Linda Sikhakhane Returns to the Room That First Heard Him Lead

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By Viranova Music Desk13 Jul 2026Music

Some stages host performances. Others become witnesses.

For Linda Sikhakhane, the room at 81 De Korte Street belongs to the second category. Nine years ago, when the building was still home to The Orbit Jazz Club, Sikhakhane presented his debut project there as a bandleader. On Saturday, 18 July, he returns to the same Braamfontein address carrying music from an entirely different point in his journey.

The building is now occupied by Jozi Gold Brewing Company, where Jazz at Jozi Gold is working to restore a regular live-jazz rhythm to a room closely associated with Johannesburg’s cultural history. It is not a reopening of The Orbit. It is a new venue consciously operating in the memory of what the space once made possible.

That distinction makes Sikhakhane’s return more meaningful.

This is not simply an established musician revisiting an early venue. It is an artist placing his past and future inside the same room. The evening will include an advance presentation of material from LINDA, his forthcoming self-titled fifth album. The project has been described as an invitation into a musical world shaped by deep spiritual and sonic ideas.

A career built between inheritance and experimentation

Born in Umlazi and connected ancestrally to KwaNongoma, Sikhakhane has developed a musical language in which the contemporary and the traditional are rarely treated as opposites.

His compositions move through questions of spirituality, memory, ancestry and identity while remaining in conversation with modern jazz. Those concerns have travelled through records including Two Sides, One Mirror, An Open Dialogue, Isambulo and 2024’s iLadi. His latest released album was issued through Blue Note and Universal Music Africa, further extending the international reach of a musical practice that remains grounded in South African cultural thought.

With LINDA, the decision to use his own name as the album title suggests a potentially more direct act of self-examination. Little has yet been publicly revealed about the complete project, but presenting its music in the room where his bandleading journey began creates a powerful frame for what comes next.

The audience will not only be hearing new compositions. It will be hearing them against the memory of an earlier Linda Sikhakhane—the musician who once entered the same space with a debut project and an emerging artistic identity.

What a room remembers

The Orbit closed in 2019 after becoming one of the defining venues in Johannesburg’s contemporary jazz ecosystem. Its absence left more than an empty entertainment space. It removed one of the regular meeting points where musicians, listeners, students and international visitors could encounter South African jazz as a living practice.

Jazz at Jozi Gold is now attempting to reconnect the address with that history through weekly performances. The significance lies not in recreating The Orbit exactly, but in ensuring that the room remains available to music, conversation and collective listening.

“There’s something incredibly special about seeing artists return to a venue that helped shape their journey,” Jozi Gold spokesperson Glynis Jardine says in the submitted release.

For Sikhakhane, that return carries unusual symmetry. The stage that once introduced him as a bandleader will now hold a musician with an established international catalogue, a Blue Note release behind him and a fifth album approaching.

The address remains the same. Everything the artist brings back into it has changed.

Linda Sikhakhane performs at Jozi Gold Brewing Company, 81 De Korte Street in Braamfontein, on Saturday, 18 July 2026. Quicket lists the event from 18:30 until 23:30. Tickets start at R350, and no people under the age of 18 will be admitted.

Reporting basis: A press release submitted by I Be Music, independently checked against the official Quicket event listing, Jozi Gold’s website, Blue Note and current reporting about Jazz at Jozi Gold.

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