More fire for Feya Faku, the fallen musical warrior

News24

7 days ago

In 1988, Feya Faku enrolled for a degree in jazz studies at a newly baptised jazz programme at the University of Natal.
He played and recorded with some of the best jazz cats in the world, including Abdullah Ibrahim, Zim Ngqawana and Bheki Mseleku.
His sound was rooted in our kind of jazz, that township baptism of fire, folklore and freedom, but stretched beyond borders like a prayer tossed into the wind.
By the red oxide paint-drenched corrugated iron-roofed homes of New Brighton, the horn first wept. A soulful cry. And oh, how it sang thereafter. Some men play music. And then some men become music.
Fezile 'Feya' Faku, born 6 June 1962, did not blow notes into his trumpet – he whispered galaxies into brass, summoned ancestors from the otherworld, poured the deep-throated memory of oceans into every phrase. When he lifted the trumpet, you didn't just hear jazz, you heard healing, you heard the echo of elders humming through dust roads and brass.
Vuyo Giba
From the very beginning, in the soul-rich soil of New Brighton in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, Feya was steeped in the language of the horn. His childhood footsteps traced paths walked by the Soul Jazzmen and the prophets of sound who gathered in garages and smoky backrooms, conjugating chords like ancient griots decoding prophecy. He was not born into jazz; he was chosen by jazz.
His sound was rooted in our kind of jazz, that township baptism of fire, folklore and freedom, but stretched beyond borders like a prayer tossed into the wind. Listening to Feya Faku was like caressing a witch while under the spell of Bitches Brew – bewitched, bewildered, but willingly undone. His phrasing didn't just seduce the ear, it slipped beneath the skin and lingered, like the kind of longing that refuses to leave quietly.
'Music is bigger than us,' he once declared to wide-eyed students at Stirling High School in East London.
He was right. But Feya made it intimate again. Music, for him, was brotherhood. It was defiance. It was tenderness offered in tight voicings. It was a sermon at midnight in a club where the only god was groove and the only gospel was swing.
And his journey? Oh, it swung like a pendulum between pain and purpose. In 1988, he enrolled for a degree in jazz studies at a newly baptised jazz programme at the University of Natal, the first such in the southern hemisphere.
Founded and headed by pianist and jazz educator extraordinaire, Darius Brubeck, the first intake of students on the programme included the likes of Zim Ngqawana, Lex Futshane, Lulu Gontsana and Victor Masondo.
Feya's early encounter with jazz can be traced back to his birthplace, which was the home of prominent jazz cats, including a group called the Soul Jazzmen.
He took his first lessons from saxophonist Mickey Stokwe, the son of the late Coleman Stokwe, one of the well-known New Brighton trumpeters. They decided to form the Modern Jazz Group and Bucks Gongco joined them.
Gongco was responsible for arranging jazz standards to feature in the repertoire of the band. Soon, the Modern Jazz Group was the talk of the town, filling the void temporarily left by the Soul Jazzmen.
The objective of the group was not to compete with the Soul Jazzmen but to create a platform for the new jazz lions to get practical lessons in music.
From there, he never looked back. In later years, he would play with them all – tenor saxophonist Winston Mankunku Ngozi; pianists Bheki Mseleku, Pat Matshikiza, Abdullah Ibrahim and Andile Yenana; alto saxophonist Barney Rachabane; vocalist Thandi Classen; tenor saxophonist McCoy Mrubata; and drummer Makhaya Ntshoko.
Much as he played with all these legends, Feya was not a mere sideman; he was a sentinel, a keeper of the flame. Feya carried ancestral memory in his case, and innovation in his embouchure.
Eight albums. Countless collaborations. From Hommage to Tacit, from Hope and Honour to Le Ngoma, he composed not only for ears, but for lineage. In Dirge, he wept for the bandleader and saxophonist Ngqawana. The same Ngqawana he chastised when he made a mockery of Gontsan's Aids death.
In Nyaniso, he honoured Ezra Ngcukana whose father, Fezile Christopher 'Mra' Ngcukana, had a great influence on him.
And in Vandalized, Feya Faku gave us more than a composition, he gave us a lament, low-slung blues etched into brass. It was not just a song; it was a cry from the heart of a man who had seen the unthinkable: the sacred, snatched.
