Local jazz veterans appearing at this year’s Cape Town International Jazz Festival reflect on the city’s vibrant musical heritage, writes Gwen Ansell.
There is an unsung Cape Town song in the countless devout, talented, piano-playing ladies who reared and inspired the city’s jazz pianists.
Abdullah Ibrahim’s grandmother played piano for one of the first South African outposts of the African Episcopal Methodist Church. And for veteran Ibrahim Khalil Shihab: “My mother composed and played piano in church. She was doing that even when she was pregnant with me. So I suppose,” he shrugs and spreads his long hands, “I was born with the music.”
Some years after that, the teenager then called Chris Schilder (he converted to Islam in 1975) was “stealing with my eyes”, watching a schoolmate who played boogie-woogie, then rushing home to try out those memorised chords on the parlour piano. By 14, he was playing at the Normandy nightclub in Rondebosch, dashing off the difficult changes of All the Things You Are in response to a patron’s challenge purely from memory. “He gave me a huge tip,” Shihab chuckles.
By the mid-1970s, he was composing the songs that helped Pacific Express to win its reputation as the country’s most adventurous fusion band, including the award-winning Give a Little Love.
That song was originally written for a female vocalist working with the band. “I always start with the melody, then find words to fit. On that one, I was trying to sing in a woman’s high register as I composed. But then Zayn [Adams] said: ‘Let me try it.’ And voom! It worked.”
He has heady memories of those intense times. “We didn’t mix much with nonmusicians. We’d go to somebody’s parlour and jam … [guitarist] Issy Ariefdien, [vocalist] Zayn Adams, [drummer] Jack Momple and [bassist] Paul Abrahams were the nucleus of the band and they were all so talented, we could just feed off one another’s ideas.” That collaboration intensified when reedman Robbie Jansen joined.
But this was apartheid South Africa. Despite audience support, steady work was scarce as racial zoning made venues increasingly hard to sustain. Shihab was composing in a single room, crammed with piano, cot, baby and, spouse Raqiba wryly adds, “a wife trying to sweep in between”.
Eventually, Shihab found work elsewhere, with long stints as a hotel pianist in Mmabatho in North West and, later, similar commercial gigs in the Middle and Far East.
Full story in Mail & Guardian
