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 network

4 nodes on the map.

Cape jazz
The name for jazz as Cape Town plays it, built on the goema beat of the carnival, the marabi groove and the saxophone sound of the langarm dance bands. Martin's view is that the idea of it was probably inspired by Abdullah Ibrahim's reworking of carnival tunes, and that what happened in the 1980s was the systematising of an older habit.

Cape Town3 connections
Goema
Both a drum and a beat. The drum is a single-headed instrument built like a small wine cask, which the Dictionary of South African English traces through Afrikaans to a dialectal Malay word. The beat runs through the carnival, the Malay choirs and the dance bands, and in the 1980s the Genuines took the name for their own music.

Cape Town2 connections
Langarm
The dance band music of coloured Cape Town, built on waltzes, foxtrots and South African steps such as vastrap and ticky-draai. Mason's point about "Mannenberg" is that its saxophone sound is langarm, which is a large part of why Cape Town listeners recognised themselves in it.

Cape Town2 connections
Marabi
The township party music that grew in the slum yards of the mining towns from the end of the nineteenth century, built on a repeating chord pattern. Abdullah Ibrahim grew up playing it, and its groove is what people hear in "Mannenberg", helped by a piano prepared with thumbtacks in the hammers.

1 connection

Play the South African music quizTen new questions every day, most of them short clips from more than 90 South African recordings, from kwela and Cape jazz to amapiano. Answer to read the story behind each song.