kagablog

SHAUN DE WAAL

Anyone who has seen Abdullah Ibrahim perform live and solo will attest that it is a very intense, even spiritual experience.

He will play without interruption for hours, blending a plethora of compositions into one long continuous suite, driven by the ostinati produced by his left hand, while different, shifting melodies or further rhythmic patterns weave in and out of a seamless fabric that implicitly has no beginning or end.

It was fellow pianist Cecil Taylor who described the instrument as “88 tuned drums”, but it is Ibrahim’s playing that really makes that description come alive. It’s not hard to see the ancestry of Africa’s overlapping polyrhythms translated into Ibrahim’s pianistic style. Appropriately, an early live recording (of a solo concert in Copenhagen in 1969) was called African Piano, and many other releases of his put Africa upfront in their titles — Anatomy of a South African Village, African Space Program, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Echoes of Africa, Ancient Africa …

Ibrahim is about to release his first solo-piano album in at least a decade, and he is touring South Africa to support it (not alone, however, but with his trio, the other two members of which are New Yorkers Belden Bullock on bass and George Gray on drums). The album is called Senzo (Gallo), and the reference is to the Japanese word for “ancestor”, as well as being Ibrahim’s father’s Sotho name, he told me on the phone from New York.

“The idea of this CD, playing extended performances without a break,” he says, “is to try to recreate a spirit of trance-dance storytelling.”

This relates to Ibrahim’s interest in African cultures where dance and storytelling are not just forms of entertainment but have communal spiritual meanings. He is a kind of shaman, communicating with ancestors from all over the continent (and the planet), channelling for them through his music. Healing runs in his family, as well as a strong church influence, and then there is his own 40-year engagement with Eastern martial arts — “Nothing to do with fighting,” he notes with a chuckle.

Senzo is a somewhat different proposition to Ibrahim’s previous solo-piano albums. Instead of the driving ostinato pattern holding it together, and the sense of an intensity, the music on Senzo is meditative and glancing, almost more a form of calligraphy than any other art form. A series of lightly shaped fragments arise and then, almost before their identities have emerged, fade and merge into the next piece. The feeling is of a mind playing upon memory, finding pieces of reminiscence, holding them up to the light and then moving to the next one. If the earlier solo performances were like thunder rolling across mountain tops, Senzo is more like sunlight sparkling through a dancing shower of rain.

Ibrahim’s live concerts in South Africa in November will incorporate his solo excursions into the trio structure. He has worked in many formats, from a duo (his famous albums with Johnny Dyani in the 1970s) to trios, bigger bands such as the seven-piece Ekhaya or the WDR Big Band in Cologne, all the way up to large symphony orchestras.

In the meantime, what we will hear in November offers Ibrahim an improvisatory freedom that is as close to an entirely solitary performance as he could come without actually leaving the New Yorkers at home.

this article first appeared on the mail & guardian website