Born in East London, South Africa, Kesivan was the first child in a family of two children. His single mom, Venore Naidoo, worked as a bookkeeper and sent Kesivan to St. Ann’s Primary School at the age of five. However, granny Maude helped raised Kesivan and remained his closest confidant throughout her life. In 1996, he graduated from Hudson Park High School. 

None of his family played musical instruments. Kesivan first got into drumming in 1990, at the age of 10. While waiting to be let into his auntie’s house, he heard her boyfriend (Reese Timothy) playing drums over Toto’s “Georgy Porgy”. What he heard excited him. This convinced him to become a drummer. Three years later, in 1993, Kesivan performed his onstage debut at the Hogsback Arts Festival in the Eastern Cape.

At the beginning of the millennium, Kesivan became the youngest person to win the Southern African Music Rights Organisation SAMRO Overseas Scholarship Competition. He took the opportunity to study abroad. He chose to study under sitar guru, Professor Sanjay Bandophadyah in India. He completed his research degree in Indian classical music systems. 

It was this experience that opened his ears to the feeling of jazz as a global musical vernacular of freedom.

Few musicians bring the experience of this freedom – of living in a world that is limitless – as intimately, dangerously close – as Kesivan. 

Watching him play is like marvelling at a cross between Animal, the wild drummer of Muppets fame, hard bop pioneer Elvin Jones and free-jazz drum genius Louis Moholo-Moholo. His approach to drumming is blisteringly ferocious and yet his harmonic manipulation of his kit is sublime subtlety itself. 

“A lot of people say I’m a rock drummer trapped in a jazz musician’s world! And I consider that a complement,” Kesivan chuckled in an interview with the Mail & Guardian back in the day. 

His genre defying style has its roots in his youth. Kesivan grew up in the 1990s, surrounded by grunge heads. For a laatie who fell in love with jazz at the tender age of 10 and who was performing professionally by 14, it would have been easy for him to sneer at his slacker rock contemporaries. 

Instead, he listened in. 

“I will always try to bring the energy and angst I got from Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden into jazz music because I believe it’s for everybody, it’s about expression. So it’s important for me to acknowledge the energy of the time, it was hard hitting,” he once said.

The energy Kesivan is talking about is the experience of freedom. Born into the so-called Y Generation, a “freedom’s children” that got to celebrate the liberation their parents fought so hard for, Kesivan was always conscious of the need to forge a new musical identity. 

“The rest of the world is looking to my generation for that new sound. Miriam, Hugh and Adullah have done their thing. It’s iconic. Their message was politically driven. Now it’s different. We have a responsibility to forge that new sound,” he once said in an interview with GQ Magazine. 

For Kesivan, it’s a sound rooted in improvisation, in rapturous expression and radical invention – but most importantly in listening. 

“South Africa needs to have more of an open mind to the art of improvisation. That magic that happens when people are improvising, it’s like you’re witnessing telepathy. And through all the bullshit that we’ve been exposed to, telepathy is one of those things you can’t lie about, it’s inter-soul communication. Improvisation is one of the gateways to get there. Being in that moment right there and then, it’s almost an acknowledgement that we’re all alive together.” 

With this in mind during the 00s Kesivan brought together pioneering combos Tribe, Closet Snare, Beat Bag Bohemia, The Restless Natives and Babu, a creative assemblage representing not just different musical traditions but the ways those traditions have cross-pollinated between folk music, classical music, improv, electro and jazz. 

His vision is unapologetically global and genre-bending. Leveraging off his 2009 Standard Bank Young Artist Award, over the past 15 years he’s forged relationships across the world. 

His most shape-shifting crew, Kesivan and The Lights, is a testimony to his openness to collaboration. 

Back in 2010 the Lights comprised South African and Swedish players in a global explosion of talent. “It’s not just about being too South African, it’s more about being an earthling with the rest of the musicians; also exposing them to our style of music,” Kesivan said at the time. 

Fair enough, but why Sweden? “Apparently Stockholm and Cape Town share the same line of longitude,” he laughed. “That’s quite a weird thing.”

