Thandi Ntuli - Blk Elijah & The Children of Meroë [Full Album Stream]

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00:00 Izibongo
08:40 Cold Winds
15:57 Amazing Grace
23:05 Portal Into A New World
29:51 Go Gently As The Sower Reaps
34:21 Secret Keeper
39:57 Wrong Turn
45:34 Inkululeko

With her third studio album, pianist, composer and vocalist Thandi Ntuli begins a journey of self-discovery that picks up where 2018’s Exiled left off. “[In 2020] I was two years into the release of the last album,” she tells Apple Music. “And I was outgrowing the place I was at when I made Exiled; it held space for difficult conversations and difficult feelings—but I didn't want to get stuck in that. I became very intentional about bringing joy back to my life, to my outlook. This album is a continuation and a response to Exiled, and it's sharing little anchors and glimpses of certain things that I felt were responsible for bringing me out of that haze.” Over eight tracks, Blk Elijah and the Children of Meroë journeys through what Ntuli frames as remembering and re-membering. “I like to think of life as cyclical, but I also think that what moves us along is looking back,” she explains. “Re-membering is putting your self together again. I think a lot of people have noticed that about the life that we had accepted as normal, pre-lockdown; there’s a reckoning that you go through when you look back.”

"Blk Elijah’ is a character I playfully created some years ago, in having a conversation with a friend of mine,” Ntuli explains. “We were talking about [South African group] The Soul Brothers. The organ player's name is Black Moses [Ngwenya]. And I said, "One day I'm going to start playing synths and call myself Black Elijah." For this project, I used the idea of ‘Blk Elijah’ as a character. If you think of your higher self, your better self, or just a guardian energy, it comes into your awareness as something that tears things apart in your life with the purpose of building a better reality. I came across the word ‘Meroë’ from a book that was talking about the African origins of different spiritual traditions in the world, and comparing certain names [with names from] Christianity. They know the Mother Mary, and the different manifestations of that name in different African cultures. ‘Mary’ pointed me to Sudan, and I learned about the area, Meroë, which is an ancient city of Kush, and the name stuck with me. In the context of this album, Meroë is a fictitious place, where I imagine people who have gone past their difficulties by doing the personal inner work and getting to know themselves, live..." - Thandi Ntuli

Along with solely featuring her own vocals across the entirety of the project (rather than her usual slate of guest stars) the album sees Ntuli play piano and synth—and record with the same band she performs with live, for the first time: Sphelelo Mazibuko (drums), Keenan Ahrends (guitar), Ndabo Zulu (trumpet), Mthunzi Mvubu (alto saxophone and flute), Shane Cooper (bass guitar), and Nomphumelelo Nhlapo (percussion) - Apple Music

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