Reviews
GWEN ANSEll on shining hour
“Ziza Muftic’s Shining Hour: singing in tongues…”
JOZI JOLS #5
Hit the link below to read the interview in Jozi Jols magazine by Carole Desbois. (It's a quick sign up process to access Issuu - just your email and a password and you're good to go)
gwen ansel on ziza muftic
"Muftic has a soft, smoky-toned voice and, like Puoane and Schrire, she’s a formidable storyteller, giving every word of her narratives the space to breathe."
james sey ON ZIZA MUFTIC
The debut release by the Ziza Muftic Quartet is an exquisite and sophisticated new addition to the South African jazz canon. While SA jazz struggles to keep its head above water commercially, with too few recording opportunities and too few live venues for the many incredibly talented players around the country, Ziza Muftic, along with her collaborators, has produced an album that is both multi-layered and eminently listenable, both live and on disc.
It is an intensely personal recording, its tracks mostly dealing with Muftic’s own emotional and musical journeys of the last few years, and culminating in the recording of this debut, which is dominated by her own compositions. The title track is a notable exception, and gives a clue to the texture of the whole recording – it is a beautifully realised version of a Hungarian folk tune attributed to Béla Bartók, the 20th Century composer noted for fostering Balkan ethnomusicology.
Muftic herself is Croatian, leaving her home country in the 1990s to escape the Balkan conflict. The Bartók song is recognisably a folk tune, though artfully arranged as an atmospheric jazz ballad, and is infused with a gentle melancholy which pervades the whole collection of tunes. Muftic interjects her own spoken word passage to the track, to great effect.
Other Balkan influences drift through the album. Another traditional composition, Ne Klepeci Nanulama, is a lullaby, eerily reminiscent of similar traditional ballads in Zulu and Xhosa, which is ideally suited to Muftic’s wonderfully resonant low range delivery. Producer Marcus Wyatt adds trademark horn flourishes which embroider this little beauty.
The jazz canon is something Muftic is engaged with on the album as much as her personal odyssey and dealing with the emotional vicissitudes of her life. In a quizzical and idiosyncratic expression of this, Oscar Peterson’s Nigerian Market Place is covered, the solo smoothly handled by pianist Roland Moses. Muftic adds a lyric, sweetly listing a range of her jazz influences and what they have brought to her creative and emotional life. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
While the general tenor and tone of the album is one of compelling and gentle melancholy, tracks such as The Score and the album closer Z-Bop up the tempo to great effect, allowing the sidemen (Moses is accompanied by James Sunney on bass and Peter Auret on drums, who also handled mixing and mastering duties) to swing out satisfyingly. The latter tune sees Muftic returning to her native tongue once more, even assaying a little bit of Croatian scatting!
Throughout Muftic’s voice is the focal point. Mostly in the lower ranges of alto and contralto, she also shows an impressive range and tonal purity, even – or perhaps especially – in the low notes. Her ability to sustain tone and colour is striking, and will please fans of Diana Krall and Melody Gardot. Muftic’s debut has a little bit more to it than comparisons with star names however. Silver Moonbeams is melancholy yet quirky, upbeat in places, and promises much from an artist clearly finding her feet as a jazz singer, but showing much bravery and creativity in her compositions, material and vocal delivery.
Ziza Muftic - Shining Hour - Standard Bank Jazz Festival 2020 - Reflections
A Reflection on Ziza Muftic's - Shining Hour - South African National Arts Jazz Festival Performance 2020
by Callandra Youngleson 10/30/20
The Masterful Ms Muftic
Jazz vocalist Ziza Muftic is a masterful songstylist. A South African raised in Croatia, Muftic embodies a triple heritage vortex of energy. It is made up of Eastern European folk tune sensibilities, touched by American and strengthened by South African jazz styles.
Ziza Muftic Sings in Tongues from South African and Eastern European jazz and folk traditions
Carol Martin 17th July 2023
https://jazzconnection.co.za/ziza-muftic-sings-in-tongues-from-south-african-and-eastern-european-jazz-and-folk-traditions/16/07/2023/
Ziza Muftic: Album trips off the tongue
By Gwen Ansell
https://mg.co.za/friday/2024-02-23-ziza-muftic-album-trips-off-the-tongue/
“Singing in Tongues”: Ziza Muftic’s exhilarating musical odyssey
The Citizen’s blog
https://eng.fatshimetrie.org/2024/02/23/singing-in-tongues-ziza-muftics-exhilarating-musical-odyssey/