At nearly seven feet tall, the jazz pianist and composer Randy Weston cut an imposing figure, whether on the street, on stage or in the recording studio. But although his seven decade career achieved some of the headiest of jazz highs, his feet never left the proverbial ground. His music remained resolutely grounded in the blues, and his blues sensibility was a potent conduit for a career-long, musical investigation of African roots.

A native New Yorker, Weston was born in 1926 and raised in Brooklyn, always the most Afrocentric of New York’s five boroughs because of its demographic mix of African-Americans, Caribbeans and Africans. His father was a Panamanian of Jamaican Maroon lineage who had also lived in Cuba prior to emigrating to the US, and who was a strong proponent of Marcus Garvey’s early pan-Africanist philosophies. His African-American mother was from Virginia, and deeply connected to the blues and spiritual/gospel traditions of the South. Together, they instilled in their son not only a deep sense of black pride, but a global understanding of his blackness. In fact, Weston belonged to a long line of Caribbean emigrants (or temporary residents) to the US who made crucial, pro-black interventions into African-American culture, including Garvey, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and many others.

Weston was in fact slow to music, resisting his childhood piano lessons before being drafted into the US Army at the end of 1944. But when he returned to Brooklyn, he opened a restaurant that quickly became a meeting place for jazz musicians, and it was during this period that he also began working seriously on his own music. Like many musicians of his generation, he was a devotee of bebop and as a pianist, he had a particular affinity for players with a percussive touch like Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Art Tatum. But he had also returned to a Brooklyn bursting with an increasingly globalised black pride, and in which jazz had become a potent commentary on the cultural and political changes that were sweeping the world in the wake of the Second World War. These included African and Caribbean independence, Civil Rights, and a constellation of broader artistic revolutions that developed in rapid succession during the 1950s – not only bebop, but also free jazz, third stream jazz, beat poetry, abstract expressionism and other movements that were transforming the culture of New York City and beyond.

An entire cadre of Afrocentric, Egyptological and pan-Africanist culture sprang up in Brooklyn during these years, inspired by the writings of Garvey, Dr Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Chancellor Williams, George James, John Henrik Clarke, Cheick Anta Diop, and other renegade scholars from various fields who doggedly beat back the narrowly Eurocentric construction of history that had prevailed over centuries of slavery, colonisation and African cultural dislocation. And a school of jazz musicians – whether implicitly or explicitly – were translating this cultural reorientation into sound. Weston found common ground early on with the bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik and the drummer Chief Bey, who helped him conceptualise his ideas of cross-cultural musical fusion. Shortly thereafter, a job north of the city led to his meeting Marshall Stearns, a jazz critic who had argued forcefully about the African roots of jazz. The meeting with Stearns began a series of serendipitous encounters that gradually brought Weston into closer contact with African music, African musicians and eventually, Africa itself.

He made a couple of early recordings that were generally well-received, but his first two significant recordings were Uhuru Africa (1960), followed by Highlife (1963). The first was essentially a celebration of African independence, while the second was inspired by Weston’s first visit to Africa (sponsored by the US State Department). As his relationship with Africa grew less symbolic and more concrete, Weston’s orbit stabilised between New York’s Bed-Stuy neighbourhood and the new nations of Nigeria and Morocco. In Nigeria, he initially connected with the highlife music played by bandleaders like Bobby Benson, Zeal Onyia and a young Fela Ransome-Kuti (still playing trumpet at the time), who were blending jazz with their own local idioms. In Morocco, where he later lived for five years, Weston, like musicians before and after him such as Ornette Coleman and Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, was taken by the devotional music played in the mountain town of Jajouka as well as the music of the Gnawa, a class of Sufi mystics whose ecstatic music sometimes sounded like a more thickly-textured version of the Delta blues. Weston was especially taken with the gimbri, the thick-toned, low register Moroccan lute whose African melodies were articulated with a percussive attack reminiscent of jazz bassists such as Slam Stewart and Milt Hinton. Over the course of his career, in fact, Weston employed a series of acoustic bassists – from his old friend Ahmed Abdul-Malik to his last, virtuoso bassist Alex Blake – who were able to transpose the language of the gimbri and other African lute-type instruments to the Western acoustic bass.

Weston’s musical Afrocentrism was less mystically-inflected than that of musicians such as John Coltrane, Sun Ra or Yusef Lateef, whose Africanist leanings generally carried an aura of spirituality. His career might be heard as unfolding in parallel with the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand). Both were deeply drenched in Ellington, Monk and bebop, but their work differed in their respective African grounding. Ibrahim’s handling of the blues was inflected by South African vernacular traditions such as kwela and marabi, and his music (the bulk of it composed in exile from South Africa during the Apartheid era) has always had a nostalgic aura. Weston’s blues, on the other hand, resonated most strongly with traditions of North and West Africa, and especially the intermediary Sahel and Savannah regions where a plethora of drums, horns and stringed instruments proliferate in a meeting of North and West African sonic culture.

Weston’s early fusions were relatively simple – Dukeish or Monkish tone clusters over jazz tunes spiced with African or Caribbean percussion, swinging vamps adapted to African 12/8 or 6/8 metres, or African/Afro-Caribbean melodies adapted arranged for expanded ensembles by his longtime collaborator, the trombonist and arranger Melba Liston. Over time, his body of work grew more complex and more varied. Highlights include his signature album African Cookbook (1969); Blue Moses (1972), with an all-star lineup including Freddie Hubbard, Grover Washington, Hubert Laws and Ron Carter; multi-volume solo tributes to Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington (1989/1990); the epic Spirits Of Our Ancestors (1991) featuring Dizzy Gillespie and Pharoah Sanders; collaborations with Moroccan Gnawa musicians (1992), and his final, capstone work The African Nubian Suite (2017).

Especially on his early tours sponsored by American organisations, Weston encountered intermittent opposition from institutions suspicious of his motives. Tours arranged by the US State Department were often mired in misunderstanding when his pan-Africanist agenda of connecting Africa with its relatives in the African diaspora clashed with the US government’s wish to promote jazz as a deracinated and depoliticised celebration of American cultural diversity. More pointedly, his advocacy of African self-determination was at odds with the US establishment’s wish to position itself as the heir of the European colonisers of Africa.

Throughout his career, Weston stayed true to his art while consistently putting himself on the line politically. Ultimately, his powerful art was an unqualified success despite whatever politically-motivated opposition he encountered. Throughout his career, he received numerous awards and accolades from many nations, lived a life of great adventure and artistic, cultural and political passion, and recorded over 50 innovative albums. When he passed away in New York on September 1 at age 92, his funeral took place at the Cathedral of St John the Divine – the same venue for the funerals of Duke Ellington, James Baldwin and Ornette Coleman – recognising his legacy as one of the 20th century’s preeminent musical pan-Africanists, and affirming Africa as the root of jazz and jazz as a radical, diasporic inflection of Africa.