When the globally revered and influential musician Hugh Masekela left South Africa in 1961 in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre, he first escaped to London, where he briefly enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama before Miriam Makeba redirected his path, encouraging him to attend the Manhattan School of Music instead. Upon arrival, he received a scholarship arranged through Makeba and her then-husband, the late artist and activist Harry Belafonte, and went on to co-author the history of African music on some of the world’s biggest stages.
Masekela was one in a long line of South Africans who would make their way to London over the coming decades, effectively creating a route that artists continue to follow to this day.
The Blue Notes
The Blue Notes — made up of five Black musicians, alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, tenor saxophonist Nick Moyake, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, bassist Johnny Dyani, and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, alongside white pianist Chris McGregor — went into voluntary exile in 1964 after two years of incessant police harassment under apartheid South Africa. They arrived in London in April 1965 for a short residency at Ronnie Scott's and decided to stay. Once settled, they infused the British jazz scene with the warmth, the lyricism, the directness and determination of their playing, leaving an impression that continues to echo through later generations of musicians.
Trombonist Annie Whitehead, in Maxine McGregor’s biography of her husband, said the Blue Notes’ influence was tremendous. “[T]hey were out of time, and they were out of place as well. They had an energy they'd been born with and they'd been brought up with and that we haven't got over here,” she said. When the Blue Notes eventually drifted apart, McGregor formed Brotherhood of Breath in 1969, essentially the Blue Notes augmented by British musicians they had drawn into their orbit.
Moholo-Moholo previously said in an interview that the original line-up “carried this loyalty to the music, this honesty, into England and to the West and we just [soaked] it. Because we came from South Africa and South Africa teaches you to play right,” adding that the band arrived with another vibe altogether: “Not better, but another level, another impact, another dimension.”
Bheki Mseleku
Durban-born pianist Bheki Mseleku arrived in London as part of a later wave. Feeling restricted by the apartheid system, the polymath left South Africa in 1977, and briefly settled in Botswana and Stockholm before eventually making a home in London. His debut performance at Ronnie Scott’s in 1987 catapulted him from the margins and paved the way for the release of his star-studded, Mercury Prize-nominated debut album Celebration in 1991. His exile from South Africa was constitutive to his life and music, while he contributed significantly to the development of London’s jazz vocabulary — a city that had, by then, been quietly shaped by South African sound for more than two decades.
His friend Eugene Skeef, a fellow musician and organizer from Durban who also went into exile and settled in London, once wrote of him: “If there were ever musicians who Africanised historically European instruments, Bheki Mseleku and Johnny Dyani led this revolution with the audacity of fearless innovators.”
Shabaka Hutchings
Shabaka Hutchings began visiting South Africa regularly in the early 2010s, and encountered a creative scene that traced a path similar to his own, albeit with a different musical texture and a different relationship to intensity than he had experienced anywhere else. He had long professed a deep love for South African composers ranging from jazz figures like Zim Ngqawana and Mseleku, and played with local musicians including Kyle Shepherd and Moholo-Moholo, with whom he also performed internationally. His connection to what would become Shabaka & The Ancestors came through trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni. The two had performed together over several years, with Hutchings even appearing on Mlangeni’s debut album, Bhekisizwe.
Shabaka and the Ancestors formed in early 2016, leading to their debut album Wisdom of Elders later that year. The band, comprising Ariel Zamonsky on bass, Gontse Makhene on percussion, Tumi Mogorosi on drums and Siyabonga Mthembu on vocals (as well as Nduduzo Makhathini on keys and Mlangeni on trumpet) subsequently toured the world and released their sophomore album We Are Sent Here By History in 2020, shortly before the global pandemic forced lockdowns and led to the cancellation of their international tour. They wound down soon after, owing to Hutchings’ shifting artistic direction.
Important as it was, the Ancestors' moment unfolded during a period of rapid activity in both Johannesburg and London’s scenes. Two years before Shabaka and the Ancestors debuted, vocalist Mthembu's other band, The Brother Moves On, played its first London show at Total Refreshment Centre (TRC) in Hackney — supporting Hutchings’ other unit, The Comet Is Coming — and made such a strong impression that they returned regularly. Mthembu described TRC as “our perfect setting,” likening it to Kitchener's Carvery Bar in Johannesburg, a cultural stronghold that hosted some of the most memorable nights in the city’s music ecosystem.
During the six years it operated, TRC became one of the most generative music spaces in London. As writer and cultural worker Emma Warren documents in her book Make Some Space, it functioned less as a venue than as an incubator — a place where musicians gathered, recorded and co-signed one another across scenes and borders. It was Hutchings’ relationship with the space that helped position it as a connective hub between like-minded scenes around the world.
