African piano

Description

What a piece of music seeks to convey can sometimes prove so strong and essential that the quality of the recording becomes secondary. Recorded in 1969 informally amid the bustle of the famous Copenhagen club, the Jazzhus Montmartre, this album clearly belongs more to the category of great documents than to that of high-fidelity recordings, but the communicative power of Abdulah Ibrahim’s music is so strong that it transcends these technical shortcomings. The listener is literally carried along by the flow of his piano, driven by hypnotic rhythmic figures, revisiting the entire history of jazz from his perspective as a South African musician, letting emerge in his phrasing echoes of township songs as well as the strong influence of Monk and Duke Ellington. African Piano is an essential album that has lost none of its fascination.