The English critic and composer Wilfrid Mellers once suggested western musical structures mirrored that civilisation's impulse to appropriate and conquer, while southern Africa's represented harmony with its surroundings.
Mellers chose a fitting place to air such a provocative opinion: the liner notes of a jazz album by South African pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim. Known as Dollar Brand before his conversion to Islam, Ibrahim, according to Mellers, is a musician "on a razor edge between hazard and hope", belonging to both an old world and a new one.
That tension brought a completely new jazz sound, and by the mid-70s the news was spreading widely. Ibrahim, who recorded both unaccompanied and with his own trio under Duke Ellington's wing in the previous decade, began to compose his most enduring themes and perform all over the world. In previous years, when South African jazz was both exhilaratingly and painfully coming of age, most of the world still thought of jazz as an American art form. But when expatriate South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela released Grazing in the Grass in the late-60s, he combined classic pop with infectious South African dance. The song was a huge hit in America, selling 4m copies. Furthermore, it arrived the time of apartheid, when many of South Africa's influential black musicians were in exile in the west. From such a bleak background, a new jazz blossomed – and Ibrahim was one of its most charismatically gifted messengers.
Adolph Johannes Brand was nicknamed "Dollar" in his teens after deals he did to buy jazz records from American sailors. He had worked with Masekela, saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi and others in the pioneering, bop-inspired Jazz Epistles group; the first African jazz band to record an album. The pianist developed his career first in Switzerland, and then, with Duke Ellington's help, in the United States. This new music startled the jazz world by splicing the sounds of township dancehalls and shebeens, African Methodist hymns of Brand's Cape Town childhood, and the American jazz of Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Four days after hearing him in Zurich in 1963, Ellington was so transfixed he gave the unknown South African his orchestra to lead for a series of American dates.
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 – such as The Wedding, performed live at Montreux festival in 1982, with saxophonist Carlos Ward.
The Wedding, Montreux 1982
It's typical of Abdullah's repertoire, a wide and slowly winding river evoking all the reveries, passions, reminiscences, jubilations and frustrations of South African life, some of it reflecting the pain of apartheid, most of it gloriously soaring beyond. He is one of jazz music's most telling exponents of the art of releasing devastating effects from simple material. His music hides orchestras in single chords, implying heat-shimmer and forest-chatter in pauses and barely struck notes, drum-choirs in sudden bursts of low-register percussive hammering.
Now in his late-70s, Ibrahim still performs – more reflectively in recent times, putting a concern for ambiance, space and implication in place of some of the pounding drum-choir clamour and vibrant, song-like harmonies of his earlier work. He has worked extensively in music education in post-apartheid South Africa, and his wonderful melodies have also inspired imaginative big-ensemble interpretation, notably by the late British arranger Steve Gray.
When I asked Ibrahim what was the first music he ever heard, he instantly replied "my heart". Music-lovers around the world have been gratefully endorsing that message for more than 40 years.
