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
7 nodes on the map.
Everyone and everything on the map
Artist
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Bheki Mseleku
Self-taught pianist, saxophonist and singer from Lamontville in Durban, born in 1955, who made his London debut at Ronnie Scott's in 1987 and recorded with Abbey Lincoln, Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson. He taught young South African players when he came home. He died in London in 2008 after years of diabetes.
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Errol Dyers
Self-taught Cape Town guitarist, born in 1952, who put the goema beat of the carnival into jazz guitar. He played with Abdullah Ibrahim, Basil Coetzee, Robbie Jansen and Winston Mankunku, and Mason quotes him on how musicians turned "Mannenberg" into a protest anthem. He died of emphysema in Cape Town in 2017.
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Mac McKenzie
Bassist and composer, born Gerald McKenzie in Bridgetown, Cape Town, in 1951, the son of a banjo player and carnival leader known as Mr Mac. He led the Genuines, the band that took the carnival's goema rhythm into rock and jazz and then called the result goema. He died in 2024.
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Taliep Petersen
Singer, composer and director who grew up in District Six and sang with the klopse from the age of six in his father's troupe, the Dark Town Strutters. With David Kramer he wrote the musicals that put Cape Town's own music on the stage, from District Six the Musical in 1987 to Ghoema in 2005. He was shot dead in his house in 2006.
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Zim Ngqawana
Saxophonist and flautist born in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, in 1959, who studied at Rhodes, at the University of Natal and in Massachusetts alongside Archie Shepp and Yusef Lateef. He directed the hundred-piece orchestra that played at Nelson Mandela's inauguration in 1994 and later built the Zimology Institute to teach outside the formal system. He died in 2011.
Group
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Jazz Epistles
The bebop group formed in 1959 by Abdullah Ibrahim, Kippie Moeketsi, Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Johnny Gertze and Makaya Ntshoko. It mixed players classified coloured and African, and men from Cape Town and Johannesburg, at a time when that alone was a provocation. Their one album is remembered as the first jazz LP by black South African musicians.
Event
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King Kong
The all-African jazz opera that opened in Johannesburg in 1959, written by Todd Matshikiza with Harry Bloom and Pat Williams. Miriam Makeba took the female lead and Hugh Masekela played in the orchestra, and the European tour that followed carried several of the musicians out of the country for good.
Hear the music for yourself