CHICAGOxLONDON, Makaya McCraven and Angel Bat Dawid
The CHICAGOxLONDON event at TRC in October 2017 brought together London musicians and like-minded artists from Chicago, including Ben LaMar Gay and Jaimie Branch. One set featured Theon Cross, Nubya Garcia and Joe Armon-Jones on stage with Chicago drummer Makaya McCraven. They had met only briefly beforehand and improvised the entire set. McCraven took the recordings home, cut them up and released them as the mixtape Where We Come From.
Among the Chicago artists who passed through TRC was Angel Bat Dawid, who first visited in 2017. On her debut album The Oracle, released on International Anthem in 2019, the track “Cape Town” featured drums by South African musician Asher Gamedze. The collaboration drew Gamedze into the International Anthem orbit and eventually led to his own releases on the label, Dialectic Soul (2020) and Turbulence & Pulse (2023).
In 2023, McCraven visited South Africa for the first time during a world tour supporting his album In These Times, recording sessions at Dyertribe Studios with some of the country’s most adventurous jazz musicians. He returned in 2024 with a more personal agenda: to pay respects to his namesake, Makaya Ntshoko, a friend of McCraven’s father, Stephen McCraven, and a respected Cape Town-born drummer who had played in The Jazz Epistles alongside Abdullah Ibrahim and Masekela. Ntshoko went into exile in 1962, founded Makaya & the Tsotsis, and shared stages with Dexter Gordon and Dyani of the Blue Notes acclaim. During the same trip, McCraven visited Moholo-Moholo and broke bread with the ailing free-jazz legend, who remained in high spirits: out with friends, swapping road stories and breaking into jazz standards between conversations. Moholo-Moholo died in June 2025; Ntshoko had preceded him the previous August.
The South Africa-Chicago Axis
This South Africa–Chicago axis was not new. Decades earlier, multi-instrumentalist Ndikho Xaba — born in Pietermaritzburg in 1934, exiled in 1964, and based for thirty-four years primarily in the United States, Canada and Tanzania, collaborated closely with Phil Cohran, co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, as well as pianist and Pan-Africanist Randy Weston. Xaba’s 1970 recording, Ndikho Xaba and the Natives, originally issued by Trilyte Records and later re-released by Matsuli Music, is suffused with South African idioms and sharpened by a political urgency that wired together US Black Power and the dispatches from the anti-apartheid frontlines.
Two recordings stand as the most direct fruit of these accumulated connections and exchanges. The first isIndaba Is, released on Brownswood in January 2021. It is a compilation of current South African improvised music, curated by Mthembu and pianist Thandi Ntuli, who acted as musical directors on the project. Recorded right after the lockdown restrictions were relaxed in 2020, the compilation captured the eclectic musical styles that developed in South Africa due to migration across the country, as well as the frantic energy of musicians that had spent a few months without gigging. The compilation placed Johannesburg, mainly — and South Africa, largely — in that international conversation. The eight tracks by Bokani Dyer, The Brother Moves On, Lwanda Gogwana, The Wretched, Sibusile Xaba, The Ancestors, Ntuli herself, Kinsmen and iPhupho L'ka Biko marked the spirit of that moment.
The second is On Our Own Clock, a co-release between South African label Mushroom Hour Half Hour and Total Refreshment Centre Recordings, released in September 2021. Pre-pandemic, the plan had been for musicians from South Africa and Senegal to travel to London's Total Refreshment Centre to make an album with musical kindred spirits in the UK. When Covid shut that down, groups of musicians instead met for a few sessions of intense recording in their home cities — Johannesburg, Dakar, London — then sent the music to their collaborators across the oceans, later returning to the studio to respond to what they'd been sent. The album features players including Gamedze, Theon Cross, Alabaster DePlume, Siya Makuzeni, and kora player Tarang Cissoko, digging into layers of South African jazz, traditional Senegalese instrumental music, and London's diaspora-informed musicality.
The TRC connection runs through it directly: the same room that hosted CHICAGOxLONDON, that welcomed The Brother Moves On on their first London night, now co-releasing an album that could only exist because of the relationships that room had made possible.
Kokoroko are in South Africa as of writing, with a series of performances lined up across South Africa and Eswatini, where they shall appear at the MTN Bushfire festival. This happens barely two months after both the Yussef Dayes Experience returned to the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, performing on the same night as Ezra Collective a mere two hours out of town at the Montreux Jazz Festival Franschhoek in Franschhoek.
What Hugh Masekela carried out of South Africa in 1961 — through London, across the Atlantic, into exile — is now flowing back, in the luggage, the instruments and the hearts of musicians who were not yet born when he left.
