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Heritage is not something Linda Sikhakhane leaves behind when he walks into a studio. It comes with him.
It is in Umlazi, where he was born and raised. In Nongoma, where his family roots lie and where he still speaks of home. It is in the music he grew up around, the people who helped shape him and, increasingly, in the stories he chooses to tell through his saxophone.
For Time Out Durban’s Heritage Series, the acclaimed jazz musician reflects on all of that through his most personal project yet: a self-titled album that turns inward while tracing the places, people and traditions that made him.
“This project is very close to my heart,” Sikhakhane tells Time Out Durban. “I guess this is when I really tell my personal stories. I zoom into myself and try to express that to the listeners and the public.”
It is a fitting approach for an album carrying his name.
Unlike his previous projects, this one did not begin with a neatly mapped-out concept or collection of finished songs. In fact, Sikhakhane admits he was not quite ready to make an album at all.
The opportunity came through acclaimed pianist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini, who was spending time with musicians visiting South Africa for mentorship. Makhathini wanted them to experience what it was like to make a body of work in a South African studio and asked Sikhakhane if he was ready to record his next album.
He said yes. Then came the small matter of actually having an album to record.
“There were no songs,” Sikhakhane says.
He began pulling together old musical sketches and creating new ones, sharing them with Makhathini before the musicians entered the studio and began building the record together.
What started almost by chance eventually grew into a deeply personal body of work, produced by Makhathini and featuring collaborators who were given room to bring their own stories to the music.
Sikhakhane says he deliberately resisted telling them exactly what their contributions should sound like.
“I felt that the music had the power to direct itself,” he says. “I trusted that if they were given the project, they would dream with it and contribute something meaningful.”
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Home as the starting point
For all the spontaneity behind its creation, there is one thread Sikhakhane is very clear about: identity.
“My name was given to me by my parents, ekhaya,” he says. “I see that as the basis of everything in my everyday journey.”
He was born and raised in Umlazi, while his family comes from Nongoma, the place he still regards as home.
“I come into the music space with myself, all that I carry and where I come from,” he says. “Without identity, I don’t think I would have a sound.”
It is a line that gets to the heart of how Sikhakhane understands heritage. For him, it is not about preserving tradition in one fixed form. It is something carried forward, shaped by time and allowed to evolve.
“For us to know where we’re going, we need to know where we come from,” he says. “We must also know that this journey has a deep sense of evolution.”
That tension between inheritance and change runs through the album.
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‘Uzalo’ brings lineage into the music
Nowhere is that more personal than on Uzalo, the album’s focus track.
It nearly wasn’t.
Sikhakhane and his team had originally planned to lead with Izwe, a track he says captures the acoustic saxophone sound and stronger jazz sensibility associated with his earlier work.
Then, while driving and listening through the album with Makhathini, Uzalo began to stand out.
The track draws on township-influenced South African jazz, but its meaning pushed it even closer to the centre of the album.
“‘Uzalo’ speaks to township-influenced South African jazz, which is a very distinctive sound within the jazz canon,” Sikhakhane says. “The song’s message also speaks to lineage and giving birth.”
The family connection is literal too. The track features Sikhakhane’s biological younger brother, Thabo Sikhakhane.
For an album already preoccupied with memory, home and identity, it makes Uzalo feel like more than a single. Family itself becomes part of the sound.
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The KZN roots behind the saxophone
Sikhakhane’s relationship with music stretches back long before recording studios and albums.
Growing up between Umlazi and his family’s home in Nongoma, he says music was already woven into the cultural traditions around him.
His formal introduction came at Clairewood Boys’ Primary School, where he joined the choir and began playing the recorder.
He practised constantly at home in Umlazi before a neighbour’s connection to the Salvation Army led him to the Siyakhula Community Music Centre, founded by late KZN jazz musician Dr Brian Thusi.
There, Sikhakhane found mentors who helped turn an early fascination with music into something more serious.
By Grade 10, he had decided he wanted to become a musician.
Convincing his parents took a little more work. They had not raised a professional musician and needed some persuading. Sikhakhane pointed to Thusi and the career he had built in KwaZulu-Natal as proof that the path he wanted was possible.
They eventually agreed, and Sikhakhane went on to study music at the University of KwaZulu-Natal before moving to Johannesburg and beginning his recording career.
The saxophone itself won him over more instinctively.
“I was really charmed by its sound,” he says.
At the time, Sikhakhane was playing clarinet. Then he heard a young musician at Siyakhula playing a transcribed saxophone solo from a South African jazz standard.
His reaction was immediate: “I want to play this instrument.”
So he switched.
Years later, that saxophone has become one of the ways Sikhakhane makes sense of inheritance, movement and identity.
He describes the new album as “a journey of recollection expressed through music”, but he does not want listeners to hear only his story.
“I hope that, as people engage with and navigate the album, they find their own personal stories,” he says.
That may be the most fitting place to leave a Heritage Month conversation with Sikhakhane. His music looks homeward, but not nostalgically. It asks what we carry with us, what changes along the way, and what remains recognisably ours.