He is the main star of the 2024 edition of Ravenna Jazz: the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim will be at Alighieri Theatre Today, Thursday 9 May, at 9pm for a concert in solo plan. Tickets: full price from 20 to 30 euros; reduced from 16 to 26.
Ravenna Jazz is organized by Jazz Network in collaboration with the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Ravenna and with the Department of Culture and Landscape of the Emilia-Romagna Region, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and with the patronage of ANCI Emilia-Romagna .
Abdullah Ibrahim
Born in Cape Town in 1934, Abdullah Ibrahim (before his conversion to Islam he had already become famous with the name Dollar Brand) is one of the few African musicians to have achieved a leading role in world jazz. And he is certainly the supreme representative of South African jazz: his debut album (Jazz Epistle Verse 11960) was the first jazz LP made by black artists in that country.
Following the worsening of apartheid and continued government interference in the lives of musicians, Abdullah Ibrahim left South Africa in 1962. He moved to Switzerland, where he found a long-term job at the Club Africana in Zurich. Convinced by Ibrahim’s partner, Duke Ellington attends one of his trio performances. He was so impressed by it that he immediately ‘sponsored’ a recording: Duke Ellington Presents The Dollar Brand Trio (1963). Ellington was right: within a few years Ibrahim’s rise in the world of jazz was very rapid. In 1965 he moved to New York, where he interacted with names of the caliber of Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Billy Higgins, Elvin Jones. On some occasions he even replaces Ellington at the helm of his orchestra.
The Seventies were a decade of intense activity (recordings with Shepp, Cherry, Max Roach stand out). Since then his career has known no pauses or failures: it is difficult to summarize the myriad of significant events (from the septet which Ekaya, to symphony productions). But the most evocative and representative aspect of his art is his solo performance, documented on numerous records and in continuous live activity. It is in this context that his distinctive style fully emerges from the powerful rhythmic definition, sumptuous and iterative, and from the melodic designs of throbbing sweetness, nostalgic, intensely evocative.
And the latest album added to his endless discography (over one hundred titles) is indeed a solo piano: Solotude (2020), which demonstrates how this icon of African jazz is still at his artistic zenith.
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