What Should A Jazz Festival Feel Like?

When the Montreux Jazz Festival Franschhoek unveiled its first round of acts about two months ago, the response in the comments section of its official Instagram page was swift and unusually pointed. A year after the debut edition of the globally recognised festival was announced, expectations had clearly solidified around what its South African iteration might represent, and what calibre of acts to expect. For many, the line-up did not meet that projection. Salif Keita was among the headline names, but his inclusion did little to shift a broader sense of underwhelm among jazz audiences who had, only months earlier, encountered Meshell Ndegeocello, Lakecia Benjamin, Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Siya Makuzeni Big Band, and Esperanza Spalding, among others, during the Joy of Jazz festival in September 2025.

It had set a recent benchmark for ambitious, thoughtfully curated programming that demonstrates range, curiosity, an attentive ear to the ground, and a clear curatorial thesis. Against that backdrop, the Franschhoek line-up appeared more tentative, even unmoored from a discernible base — if it had one at all — raising questions about how international festival brands translate into local contexts, and what audiences come to expect from them.

The visceral reactions spoke to that disjuncture. For many, the issue wasn’t simply who was booked, but what the line-up signaled. “It’s giving Untitled Basement,” one user wrote, invoking the Johannesburg venue as shorthand for a scene audiences can access year-round. Another asked, pointedly, “So, uhm, women in jazz just don’t exist?” These responses coalesced around a broader frustration: a mismatch between institutional promise, recent precedent, and audience expectation.

In their defense, the Montreux Jazz Festival Franschhoek emphasised that foregrounding artists of African origin was “both intentional and central” to its mission. A month later, the second phase of the line-up was unveiled, and the melodrama that had trailed the first announcement had all but dissipated.

The additions were decisive. Robert Glasper, Ezra Collective, Róisín Murphy, Thandiswa Mazwai — now, the program carried a density that felt commensurate with the festival’s global branding. It was, at least on paper, more jazz than the Franschhoek Valley — nestled in the winelands of Cape Town — could reasonably contain.

From then on, the textures widened. Want a big band? Kesivan Naidoo's AmaBig Band Experience promises exactly that. Looking for intergenerational alchemy? Brother Kujenga — a portmanteau project comprising members of The Brother Moves On (TBMO) and Kujenga set to explore the ridges, the ruptures, and the regenerative currents that continue to shape Black music — has got you covered. Elsewhere, Bokani Dyer and Gareth Lockrane will pay tribute to the late, great, and deeply prolific Bheki Mseleku, whose spiritually anchored practice remains a touchstone in the global canon of creative improvised music.

Kesivan Naidoo is at his home in Switzerland when OkayAfrica speaks to him. A virtuoso with a restless practice, he began playing professionally at 14 and has since worked with a formidable lineage: from Mseleku himself to one of his earliest mentors, Lulu Gontsa, to Hugh Masekela and even Miriam Makeba.

In addition to presenting his own work —“making strides with the music […] busy arranging stuff for a 26-piece orchestra,” as he puts it — he will also join Dyer and Lockrane for the Mseleku tribute concert. “[Mseleku] always used to tell me that the dance element in our music is very important. What makes his music magical is that he maintained that element of dance in his storytelling. My mission is to carry that on,” he says.

“We’re moving, and I just want to be able to blend these influences together, and show Cape Town and the world how we approach jazz.”

He’ll be joined by a horn section comprising Swiss and South African musicians, a configuration that grew out of a pitch to festival organisers during his South African tour last year — one that ultimately secured him an early booking. Vocal duties will be handled by BONJ, Boohle, and Moonchild Sanelly, artists with the tonal and stylistic range to meet the demands of a large-scale jazz orchestra setting.

“The context usually tells you where the direction will go,” he explains. “All I’m doing is reimagining the tracks in a jazz orchestra setting. That has its own limitations, and the tracks I’m arranging have theirs. I try my best to stretch those limitations as much as I can, but the different genres still need to find a way to work together.”

It’s not an especially mystified process, he adds. “Jazz is strongly rooted in South African music, so it’s not difficult to put jazz into our popular music, and vice versa.”

By staging this project, Naidoo situates himself within a lineage of composer-arrangers who continue to interrogate and extend a nearly century-old tradition. Big band, he notes, once occupied the centre of popular music in the early 20th century — driven by figures like Count Basie and Duke Ellington — before jazz migrated into more formal, concert-hall contexts.

