The academic Wilfred Mellers wrote that the music of the new world, embodied in its determinedly linear constructions, mirrored western civilisation's impulse to conquer. He also argued that southern Africa's music was much more concerned with its surroundings. Mellers chose a fitting place to air the opinion - the covernote to an Abdullah Ibrahim disc. Ibrahim, Mellers said, was a musician of the old world and the new - and, as such, "on a razor edge between hazard and hope".
Since his arrival in Europe then the US in the 1960s, driven from South Africa by the atrocities of apartheid and at that time known under his pre-Muslim name of Dollar Brand, Ibrahim has become one of his country's most celebrated artists, and has worked with Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. A regular visitor to the UK, he returns to London this week for a concert presenting perhaps the most ambitious reappraisal of his pieces ever attempted.
Ibrahim adopted Islam in 1968, devotes his work to worldwide peace and reconciliation, and believes that his people were privileged to have been chosen to give the world hope by showing the way out of apartheid. He campaigned vociferously for his country's freedom as an artist and ANC member for 30 years. Though Ibrahim is moving in his stately way toward his late 60s, his agenda is probably longer now than it has ever been - as a player, a composer and collaborator. Since his return to South Africa in 1992, he is also increasingly acting as an educator and mobiliser of music projects for his country's youth.
He has no doubts about the improving power of the arts. Growing up in the townships, he recalls: "We read the Bhagavad-Gita, Shakespeare's sonnets, Bernard Shaw, Hegel and Marx. We listened to Herbie Nichols playing jazz piano, absorbed every thing because they all helped to travel beyond the South African experience at that time. They were a springboard. To the world, and to the universe."
It is as an eloquent jazz pianist that Ibrahim is best known, bridging the sounds of the township dance halls and shebeens and the jazz of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. So startlingly did he do this, that Ellington himself put Ibrahim into a recording studio within four days of hearing him in Zurich in 1963. He even gave the South African his orchestra to lead for a series of American dates.
As a composer, Ibrahim has written some of the most vividly beautiful themes to emerge from his culture's special chemistry of African vocalised phrasing, Cape Town multi-ethnicity, European church music and jazz. His music is a wide and slowly winding river evoking the reveries, passions, reminiscences, jubilations and frustrations of South African life, some of it reflecting the pain of the yoke, most of it gloriously soaring beyond. He is one of jazz music's most telling exponents of the art of producing devastating effects from simple materials. His music hides orchestras in single chords; suggestions of heat shimmer and forest chatter in pauses and barely struck notes; drum choirs in sudden bursts of low-register hammering. Ibrahim's mother and grandmother were both musicians for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and echoes of their influence are present to this day. His Cape Town-based son is a pianist and guitarist, his New York-based daughter the rap singer What What - so the line goes on. If Ibrahim admirers ever have an uncharitable thought, it is that his piano playing has grown a shade overmeditative and preoccupied over the past dozen years. So they will be grateful for the rich and vigorous big-band developments of old and new Ibrahim material for this week's gig.
These sumptuous expansions of classics have emerged from Ibrahim's collaboration with the Hamburg-based NDR Big Band. They return exuberance and drive to themes originally boiling with them. But if the shift requires some adjustment of approach for Ibrahim himself, fronting a big-band isn't too unfamiliar. "My first gig in Cape Town in the 1950s was with a big band," he recalls, in a voice as sonorous and rhythmically wayward as his piano playing. "I was straight out of high school. We did all those American swing arrangements - Count Basie, Sy Oliver. Then I was in a band we called the Tuxedo Slickers, because our theme song was Tuxedo Junction. There was such a cross-cultural dynamic then that sometimes you couldn't tell if the band was playing a Basie swing riff or a traditional African one, they were so close. But it took a minute to adjust to working with the NDR. You are immediately into high-energy dynamics. A big band is the vehicle to stomp, and riff and ride." If Ibrahim has become more reflective in recent times, improvisation still fascinates him. He thinks that jazz musicians are probably better cut out to be citizens of the information age than classical players because "as an improvising musician you carry a huge database of possibilities, coded to be accessed at breakneck speed. But that takes a lot of preparation. A young saxophonist apparently asked John Coltrane, 'What books must I use?' Trane said, 'All the books.' " Ibrahim chuckles uproariously. "All the books," he repeats, wonderingly.
"Miles Davis told the jazz composer and writer George Russell he wanted to learn all the chord changes. It's supposed to have made George write The Lydian Chromatic Concept, a big influence on modal jazz. It's a desire to know how to make the music from every perspective, to understand how it works inside out, so that it becomes second nature. Only then can you improvise. Then you can understand coded formulas in the music that guide you to create in your own way, but they've become almost instinctive. They're processes that in classical music could need a long explanation, but in jazz, once you're ready, need no explanation at all."
