nothin Thabisa Follows Her Own Path | New Haven Independent

Thabisa Follows Her Own Path

Brian Slattery Photo

Thabisa at Kehler Liddell.

Thabisa strolled from the back of Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville with a megaphone in her hand, already singing. The people in the audience, seated on the gallery floor — many on blankets and pillows — fell quiet as soon as they heard her voice.She strolled in, took her stand on the small carpet set up under the lights to make a stage. Various percussion to her right. A guitar and a trumpet on stands to her left. Behind her, a large yellow wingback chair, a floor lamp, an end table with a framed picture on it.The South-African born and now New Haven-based musician sang mostly in Xhosa, but a line in English leapt into the audience’s ears.“This is where I am,” she sang, “I’m here to stay.”

It was a fitting beginning to a set of music Saturday night that featured Thabisa the person as much as Thabisa the musician, and found in her a performer who connected to the crowd with total ease by being herself.

The name Thabisa,” she explained, is a command. It means make others happy.’ So if you see me bubbly, I’m just following my name.” She moved to a song she sang as a child in a school run by Seventh-Day Adventists, and to her upbringing by her grandparents.

They didn’t let me follow trends,” she said, whether that meant a pair of shoes or a particular way of thinking. They gave me a life where I felt like I didn’t need anything else,” she said. It let me put myself in a world sometimes full of monsters and be confident.”

The next song Thabisa performed, she dedicated to her mother — the woman in the photograph on the end table. She explained that she has no memories of her, only stories that other people told her. A portrait emerged through those stories of a sharp, fiery woman, the kind of person who sneaked out at night for parties with a friend against her grandparents’ wishes. One night, Thabisa said, her grandfather got tired of it and put a basin full of water below her mother’s window so that she would fall in it when she crawled out. The trick worked. She could hear her grandfather laughing to himself in the house when he knew his trap had succeeded.

The words to the song Thabisa sang for the mother she never knew were in Xhosa, but as Thabisa said, you have to listen with your soulful ear, not with your mind that understands language.” It wasn’t hard to do, thanks to the raw emotion in Thabisa’s voice, and on her face, as she sat in the chair and sang to the photograph. At the end of the song, as applause washed over her, she reached over and produced tissues to wipe her eyes.

I came prepared,” she said.

She then introduced her band for the evening: Eric Rey on percussion, Mark Palleccio on guitar, and Tim Kane on trumpet. They backed her up on a set that ranged from Miriam Makeba to Summertime” to selections of her originals, some of them from the two albums that she recorded in South Africa — The Journey and Eyodidi — before moving to New Haven. She made each song her own, working her way around the room, giving time to connect with everyone there, sometimes to join her in singing. She gave Palleccio, Rey, and Kane each step out as well, which Kane especially did on the group’s rendition of Summertime,” delivering a solo that started old-school and quickly moved to Kane exploring the edges of his horn’s sound, to mesmerizing effect.

In the songs themselves and in Thabisa’s patter between the songs, the message was clear: To be yourself, and to follow your own path. I believe that what you breathe out, what you utter, you create, you make alive,” she said at one point, and listening to her, watching her perform, it was easy to believe she was right.

Click below to listen to an interview with Thabisa and singer-songwriter Steve Mednick on WNHH’s Dateline New Haven,” including some musical performances 

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