Mannenberg

By Abdullah Ibrahim's own recollection, Mannenberg was recorded in one take. In June 1974, on one of his brief visits home from exile, Ibrahim, who still released records under his former name Dollar Brand, was in a Cape Town studio with producer Rashid Vally and a band assembled by saxophonist Basil Coetzee. After days of working through written material, Ibrahim began improvising at the piano and gradually drew the others in. Thumbtacks on the piano hammers gave it the metallic ring of marabi, and Coetzee's saxophone solo earned him a lifelong nickname: Manenberg. The title pointed at something painful. At the time, the government was forcibly removing Coloured families from District Six, and Manenberg, the township where Coetzee lived, stood for those removals. Ibrahim later explained that to the band it symbolised the removal of everybody from everywhere, and that the piece affirmed their own culture was valid. There are no lyrics. Instead the music folds marabi, the ticky-draai beat and langarm dance-band melody into jazz, so that it sounded familiar to listeners across Black and Coloured communities. Vally played it through loudspeakers outside his Johannesburg record shop before the album was even out, and sold 5,000 copies in the first week. Released on Mannenberg: Is Where It's Happening, it became an instant hit. Later, as Coetzee and Robbie Jansen played it at rallies against the government, it became one of the most popular songs of the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s. A wordless improvisation ended up saying what could not be said out loud, and it remains a landmark of Cape jazz.