Pretoria born, Antwerp Belgium based jazz vocalist Tutu Puoane will be on tour in South Africa this August, presenting the music of her current and award-winning double album project Wrapped In Rhythm, which is based on and dedicated to the poetry of Lebo Mashile. She will perform two concerts with her full band in Gauteng, and do four more in an intimate duo setting with her Belgian pianist Ewout Pierreux in Durban, Cape Town and Gqeberha.
The orchestral Volume 2 of the project (featuring Metropole Orkest) will be released worldwide on 19 September, but Puoane will already have limited physical pre-stock of CDs and vinyls available at the shows.
Tour dates
1 August: Market Theatre, Johannesburg (feat. Ewout Pierreux, pno / Shane Cooper, bass / Sphelelo Mazibuko, drums)
2 August: State Theatre, Pretoria (feat. Ewout Pierreux, pno / Shane Cooper, bass / Sphelelo Mazibuko, drums)
6 August: UKZN Jazz Centre, Durban (feat. Ewout Pierreux)
8 August: Youngblood Gallery, Cape Town (feat. Ewout Pierreux)
10 August: Guga S’thebe, Cape Town (feat. Ewout Pierreux)
15 August: The One Room, Gqeberha (feat. Ewout Pierreux)
The inspiration
Tutu Puoane who has lived in Antwerp, Belgium since 2005, walked around with the poetry book In A Ribbon Of Rhythm by Lebo Mashile under her arm for almost a decade. Mashile’s poetry offers unique and very personal insight into the reality and emotional world of a young black African woman of South Africa’s first post- Apartheid generation. The poems made a deep impression on Tutu, and every time she read them, she heard music.
“I remember how deeply I was affected by the poetry collection In A Ribbon Of Rhythm,” she says. “Ten years ago, this book had me in a choke-hold. I often find things about my country so difficult to express, it all feels so strange after being gone from home for so long and yet still hold a very deep connection to the land and people. The poems of Lebo helped me feel and express things I couldn’t express myself.”
Meeting your hero
She met Lebo in Johannesburg in 2014, she shares. “I told her how much I was being captivated by her work. She then gave me a copy of her anthology and blessed me with her permission to go ahead and sing her words. She was so kind, loving and warm and she immediately thought it was an interesting idea. She loved the first poem I recorded of hers on one of my previous albums, so she was very welcoming of the idea of doing a whole music work based on her poems.”
Tutu Puoane ended up writing a collection of songs based on some of her favorites from Mashile’s anthology. The result is a beautiful repertoire at her own African crossroads of jazz, singer- songwriting and soul.
Volume 1
This music forms the basis for the double-album project titled Wrapped In Rhythm, the first volume of which was released in March 2024 in a production by American musician/bassist/ producer Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Herbie Hancock, …).
It has since been warmly received locally and internationally. In August 2024 the album won 3 South African Jazz Awards in Tutu’s home country South Africa (Best Female Artist 2024, Best International Jazz Album 2024, Best Contemporary Jazz Album 2024). Tutu presented the music of Volume 1 at the 2024 Standard Bank Joy Of Jazz Festival in Johannesburg in September 2024.
Says Lebo Mashile ”When Tutu started sharing her experiments online during the pandemic, and when I first heard what she and Ewout were doing in their home studio, it felt like multiple timelines were collapsing and converging at once. Across continents, in the isolation of lockdown, on social media, I felt intimately connected to Tutu’s imagination of these poems, and seen and affirmed in a way that no artist has ever made me feel before.”
Volume 2
For Volume 2, Tutu Puoane collaborates with the world-renowned and Grammy-winning Dutch Metropole Orkest (Vince Mendoza, Jacob Collier, Somi, Ledisi, Lizz Wright, …) directed by the American-Portuguese conductor Jacomo Bairos (Nu Deco Ensemble, Miami). This orchestra uniquely combines the sound of a classical ensemble with that of a big band, with arrangements by Belgian trumpeter and arranger Bert Joris. This 2nd Volume will be released worldwide on 19 September 2025.
Drink in the words
For this upcoming SA tour, Tutu Puoane would love for “People to come, sit down, turn their cell phones on silent and really drink in these words and this music. I will of course play some of their old time favourites, but this is a chance for my South African audience to experience/remember the magic of Lebo Mashile’s powerful In A Ribbon Of Rhythm.
Image by Tom Vandewalle
