From Cape Town, the transcending power of music

PUBLISHED: March 29, 2026 | www.baltimoresun.com

Cape Town does not simply host a jazz festival; it reveals itself through it.

Inside the Cape Town International Convention Centre, a global tapestry of sound converges. Artists spanning continents and traditions take the stage: Jacob Collier, Abdullah Ibrahim, Yussef Dayes and the Yussef Dayes Experience, Morin Dey, Fatoumata Diawara, Sheila E. and the E-Train, Yellowjackets, Varijashree, Nubiyan Twist, Nduduzo Makhathini, the CTIJF Jazz Orchestra, Igor Butman and the Moscow Jazz Orchestra, Sipho Mabuse (Hotstix), Scorpion Kings and Camissa Knights.

This year also marked a generational transition. Dr. Iqbal Survé passed the reins of the festival to his son, Rayhaan Survé, signaling both continuity and renewal. The opening ceremonies on Thursday night at Youngblood Gallery set that tone with precision, a spectacular fashion show designed to attract a younger, cross-disciplinary artistic audience.

At the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, rhythm becomes language, history becomes sound and the city’s layered identity, its beauty, its scars, its endurance, finds expression in every note. There is a pulse here that cannot be manufactured. It is lived.

Friday offered a duality, reflection and revelation.

Earlier in the day, a journey to Robben Island, not as tourists, but as witnesses. The narrow cells, the stillness, the echoes of voices that refused to be silenced. It is here that Nelson Mandela and countless others transformed suffering into purpose. Robben Island was never just a prison; it was a crucible of human dignity.

Yet by night, that same spirit found expression in sound.

At Robben Island, the stage came alive with performances from Yussef Dayes and James Mange, rhythms that carried both urgency and reverence.

At the center of it all, Abdullah Ibrahim took the stage Friday night, not in reflection, but in command.

At 91, he does not perform as much as he presides.

A towering figure in South Africa’s cultural and spiritual landscape, Ebrahim carries with him not just decades of mastery but the weight of a nation’s memory. Long tied to the historic Bo-Kaap, where music, faith and resilience have intertwined for generations, his presence signals something deeper than entertainment. It signals continuity.

As Mandela once said: “They have Mozart, Bach and Chopin. We have Abdullah Ebrahim.”

Inside a packed auditorium, that truth was not quoted; it was felt.

The performance opened not with flourish, but with restraint. A two-part piano meditation, deliberate, searching, almost prayerful. Each note carried space around it, as if silence itself were part of the composition. This was not music chasing applause; it was music demanding reflection.

Then came the unexpected: a solo vocal passage.

Unadorned. Chant-like. Almost ancient.

In that moment, Ebrahim was no longer just a musician; he was a vessel. His voice moved through themes of struggle, of apartheid’s long shadow, of spiritual endurance and of a future still being written by the young. It was both deeply personal and unmistakably collective.

Time slowed.

The pauses grew longer. The room quieter.

Silence became sound.

What unfolded was less a concert and more a ceremony, an invocation of ancestors, a meditation on identity, a reminder that history is never truly past in a place like this. It lives in breath, in rhythm, in memory.

And perhaps that is the essence of Cape Town itself.

A city where contradiction and beauty coexist. Where the scars of history are visible, yet so is the determination to transcend them. Where art does not escape reality; it confronts it, reshapes it and, at its best, redeems it.

Moral clarity: Great art does not distract us from truth; it returns us to it.

This is a certainty:

At the 2026 Cape Town International Jazz Festival, from generational leadership to Robben Island’s solemn memory and from Friday night’s commanding performances to Abdullah Ebrahim’s enduring presence, one truth remains: Music, at its highest form, is not heard; it is inherited.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

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