In 2014, his home in Linden, Johannesburg, was broken into, violated by hands that knew nothing of harmony, nothing of breath drawn before a note, nothing of the sacred covenant between musician and horn.
Among the stolen items were his most treasured companions: a rare trumpet and flugelhorn, hand-forged by Adams Musical Instruments in the US the previous year.
These weren't ordinary tools; they were gilded extensions of his soul, custom-built to accommodate his struggle with Bell's palsy, a nerve condition that had once threatened to silence his gift.
Light in weight, warm in tone and tender against the skin, they were sculpted for resilience. Their theft was more than a robbery; it was an act of desecration.
Vuyo Giba
And so Feya Faku did what only a true jazz griot could do: he translated grief into groove, pain into poetry and rage into resolve. Vandalized was not just about loss; it was about reclaiming the melody from the silence.
In 2019, he curated Le Ngoma Songbook – nearly 100 compositions – a living document of what it means to be a jazzman in Africa: celebrant, curator, custodian.
Then came Impilo and Live at the Bird's Eye, the Swiss offerings recorded during his residency and renewal. Albums not of return, but of resurrection.
He closed the circle where it had all begun.
Last month, he stood as a surprise act beside Herbie Tsoaeli at the Mandela Bay Jazz Legacy Festival, his flugelhorn crackling with history. Then, on 6 June – his birthday – Feya Faku offered us one final gift: a luminous, soul-stirring performance at the Mandela Bay Theatre Complex.
It was not merely a concert, it was a benediction, a final bow woven in breath and brass. As if sensing that the curtain was drawing near, Feya Faku poured everything into that night: every phrase a farewell, every note a love letter to the land and the people who shaped him.
History will not forget this moment, nor the visionary stewardship of Monde Ngonyama, the indomitable CEO of the Mandela Bay Theatre Complex, rightly revered as the lion of the arts.
Dalisu Ndlazi on bass, Sydney Mnisi on sax, Ayanda Sikade on drums and Vuyo Mjindi on keys – all wrapped around him like brothers in song. His horn floated that night. Almost too light. As if it already knew.
Weeks later, in Basel, Switzerland, a silence. He was there on invitation of Veit Arlt, who, for more than a decade, has been organising concerts with jazz musicians from SA, in cooperation with The Bird's Eye Jazz Club in Basel. So, for the Swiss-SA collaboration, he took along piano maestro Paul Hanmer.
He didn't arrive for rehearsal. The trumpet had fallen still.
The man had gone home. But not before leaving echoes. Not before sculpting eternity from breath. Not before reminding us that jazz is more than a style; it's a declaration: I was here; I mattered; I made music.
And so, let us say his name with reverence.
Fezile Faku
Feya
Hornman
Healer
Raconteur
Historian
Torchbearer
Lodestar
Feya once confided in me, with that hushed tremor only the deeply wounded carry, how his divorce from Nomalungelo gnawed at his spirit, how it hollowed out the quiet chambers of his soul. Their union was blessed with two boys.
The city, with its sharp edges and unresolved echoes, became unbearable. So, he did what many do when the world frays at the seams: he journeyed back to New Brighton, the crucible of his beginnings, to seek out the fragments of himself scattered among childhood jazz riffs and township dust.
But it wasn't just nostalgia that brought him peace. There, amid the memories and melancholia, he found unexpected solace in a muse of a different kind, Qhiya Nkulu, the woman he once immortalised in melody, the radiant jazz photographer Vuyo Giba.
Their connection rekindled like a vinyl pressed too long ago but still warm with meaning. It was to her that he last spoke of our mutual friend, Hanmer, now hospitalised. He told her gently, with the tenderness of someone carrying too many goodbyes, that he would call back.
But that call never came. Instead, the silence was his final note. On 23 June, Feya Faku slipped into eternal rest, peacefully in his sleep over there in Switzerland – his trumpet beside him, his heart full of music and his promises carried gently on the wind.
Let the solos carry him skyward. Let the rhythms rock him gently. Let the celestial band of jazz meet him at the gates and say: 'The stage is ready.'