Soweto Rock Is Still Alive, And It’s Getting Louder

There are moments when a scene speaks for itself, and all you can really do is listen closely. Right now, something important is happening in Soweto. At a time when the township has just lost one of its rock standard-bearers, Thabo “Rock Ruler” Masina of Shameless, the biggest rock gathering Soweto has seen in years is coming to life, not through corporate intervention or heritage branding, but through artists doing what they’ve always done, organising themselves.

Soweto Rock Festival, taking place on 16 June 2026, with monthly activation event leading up to the finale. The first of these activations is happening 31 January 2026. An initiative led by Nathi “Automatic” from the Soweto rock band Reburth, in collaboration with Sawubona Music Jam and it feels both like an event announcement and a cultural response.

The passing of Rock Ruler landed heavily across the scene. Shameless weren’t just a band, they were proof that rock could be township-rooted, loud, political, spiritual, and unapologetically local. Their Nkabi Rock sound reminded us that distortion and rebellion were never foreign to Black spaces, they were simply under-archived.

So when a major Soweto rock festival emerges now, it doesn’t feel opportunistic. It feels necessary. Not as a tribute in name, but as a continuation in practice, living that rock kinda life... whatever that means. Soweto Rock didn’t begin on festival stages, It started in backyards, four-room houses, borrowed PAs, blown speakers, and neighbours who tolerated the noise because the energy felt bigger than inconvenience.

There were no proper venues. No infrastructure to speak of. Just young people stubborn enough to believe that rock belonged to them too. What Soweto Rock Festival is doing is stitching that lineage together, from backyard to stage, without pretending the journey was clean or easy. No nostalgia, just wits and guts,  documentation in real time.

A Scene That Refused to Disappear

The line-up reads like a map of persistence:

Reburth.
Shameless.
Twenty One Children.
The Black Cat Bones.
Drain Brain Experience.
Aura Electric.
Punk Crusaders.
And many more.

Some are established. Some are still emerging. Some may never be “commercial” in the traditional sense. That’s not the point. Scenes survive because they allow room for difference, friction, experimentation, and sometimes failure. What matters is continuity.And continuity is exactly what this festival asserts

Rock in South Africa has often been framed as something imported, marginal, or nostalgic, especially when it emerges from Black townships. Soweto Rock Festival pushes back against that quietly, with a loud genre. Remember kleva,

• Rock has always been here
  
  

• Township youth have always reinterpreted it
  
  

• Infrastructure doesn’t precede culture, culture forces infrastructure to follow
  
  

Most importantly, this shows what happens when artists organise themselves instead of waiting to be validated.

An Archive Note

Brown Band Archive exists to pay attention to moments like this, moments where scenes move forward despite loss, despite limited resources, despite historical erasure. The death of Thabo Rock Ruler is a wound. The rise of Soweto Rock Festival is not a replacement, but it is a response, one rooted in sound, community, and collective memory. From backyard noise to festival stages, Soweto rock is still roaring. And this feels like the first chapter of something that will matter for a long time.

Congratulations to Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness (BCUC) for being named the winner of the WOMEX 23 Artist Award! The WOMEX Award was introduced in 1999, and honours exceptional achievements in global music on the international level – musical excellence, social importance, commercial success, political impact, lifetime achievement.

In its award citation, WOMEX said: “With their all-embracing musical philosophy, BCUC are inherently political. Their songs are shot through with political messages and lessons. They hold high their values and social responsibilities, while being unafraid to criticise the wrongs around them. Like their music, their political perspective is uniquely South African while sharing a solidarity that encompasses the African continent and world as a whole. Even their organisation is utopian – the seven-piece collective is leaderless, each member contributing equally to the passion of the music.”

