South Africa's leading cultural ambassador has led a richly fulfilling life although, as with many from his homeland, the road was often arduous.

Abdullah Ibrahim's dedication and spirit helped him to defeat prostate cancer last year. It was another chapter in a life of adversity.

At 67, he is still engaged in many projects, including the establishment of his M7 music schools around Cape Town.

As a young man, he was unable to follow an academic route into music or medicine due to apartheid.

Instead, his creative appetite was fed partly by a diet of jazz records that circulated in Cape Town during the Second World War courtesy of visiting American GIs.

At first, he played in big bands under the name Dollar Brand but hearing bebop on vinyl moved Ibrahim and other players towards smaller combos so that, by the end of the Fifties, Ibrahim was the pianist in the region's finest band, the Jazz Epistles.

The departure of several players for London meant the band disintegrate but Ibrahim carried on his crusade as a soloist, mentored spiritually by the recordings of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.

Jazz gigs continued for a while but increasingly stringent laws and daily arrests took their toll: When Nelson Mandela was jailed in 1962, Ibrahim and many others left.

He was playing in Zurich with his fellow exiles when Duke Ellington heard him and, encouraged by Ibrahim's wife, Ellington got him to Paris to produce his first trio recording.

He settled in New York in 1965 and began a fervent period embracing free jazz, joining a scene bubbling with the work of John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Don Cherry.

He returned to South Africa in the mid-Seventies. The violent suppression of the student uprising in Soweto in 1976 persuaded him to join the ANC and, consequently, he lost his citizenship.

The advent of his band Ekaya brought him further attention in the Eighties. Their international tours included memorable appearances in Brighton with a US line-up, including saxophonists Carlos Ward and Ricky Ford.

Some of the composer's finest pieces were recorded definitively by that band on the CD Water From An Ancient Well and he has since performed many solo piano concerts. Last year, he toured with a new Ekaya line-up.

He settled in his homeland at the invitation of Mandela in 1990 and is now helping to set up black-owned studios and venues in his home town.

He has released CDs with the European Community Youth and the Munich Radio Symphony Orchestras.

This current tour and the new CD Ekapa Lodumo showcase new arrangements of his pieces with Hamburg's NDR Big Band, one of the world's great jazz orchestras.