As HKW Director Bonnaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung remarks from the stage, “when Abdullah Ibrahim is in town, he deserves a packed house”, and the audience duly flows into the Miriam Makeba Auditorium well past the advertised start time. Beginning fifteen minutes late, the concert lasts perhaps another ninety without a break, although it feels much shorter. Now 90 years old, Ibrahim largely follows the format of his recent trio album 3, recorded last year at London’s Barbican. Ibrahim, flautist Cleave Guyton and bassist Noah Jackson—the latter members of his group Ekeda—rarely play together as a trio. Rather, the pianist alternates extended solos with duo features, from up-tempo, traditionally-swinging jazz—Guyton playing Monk on piccolo, Jackson playing ‘Giant Steps’ on double-bass—to slower pieces characterised by Bachian counterpoint and timbral combinations reminiscent of the exquisite 1963 duos recorded by Eric Dolphy and Richard Davis. But Ibrahim is the real focus, his playing manifesting what we might call late style: pared down, all ornamentation cleared away.
For decades, Ibrahim’s solo performances have involved long medleys in which fragments of his familiar songbook are linked like flowers in a garland. In the past, these were often driven by propulsive groove. As he gets older and older, the medleys get slower and slower, music stripped back to the bare bones—a blues scale, a Monkian dissonance, a rich, impressionistic chord. As Ibrahim once remarked of Good News From Africa, his superlative 1973 duet with bassist Johnny Dyani, “[when] you play bebop, you fill out a space. When you play our music, you don’t play notes, you just play space!” Without a rhythm section, Ibrahim’s rubato playing unfolds introspectively, in flexible, slow time. Chords, melodies, transitions come together as in a waking dream, in which each phrase has simultaneous fragility and depth. It’s as if the weight of history accumulated in the pianist’s fingers at once lends them the collective power to strike the keys, and weighs them down, so that each note played must be wrested from the accumulated ghosts of time, ageing and history. To play is to “invest in loss”, Ibrahim remarks in a recent interview. One must “strike the note [...] with the utmost sincerity”, because “you don’t expect to get anything in return”.
We might, I think, view all of Ibrahim’s late performances as essentially variations on the same structure. In a 1984 interview with Graham Lock, Ibrahim linked the role of repetition in his music to the Islamic Tariqa, or 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! [...] That’s where the music comes from and its purpose is to put you in that stage[.]” Previously, this could be heard in the repeated, loop-like structures which guided and grounded Ibrahim’s music. But his current mode, a set of repeated ruminations on the same pieces, might too be linked to that state of Tariqa, to the way a prayer follows a set pattern in order to address questions that remain new precisely through repetition, drawing again on that water from an ancient well. Tonight, the beautiful and sombre ‘Blue Bolero’ that emerges as the evening’s theme or leitmotif, a kind of anti-fanfare, as it did overt twenty years ago on African Magic, another trio album recorded at HKW back in 2001, as well as on the more recent Dreamtime. The piece is played three or four times, orientating the music, giving it direction.
Towards the end of the performance, Ibrahim plays the melody to ‘Ubu Suku (Evening)’, a piece first heard on Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio back in 1963, but receiving perhaps its finest rendition in a breath-catching duet version with Archie Shepp the following decade. I’d had the melody in my head all day: one of Ibrahim’s most beautiful pieces, its melodic figures rise and fall, surging into an impassioned sigh met with a lilting, halting left-hand reply. Guyton and Jackson’s arrangement for clarinet and cello gives the piece a chamber-music quality, but it’s the special weight of Ibrahim’s brief solo rendition that sticks in the mind. As the applause rings out, Ibrahim returns once again to ‘Blue Bolero’, then abruptly stands up from keyboard. His wife, Marina Umari, comes on stage to support him as he links arms with the other musicians and the audience rise for a standing ovation. Putting a hand to the side of his head, he sings, unamplified, as he’s done at the end of all his recent concerts, alternating a South African refrain with English words bespeaking the Middle Passage. (On 3, the piece is sub-titled ‘The Sound of Centuries Old Maritime Cargo’.) “When I came back, there was no one there to welcome me home”, he sings, barely audible. With everyone in the room standing, it’s as if we were at church, the music carrying the weight of those apartheid years in which Ibrahim became a kind of national composer, Mandela calling him “our Mozart”, but also of those longer and ongoing imperial histories with which those years are entwined.
I hear a voice from the audience quietly harmonizing behind me, and imagine if the whole hall had raised their voice in anthem. But that would not have been appropriate, for this is about quietness, about ‘solotude’: being alone, but with witnesses. Ibrahim keeps singing as he’s guided off stage, and as he disappears into the shadows and the applause gets louder, I swear I can still hear him singing, and I wonder where his mind has travelled. For this music is not just about one person, but about those legacies which have formed and informed his music, and this song is neither a statement of facile resolution nor fatalistic acceptance, but of a kind of hope that comes out of facing the abyss, plucking a note out of it, a word, a song. I swear I can still hear him singing.
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