Are you a songwriter looking for a place to make some music.. showcase your beautiful songs. Do Join for a monthly showcase called the Songwriters Soapbox, hosted at Braamfontein's Mangrove. There is an open mic session that is free to sign up to for performers. 

https://www.webtickets.co.za/event.aspx?itemid=1516001726

Leegan Starchild had a performance billed at Edikeni in the Month of May. I had never been to the place, but I honoured an invite by Bassist and Producer Vuyo Manyike who was the bassist for the evening..

Firstly I was not expecting the location... surrounded by corporate skyscrapers, i feel like a jack sorrounded by beanstalks, I muse on the possibility of giants and an immense wealth hovering above us, heavily guarded and accessed through only climbing corporate ladders. This is the heart of Africa's richest area, eSandton, The only reason i'd drink in sandton is if im working and the drinks are free. but im here spending this money, in search of a feeling. I sigh in relief that the space is not somewhere upthere in a skyscraper, sure the views are great... but i like my feet on the ground. There is music already happening. 

the space seems intimate even from the outside.  Sparsely lit, there is only one person outside, having a smoke. quick greetings but warm, the brother offers to buy me some wine, but im in a no alcohol from strangers phase. I choose caffeine. the space doesnt feel intimidated  noticing by the giants around it... perhaps because it represents home, a place and structure which trumps and towers any other place. 

The place /space im within is called eDikeni, Inspired by its namesake, the Eastern Cape town of Alice, eDikeni is a uniquely Ubuntu-centric kitchen-bar-lounge that has been supporting live music in Johannesburg... the music is mostly Jazz, from really technically brilliant South African Jazz Musicians. This Night was not going to be different. and I was pleasantly surprised by all the vocal work by drummer Leagan and the featured artists, Just Hlo and Thapelo Lekoane. 

After years as a dependable instrumentalist working with some of the biggest names in the country Leagan Starchild steps out on his own and released an EP under Universal Music.  

He released an eight track project boasting influences from the great orchestra of nature and its sounds that reflect a global kind offering that is unmistakely Soul, perhaps jazz. Leagan brings his unique flavour of musicality and flair to the music industry.

The project has been in the making for five years,  is also a work of collaboration, The quality of the workmanship and finesse is testament to the time invested in it. Each song has been painstakingly crafted and masterfully produced, with vocals by Just Hlo, Thapelo Lekoane, Smangaliso Asi and fire instrumentalists.

“When listening to this EP, I pray that this music transcends us to a place where we see no differences in one another.” - he says of his offering. 

Leagan worked with Llewelyn George as a co-writer of a few songs and he credits him as one of the main people to walk him through the recording.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time but I didn’t know my truth. I needed my music to help people grow and contribute positively to society. There is a lot happening in life, and we need to cherish love, patience and care for others,” he explains.

Natural elements permeate the record, the sounds of the waves of the sea, the wind in the trees, birds squawking and people chattering in the distance. His songs are a conduit that connects music lovers with the orchestra of nature and its beauty, undisturbed in its glory.

My wish is to see what music music our incredibly talented session musicians would create if they had the opportunity. If This album has anything to say is that, we have musicians of the highest world calibre working in South Africa, This is something to be proud of.

Group Theory: Black Music is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi. Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis Moholo-Moholo, Makaya Ntshoko and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a flexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African inflection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension, taking the drummer’s chair in both Shabaka Hutchings’ Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched.

As Mogorosi’s first project as leader since 2014, Group Theory: Black Music marks a return to the drummer’s musical roots. The sound is anchored in the transnational tradition of Great Black Music, with the core of the group comprising a quintet of newcomers Tumi Pheko (trumpet) and Dalisu Ndlazi (bass) alongside the experienced guitarist Reza Khota, with Mogorosi himself and altoist Mthunzi Mvubu, another Ancestors member, representing the current generation of South Africa’s creative music torchbearers. Motivated by Mogorosi’s driving dynamism, the group create deep-hued modal grooves that burn with a contemporary urgency, while established pianist Andile Yenana brings an elder voice to three of the tracks. Featured vocalists Gabi Motuba (Project ELO, The Wretched) and Siyabonga Mthembu (The Brother Moves On) take differing approaches to the spiritual standard ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’, while poet Lesego Rampolokeng pours out lyrical fire on ‘Where Are The Keys?’, creating a bridge back to the Black Consciousness movement and figures such as Lefifi Tladi and Wally Mongane Serote.

