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- 50 great moments in jazz: Abdullah Ibrahim
While apartheid divided a nation, South African jazz artists were exporting a heady mix of harmony, energy and hope
The English critic and composer Wilfrid Mellers once suggested western musical structures mirrored that civilisation's impulse to appropriate and conquer, while southern Africa's represented harmony with its surroundings.
Mellers chose a fitting place to air such a provocative opinion: the liner notes of a jazz album by South African pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim. Known as Dollar Brand before his conversion to Islam, Ibrahim, according to Mellers, is a musician "on a razor edge between hazard and hope", belonging to both an old world and a new one.That tension brought a completely new jazz sound, and by the mid-70s the news was spreading widely. Ibrahim, who recorded both unaccompanied and with his own trio under Duke Ellington's wing in the previous decade, began to compose his most enduring themes and perform all over the world. In previous years, when South African jazz was both exhilaratingly and painfully coming of age, most of the world still thought of jazz as an American art form. But when expatriate South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela released Grazing in the Grass in the late-60s, he combined classic pop with infectious South African dance. The song was a huge hit in America, selling 4m copies. Furthermore, it arrived the time of apartheid, when many of South Africa's influential black musicians were in exile in the west. From such a bleak background, a new jazz blossomed – and Ibrahim was one of its most charismatically gifted messengers.
Adolph Johannes Brand was nicknamed "Dollar" in his teens after deals he did to buy jazz records from American sailors. He had worked with Masekela, saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi and others in the pioneering, bop-inspired Jazz Epistles group; the first African jazz band to record an album. The pianist developed his career first in Switzerland, and then, with Duke Ellington's help, in the United States. This new music startled the jazz world by splicing the sounds of township dancehalls and shebeens, African Methodist hymns of Brand's Cape Town childhood, and the American jazz of Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Four days after hearing him in Zurich in 1963, Ellington was so transfixed he gave the unknown South African his orchestra to lead for a series of American dates.
Ibrahim has written some of the most vividly beautiful themes to emerge from his culture's special chemistry of African vocalised phrasing, Cape Town multi-ethnicity, European church music and jazz – such as The Wedding, performed live at Montreux festival in 1982, with saxophonist Carlos Ward.
The Wedding, Montreux 1982
It's typical of Abdullah's repertoire, a wide and slowly winding river evoking all the reveries, passions, reminiscences, jubilations and frustrations of South African life, some of it reflecting the pain of apartheid, most of it gloriously soaring beyond. He is one of jazz music's most telling exponents of the art of releasing devastating effects from simple material. His music hides orchestras in single chords, implying heat-shimmer and forest-chatter in pauses and barely struck notes, drum-choirs in sudden bursts of low-register percussive hammering.
Now in his late-70s, Ibrahim still performs – more reflectively in recent times, putting a concern for ambiance, space and implication in place of some of the pounding drum-choir clamour and vibrant, song-like harmonies of his earlier work. He has worked extensively in music education in post-apartheid South Africa, and his wonderful melodies have also inspired imaginative big-ensemble interpretation, notably by the late British arranger Steve Gray.When I asked Ibrahim what was the first music he ever heard, he instantly replied "my heart". Music-lovers around the world have been gratefully endorsing that message for more than 40 years.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Lunice – Freaky
The master of food preparation-based dance moves turns his attention to juddering cut'n'paste electro. Go wild with your burger-flipping hand!
Canadian producer and turbo crunk aficionado Lunice is known mainly for two things: remixing Deerhunter (alongside Diplo), Kanye and the xx, and dancing to Lil B's All I Know in a manner that suggests he's flipping burgers and stirring soup. While wearing a backpack. When he's got a spare minute he also makes brilliant cut'n'paste electro-rap like Freaky, complete with strangely filtered beats, juddering vocal snatches and giant synth claps. Particularly brilliant is the moment at 2:56 when he messes with the pitch of the beat and adds some echo. Frankly, if you're not performing some food preparation-based dance moves then there's nothing we can do for you.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Pyongyang goes pop: A spy reviews Lethal Bizzle
North Korean radio consists largely of revolutionary anthems about being a diligent farmer. So what happened when our writer introduced Gallows, Lethal Bizzle and Coldplay to a local?
On my first trip to North Korea in 2009 I asked my state-sanctioned guide (and very likely government spy) what the most popular song on the North Korea airwaves was at that moment. Mr Lee – a lithe, boyish gentleman with a clean-split centre-parting – sighed and told me it was a heroic ballad about being a diligent farmer. In the North they can't get enough radio – every kitchen is fitted with one that can't be switched off. It's a government order, so from morning to night citizens must enjoy revolutionary hits and paeans celebrating the multifarious talents of Kim Jong Il (lest anyone forget). So even though Mr Lee may have secretly be craving South Korea's Girl's Generation, he and millions of others are forced to stick with what their leader gives them: boring revolutionary anthems about being a good socialist. But as more outside materials sneak under the radar, the tension between Kim's socialist utopia and the real world is increasing.
Earlier in the morning Mr Lee had been sitting on the tour bus ferrying us around Pyongyang, avidly reading a copy of the New Yorker that a tourist had given him the week before. The issue featured a story about an author's drunken homosexual awakening that had taken place on board a night train. Mr Lee read it with much curiosity. Clearly he wanted to know more about the world than just diligent farmers.
Pop music in North Korea hasn't always been this boring – during the economic glory days of the 1970s and 80s, when the socialist North were well ahead of their southern neighbours, Kim Il Sung loosened the rules on what kind of entertainment could fly with the people. That all changed after the song Whistle caused so much popular frenzy that the state reclassified it as dangerous material and repressed it, returning airplay rights exclusively to the diligent farmers and their ilk. All this despite the song in question being about as provocative to western minds as a kitten doing a cute sneeze.
To indulge Mr Lee's urge for outside culture and indeed my own curiosity as to his response, I showed him how to use my iPod. He embraced the challenge with enthusiasm. His first choice was unexpected – UK thrash urchins Gallows. Yet my surprise probably did not outweigh his as he went through what was evidently his first guitar thrash experience. The pained look on his face belied his polite disapproval of the sounds in his ears and he moved on swiftly. After a few more minutes of wheel-click browsing, he told me quite assertively that "Lethal Bizzle would not suit the Korean people" as it "has no proper melody". Yet he warmed right up to Coldplay and listened to one of their albums from start to finish, further widening the sample that proves Chris Martin's gang produce music so damningly average and inoffensive it can even pacify citizens living under a fear-inducing totalitarian regime.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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