Charismatic guitar savant Sibusile Xaba reframes maskandi and the avant garde into his own humanist manifesto.

Don’t miss this intimate performance alongside Nombuso Mathibela and Dj Bubbles at Untitled Basement, 7 Reserve Street Braamfontein, on Saturday 7th September 2019. Tickets R140 at Quicket.co.za and R180 at the door.
With a vocal style that is part dreamscaping and part ancestral invocation, Sibusile Xaba divines as opposed to plainly singing. Combined with a guitar style that is rooted in expressive picking, Xaba’s music shatters the confines of genre, taking only the fundamentals from mentors such as Madala Kunene and Dr Philip Tabane and imbuing these with a mythology and improvisational intensity all of his own.

His debut LP, Open Letter to Adoniah was released by local label Mushroom Hour Half Hour to rave reviews from Giles Peterson, The Wire, Ninja Tune, KCRW Radio to name a few… he recently recording his next album in Paris.

With a vocal style that is part dreamscaping and part ancestral invocation, Xaba divines as opposed to plainly singing. Combined with a guitar style that is rooted in expressive picking, Xaba’s music shatters the confines of genre, taking only the fundamentals from mentors such as Madala Kunene and Dr Philip Tabane and imbuing these with a mythology and improvisational intensity all of his own.

His debut LP, Open Letter to Adoniah (one half of debut double album project) is a musical open letter to Sibusile Xaba’s child, Open Letter to Adoniah is an album reverent of life and its connectedness to a higher source. The music emanates from dreams revealed to guitarist Sibusile Xaba over consecutive days and was recorded by Mushroom Hour Half Hour in the Magaliesberg Mountains, just outside of Johannesburg in Winter 2016.

Maskandi, malombo, the desert blues and jazz all figure in Sibusile Xaba’s expansive vocabulary, albeitthrough a magnetic individual filter.