How the CTIJF became Africa’s Grandest Gathering

THE Cape Town International Jazz Festival (CTIJF) has a long and storied history dating back to the 2000s, and with this year’s edition being the 22nd, it is lear that through all the unexpected twists and turns, it remains “Africas Grandest Gathering”.

- THEOLIN TEMBO. [e-mail]

Back in 2000, the CTIJF was born as the North Sea Jazz Festival Cape Town with Herbie Hancock, Abbey Lincoln, and Hugh Masekela, to name a few, mesmerising a cosmopolitan crowd numbering 6 000 attendees at the city’s Good Hope Centre.

The inaugural festival became a realised vision, first seeded in the heady years after the end of apartheid, when the largest contingent of international jazz stars this culturally isolated country had ever seen, set foot on these shores.

The festival came to be through a critical partnership struck with Holland's Noord See Festival. The event benefited from the vast experience of its Dutch counterpart.

Tteventually stood on its own and was renamed the Cape Town International Jazz Festival in 2004. In that year, CTIJF also moved from the Good Hope Centre to its current home, the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC).

The CTIJF has been fully black-owned since the Survé Family rescued it from near collapse in 2006.

While the challenges were vast, especially with regard to continued corporate support and audience growth, the CTIJF could now stand independently — a “Proudly South African” initiative.

Attendance gradually grew from 14 000 to 32 000 by 2009, and it had become affectionately known as “Africa’s Grandest Gathering” with a reputation as a phenomenal musical, multi-cultural, and multi-media event ~ a familiar feature on the African continent and the southern hemisphere’s travel and cultural calendar.