Bokani Dyer builds the album Traditions out of covers and bow music

Bokani Dyer releases an album called Traditions on 1 October, and five days later he walks onto the stage at Ronnie Scott's in Soho as a headliner for the first time. The South African pianist and composer last played the Soho club in 2019, on a double bill for its piano trio festival. The 6 October date falls in the middle of a world tour built around the record.

The album is a departure in the plainest sense. Dyer has built his catalogue on his own compositions, and this one is not that. "For the first time this album is predominantly covers," he told UK Jazz News, adding that he simply felt like playing other people's music and enjoyed the work of shining a new light on something already established.

He was careful about which established music. Dyer says he could have called the album Standards, but that framing carries baggage he did not want, so the repertoire reaches well outside the jazz canon instead. A Bach chorale sits alongside a composition by his father, the saxophonist Steve Dyer, and a piece derived from pre-colonial South African bow music.

The bow music came to him through a transcription project, and it is the part of the record he talks about with most energy. What caught him was music conceived entirely outside Western harmonic structure. Even what gets filed as classic South African jazz, he points out, traces back through the Methodist church to something that arrived from elsewhere. The bow recordings carry none of that. The piece he describes is in 13/8, played and sung at once, and he calls the precision of it amazing.

Traditions was recorded primarily in New Jersey, and the trio Dyer is touring is new: the New York bassist Tim Norton and the Swiss drummer Dominic Egli. The tour takes in the Monterey Jazz Festival in California, runs through Europe to the UK, and finishes with his debut at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.

London is not a neutral stop on that route. Dyer talks about the long musical conversation between South Africa and the UK, shaped in part by exiled musicians who settled in London, among them the pianist Bheki Mseleku, one of his own formative influences. He notes that Mseleku recorded with a generation that went on to shape the players working in Britain now, several of whom Dyer has since worked with himself, naming Shabaka Hutchings, Soweto Kinch and Gareth Lockrane.

His own history with the city runs back further than the Ronnie Scott's booking suggests. The late London Jazz Festival director John Cumming caught a show of his at The Vortex early in his career and booked him off the back of it, which is how a young Johannesburg pianist ended up on British stages in the first place.

The release goes out on Dyertribe, Dyer's own imprint, distributed by Africori and Warner. That answers a gap in our earlier note on this story, which recorded the label as unreported when UK Jazz News prints it at the foot of the piece. No tracklist has been published, and the tour has been described by its shape rather than listed date by date.

Confirmed release dates sit on the release calendar, and the rest of our jazz coverage is on the jazz hub.