But where Group Theory: Black Music moves an established format dramatically forward is in the addition of a ten-person choir. Conducted by Themba Maseko, their massed voices soar powerfully above every track as a collective instrument of human breath and body, and enter the album into the small but significant number of radical recordings to have used the voice in this way, such as Max Roach’s "It’s Time", Andrew Hill’s "Lift Every Voice", Billy Harper’s "Capra Black", and Donald Byrd’s "I’m Trying To Get Home". At the same time, the presence of this wall of voices brings an inextricable connection to the venerable tradition of South African choral music, and to the importance that the Black choir has had for South Africa’s religious, political and social cultures, including the culture of South African creative music itself. From the Manhattan Brothers and the choral compositions of Todd Matshikiza to figures such as Johnny Dyani and Victor Ndlazilwane, the collective power of voice has been one of the cornerstones of improvised creative music in the country.

‘I started out in a choir’, says Tumi, as he reflects on the significance of Black voices in concert. ‘There’s this idea of mass, of a group of people gathering, which has a political implication. And the operatic voice has both a presence, and a capacity to scream, a capacity for affect. The instrumental group can sustain the intensity of that affect, and the chorus can go beyond improvisation, toward communal melodies that everyone can be a part of.’

This potential for communality in the music swings close to Group Theory’s conceptual centres of gravity. The title refers to the mathematical theory of the same name, the essentials of which concern the axioms that make a simple set of items into a true mathematical group – associativity, closure and an identity element. These mathematical ideas offered Mogorosi a metaphorical platform for thinking about the way that individual players in a musical unit are also bound together at the moment of creation, in a unity that begins to challenge the individual and complicates conventional ideas of leadership and hierarchy. In bringing experienced musicians such as Yenana and Khota into the orbit of younger players, Mogorosi also wants to re-orientate the idea of teacher-student relations toward a more open vision of intergenerational knowledge sharing. ‘We are looking for questions, not answers’, he says.

Mogorosi’s overarching vision on Group Theory: Black Music is encapsulated by the touchstone quotation from Amiri Baraka – ‘New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.’ For Mogorosi, these words speak to an essential feature and function of Black creative and improvised art – the search for the point where individual boundaries collapse into the universal ongoing flow of the music, at the moment of group creation. This flow is not local, it is transglobal, and it joins the music of the diaspora with Africa, allowing connections and relations to range across historic and contemporary spaces of struggle, self-determination and transformation. Such effects are also transtemporal, dropping deep down into the wells of history to bring forth sounds from the present and future, and allowing the music to burrow back into the past. As Baraka’s words imply, the individual cannot escape this search unchanged, and the creative musician does not desire to: in the time of its creation, New Black Music intends to flow into and through the performers from sources beyond them. The writer of a song is never the only author; the soloist always speaks for others; the leaders are never one but a host of many. Previous times and places, previous performances and compositions, previous souls and struggles are always made manifest in the music; the search for the inner self is also a quest to dissolve the individual into the living soundways of those who came before and those who will come after. ‘The album is under my name,’ says Tumi, ‘but the ideas aim at a decentring of the individual composer or author, and a a decentring of the idea of the “leader” – it tries to encapsulate the idea of a group effect, to go beyond the point of origin, and it refuses geo-specific narratives.’

