Composer Andile Khumalo stretches a wide canvas of pan-culturalism in ways not immediately apparent in his music. Born in Durban, South Africa, in 1978, Khumalo moved to New York City to study spectral composition at Columbia University. That heady approach to writing music works with qualities beyond pitch, such as difference tones and harmonic fusion. He then brought those tools back into the musical forms with which he grew up. The antecedents fade into the background, and the results are boldly beautiful.
 

Khumalo was first heard on record (to my awareness) on the 2021 album confined. speak. by Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente. Tracing Hollow Traces is Khumalo’s first portrait album, and New Focus Recordings has provided a generous platform for assembling talent. Dal Niente appears again, repeating Beyond Her Mask and adding Shades of Words to the program. On both, soprano Carrie Henneman Shaw moves easily through narration, sung sections, and vocalizing, and through mythic, dreamlike imagery and social commentary. Two top-rated New York ensembles, Argento and Wet Ink, appear, but it’s the smaller pieces that are most captivating: ISO[R] for piano, flute, and cello is deep and moody, built around the extremes of the instruments’ registers and demonstrating again Khumalo’s talent for bringing emotional response out of academic exercise. If there’s one reason to listen to the album, however, it’s the title piece. The quick and playful clarinet solo is a virtuosic flight of fancy, performed by the remarkable Carol McGonnell. In the spaces between the notes she plays lies Khumalo’s smart and beating heart.