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Over his 50-year career as a musician, Abdullah Ibrahim has played to a wide range of audiences. As a Capetonian ingénue come to big-city Johannesburg, he played in the shebeens and dance halls of Sophiatown to admiring gangsters. In exile in Switzerland and later New York, he played host to the cream of American jazz musicians: Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, his early heroes, became friends. Later, in the dark days of the 1980s, his New York club accommodated the African National Congress (ANC) government-in-exile. Last weekend, Ibrahim commanded the stage at the Barbican in London with the combined forces of the BBC Concert Orchestra and Big Band.

With his sometime bandmate Hugh Masekela, Ibrahim is part of the golden generation of South African jazz musicians who lit up the 1950s before departing to international acclaim. But unlike Masekela, now an earthy showman, Ibrahim has moved towards the cerebral, the ascetic, the mystic, the classical. Talking in his London hotel ahead of the Barbican concert, he sips green tea and wears a collarless white shirt; no brightly coloured Mandela tunic for him.

He was born Adolph Brand in Cape Town in 1934. As he grew up, he absorbed the varied influences of the time and place: the gospel music of his parents’ African Methodist church, the carnival, the soundscape of the so-called Bushmen, American jazz on the radio.

At 20, he became “one of the young men who left home and walked to Johannesburg”, as he put it – a journey of about 1,000 miles. He went in search of the saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi. “As well as making music, we became friends. I went to stay with him in George Goch [township]. Then [Hugh] Masekala and [Jonas] Gwangwa joined.” In 1959, as the Jazz Epistles, this group recorded South Africa’s first jazz LP, Verse One.

At the Barbican concert, these Johannesburg days were remembered in “Song For Aggrey”. Its dedicatee, Aggrey Klaaste, was one of the young journalists who clustered around the weekly magazine, Drum. Ibrahim remembers the milieu with fondness. “Casey Motsisi, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, we all used to hang at the shebeens in Sophiatown. We used to gather in these little flimsy township houses and talk liberation.”

Sophiatown, before it was bulldozed by the government as a “black spot”, was the cultural heart of Johannesburg, where Drum’s writers and photographers mingled with boxers and politicians and jazz singers. It had a darker side, though. “Sophiatown was dangerous, but it had camaraderie. The gangs – the Young Americans, and across the street in the Western Native Township, the Cooperatives – were personal friends. They were very supportive. They were proud of us for representing the community.”

The political climate darkened after Sophiatown was destroyed and after the Sharpeville massacre. Musically, things became harder. Nearly all the jazz musicians in the country left to take the hit musical King Kong, a Sophiatown Porgy And Bess, to London; many never returned.

Ibrahim did not go to London: “Everyone left except me. I stayed at home for a year and practised 12, 15 hours a day.” Back in Cape Town he met the singer Sathima Bea Benjamin. They bonded over a shared love of Duke Ellington, and married. They took up a residency at a small club in Zurich, the Africana, and when Ellington’s band played in the city, Benjamin persuaded him to come and listen to her husband. “Sathima,” says Ibrahim, still smiling at the memory, “must have worked some magic charm.” Ellington recorded both of them, and took the couple under his wing when they moved to New York.

In the late 1960s, Ibrahim converted to Islam and changed his name. “Cape Town has intermarriage and mingling with the Malay people. Lots of my friends were Muslims. I was drawn to Islam by the concept of Tawhid, of unity. At the time, apartheid was becoming more divisive. I thought, we’re all interconnected.”

In the early 1970s, back in South Africa, he recorded a series of instrumentals, notably “Mannenberg” and “Black Lightning”, that became anthems for the resistance movement. The state responded predictably: Ibrahim remembers the “4am knocks on the door. The whole series of events, people getting arrested, it gave the signal. Everything was regarded as subversive.” He moved back to New York. At the request of the ANC he became politically involved, rallying other musicians to the cause. The state took away his citizenship, and he joined the widening diaspora of exiles. “At the Sweet Basil club in New York, the whole ANC government-in-exile was there.”

When he returned to South Africa 20 years later, he found the state of jazz devastated. “The timeline had been severed. If you’re a musician in the States, there’s continuity so the next generation has a point of reference. Apartheid shattered that. The younger generation is completely disconnected. In our music school, it’s difficult to make them understand. In rehearsals, I have to be a reluctant history teacher.”

As artist-in-residence with the Essen Philharmonie, Ibrahim has been reworking his songs, some of which were on display at the Barbican. “Voices” uses a five-voice choir. “I regard my compositions as songs. I’ve written lyrics, but hardly recorded them.” The pieces hymn Cape Town and remember Monk and Ellington; a love song is set to a slinky bolero. “The songs are video clips of what I’ve experienced.”

The other new project is an African concerto. Steve Gray has arranged Ibrahim’s solo pieces for a full orchestra; a piano playing off against deep woodwinds and marabi tubas. Ibrahim acknowledges the unease that his generation of South Africans feels for classical music as “‘white” or “European.” But he recalls how Moeketsi used to play Mozart’s clarinet concerto, and his own piano lessons with a local schoolteacher. This music is, for him, “coming home”.

Ibrahim is also now championing a project he calls M7. “Music, movement, medicine, meditation, martial arts, menu [diet], masters. It’s a hip way of combining all aspects of art and medicine – music therapy in hospitals, for example, or helping young people with short attention spans use meditation to focus.” The project has a small auditorium in Cape Town and a network of practitioners; he now wants to create something similar in Europe.

“In high school I wanted to do medicine.” He spreads his hands wide and shrugs at the impossibility: that time, that place. “I wanted to go the music conservatory: that was stopped also.” Some 60 years later, all his ambitions are coming true.

www.abdullahibrahim.com