Saccharine Radio: Jazz Vol 22 – a personal adaptation of ‘The Sabbath’ by Gabi Motuba

Jazz is an ever-evolving medium that keeps track of all that is, all that was, and all that will be. It welcomes the friend and foe, envelopes the lonely, and expands the mind of the curious. In its own witty way, it reveals the truths of existence, the struggles of survival, and the indifference of loss. It is an institution, a sanctuary, and it is most certainly Gabi Motuba.

In case you are unfamiliar with this goddess of jazz, Gabi Motuba is an award-winning jazz singer, composer, arranger, and scholar whose music delves deep into the emotional landscape of the human experience. Her sound, musicality, and overall approach to music are second to none. It’s comes as no surprise that her sound is the cornerstone of Saccharine Radio’s Avant-Garden sub genre. Her music isn’t designed to be consumed at a fast-food pace, it’s a companion that walks beside you on any day, through anything.

Jazz Vol. 22 is an ode to Gabi’s artistry, a quiet study of the elements that make her work linger long after the last note. The strings that feel like slow-moving light, the vocals that hold both ache and assurance, the smooth elegance, the restraint, the emotional precision – all form the vertebral column of this playlist. Instead of attempting to recreate The Sabbath, this offering mirrors its pulse: a curation that listens inward, that breathes, that allows space for silence to speak just as loudly as sound.

Through The Sabbath, Gabi continues to redefine jazz as a vessel for vulnerability, growth, and truth. She does not distort the tradition, she expands it, gently, insistently, like water tracing new lines into stone. The album moves with the patience of someone who has learned to sit with her own interior world while observing the exterior. It is jazz as meditation, jazz as witness, jazz as lifestyle, jazz as deliberate rebellion against noise.

A CALL TO REMEMBER

on a sabbath, 
the verses sway us into a kind of giving of self —
drawing us near to our Creator;
the putting of pulse on the floor 
the releasing of the hallow the relentlessness that tends to mount itself 
to on the furthermost platform 
Here, we deposit it all down
there is no room to give in to what is unholy.
here, we will be met with grace 
we will leave things that should be left behind, 
as at some end and point in our lives we will not be here,
and how we choose to live matters for those 
constantly left behind. 
we cannot bypass the laws 
forget the fading echoes of sound
Forget to attend to rapture —
not on a sabbath,
don’t you forget to remember The Father
the word,
the rivers of Babylon 
songs of Zion. 
The deepened rendering of your becoming.

becoming,
falling but becoming —
to remember your true essence & importance of ever existing in this world. 

and by means with this, 
may we bare with the knowing 
that even in the depths of our agony 
we were never alone.

~ Thandiwe Nqanda

Thandiwe Nqanda’s A Call to Remember moves in the same spiritual current as The Sabbath, a reminder that rest is not inactivity but return. The poem, like Gabi’s music, asks us to lay down what is heavy, to remember what is holy, and to recognise becoming as a sacred, ongoing act. It speaks to the same posture of surrender and presence found in the album: the releasing, the reckoning, the quiet insistence that even in our deepest ache, we are never abandoned. Where Gabi renders devotion through strings and breath, Thandiwe does it through verse, both offering a gentle call back to essence, faith, and stillness.

Saccharine Radio turns seven this month, seven years of archiving mood, mapping emotion, and offering soundtracks for the margins of living. It feels fitting that this milestone is marked not with loud celebration but with reverence. Gabi’s work has always reminded me that jazz doesn’t shout for attention, it earns it through depth, through care, through honesty. Vol. 22 is a thank-you note to that lesson.

The hope is simple: that this playlist points you back to The Sabbath, or toward it for the very first time. That you hear something here that pulls you into Gabi’s universe, or at the very least, makes you curious about the stillness and intention that shapes her sound. If Saccharine Radio has done anything over the years, it has been to hold space for discovery. This volume, like the others, is a door – a door worth walking through.

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