South African jazz is the most under-covered major tradition in the music, and one of the few where the political context is impossible to separate from the sound. This is a guide to the essential albums.
The music grew out of marabi, the township piano style of the 1920s and 1930s, and kwela, the penny-whistle music of the 1950s. What made it jazz was American records arriving in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and a generation of musicians who took the harmony and applied it to rhythms and melodies that were already theirs.
Then apartheid made it almost impossible to practise. The Group Areas Act destroyed Sophiatown and District Six, mixed-race bands became illegal to stage, and after Sharpeville in 1960 a significant proportion of the country’s best musicians left and did not come back for thirty years.
A great deal of the music below was therefore made in London, New York or Scandinavia.
Start Here: Top 5 South African Jazz Albums
Mannenberg — Abdullah Ibrahim (the closest thing to a national anthem)
Yakhal’ Inkomo — Winston Mankunku Ngozi (recorded at home, in 1968)
Jazz Epistle, Verse 1 — The Jazz Epistles (where it starts)
Home Is Where the Music Is — Hugh Masekela (the best of his own records)
Wisdom of Elders — Shabaka and the Ancestors (the modern connection)
1. The Jazz Epistles — Jazz Epistle, Verse 1 (1960)
Jazz Epistle, Verse 1 is generally described as the first jazz album recorded by Black South African musicians, and the line-up is extraordinary.
Abdullah Ibrahim — then known as Dollar Brand — on piano, Hugh Masekela on trumpet, Jonas Gwangwa on trombone and Kippie Moeketsi on alto saxophone.
The group barely existed. Recorded shortly after the Sharpeville massacre, the album came out in a small pressing and the band dispersed almost immediately, with most of its members leaving the country.
2. Abdullah Ibrahim — Mannenberg (1974)
Mannenberg became an unofficial anthem of the anti-apartheid movement without containing a single word.
Recorded in Cape Town with Basil Coetzee on tenor saxophone, it is built on a repeating piano figure that draws on church music, marabi and something entirely Ibrahim’s own.
The title refers to a township on the Cape Flats, created by forced removals. The record was released under various titles including Cape Town Fringe, which is worth knowing when you go looking for it.
3. Winston Mankunku Ngozi — Yakhal’ Inkomo (1968)
Yakhal’ Inkomo is the great South African tenor saxophone album, made by a player who spent most of his career unable to perform for mixed audiences.
The title translates roughly as “the bellowing bull”, and the music is openly indebted to John Coltrane while remaining unmistakably local.
Mankunku stayed in South Africa rather than going into exile, which limited his international profile enormously and makes this record all the more remarkable.
4. Hugh Masekela — Home Is Where the Music Is (1972)
Home Is Where the Music Is is the strongest album Masekela made, recorded in London with Dudu Pukwana on alto.
Most listeners know Masekela through “Grazing in the Grass”, a 1968 instrumental that reached number one in the United States, and through his later anti-apartheid anthem “Bring Him Back Home”.
This double album is where the jazz playing is most serious, and Pukwana’s presence gives it an edge his American-recorded albums lack.
5. Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath — Brotherhood of Breath (1971)
The Brotherhood of Breath took South African township melody and ran it through a free-jazz big band, and nothing else has ever sounded quite like it.
McGregor was a white South African pianist who had led the multiracial Blue Notes in Cape Town. When performing together became untenable, the band left for the Antibes festival in 1964 and settled in London.
The Brotherhood grew out of that group, mixing the South African exiles with British free improvisers. Loud, joyous and chaotic in roughly equal measure.
6. The Blue Notes — Blue Notes for Mongezi (1976)
Blue Notes for Mongezi is a long, raw memorial recording for the trumpeter Mongezi Feza, who died in London at 30.
The surviving members — McGregor, Dudu Pukwana, Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo — recorded it shortly after his death, and it is as much a wake as a performance.
Difficult listening and essential context for everything the exiles did afterwards.
7. Dudu Pukwana — In the Townships (1974)
In the Townships is the most immediately enjoyable record to come out of the London exile scene.
Pukwana’s alto playing is fierce and blues-drenched, and the material stays close to township dance forms rather than heading into free improvisation.
A good entry point if the Brotherhood of Breath records feel like too much at once.
8. Bheki Mseleku — Celebration (1992)
Celebration announced a major pianist at the point when South African musicians could start coming home.
Mseleku was largely self-taught, played saxophone as well as piano, and recorded this in London with a band including Courtney Pine and Jean Toussaint.
The record came out as apartheid was ending, and it carries that moment in it.
9. Sathima Bea Benjamin — A Morning in Paris (recorded 1963)
A Morning in Paris was recorded with Duke Ellington’s involvement and then sat unreleased for thirty years.
Benjamin, a singer from Cape Town and Abdullah Ibrahim’s wife, persuaded Ellington to hear the couple perform in Zurich in 1963. He arranged a Paris session on the spot.
The tapes were lost and the album finally appeared in 1997. Her singing is unhurried and quite unlike the American vocal tradition she is otherwise compared to.
10. Philip Tabane and Malombo — Malombo (1970s)
Malombo built a music from Venda ritual traditions, guitar and hand percussion that has almost no relationship to American jazz at all.
Tabane rejected the jazz label and the comparisons, and his playing — spiky, rhythmic, entirely unorthodox — has more in common with what later became known as spiritual jazz than with anything in the mainstream.
Recordings are scattered and reissues are inconsistent, which is part of why he remains under-known.
11. Shabaka and the Ancestors — Wisdom of Elders (2016)
Wisdom of Elders connects the current London jazz scene directly to Johannesburg, and it is the best entry point for younger listeners.
Shabaka Hutchings recorded it in South Africa with local musicians including Mthunzi Mvubu and Siyabonga Mthembu, and the record does what the Blue Notes did in reverse.
Its follow-up, We Are Sent Here by History, is equally strong.
12. Nduduzo Makhathini — Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds (2020)
Makhathini is the first South African artist signed to Blue Note, and his work places Zulu spiritual practice at the centre rather than the margin.
A pianist and a trained sangoma, he treats the music as ceremonial rather than performative, which puts him in a lineage running back through Ibrahim.
His subsequent albums In the Spirit of Ntu and uNomkhubulwane are both worth hearing.
Where to go next
Two threads. The exile thread runs from the Blue Notes through the Brotherhood of Breath into British jazz generally — Louis Moholo-Moholo is still playing, and his influence on the London scene has been enormous. The home thread runs from Mankunku through Zim Ngqawana and Moses Molelekwa to the musicians recording in Johannesburg and Cape Town today.
For reissues, the Matsuli Music label has done more than anyone to bring lost South African records back into circulation, and their catalogue is the single best place to dig.
Which South African jazz album would you start someone with? Let us know in the comments below.
More guides to albums, musicians and jazz history in the Jazzfuel archive — or sign up for the Weekend Edition newsletter for a jazz reading list every Saturday.
