Writer: Live Music Desk | Photographs: Supplied
In June 2023, 2024 SAMA Award nominee and 2021 Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz Winner, Vuma Levin received the Confluences Grant from ProHelvetia to develop works in Collaboration with Musicians from Switzerland. The resulting product is a new album titled “Allegories” releasing on 11 July 2025 with the co-led Swiss-South African Project In Motion.
In June and July Vuma will be undertaking a tour of Johannesburg, Makhanda and Cape Town to Launch the album.
Tour dates will include:
1 July, Makhanda National Youth Jazz Festival, DSG Hall, Makhanda, South Africa
3 July, Makhanda National Youth Jazz Festival, DSG Auditorium, Makhanda, South Africa
10 July, Chiesa di pazzo Lupi, Johannesburg, South Africa FREE, Limited Seating
11 July, Chris Seabrooke Music Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa R180
https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/event.aspx?itemid=1571460073
12 July, The Commons, Muizenberg, South Africa R180
https://fixr.co/event/vuma-levin-martin-perret-tickets-340964565
13 July, Jazz in the native yards, Guga Sthebe Cultural centre, Langa R150 on Quicket,R200 @ the Door
https://www.quicket.co.za/events/320388-in-motion-led-by-vuma-levin-guitar/#
The Album was recorded at the legendary Studio Flon in Lausanne Switzerland and features some of South Africa Europes finest talent including: Théo Duboule (guitar – CH), Vuma Levin (guitar), Matthias Spillmann (trumpet – CH), Marco Zenini (bass – IT) and Martin Perret (drums – CH).
Led by multi-award winning musicians, Vuma Levin, Théo Duboule, and Martin Perret, In Motion represents a meeting of South African and Western European musical cultures. The project seeks to establish a creative dialogue between folkloric musics from Switzerland and South Africa, focusing on the period prior to and during the early stages of colonialism.
Of the concept behind the album Levin says:
“The Renaissance is often perceived as the period that propelled Western Europe from the so called darkness of the Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, laying the foundation for modernity.
However, this narrative of rational progress was facilitated by acts of racial violence: the wealth amassed through colonial encounters with the Americas, the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade, and the subsequent scramble for Africa. This material subjugation was accompanied by a discursive violence that framed Africa and its people as savage, backward, and outside historical time.”
“During the Enlightenment, the notion that submission and domination were essential features of progress and the movement towards self-consciousness was commonly accepted as seen in narratives around the so called civilising mission of colonisation. Eurocentric interpretations of Hegel’s Lord and Bondsman allegory were used to reinforce such notions. The album Allegories, launching 11 July 2025, challenges these ideas by asking: What if the story of the Renaissance and modernity were retold from the perspective of the oppressed—the enslaved and colonized?”
The project seeks to offer an aestheticized reimagining of Hegel’s allegory through sound, transforming it into a tale of resistance and emancipation. To realize these conceptual insights, the project reinterprets 16th and 17th century madrigals transcribed by Basel-based physician Felix Platter, embedding them within the cultural vernaculars of traditional Nguni music, contemporary jazz, and the Black Atlantic!s popular music traditions. By foregrounding Black Atlantic musical practices, the resulting hybrid compositions challenge colonial narratives and assert Africa and its diasporic peoples as integral to modernity rather than external to it.”
The tour will see In Motion joined by renowned South African percussionist Gontse Makhene.
“Vuma Levin is destined to be one of South African jazz’s greatest musicians” – Mail and Guardian
