Award-Winning Pianist and Scholar Dr Sibusiso “Mash” Mashiloane Releases 60 Original Compositions as a Free Book

Award-Winning Pianist and Scholar Dr Sibusiso “Mash” Mashiloane Releases 60 Original Compositions as a Free Book

Sounds of Home: Compositions Book One makes South African jazz composition freely available to musicians, students, and educators worldwide.

Durban, South Africa - Pianist, composer, and scholar Dr Sibusiso “Mash” Mashiloane has released Sounds of Home: Compositions Book One, a notated collection of 60 original compositions, as a free digital download. The book is the first of a planned series and represents years of work translating a body of music long carried through performance and memory into written form for the first time.

Compositions Book One brings together years’ worth of Mashiloane’s music, from early works through pieces connected to his acclaimed ISIGQI project, each accompanied by his own programme notes on the people, places, and moments that shaped them. The collection spans tributes to family and mentors, reflections on township life and South African identity, and pieces rooted in the concept of isigqi, the organising pulse at the centre of Mashiloane’s musical and academic work.

“This music has always lived in performance and in memory. I wanted it to also live on the page, where other musicians could pick it up, learn from it, and carry it forward. That is why the book is free, the music was shaped by community, and it belongs back with that community,” said Mashiloane.

The full 60-composition collection is available immediately as a free PDF at www.sibumash.com. Readers who would like a printed copy for their shelf or for teaching use can place a pre-order at the same address.

Mashiloane holds a PhD in Music from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he lectures at the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music. He has released eight albums, most recently Isigqi: Live at the bird’s eye, recorded in Basel with Swiss musicians. In 2024 he composed the ISIGQI Suite for the National Youth Jazz Orchestra of Carnegie Hall. His work has been recognised with a NIHSS Award, the AFRIMA Award and multiple Mzantsi Jazz Awards.

Sounds of Home: Compositions Book One was edited by jazz writer Gwen Ansell, with music formatting by Pascal Haas and Mashiloane, book design and layout by Brandon Ryan, and cover design by Sanele Balintaba. The book was project managed by Marlyn Ntsele of iSupport Creative Business.

The book includes a foreword by pianist, scholar and Mashiloane’s former lecturer Neil Gonsalves, and an afterword by pianist Darius Brubeck, who introduced the first Jazz Studies degree programme in Africa at the University of Natal (now UKZN), where Mashiloane himself currently lectures.

About Sibusiso “Mash” Mashiloane

Sibusiso “Mash” Mashiloane is a South African jazz pianist, composer, and academic whose work explores South African jazz as a form of knowledge, rooted in Ubuntu, community memory, and the idea of home. He lectures at the UKZN Centre for Jazz and Popular Music and has performed and recorded across South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States.