IN STRUGGLE,
IN GRACE

Abdullah Ibrahim: Music, Revolution & Prayer

The great Capetown pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (aka Dollar Brand) grew up in apartheid South Africa and has devoted his life to fighting that rank injustice. In this rare in-depth interview, he tells Graham Lock about the role his music plays in the freedom struggle; and talks, too, about his Muslim faith, and his musical loves from Africa to Duke, Monk and free-form.

Part 1: The Cultural Freedom Fighter

JULY 1983. Abdullah Ibrahim stands at his hotel-room window and looks down at the green turf of the nearby Lords cricket ground.

‘Did you see that Australian team?’ he asks. ‘Ray Lindwall, Keith Miller: Oooeee, they were great!’

You saw them here? I ask, puzzled.

‘No, no. In Capetown, in the Fifties. I used to watch the cricket there. I saw Stanley Matthews, too.’ He smiles at the memory of a pleasure long since sacrificed in the fight for that single, elemental right of equality.

It’s a minor irony of fate that Abdullah Ibrahim, one of music’s most eloquent opponents of apartheid, is here in a hotel overlooking Lords in the very week that the MCC are to vote on whether to send a cricket team to South Africa.

The notion that it’s now OK to do so, that the Pretoria regime is taking a more ‘liberal’ stand on apartheid, is dismissed by Ibrahim with a contemptuous snort.

‘It’s a joke, man, a smokescreen. What do they actually mean by liberal changes? They say, OK, they’re going to give limited civil rights to the so-called Coloured people and the so-called Indian people. Blacks are completely excluded! That’s 75, 80 per cent of the population excluded!’

‘And Black people didn’t vote for this situation,’ he chuckles incredulously. ‘So it’s illegal – the South African government is illegal. I never voted for apartheid. I’ve never voted in my life.’

He lowers his tall, wiry frame into an armchair and pours out two cups of his favourite mu tea. My impression is of a man of great dignity, authority and charm. On the drive back from the soundcheck he was affable, full of humorous anecdotes; now, talking about the politics of his native land, his speech is quiet and urgent.

I ask him how he sees the current situation in South Africa.

‘The Nationalist Party are split. Some think they should give these rights, others say that it’s opening up the floodgates. And, really, they’ve created a situation – apartheid – that’s impossible for them to dismantle, so they are politically bankrupt. There’s nothing that the regime can offer the people, except oppression. It’s an instrument of destruction, so it has to be destroyed!’

But how long will that take?

‘Allah says in the Koran, the truth has come and falsehood has vanished. The nature of truth is that it stays, the nature of falsehood is that it leaves.’

He smiles grimly. ‘And the system that regime has created in South Africa must be the most horrendous falsehood ever perpetrated on the human race.’

A Tactical Retreat

The jazz in this story begins with Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five, whose jump-band music crossed the Atlantic in the Forties and found its way to Capetown, where hits like ‘Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie’, ‘Caldonia’ and ‘Is You Or Is You Ain’t My Baby’ were blasted out by the township ice-cream vans.

These vans, with their boisterous selections of Jordan, Tiny Bradshaw, Erskine Hawkins, were a vital source of jazz for the young Abdullah Ibrahim, then Dollar Brand – or, more precisely, Adolph Johannes Brand, born October 1934, son of a Bushman tribeswoman and a Basuto tribesman. The other sources he remembers were the one weekly jazz show on the radio and the musical studies he began at the age of seven, encouraged by a grandmother who played piano at the local AME church.

He began his musical career, thought, in a vocal group, The Streamline Brothers (four men, one woman!) whose repertoire spanned South African traditional songs and American doowop.

‘Our traditional music,’ explains Ibrahim, ‘has the same source as Black American music. The urban music was very close to swing, so it was not like we were playing American music, it was all the same to us. We sang traditional songs, American popular songs, doowop, spirituals…you remember The Deep River Boys?’ He breaks off to sing an impromptu version of ‘It’s Just The Gipsy In My Soul’. ‘Those Streamline Brothers! Oooeee, they could sing!’

