Woke up this morning with the sad news in my email inbox–from music journalist Gwen Ansell–that Ezra Ngcukana (b. 1954), the great Cape Flats jazz musician and a member of the Ngcukana jazz dynasty, had passed away. Ngcukana had been diabetic with high blood pressure. Ngcukana’s death is “… no doubt exacerbated by the sadness everybody in Cape Town is still feeling about Robbie Jansen. Ezra must have been devastated by that.”

The best tribute to Ngcukana’s genius I have seen (h/t: Suren Pillay) is this, posted earlier today, by the historian and photographer, John Edwin Mason, here .

Image: John Edwin Mason

 

Further Reading

Sinners and ancestors

Ryan Coogler’s latest film is more than a vampire fable—it’s a bridge between Black American history and African audiences hungry for connection, investment, and storytelling rooted in shared struggle.

How to unmake the world

In this wide-ranging conversation, para-disciplinary artist Nolan Oswald Dennis reflects on space, time, Blackness, and the limits of Western knowledge—offering a strategy for imagining grounded in African and anti-colonial traditions.

A migrant’s tale

On his latest EP, Kwame Brenya turns a failed migration into musical testimony—offering a biting critique of ECOWAS, broken borders, and the everyday collapse of pan-African ideals.