GABI MOTUBA brings The Sabbath Live at the Basement

Special feat: Tumi Mogorosi / Reza Khota / Thabang Thabane / Vimbz Mavimbz

Friday 04 Oct 2024

Venue: Untitled Basement

Time: 7pm Doors Open

Door: R 400

“Gabi Motuba’s new Sabbath: powerful sounds of liberation

It’s a powerful work of sonic theology, expounded through music.

The Sabbath began as a suite of short, quartet-plus-voice compositions that toured to Cape Town in 2019 and gained some radio exposure. In 2022 the first, five-movement Sabbath album appeared. With this new release, the ensemble has grown. Strings are still at its core: Zos Ntuli and Chevonne Plaatjies on violins; Themba Mashobane on cello and Thembinkosi Mavimbela on contrebass. They’re joined by guitarist Reza Khota, trumpeter Robin Fassie, percussionist Thabang Tabane and drummer Tumi Mogorosi.

Sabbath is particularly important. Sabbath days are days of rest; in Sabbath years, exhausted earth is rested. In a half-century Jubilee year, debts are wiped and debtors freed from bondage, all to recall Exodus: once we were unfree but we resisted and took our chances marching into the desert – things do not have to be this way.

That’s a powerful revolutionary message and on this iteration of Motuba’s Sabbath the lyrics make it much more explicit.

Motuba is a formally-trained singer, but increasingly across her albums she’s been moving towards a gorgeously seamless vocal texture where the mellifluous idioms of “classical” singing can transition easily into the shouts of church worship, the swing of jazz and the dissonances of avant-garde improv. All represent a human voice with something important to say; they don’t need to pull in different directions.

You can listen to this album simply as new, original music, and on that level, it is certainly worth your attention. It represents a composer/vocalist with a unique vision, growing more into her powers with every release, in collaboration with equally inventive and empathetic fellow-players. Whether you mentally file it under jazz (whose essence is, of course, precisely this kind of spiritual openness), or somewhere else, it’ll be one of the most interesting musical journeys you take this year.”

Written by Gwen Ansell