THE brilliantly original Bristol-born pianist, Keith Tippett, has been cutting extraordinary albums since his first, You Are Here… I Am There in 1969 when he was 22. So the reissue of his neglected 1979 classic solo album The Unlonely Raindancer is a significant jazz moment.

It was recorded during a 1979 tour of the Netherlands. I asked him about his pathfinding life in music, and the now-times relevance of the record.

“My parents met in the war. My dad became a policeman and my mum was southern Irish and a housewife. At home I heard all kinds of music — western classical, church choral and brass bands. My grandad lived with us and played piano with a beautiful touch. I began to learn when I was six or seven years old.

“In my early teens I discovered traditional jazz through the radio,” he continued. “Kenny Ball, Chris Barber and Acker Bilk. Then through my maths teacher I found Armstrong, Bechet, Beiderbeck, Ellington and Basie.”

He became a professional musician in 1968, playing his first gigs at the 100 Club in London. Soon after he made a succession of key recordings, from the 50-piece orchestral Septober Energy of 1971 to the three epochal Mujician solo albums between 1981 and 1987, which he told me were prompted by The Unlonely Raindancer album.

“The title came to me after an afternoon’s rest during the Netherlands tour. My music has always evolved — it was never planned.” When I asked him what unified his work, and how such contrasting sounds grew and fused from the same creative mind, he admitted: “It’s a mystery to me.”

The rolling, visceral pianism of the opener of The Unlonely Raindancer, called Tortworth Oak after Tippett’s Gloucestershire village home, has a raw, elemental power, as if this mighty tree is all life itself. It has orchestral force — tidal, turbulent, tempestuous, but this is but a single piano being played live, inspired by the sound that a grandfather once passed on to a young Bristolian boy.

Under the teeming notes and the hand-drummed and howled message of the title tune is piano birdsong, solitary and desperately urgent, like a quasi-extinct species chirruping for survival — a frantic presage to the consoling lyricism of Thank You God for My Wife and Children. The beautiful riverine flow of the serene tune to his mother’s nation, Dear Ireland, is especially lucid and moving.

I asked him about the album title and if he had played its music as a dance. “Dance isn’t necessarily a crucial part of my music,” he told me, “although I seem to use it a lot in my titles. Personally I’ve never been able to dance with any confidence. Maybe I should have called it another version of the title of my second album, Dedicated to You, but You Weren’t Listening. How about: Dedicated to You and You’re Still Not Bloody Listening.”

But still listening his admirers are, and Tippett, after a period of serious ill health, is back on his mission: “I keep on keeping on with my music,” he declares.

For years his watchwords have been “may music never become just another way of making money.” And he has plenty of hope for music’s future in the hearts and minds of young musicians: “I’m sure the music will thrive in one way or another. Every generation has its exceptional talent.”

Tippett’s generation certainly did, and he was, and still is, at the very heart of it.