Cape Town Data

The South African Music Graph

See who taught whom, who played what and where, on one map of South African music.

See how South African musicians, songs and places are connected. Every connection below is sourced, and every node leads to what we know about it.

The map grew out of our article An Interactive Network of Cape Jazz Musicians.

The network

3 nodes on the map.

Everyone and everything on the map

Artist

  • Kesivan Naidoo

    Drummer born in East London in 1979, who studied jazz at the University of Cape Town's South African College of Music and won the Standard Bank Young Artist award for jazz in 2009. Bheki Mseleku shaped his playing, and he worked with Hotep Idris Galeta, Winston Mankunku Ngozi and Miriam Makeba. He leads Kesivan and the Lights.

    1970sCape Town

Song

  • Mannenberg

    The tune Abdullah Ibrahim improvised at a prepared upright piano in Cape Town in June 1974, with Basil Coetzee taking the first solo. The groove is marabi, the saxophone sound is langarm and the beat sits close to a slow goema. Coetzee and Jansen then played it at rally after rally, and it became the anti-apartheid anthem of Cape Town.

    1970sCape Town1 connection

Album

  • Mannenberg - 'Is Where It's Happening'

    The 1974 LP that carried the tune, released by Rashid Vally after he decided the working title was not marketable. A photograph Ibrahim took of Gladys Williams was on the sleeve. With Gallo distributing it, 43,000 copies sold in South Africa within seven months, extraordinary for a jazz record.

    1970sCape Town1 connection

Connections

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