German radio station SWR has sponsored new jazz collaborations since 1966. This first meeting between Herbie Hancock’s Benin-born guitarist Lionel Loueke and South African pianist Kyle Shepherd’s trio (with Shepherd’s countryman Mthunzi Mvubu on alto) wonderfully marks a half-century’s public service. Recorded live in three towns in SWR’s Baden-Württemberg broadcast area, Shepherd’s playing and writing dominate. There’s a tensile strength to his cyclical runs during the 20-minute ‘Reinvention/ Johannesburg’. That track’s magic comes when piano and alto’s rockfall slide becomes a gorgeous piano ascent, catching the moment when gospel transmuted into Cape Jazz. Shepherd wrote ‘Loueke’ for the guitarist, who responds with fuzzed and scratched tones, and the near-a cappella snap and clack of fingers and tongues. The fusioneering of Loueke’s Hancock day-job is balanced by a conventional jazz guitar meditation on Paul McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’, and the prayerful hush of his vocal on ‘Ouidah’. The popular intent of South African jazz (and of Loueke’s Benin jazz baptism by George Benson albums), still so evident when Hugh Masekela got a youthful tent jumping at 2016’s Love Supreme, animates the climactic ‘Xamissa’. Mvubu’s liltingly melodic alto solo is followed by a joyous Loueke, over a township shuffle you can picture. This quintet never wastes its tunes’ expansive time, and always has space. Baden-Württemberg brokered a beautiful African summit.