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Abdullah Ibrahim interview: 'I don't like the word jazz'
An unshakeable self belief: Abdullah Ibrahim Credit: Andy Sheppard/Redferns
Ivan Hewett, Classical Music Critic
14 November 2017 • 7:00am
Ivan Hewett
The stellar career of Abdullah Ibrahim is inextricably entwined with the struggle and eventual victory over apartheid in his native South Africa. Along with his old friend, the trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and a few other talented and brave musicians now mostly forgotten, he created a specifically South African form of jazz, which in the Fifties and Sixties flourished in the townships and is now known worldwide. His best-known piece 'Mannenberg – is where it's happening', named after a black township, became the unofficial anthem of black South Africa, and Ibrahim performed it himself at the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first President of a free democratic South Africa in 1994. Next week, he appears with his long-standing group Ekaya, to revisit the music he created with Masekela and the other members of Jazz Epistles, the first African jazz group to break onto the world stage.
It's an astonishing tale of talent and fortitude winning over the difficulties of living in apartheid South Africa, where Ibrahim was an object of suspicion twice over; for being black, and for working in the supposedly subversive musical idiom of jazz. Surviving it meant acquiring a thick skin and unshakeable self-belief. In his younger days Ibrahim could seem arrogant, even to his allies. Yet now there's a wonderful serenity about Ibrahim, a complete absence of bitterness, which is striking and moving. His large frame, usually clad in a sober black smock, and his frizz of white hair gives him a priest-like air.
Ibrahim is unwilling to bask in old glories, and sidesteps nearly all my attempts to lead him down memory lane. And he doesn't relish my description of him as South Africa's greatest jazz pianist. "I don't like the word jazz," he says. "When people ask me what I think about jazz I always remember what Duke Ellington said when someone asked him the same question. 'I haven't used that word since 1947. It's not a category I want to belong to.'"
Ibrahim in 1994 Credit: Getty
It's a statement that typifies the man. Abdullah Ibrahim has always been a moving target, always shifting between identities and countries. Even his name has transmogrified, to mark a new stage in his life. He was born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town in 1934, and very soon showed a precocious musical gift for music. His grandmother played the piano in the same local church where his mother led the choir. By his late teens he was already a talented pianist, and had acquired a new stage name, Dollar Brand. He was fascinated by American big-band music as well as the church music he was raised in, and the rich meld of indigenous musical styles all around him. Most of all, he was fascinated by the new sounds of bebop, which had percolated through to South African townships via American serviceman stationed in North Africa during the Second World War. "We never regarded the music as foreign," says Ibrahim. "We just thought of it as the music of our brothers and sisters in a different part of the world."
It wasn't just the musical qualities of American jazz that made it so attractive. It was a potent symbol of resistance. "You have to remember that there were all kinds of formulas and codes of conduct that blacks had to adhere to," says Ibrahim. "Life was full of boundaries – we were not allowed to travel to certain places, go in certain sorts of venue. But the worst boundaries were the implicit ones. You were not supposed to think outside of the box, so if you were a musician you were supposed to stick to African styles, and not go beyond them. So my early compositions in a bebop style were greeted with a lot of hostility."
The young Brand and his fellow jazzers often skirted illegality, playing in mixed-race venues which were banned by the regime. When they were invited to play in rich white South African homes they had to eat downstairs with the servants (an indignity recalled in the title of a well-known piece from the Jazz Epistles era, 'Scullery Department').
But as Ibrahim wryly pointed out in a story he told recently on American NPR radio, the habits of improvisation honed by a jazz musician could be invaluable in avoiding the dangers of real life. "I remember there was one year when I was living in one of the few black enclaves left in a rich white area of Cape Town. I woke up on Christmas morning, after a party on New Year's Eve, and it was such a beautiful morning I decided to go for a walk. I enjoyed walking along the tree-lined streets and listening to the turtle doves, and didn't realise I was in an all-white area. I lay down on the pavement to sleep, and when I woke two policemen were standing over me. Of course they thought I was there to rob somebody, so I had to disarm them by wishing them Merry Christmas. They took me away in a van, and when we arrived at the police station they walked away and left the doors of the van open. This was an invitation to run away, so they could shoot me. Instead I ran into the police station, and again wished everyone Happy Christmas. So they let me go."
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In 1959 Brand and a few other musicians formed the Jazz Epistles, and in January 1960 recorded their first album, Jazz Epistles Verse 1. Only 500 copies were produced. Shortly afterwards came the infamous Sharpeville massacre of civilians protesting against the regime's restrictions on travel. Life became even more restrictive for jazz musicians, and soon the Epistles scattered overseas. It was the beginning of decades of semi-exile for Brand, beginning in Zurich, where he won the admiration and support of Duke Ellington, who happened to be performing there. This meeting opened many doors for Brand. In 1965, with his new wife, the singer Sathima Bea, Benjamin Ibrahim moved to New York, where he met the great bebop musicians who until then he had admired from afar. In 1968, on an ultimately abortive attempt to resettle in South Africa, he converted to Islam and took the name Abdullah Ibrahim. After the Soweto student uprising in 1976, Ibrahim joined the ANC (African National Congress), at that time a proscribed organisation. So once again he was forced to leave South Africa and return to New York. "They took away my citizenship and banned my music," he says. "I was totally cut off from my own country."
Bereft of his real homeland during these years of wandering, Ibrahim tried to recreate it in imagination, through such pieces as Mamma and The Wedding. Since apartheid ended he has spent part of each year in South Africa, replenishing those ancient musical roots, and helping to build a solid institutional base for South African musicians. He has set up a production company in South Africa, and a performing arts academy named M7, which teaches across seven disciplines. In 2006, he led the Culture Ministry's project to set up the Cape Town Jazz Orchestra.
Juggling all this with a punishing touring schedule would tax a man half his age. Yet when Ibrahim sits down at the piano he seems to have infinite energy and focus, spinning long improvised pieces that draw on all the many musical traditions he's encountered in his long life. "Music has no time-line," he says. "it is contemporary in the sense that everything is always evolving. We must always renew things, and we must never repeat."
Abdullah Ibrahim and Ekaya appear at the Royal Festival Hall on 14 November as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival 020 3879 9555; efglondonjazzfestival. org.uk
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