Abdullah Ibrahim/WDR Big Band: Bombella

The solemnity that has sometimes quietened the defiantly jubilant music of South African pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim hardly touches this terrific big-band album at all. Ibrahim, now 75, is teamed here with Cologne's fine WDR orchestra, and the session is in part a dedication to British arranger Steve Gray – who died last year, but whose Ellingtonesque reworkings of the South African's classic themes are modest masterpieces. In working with Ibrahim, Gray made the sound of a jazz orchestra veer between that of a Salvation Army band and a Saturday-night Harlem jam-session, thus embracing the composer's principal influences: church hymns and 1940s American swing. The smoky sax melody of Song for Sathima represents Ibrahim's soulful lyricism at its best; the gleeful strut of Mandela emerges first in a piccolo solo over breezy swing and ends up sounding like Ellington, Basie and Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath bands combined; and when the orchestra picks up the insinuating harmonic shift in the brooding District Six it tingles the spine. Ibrahim doesn't play much on the album, but his short contributions are telling, and the orchestra's formidable soloists don't put a foot wrong.