Soul food: Out of necessity Gabi Motuba sings, she swings black life and her conduction is continuously marshalling an imminent feeling of self-sovereignty. Photo: Standard Bank
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 that
are 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.
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 corollary The 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 the mise-en-scène of 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. By far her most capacious foray into the theme of death, which resonates so deeply and so personally due to her late father’s untimely transcendence to the Elysian Fields, The Sabbath is Gabi’s rejoinder to the falsity of the fleetingness of grief.
To then re-compose it as a landscape, grief under Gabi’s insurgent sonic gaze assumes a different comportment, an ideological form whose life-world is expressed in the every day, often in spectacular forms if we recall shattering moments like the Marikana massacre, the killing of Andries Tatane and of Uyinene Mrwetyana or the 2021 July riots.
All these moments, which tell of the eternal recurrence of South Africa’s bursts of episodic violence, are mournable and permanent in our collective psyche. Ultimately, this is where we find ourselves, in the domain of the incomprehensible. But Gabi vibrates differently, higher, spiritually if you will.
The Sabbath is a sermonic text. Its 11 epistles, from The Black Adhan to Amen, are just as well prayerful solicitations that sonify that which eludes speech as they retrieve the power of the almighty.
The sonification takes seriously the socio-aesthetical importance of the black church whose spiritual and emotional resources become the psychic raw materials needed for the freedom-thinking of a historically disparaged people.
We begin to see with greater clarity how this work intervenes: since the wanton violence inflicted on black life is unending, so too remains inexhaustible our resistance to it. It is not surprising then that the last composition from The Sabbath takes this sentiment in stride.
In an unfurling elliptical form, Gabi sings with the fullest guttural conviction, “Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen…”, as though aware that the utterance is neither the sole province of Christian hymnody since it discerns from different musical geographies nor that its intrinsic message, “so be it”, is in and of itself a call and response gesture.
The metaphorical conditioning here is palpable. Neither defeatism nor stoic revivalism, “so be it”, as Gabi’s holy declaration goes, reckons with the harms of this wretched earth. Thus, “so be it” announces the rebellious strength and endurance of the permanently minoritised.
If you’d care to indulge another assumption here: the specificity of Gabi being a singer is in itself important on at least two fronts.
With the exception of Mogorosi’s epoch defining Project Elo (2013), Gabi has hardly been featured in other distinctive works in South African jazz, which suggests that her virtuosity has been largely conditioned from and within her own musical prowess.
Further still, the journey she is on has not yet seen her avail herself to the category of the “singer-instrumentalist”, that is, the singer-pianist, singer-guitarist, singer-bassist and so on.
What we have seen from her is an attempt to exhaust the category of singing in its singularity.
If we locate her work in the ambit of freedom sounding, this should alert us to the poundage of singing lamentations and prayers because for Gabi, even with its dense scripturality, Amen after all remains a plea, and a rebellious chant. This too constitutes that swing sense — that freedom groove that is so complicatedly written into the music and performance of black life.
You can’t wonder about it enough; Gabi’s performances hold as much importance — and spiritual weight — as Sunday sermons. We can even say that the black church claims Gabi and that she likewise claims its syllables, scriptures, musical and spiritual resources. She is not only deeply moved by its excesses of beauty but Gabi seems equally enamoured by its material iconographies.
Can we deny in her work the affective register of the Anglican church bell ringing, in tow, rhythmically or the distinct humming and murmuration of the Methodist church?
Better yet, can we ignore the gesticulative accompaniment of her hands that simulate notes and insurrectionary harmonies?
The hands do something more — they direct us to Gabi’s penchant for conduction as her forays into this terrain with the Morris Isaacson Music School demonstrated. But there is also a sense that her conduction looms larger.
Could it be that Ofentse Pitse, the daring conductor of Kabza De Small’s Red Bull’s Symphonic Orchestra performance, whispers to Gabi: “Hey sis, thank you for letting me into your world, for showing me that your assemblage of gesturalism, emotion and form on the podium are but coalescing properties of self-knowing”?
After all, the kinematic features of music-related movements conceal an unnerving reality: the modern technologies we call our bodies are, in their beauty and batteredness, the foremost sites of speech, resistance and refuge.
It is irrefutable that the penal truth of this colonial, extractive, modernity we inhabit is one that ritualises violence, producing living-corpses and endless deathscapes.
Out of necessity Gabi sings, she swings black life and her conduction is continuously marshalling an imminent feeling of self-sovereignty.
For an album whose conclusions seem simple, we are yet to fully reckon with its ambitions towards freedom-making. Ultimately, this is the work of The Sabbath. This is the work Gabi is sent to do.
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