Musical Musings on Hands

with 

Kesivan Naidoo and Sabelo Mcinziba

Iwalewahaus, 29.11.2024, 19:00

Musical Musings on Hands

This musical conversation between trail-blazing jazz drummer and composer Kesivan Naidoo and artist-anthropologist-Cluster Fellow Sabelo Mcinziba will be a stylistic infusion of philosophical reflections on the life worlds of hands. The audience is invited to an immersive experience through careful and interactive listening in these musical musings and performances that animate the ideas sonically.

The conversation, faciliated by Joschka Philipps, stages a phonic mapping and tracing of sonic productions by hands in various activities, contexts and by different actors; ranging from labour to entertainment, often blending and bending the perceived lines of engagement given the multiplicity of hands as a medium of human expression.

On an aesthetic register, the conversation and performance summon conscious consideration on the musicality of everyday rituals in the performance of humanity through our hands, especially in the context of an increasingly precarious world sociopolitically. It grounds improvisation not only as a cornerstone of jazz but also philosophically as a living practice in the face of unsettling orders historically as well as in the present.

Please join us for an evening of courageous curation where rapturous sounds are installed as a deliberate disturbance to harmony rested on repression in some traditions. An evening that hopes to pose questions to compel us to reconfigure ideas of humanity in the 21st century.

About Kesivan Naidoo

Jazz drummer and composer Kesivan Naidoo’s music has been hailed by critics as “majestic playing, mind-blowing listening” and “the birth of a new South African jazz sound”. Born in 1979 in East London, South Africa Kesivan was one of the first nonwhite students in a formerly white school. He fell in love with jazz at the age of 10 and started performing professionally at 14. Born into the generation of “freedom children”, he used music to celebrate the liberation his elders fought so hard to achieve. Kesivan’s sound is rooted in the art of improvisation, in rapturous expression and radical invention—and most importantly, in listening.

Over the past 25 years, he’s forged relationships across the world. He's performed in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America with jazz luminaries including: Dave Liebman, Danilo Perez, Joe Lovano, Tarus Marteen, John Patitucci, Maria Schneider, Miriam Makeba, Bheki Mseleku, Zim Ngqawana, Feya Faku, Rene McLean, Jimmy Dludlu, Judith Sepumba, Hotep Galeta, Steve Newman and Carlo Mombelli, Bruce Cassidy, Winston Mankunku and more. He’s also honed his diverse musical vocabulary anchoring innovative groups including Tribe (traditional jazz), Golliwog (funk), Closet Snare (electronic jazz), Babu (world music) and Beat Bag Bohemia (Swiss-Southern African collaboration of four drummers, contemporary classical music).

Kesivan graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BA in Music. In 2000 he won the SAMRO Overseas Scholarship Competition which gave him the opportunity to spend one year studying under Prof. Sanjoy Bandopadhyay in India. As the Creative Director of Silent Revolution Music, Kesivan is also a music activist and has composed for feature films and documentaries. In 2010 he released his first album Instigators of the Revolution with his band “Kesivan and The Lights”, nominated for the South African Music Award (SAMA). In 2014 Kesivan and The Lights performed to standing ovations at the international launch of the album Brotherhood at Carnegie Hall. In 2016, Kesivan graduated with his Master’s degree from Berklee College of Music, Global Jazz Institute in Boston, USA under the supervision of Grammywinning pianist Danilo Perez in 2016.

Kesivan now lives in Basel, Switzerland. His latest project is a collaboration with Adrian Mears who arranged Kesivan’s compositions for the Swiss Jazz Orchestra.

About Sabelo Mcinziba

Sabelo Mcinziba is a researcher preoccupied with the question of the Human throughout history. His intellectual work is inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary in service of a set of questions that come together when thinking about the human. These include the question of power, violence, trauma, land, death, freedom, aesthetics, space, modernity, identity, heritage, memory, etc. 
He curates audience-participatory and collaborative walking tours in urban and rural settings. The narration method forms intersections between history and the philosophies that shape the past and the present. The tours are an invitation to study how the same patterns are expressed through path dependence and historical recurrence. He is committed to intellectual work that rehumanizes the dehumanized by imagining alternative Afro futures.