Between my wife, Ruth, and I, our history with the late Abdullah Ibrahim reaches back more than half a century. My wife actually knew of him first when she was a young music student at the University of Cape Town and he was still Adolph “Dollar” Brand. This happened before I had even heard of him or listened to his music – let alone met my wife.
Back then, Ruth had joined a neighbourhood s hotokan -style karate dojo. I wonder, were she and her friends somehow preparing for their defence in revolutionary street fighting that might occur? Or perhaps to be able to protect herself as a young woman when she travelled to and from late university classes or music practice at night? Or maybe it was just an urge to gain the discipline that participation in martial arts training imposes on its students.
As it happened, Dollar Brand was also a dedicated student of karate. His dojo, or karate studio, also instructed in the shotokan style, but we believe his dojo had been led by Cape Town’s master karate teacher, Stan Schmidt.
It turned out those two clubs scheduled challenge matches, and as a result, Ruth first saw Dollar Brand in a karate dojo. In my mind’s eye, when I heard about it, I visualised those matches taking place something like the cinematic “Karate Kid” – challenges between South African karate devotees in different clubs as they competed in one of Japan’s great athletic and spiritual activities.
Back then, my wife also occasionally heard Brand’s music performances in Cape Town. This was as he was still emulating – or re-envisioning and reinterpreting – the styles of his favourite contemporary American jazz greats such as Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington. But just around that time, Brand undertook the consequential step to embrace Islam, and changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim.
New influences
At that point, too, Abdullah Ibrahim began reimagining his music, subtly incorporating the influences of the church music from his early childhood, echoes of the muezzins’ daily calls to prayer in Cape Town, those nearly hypnotic repetitions in Asian music, and other influences and melodies from Southeast Asian musical traditions. He also began incorporating references to the ancient musical influences of the indigenous Khoi and San peoples.
As a result, he forged a musical vocabulary and style that became a special South African genre of jazz, copied, emulated and performed by others, and increasingly appreciated by audiences as one of South Africa’s very own musical languages and voices.
Then, in 1974, his album “Mannenberg” was issued by the Al-Shams (the Sun) arm of Kohinoor Records, led by music entrepreneur Rashid Vally. That record store in downtown Johannesburg had been a sanctuary for the country’s jazz world since the early 1950s, and Abdullah Ibrahim had become a true star.
Abdullah Ebrahim. (Photo: Charles Chillo Slinger / Facebook) Meanwhile, in January 1975, I had just arrived in Johannesburg for my time with the American Consulate General there. I knew very little about South African music and, quite frankly, I had never heard of Abdullah Ibrahim. But early in my first year, one of my South African colleagues invited me to his home for a typical South African institution, the Sunday lunch. (He lived in a neighbourhood zoned for coloured South Africans, close to mining dumps – the toxic waste rock and soil deposited there after any gold ore had been extracted, and so I would also see beyond that diplomatic bubble.)
Mannenberg
As a special gift for coming, my colleague presented me with a copy of Abdullah Ibrahim’s newly released recording, entitled “Mannenberg”. (Mannenberg is the name of one of Cape Town’s working-class coloured neighbourhoods.) The gift came with a stern admonition that I must listen to it to understand the country I was now living in.
I fell under the spell of the complex rhythms and interwoven aural textures of that music in which Abdullah Ibrahim was playing an ever so slightly out of tune, almost honky-tonk piano, together with his musical colleagues, Basil “Mannenberg” Coetzee and Robbie Jansen, who had created a defining moment in South Africa’s musical vocabulary.
A half century later, I still have that vinyl, even though we have subsequently added CD versions of the same album, plus many others of Ibrahim’s oeuvre, to our collection.
Thereafter, for years, I served in assignments in East Asia and in Washington. When we returned to SA in 1989, soon enough, the frozen-in-amber quality of South African politics had begun to break up and it seemed increasingly clear that new things might be possible in our cultural activities.
Early on, we worked overtime to assist the musician, Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse and his band, who were stuck in Britain before trying to go onwards to the US. We arranged to sort out emergency visas for Mabuse and his group to be issued in London (we could still do such things, pre-9/11 or Covid) and then we scrambled to find some funding to cover some of thei…
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