For his solo concert Thursday afternoon as part of the JVC Jazz Festival, the South African expatriate pianist Abdullah Ibrahim played an uninterrupted hour of music - Ellingtonian jazz ballads, hymns, boppish melodies, rolling Cape Town-style vamps, full-chorded gospel. It was music filled with invention and power, and utterly personalized. Beneath it all, even the jubilant gospel shouts, was a grave dignity, as if to say that excitement and despair were short-lived against the continuity of history.
Mr. Ibrahim's left hand usually stayed in the low register, playing steadfast, deep-toned chords or circling through an ostinato - independent of a right hand that might be playing songful, yearning melodies or angular, Thelonious Monk-influenced plunks or leaping dissonances. (Keith Jarrett learned a lot from that combination.) At times, the melodies seemed to be crying or raging as the left hand continued implacably. Now and then, the two hands would unite to share chords that built to a full-piano tremolo, making a hymnlike song ring out. Yet like Beethoven and Ray Charles, Mr. Ibrahim can make even major keys sound somber.
Mr. Ibrahim set his music in context when he sang his encore. He sang, apparently in a South African traditional style, about return from exile and then, slapping his thighs for polyrhythm, about revolutionary leaders in Africa, ending with ''South Africa - Mandela.'' It is clear where the sense of determination in Mr. Ibrahim's music comes from.