Cutting across lines of latitude and longitude to create a new musical territory, without maps, his debut album as a leader, Instigators of the Revolution (2010) was a celebration of a musician coming into his own and reaching the holy grail of jazz: a unique voice. 

“Miles’ saxophone player, Dave Liebman, told me ‘Listen, this is the right age for you to become a leader now.’ This is the time,” he confessed at the time.   

Instigators of the Revolution may have been a bold title, but Kesivan has always been as humble about it as ever. “It pertains to the instigators of the revolution in acoustic music back home,” he said upon its release. 

“Bheki Mseleku and Winston Mankunku were monumental to my progress. Unfortunately they’re deceased now. I had the pleasure of re-arranging some of their tunes,” he reverentially explained. However, Mseleku and Mankunku weren’t the only artists getting a revamp. The album also includes de-and-reconstructed versions of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” and even some Bjork material from Dancer in the Dark.

Bridging worlds, exploring melodicism amid mayhem, bringing together old and new, playing between free improv, jazz, hip-hop, rock, electro and acoustic approaches, Kesivan was on a mission to rewrite jazz history to create the ‘future sound of now’, yet always remembering yesterday. 

“As much of an earthling as I claim to be, I still have a very strong affinity for where I’m coming from,” he reflected. “I’ve worked with the greats. They’ve been guiding lights for me. So therefore I have a responsibility to take it further and keep it going. My generation is trying our damndest to make sure the music stays alive. The music evolves every time you play it. My message is this is the starting point, and I’m definitely taking it further.” 

Over the past decade this (r)evolutionary bent has borne fruit. 

In 2014 The Lights released their seminal album, Brotherhood. As anyone who caught his live performance with The Lights at Carnegie Hall at the Ubuntu Festival in 2014 will testify to, he remains the missing link in South African jazz: between Abdullah Ibrahim’s metamorphosing sonic fictions, Bheki Mseleku’s holistic approach to rhythm and melody, and yes that allusive global jazz groove. 

“How are we moving our music forward?” he asked at the time. 

Well, after a ‘big fish in a small pond’ creative anxiety attack that threatened to self-decapitate his career, Kesivan reheard and reimagined many a South African jazz musician’s existential gnarl-gnashing. 

He went back to school. Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer Danilio Perez (yes, Wayne Shorter’s main man) invited him to study at his pioneering Master’s programme at the prestigious Berklee Global Jazz Institute, from which he graduated in 2016.  

“In my thesis, I used my compositions to tell the ancestral story of a superhero on a spiritual journey to save the dream world through music. Unsurprisingly, this has led me to explore filmmaking not only as an avid movie audience but also as a composer and writer. One of the feature films I wrote the music for won the Safta Award (South African equivalent of the Oscars),” reflected Kesivan at the time.

Since graduation he’s been fleshing out his cinematic superhero sound performing live and recording with such downtown NYC heavyweights as bassist William Parker, saxophonist ‘Big’ Joe Lovano’ and bassist John Patitucci.

After his New York exodus in 2019 he set up ‘home’ in Basel, Switzerland. The home of the legendary Bird’s Eye jazz club. It’s a latitudinal as well as longitudinal groove, dig it?

Then COVID happened. He hunkered down in the mountains. He studied Chinese metaphysics. He sidestepped his ‘Seven Killings’ forecast (go on, Google it). 

He remembered that jazz is always about the long game. He practised. He somewhere, somehow, scored a cymbal that Elvin Jones used to play (yeah, give Coltrane’s drummer some love). He named the cymbal ‘Bette Davis’. In his rehearsal studio Davis helped him to rehear the energy, the expression. ‘Beauty is a rare thing’, as Ornette Coleman so memorably called it.

And in 2023, in self-imposed exile in Switzerland, he reheard the calling. He practised. He reimagined the ‘Brotherhood’ as a Big Band Experience. He began to collaborate with a global roll call of musicians to breathe new life into his signature modal Afro-Indo modulations, shadowy cinematic improvisations and more.

‘So, what [next]?’ as Miles Davis once asked.

Well, listen and watch this space….