/ 7 November 2008

Water from an ancient well

Anyone who has seen Abdullah Ibrahim perform live and solo will attest that it is a very intense, even spiritual experience.

He will play without interruption for hours, blending a plethora of compositions into one long continuous suite, driven by the ostinati produced by his left hand, while different, shifting melodies or further rhythmic patterns weave in and out of a seamless fabric that implicitly has no beginning or end.

It was fellow pianist Cecil Taylor who described the instrument as ”88 tuned drums”, but it is Ibrahim’s playing that really makes that description come alive. It’s not hard to see the ancestry of Africa’s overlapping polyrhythms translated into Ibrahim’s pianistic style. Appropriately, an early live recording (of a solo concert in Copenhagen in 1969) was called African Piano, and many other releases of his put Africa upfront in their titles — Anatomy of a South African Village, African Space Program, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Echoes of Africa, Ancient Africa —

Ibrahim is about to release his first solo-piano album in at least a decade, and he is touring South Africa to support it (not alone, however, but with his trio, the other two members of which are New Yorkers Belden Bullock on bass and George Gray on drums). The album is called Senzo (Gallo), and the reference is to the Japanese word for ”ancestor”, as well as being Ibrahim’s father’s Sotho name, he told me on the phone from New York.

”The idea of this CD, playing extended performances without a break,” he says, ”is to try to recreate a spirit of trance-dance storytelling.”

This relates to Ibrahim’s interest in African cultures where dance and storytelling are not just forms of entertainment but have communal spiritual meanings. He is a kind of shaman, communicating with ancestors from all over the continent (and the planet), channelling for them through his music. Healing runs in his family, as well as a strong church influence, and then there is his own 40-year engagement with Eastern martial arts — ”Nothing to do with fighting,” he notes with a chuckle.

Senzo is a somewhat different proposition to Ibrahim’s previous solo-piano albums. Instead of the driving ostinato pattern holding it together, and the sense of an intensity, the music on Senzo is meditative and glancing, almost more a form of calligraphy than any other art form. A series of lightly shaped fragments arise and then, almost before their identities have emerged, fade and merge into the next piece. The feeling is of a mind playing upon memory, finding pieces of reminiscence, holding them up to the light and then moving to the next one. If the earlier solo performances were like thunder rolling across mountain tops, Senzo is more like sunlight sparkling through a dancing shower of rain.

Ibrahim’s live concerts in South Africa in November will incorporate his solo excursions into the trio structure. He has worked in many formats, from a duo (his famous albums with Johnny Dyani in the 1970s) to trios, bigger bands such as the seven-piece Ekhaya or the WDR Big Band in Cologne, all the way up to large symphony orchestras.

In the meantime, what we will hear in November offers Ibrahim an improvisatory freedom that is as close to an entirely solitary performance as he could come without actually leaving the New Yorkers at home.

”We can take off in any direction at any moment,” he says. ”If I play with a trio, my musicians understand that every performance is quite different and that I allow myself to go in any direction. My compositions act as a signpost. They give me a formula in which to improvise, a freedom to expand. The songs are never static.

”The compositions try to capture different moods and experiences and they act as launching pads. There are always events that you’ve touched on, way back, that re-emerge — it’s like retracing the steps of memory.”

But his music is not merely a backward-looking exercise. It may contain memories of all sorts of different music, from that of his idol and mentor, Duke Ellington (subject of several tributes from Ibrahim in years gone by) to that of the free-jazzers of 1960s New York such as Ornette Coleman, never mind the raw energy of fellow South Africans and one-time collaborators such as Kippie Moeketsi and Basil Coetzee. But it is also timeless, like the trance-dance of South Africa’s First People, the |Xam (as another album title of his has it, this is ”music from an ancient well”), and always moving into the future.

For Ibrahim, even in his mid-70s (he turned 74 on October 9) and after a composing and performing career spanning six decades, there is a constant sense of adventure. ”This is the beauty of the genre we’re working in,” he says. ”There’s always the possibility of new discoveries.”

By now Ibrahim’s music has taken in so much, and transformed so much from so many sources into his own unique voice, that it is way beyond jazz as such — though jazz might be the most inclusive music around. Ibrahim’s music is just music, perhaps a music of the spheres. In our talk he quotes the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi: ”There is only one sound. All the rest is echo.”

The Cape Town gala concert at Artscape on November 1 will feature a performance by the Abdullah Ibrahim Trio and solo performances by Abdullah Ibrahim with an opening set by the Cape Town Jazz Orchestra. The Durban concert takes place at the Jazz Centre on the University of KwaZulu-Natal campus on November 5 and 6 at 8pm. The Johannesburg concert takes place at the Wits Great Hall on November 7 at 8pm