Abdullah Ibrahim

The musicologist Wilfrid Mellers once described Abdullah Ibrahim, the much-loved and hugely influential South African composer and pianist, as a musician of both the old world and the new – "on a razor edge between hazard and hope". Now 75, Ibrahim is less audibly on a razor edge, but those tensions still give his music a rare eloquence. The affection his fans feel for him was apparent in the roars that greeted his slow walk to the stage, and in the even louder standing ovation for him and his seven-piece group, Ekaya, that ended an unbroken two-hour-plus show. Various incarnations of this band have been wrapping warm harmonies around Ibrahim's lovely combinations of African traditional and pop music, church hymns and American jazz since the 1980s. This is a very powerful edition, particularly in the preacherly wailing of alto saxist Cleave Guyton and the silkily fluent trombone sound of Andrae Murchison. Ibrahim played a slow solo piano medley in the opening minutes, but his Ellington-to-Monk keyboard charisma is receding these days, and the regular trio (with Belden Bullock on bass and George Gray on drums) quickly formed to add deep harmonies and flickering percussion to the sonorous chord-shifts of Ibrahim's hymnal slow pieces. Many of his classic themes were then delivered by Ekaya, sometimes in hushed four-part horn harmony, sometimes as sassy Saturday-night 1940s swing. Cleave Guyton and tenorist Keith Loftis often injected a fierce blues feel, and one of Ibrahim's breathless train-rhythm shuffles set the band jumping near the finale. As Water from an Ancient Well fell to a collective whisper and drifted through the hall, Ibrahim repeatedly intoned the title. It was a pretty accurate description of what the show had been all about.