Ibrahim moved to piano for his next band, The Tuxedo Slickers; then came a stint with the Willie Max dance band before, at the beginning of the Sixties, he formed his own group, The Jazz Epistles, who included trumpeter Hugh Masekela and altoist Kippie Moeketsi. They were the first Black group in South Africa to record an LP.

What was the government line on jazz then? I ask.

‘The government line is that you must stand in line, whatever it is,’ Ibrahim grunts sarcastically. ‘At that time the Nationalists had just introduced the Group Areas Act. Before, there were still places where people lived and played together and there were mixed audiences. Then the Nationalists separated everybody into what they thought were their rightful social places, so communication broke down. The whole culture broke down.’

Presumably that was one of the reasons you left South Africa in 1962?

Abdullah Ibrahim’s tactical retreat took him to Switzerland, and then around the European club circuit. But it was back in Zurich, in February 1963, that his fiancé Bea Benjamin (now his wife) persuaded an itinerant Duke Ellington to hear him play. Ellington, then a director of Reprise Records, was so impressed that he fixed up some recording dates for the young pianist and supervised them himself.

For Ibrahim, this was a marvellous fillip. Invitations came for him to play at the Antibes Jazz Festival and, in 1965, at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. This took him to the US after an unhappy stay in London, which he now remembers as a time of too little work (‘I think we got three gigs in six months, two pounds ten shillings a time!’ and too much drink (‘Oh, man, that was a foggy time. The fog was inside my head, right? I had a problem then, too much liquid!’).

Ibrahim stayed in the US for three years. He played with the Ellington band for a time; he also became very involved in New York’s radical music scene, playing with pioneers like John Coltrane, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman and Sunny Murray.

Was it not a big jump, I ask, from playing with Ellington to playing with, say, Coltrane or Coleman?

‘Oh no, man. You’ve never heard Ellington play "out"? Wow! Listen to that LP Piano In The Foreground. There’s a track "Summertime", listen to Duke’s piano there – it’s Cecil Taylor!’ He grins at my naivety. ‘They played that stuff long ago, it was just never recorded, except here and there, cause the record companies freaked out when they heard it.’

‘It’s like the French and Charlie Parker. You know that story? When the critics in America were first writing about Charlie Parker, they sent an LP over to the French critics and the French critics sent it back with a message, whoa, this LP’s recorded at the wrong speed. The Americans had to sent it back again with a note – no, man, the guy plays at that speed!’

Free music, he adds, was ‘euphoric to play, but nobody wanted to listen – those were the lean years’. One consequence of this is that his music in the Seventies and Eighties has taken several steps back from the farther edges of free-form. Ibrahim still makes room for improvising but now it’s within a song-structure and nearly always balanced by his gift for spare, graceful melodies. If the more avant-garde fans were disappointed, at least a lot of people are listening now. Another pertinent factor is that Ibrahim’s musical roots predate free-form: John Coltrane was an inspiration, yes, but outside of his African heritage the most evident influences on his music have always been Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, whose songs he has frequently recorded.

Why those two in particular? I ask.

He shrugs philosophically. ‘If you are a so-called European classical player, you have to go through Bach. There’s no way you can handle that music without going through Bach. And if you’re a pianist you have to dig Chopin. That’s Duke and Monk. Monk is an extension of Duke. Duke is the founder and there’s no way to get around it. The music of Ellington, the sound of Ellington, is an institution. Ellington is the sound scientist, and Monk is – purity and clarity.’

‘Max Roach told me this story, right. He was recording with Abbey Lincoln, back in the Sixties when Abbey was a very young singer, and this was one of her first LPs. She was having trouble with a son, trying, and trying to get it right, and Monk was in the studio, just listening. After the fifth or sixth take, he walks over to Abbey and whispers in her ear. And after the session, she says to Max, "Man, you’ve got some weird friends. That Monk!" So Max says, "Why what did he say?" And she says, "He came up and he told me, sing it wrong!"’ Ibrahim bursts into delighted laughter.

