Tumi Mogorosi (of Shabaka and The Ancestors)

Multi-award-winning Tumi Mogorosi is increasingly building a reputation in the South African jazz scene among the new crop of young jazz musicians and activists/ theorists of this interesting time. The young artist has refined his brush strokes alongside prominent South African jazz musicians who count – among trumpeter Feya Faku, the late saxophonist Zim Ngqawana, bassist Herbie Tsoaeli as well as pianist Andile Yenana to name a few.

Tumi recorded his SAMA-nominated debut album, Project Elo, which was released in 2014 and re-released in 2015, by an acclaimed London-based Record company (Jazzman Records).

In 2016, Tumi Mogorosi recorded a duo album Sanctum Sanctorium with South African Vocalist, Gabi Motuba, during his Prohelvetia Residency. The album features the acclaimed Swiss pianist, Malcom Braff whose work is probing and opening a new and exciting approach to how the piano is played.

He subsequently recorded a duo album, in collaboration with Pule Pheto, and in artistic conversation with visual artist, Mzwandile Buthelezi, who forms as a silent third member to the outfit. Mzwandile writes visually, the sonic text the musical duo offers. He offers ten visual texts for the ten sonic pieces. The visual text becomes the liner notes of the album which makes its move in ways of an art piece or intersections of visual and sound groupings. This ‘trio’ so to speak presents a visual and sonic experience that is narratively involved in the socio-political climate of the oppressed.

Tumi Mogorosi, also in the formation of a band, recorded a conceptual/theoretical project which is an interpretation of a written text by Frantz Fanon (psychologist, revolutionary, intellectual) called The Wretched (named after the book, The Wretched of the Earth). The outfit consists of the following: vocalist and sound-scaper Gabi Motuba, Tumi Mogorosi on drums, and sound artist Andre Van Wyk. This project explores the sound through the lens of a shriek, a scream, a moment at the end of the limit of struggle. Theoretically this aligns itself with a history of sonic writing that has been the means to deal with trauma or as refrains of such.

Tumi Mogorosi's recent project, Group Theory: Black Music (released July 8, 2022), is an outfit that explores musical motives and improvisation in and around form. The Fall, is the first single of this album. “Group Theory: Black Music is a bearing witness to violence and a meditation on liberation. How bearing witness to being Black in the world brushes one against a violent history of dispossession and dislocation. These Sonics sit in the hold of ship and meditate on absolute freedom from absolute violence. Black Music moving from the great beyond into the unknown and unthought.”