LARRY SCHWARTZ
MORE THAN 20 years after Abdullah Ibrahim visited Australia, the veteran jazzman talks of the response by some Aboriginal elders to photographic slides he had shown of the indigenous Khoi and San peoples of southern Africa.
“They wanted to know where these people are because (they said) these were the old, old people from the Dreamtime,” Ibrahim says. “There is an interconnectedness.”
In three decades since he first left South Africa, Ibrahim has endured two lengthy periods of self-imposed exile, in the 1960s and late ’70s to early ’90s. “In exile you deal with dreams,” he says. “You dream that you are at home and you wake up, stunned, to reality. It’s very traumatic.
“But again, going into exile meant some kind of serenity because we were like first generation composer-improvisers in the South African genre. We didn’t have the other points of reference. Like in jazz music, you have reference from Jelly Roll Morton up through (Thelonius) Monk and
Ellington. We had to create our own vocabulary and that takes time.”
Ibrahim is of a generation that includes the late saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi who discovered him playing piano in a cinema in the Cape Town suburb. Called District Six, it was later razed by authorities. With trumpeter Hugh Masekela, they formed the Jazz Epistles, melding African folk
tunes and township music with influences including Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus.
“We felt that we had something as valid as anywhere else,” Ibrahim says, “or any other people.”
The last time I heard his subdued voice, he was singing a song for his (and my own) native Cape Town, in a small waterfront venue in that city. That was months before South Africa’s first democratic election in April 1994. “It’s unbelievable what happened there overnight,” he says, and talks
of “the horror, the horror of apartheid”.
Among the best known returnees, he now has a home in a southern suburb of Cape Town, as well as the apartment he and his wife – singer Sathima Bea Benjamin – have kept in New York’s famous Chelsea Hotel.
More than any other musician, Ibrahim’s music takes so many of us expatriates home.
Now he’s on the end of the line in some hotel room in Berlin, en route to Australia, and he is clearly most articulate, and comfortable, speaking through his music. “Well we have a song called The Mountain,” he says, when asked about the impact of Table Mountain, after a lengthy absence.
“Everything I have experienced has been captured in that song.”
The way he explains it, “those memories of Cape Town and the experiences are actually captured in my compositions. So playing the compositions I relive those moments.”
We talk about post-apartheid South Africa. “There’s a lot of hard work to be done,” says Ibrahim, who has founded a cultural academy for disadvantaged South African primary school children. “But people have committed themselves.”
I tell him I was struck on a recent visit by the faith Nelson Mandela and other captives on the prison island outside Cape Town must have had in a future unfettered by segregation. “This is the key to our existence,” says Ibrahim, who converted to Islam in the late 1960s. “The faith.”
HE WAS born Adolphus Johannes Brand in October 1934. Until his conversion, he was known as Dollar Brand, a nickname that alluded to his passion for music by the likes of old 78s brought ashore by American seamen.
As a child, he’d encountered music along with religion in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where his grandmother played piano.
But there were other influences. “My great-grandfather knew everything about herbs and was a healer. My grandmother’s people were (indigenous) Khoi, San, Nama. My father’s Sotho. We were all victims of apartheid. So we never fully experienced that cultural dynamic. But now we can.”
Ibrahim plays keyboards, synthesiser, saxophone and flute. He is visiting Australia to perform at the Boite 2001 Winter Festival and will be backed by American bassist Beldon Bullock and drummer Sipho Kunene, who went into exile with his family when he was four.
Ibrahim is not sure which of his pieces they might perform tonight. “For us, the dynamic changes,” he says, the comment reflecting not just music but uncertain times in which he has endured.
The Age. Friday 20th of July 2001
Larry Schwartz Writer 