This past weekend I drove from Johannesburg to Rustenburg and back. The Bokani Dyer trio was my soundtrack the whole way. Traditions, due out on 1 October, landed in my inbox early and there's no better way to get inside an album than a few hundred kilometres of open road.
Built around Dyer on piano and vocals, with drummer Lumanyano Mzi and bassist Tim Norton rounding out the trio, it made for a calm drive: the kind where you don't feel the urge to test the speed limit. The more I listened, the more the layers in it opened.
It was only once I started reading about the album that I understood how much history is packed into it.
Unlike most of Dyer's catalogue, Traditions is largely made up of covers. Its opening track, African Piano: Inxembula, is a Xhosa song recorded by uhadi player Nofinishi Dywili and the Ngqoko Women's Ensemble, later repurposed as a struggle song during apartheid.
When I get Dyer on a video call, he's in Los Angeles, a stop on a tour that will carry him through the US, Europe, Australia and back home to Southern Africa before the year is out. It's just past 9am there, his first meeting of the day.
I asked him what he was trying to understand about his own musical inheritance in making the album.
"It's more looking at paying homage to all the different stops in my journey," he says. "The interesting things that I've encountered musically. From being born in a certain context, growing up in a certain context, going to study music."
He mentions the classical piano training he picked up alongside his jazz studies and "just thoughts about the South African jazz legacy, which is the world in which I exist".
Traditions, as he describes it, is his attempt to fold all of it — classical, jazz and indigenous South African forms — into the sound of a piano trio. Given how much weight a song like Inxembula carries, I ask how he decides what he's allowed to change and what has to stay untouched.
"Every song on the album has its own story," he says. That one, he left almost entirely alone. He first encountered it years ago, transcribing pre-colonial South African music for the Southern African Music Rights Organisation's archive, work he took seriously because so little of that music exists in written form.
"If we look at this music that has no exposure to Western thinking, Western forms, Western instruments: it's really interesting to hear how advanced and interesting it is."
Even reworked for the trio, Dyer tried to preserve its melodies and rhythms as closely as he could.
"It does sound different to the original but still, I tried to preserve the melodies and the rhythms."
Other tracks got a freer hand. Young vocalist Phoebe Mgxaji, whom Dyer met while teaching part-time at Wits University, guests on two songs, including a reimagined Thembisa.
Violinist Kabelo Motlhomi, "just an amazing" player from Resonance String Quartet, appears on But Beautiful, where Dyer also sings. Mozambican guitarist Julio Sigauque joins him on Ropasci.
Dyer turned 40 in January, and marked it with a party at his father Steve Dyer's plot in Centurion, bringing together people from every era of his life: family from Botswana, school friends, university friends and fellow musicians. "It was great for me because that was kind of bringing together all these people from different times of my life, which kind of made it extra special," he says, though he admits the open-mic format meant a few guests got a little too comfortable behind it.
"You get, you know, when people get excited and then they get on the mic and they don't want to leave."
Dyer's path has moved through several places at once: born in Gaborone, Botswana, before relocating to Johannesburg with his family around grade two, schooling and later studying jazz in South Africa and now touring the world's stages.
He returns to Botswana a few times a year, where his mother's family remains. "It's what I consider one of my homes," he says.
Reaching 40 hasn't necessarily matched whatever picture he once had of it.
"I don't know if this is what I imagined," he says. But he's noticed something in how people who've crossed that threshold describe it to him.
"For many people who I've spoken to who have passed 40, they said that this was the best years of their life. They feel like they are very much in control of their destiny."
Ageing has its costs too: "The body isn't what it used to be." But he's healthy, and when he looks back at the road he's walked, he's happy with it. "It's been a beautiful journey."
Being raised by a father who is himself a celebrated South African jazz musician is inseparable from Dyer's story. Traditions makes that explicit: the track Reconstruction and Development is a cover of a song written by Steve Dyer.
He hasn't played it for him yet. "He knows that I recorded it but I don't think he's heard it yet. He'll just hear when the album comes out."
Growing up under that kind of scrutiny could have come with pressure to measure up. Dyer acknowledges it but not with resentment.
"He's a discerning listener because he's a musician himself, so he knows what's going on. But he's great in that he's never tried to be too imposing about his way: like his way is the only way. He's always allowed me to express myself freely."
I ask whether making an album this steeped in inherited material, struggle songs, jazz standards, classical influence and his father's composition, has changed how he thinks about an artist's responsibility to history.
"Not really. I'm still trying to maintain integrity within the art, which I think is the main thing, trying to shed the best light on all the music that I'm playing, which is kind of honouring the music that I'm covering, honouring where we are coming from as a South African legacy."
For him it was less a grand statement than an ongoing question. "Exploring what tradition and lineage and moving forward, you know, what that means."
Dyer isn't an artist who works to a fixed timeline. Traditions took its own unhurried route to completion. The trio recorded most of it in New Jersey over a year ago and the album has been evolving ever since.
"It's not something that I decided at the beginning to say: 'Okay, this is how I'm going to do it,'" he says.
"But sometimes it just kind of works out like that: there were other things happening and it didn't seem like the right moment."
After returning from the US, he added further layers with Norton on bass and Mzi on drums, "adding some different people and textures and sounds to complete the album".
That same unforced logic shapes how he thinks about what comes next. There's another album in the works, more song-based than Traditions, which he describes as "nearly done". But he isn't mapping out a five- or 10-year plan.
"I like more of an organic approach," he says, "just enjoying the journey and choosing concepts of projects that are relevant to the communities and speak to the generation that we're living in."
For Dyer, that's the point of making music. "I'm not just creating the music for myself. It's a sharing of a story that I'd like to be relevant and thought-provoking to the communities that embrace the music."