Pushkin's family tree takes us on a rollercoaster ride through history with no shortage of unexpected twists and turns. Just imagine, Aleksandr Pushkin, the father of Russian literature and poet of the Slavic soul, was actually the great-grandson of a slave from northern Cameroon who was sold at auction in Constantinople and bought by a Russian ambassador. Abraham Petrovitsch Hannibal was adopted by the 18th-century tsar Peter the Great and ended up as a first-class scholar who made his mark as one of the engineers and builders of the Russian empire. History, it seems, always has a place for irony.

Bring on the music!

Saxophonist David Murray has plunged into this fascinating history, poring over stacks of ancient documents and Pushkin tomes. Push back the door of Murray's apartment in Paris's 20th arrondissement and you'll find every available surface littered with musical scores, poetry books and portraits of the legendary author of Boris Godunov (who, incidentally, bears a striking resemblance to literature's other famous Creole, Alexandre Dumas). Murray claims he has "spent a great deal of time fact-gathering" and, judging by the piles of American essays, French reviews and Russian manuscripts (brought back from a recent concert trip to Moscow), this is nothing if not an understatement. "I'm totally worn out with my Pushkin research!" the musician declares, stretching back in his chair, "It's over to the music now. Bring on the rhythms and the strings!"

The saxophonist started work on his musical adaptation of Pushkin in August 2004, but the inspiration for the project can actually be traced back three decades earlier. Murray remembers "seeing a show by John Oliver Killen in New York based on the same story in 1975, but I didn't realise what far-reaching effects that show would have on me!" Pushkin's genealogy appears to have inspired a whole host of creators, in fact, and Murray gained valuable input to his own project from Blaise N'Djehoya, a Cameroonian author and film-maker based in Paris, who has spent many years poring over Pushkin's origins himself. Murray acknowledges the debt he owes N'Djehoya, declaring that "he nourished me with food for thought every step of the way!" 

Strangely enough, while Pushkin has become a major reference amongst Afro-American thinkers (Claude McKay, WEB Dubois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright to name but a few), his story is less well-known in France. A series of articles were published in the French review Présence africaine to mark the 200th anniversary of Pushkin's birth, but – call it another irony of history - it has taken a black American musician exiled in Paris to bring Pushkin back into the spotlight.

Murray says he was particularly impressed by Pushkin's poetry. "It has very specific metre and scans in a very rhythmic way," he says. Murray has now reproduced Pushkin's poetic scansion and metre in a musical score, presenting it in what he likes to describe as "a form of jazz opera." Keeping ten of the twelve original themes he composed based on Pushkin classics such as Eugene Onegin as well as Blaise N'Djehoya's books including Stolen By Night, Sold By Day, the saxophonist takes theatre-goers on a sweeping journey, which begins in the African slave markets and ends on the snow-swept streets of Moscow.

A multi-cultural cast

With its vast geographical and historical panorama, Murray's Pouchkine called for an international cast. And the polyglot "jazz opera" is well served by the vocal skills of African singer Sally Nyolo who gives a stunning performance of Pushkin's Ode to Liberty. "It's difficult to go beyond Pushkin's original words," she says, "He was a legendary figure who could never be confined to one particular time. He was one of the first Creole faces who could have been my own, in fact! Pushkin was one of the children of those Africans who set out across the world and at the end of their voyage discovered the miracle of dual nationality!"

Angola's musical patriarch Bonga has also been enlisted to play the role of Pushkin's great-grandfather, Hannibal. "I'm the hidden face of the twentieth century, the African in this story!" he says, "I was actually very moved to discover that Pushkin was one of us! But the point of this story is less about focusing on the past and more about looking to the future. What we're striving to get across, beyond current prejudice, is the concept of a multi-coloured world, a world that's not bogged down in its roots in any way!" Bonga, who is visibly committed to this "highly symbolic" story, will be performing two songs in Bantu while American actor Avery Brooks (who shares the role of Pushkin with Victor Ponomarev) recites his part in English. The Russian singer Helena Frolova (who, according to Murray, "plays Pushkin's nanny and, on a wider scale, represents all Russian women") will be adding her own mother tongue to the multilingual line-up.

Add to this a rhythm section playing in pure free jazz tradition, a Senegalese guitarist versed in funk rhythms and a string ensemble led by a jazz trombonist and you'll understand the full force of Murray's hybrid creation (perfectly in keeping with the dramatic life of the black Russian killed in a love duel against a French officer at the age of 37).

"The strings represent the European aspect of the piece and they play a very important role," says Murray, "Pushkin wasn't an African, he was a Creole, a man who straddled two worlds. That's what makes him so fascinating!" And the well-read musician immediately cites a quote from Pushkin's My Family Tree, a "text which deals with this double identity." "Alexandre Dumas was a French author, James Baldwin an American author and Pushkin a Russian author." There's no question of David Murray pigeon-holing these writers as "African authors before being simply authors." That would be too easy, too racist. "For me, this project, which coincides with me turning fifty and the death of my father, represents a sort of closure. It brings together so many experiences I've been through in my life, but I've pushed things further in terms of delving into classical writing and immersing myself in both the French and Russian texts. At the end of the day, this is the most European project we could possibly have come up with!"

Pouchkine / David Murray Banlieues Bleues (Friday 11 March and Saturday 12 March) at MC 93, Bobigny. At the Barbican Centre in London 13 March.