NALEDI’s Quest for Community in a Faraway Land
NALEDI’s journey into music-making wasn’t exactly linear. She was a musical child, but thought twice about following that route upon hearing that artists often struggle to make ends meet. Instead, she studied international relations at the University of Cape Town and then decided to head to the U.S. to study music — a place she had admired since her early years.
She wanted to fetch the sound of jazz from its source, to learn the music from its appropriate cultural context. Now, well over five years after migrating to the United States, she has an EP, Batho, that provides a glimpse into the many feelings she has experienced since her arrival.
Her first two months in America were full of longing. She couldn’t put her finger on it, and didn’t want to label the feeling as homesickness. Talking to friends, she realized that what she missed were her people back home. “There’s a big difference in the way we act culturally,” she tells OkayAfrica from her New York apartment. “At home, I feel like it’s a lot more community-oriented. It’s people first, in a sense. After moving here, I understood that that thing is unique to the space that we’re in. America is very individualistic."
Photo courtesy of NALEDI.
NALEDI’s first two months in the U.S. were full of longing.
She struggled to come to terms with that fact, and her experience during the COVID-19 lockdown impressed upon her the need to be in community with people. She still misses home a lot — the people, the energy, the feeling of being there. She has been intentional in building a tight-knit home away from home in an attempt to cushion the longing. Our conversation revolves around these ideas of loneliness, belonging, migration and achieving the things she previously thought impossible.
“When I was at the New England Conservatory, there were 4 percent Black people at that school. I was the only African person from the continent. That’s another sense of removal,” she says. Black Americans were welcoming, however, and that made things more bearable overall.
“I know there's a lot of tension between Black Americans and the diaspora, but in that particular space, they were learning from me, I was learning from them. I was president of the Black Students Union for two years. And I think one of the reasons people trusted me in that position was also because America and South Africa have quite parallel stories, but we are a little bit of a step forward in talking about ours.”
Photo courtesy of NALEDI.
NALEDI’s father cultivated a love for jazz, and her new album Batho is an ode to that heritage.
She spent several formative years in Boston, and moved to the Big Apple after completing her studies. She found New York to be more welcoming, with the added advantage of a vast South African community. “[America] is the land of dreams. Everything just feels so much closer to attaining in this space. Some things that were really far-fetched for me, it always felt like it’s in the ethereal space.”
NALEDI’s father cultivated a love for jazz from early on. He used to take her to renowned venues such as the Orbit and Nikki’s, as well as festivals like Joy of Jazz. In Cape Town, she used to hang around music students, which helped maintain her connection to the craft.
NALEDI didn’t set out to become a jazz artist, but knew that jazz was the way to access what was happening in her head, since that is the language of music she was raised on.
“I didn't have a lot of training, and I had these ideas in my mind of how I want the music to sound, but it's hard for me to communicate and it's hard for me to actually feel it out. It wasn’t necessarily ‘jazz,’ it was just music, and I [felt] like jazz is the way to get there,” she says.
Photo courtesy of NALEDI.
For NALEDI jazz was the way to access what was happening in her head, since that is the language of music she was raised on.
Jazz reflects the zeitgeist. It’s intellectually stimulating, spiritually invigorating and emotionally perplexing. “It's hard to find music that does that. So that's kind of why I chose this route. But I don't think I found that there was a point where I fell in love with jazz. It's like your siblings, they’re just around,” she says.
Batho is an outstanding achievement from the musician. At six songs long, the work provides listeners with a peek into her wide imagination. We get to discussing her songwriting process, and it emerges that she doesn’t follow any particular path. She’ll be taking a walk, and a melody will decide to come. With a song like “Batho Baka,” she was listening to a lot of South African jazz that a friend had recommended to her.“I sat at the piano and just started playing this rhythm. You could just hear that it’s music from home. I wrote it in 2018, about two months after I moved to the U.S. I wasn’t thinking that I’m gonna put this on an album, it was just the first one I wrote,” she says.
Of the six songs, NALEDI says that “P[x]J” best exemplifies her relationship with America. It starts off menacingly, with Naledi and the bass sparring for space in the mix. The song resolves into a swinging jam, delightfully melodic and satisfying to the ear. “When a child dies everyday, what does it mean,” she asks, dragging the ’n’ to emphasize the severity of the situation.
NALEDI adds: “I first heard the phrase when I went to a protest here in the U.S. after the killing of George Floyd. South Africans sing, and Americans chant. One of the chants was ‘no justice, no peace, no peace, no justice.’ That stuck with me in 2020, and when I wrote the song in spring 2021, it was just after there were shootings in Buffalo at some grocery store. Weeks later, there was a shooting in Uvalde, Texas, at an elementary school. That phrase came back to me. I was feeling really despondent.”
NALEDI was also involved in Dreaming Zenzile at the time, a play about the life of Miriam Makeba by another celebrated jazz musician, Somi. She was inspired by Makeba’s responses to social injustice, and was also watching speeches by the likes of Winnie Mandela.
“I was just sitting for like an hour and just watching a bunch of speeches, and then the song came to me, and I just started recording. It’s one song on the project where every single part of the song is something that came from my heart,” she reveals.
Photo courtesy of NALEDI.
With ‘Batho,’ NALEDI has set the tone for what looks set to be a fruitful career.
NALEDI has set the tone for what looks set to be a fruitful career. The music is devastatingly beautiful, and hauntingly immersive. We wind up our conversation by discussing the value of dreams to her, and she takes to the question like she’d been anticipating it.
“I have a foundation called the Dreaming Girls Arts Foundation. Everything I do is in honor of the dreaming girl. I have always been a huge dreamer, and the way I dreamt was always like, I would dream myself into a reality. The foundation was me trying to find a way to keep girls and women as critically conscious members of society, but through the lens of music.”