Sibusile Xaba

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

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, albeit through a magnetic individual filter.

What the press has to say:
"This music is extraordinary" – Gilles Peterson (BBC Radio)

"Xaba's intricately fingerpicked patterns produce emotional warmth and rich texture, and he brings an abundance of heart and complete spirit commitment as he sings, laughs, declaims and weeps over the tracks" – The Wire

“Une musique bien enracinée [qui] nous laisse comme en apesanteur”. – Le Monde newspaper

“Super deep sounds on this wonderfully addictive album... Don't miss out... Don't be late Don't wait music you need.” – Jon More (Coldcut / Co-founder of Ninja Tune)

“This blew me away, punched me in the gut the minute I heard this cut”. – Anthony Valadez, KCRW Radio