Sphelelo Mazibuko: FACES, Jazz
Interview
By Amahle Shosha
There is a calm authority to Sphelelo Mazibuko as he talks about the long, winding road that has led him to this moment presenting his own music under his own name, on his own label, with a new project called Faces.
“It has been strategic,” he said. “It has been a long walk, but very humbling.”
It is a choice he has not rushed. For years, Mazibuko has been in the background in other people’s shows — a first-choice drummer for Dorothy Masuka, Sibongile Khumalo and Kyle Shepherd — and sharpening the craft behind a drum kit, including composition, presentation, business and branding.
“Because of that, I needed the time,” he said. “Thank God I did.”
He does not shy away from the variety in his background: pop, gospel, jazz, experimental, touring with big names in South African music, and performing across genres. “It all built me. It only made me who I am,” he said. “Which means there are different sides to me, different faces.”
So there’s Faces the Quartet, which leans on a modern jazz approach while paying homage to South African jazz history. And, later in the year, he will release Faces: The Experiment, an album he describes as “more alternative, very experimental”. It will blend R&B, soul, and other styles, always anchored in his love of jazz and commitment to showing how all these genres connect.
Mazibuko refuses to let the drum kit be a background instrument. “Other people look at it in a stereotypical way, where drums are just holding groove and bashing,” he said. “For me, I spend so much time on the instrument to know how I can make it romantic, how to make it sound gentle, how to make the same instrument feel like it’s a storm.”
He wants his audiences to also feel those emotions and to find comfort in them. South Africa, he said, is a place of enormous stress and trauma. “People are tired emotionally. If we can create a safe space in music where someone can say, ‘Despite everything that is happening, I can find peace,’ that is the hope.”
