WOMAD

Abdullah Ibrahim

From South Africa

A professional musician for almost 50 years, Abdullah Ibrahim is one of the key figures not just in the history of South African jazz but in the development of the music worldwide. Born in Cape Town in 1934, he began to play piano at the age of seven, and in 1960 joined the Jazz Epistles, which also featured Hugh Masekela and trombonist Jonas Gwangwa. This band recorded South Africa?s very first progressive jazz album, a disc that remains a landmark in music.

Ibrahim, then known as Dollar Brand, played across Europe and the US with his own trio in the sixties, and played five shows substituting for Duke Ellington in the great bandleader?s orchestra. (?It was exciting but very scary. I could hardly play,? Ibrahim recalled.) Like Ellington, he has brought together different threads of African and American music to create a body of work that is distinctly his own, clearly South African in its roots but appealing to a global audience.

Ibrahim, who converted to Islam in the late sixties, returned to South Africa in the seventies but was forced out by the 1976 State of Emergency. His exile was to last 14 years. Throughout that time, as Ibrahim said in 1988, his groups ?became like actors interpreting the feelings of the voiceless in South Africa. They have been forced into silence. We report their pain and their courage?.

He returned to South Africa in 1990, his concerts there hailed as the homecoming of ?the people?s champion?. His musical range remains huge, encompassing film scores and, more recently, new scores with a Swiss composer of some of his earlier work but arranged for a 22-piece orchestra with piano soloist. It?s all further proof that there are no boundaries in this music, nowhere to which this peripatetic musician will not travel.