Derek Gripper

McCoy Mrubata

San Francisco Jazz

A rising vocal star and two-time JUNO Award winner, Montreal-based singer and songwriter Dominique Fils-Aimé performs two nights in the Joe Henderson Lab with music from her latest album, Our Roots Run Deep, which took the 2024 JUNO for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year. “What she does with her voice is absolutely incredible” (NPR).

Dominique Fils-Aimé

SFJAZZ Center

Born and raised in Cape Town’s historic Langa township, saxophonist and flutist McCoy Mrubata has come to represent the South African city’s glorious jazz legacy.

As a child he absorbed the soulful hymns of the Zion Church, the chants and rhythms of traditional healers and the South African swing of the Merry Macs, an early Cape Town jazz combo that rehearsed across from his home. Leaving school after the bloody 1976 Soweto uprising, he threw himself into music, studying with Langa legends such as pianist Madoda Gxabeka, tenor saxophonist Winston Ngozi, trumpeter Fezekile “Blackie” Tempi and penny whistle master Robert Sithole.