‘Monk’s music is beautiful. You can’t get into it or play it without clearing your head. Time! He was into time.’ (He taps out a bop rhythm, then hums a ballad.) ‘See, Monk played other rhythms, too, he played tempos in between. That’s why drummers had problems with him. Like, you come in there and you’re a bebop drummer – pichaw, pichaw, pichaw – but Monk’s got one beat that’s as big as a house – paaaaaaaaaaaah – and then I takes a hundred years before the next beat arrives – paaaaaaaaaaah! So you’ve got all this space in between and drummers didn’t know what the hell to do, they’d get lost in all that space.’

He laughs again. ‘Like, Monk told Ben Riley once, "Just because you’re the drummer doesn’t mean you’ve got the best beat in the band." Monk was something else, man!’

Mannenberg – Is Where It's Happening

In 1968 Abdullah Ibrahim returned to South Africa, and divided the next years between Africa, Europe and the US. While few of his Sixties’ recordings remain in catalogue (notable exceptions are 1965’s The Dream, and Confluence – a 1968 duo with Gato Barbieri, both on Black Lion), his music through the Seventies and Eighties has been well documented and LPs on numerous labels are currently available in the UK.

Despite the maelstrom of New York free-form from which he’d just emerged, the primer influence on Ibrahim’s Seventies music was his return to African roots. Nearly every LP title refers to Africa and many individual tracks are either drawn from traditional sources or deal with specific aspects of South African life, often from an upfront political perspective: ‘Soweto’ and ‘Mannenberg’ honour the townships, ‘Tula Dubula’ anticipates the racists’ downfall, while ‘Hit and Run’ baldly asserts ‘Freedom comes through the barrel of a gun’.

These South African songs are the most dramatic element in Ibrahim’s music. Whether it’s the sombre left-hand rumbles with which he mourns the latest racist outrage or the exuberant, lyrical swing of his township salutes, there’s a direct and deeply emotional quality to his music which can pierce to the heart.

A second vital influence on Ibrahim’s work stems from his conversion to Islam in 1968. On LPs like Good News From Africa and Children of Africa, the calming presence of Muslim devotional music and chants is to the forefront and his music’s most ready spiritual facet – its sense of serenity – is very apparent.

Though these Afro-Islamic aspects predominate, Ibrahim maintained his interest in the US avant-garde. He spent much of 1972 in Copenhagen, playing with Don Cherry and Carlos Ward (with whom he still works regularly), the front of his collaboration being the Third World-Underground LP on Trio. He also recorded a couple of breezy big-band LPs – African Space Programme, The Journey – on which New Music luminaries like Hamiet Bluiett, Enrico Rava and Sonny Fortune shake the house with their blowing.

Ibrahim, too, was extending his resources, added soprano sax and flute to his distinctive piano. In recent years he seems to have drawn all these musical strands together, transmuting the separate elements into a new, darting lyricism that’s all-pervasive on records like Zimbabwe and Ekaya. Perhaps because he’s now based in New York again, Eighties’ LPs like Duke’s Memories, Zimbabwe and the solo African Dawn show the re-emergence of Ellington and Monk as primary influences, both in the use of their tunes and in what sounds to me like Ibrahim’s growing complexity as pianist and composer. His playing is spikier now, the melodies strung with acidic frills: and the swaying grace of ‘Sotho Blue’ or the sheer beautiful rush of ‘For Coltrane No II’ reveal a music that’s deft, airy, yet richly individual.

His most sought-after music, though, dates from the mid-Seventies: the South African recordings like Soweto and the legendary Mannenberg (soon to be distributed in the UK by IMS) are still phenomenally popular. It’s a bitter irony that, at first, no record company would touch Mannenberg.

