Bokani Dyer was born in Gaborone, Botswana in 1986, the son of a family living in exile from apartheid. His father is Steve Dyer, a South African saxophonist, so Bokani was steeped in music from his earliest years.

He remembers hours of listening to his father’s music as a boy, but it wasn’t until he was 16 that he started playing the piano, provoked by hearing some Janet Jackson songs and then going on to take formal piano lessons.

When he left school after periods of living in both Gaborone and Johannesburg, he studied the jazz programme at the University of Cape Town — now free from the strictures of apartheid. He graduated in 2008 and in 2009 was awarded a three-week scholarship in New York, where he was tutored by the prime pianist Jason Moran.

By 2014 he had achieved recognition in South Africa as a major jazz force, had made two albums and was invited to perform at the London Jazz Festival, both at the Vortex in Dalston and the free stage at the Royal Festival Hall with young British stalwarts like Soweto Kinch and Shabaka Hutchings.

Completely fortuitously for me, having just listened to a marvellous early evening set by a reincarnation of the South African Blue Notes (who arrived in London also as exiles from apartheid in 1964, setting the jazz scene ablaze) in which Dyer, Kinch and Hutchings had prime performing roles, I found myself sitting next to Dyer at the late evening concert of his country’s greatest jazz pianist, Abdullah Ibrahim — born in Cape Town in 1934.

We were both very moved by the performance, and Bokani — as one of the great Ibrahim’s true inheritors — was imbibing his every note, every sound.

He very generously gave me one of his own Cape Town-produced albums, Emancipate the Story — and listening to it, it is clear that he has a unique piano voice, with a particularly close kinship to the late South African genius of the keys, Bheki Mseleku.

Bokani gathered a vibrant group of young South African musicians together for the Eman

cipate session, which has a very different timbre from recordings cut in Europe or the US.

The opener is Fanfare, with an almost mordant tone to its ensemble before Bokani plays an expansive chorus, and trumpeter Marcus Wyatt’s solo has considerable potency in his notes. Tenorist Buddy Wells holds the sense of suppressed menace.

Bokani is the composer of all the album’s pieces, and Meditation Suite is another slow burner with more breathy Wells and mellow Wyatt before Bokani drums his keys and heralds the conclusion.

Kgalagadi has a pounding rhythmic foundation with Shane Cooper’s emphatic bass and more scope for Mark Buchanan’s whining guitar.

In the next track, Tales, it is as if the pianist is a griot who has travelled to a place where he begins to tell his stories, while the receptive ensemble listen and then join him.

On Hoods, Bokani plays a Rhodes electric keyboard and Buchanan’s guitar echoes his modernism, while, as through the whole album, drummer and percussionist Ayanda Sikade and Tony Paco stoke up the propulsion.

What is the message and testimony of Sermon? Again, its timbre seems to hold jeopardy and Wells’s and Wyatt’s lucid attestations perhaps hold warnings and cautions as well as messages. Cooper’s plunging bass anticipates Bokani’s sombre tidings of a solo.

In 1973 Ibrahim called one of his earliest solo albums African Piano, but Bokani’s tune with the same name has a very different sound. He plays his Rhodes with the percussion hedging all around him, with new narratives spurting from his keys.

It is a very different South Africa now, although the final track Zim Zim echoes the 1970s days of Ibrahim’s epochal Mannenberg. Wells’s horn sometimes resounds like that of Basil Coetzee, showing that Bokani and his compadres are as much about South African musical tradition as they are of its future.