Naidoo invokes the word ngoma to describe what he is attempting: a synthesis of instrumental performance, voice, and dance. “Somewhere along the line, the dance element fell away from jazz globally,” he says. “But we kept that in South Africa. So I’ve decided to hold onto that, to keep a strong sense of movement in the music I’m presenting.”

BONJ says, "It's really nice to have an artist like him, who was part of the jazz community in Cape Town, doing a project like this, and how big it is, and the type of musicians he's called on. I've never performed with a big band, so this is scary for me. I'm thrilled! I think of each of us: Boohle, myself, Moonchild Sanelly, and how we're different artists. I am just grateful that my name gets to be there. Kesivan's been so generous to say, ‘This is not my performance. You, the featured artists, it's your thing. I want you there because I'm inspired by the work that you do.’"

On the wall behind Femi Koleoso’s desk sits a board crowded with collaged images and flags from across the world, a quiet map of the different nations that move in and out of the space he’s in. When OkayAfrica reaches him, he’s in the middle of one of his regular visits to youth centres in London, work he returns to whenever he’s not touring, rehearsing, or recording with Ezra Collective.

“I still go into schools and spend time with young people. That stuff will last longer than performing and travelling the world, you know?!” he says. 

The New Wave: Ezra Collective and Brother Kujenga

It’s a few days out from their South African debut, and his excitement is peppered by a clear sense of perspective. “I got the opportunity to play my drums in South Africa because our music is popping, and Ezra Collective is in a moment of popularity, but that might not last forever. Whereas if you find a home in helping the next generation, there will always be a next generation.”

A decade on from their breakout project, Year 7, which helped usher in a new wave of Black British improvised music shaped in part by the legacy of Fela Kuti, and more than a decade since their founding in 2012 — the year of the London 2012 Olympics — the band’s trajectory remains tethered to a specific social and political context. The 2011 London riots had exposed once again the fault lines of Black British life in a society structured by the dehumanization and exclusion of its minority populations. 

That context continues to shape the group’s ethos: a community-first practice rooted in collective care. In the behind-the-scenes film documenting the recording of their 2024 album Dance, No One’s Watching, family members sit in on sessions, affirming that the centrality or intimate support systems — in addition to public acclaim — in sustaining the collective’s artistry. The feeling that your people see you, hold you, and, in some cases, approve of your work carries a weight that no streaming metric — four million monthly listeners on Spotify, at the time of writing — can replicate.

“It will bring me deep joy to look at the audience and not recognise anyone,” Koleoso says, thinking ahead to the show. “Because then it’s all people I’ve never met before, and I can channel their excitement, their joy at seeing Ezra Collective, into how I’m feeling.”

The seeds for Brother Kujenga had already been sown by the time the concept was pitched to festival organisers. The Brother Moves On’s storied presence on the local live circuit had long inspired Kujenga, who were actively seeking out collectives that not only sounded aligned but shared a similar ethos. Admiration soon turned into proximity, culminating in a shared bill in Cape Town about two years ago. The idea evolved further in Johannesburg, where TBMO invited Kujenga to join them on stage to celebrate a decade of their album A New Myth.

Since then, Kujenga have come into their own, emerging as figureheads among a new wave of bands. “Back then, they weren’t too sure of themselves; they were still finding their feet,” says Siya Mthembu. “Now, they’re an institution. It’s equals going in; it’s no longer a young band stepping in with their heroes. It’s full-on heroes making the space happen.”

Kujenga’s Owethu Ndwandwe frames it with a mix of reverence and clarity: “There’ll always be that younger brother kind of respect and admiration. But I understand how we work now, it is a thing of equals, and I’m excited for that.”

Both bands had initially pitched independently to be part of the festival line-up, before arriving at a shared proposition. “At some point we realised it was either all or nothing,” Mthembu recalls. “So we put it forward: what about Brother Kujenga, would that shift things?” A nerve-wracking 48 hours later, the idea was approved.

Even with that clarity, Mthembu is wary of over-determining the moment. “I’m trying not to overthink it. On the day, what does it look like? What does it feel like?” he says. There are practical tensions to navigate: Kujenga may want him on certain songs and not others; there’s the sheer density of two bands sharing a stage; and the inevitable question of repertoire: what makes the cut, and what doesn’t. Beneath the excitement sits a productive nervousness, the adrenaline rush of risk, and the possibility of odd futures coalescing to activate the environment.