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 clear that through all the unexpected twists and turns, it remains “Africa’s Grandest Gathering”.

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.

It eventually 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.

Independent Media archives show that for festival founder, Rashid Lombard and his partner Billy Domingo, the fruition of what the festival became was almost inconceivable when they first started.

“Coming from the cultural vacuum that was apartheid South Africa and preceded by a few failed attempts by other parties to pull off such an event, espAfrika was confronted with public scepticism.

“It was only when a few star artists such as Ronny Jordan and Roy Hargrove arrived early for the event and gave television interviews, that the public began to buy in and ticket sales improved,” a newspaper editorial mentioned.

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How the Cape Town International Jazz Festival became Africa's Grandest Gathering