Walk into the basement of The Athletic Club & Social any night from a Wednesday to a Saturday, and you’ll find a crowd that looks more like a Boiler Room audience than your grandpa’s jazz club. Young people hunched over Negronis, heads nodding, bodies swaying, fully locked in. This is jazz—but not as the world once knew it. This is jazz with an edge, a bounce, a future. Welcome to Cape Town: one of the new jazz capitals of Africa and the world that, frankly, has been carrying the spirit all along.
Let’s be clear—Cape Town has been deep in the jazz game since the mid-20th century. During apartheid, jazz here wasn’t just music; it was resistance. It carried stories, frustrations, and dreams through smoky club windows and back alley shows. Cape Town gave us some of the most iconic names in African jazz history—Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly Dollar Brand), a District Six local whose Mannenberg became an unofficial anthem of the anti-apartheid movement. Basil Coetzee, the Cape Flats-born saxophonist with a tone like sandpaper on fire, helped define that sound. Robbie Jansen, another Cape Town stalwart, fused Cape jazz with goema rhythms and street carnival spirit to create a sound that was unmistakably local—and deeply influential. And we can’t forget the Ngcukana brothers, Ezra and Duke, whose contributions to South African jazz were both musically profound and politically resonant. Raised in a family of musicians, the Ngcukanas helped shape the modern Cape jazz idiom, with Duke’s saxophone work and compositional flair placing him among the country’s most respected jazz voices. Alongside them, artists like Thandi Ntuli, with her genre-defying piano work and fearless sonic exploration, and Thandiswa Mazwai, whose roots in kwaito, soul, and jazz make her one of the continent’s most compelling storytellers, have helped ensure that South African jazz remains both inclusive and boundary-pushing.
This is the lineage today’s scene is building on. And it’s growing louder by the week.
However, Cape Town’s jazz legacy doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it has always been part of a wider continental conversation. From the 1960s onward, as jazz scenes blossomed in cities like Lagos, Addis Ababa, and Dakar, Cape Town remained a critical node in the pan-African jazz web. Musicians here were dialed into global currents: listening to Miles and Mingus, yes, but also to the Afrobeat experiments of Fela Kuti, the Ethio-jazz modalities of Mulatu Astatke, and the griot-inflected improvisations coming out of Senegal. While apartheid limited physical movement, the sonic dialogue persisted—through pirate radio, smuggled records, and shared diasporic rhythms. South African jazz exiles like Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela played pivotal roles abroad, collaborating with artists across Africa and the U.S., while planting seeds that would loop back into Cape Town’s soundscape. You can hear it today: in the layered polyrhythms of groups like Kujenga, or the spiritual depth of Langa-based collectives like Jazz in the Native Yards—echoes of Lagos, Addis, and beyond, reinterpreted through a uniquely Capetonian lens.
Due to our port-city status, Cape Town absorbed diverse musical styles—American jazz, Caribbean calypso, and European harmonies—which blended with local traditions to form a distinct “Cape jazz” sound. Cape jazz is marked by improvisation, political defiance, and a rhythmic lineage that draws from goema and marabi. It’s now taught and studied internationally, with universities and conservatories recognizing it as a legitimate and distinct jazz subgenre. And institutions like UCT’s South African College of Music continue to nurture the next wave of talent, making jazz more accessible to younger generations than ever before.
This shift in jazz is loud, and it’s local. Again, look to acts like Kujenga taking South Africa and the world by storm, or the rhythm-hopping Umuthiomkhulu Ensemble blending Xhosa poetry with horn lines that could blow the doors off any downtown stage. There’s also Internet Athi, layering electronic textures over South African groove patterns, and Operation Khathaza with an authentic, raw sound. These artists aren’t just riffing on Coltrane or Davis—they’re writing new chapters rooted in their own lived realities, sometimes even nodding toward London’s Kokoroko or Chicago’s Makaya McCraven, while keeping things unmistakably Cape Town. Today’s innovators—like Kyle Shepherd, Bokani Dyer, and Mandla Mlangeni—are fusing traditional Cape jazz with hip hop, electronic, and classical influences, keeping the genre fresh and globally relevant.
What makes Cape Town’s jazz ecosystem special right now is how community and culture intersect in real spaces. You’ve got venues like Harringtons, 196 Victoria, and Guga S’thebe in Langa, intimate joints where the line between performer and audience blurs. The Blue Room? Sure, it’s there. But it’s the smaller, sometimes secret spaces—the basement jams, the gallery pop-ups—that hold the soul. These are not just gigs; they’re cultural conversations, improvised in real time.
But you can’t talk about Cape Town jazz without shouting out Africa’s Grandest Gathering. The Cape Town International Jazz Festival (CTIJF) has been more than a feather in the city’s cap since it launched in 2000—it’s been a crown. One of the largest jazz festivals on Earth, drawing over 30,000 fans each year, it’s where world-class meets hyper-local. It’s where Kamasi Washington might follow a set by Bheki Khoza or Bongeziwe Mabandla. A melting pot of global talent, the Cape Town International Jazz Festival generated over R119 million for the local economy in 2024 alone. Through its masterclasses and workshops, it shapes musical careers and opens doors. For two electrifying days each year, Cape Town becomes the heartbeat of global jazz.
And the thing is, people are noticing. International artists aren’t just flying in—they’re sticking around, collaborating, recording, vibing with local players. There’s a quiet power in that. Cape Town doesn’t just consume global jazz trends—it contributes to them. Our artists are now part of the global narrative, reshaping what jazz means in 2025.
Jazz here doesn’t live in a museum—it breathes in the street markets, in the backrooms, in the hands of young musicians raised on both Hugh Masekela as much as the Ezra Collective. It’s a sound that feels ancient and future-forward all at once. It reflects Cape Town’s contradictions: beautiful and bruised, orderly and chaotic, coastal and cosmic.
So yes, Cape Town is one of Africa and the world’s new jazz hubs. But let’s not pretend we just got here. The resurgence you’re hearing is not a beginning—it’s a renaissance. A city remembering its power, recharging its traditions, and remixing them for a generation that craves the experimental, the unexpected, the local. Jazz in Cape Town isn’t going anywhere.
It’s only getting louder.
