Cape Jazz

Cape jazz is the jazz tradition of Cape Town, South Africa, formed from the city's marabi party music, kwela, Cape Malay song, church hymns and American jazz records. Its hallmark is the ghoema beat, the loping shuffle of the Cape carnival, under melodies of hymn-like simplicity played with buoyant, celebratory lift. Pianist *Abdullah Ibrahim*, born Dollar Brand, is its central figure; the exile generation of *The Blue Notes*, *Johnny Dyani* and *Louis Moholo* carried the Cape Town vocabulary into European free jazz after leaving apartheid South Africa in the 1960s, giving the style an unusually wide span between folk dance music and the avant-garde.