On Seeing Abdullah Ibrahim in 2018

Kim Kleinman, Contributing Writer

My most recent contribution to this blog was a recollection of seeing Sonny Rollins perform in 2009. Now I return with a memory, now bittersweet due to his own death this week, of seeing Abdullah Ibrahim in 2018. Rollins was 79, old only until the moment when the band and his own playing lit a spark. Ibrahim was 83 and although ever alert and observant, he was less energetic. But he guided his band with all too brief solo improvisations and then the occasional incisive chord that changed mood and direction, launching the band in a fresh direction.

I remember being mildly disappointed that there wasn’t more piano. I had prepared for the gig by listening to that early trio album presented by none other than Duke Ellington, several of the often solo tribute recordings Ibrahim made honoring Ellington, and the album “Water from an Ancient Well.” Since the tour was initially billed as a reunion of the Jazz Epistles, Ibrahim’s first band with Hugh Masekela, I listened to those foundational sides. Masekela, whom until then I knew solely due to “Grazing in the Grass, a wonderful tune that too quickly became an earworm, had to cancel the tour due to a recurrence of the cancer that killed him three months before I saw his old friend and bandmate.

Instead, Ibrahim soldiered on with his his band, Ekaya, with Freddie Hendrix taking on the trumpet duties.

Ibrahim began the proceedings with a solo rumination before he was joined by Cleave Guyton on flute (otherwise, Guyton primarily played alto saxophone and led the horn section) and bassist Noah Jackson on cello for a piano trio that evoked European Tradition chamber music. With that the other horns—Hendrix’s trumpet, a tenor sax, baritone sax, and trombone—and the drummer joined the fun. Ibrahim had a rich palette that could evoke Ellington, the Jazz Epistles (and their admiration for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers), church, and the townships. Jazz to be sure but also distinctively South African. His countryman musician Nduduzo Makhathini recently evoked the “fugitiveness” of this music forged in America and returning to Africa and its impact on generations of Africans from Ibrahim and Masekela through to him today.

Throughout I wished for much more of Ibrahim’s piano and yet, like his hero Duke Ellington, he was playing his band with gestures and facial expressions as much as a well placed chord. He did take another short solo interlude before being part of the chamber music trio with flute and cello. And then the music existed in memory, one I’m glad to be able to revisit now to honor Abdullah Ibrahim.