Gig Alert: The Jazz Epistles ft. Abdullah Ibrahim & Ekaya at Town HallTickets: $55-75, Show at 8PM. Jazz is definitely an American art form – but that didn’t stop musicians in South Africa from adopting it as their own. For black musicians under an apartheid government, jazz became a means of personal and communal expression, and one of the signal events in South African jazz happened in 1960, when the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, trumpeter Hugh Masakela, and others got together to record the album called The Jazz Epistles. The Jazz Epistles were South Africa’s earliest most influential Jazz (bebop) band, a band that Ibrahim is recreating, 57 years later. Members of the 1960 band The Jazz Epistles, led by Abdullah Ibrahim (Hugh Masakela is now ailing), along with a fine cast of South African musicians, play Town Hall tonight.