Mannenberg was actually recorded during a break in a studio session when Ibrahim began playing around on an old upright piano whose honky tonk sound he liked. When no record company wanted to release that particular tape, Ibrahim made some acetates himself and played the disk in a little record shop near the Johannesburg bus terminal. Within a week, he’d sold 5000 copies over the counter and the LP, whose appearance had coincided with the 1976 uprisings became synonymous with the freedom struggle.

Apartheid Horrors

In 1976, Ibrahim organised a South African jazz festival that totally contravened government apartheid regulations. A few days later, he slipped out of the country and he has never been back. He was, he adds, already in trouble with the authorities for refusing to appear on the country’s apartheid TV network – one station for whites, one for Blacks.

‘I’m not interested in those divisions,’ he sighs, ‘but there’s nothing you can do. If you become a commercial success in South Africa, they’re going to try and use you, make you pay homage to the system. The moment you become visible, you have no choice. The system drives you into the arms of the revolution: either that or you stop playing. You leave the country or you stop playing. There’s no other way to deal with it.’

The year 1976, he explains, was a turning point in South African politics.

‘The '76 uprising was so widespread, it swept the whole country. It was then that people began to understand that the end of dialogue had come: over 600 people shot dead, unarmed children…So when we left in '76, the ANC asked us to play a more vocal role and we accepted. Dialogue was finished and it seemed to me that the only solution was that we have to free ourselves through armed struggle.’

You said earlier that you were a cultural freedom fighter. Can you explain that? What do you see as the function of your music in the struggle?

Ibrahim sips his tea thoughtfully, then speaks with a quiet vigour. ‘You see, the regime calls us terrorists. I look at my mother, she doesn’t look like a terrorist to me, a very gentle, very beautiful woman. I look at her, I look at my grandmother, my great grandmother, my great grandfather, I look around and I see my family…you know, Duke Ellington said, "I was raised in the palm of the hand of the very best people in the land – my mother, my father, and love". This is where I come from.’

‘Now the time has come…our president Oliver Tambo said this year that we have run out of cheeks to turn. That the time has come to say that Black people won’t be the only ones to bleed. They call us terrorists, savages, that stereotype. So through the music we can show the gentleness of our people – and not just of our people, but of humanity. And the reality, the beauty of Allah’s creation.’

‘See, you don’t have to read about a people or anything,’ he laughs, ‘just listen to their music and eat their food. Let the racists play their music and we’ll play ours, and you can be the judge.’

Songs of Freedom

The day Abdullah Ibrahim flies out of Britain, the MCC vote against sending a cricket team to South Africa. That night on television, I watch a purple-faced Denis Compton, pro-tour spokesman, splutter that a battle has been lost but the war is just beginning. I remember Abdullah’s words – ‘Our people have been fighting the fascists for centuries’ – and I know Compton is wrong. This war is an ancient war and, despite Compton or Thatcher or Botha or anyone, the war will be won because it must be won if there is to be any hope or dignity or value in living on this planet.

And I remember the first time I heard Abdullah Ibrahim play live, at Bracknell in 1982. On a late summer afternoon, with the festival marquee packed and keen with expectation, Ibrahim and Carlos Ward played some of the most incredibly beautiful and moving music I’ll ever hear. By turns delicate, poignant, austere, the duo slipped from Monk to Ellington to traditional African songs, conjuring a resonance from the simplest tune.

The set closed, a flute motif dancing lightly over the piano’s grave rumbles, and the whole audience leapt to their feet, drained but ecstatic. The applause came like a cloudburst.

Part 2: The Music of No Mind

MARCH 1984. At 3 p.m. precisely I knock on the hotel-room door. To my surprise, someone on the inside knocks back. Bemused, I knock again and the door swings open. I step inside to find Abdullah Ibrahim, grinning from ear to ear, hiding behind the door.

‘Har!’ he exclaims in his guttural, R-rolling accent.

