The inspirational jazz drummer and bandleader Louis Moholo-Moholo, who has died aged 85, made music with fellow South African exiles that brought enthralling new sounds to the world beyond their troubled homeland in the 1960s.

Over six decades in music, he performed with some of the most creative musicians in the jazz of his time. He was as compelling to watch as to hear – cracking out explosive accents with a force that could lift him off his stool, or stroking delicate cymbal patterns like wind rustling in trees.

In 1963, in Cape Town, he joined the pianist Chris McGregor, the trumpeter Mongezi Feza, saxists Dudu Pukwana and Nikele Moyake, and the bassist Johnny Dyani to form what would become the famous mixed-race jazz sextet the Blue Notes.

Repressive South African life after the murderous apartheid government crackdown of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre had become ever more intolerable. McGregor, who was white, would sometimes have to play drums behind a curtain to fool the police if he was sharing a stage with black partners, or even on occasion disguise his skin colour with boot polish, and Moholo-Moholo and his friends were often arrested.

Their breakout came in 1964 when the band was invited to the Antibes jazz festival at Juan-les-Pins, France, then played the Afrikaner Cafe in Zurich (to which the South African émigré Abdullah Ibrahim had recommended them) before moving to London, and to gigging at Ronnie Scott’s Club.

An entranced early witness to the South Africans in London in 1965 was the British singer-songwriter Robert Wyatt, who marvelled in the Guardian in 2003 at the memory of exultant horn sounds and driving rhythms like “a living volcano. And right inside, such pretty tunes.”

Word of their unique music soon spread. The American free-jazz trombone virtuoso Roswell Rudd hired Moholo-Moholo to play on his 1965 recording debut. In the following year, the saxophonist Steve Lacy took Moholo-Moholo and Dyani on tour through the UK, Italy and South America.

In 1967, McGregor formed an incandescent international big band of South Africans and Europeans called Brotherhood of Breath – Duke Ellingtonesque harmonies, African marabi and kwela dance forms, bebop and freebop gleefully mixed. In 1968, the Blue Notes released the album Very Urgent, a small-band burnup illuminating how vividly African roots and American/European inspirations had entwined.

The 1970s mainstream record industry, not usually attuned to edgy jazz, woke up – with RCA recording Brotherhood of Breath on its Neon imprint, and Polydor Records releasing Very Urgent.

In the 1970s, Moholo-Moholo played in Pukwana’s carefree Afro-rock groups Assagai and Spear, and formed a world-class improv rapport with the South African bassist Harry Miller and the British alto saxophonist Mike Osborne at the Peanuts Club in east London – unique but overlooked gigs captured on the Ogun label’s recordings Border Crossing (1974) and All Night Long (1975).

Moholo-Moholo worked with Miller’s avant-jazz-to-African Isipingo group, performed with the saxist Elton Dean’s Ninesense, a horn-packed band that sounded much bigger than it was, and developed a lasting connection with the virtuoso pianist Keith Tippett. He also led his own ventures including Spirits Rejoice (1978), a South African/British group including Tippett, the saxophonist Evan Parker and the trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. The acclaimed eponymous 1988 release by his band Viva La Black celebrated African and Caribbean links to UK jazz with a lineup including the expat South Africans Sean Bergin (saxes) and Thebe Lipere (percussion) and the imaginative UK/Caribbean saxophonist Steve Williamson.

Through the 1980s, Moholo-Moholo recorded his improvised piano/drums duos with Tippett (1980), Schweizer (1986) and Taylor (1988), and played in various impromptu cross-genre bands but by 1990, he had become the only surviving member of the original Blue Notes. His partners’ short lives affected him profoundly, but 1990 also saw Nelson Mandela released from a South African prison after 27 years.

It was the right time for the launch of the 25-piece Dedication Orchestra, an A-list ensemble whose objectives were to cherish the South Africans’ huge musical contribution – to make their musical legacy available for future generations, and to establish a bursary at Cape Town University for young African musicians to study jazz. In 1993 Viva La Black toured South Africa on a British Council sponsorship, to fervently excited crowds. The gigs unveiled the country’s first official black/white group.

Louis Moholo (who adopted the surname of Moholo-Moholo after his return to South Africa in 2005) was born in Cape Town, to Dorah, a caterer, and Christian, a driver, whose family had migrated from Lesotho via the Orange Free State’s diamond mines to Langa township. Langa was the oldest Cape Town suburb, built to house displaced Africans into more easily policed communities under the country’s infamous Pass Laws.

There was no formal music-schooling, so African children learned from neighbourhood elders and each other, and in the young Louis’ case, his father’s radio – through which he became fascinated by the jazz of the 1940s and 50s. Early guides for him were percussionists in local Scouts’ bands, Langa’s eminent drummer Phaks Joya, and, on the radio, Louis Armstrong’s virtuoso sideman Big Sid Catlett. As a teenager, Moholo-Moholo joined the township’s Young Rhythm Chordettes group which included the rising young bebop saxist Danayi Dlova.

By 1962, at 22, he was good enough to play in the Cape Town saxophonist Ronnie Beer’s acclaimed Swinging City Six, and he tied with South Africa’s popular bandleader Early Mabuza (a one-time collaborator with the former Abdullah Ibrahim, Dollar Brand) for the best drummer award at Johannesburg’s Cold Castle jazz festival. The connections Moholo-Moholo made there were life-changing.

Moholo-Moholo and his wife Mpumi moved back to Cape Town in 2005, their return warmly welcomed by admirers across the generations. He played again in his homeland, but he often returned to work in the UK, notably leading Four Blokes (a characteristically offhand name for a superb band with the saxophonist Jason Yarde, the pianist Alexander Hawkins and the bassist John Edwards) and Five Blokes, augmented by the reeds star Shabaka Hutchings.

Mpumi died from Covid in 2021, and her death and Moholo-Moholo’s declining health eventually silenced his playing, though his home remained an open house for anyone who wanted to drop by and talk music, life and politics.

He is survived by his niece, Sizwe.

• Louis Tebogo Moholo-Moholo, jazz drummer and bandleader, born 10 March 1940; died 13 June 2025