Jazz Cafe Festival 2026

Anish Kumar

UK producer known for sample-heavy, disco-infused and culturally rich house music.

Arthi

Arthi has sold-out headline shows across Europe and joined forces with party collectives in France, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland. This year, she brought her sound to major events in the UK's summer calendar including Shangri-La at Glastonbury Festival, FourTet's All-Dayer at Finsbury Park and a pop-up rave in east London hosted by Fred Again, featuring Kenny Beats and Jyoty. She has toured the country DJing for Katy B and performed for party collectives including Moonshine, Keep Hush, Pxssy Palace, DialledIn, Boko Boko and Movimientos. ​ She regularly appears on radio as a resident DJ and presenter at Rinse FM with guest mixes on BBC Radio 1Xtra, BBC Asian Network, Foundation FM, NTS and more.

Bushbby

Bushbby is a UK-Colombian DJ, born with a deep connection to both Latin America and the UK club scene. Primarily based in London, her sets deliver an explosion of Reggaeton, Dancehall and Dembow, expertly woven amongst the timeless Latin rhythms of Cumbia, Champeta and Salsa. Since her DJing inception in 2019, Bushbby has become a respected and unapologetic Latinx voice in London’s club scene. As well as igniting stages at leading festivals such as Glastonbury, We Out Here, Lost Village, Boomtown and Outlook, she has performed extensively throughout Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, and spotlighted many upcoming Latinx artists through regularly curated radio shows and club nights. Community is at the heart of Bushbby’s contribution to music, intensifying the unique UK-Latinx presence across the map whilst enabling the reconnecting of diasporas in a celebration of roots and rave culture.

CHAMOS

Known for their genre-spanning DJ sets that seamlessly blend West Asian influences, bass, and percussion, CHAMOS truly embody their name—meaning "friends"—as they bring together diverse sounds and audiences. With members from Kurdish and Dutch backgrounds, their music effortlessly fuses traditional and electronic elements. Building on the success of their club edits series, which has garnered attention from DJs and artists alike, the duo has cultivated an organic and ever-growing fanbase.

Dan Shake

British DJ and producer known for his uplifting, sample-heavy disco and house tracks.

Greentea Peng

Lauren Duffus

Mafalda

Mafalda has a motto: only play the records you really, really love. You can see that ethos in action when she’s behind the decks, as the beginning of a track makes her smile, or as she sings along the whole way through. The Portuguese DJ’s sets are wide-ranging, spanning anything from soul, gospel and jazz to house, R&B and Brazilian rarities – but they’re always uplifting and forever joyful. Over the past 10 years, she’s become a celebrated selector, guided by the search for songs that feel like a warm hug. It’s why she was called upon to open for Madlib, for a Boiler Room session in Madrid, and invited by Four Tet to play on his curated bill for Nuits Sonores festival in Lyon, and is a standout name on European festivals like Field Day, Glastonbury, We Out Here and Primavera. Her guest mixes for Dekmantel, Gilles Peterson’s 6 Music show, Resident Advisor and beyond are thoughtful, inventive and laced with the occasional what-the-hell rarity. Testament to her taste, Mafalda was also a recent guest on Tom Ravenscroft’s BBC podcast Peel Acres, where she got to rifle through legendary British broadcaster John Peel’s record collection. Jazz was the seed for Mafalda’s DJ journey, specifically hearing Sadar Bahar play a jazz tune in the early hours at Corsica Studios in 2014. It also inspired her to relocate from Lisbon to London, where she found a home on the UK capital’s dancefloors. She soon got the record bug, and landed a job at London record shop Cosmos. Until it shut in 2015, you could also find her at storied basement club Plastic People, the pitch-black boom room where she met Floating Points. Mafalda was instrumental in the early days of his reissues label, Melodies International, putting together the various fanzines that accompanied the releases, and then going on to co-run the label and programme its events until 2019. Memorably, she drew the image of a hand holding a rose that’s on the front of one of the label’s most celebrated reissues, ‘You’re A Melody’ by Aged In Harmony, and is still a resident at the global parties of the same name. Since then, Mafalda’s monthly NTS radio show Tropic Of Love has built a dedicated following and turned into a label, “guided by mood rather than genre”, she says. It was named for a Shirley Nanette song, which sprung out of Mafalda’s cult DJ residency at a pub in east London and originally started on Red Bull Radio in 2018. She’s a passionate record collector, but not elitist, and her own imprint is her way of sharing the music she loves even further. 2023 is set to be an even bigger year for Mafalda, as she heads to Ibiza for the Glitterbox residency, to Morocco for Oasis Festival and Albania for Kala. Look out for her back-to-back sets with Glasgow’s Rebecca Vasmant, too, which have been must-attend sets of the summer.

Mansur Brown

MESSIE

After breakout opening sets for Fred Again, a long run of shows throughout New Zealand, and her own sold out nationwide tour, Wellington-based DJ MESSIE, aka Tessa Hills, is the latest DJ to take the electronic dance music scene to filthy new levels. Hand-picked by Fred again to open for his surprise Coroglen Tavern show in NZ in March 2024, the Gisborne born-and-bred DJ left him impressed, leading the UK electronic producer/DJ sensation to fly her out to Perth to open for one of his biggest show to date in front of 35,000 people. Growing up in small town Gisborne immersed in all-inclusive skateboarding and band culture as a former drummer, MESSIE’s passion for drumming was the pipeline for her falling in love with genres like Garage, Breakbeat, and Jungle. She has since expanded her sound and it’s safe to say each set will keep you guessing what will come next as she effortlessly merges genres such as Baile Funk, Ghetto Tech, Jersey Club, Juke, Afro beat inspired drums, Techno and many more global club soundscapes that encompass her high energy DJ sets. MESSIE’s sets are guaranteed to be bootleg heavy with something for everyone as she draws from her own music taste of rap and grime, to early 2000’s singalongs, girl-boss anthems and queer music culture in the form of edits you’d never expect. Inspired by the likes of established queer and wahine DJ’s including Lady Shaka, Miley Serious, SHERELLE, Nia Archives, Half Queen, and Hurricane Emily, the latter who was a mentor to MESSIE as a part of her community DJ workshops, MESSIE is already well on her way to becoming one of the countries most in demand selectors - and it’s only going to get messier.

Nightmares on Wax

System Olympia

System Olympia is a prolific London-based producer, song writer and vocalist, building a sonic world inspired by erotic literature, late night drives and dance floor romance. A timeless sound defined by lush pads, dreamy synths, gritty drums and earworm melodies. System Olympia graces the NTS airwaves on her monthly residency sharing a mix of boogie, RnB , synth pop as well as lots of her own unreleased music. Delta of Venus LP, an ode to the 1977 groundbreaking anthology of erotic short stories, labeled an underground classic whilst her latest album, Always on Time, was listed on Pitchfork’s ‘29 Records You May Have Missed’. System Olympia tracks also feature on Mount Kimbie’s DJ Kicks, Pete Tong’s Essential New Tunes, DJ Harvey’s latest compilation. She founded her own record label Okay Nature Records and releases her music mostly exclusively on it.