For this meeting I’ve brought along two friends, musician Katy Zeserson and photographer Nick White, both keen Ibrahim fans. Abdullah, too, has a few mates with him and others drop in during the afternoon, plus more journalists and a constant stream of room-service people bringing teas and fruit juices for the visitors.

The resulting interview is very different from our earlier one. Rather than a sombre analysis of South African politics, the talk today is relaxed and expansive, and revolves mostly around Islam, to which Ibrahim became a convert in 1968 (changing his name from Dollar Brand) and which he discusses in engaging manner – like the Muslim equivalent of a Zen master – mixing humour and off-beat anecdotes with the more serious stuff.

We begin by talking about his Camden Jazz Week concert of the previous evening. A planned duo with Max Roach had been cancelled the day before the gig when Roach was taken ill and reedsman Sam Rivers flew in as a last-minute replacement.

Ibrahim and Rivers had not played together before and had little time to rehearse. Was this not a problem? I ask.

Ibrahim frowns for a moment, then smiles. ‘What did Ben Riley ask Monk?’ "Hey Monk, when are we going to rehearse?" Monk said, "Why? You wanna learn how to cheat?"’ He breaks into delighted guffaws, as he will do throughout the afternoon.

You don’t rehearse much? asks Katy, when order is restored.

Hmm. I ask how his conversion to Islam had originally come about.

He smiles. ‘Well, we are all convertible.’

But why you? Why then?

‘I think we cannot really question the when. That is up to the Creator. All things come through grace, there’s nothing you can do about it. We don’t make Muslims, you know, Allah makes Muslims. And when you realise that whatever comes to you comes through grace, then you become tolerant. When we do not understand grace, that is the reason we become intolerant.’

But you wouldn’t be tolerant of, say, the South African government. Isn’t there a difference?

‘That’s right,’ Ibrahim nods. ‘Allah says, it is incumbent on you to speak up against injustice wherever it exists, otherwise you become part of it. Allah says the only reason we have created life and death is to see who among you are more truthful than others. Do you really say what you believe, believe what you say?’

‘Now comes the question of choosing your company. See, the only reason you get in a mess is because of the company you keep. You may say, I don’t feel satisfied with this company, my heart doesn’t feel it, but you also think, if I keep this company I may get some goodies.’ He bursts out laughing. ‘But you don’t get the goodies, you get messed up. So put your trust in your Lord, for on that day when you are confronted with the Creator, you will have no helper and no power of refusal.’

Dealing with Death

Er, yes. I’m feeling a little zonked by this. Luckily, Katy takes over the questioning. Does this trust connect with what you were saying about rehearsal and prayer? she asks. I think a lot of young musicians have the notion that jazz is hard, that you have to practise a lot, but your music sounds so simple.

Ibrahim shrugs. ‘It’s like everything, even your religion, if it becomes a burden to you, then you must leave it alone. When you say young musicians think jazz is difficult to play, maybe it’s got to do with the interpretation of what technique is.’

‘For example, we study martial arts and the traditional training for martial arts is that you take one basic technique and practise only that technique for a year, then you move on to the next technique. So it comes down to trust and it’s what divides the believers from the non-believers: cause if you’re a believer, you’ll know that you have all the time in eternity to finish what you started. It’s when you become a materialist that you have to get it done before you die, so you cram in as much technique as possible.’ He chuckles at the absurdity. ‘Like, "I’m gonna get this down cause I’m gonna be dead".’

‘You have to go through the process of practising the basics but the basic training has nothing to do with perfecting a technique to use that technique. The basic training is to perfect yourself. Traditional training was to train oneself to deal with death. I think really any kind of training teaches you how to die. The Chinese have a saying, the more you sweat in peace the less you bleed in war.’

States of Trance

I’d also like to know, says Katy, to what extent you plan your music. Or does it just arrive at your fingertips?

