The largest jazz event on the African continent, the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, will celebrate its seventh year with dates set for March 31 through April 1. For the third year, the festival will take place in the recently constructed Cape Town International Convention Centre and in five venues in the surrounding area. Over 40 acts are scheduled to perform, along with the traditional free concert on March 30.
Confirmed artists include Miriam Makeba (pictured), Chucho Valdes Quartet, Charlie Hayden Quartet, Freddie Cole, Louie Vega and His Elements of Life, Nestor Torres, Terence Blanchard, Omar Sosa Quartet and Tribute to Ray Charles featuring Joe McBride, Gerald Veasley and Kenny Blake. More artists will be added in the coming months.
Festival organizers are working with South African Airways to create ticket, flight and boarding packages. More information on travel packages is available at www.flysaa.com and more information on the festival is available at www.capetownjazzfest.com.
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time