SOUTH AFRICA’S skies hover over the South Bank of the Thames as septuagenarian Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Cape drums fire the 23-piece Dedication Orchestra.

Their heartfelt set is a blessing for the great South African jazz exiles the Blue Notes who arrived in London from apartheid in 1964. 

Some of their original and revered contemporaries, from pianist Keith Tippett, tenorist Evan Parker, altoist Ray Warleigh and trumpeter Henry Lowther, are still here with other younger virtuosi like saxophonists Jason Yarde and Julian Arguelles and bassist John Edwards from later generations adding their own committed brilliance.

There’s a moving rendition of Dudu Pukwana’s Be My Dear with a beautiful solo from Warleigh before his palaver with Tippett’s piano and stunning choruses from trombonist Annie Whitehead and Yarde in the drama of Chris McGregor’s opus The Serpent’s Kindly Eye.

The evening features a new Abdullah Ibrahim trio with the veteran pianist playing with cello and flute in some exquisite Cape chamber music. 

But the power of the future arrives with a new formation of the Blue Notes, with Botswana-born pianist Bokani Dyer and a group of dynamic London-based compadres — Soweto Kinch and Shabaka Hutchings on saxophones, master drummer Mark Sanders and plunging bassist Karl Rasheed-Abel. 

A stirring and free session it is, blowing acoustic storms over the adjacent river.

Sanders turns up twice more to flurry the ears. With saxophonist John Butcher in the astonishing Tarab Duets, the duo add their inventive timbres to 70-year-old recordings of musicians from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and other parts of the Arab world.

The world is one again at the Vortex session of a trio of south London tenorist Paul Dunmall, the ubiquitous Mark Sanders and visiting US pianist Lafayette Gilchrist. 

Dunmall’s guttural volleys, winnowing soprano saxophone runs and deep-bloodied lyricism are a transatlantic foil to Gilchrist’s testifying wayward scales and church-inflected phrases. Sanders scrapes his bow against cymbals in long colloquies with Gilchrist’s quiescent beauty and Dunmall’s passionate outcries. The damp Dalston night is set afire.

The surging Afro-Cuban pianism of Chucho Valdes gives the solo standards that he plays at King’s Place such as My Foolish Heart, People and Autumn Leaves new rhythms and reflections. His performance of Blue Monk makes a startling sonic essay of the old guvnor’s tune, infusing it with the soul of rampaging Caribbean bop.

The alluring, levitating folk-inspired tenor saxophone of the young south Londoner Tori Freestone brings to mind Art Blakey’s introduction to his latest Jazz Messengers: “There is a new star in the jazz firmament tonight.” 

Her tenor’s lightweight sound flies out, her notes pealing from her horn like the human, working voices of her watermen ancestors plying the Thames as she takes one of her forebears’ shanties The Press Gang and gives it a shimmering jazz soundscape, erupting into free-sounding passages of deep and impassioned beauty.

Then comes Ibrahim Maalouf — Beirut-born and France-ensconced — playing his four-valved trumpet with a unique power, pounding drums, guitar, bass and a four-trumpet chorus behind him. 

Illusions is how he dubs his programme but the reality is a penetrating sound, drawing his listeners deep inside the raw world of his notes.

Tenorist JD Allen from Detroit and his relentless trio invoke the fury and improvising combustion of another Sonny Rollins with Jonathan Barber’s furious drums behind him and his dark, mordant tone — hymnal at times but always stark and irrepressible — providing a dynamic prelude to the Africa-beloved piano of 88-year-old Brooklyn-born Randy Weston. 

His set recalls his sojourn in Morocco and he plays like a latter-day griot with the mighty tenor saxophone sound of Billy Harper, the 71- year-old from Houston. 

As they duet on Weston’s Hi-fly or Blues for Africa, the pianist recalls that the latter was inspired by the walk of African elephants and, as you listen, they appear in the imagination. 

But you also hear the cries of those stricken with Ebola in the most agonising of notes.

The festival ends for me with a celebration in the Purcell Room, where a group of mainly Caribbean musicians salute the 100th birthday of the Jamaica-born bassman Coleridge Goode, ex-beating heart of Django Reinhardt’s immediate post-war band and the ’60s London quintets led by Joe Harriott and Michael Garrick.

The searing Cuban violinist Omar Puente plays a Grappelli-inspired acoustic violin, Byron Wallen a Shake Keane-inspired trumpet and Gary Crosby plucks and pizzicatos his bass in a loving tribute to the centurion whose life holds almost an entirety of jazz history. 

Long live his sound and rhythm, his beat of art, life and freedom.