A million ancestral drums pound in these two albums made in 1973 by the shamanic South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, expressing his devotion to the continent of his birth and three great musicians of an adopted nation and an adopted music. 

And yet they are both solo piano performances recorded in the Thunder Sound studios of Toronto in the depth of a Canadian winter, the sounds of a genius of the oppressed and disfigured south struggling against apartheid deformity, created during a few blissful hours in a receptive and admiring north on a far continent of exile.

Ibrahim had left South Africa as Adolf Jonannes “Dollar” Brand in 1962. Found by Duke Ellington in a Zurich nightclub, he first found landfall in the Americas in 1965, where the Duke organised his first US recording session. 

He played at the Newport Jazz Festival and within a few months he was working with Coltrane’s great drummer Elvin Jones and living in New York. By the time of his 1973 Toronto sessions he had turned to Islam and had returned from his first hajj.

The long, compelling tracks of these albums segue into each other in a seamless unity. They are a huge shout of art and life as one, telling the story of a musical griot’s influences and inspirations from two continents, while never leaving the sounds and blood of home, with Ancient Africa stirring through every note and phrase in a frozen, faraway land.

No performances more passionately and with such powerful virtuosity express the musical unity of Africa and the US than those which are given to us on these two records. 

Fats, Duke and the Monk is the middle track of the first album and the sonic shadows of Waller, Ellington and Monk are cast clearly in Ibrahim’s sounds. 

The Duke’s Harlem melodism, so closely mirrored in many of Ibrahim’s tunes, emerges with a singular beauty in the South African’s version of Ellington’s The Single Petal of a Rose while Ibrahim’s own urban patterns romp through his Ode to Duke.

Waller’s Honeysuckle Rose is a tribute to Fats’ mastery of the New York “stride” piano style which he learned from his own mentor James P Johnson, and which found its way to Cape Town to be picked up by Ibrahim and given his own township timbre. 

Then comes Thelonious and his Think of One and Ibrahim’s tribute, Monk from Harlem, to complete the trinity.

The opening suite “Salam Peace” is brimful of Ibrahim’s own numbers, including Hamba Kahle, Blues for a Hip King and Gwidza all streaming in and out of each other, his drumming piano causing Africa to rise irrepressibly through the lakeside Ontario snow.

The 24 minutes of the long concluding track — African Portraits — are a homage to the South African musicians either left in South Africa or fellow exiles escaping apartheid. 

There are salutes to trumpeter Hugh Masekela (also in the US), trombonist Jonas Gwangwa and the essential altosaxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, who was Ibrahim’s bandmate in the pioneering Johannesburg band the Jazz Epistles.

Ancient Africa is a jewel of an album, an epic praise-song to Ibrahim’s true continent, its earth, its people, its rivers and mountains, its relentless drums. 

The engrossing notes of Water’s Edge and its repeated chorus flow into Bertha in 

Turquoise and the mesmeric Krotoa. 

It is as if Ibrahim has never left the eternity which is Africa and that it must go with him wherever he travels. 

All the time and beyond the sound of the chiming keys is Ibrahim’s wailing, wordless, chanting voice as if he is calling upon history, his home and the ever-close people that he loves.

Released in 1973, all the tracks are Ibrahim’s compositions and, as he moves into The Aloe and the Wild Rose, Cherry or Bra Joe from Kilimanjaro, he carries his transoceanic African-American inspirations — Fats, Duke and the Monk — back to Africa with him as a conductor of their own astonishing creations.