The people keeping South Africa’s live music scene alive are not the big corporate promoters. They are independent organizers, many of them Black-owned and community-rooted, building festivals one season at a time while larger events fold around them.
As major festivals like Rocking The Daisies have ceased operations and other established events have failed to return, a new generation of smaller festivals is expanding its reach and deepening its connection to audiences. Umanyano Lwe Jazz, Kids Love Jazz, and Your Weekly Touch Up are not filling a gap so much as redefining what a festival can be and who it serves.
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Umanyano Lwe Jazz (ULJ) is perhaps the clearest example of this shift. Founded in 2021, the festival turns five this year and has become a fixture in South Africa’s jazz calendar. Founder Zukiswa White describes the work as requiring both precision and improvisation. “We’re proud that we still get to do the thing we set out to,” she told OkayAfrica. “Five years later, we have affirmed for ourselves, and perhaps even others, that ideas can live. That Black cultural production deserves patient and long-term investment as public cultural infrastructure. That cultural work can do more than entertain: it can archive memory, inspire imagination and expand public participation through culture.”
This year’s edition is scheduled for December at Casalinga in Muldersdrift, northwest of Johannesburg. The lineup includes Theo Parrish, Aja Monet, Tlokwe Sehume, Zoë Modiga, Buhlebendalo, and Ndabo Zulu. The expanded venue reflects genuine growth. White is clear-eyed about what that growth demands. “Getting to the fifth-year milestone has meant that seeing ULJ through its first decade feels a lot less far-fetched. But I suppose that’s just the math,” she said.
The human cost is real. White and co-producer Thato Thinyane recently moved to full-time work on the festival for the first time, a decision driven by the scale of growth outlined in the organization’s five-year plan. Preparation for this year’s event began in February. “As we approach the 100-day countdown in a few days, we wish we had another six-month run because time simply flew,” White said. Running a world-class boutique festival on community terms, it turns out, is a full-time job.
Meanwhile, Kids Love Jazz has been quietly building something remarkable of its own. Last year the initiative toured 13 cities across Southern Africa, with six locations selling out. More than 10,000 music lovers attended across 28 live acts and DJs. Vuyo McGlad, who leads the initiative, stressed that the expansion happened without sponsorship funding. The team partnered with four communities and reached three schools. “It’s been amazing. We learned so many things across all the cities,” McGlad said. The decision to engage young audiences with jazz, and to do it at grassroots scale, speaks directly to the long-term health of the country’s live music culture.
Your Weekly Touch Up, run by artist agency NORMVL, has taken a different path to the same destination. A weekly event series for three years, it recently announced its inaugural Touch Up Fest for late July. Over 156 weeks, the series has hosted more than 300 acts. That track record has become its most persuasive asset. Lwandile Nkanyuza of NORMVL explained the shift in thinking: “What we gained was obviously what we’re gaining every week, building the community, the creative things we wish existed, building infrastructure for artists like us. It became less about earning weekly, which is where we started.”
The festival, Nkanyuza said, was the obvious next step. “Every now and then you need something that will make you squirm, something that’s a bit of a challenge. So the festival was a no-brainer as far as the next logical step: accommodating a larger audience, maybe going bigger on our curation, from three per night to something a little bit bigger.” Sponsors, once hesitant, are now paying attention. “And now if we say, hey, we’re doing a festival, and we’re ticketing it, they’re like, okay, you guys haven’t let us down for 156 weeks as far as the curation goes. I think we can give you money for a festival.”
What connects these three ventures is a shared conviction that cultural infrastructure is a public good, not just a commercial product. White put it plainly when describing the emotional weight of the work: “It takes a whole lot of grit, a delicate dance of trusting our gut and the proverbial process, an enormous amount of consistently believing in that which we do not yet see (faith!), and tons of tears every other second week or so.”
The question South Africa’s cultural sector now faces is whether this model, patient, community-funded, and built on long-term trust rather than short-term returns, can survive long enough to become the norm rather than the exception.