There are musicians who perform sound, and there are musicians who inhabit it.
In conversation, Muhammad Dawjee does not rush toward clarity or conclusion. Instead, he circles ideas the way improvisation circles a motif — returning, revising, letting memory and instinct guide the arc. For him, sound is not merely arrangement or genre. It is inheritance. It is breathe. It is a way of locating oneself within histories that are fractured, layered, and still unfolding.
From the sonic rituals of his grandfather’s living room to the physical necessity of the saxophone in his own body, his relationship to music is inseparable from lived experience. Questions of otherness, texture, imperfection, and craftsmanship are but daily negotiations — between lineage and experimentation, control and surrender, structure and improvisation.
What follows is a conversation about the quiet discipline of becoming.
In Conversation
Thandolwethu Mbatha (TM): Within music, there is sound—just sound alone. When did your relationship with sound start, and what does it look like for you to still be with it after so long?
Muhammad Dawjee (MD): This is the closest reference I have. My grandfather was a religious man, but he was so religious he was almost rebellious.
My grandfather’s father was an Indian man who abandoned the family. So my grandfather rejects his Indian identity completely. He says, "I’m a Malay person. My ancestors are slaves from the Cape." And what gave them their identity was Islam, and the fact that they had to struggle to hold onto it. They had secrets. And some of their secrets were held in song.
There is this practice, Gadat, a melodic recitation. Shaykh Yusuf Makassar and others taught this melodic recitation to enslaved people. They would meet in underground meetings to preserve the religion sonically. So, part of my grandfather’s perpetual quest was to become a master of this recitation. Not just for mastery, but to be the vessel to connect this tradition to his grandchildren.
On Sundays, he would gather the grandchildren in his living room to recite this thing, and he would record it on his reel-to-reel tape machine. I was too young at the time, but I know it happened. I think my introduction to sound was this. It was sonic preservation.
TN: With the saxophone being so central to your voice. What is it about the saxophone that keeps calling you back?
MD: On Saturday mornings, my father would take out the sax and play. He told me it was his dream to play professionally. He later told me he bought it before he even bought a fridge for the house. He hid it for years. Practised at work. I was attracted to it; I just wanted to hold it.
Why am I devoted to it now? It’s complicated. I’ve spent so much time on it, but there is still so much to learn. It still troubles me. I’m still curious about it.
I started playing a wind instrument when I was six (the clarinet). I think it changed my physiology. When I stopped playing later in life, my body collapsed. I became deeply depressed.
The saxophone helps me breathe. Literally. It requires long, sustained exhales. Back pressure. Diaphragm control. If I don’t play for more than two days, I feel like I can’t function. My head gets compressed. I need to do it to breathe.
TN: Let’s talk about your EP, Otherness. What does "Otherness" mean to you now, as a lived experience?
MD: It was my project of patchwork. Trying to see, where did I come from? How can I make sense of these influences and put them on a canvas?
I knew there were certain stylistic things I wanted to use. One was the sound of Ghoema, but not accurately—almost like a mistranslated Ghoema. Because my experience of my ancestry is a bit far removed. And then to include my upbringing in Jazz.
Ghoema sits on a 16th-note grid, and Swing is in a triplet subdivision. I was curious about the overlap between those two feels. A lot of the songs move between them.
TN: If you were to describe your sound—the sound you have developed over time—as a texture rather than a genre, how does it feel to the touch?
MD: This is going to get me in trouble... but it feels like the skin of someone you love.
You know, if you are touching that person... you can feel the skin. Even if you’re angry at them. You can feel the parts that have aged, the parts that glow, the scars.
TN: Does cohesion in that texture come from consistency, or from holding different parts together?
MD: It’s holding difference together. Sonically, when you are in a moment of real love on the bandstand, it’s not about smoothing things out. It’s like... we are touching each other. Your sounds are touching each other and they might be very different. There might be a harsh color, something cutting. Do you want to round that off? Or do you want to screech through that harshness and take it to its limit?
Because we are healing each other. We are breathing together. That’s cohesion. That’s real solidarity. That is what makes us people.
TN: In this digital age, how do you think about craftsmanship?
MD: I worry about the distraction. All these tools, the algorithms... they are very dangerous things. For me, I’m trying to just stay in the room. Bring the sound back to the room.
Even the album I’m working on now, yes, I’m using digital tools to mix it, but I’m recording it in one room. I tried to go back to the origins of the tradition—like those Blue Note recordings. If you look at the photographs, everything was close and intimate. That’s what I want to do. Keep people in the room. Even if it’s just a brief moment.
TN: How do you personally relate to mistakes, missed notes, or unexpected turns in your work?
MD: There aren't any mistakes. Maybe a mistake is just a door to a room you didn't know was there.
My fingers... they have a mind of their own. You just have to stay curious and see what wants to come out. You have to be patient. If you hang up on what's "right," you've lost it. Just think of what’s beautiful, or what’s different. I like to follow my heart, and then allow my mind to help it along.
TN: Finally, what do you wish for listeners to carry with them after listening to your music?
MD: I hope, if anything, that they are moved.
I hope they have the feeling I’ve had at performances where you are taken to the edge of your seat. And the gig ends, and you can’t move. You just want to sit in the venue. You don’t want to rush back out there. Nothing actually matters. And you get a sense of presence in your life, and stillness back in your life. Ownership of your life.
I think music does that. It compresses and expands time. So I hope a listener gets there. And leaves with that sense of ownership over their life.
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In the end, what emerges is not a fixed definition of otherness, nor a manifesto about jazz, tradition, or modernity. Instead, what lingers is something more intimate: presence.
Presence in breathe.
Presence in the room.
Presence between listener and sound.
His reflections resist neat resolution. Craftsmanship is not perfection but attentiveness. Mistakes are not failures but doors. Cohesion is not sameness but the careful holding of difference. Even the future, as he describes it, remains deliberately un-narrated — the practice must stay ahead of the story.
If there is something to carry from this conversation, it is perhaps this: sound is not only something we hear. It is something we inherit, something we tend to, something we pass forward. And in its most honest form, it asks only that we remain curious enough to listen — to memory, to imperfection, to each other.