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Dancers at the Castle Lager Jazz Festival at the Orlando Stadium in Soweto c.1962. The Cold Castle Lager Jazz Festival was held in Soweto from 1962 to 1964. Alf Kumalo, Peter Magubane and Ernest Cole attended these events and a select group of photos have survived of which Kumalo’s ‘Women Dancing’ remains perhaps the most iconic. Just how and why South African Breweries sponsored these remarkable multiracial events is a story rarely told and much of which is lost in the lagerly foam of forgetting. However, what we do know is that some of South Africa’s greatest jazz moments occurred and were recorded at these events and that tens of thousands of people of all races attended them. As Lewis Nkosi wrote, out of a time of extraordinary violence and oppression came  ‘an ebullient sound more intuitive than any outside the United States of what jazz is supposed to celebrate — the moment of love, lust, bravery, increase, fruition, and all those vivid dancing good times of the body when the Now may be all there is.’