SA: Thandi Ntuli reveals release date for Rainbow Revisited album

The album, whose lead single ‘Nomayoyo (Ingoma ka Mkhulu)’ is out on all digital music platforms, was created in collaboration with American producer and percussionist Carlos Niño, while the cover art was designed by British jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings.

In 2019 Ntuli travelled to Los Angeles for the first time to perform at The Ford Theatre at a show presented by The Nonsemble. While there she met the LA-based Niño and he invited her to do a session with him and engineer Andy Kravitz at Studio 4 West.

“Having been aware of some of his work, I knew that, with Carlos as producer, the artistic direction of the album would likely take me to a place I’d never considered going,” Ntuli recalls in her liner notes for the album.

“A fact that had me both curious and terrified as one tends to be when stepping into the unknown. On that Zen-like California afternoon in Andy Kravitz’s cosy studio in Venice Beach, he encouraged me to play around with various iterations of my composition Rainbow. ‘Try it this way’, ‘How about adding that?’, ‘Can you breathe into the mic?’, ‘What if you focus on the last section?’, and many other explorations that eventually went through a few cuts, edits, yays and nays to become this body of work. Rainbow Revisited was birthed through that session, another session a couple of days later, and a series of many small synchronicities that led up to that moment.”

Describing the collaboration, Niño said: “I was super excited when I heard that Jason Sugars and Kali of The Nonsemble were bringing Thandi to Los Angeles. I was invited to play with her, Siya Makuzeni and Katalyst Collective at The Ford Theatre. I reached out to Thandi to see if she had time and interest to get in the studio while she was here, and she did.

“We became fast friends, established essential trust, talked through some things, and got to work. I had always envisioned that this would be a full-length album, and we had plenty of recordings, but exactly what it was going to be, and how it was going to flow, took some time and space. In late 2021, I was called by an inner voice to return to this project and finish the album. Luckily, Thandi was into what I sent her and we were able to proceed in our collaboration, that is Rainbow Revisited.”

The album’s lead single, ‘Nomayoyo (Ingoma ka Mkhulu)’, is a warmly soul-quenching, canonic piano chant played by Ntuli. “A particularly special moment for me was when [Carlos] invited me to play something from home, which lent itself to me recording a song originally written by my grandfather that we often sing when at family gatherings,” Ntuli said.

Ntuli’s recent album, Blk Elijah & The Children of Meroë, has been nominated in three South African Music Awards (SAMAs) 2023 categories – Female of the Year, Best Jazz Album and Best Engineered Album.

Pre-order Rainbow Revisited here.