On Tuesday night, at Quiet Life Co’s studio in Cape Town, Jabulile Majola and Ross Dorkin, who produced most of Ipasi, sat a small room down and played the album through one song at a time, saying where each came from before we heard it. By the middle of the session the room had gone quiet in the way rooms do when you have their full attention. It is the most moving new work I have heard in a long while, and the feeling in there was real. Most of it is in isiZulu, which I don’t speak, and that only made it hit harder. Nobody was performing it. People just sat with it.
Ipasi is out today. It follows Isitifiketi, his 2025 debut EP, and the two titles talk to each other. “Isitifiketi” means birth certificate. “Ipasi” means “ID document”. One names where he started. The next asks who he has become since.
Birth certificate to ID document
“In the process of writing Ipasi, trying to figure out the theme and spirit of the record, I was faced with the question, ‘Where to from Isitifiketi?'” Majola says. “Thematically I knew that I wanted to touch on growth and change. What I see is that sonically the songs on the album are way more expansive.”
He is right about the sound. Across eleven tracks, sung largely in isiZulu, the Afro-folk and Afro-soul he is known for opens up, with fuller arrangements and more room for the songs to move. It was recorded across Cape Town, KwaZulu-Natal, Johannesburg and London, with Gregory Abrahams producing “Uze Wazi” and Dorkin steering the rest. Akeeda Keet, Thami James, Thando Zide and Lia Butler feature across it. So does the audience from his show at the Baxter, recorded live.
Majola was born in KwaZulu-Natal, taken in by a pastor’s family and raised in Greytown, and he named the whole project after his birth mother. The two years since Isitifiketi brought two SAMA nominations and stages like Kirstenbosch, the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, Untitled Basement and many more. That history sits under the record without being announced. What came through most in the studio was how he speaks now, especially about his wife and the family they are planning. You could watch the growth he keeps writing about happening in front of you.
Seven years of walking to learn to run
The clearest account of that growth came not from the label but from Danilo Queiros, who founded Quiet Life Co and started Jabulile on this road. In Instagram stories posted this morning, Queiros walked through the seven years the two have worked together, back to a plan to shoot a documentary with Jabulile’s remaining label fund. Jabulile phoned him the day after the Isitifiketi run and said he wanted to spend the budget taking the music to the country instead. They did both. That tour sold more than 1,400 tickets, and the footage shot along the way became the visuals now carrying this album. “7 years of walking to learn to run,” Queiros wrote. “They say 7 years is a cycle and today we start the next one.”
The Ipasi tour is already on the road. It opened this week and plays its first full show tonight at The Gallery on Produce in Gqeberha, then more in East London, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Langa, with a homeground finale at The Playhouse in Durban on 25 September.
“All things that live grow, and all things that grow, change,” Majola says of the record. On Ipasi you can hear him keeping his word, eleven times over.
