Description
Some music asks you to admire it. This asks you to move.
Future Ghoema is Blake Hellaby’s latest project. Original South African songs built on the ghoema pulse, sung by Hlelo Zungu, with three voices behind him and a young Cape Town rhythm section under them. Africa, jazz, Cape Town and groove, in the same set of songs.
The music has been played in public once. People left that room annoyed that they could not take it home with them, and he is still getting messages asking where to hear it. It is still not out. On Sunday 22 November it gets played the way it was meant to be played, in a club, for a crowd.
Big melodies. Harmony that does the work without showing off. The conviction underneath all of it is simple: music is not there to be clever or fast, it is there to move you, to say something, or to make you dance. That is why these songs land on a jazz crowd and on people who have never bought a jazz ticket in their lives.
The subjects are not light. Inherited hardship, freedom as unfinished business, unity, mothers, and the charm of the politician who wants your vote. They are carried with joy rather than anger, which is the harder way to do it and the way that lands. This is music for the underdogs and the outcasts.
Hlelo Zungu fronts the band, with Kgoerano Lebambo, Nathan Tromp and Jaiden-Caide Tobin on backing vocals, Jaden Philander on guitar, Blake Hellaby on piano, Adam Fredericks on bass and Jeane Louw on drums. The rhythm section is Cape Town, which matters when the music is built on a Cape Town pulse. They are young, they are good, and they are raring to play it. Call and response, four part vocal writing, and a band that moves from a meditative cyclic groove to a protest chant in 6/8 without changing gear.
Ghoema is the pulse. It came out of this city, but once you know it you start hearing it everywhere, in music from all over the world, in genres that have never heard the word. It is the rhythm that does not negotiate. Wherever you are from and whatever you listen to, when the ghoema starts your foot is already tapping. These songs go looking for it across jazz, Cape sounds, Xhosa and Zulu rhythm, the klopse and the club, and build on what they find.
Blake Hellaby has spent the year filling this room with other people’s music. This one is his.
Two sets. Songs you cannot hear anywhere else yet.
Sunday 22 November 2026
Cape Town Jazz Club, Bokeh, 11 Warwick Street, Claremont
19:00 Doors
20:00 First set
21:15 Second set
22:00 Finish
General admission: R250
Students: R150, limited to 30, student card required at the door
Early bird: R150, first 10 tickets only
