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

6 nodes on the map.

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 Town2 connections

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 Town2 connections
Kwela
The pennywhistle music that carried South African sound abroad in the 1950s. South African History Online glosses the name as Zulu for get up, and notes that in township slang it also meant the police van. Basil Coetzee started out on the pennywhistle in 1958.

2 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.

5 connections
Mbaqanga
The African jazz that grew out of marabi and kwela from around 1950 and became the popular music of the townships. Zacks Nkosi's "Jackpot" is an mbaqanga tune, and Robbie Jansen counted mbaqanga among the styles a working Cape Town musician simply had to know.

2 connections

Johannesburg
The other pole of South African jazz, where the Jazz Epistles played, where King Kong opened in 1959, where Rashid Vally ran the Kohinoor record shop, and where kwaito later grew out of house music in Soweto.

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.