Grace Under Pressure
“Could you please hold it a moment?” Abdullah Ibrahim asks, staving off my question. “Just so I can prepare my tea.”
We are sitting in a small conference room at Ibrahim’s Washington, D.C. hotel a day after he’d been honored at the Kennedy Center’s 2019 NEA Jazz Masters tribute concert. A server stands before us, pouring hot water. Ibrahim isn’t brusque in pre-empting me; he doesn’t even seem particularly annoyed. But the 84-year-old South African pianist and composer personifies dignity. He insists on a certain respect, a certain protocol.
“It’s actually very hard to find someone who’s going to work out in his band,” says saxophonist and flutist Cleave Guyton, Jr., who plays with Ibrahim on his new album, The Balance, released in late June by Gearbox Records. “It’s not just about finding a person who can play like Abdullah wants—it’s also about having the right manners. They have to be a serious musician, but they also have to be somebody who has a particular attitude and can be a gentleman.”
It makes sense. Ibrahim—who performed as Dollar Brand into the late 1970s—endured South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime, and his music, a potent compound of jazz and South African influences, became a symbol of resistance to and liberation from apartheid. No less an eminence than Nelson Mandela described Ibrahim as “South Africa’s Mozart.”
Along with dignity comes grace, which anybody who has heard his music surely knows. And they were on display in Ibrahim’s acceptance of the Jazz Masters fellowship. Appearing on the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall stage to a standing ovation, the tall, slender, besuited pianist stood silently for a long moment after the applause had died down.
“Good evening, esteemed