South African creative and improvised music, with its nomadic history of journeys between the US, Europe and South African, has always been exemplary of these ongoing processes, and it is fitting that Group Theory: Black Music should itself be the result of an international collaboration. Starting from a shared vision and understanding of the parallels between the music being made in their respective countries, South African label Mushroom Hour Half Hour and London based label New Soil were able to pool their resources to support Tumi’s large-scale creative vision for this project and enable it to find the global audience it seeks and deserves.  

credits

releases July 8, 2022

Andile Yenana – piano [tracks 4,5,9 & 11]

Dalisu Ndlazi – upright bass

Gabi Motuba - vocals [track 10]

Lesego Rampolokeng – vocals [track 11]

Mthunzi Mvubu – alto saxophone

Reza Khota – electric guitar

Siya Mthembu - vocals [track 5]

Tumi Mogorosi - drums

Tumi Pheko – trumpet

Voices

Brenda Thulo

Cecilia Phetoe

Charles Shikwambana

Fortunate Jwara

Noluthando Biyana

Sibongile Mollo

Steve Mthombeni

Tebogo Magwe

Themba Maseko - conductor

Thulisile Ntetha

All songs composed and arranged by Tumi Mogorosi, except tracks 5 & 10 (traditional song arranged by Tumi Mogorosi) and track 11 (musical work composed by Tumi Mogorosi & literary work authored by Lesego Rampolokeng)

Recorded by Peter Auret & Oyama Songo at the Downtown Music Hub, Johannesburg on 6 & 7 December 2021

Edited & Mixed by Dion Monti

Mastered by Norman Nitzsche at Calyx Mastering

Produced by Andile Yenana & Tumi Mogorosi

A&R by Andrew Curnow & Federico Bolza

Executive Produced by Andrew Curnow, Federico Bolza & Nhlanhla Masondo

Cover Photograph by Andrew Tshabangu

HONOUR THE FATHERS

Father’s Day Music Concert

Sunday 19 June 2022

NIROX Sculpture Park

Join us in the idyllic setting of NIROX Sculpture Park on Sunday 19 June as we celebrate Father’s Day with a musical programme featuring some of South Africa’s finest acoustic musicians and poets.

The concert will be graced with the magnetic musical presence of one of the most iconic South African musicians of our time, Vusi Mahlasela. From activist to ambassador, Vusi Mahlasela has performed songs and poems around the world for the better part of three decades, performing at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration and collaborating with international artists including Paul Simon, Dave Matthews and Sting.

As a venerated Elder of the local musical landscape, Vusi Mahlasela will share the stage with the prodigious talents of

Bongeziwe Mabandla

Isandi Nawe

Matthew Dickinson

Tubatsi Moloi

Lerato Lichaba

The programme will be opened by the ethereal musical poetry of Modise Sekgothe.

HONOUR THE FATHERS will be presented amidst the NIROX Winter Sculpture Exhibition: Good Neighbours, featuring 35 original sculptures installed throughout the beautiful gardens.

Concert cuisine courtesy of the Epicurean Emporium - a careful selection of the best food stalls, emphasizing healthy locally-sourced produce, including fresh oysters and bubbles.

‘And then there was Fire…’ restaurant is open to concert-goers for lunch. Booking is essential. (www.andthentherewasfire.com)

Bernie’s Bar will ensure elegant hydration throughout.

Gates open at 10h00 on Sunday 19 June 2022.

Tickets:

R400 Early-Bird

R500 General admission

Children under 10 enter free of charge.

CALEO Wealth Management is the anchor sponsor to NIROX Foundation’s ongoing concert programme.

Children are welcome under parental care to ensure no disruption for other patrons during the performance.

GPS: S25°59' 09.56'' E27°46' 59.17"

No food, drinks, pets, gazebos or sporting equipment may be brought into the park.

Entry and use of the facilities is entirely at the visitor's own risk. NIROX has no responsibility for injury or loss of any kind, howsoever arising.

Due to COVID legislation and our desire to be intimate with nature, the concert is strictly limited to 800 guests, including children. For this reason we are unfortunately unable to accommodate a reduced children’s ticket price.

All COVID precautionary measures will be taken. No entry without a mask, social distancing to be observed.

NIROX is a cashless venue. All transactions via credit card machines, Zapper and Snapscan.

