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Cape jazz is a South African jazz style centered on Cape Town. It blends the harmonic language and improvisational ethos of American jazz with local grooves rooted in Cape Malay/"goema" carnival rhythms, marabi’s cyclical harmony, and the street-parade sound of brass and percussion. Early ensembles favored instruments that could be carried in processions—trumpets, trombones, saxophones, banjos/guitars, and hand percussion—before piano-led combos became equally prominent. The result is a vibrantly rhythmic, often danceable jazz that can feel both celebratory and reflective, with melodies that echo community songs and carnival calls while solos draw on bebop and hard-bop vocabularies. Many writers mark 1959 and the formation of The Jazz Epistles (featuring Cape-born Abdullah Ibrahim) as a catalytic moment, though the idiom drew on earlier 20th‑century Cape social dance musics and developed in parallel with American jazz.