How life under apartheid taught a jazz master to be nimble on the street and on stage

‘Dr Ibrahim, how does one improvise?’

Born in Cape Town in 1934, the South African jazz legend Abdullah Ibrahim came of age during the apartheid era, when a black man’s ability to improvise during tense run-ins with gangs and white authority figures could mean the difference between life and death. In this short animation for NPR’s Jazz Night in America, Ibrahim explores how close calls in his youth helped him to become a master improviser on stage, while touching on how the freedom inherent to jazz threatened South Africa’s racist power structure.