The Pianist
Abdullah Ibrahim
World-renowned jazz musician Abdullah Ibrahim, once known as Dollar Brand, has transformed not only the world of music but the people who listen to him, such is the healing power of his work. He returned to South Africa in 1992 after 16 years in exile and speaks of Cape Town as a city of secrets with a depth that has yet to be explored.
There’s a large tract of land in the middle of Cape Town’s CBD, it’s empty but for a few run-down buildings. There isn’t much to see there, in a city where seeing is everything. But District Six holds the memory of one of the most vibrant cultures this city has ever known, hides some of our greatest stories and has nurtured this man, Abdullah Ibrahim, one of South Africa’s greatest musical talents.
Back in Cape Town for a few months before slipping away to play in concert halls all over the world, he’s agreed to a meeting in the old YWCA building in District Six, once a landmark of music, culture and rebellion. The building now houses the Cape Town Jazz Orchestra of which Abdullah is creative director. Another project, M7, the school he founded to teach musicians to be more than practitioners, was the former tenant.
At M7 music is the principal focus but is supported by a holistic mix of body, mind and spirit – movement, menu, martial arts, medicine, meditation and masters – to nurture these students into the realms of healing and transcendence.
He writes Cape Town on a piece of paper, circles it and sits back in his chair. ‘Do you know my song “Knysna Blue”?’ he asks and begins a slow, soft recital of the lyrics. The song tells the story of a local man who has seen the Seven Wonders of the World but has never been to the top of Table Mountain. ‘It’s about what we’ve lost,’ he says and carries on with the song. The man is grieving and is told by a Cape Town mystic to go and wash his tears in the Knysna lagoon. He drives through the night to Knysna and there realises that he will find his healing deep in his love for what is lost. ‘And it’s about what we’re trying to regain. We do not know our own country. We’re in exile still.’
‘Words have many associations,’ he says, perhaps aware that when spoken or written without the accompanying feeling and nuance of music, these words can be misconstrued. ‘The world is made up of the obvious and the hidden,’ he explains. ‘In Cape Town, what we are involved in is 99 percent obvious and one percent hidden.’ It’s an unusual and rather baffling beginning but it is apparent that this is to be a conversation of free association, one that journeys, loops, challenges but if it is allowed will elevate, teach and heal. Much like his music.
‘The San come to work in the garden here,’ he says. ‘I ask them if they like it here, they say: “No, we don’t like the Cape. The people don’t listen to their still voice”. These silent people are supposedly illiterate but they can look at your hand and tell your bloodline, read the sun and the stars and find what is hidden,’ says Abdullah. ‘We are illiterate to ourselves.’
He starts humming and tapping the table, mentions Clyde and Ayre Streets, how he saved to buy sheet music and listened to a friend’s music collection on Sundays. This leads to a few thoughts on our immediate locale, Buitenkant (‘outside’) Street just up the road, so-called because it was literally outside then to the folks in the Castle; Malaysian royalty, ‘some heavy people’ who lived in the area; and the absurdity of calling the Khoikhoi chieftain Autshumao ‘Harry the Strandloper’. These thoughts surface, small, fascinating glimpses into this lost world, but the facts remain hidden.
‘My father’s name was Senzo, which in Sesotho means creator and which means ancestor in Japanese.’ He is talking about the name Senzo he has given his newest work but is also linking his life, this place and its people to a larger story. He has an obvious affinity with the East and has studied the martial arts of the Jokokan school for thirty years. He repeats ‘constant enlightenment on the path to the divine’ often in the conversation and this is their teaching: to keep at it, your work being your best prayer, allowing what follows to evolve organically. Abdullah has recently returned from Kyoto, where he was the first musician ever to be invited to play in a Shinto shrine.
‘I studied with the best teachers in the world right here,’ he says. It isn’t clear whether they are music teachers. They may be but they are likely to have taught the deeper lessons too. ‘These people don’t need or want to be known, they are not about commercialism. You need positive and negative to make light,’ he says. ‘Opposites – the obvious and the hidden. We are ushering in a time when our stories will be told. When what we have been nurturing through the centuries will unfold,’ he says, suggesting that Cape Town may yet come into balance and know more of itself than beachfront property and international ambitions.
‘This place is deep, my dear,’ he says, getting up to fold the Jokokan banner as he ends off what is certainly one of the most delightfully strange yet somehow reassuring opinions of Cape Town. ‘People are not coming here for the seen. Though they may not realise it, they’re connecting to the unseen.’
Listen to Abdullah Ibrahim’s albums CAPE REVISITED and AFRICAN SUITE, among others, available at all good music stores.
Watch the homage to Abdullah Ibrahim A STRUGGLE FOR LOVE,
a film by Ciro Cappellari.
To learn more about the history of District Six, go to the District Six Museum
25A Buitenkant Street
Tel/Fax: 021 466 7200
www.districtsix.co.za
Visit www.abdullahibrahim.com for information on concert dates.