WHEN I first heard the Muslim names and beautiful lucid notes of these two extraordinary musicians some 55 years ago — one a pianist, the other a saxophonist — I had no idea that they were black Americans, let alone jazz virtuosi; one born in the steel city of Pittsburgh in 1930, the other with his boyhood and youth in the streets of the motor city Detroit, having been born in Chattanooga, Tennessee a full decade before.

Ahmad Jamal and Yusef Lateef were names that fascinated me. I remember sitting in my friend’s front room after school in 1959, listening to extended-play vinyl records on his proud Dansette record player as they fell onto his turntable and thinking: “Why did these Americans have names like this? They’re not from Egypt or Algeria?”

And yet all these years later, in 2012 when this concert was recorded, they were still playing, in a world cursed by Islamophobia, after two lifetimes of music which had pioneered the new glories of cosmopolitan music within a jazz rubric.