Mabi Gabriel Thobejane

THIS DESCRIPTION OR BIOGRAPHY IS INCOMPLETE.  IT IS CENTRED AROUND THE PERIOD OF THE ARTIST'S WORK WITH MELT2000/B&W MUSIC

Gabriel Segwagwa Thobejane (1947 - 2021) was born in Mamelodi, South Africa.
The young Mabi did a lot of things that normal kids do: he sang in the primary school choir and ran successfully in the athletics team. But there was a crucial difference between Mabi and the others. He ran to the beat of drums pounding in his head. At the age of five, he liked to listen to the women of the Balobedu tribe drumming in the next street and he watched them carefully, noticing not only how they hit the drums, but where. That way he learned to visualise the way a drum is struck from the tone of the beat it produces, discovering how to truly hear music.
 Mabi's parents did not share his enthusiasm for drumming. Strict members of the African Bethel Church, they believed that their child was destined to be a priest and they beat him constantly in order to help him fulfil his destiny. But the more they beat him, the more Mabi loved the drums. He would simply escape into the rhythm of the beatings. He started making his own drums, fetching the skins from the local tannery, and played them in front of Charlie Kguludi's shebeen, always drawing a crowd and earning a few pennies.
Not all of Mabi's family frowned on music. His uncle, Dr. Philip Tabane, was an accomplished guitarist and the leader of one of South Africa's seminal bands, Malombo. He recruited Mabi on drums and took Malombo to the USA to make it big. Waiting for their big break, the pair lived for a while in Harlem, where Mabi first learned about alcohol and started drinking steadily. Malombo played in San Francisco, where Mabi shared the stage with Miles Davis and heard in full flow and experienced a revelation, conceiving in his mind new sounds of the music that he would one day make. Mabi crossed the Atlantic and came with his uncle to stay in Brixton for a while, but still they had no luck. Without the opportunity to translate the sounds he heard in his head Mabi's brain started to hurt until, disillusioned, he returned to South Africa.
Mabi came home in 1976, the year of the Sharpeville massacre, which changed everything. He was stuck in the office of a coal yard on June 16, the fateful day when the teargas and bullets started to rain down. Locked in, he had to kick the door down to escape asphyxiation and avoid a confrontation with homicidal police. After that, the cultural boycott made it difficult for musicians to work. Malombo foundered and a subsequent project, BADIMO - meaning 'ancestors', but also his acronym for Black Art Demonstrators In Music - barely got of the drawing board. All along abi formed a deep friendship and collaboration with Madala Kunene which lasted for 50 years.
 In 1979, Mabi joined Sipho Gumeded and Khaya Mahlangu to form Sakhile, a group which instantly became central to the seminal Sounds Black series of concerts and eventually achieved great critical acclaim when it reformed at the end of the 1980s. Despite the relative success of Sakhile and other projects during this period, Mabi still could not get the sounds he was hearing out of his head and his drinking became such a problem that he was living between six packs and barely getting by.
Throughout the Nineties, Mabi did odd session jobs. He taught percussion at the influential FUNDA cultural centre. He collaborated with Matsemela Manaka on theatrical productions. Then Sipho Gumede introduced him to Robert Trunz of M.E.L.T.2000 (then B&W Music). In the year of South Africa's liberation and the first free elections, B&W Music (MELT2000)  were celebrating by bringing internationally renowned musicians of the calibre of Airto Moreira and Jose Neto, Byron Wallen to work with local musicians in a project called the OUTERNATIONAL MELTDOWN SERIES.
Creatively revitalised, he put the six packs behind him and was relieved to be able to finally begin working on an album of his own, Madiba. An intensely personal record chronicling his personal odyssey and struggle for self expression, this album is the realisation of an ambition he has nurtured for more than twenty years and is a testament to his perseverance and fighting spirit. Mabi met Ben Watkins in 1995 and started a decade long working relationship with JUNO REACTOR touring the globe.
Mabi was doing what comes naturally,  beating hell out of those drums and running to the beat.