival, and played alongside Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders and others, he brushed off comparisons with characteristic self-assurance: “No, I don’t play like Miles. Miles plays like me.” Back home in South Africa, and with a newly signed international distribution deal with WEA Records, he harnessed this momentum into a larger band setting, capturing a rare intensity.

The result was Sangoma, an album that bridges contradictions: expansive yet intimate, celebratory yet haunted by exile and return. Tracks such as “Sangoma,” “Hi Congo,” and “Keya Bereka” are not simply performances but living testaments, songs that would remain in his repertoire for decades. Unlike the moody, immersive character of much of his work, here Tabane is on the move, urgent, restless, uncontainable. As he announces on the second track, “Maskanta wa tsamaya” (“something that kicks ass”).

More than four decades on, Sangoma is both a historical document and a timeless invocation. From his home in Mamelodi to the world and back again, Tabane’s spiritual healing endures, raw, electric, and unbowed. "