Vuma Levin at Hugh's Jazz Club

South African guitarist and composer Vuma Ian Levin is one of the leading voices of his generation, creating music that interrogates questions of identity, history and being in post-Apartheid South Africa. As the Mail & Guardian wrote, “Vuma Levin is destined to be one of South Africa’s greatest musicians.”

Levin began his jazz studies at 18 under the guidance of South African guitar legend Johnny Fourie. After completing his studies at the Tshwane University of Technology, he was selected for the Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Band, performing at the Grahamstown Jazz Festival and the Standard Bank Joy of Jazz Festival.

He later graduated cum laude from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, where he was awarded the Non-EU Talent Scholarship for his Master’s studies. During his time in the Netherlands, he won multiple prizes at the Keep an Eye Jazz Awards (national winner in 2016; international prize winner in 2014 and 2016), won second prize at the Dutch Jazz Awards, and was a semi-finalist in the Montreux Socar International Jazz Guitar Competition.

In 2017, Levin returned to South Africa to join the faculty at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has since released five albums as a bandleader, including Antique Spoons and the SAMA- nominated the past is unpredictable, only the future is certain. He was named the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz and has been featured on CNN’s African Voices. Levin has performed internationally at leading festivals and venues including the North Sea Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival, Bimhuis, LantarenVenster and the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, and has collaborated with artists such as Benjamin Herman, Ohad Talmor, Feya Faku, Kesivan Naidoo and many others.

For this performance at Hugh’s Jazz Club, Levin leads a stellar sextet featuring Sisonke Xonti (saxophone), Bokani Dyer (piano), Romy Brauteseth (bass), Peter Auret (drums) and Gontse Makhene (percussion). Through this ensemble, he continues his ongoing artistic project: using music as a form of sonic historiography that documents, interrogates and reimagines Black South African experience.

The programme features music from his acclaimed debut The Spectacle of an-Other, alongside a selection of newer works. These compositions traverse memory and imagination, drawing on South African musical lineages while engaging the transnational circulation of Black culture. At once reflective and speculative, Levin’s work situates jazz as a vital archive — one that makes audible the legacies of displacement, resilience and creativity that shape Black South African histories. Yet it also insists on futurity: imagining, rehearsing and performing the possibilities of new identities, new communities and worlds yet to come.

Bold, expressive and deeply grounded, the ensemble offers a performance where history and futurity sound together — articulating jazz as a site of transformation and becoming.

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