It is now 40 years since Hazel Miller and her husband, the great Johannesburg-born bassist Harry Miller, founded Ogun Records.

Hazel says that the Ogun label was necessary “to get this music out there,” to enable listeners everywhere to hear this South African sound that was so central to the people’s struggles against apartheid and the creation of a new South Africa.

“None of the big commercial labels were interested,” she says. “We needed Ogun so much to keep alive the sounds of our friends in exile from South Africa and their friends over here.

“So many of them are gone now, but the Ogun collection is a living history, an archive of their brilliance. It still carries their spirit of freedom.”

The first ever Ogun release was the vibrant live recording at Willisau in Switzerland of the Brotherhood of Breath big band in January 1973, featuring a luminous amalgam of South African and European musicians from Chris McGregor, Louis Moholo-Moholo (pictured), Dudu Pukwana, Harry Miller and Mongezi Feza to Evan Parker, Radu Malfatti, Gary Windo and Harry Beckett.

Now, four decades later, Moholo-Moholo leads a quartet of London-based musicians, alto saxophonist Jason Yarde from Beckenham, virtuoso bassist John Edwards from Hounslow and the Oxford-born pianist Alexander Hawkins.

“The Ogun approach is always to bring musicians of different histories, cultures and generations together,” says Hazel.

“Louis is a survivor of that first generation and he carries with him a massive musical story which his new bandmates now all share. They continue the tradition and the spirit of these elders.”

And how! The opener is For the Blue Notes, dedicated to the original sextet who arrived in London as refugees from apartheid in 1964, with Moholo-Moholo as their 24-year-old drummer.

Hawkins’s lightning fingers make the riff and Yarde’s Caribbean-rooted alto sweeps into a swiftly flying solo with Edwards and Moholo-Moholo delving below him.

The beginning of Something Gentle isn’t much less restrained with Yarde’s soprano in joyous fettle and Moholo-Moholo slamming his drums.

Hawkins’s striking of his keys is similarly percussive — there are definitely two drummers in resplendent unison here, Cape Town and Oxford as one.

And when Edwards turns to his winding and shimmering bow the foursome move towards a finality of silence.

It is the duetting Yarde and Edwards who begin All of Us before Hawkins’s almost distant notes seem to come closer and closer and Moholo-Moholo blows earth in a gradual ascension of sound and Yarde turns to his alto for the segueing into Khwalo.

All four musicians testify for the churchlike and hymnal Mark of Respect, written by Moholo-Moholo’s pianist confrere Pule Pheto who featured on previous Moholo-Moholo

Ogun albums, Bra Louis-Bra Tebs (2005) and An Open Letter to my Wife Mpumi (2008).

Mournful, elegiac and full of love and pride, it salutes all those comrades of music and struggle who have passed, before and during the life of Ogun.

Tears for Steve Biko is a moving echo of the tune that bassman Johnny Dyani wrote and recorded in 1978, one year after the murder in detention of the beloved activist of black consciousness, Song for Biko.

Yarde blows a long impassioned tribute before Edwards, Hawking and Moholo-Moholo continue to invoke the blood of the people’s history inside his song.

In an instant, 16 minutes have passed and centuries of African suffering and resistance have been set down.

The album title theme, simply 4 Blokes, is a sheer exposition of fourfold artistry led by Hawkins’s percussive keys and Yarde’s ceaseless breath, and the Dudu Pukwana tune Angel-Nomali becomes the life-blood of another altoist from a succeeding generation as Yarde blows into its soul above the huge sound of Moholo-Moholo’s drums and Edwards’s resonating undertow.

The final and beautiful reprise of Something Gentle which closes the album is another reminder to its listeners that, according to Yoruba belief, Ogun was a smithy-deity, who from the very heat of his forge presided over the inspiration of creativity and truth.

Time after time over 40 years his records have done the same.