Live Music in Johannesburg

Few cities have shaped a continent's popular music as decisively as Johannesburg. Its townships, particularly Soweto and Sophiatown, incubated successive generations of genre-defining sounds: marabi fused jazz with African tradition in Sophiatown shebeens by the late 1920s, kwela brought penny-whistle energy to township streets in the 1950s, mbaqanga blended American R&B with Zulu music from the 1960s onward, and kwaito defined the post-apartheid generation from the late 1980s. Gallo Records, founded here in 1926, documented much of that history, recording Solomon Linda's "Mbube" at its studios in 1939. Today the city's live circuit runs from The Orbit's premier jazz programming in Braamfontein to Niki's Oasis in Soweto, where township jazz and mbaqanga remain fixtures, to The Linder Auditorium, home of the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra. The infrastructure for serious listening, across every genre, is firmly in place.