It began at a jazz event at the Joburg Zoo, where Vuyo McGlad and his friends went to catch a show called Jazz in the Lights, and the music stayed with them. They had come to enjoy the jazz event, and Vuyo observed that the crowd was mostly comprised of older people, but noticed the energy shift when a prominent South African jazz band came on stage. “The kids left their seats, just to come closer to the stage for this band,” he says. “I just thought, the kids really love jazz, man.” Two months later, with no plan beyond that conviction, they put on a jazz event of their own. From nothing, they curated their first jazz event and that was the birth of Kids Love Jazz.

It is a surprising origin for a man who, by his own telling, did not set out to be a creative. McGlad grew up around a community group called the Revelation Spiritual Home, where most of his friends come from and where, he says, much of the influence and guidance in his life came from too.

What he wanted to study was politics. His first choice at the University of Johannesburg was a BA in Humanities, majoring in Public Management and Governance. “I wasn’t really a creative,” he says. “I was into politics, actually.” So what pulled a politics student into poetry nights and alternative gigs? The energy those spaces carried, mostly. He kept going to alternative events, a poetry night among them, and loved what they brought into a room, but he also noticed that there was a gap. “I kind of felt like there was something missing in the space,” he says. “There were alternative spaces, but there were not enough for my age mates and people who are younger than me.”

That gap became NarowBi, the live-events company he started with his friends, whom he calls “very, very instrumental” in shaping it. The need was simple: a place for “live bands, rock bands, alternative, anything that’s alternative.” Vuyo remembers the day the first poster went up, some time after COVID, and he insists nobody was planning an institution. “The intentions weren’t really to be this big. The intentions were just to have fun.” He gives some of the credit to something harder to measure. Spirituality runs through his family, where people used to host events too, and he feels he simply tuned in. “I tapped into some aura, or energies that are around me, and we made it happen.”

His own road was not a straight one. McGlad dropped out of UJ, took what he calls “a forced gap year”, and worked as an administrator at the Dr S.B. Radebe Foundation. It was during that time that he realised how much he loved running NarowBi’s events. “I really enjoy doing these events,” he says, so he decided to go back to school. A mutual friend on Instagram, Thandeka Gilbert, who he says has since become a mentor, sent him a post about a creative scholarship. He applied, got in and went on to study at the AAA School of Advertising. “I learned so much from that,” he says. “I learned marketing, I learned art direction, I learned copywriting.” He describes his life now as a balance between a creative side and a spiritual one.

Kids Love Jazz started in 2024 with a simple brief. “The vision that we had was to have fun and give the youth a voice and also just break this notion that jazz is for old people,” he says. The hardest part since then has been financing. “I think funding is a really big challenge,” he shares candidly. “We could go far if we had funding, because some of us in the team do this part-time, and it would have been nice if we just did this full-time.” They still chase sponsorships, he adds, and they lose money sometimes and win a little now and then.

Then came 2026, a year in which, he says, “dreams came true.” The team took Kids Love Jazz on tour to more than a dozen cities, “self-funded, no sponsor whatsoever.” Over 10,000 people attended, and close to 50 live acts and DJs were “booked and paid,” which, in his words, means “that employment was created.” “It was our first time, definitely not the last time, but also I think it was first of its kind, if we’re being honest,” he says.

“It was scary, man. It was really scary,” he shares. Even so, he says the team refused to dwell on the fact that they had never done anything like this before, and the afterglow of the tour’s success has lasted. “I think last week someone posted pictures from the tour,” he says, and people, he adds, “can’t wait to see what’s next.”

So why tour at all, and why beyond the big metros? “We wanted to prove that there’s jazz listeners out there,” McGlad says. Instead of sticking to Joburg, Durban and Cape Town, the team asked, “why not include other places” that people don’t often see? “So we wanted to be the difference.” Bloemfontein produced one of the best shows of the run, and they plan on going back.

In Makhanda, Kids Love Jazz was part of the National Arts Festival programme on the Fringe, with three dates, at a time when the festival’s own jazz programme had stopped. People noticed and were delighted by Kids Love Jazz’s presence. “A lot of people came to us, and they were just telling us that they’re grateful that we came because the jazz festival didn’t happen,” he says. “

But beyond just touring different locations, Kids Love Jazz also gave back, pouring into the communities they visited. Along the way, the team booked artists from schools that had never performed, “so we gave them the platform,” ran workshops in Durban and Joburg teaching children to play instruments and to paint, and partnered with an organisation called Street Store to donate clothes. McGlad ties that kind of work to the biggest lesson South African creative culture has taught him. “People are the realest currency,” he says. “You better treat everyone, even if you don’t know them, with respect and with love.”

Asked how he wants Kids Love Jazz to be remembered, McGlad does not hesitate. “We made jazz cool, bro.” He wants it known as “a collective that made jazz cool for the young ones, at a time when jazz tickets were quite pricey. We made it affordable.” He also wants people to remember “making sure that the spaces are inclusive and there’s hope for the alternative kid.” And then, plainly: “We are the home for the alternative kid.”

The last show of the year, on the 31st of October at The Playground in Johannesburg, is a homecoming celebration of the tour, with a lineup still being finalised. After that, McGlad promises more. “We’re definitely doing another tour,” he says, along with collaborations with festivals beyond South Africa, “The next couple of years are going to be amazing.” And, with a flourish: “We’re going to book your favourite, favourite people.”

It is worth going back to that day at the zoo. A man who says he was into politics, and not much of a creative person, watched a young crowd leave their seats and decided to create a community from his quiet observation. Everything Kids Love Jazz has become since: the tour, giving back to communities, being on the Fringe programme at the National Arts Festival, is what happened when he took that observation seriously. The kids, it turns out, really do love jazz.