The lift doors close in Braamfontein, and the city begins to slip away. Thirteen floors later, they open onto a wood-panelled foyer washed in low amber light. Through the glass windows beyond, Johannesburg stretches outward, dense and restless, its lights echoing the city’s charged energy. This is Hugh’s, a new jazz club above the city, shaped by belief in what the city can still hold when care is applied with patience.
It exists because two philosophies, separated by time, found common ground. Hugh Masekela understood creativity as responsibility, a way of holding dignity, connection and beauty in the face of rupture. Adam Levy, founder of Play Braamfontein, has long worked from a comparable instinct, translating a deeply felt aesthetic vision into spaces that invite people back into shared experience in the inner city. One shaped feeling through sound, the other through atmosphere and form, but both trusted that art, when taken seriously, could still do civic work.
A practice shaped in rooms
Levy’s 20-plus-year contribution to the city has unfolded with consistency and intent. His projects arrive with a distinct point of view, shaped by a finely tuned eye for atmosphere, detail and the emotional choreography of a room. At The Alexander Theatre, this sensibility expressed itself through restraint, working with proportion, texture and memory to let the building’s character re-emerge rather than be overwritten. At Anti Est, that same eye loosened into provocation, composing a space that celebrated the anti-establishment and the artisan through circulation, tension and finely considered detail.
From The Alexander to The City Beach Club, his work reveals an understanding that how a space feels determines how it is used. Light is placed to draw people inward, materials are chosen to absorb sound rather than bounce it back, sightlines are considered so no one feels peripheral. The result is not spectacle, but attention.
What connects them is not a signature look but a shared sensibility, a belief that space can be composed with the same care as music. Hugh’s extends this way of thinking upward, both literally and philosophically, carrying that long-developed approach into a room where listening itself becomes the primary act.
The view that never left
For Pula Twala, Hugh Masekela’s daughter, the project reopens a deeply personal vantage point. Like Levy, she remembers standing far above the city at the Carlton Hotel as a child, where Johannesburg unfolded as something expansive and alive. That memory returns here, refracted through velvet curtains, warm light and the way the room opens outward.
“My dad loved seeing the city from above,” she says. “He was always aware of how it moved, how it breathed. Being here brings that awareness back. It’s not about the past. It’s about recognising that the city still has a pulse.”
For Pula, it is less about tribute and more about how the room behaves. Hugh, she says, resisted being fixed in place or time. Music, for him, needed to remain open and in motion. For her, Hugh’s succeeds not by invoking her father, but by creating the conditions where that restlessness can continue.
That thinking sits at the heart of the creative collaboration between Levy and the Hugh Masekela Heritage Foundation. Hugh’s is not conceived as a monument or a fixed tribute. It is a continuation, guided by trust, memory and the understanding that legacy only remains alive if it is allowed to evolve.
A room that listens
Inside, the club behaves like an instrument. Dark timber, amber light and deep red velvet draw attention inward. The stage is close, the sound intimate and the acoustics tuned for clarity rather than force. Nothing competes with the music; the room asks for presence.
From every seat, the skyline remains part of the experience. Two performances unfold at once, the one on stage and the one beyond the windows, Johannesburg improvising in light, traffic and shadow. Music here is not sealed off from the city but held in conversation with it.
Lineage, embodied
Opening night, which took place on January 29, belongs to Cameron Ward, who joined Hugh Masekela’s band as a teenager and stepped onto the stage with a different weight. Not repetition, return. The notes he plays carry memory, but also risk. The room is new. The city is watching. The lineage has to hold.
That sense of risk is part of what makes the project alive. The inner city can be a tough sell in 2026. Will audiences climb those 13 floors to listen again? Will the gesture find its people? Hugh’s does not arrive with guarantees; it arrives with conviction.
Through the foundation’s long-standing relationships, the calendar ahead draws from a wide network, bringing together musicians linked to Hugh’s legacy with artists of international stature and contemporary voices shaped by the same spirit. The resulting flow moves easily between generations and geographies, grounded locally while remaining open to the wider world. It is not announced as a claim but revealed gradually, night by night.
“It was always important to my father that music stayed open,” Twala reflects. “He believed in exchange — between people, between places. That spirit has to live in the room.”
Where it lands
Hugh Masekela’s life was shaped by movement, by exile and return, by carrying Johannesburg into the world and the world back home through sound. Adam Levy’s work moves in a different register, staying close, shaping the conditions that allow culture to take root and endure. Hugh’s is not where those ideas are explained; it is where they are tested.
The lift doors open again. The city waits below. Somewhere above, a trumpet sounds, lingering on the air of a room that understands, once again, how to listen.
Hugh’s opens on Thursday nights at 73 Juta Street, Braamfontein, with its rhythm set to expand as the programme unfolds.
