We were at Youngblood on the last Friday of June, in a room thick with familiar faces, when espAfrika set out what the Cape Town International Jazz Festival (CTIJF) becomes in 2027. Not a weekend. A month.
When Olivia Rodrigo announced Daisy Chain Fields last week, an all-women festival in California with the proceeds going to women’s and girls’ charities, it got us thinking about home. Not whether we could copy it. Whether Cape Town has its own version waiting to happen.
Cape Town doesn’t get a steady stream of international tours. It comes in waves.
A few quiet months. Then suddenly: a cluster. A venue locked in. A genre moment. A reminder that while the city is still figuring out how to sustain its own music economy, it can still pull serious global names when the system aligns.
Here’s every international artist currently confirmed for Cape Town across 2026 (and what each booking actually says about the city right now).
This piece is about a campaign, a document, and a growing movement that could meaningfully shift how live music works in Cape Town. It’s about who AHCOM are, what Our Conditions of Work sets out to do, why we’ve signed the petition — and why we think the rest of the scene should take it seriously too.
There’s a version of event production that most of us have quietly accepted as the norm: book a venue, stack a lineup, open the doors, hope the energy takes care of itself. It works often enough. But it also means that when something genuinely considered comes along — when an event treats the entire experience as the creative work, not just the music — you feel the difference before the first act even starts.
Kiss Kiss was that difference.
If you’ve spent any time in Cape Town’s live music circles over the past few years, you’ve probably ended up at 35 Loop Street. The KAYA Café — now operating as KAYA HQ — has quietly become one of the most consistent launchpads for emerging talent in the city. Not through hype or algorithmic positioning, but through something far less glamorous and far more valuable: showing up, night after night, with intentional lineups and a genuine respect for the artists on stage.
For all the scale and prestige that comes with the Cape Town International Jazz Festival (CTIJF), what stayed with us most this year was something more fundamental. It was the love in the room for live music played by actual people, in real time, on actual instruments. Not as nostalgia. Not as a niche concern. As something alive, urgent, and worth gathering for.
Cape Town’s music scene is usually discussed in fragments. The punk kids are over here. The jazz heads are somewhere else. Rap has its own rooms, its own circuits, its own gravity. DJs and bands only really interact after a band’s set. We talk about “the scene” as if it is singular, but most weekends it behaves like a loose federation of micro-scenes that only occasionally brush shoulders.
That is part of what makes Hey Hey Now Now interesting.
There’s a particular kind of artist Cape Town produces every few years. Not the loudest in the room. But the kind whose growth feels inevitable in hindsight — as if each stage was simply waiting for them to arrive.
For Jabulile Majola, 2026 is shaping up as that year.
