XOLANI FAKU AT THE JAZZ JAM SESSION — NEW BRIGHTON LIVING JAZZ

By Lindikaya Ntshinga  Bhayeni Ntshinga Manzi Nqeno Lusiba

There are moments in jazz where history stops feeling like something written in books and becomes something you can physically breathe in the room.

I met Xolani Faku at a Jazz Jam Session kwa Nceba. I never really left that moment. Even after two photographs and the walk back home, it stayed with me, alive in my mind, refusing to fade, insisting to be written.

What humbled me most was that he already knew me. That recognition between artist and listener became something rare, something beyond music, something deeply human that cannot be rehearsed or performed.

Xolani Faku is a young trumpeter carrying himself with humility, discipline, and deep musical awareness. In him, I felt a presence that does not shout for attention but allows the horn to speak with clarity and truth. He is connected in spirit and lineage to the legacy of Feya Faku, and that connection is not just in name or history but in the way sound is carried forward with respect and intention.

He is younger than me, yet in that moment I did not see age as hierarchy. I saw presence. I saw listening. I saw a young king who understands that jazz is not about performance alone but about honesty between people, between breath and instrument, between silence and sound. That is why I respect him.

Jazz, when it is alive, is not entertainment. It is conversation between souls. It is memory speaking forward. It is struggle transformed into sound. It is silence breaking open into meaning without asking permission.

What I witnessed at that jam session was not just playing. It was dialogue. It was exchange. It was a living language being spoken in real time in New Brighton, the soil where so much of this sound was born.

This is what jazz should feel like in its birthplace. We are still trying. We are still building. We are still calling the spirit back into the spaces where it first learned to breathe.

Gqeberha remains a Mecca of jazz music. If you understand this lineage, you understand that names like Abdullah Ibrahim, Chris McGregor, Dudu Pukwana, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Tete Mbambisa, Duke Makasi, and Zim Ngqawana are not just history. They are living memory. They are proof that sound carries ancestry. They are evidence that this place speaks music fluently even when the world forgets to listen.

And I do not write this as an outsider observing from a distance. I write this as someone inside the story, standing within the sound, carrying it home with me.

I am Bhayeni Ntshinga Manzi Nqeno Lusiba, the writer.

I am grateful for moments like these because they remind us that jazz is not locked in recordings or archives. It lives in rooms where people meet. It lives in handshakes. It lives in recognition. It lives in New Brighton still breathing through sound.

Gqeberha remains a Mecca of jazz music. We are still here. We are still listening. We are still becoming.

Camagu.

Written by admin