The late American pianist, composer, and “Legend of Jazz,” Randy Weston, stretched across history to forge connections to an African past, as he had done for decades.

On his 2017 recording, The African Nubian Suite, Weston took as his subject matter the very origins of humanity – the fossilized skeletal remains of “Ardi,” a hominid who lived around 4.5 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. This "planetary music," as Weston called it stretches across millennia, looking to the Nubian empire (now northern Sudan/southern Egypt), African folk traditions, Sufi music, blues, and jazz. Randy Weston joined us in-studio in 2017. (From the Archives.)