Most musicians, even brilliant jazz improvisers, prioritize the present when recording and releasing new work. What kind of reviews is this record going to get? Will my fans like it? Is it going to sell?

But with his stirring new Blue Note album, The Myth We Choose, the pianist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini is focusing on the impact his music will make throughout the arc of time. Co-produced by Makhathini and his 18-year-old son, Thingo Makhathini, The Myth We Choose features riveting performances by the pianist’s working trio with bassist Dalisu Ndlazi and drummer Lukmil Perez (or, on select tracks, Ayanda Sikade), plus special guests including Shabaka Hutchings and a stacked lineup of South African talent: DJ and producer Black Coffee, trumpeter Robin Fassie, guitarist Keenan Ahrends, and the vocalists Thando Zide, Muneyi and Omagugu, Makhathini’s spouse and longtime collaborator. This is music made for posterity — even eternity.

Songs are vital to a culture’s myth-making, Makhathini argues, which makes them essential to how future generations perceive history. “I have always felt that songs speak to us, songs look at us,” he writes in the album’s liner notes. “In years to come, it will be the histories of the day that will choose or not choose our songs. If our songs are not chosen, then our voices would never be heard… On the contrary, if our songs are chosen, then indeed, what we are dealing with now is designing future myths. With our actions today, we are making suggestions for what tomorrow may be.”

That’s a profound ambition for an LP, but coming from Makhathini, it’s hardly surprising. To the 43-year-old South African — an educator and healer as well as a venerated musician — a performance is a ritual that demands real engagement from its audience and does an incredible amount of conceptual heavy lifting. Music invokes personal, familial and cultural stories, Makhathini says. Music is prophecy. Music can restore physical vitality.

To say it another way, he doesn’t make music to merely entertain — even as his music proves positively thrilling. As he’s demonstrated throughout an extensive discography, including three previous albums for Blue Note, Makhathini merges spirit-seeking American jazz — in particular, the music of his heroes John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner — with the most irresistible traits of South African jazz and the galvanizing rhythms of Afro-Cuban music. Like Trane and Tyner on A Love Supreme, he’s forever pushing and ascending; at the same time, his touch and language on the piano are imbued with the earthy, gospel-tinged melodic radiance of Abdullah Ibrahim or his greatest mentor, Bheki Mseleku.

In truth, words cannot begin to encapsulate his aesthetic, which is ever-evolving. And on The Myth We Choose, Makhathini’s soundworld expands further still, thanks in large part to Thingo, who helped his father steer the album (though he doesn’t perform on it). A producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who focuses on the alto saxophone, Thingo has developed a deep and wide-ranging understanding of music old and strikingly new, which proves transformative throughout The Myth We Choose. “Every time you hear a connection to electronics, or different kinds of grooves that people don’t as often associate with me, those are his ideas,” says Makhathini.

An exceedingly modest man, Makhathini has delivered all sorts of grooves throughout his career, and is no stranger to collaborations with artists at the vanguard of contemporary music. But on The Myth We Choose, these sounds are more fully realized, and more thoroughly subsumed into Makhathini’s artistry. The result is an album that enhances the accessibility of Makhathini’s music without sacrificing any of its spiritual integrity. Take “Tethered,” for instance, “about the inevitability of love against the inability to gauge our emotional entanglement when one is deep in love,” says Makhathini. Imbued with artful neo-soul and featuring the singer Thando Zide, it comes across as both sultry and sacred, an enigmatic convergence of body and spirit. The closing “Zimthilili,” with sweetly hypnotic vocals from the pianist, is equally magnetic.

Or cue “Ḽiṅwalo ḽa Mubebi,” co-composed by Makhathini, Thingo and the guitarist and vocalist Muneyi. A tribute to fatherly love — and to fathers who transcend the masculine stereotypes that prevent them from professing that love — it digs into an elusive space between a torchy, brushes-fueled vocal-jazz ballad and a heartrending pop piece. The English-language ballad “What People Say” is another affecting gem, a meditation on the creation of myths featuring Omagugu. Both tracks are unforgettable, dripping with feeling and demanding repeat listens. Ditto “Ekuqaleni,” where Makhathini matches the high drama and constant motion of The Bad Plus with Kraftwerkian vocoder.

Vocals, including Makhathini’s incantations, take pride of place at various points, and the decision to color more songs with voice was rooted in part in our fractured, dystopian global landscape. Singing, Makhathini explains, can be a more lucid, urgent delivery system for his message about music’s hallowed communal role. “I think, in a world that’s a minute from falling apart,” he says, “there’s a need to utilize human language more, to be very intentional about what we mean.”

The same argument could be made for the use of electronics on the album — both Makhathini’s own keyboards and programming as well as the drum programming that Black Coffee contributes to “What People Say (reprise).” “Jazz has always been a result of socialization,” Makhathini says, “and of deep listening to society and the sounds that are happening around us.” He points to Miles Davis as a prime example of someone who found creative strength by embracing the innovations of popular music.

Of course, the album’s overwhelming spirit of transcendence is rooted in hard-won mastery and the joys of human collaboration. “Kuzodlula” contemplates the nature of forgiveness — “real forgiveness is the very attempt to forgive the unforgivable,” says Makhathini — with virtuosic trumpet filigree from Fassie, a protégé. With its hard-angled grooves, handclaps, avant-garde coloring and spoken/sung invocations, “Imvunge KaNtu” is a bold tribute to ancient African wisdom and the concept of interconnectedness known as Ntu. Conversely, “Unembeza” is a slow-to-mid-tempo delight, an exercise in the gospel-kissed glow that is uniquely South African. (In an interesting juxtaposition, its thematic inspiration is the question of how our world will end.)

A kind of hymn to the blessings that accompany rain, “Liyoze Line Nangakithi” is a gently probing conversation between Makhathini, his longtime friend and collaborator Shabaka, on flute, and Dalisu Ndlazi on double bass. “Dalisu is someone I’ve mentored for years, and I’ve been playing with him since he was really young,” says the pianist. “Shabaka and I share a lot of music. We share ideas about being in the world, and about cosmology.”

Ultimately, The Myth We Choose is about the awareness to create a legacy of love and healing in the present tense. “This notion of a Black body as being animated and used for entertainment has failed historically,” says Makhathini. “So, for me, accepting the failure of Black performance, I resort to this idea of ritual” — the idea of past, present and future all commingling on the same plane. What’s more, in this ritual the composer, performers and audience become equal partners, facing the sounds that inspire self-reflection with open hearts.

“Wayne Shorter said something really beautiful that I liked some years ago,” Makhathini continues. “His idea was to play and write music the way you want the world to be, the world that you hope for. That’s always my purpose.”