Meet Naomi Tagg – the musician behind SoWhat Entertainment
If you've worked with SoWhat Entertainment over the years, you may know me in completely different ways. You may have come across Organic Lounge or Chilli & Lime, seen me on electric violin with All Stars, or booked The Velvet Violins without realising that the same person is behind the concepts, music and creative direction of all of these. So I thought it was probably time to join the dots.
I'm Naomi Tagg, a violinist, composer, arranger and the person behind SoWhat Entertainment. I've been working professionally as a musician for close to 30 years, starting with weddings in the Cape Winelands as a teenager and going on to perform in more than 20 countries. Along the way I've released my own music, performed with international artists and orchestras and, most recently, received Artist of the Year – South Africa at the 2026 BraVo International Music Awards at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
But running alongside my own career as a violinist has been another creative journey: 20 years of dreaming up, building and developing the acts that make up SoWhat Entertainment.
It started with Chilli & Lime
I started Chilli & Lime in Johannesburg in 2006, after moving from Cape Town with my electric string band, Muse SQ. I loved performing as part of an all-female string quartet, but I also wanted to explore another side of my playing, jazz violin and improvisation, before later moving to the UK to explore the music and events scene there. Chilli & Lime performed as a jazz quintet, bringing South African jazz together with jazz standards for the events industry. For a few years we became something of an industry favourite, dubbed the “Rainbow Band” for both the make-up of the group and the distinctly South African music we brought to events. Twenty years later, Chilli & Lime is still part of the SoWhat Entertainment roster.
Then came an idea that was considerably harder to explain.
Organic Lounge – before DJ and live music was really a thing
Organic Lounge came from my love of improvising. In 2007, I wanted to combine the freedom and energy of live improvisation with a DJ set. At the time, most clients didn't quite understand the concept, and combining a DJ with a violinist was still relatively unusual. Nonetheless, we forged ahead. Organic Lounge became one of South Africa's first dedicated DJ and live-musician event acts. Today, we perform in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, with DJ and live-musician combinations for corporate events, weddings, cocktail hours, canapés, networking events and private celebrations.
The concept has also grown far beyond DJ and violin. I now draw from a fantastic pool of saxophonists, trumpeters, percussionists, double bass players and other musicians to create different combinations depending on the event, from relaxed cocktails and networking to something with considerably more energy. The line-up may change, but the principle doesn't: great musicians improvising live over curated music.
Building All Stars from scratch
All Stars was a very different project. This one I built from the ground up with Matthias Bakker. We researched, designed, built and developed the concept of an LED band, wrote and produced the music with David Bakker, and thought through everything from the instruments to the visual identity (all before AI made researching and developing ideas quite as easy as it is now!)
The result was a contemporary electronic live band built around electric violin and LED bongos, with LED keys available when we want even more visual impact. We released our first EP just as COVID arrived, which wasn't exactly ideal timing for launching a live band. But All Stars survived and remains one of our most distinctive options for clients wanting something more energetic and visually striking.
The Velvet Violins
The Velvet Violins draws on another side of my musical background: string arranging and my love of reinventing contemporary music. Our all-female string quartet in Johannesburg performs everything from contemporary pop and film music to South African favourites. I arrange much of our repertoire myself, which allows us to create music specifically for our musicians, clients and projects. That has also taken the quartet beyond conventional events into recordings, television productions, brand campaigns and bespoke commissions.
Naomi Tagg and SoWhat Entertainment – Beyond the Bands
While I've spent the past 20 years creating acts for SoWhat Entertainment, I've never stopped developing my own work as an artist. My solo career has always moved between worlds, classical training, jazz and improvisation, electric violin, electronic music, film-inspired composition and South African music.
Sunset Sessions is probably the sound that feels most like me right now. I DJ while weaving live violin melodies and improvisation through lounge, deep house and Afro House, placing the violin in a completely different musical world. I also write and produce much of the music myself, so the sound is becoming increasingly my own. It's an outdoors-only project because the setting is part of the experience: sunset, open air, beautiful surroundings and music that moves with the changing mood of the evening. It's romantic, nostalgic, chic and effortlessly cool, but mostly, it's simply music I genuinely love to play.
Alongside my events work, I perform internationally as a headline violinist, taking my own show with a band aboard cruise ships and to stages around the world.
Film-inspired music and composition have always been another love of mine. My last album (Neolektra) saw me headlining South Africa's National Arts Festival and playing live on BBC Radio London. I'm currently writing a new, more emotive and cinematic album, and over the next few years I'd like to move further into the composer space alongside performing.
I also love working with Meisie, a collaboration between three South African women, each coming from a very different musical background. We bring those influences together to reimagine South African folk songs in our own way.
So, despite being the person behind SWE, I'm very much still a working musician.
The thread through all of it
Whether I'm developing one of my own projects or an SWE act, the process is remarkably similar. I conceptualise the acts, choose the musicians, curate the music, create arrangements, develop the sound and think about how they should look and work in an actual event environment. And I'm particular about the musicians I use. South Africa has extraordinary musical talent, and over the years I've built relationships with some brilliant players. Technical ability matters, of course, but so do musical instinct, professionalism, reliability and knowing how to read a room.
Experience counts for a lot in events. It's not enough to be a great musician: you need to be able to read the room, understand what the client is trying to achieve and know when the music needs to lead and when it needs to sit in the background. After nearly 30 years of weddings, corporate events, launches and private functions, that's something I pay a lot of attention to when putting together our acts and choosing the musicians I work with. I want SoWhat Entertainment to offer more than a list of bands for hire. I want to be able to look at an event, understand what it needs and recommend the music and musicians that will actually work.
Weddings are a perfect example. The music might begin with solo violin or a string quartet for the ceremony, move into DJ and live musicians for canapés and cocktails, and build into something more energetic for the reception. Corporate events work in much the same way: perhaps a solo violinist for guest arrivals, a jazz band over dinner and a DJ with sax for dancing later on.
And somewhere amongst all of this, I'm travelling between cities most weeks for performances, writing and arranging new music, running SWE and raising three children with my husband.
It's a busy and sometimes slightly chaotic creative life. But 20 years after starting SoWhat Entertainment, I'm still coming up with new ideas.
And I'm definitely not done yet.
Comments