Disclaimers:

Entry to the park is at your own risk. NIROX is not responsible for any loss, injury or damage.

Children are their parents’ responsibility. They must be under adult supervision at all times and respect the performance and experience of other patrons of the concert.

Sculptures are not to be handled or played upon.

The landscape is precious. Please treat it so.

No refunds - NIROX is an outdoor venue, subject to the weather. While every care is taken to mitigate inclement weather, we cannot give refunds for weather interruption.

Entry to the park constitutes agreement that images of visitors may be captured and published on social and other media by other visitors and by Nirox and its partners for promotional and communication purposes.

The event will comply with current Covid legislation and best practice. If these change Nirox is not responsible for any curtailment or cancellation of this event.

Mandla Mlangeni, Maleh, BLK JKS and The Brother Moves On to headline Fête de la Musique

Spring in Johannesburg is set to be filled with sounds created by a diverse range of amazing artists at one of the city’s most eagerly anticipated annual events.

The headline acts for this year’s Fête de la Musique Joburg have been announced: Award winning jazz trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni; afrocentric ancient futurists The Brother Moves On; pioneering art rockers Blk Jks and SAMA awarded songstress Maleh will be on stage at four locations as part of this popular festival on the 18th of September 2021.

Joining the headliners at the four different stages in Johannesburg and Soweto are the artists selected during the call out for musicians and DJ to be part of the Fête de la Musique Joburg:  Ms Party, Mx Blouse, Melo B Jones, Ikati Esengxoweni, LaliBoi, Manu Grace,  Basadi ba Mintsu, Bobo Jay Nzima, AN.D, DJ Binz, Shotgun Tori and the Hound, Sibusiso Mashiloane, Simba Ci, Spokenpriestess, Sun Xa Experiment and Tshepang Ramoba.

Selen Daver, the Cultural Attaché for the French Embassy of South Africa, said, “Over the last decade, Fête de la Musique has grown to be one of the most anticipated experiences amongst avid festival-goers in Johannesburg. After the postponement of last year’s event, we are happy to be back again, this time in four different locations, with limited capacity to ensure everyone’s safety. Our goal is to make live music accessible for all while giving young musicians a space to reach a broad audience.”

The Fête de la Musique (or World Music Day) is a popular and free music festival that has been taking place each year in France, internationally and was established in South Africa in 2010. In Johannesburg, it has become a great platform for both renowned and upcoming talents to make themselves known. Many local and international artists have taken part in the event throughout the years and contributed to its success, including Samthing Soweto, Msaki, Nakhane, Zoe Modiga, Blk Jks, Urban Village, BCUC, Berita, Baenz Oester and the Rainmakers and Bombshelter Beast.

The Fête de la Musique Joburg is brought to you by the French Institute of South Africa and the Alliance Française of Johannesburg, in partnership with Bassline Live and Newtown Junction. It is made possible by the continuous support of TOTAL South Africa to the arts.

Simz Kulla is a Producer/Vocalist; Yamaha Endorsee; Composer & Song Writer. His instruments are primarily keyboards and guitars.

Better known for his work with The Muffinz, Simz is a well rounded creative with strengths in music production, specifically vocal production. His music career was born in 2008 when he joined the UJ Choir. This is where he met the other members of The Muffinz, where they released albums and singles of critical acclaim during the period 2012 - 2019.

He has finished his debut solo EP titled “Discovery” scheduled to be released early in on the 9th of April.  

His music can be described as charged afrocentric soul, a unique blend of funk, soul, jazz and African folk music that ignite this charged 'electricity'. His smooth vocals give a pleasant twist to this heated genre while his band, The Automatikz, feature in the music and are a force in their own right. The style of music is refreshing in an era where pop music could be defined as any genre that has support and traction. Simz Kulla is adding his flavour to the conversation.

He lets passion drive his God given talent and plays a big role behind the scenes in the music industry as a producer & singer/song writer.

the music is available for streaming on the side.