It’s not easy to go back. Especially when “back” isn’t a place but a version of yourself you’ve outgrown. For bassist and composer Benjamin Jephta, revisiting his debut album ten years later wasn’t about nostalgia — it was about truth-telling. Homecoming Revisited, released on 19 September 2025, doesn’t try to reconstruct 2015. It listens to it from the other side of a decade — one that’s taken Jephta from the Cape Flats to Berklee, to stages around the world, and back to the South African jazz community that raised him.
“As a player, I sit in the music differently now,” he tells Let’s Get Local. “When I was 21, 22, I was still trying to prove I could play. Now I’m more interested in touch, in feel, in leaving space. I don’t have to fill every bar to show you I’m here — the groove can say it for me”
That shift — from technical assertion to emotional clarity — defines both Homecoming Revisited and a broader generational movement in South African jazz. Jephta’s reworked album threads new arrangements through the voices of collaborators like Kujenga, Bokani Dyer, Ndabo Zulu, and Siya Makhuzeni, reflecting a vibrant community that has learned to sound like itself again. Featuring contributions from over 30 musicians, the project stands as a collective expression of creative renewal and shared identity.
Revisiting the past without repeating it
Jephta’s 2015 debut, Homecoming, was a calling card — a young musician staking his claim in a post-apartheid jazz landscape still grappling with identity and inheritance. Homecoming Revisited isn’t an anniversary edition; it’s a dialogue across time.
“The trick,” he says, “is not to treat the old music like an artefact in a museum. Nostalgia can lie to you. It can make the past seem perfect and untouchable. But the truth is: I’m not that person anymore, and none of the musicians I collaborated with then are the same people either. So why would the songs still behave the same?”
This approach — reframing instead of re-enacting — has kept Homecoming Revisited alive. “We didn’t try to ‘recreate 2015,’” Jephta adds. “We asked, ‘What does this song mean right now, in 2025, in this room, with these musicians?’” The result is less remake, more regeneration: grooves shift, horn lines stretch, silences speak.
Finding “home” again
In the decade between Homecoming and Homecoming Revisited, Jephta’s understanding of “home” has widened. Born and raised in Mitchells Plain, his early sound was shaped by ghoema rhythms, brass bands, and the emotional gravity of Cape Town’s musical traditions. “In Cape Town,” he says, “music is not just art — it’s survival, it’s memory, it’s dignity.”
But Johannesburg, where he now teaches and composes, gave him perspective. “Cape Town gave me my voice. Joburg made that voice accountable to more than just myself.” That sense of accountability, to community, to story, to purpose, runs through every note of Homecoming Revisited.
“‘Home’ is not just a physical place for me anymore,” Jephta reflects. “When I wrote the first Homecoming, home meant Cape Town, family, the Flats, people who raised me. Now it also means community — the musicians around me, the younger artists I work with, the audiences that hold us up. Home is a network. It’s a responsibility”
Between the local and the global
Jephta’s music has always been rooted in South Africa but in conversation with the world. A Berklee graduate who’s performed with Danilo Pérez and Terri Lyne Carrington, he knows what global exposure can bring, and what it can distort. “I don’t see it as ‘protecting’ South African identity from global influence,” he says. “I see it as: South African music is global already.”
When he tours abroad, listeners often ask about the “feel” of his sound — the bounce, the phrasing, the harmonies. His response is simple: “That’s home. That’s Kaapstad, that’s Jozi. It’s the way our drummers sit on the back of the beat, it’s the way horns tune and phrase melodies. You can’t fake that. You have to live in it.”
Jephta’s recent work — especially Born Coloured, not Born-Free (2023) — has explored identity in deeply local terms, but he’s never treated “local” as a limitation. His blend of Cape Jazz, hip-hop, electronic textures, and Afrobeat grooves feels cosmopolitan precisely because it’s so grounded. “I’m not trying to sound American,” he says. “I’ve done the New York gigs. I don’t need to cosplay New York jazz to feel valid.”
The next wave
Perhaps the most striking thread in Homecoming Revisited is Jephta’s embrace of younger musicians — a new wave that, as he puts it, “is completely uninterested in begging for permission.” He sees them as expanding the definition of jazz rather than defending it.
“The younger musicians are not doing genre politics. At all. And I love that, because that has always been my vibe,” he says. “The new kids will sample a church hymn, play a swing line, put a trap hi-hat over it, then rap something that sounds like diary-entry-level personal, and it all feels honest. There’s no apology.”
We’ve seen bands like Kujenga, Operation Khataza, and other collectives emerging from venues such as The Commons, Selective Live, and One Park, blurring lines between spiritual jazz, marabi, protest music, and even hip-hop. Jephta hears in them the same impulse that drove his own early work — but freer, less self-conscious. “They’re building their own rooms and telling the world, ‘You can pull up if you want’,” he says. “The standard now isn’t ‘Can you sound like Blue Note in 1965?’ It’s ‘Can you sound like you — and can we hear where you’re from inside that?’”
A decade later
If Homecoming was about arrival, Homecoming Revisited is about endurance, about finding ways to stay rooted while evolving. It’s also a meditation on what it means for South African artists to define themselves without waiting for international validation.
Jephta isn’t just revisiting an album; he’s reimagining a philosophy: music as identity work, as a map of belonging. “I’m not chasing approval in the same way,” he says simply. “I’m chasing honesty.”
And in a year when so many South African musicians are rethinking what it means to “sound like home,” Jephta’s project feels less like a return and more like a reminder: you can go global, but the groove — the real one — always knows its way back.