Ibrahim laughs. ‘Allah says, you plan and I plan, too, and I’m the best of planners.’

‘We have a book for concerts that we play but we don’t play the same every night. You know Japanese Noh theatre? Noh theatre is, like, the eventual state of bringing the mind, body, soul – bop! – together at one point. The Japanese say Mu Shin, No Mind.’

‘Now, the playing of what people term jazz comes from what we call in Islam Tariqa, a state of trance. At home we have chants – you say: "There is no God but He"; say that for five, ten hours, you’ll get stoned! I’ve seen them: one guy thinks he’s a rabbit, one guy climbs up the wall…,’ he hoots with mirth.

‘Traditionally, people would call them mad, you know. People in a trance – you could cut them and there would be no blood. Tariqa! That’s where the music comes from and its purpose is to put you in that stage, where you are Mu Shin, No Mind. A Japanese swordsman said, "Under the sword lifted high, there is Hell to make you tremble, but you go ahead anyway if you are No Mind."’

‘That’s Noh theatre. They can never repeat a movement. That’s Sumi painting, too. They don’t rub it out and do it again, it’s like – ah, ah, ah, finished! Same with the music.’

He frowns for a moment, then adds reflectively, ‘And that’s the war that’s being fought on this planet. Between the normal people and the crazy ones.’

Mind and No Mind, says Katy.

‘Right! And the crazy ones are winning it. There’s no way you can overcome it. That’s what’s happening in Iran, Beirut. People with No Mind. Completely out of their mind. You must be to drive a truck with 2000 lb of explosives into a building.’

‘It’s what happened in Vietnam, too. It’s happening all over the world. And there’s no way you can fight against that kind of war unless you are prepared to do the same thing. Now, if you are worried about your mortgage or how you’re going to die…,’ he chuckles softly.

Ibrahim smiles, his mind on Ellington. ‘Duke says the blues – you know, people are always asking, what is the blues?’ He grins. ‘Man, I read all the books on it. I exhausted the public library and then I said, get me more books! They say, like, "The blues is a flattened third and a flattened seventh and the blue note is a bended note of despair sung by the people in the cotton fields".’ He laughs uproariously. ‘"Then the blues went up the river to Chicago and Kansas City." You know how they talk!’

‘Duke said, "The blues is the accompaniment to a man and a woman going steady. And if neither of them wants to sing the blues, the blues just vamps until they are ready".’ He guffaws again. ‘You know, they asked Duke, how would you like to record with John Coltrane? Duke said, that would be an unmitigated gas.’

Abdullah practically collapses on the floor with laughter. ‘Duke, man,’ he gasps. ‘Oooeee, he was fantastic!’

Home

Ekaya, Abdullah Ibrahim’s new LP, brings us full circle. Named after a southern African word that means ‘home’, Ekaya has for him a special significance which he explains in a poem on the LP sleeve.

And so, after three hundred years, we met again –
Far from our ancestral home -
(Bear in mind/THE CREATOR HAS DESIGNED)
On the autumnal shores of this other continent…
And rebuilt our cosmic dwelling – EKAYA!!!
The spirit of Africa.
Time has only changed the manner of our speech
- The language of our souls remain –

It is here, in the spirit of Africa, that his music has its roots. Shaped by his Islamic faith and by his commitment to the ANC, Ibrahim’s jazz works as a spiritual politics, drawing on the unique power of beauty and gentleness. It is a music alive with paradox and emotion, potent with a magic that battles apartheid like Archie Shepp’s famous cry of ‘Let my notes be bullets!’: a music to and from the heart, that speaks ‘the language of our souls.’

Words by Graham Lock
Transcription by Ani Encheva
Photography by Nick White & Jak Kilby
With special thanks to Tony Herrington at The Wire

Abdullah Ibrahim gives a solo piano performance at Le Guess Who? 2022 on Sunday, 13 November.

Want to read more in-depth music stories like these? Subscribe to The Wire here.