Pianist-singer Thandi Ntuli shouldn’t be the one South African artist reinventing a contemporary music that some critics need to hold locked in a field known as “jazz.” The sound of up to date South Africa is a worldwide beacon for potential musical futures exactly as a result of so many artists entrenched within the nation’s nice improvised custom, with its lovely Xhosa and Zulu melodies, hold pushing past the accepted that means of that four-letter phrase.

Ntuli, a 36-year-old emissary of a Johannesburg scene gone world, is a standard-bearer for experiments at jazz’s margins. A classical piano prodigy who turned down a Berklee scholarship to review at College of Cape City, she has collaborated with home producers and joined London saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings’ Ancestors group for a spell. Ntuli’s earlier studio albums as chief—The Providing (2014), Exiled (2018), and Blk Elijah & the Kids of Meroë (2022)—exhibited visionary scope: piles of devices and musicians, preparations that took benefit of their broad tonal and harmonic ranges, and compositions that veered between pop requirements, non secular thought bubbles, and theatrical narratives, plus a voice and musical management to hold all of them.

Rainbow Revisited edits down such big-budget ambitions. It’s primarily a solo piano-and-voice session, recorded one Venice Seaside afternoon with percussionist/vibes’n’chimes orchestrater Carlos Niño frivolously guiding and taking part, at instances bringing minor overdubs and post-production into the combo. The music is spare, laser targeted on these incandescent gospel melodies that really feel like a Mzansi jazz birthright, and on methods to minimally decoration them for a broader, internationalist (Anthem and in any other case) viewers.

Such embellishment doesn’t obscure Ntuli’s expansiveness. It reveals her energy in a distinct gentle—on this case, bathed within the Golden State’s sunrises and sunsets. Ntuli will need to have been all in, as a result of she named new unique tracks after each. The opening “Dawn (in California)” is a crisp take for piano and voice, abstracting these beautiful melodies into cubes; later “Sundown (in California)” focuses on folky, melancholy vocal improvisations that draw a direct line between Ntuli’s strategy and that of her onetime employer, the good singer Thandiswa “King Tha” Mazwai. On the opposite facet of the spectrum, there are studio experiments whose titles nod to their building: “Breath and Synth” and “Voice and Tongo.” These ethereal, atonal rhythm miniatures, straight out of the Carlos Niño & Mates almanac, permit for frolicsome exhalation. In all this newfound house, Ntuli appears unencumbered, free from the constraints usually imposed by jazz’s institutional trappings.