Review: Abdullah Ibrahim, The Lantern

He may have needed help with the few perilous steps up to the Lantern’s stage but the 82-year-old Abdullah Ibrahim’s dignity and strength was apparent as he walked over to the Steinway and settled onto the piano stool. Barely registering the warm welcome from the capacity audience he put his battered portfolio of sheet music in place, adjusted his seating position and then began to play. 

As is his way, he then didn’t stop for 70 minutes, each elliptically rendered tune leading into abstracted deconstructions allowing the next to emerge. It’s a remarkable thing to witness and clearly requires the strategic thinking of a marathon runner: the opening fifteen minutes were shaped around a lilting ballad sketched into shape. As the piece deepened harmonically it maintained a deliberate pace, hands alternating in an unobtrusive warming-up routine concealed by the sheer elegance of the improvisation. As ever, Ibrahim’s playing had the limpid clarity of a great classical pianist, as if Dame Myra Hess had discovered jazz. It took a long time for him to relax a straight four-to-the-bar bass and finally erupt with a rich flourish of gospel tinged with rolling South African inflections. When it came he himself looked pleased, as if it had happened to him unawares. Nevertheless a few minutes later he had reverted to a quieter Satie-like deliberation.

And thus, tidally, the music rolled out of him for over an hour, a rich variety of well-judged patchwork that seemed to flow from a man so full of music he can follow it wherever it goes. He played by the rules but with scant regard for the obvious, sometimes raising a smile with an unlikely juxtaposition that, in his hands, worked perfectly. Now and again there’d be a teasing pause, just for a second, that suggested he might be done but each time he was ready with the next part and it was as if he had to get it all in, every style and nuance that he’d learned in a career stretching from the shebeens of Apartheid to the nightclubs of Harlem, from fronting the Ellington band to returning to Nelson Mandela’s South Africa at the President’s request. 

It was all there and it fitted together perfectly in a way that said something important about the man himself. Like many others in the Lantern audience I had seen him perform many times since the 70s when, with Hugh Masakela and others, he was part of an Apartheid diaspora forced from their country because of their race. Over the years I have seen him angry, austere and understandably conflicted to be performing for white audiences in a colonial country. The music has sometimes been grudging, dragged out by the necessity of being on stage. I have never before felt such warmth from Abdullah Ibrahim, felt his joy in what he can do, what he has created and what he so generously shared with us in the Lantern. It suggested a man who is finally finding a well-deserved peace with himself and the world around him and that possibility added a whole extra dimension to the performance. I hope to see him perform again, many times, but if that was my last opportunity it could not have been more satisfying.