If Nancy Griffith took us back to the early Seventies, this album takes us back to the Fifties. From the name and title I was expecting maybe some kind of Middle-Eastern world music, but Ibrahim is actually a South African jazz musician, a pianist and bandleader by trade.
And although there’s a little bit of a modernist flair to it (traces of funk creep in, for example), this is no Chick Corea electric piano stuff. No, this is very firmly in earlier styles. The opening track, Mandela, is a jaunty bit of swing, while much of the album is slower, very delicate Thelonius Monk kind of free and light. Saxophone and flute soloing prevail, there’s not a lot of Ibrahim’s piano to the front of the tracks except maybe The Wedding.
It’s entirely instrumental, but from the inclusion even of track names like Mandela, or Manenberg Revisited (an alternate name for Cape Town), you can sense there’s an underlying political sentiment. Ibrahim is classed as "mixed race" himself, and took a stand against Apartheid.
As with Griffith, this felt like a delightful palate cleanser from the harsher side of mid-Eighties music, the thrash, the hardcore, the hip-hop, the goth. Sometimes you need a bit of lightness to counter the heaviness; it makes both stand out all the more. And you know what, I was surprised how much I’ve missed jazz and I hope there’s more in the future.
And with that strange mixed bag of music we come to the end of 1986. See you tomorrow for a new year.
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