Abdullah Ibrahim

It wasn't easy.

You know, there's this wonderful documentary called Amantla in which the, you know, dollar brand of Abdullah Ibrahim, South African pianist, talks about how apartheid infected everything, all power dynamics, including within the white world.

as well as white and black, and then within the black world of South Africa were infected by apartheid laws, regulations, etc.

What Paul recognized was that, you know, there was no way to avoid it.

Well, doing tributes to the recently departed seems to be something that the Hotbox does quite a lot of these days.

But I certainly won't apologise for this one, the wonderful South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who died this June at the age of 91.

And it was only a couple of years since he last appeared in Ireland, actually.

His love of performance extended well into this year too, I notice.

So let's not only dive into some of the music of Abdullah Ibrahim, but also take in the background of South African jazz, which we probably don't listen to quite enough.

The style that gave him his initial impetus and remained indeed part of his worldwide recognition.

This one is quite elderly, quite a long time ago.

That was called Zimbabwe, his own composition dating from 1983, indeed from an album of the same name.

It's a great pleasure.

But before we go to that, Abdullah, may I suggest we don't forget somebody you were talking, you're going to talk about, somebody from the townships, musician Abdullah Ibrahim.

Of course.

Better known as Dolambrand sometimes, died 15th of June this year from Cape Town, surely the greatest pianist Cape Town ever produced.

And when I say not much, I mean in a particular kind of mainstream sense of what an alternative music scene is.

I do feel that people like Sati Mabea Benjamin, who was a singer, jazz singer, composer, kind of, to some extent, lived in the shadow of her husband, Abdullah Ibrahim.

As much as I don't want to kind of impose that language upon her, but it was quite clear for a long time that she took a back seat to raise their kids and allow Abdullah's career to take off.

And I think there's a clear tradition of that happening.

So Blom Durence was like [guitar playing] very simple guitar, I mean.

[guitar playing] You know, this is the same s- the same music that, uh, Abdullah Ibrahim was, was, was, was drawing on, you know, the famous Cape Jazz.

Yeah.

That's where Alex, that's where Alex was coming from, and then I was taking that back to the guitar and doing it in a very simple way.

Cool.

A guy called Bill Bregan at the time was working at NYU University and gave me the opportunity to sit in some jazz lessons, introduced me to Abdullah Ibrahim, introduced me to Fela Kuti and that kind of music.

So I spent a lot of time looking into African jazz, African music.

and then that's why i said you know i needed to go to ghana yeah because i felt like ghana is the birth of a lot of african music i discovered when so people i fell out to kai life to to nigeria birth afrobeats and then the magic system influence from ghana We used to enjoy Frederick Mayweather's music a lot in Cameroon.