Distinguished pianist Abdullah Ibrahim doing what he does best

South Africa’s most distinguished pianist, Abdullah Ibrahim, presented two solo piano concerts at the Artscape Theatre at the weekend.

The highly anticipated programme showcased Ibrahim’s compositions spanning the past seventy years, influenced by people, places and events that have impacted his life and career.

Ibrahim is a world-respected master musician, was born in 1934 in Cape Town and baptized Adolph Johannes Brand.

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SOURCED FOOTAGE FROM PREVIOUS, UNRELATED CONCERT

His early musical memories were of traditional African Khoi-san songs and the Christian hymns, gospel tunes and spirituals that he heard from his grandmother, who was pianist for the local African Methodist Episcopalian church, and his mother, who led the choir.

The Cape Town of his childhood was a melting-pot of cultural influences, and the young Dollar Brand, as he became known, was exposed to American jazz, township jive, CapeMalay music, as well as to classical music.

Out of this blend of the secular and the religious, the traditional and the modern, developed the distinctive style, harmonies and musical vocabulary that are inimitably his own.

After the notorious Sharpeville massacre of 1960, mixed-race bands and audiences were defying the increasingly strict apartheid laws, and jazz symbolized resistance, so the government closed a number of clubs and harassed the musicians.

Some members of the Jazz Epistles went to England with the musical King Kong and stayed in exile.

These were difficult times in which to sustain musical development in South Africa. In 1962, with Nelson Mandela imprisoned and the ANC banned, Dollar Brand and Sathima Bea Benjamin left the country.