Don Laka’s Invitations 2 connects kwaai-jazz history with a new generation

Don Laka has returned to the Invitations concept almost two decades after the original project, using Invitations 2 to connect his long South African music history with a younger generation of collaborators.

The 24-track album follows Laka’s return to Sony Music Entertainment Africa earlier this year and extends a body of work that has always resisted neat genre boundaries.

What landed

Laka’s own term for much of that approach is kwaai-jazz: a fusion of jazz with South African forms including kwaito, kwela and marabi. Invitations 2 keeps that vocabulary intact while opening the project to contemporary voices and production choices.

The album’s lead single, eGawutini, features Siphokazi and revisits one of the oldest urban stories in South African popular music: leaving home for Johannesburg in pursuit of a better life. The city changes, the ambitions change and the sound changes, but the emotional structure of that journey remains familiar.

That generational bridge is central to the wider album. Laka has spent decades as a pianist, composer, producer and arranger, but Invitations 2 is not framed as a retrospective. Instead, the project uses his catalogue and musical language as a meeting point for artists working in a very different industry from the one in which he began.

At the Johannesburg media launch, collaborators including Encleĕ, Kelo K, Tally N and African Soul Prince discussed the process of working within that framework. Their presence reinforces the idea that the album is designed around exchange rather than a veteran artist simply revisiting old material.

The timing is useful. South African music is currently moving through one of its most internationally visible periods, driven heavily by amapiano and other electronic forms. That success can sometimes make the country’s longer musical continuum disappear from the conversation.

Laka’s work is a reminder that the lines between jazz, pop, township music, dance music and electronic production in South Africa have been crossing for decades.

Invitations 2 therefore lands as more than a comeback record. It places a musician associated with several generations of South African popular music in direct conversation with artists building the next one.

The important question is not whether younger listeners know the full history behind that sound. The album gives them another route into it.

What is still open

Invitations 2 is out now, with eGawutini featuring Siphokazi serving as the project’s lead single.