Deam time

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LÉGENDE DU JAZZ! UN DES PLUS BRILLANTS PIANISTES AU MONDE ABDULLAH IBRAHIM. LE DERNIER ALBUM 'DREAM TIME' EN ÉDITION VINYLE. « Beware of Abdullah Ibrahim's left hand, it is magical! » --- LE MONDE ---.Adolph Johannes Brand, born in Cape Town, South Africa, on October 9, 1934: Sotho mother, Bushman father, racist state, slave name. His grandmother plays the harmonium at church. He takes piano lessons at the age of 7. Seventy years later, here he is headlining the Jazz à La Villette festival. Known first under an ironic pseudonym, "Dollar Brand," converted to Abdullah Ibrahim since 1968, he has mingled with the very first circle of great jazz musicians. Duke Ellington? In 1961, just as Dollar Brand has recorded - the first black group to do so - for the South African company Continental, Paul Meyer, the owner of the Discoclub in Geneva, invites him to Switzerland. From 1962 to 1964, he stays in Zurich, with a group where his future wife, Bea Benjamin, performs. She invites Duke Ellington, during an orchestra tour, to discover him. Everything falls into place. Duke has him record, in Paris, Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio. A stunning success. A few months later, in New York, he plays piano for the orchestra during a whole tour on the East Coast. John Tchicai? Don Cherry? Gato Barbieri? Sunny Murray? John Coltrane? Ornette Coleman? Elvin Jones (album in his quartet in 1966)? Archie Shepp (duo recorded in Japan in 1976)? He has been more than their partner. Max Roach? Let's talk straight about a militant duo with high symbolic content. However, it is less his bubbling passion for encounters and confrontations that strikes than his radiance, his spirituality, his unique universal way of putting the life of an African into music. As a composer, one could lazily list his instruments: piano, soprano, bamboo flute, cello, kazoo, voice, gesture, martial arts, or the air he breathes. Flow of the universe, genius of transmission and large ensembles. Whether solo, secretly, in duo (with bassist Johnny Dyani), in trio... He does not resort to martial arts to attack or defend, but to reach that point of non-knowledge that opens him to the understanding of the world. Jazz musicians, the only great philosophers of the century juggling with waves, dance, and the forces of the spirit. At 14, he discovered "jazz," alone. Not necessarily the cream, better: the secret. What could that vocal group where he started, the Streamline Brothers, have sounded like? Where did they play? For what audience? Ah yes! Easy, for the Blacks of Africa. He joins the Tuxedo Slickers (instrumental), the Manhattan Brothers (where he meets Miriam Makeba), and there, sparks trios, sextets (The Jazz Epistles), septets drunk with brass and percussion. An orientation he will never diverge from, especially in solo piano. He treats the keyboard as percussion, rhythmic palimpsest, repetitive formulas, orchestral abundance, formidable left hand, sound masses magnetized by the bouncing of the right hand. In Manhattan, from Carnegie Hall to the Village Vanguard, he haunts all the decisive places. In his country, he founds music schools, advocates, directs the Jazz Composer's Orchestra, organizes the first South African jazz festival, and is expelled in 1976. He is with his partners (trumpeter Hugh Masekela), his compatriot, Chris McGregor - founder of the Brotherhood of Breath, the "brotherhood of breath" - the musical resistance, the honor and promise of South Africa. As usual, at Mandela's release, it is a "white Zulu," Johnny Clegg, a friendly clone of Claude François, who will reap the rewards. Two milestones in Abdullah Ibrahim's career: his Kalahari Liberation Opera, in the early 1980s, and the soundtrack of the film Chocolat, by Claire Denis (1987). Few non-American musicians - Django? Martial Solal? Jo Zawinul? - have managed to integrate at the highest level of jazz, without losing their accent. Critic Michel-Claude Jalard identified in Ellington, Monk, and Cecil Taylor "three apostles of the discontinuous" (Is jazz still possible?, ed. Parenthèses, 1986). We must add Abdullah Ibrahim, master of fluid breaks and other "nuptial destructions"; author of the prodigious solo Senzo (2009) that reconnects with his African Piano (1969): the Köln Concert of the African continent. --- Francis Marmande, LE MONDE ---.The great South African composer and pianist Dollar Brand, better known as Abdullah Ibrahim, is a figure linked to the struggle against apartheid and the history of black music. He draws his inspiration from the multiple identities of his country in his music borrowed from Cape Malay songs, traditional African music, carnival music, Afro-American jazz standards, and religious music. There is not only the land of South Africa in Abdullah Ibrahim's piano. Just as there are not only stories of human madness (murdered father, mother he believes to be his sister, country torn apart by apartheid). For the Cape Town pianist plays life before playing his life. Like the greatest. Ellington in particular, whose path he crosses while his art is still in its infancy and who takes him under his wing. "You are blessed because you come from the source," the Duke will declare, impressed. Since then, Abdullah Ibrahim sings with his fingers. A spiritual song like rarely heard. And if the free storm can arise, the calm of a weightless melody will impose its melancholy. Perhaps that is why a filmmaker like Claire Denis dresses her films in this unique harmonic undertow. -- CITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE, PHILHARMONIE DE PARIS ---.