Pianist-singer Thandi Ntuli is not the only South African artist reinventing a modern music that some critics want to keep locked in a box called “jazz.” The sound of contemporary South Africa is a global beacon for potential musical futures precisely because so many artists entrenched in the country’s great improvised tradition, with its beautiful Xhosa and Zulu melodies, keep pushing beyond the accepted meaning of that four-letter word.
Ntuli, a 36-year-old emissary of a Johannesburg scene gone global, is a standard-bearer for…
