New to African music? Start with Louis Mhlanga.

African music is not one style but hundreds, spread across a continent of many languages and long musical histories. The genres on the biggest global playlists now, Amapiano and Afrobeats, are recent arrivals; the traditions behind them go back generations. For anyone who wants to start listening but does not know where to begin, a live concert by an experienced player is a practical entry point, because it needs no background knowledge.

This guide is built around one such concert. In Cape Town, the guitarist Louis Mhlanga is performing his album Living for the Living at the Artscape, in a series called Voices of the Ages. Mhlanga is a useful place for a newcomer to begin: his music is largely instrumental and melodic, so there is no language barrier, and his playing draws on several African traditions at once, which makes the wider map easier to follow afterwards.

Voices of the Ages is a curated concert series presented by Elvis Sibeko Studios, a Cape Town creative house that stages large African productions, in association with the Artscape. The idea behind the series is simple: music that carries memory, identity and hope from one generation to the next, performed live and up close. For this evening, that means Louis Mhlanga and his band playing Living for the Living, with stories shared between the songs, across about seventy minutes.

The Artscape, on Cape Town's Foreshore, is the city's main performing-arts centre. It opened in 1971 and is home to the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, Cape Town Opera and several resident companies. A concert on this scale is a seated theatre show rather than a large arena event, which suits acoustic, detail-heavy playing where the interplay between the guitar and the band is easy to hear.

Louis Mhlanga was born in Harare in 1956 and taught himself guitar as a boy, first by copying the rock records that reached him, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, then by studying the guitar traditions of southern and west Africa. The combination became his signature: he took the interlocking patterns of the Shona mbira, the thumb piano at the heart of Zimbabwean music, and translated them onto a modern electric guitar. Critics have long called him one of the finest guitarists Africa has produced.

His career runs through half a century of the continent's music. He came up in 1970s Zimbabwe alongside Thomas Mapfumo and Oliver Mtukudzi, moved through London and Nigeria, and settled in South Africa in 1985, where he became a first-call collaborator for the giants: Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Ray Phiri, Vusi Mahlasela, Busi Mhlongo. He has produced records for Mapfumo, for Nigeria's King Sunny Ade, and for Mahlasela, taught African guitar in the Netherlands, and toured with the global Playing For Change project. Living for the Living, released in 2024, is a nineteen-track double album of Zimbabwean guitar classics, and the heart of this concert.

Living for the Living is largely instrumental, and that is part of why it works so well as an introduction. There are no lyrics to follow in a language you may not speak. There is just melody, rhythm and a guitar that sings the tune the way a voice would. Many of the pieces are old Zimbabwean songs that listeners who grew up there will recognise, reworked as solo guitar. You do not need that memory to enjoy them; you can simply follow the melody.

What makes Mhlanga distinctive is the mix of three traditions in his playing. The foundation is the interlocking pattern of mbira music, in which two melodic lines cross over each other and the beat sits lightly. Over that is the tone and phrasing of a rock guitarist raised on Hendrix. And through it runs the harmonic looseness of jazz, where a tune can move away from its melody and return. It is technical playing, but the melodies stay simple enough to follow on a first hearing.

Mhlanga's music sits within a wider southern African tradition, and it connects to the rest of the continent's popular styles. Below is a short map of genres worth knowing, each with one or two artists to look up first. They are grouped roughly by region and era, and can be explored in any order.