EVENTS

In the last nine years the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, known as ‘Africa’s Grandest Gathering’, has grown exponentially. Its attendance figures have risen from 14 000 at the first festival to well over 32 000 at the last. Melodytrip has ranked it as the fourth best festival in the world, beating international greats such as Switzerland's Montreaux Festival and the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland, making it truly worthy of its title as ‘Africa’s Grandest Gathering’.

The fest takes to the Convention Centre for the sixth consecutive year and over 40 artists came together to thrill music lovers of all ages for just one weekend. Apart from astounding performances the festival also offered several free music and skills workshops run by industry professionals. The aim of these workshops was to develop the local community through the advancement of attendees’ practical skills in both music and business, equipping them to succeed in the competitive music industry.

The Jazz Fest is one of the most diverse in South Africa with approximately 50% of attendees coming from outside of South Africa This somewhat surprising result was uncovered in 2006 by The Centre for Tourism Research in Africa which found that at least 35.3% of festival-goers came from other African countries while just fewer than 16% were from elsewhere in the world, proving the Jazz Festival’s world class pedigree.

This year, which marked the Festival’s 10th anniversary of the festival, saw little departure from the traditional programming schedule. While the majority of the festival acts remained strictly jazz, a selection of related genres were added to give accent to the line-up. Amongst others Afro-pop, soul, funk and blues acts gave zest to the programme. Their line-up had an approximate 50-50 split between local and foreign acts to ensure that festival-goers would experience the best of both homegrown and internationally-bred talent. A plethora of major international acts took to the Convention Centre stage including John Coltrane’s protégé Dave Liebman, Kyle Eastwood, Clint Eastwood’s son, and Mile Davis’ drummer, Al Foster. South Africans weren’t to be outdone and majors names such as Napalma, 340ml, Freshlyground and Rus Nerwich showed that certainly got talent too