Jazz
Wewantsounds · 11 September 2026
The tape starts with the piano already going. “Don’s Song”, a Cherry composition, opens with Dollar Brand hammering out the theme for all it is worth and the trumpeter coming in afterwards for two separate solos; the second is full of extended notes and those flutters and flurries that belong to nobody else. This was played at the Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen on 14 November 1972, issued in Japan only in 1974 on Trio Records through its Nadja imprint, and until now it had never left the archipelago.
All three men were heading outward that year. Brand, who had converted to Islam in 1968 and was already Abdullah Ibrahim whatever the sleeve says, had Ellington and Monk in his hands and the Cape in everything he wrote; Cherry came out of Ornette Coleman and was deep into collecting music from everywhere; Carlos Ward would go on to spend years alongside the pianist. All three sing, and Cherry and Ward add percussion: this is a record of three people doing everything. “Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro” rests entirely on Brand’s left hand, and from the midpoint of the concert onward the pieces get shorter and fill up with voices, down to “Waya-Wa-Egoli”, “Swazi” and “Wayeah-Wayeah-O”, which end the night almost as a string of songs.
The reissue is Wewantsounds’ (WWSCD125 on CD, WWSLP125 on vinyl) and it is clean work: a new master cut at Colorsound Studio in Paris from the original tapes, the Japanese cover exactly as it was, with photographs by Ib Skovgaard and design by Tamio Maejima, and a booklet with new notes by Jacques Denis in English and French. Lars Vester Petersen made the recording, and the original production is credited to Dollar Brand and As-Shams, the label Rashid Vally opened in Johannesburg and which the pianist himself named with the Arabic word for the sun. Ibrahim died on 15 June this year at ninety-one, three months before this came out: without meaning to, the record lands both as the first international edition of one of his concerts and as a posthumous piece of archive.
What disappoints about a first international edition is that it adds nothing from the concert. Wewantsounds remasters, reproduces the 1974 artwork and running order, and leaves the document exactly where it was, piano already running on the first note and with the abrupt transitions between pieces. For a night that right now exists only here, a 2026 edition could have said whether the Japanese edit was the whole set, whether there were announcements, whether there is unissued tape; it says none of this anywhere, and with the pianist dead since June there is no longer anyone to ask. The recording justifies the entire operation: three musicians from three traditions agreeing with one another without softening any of them, and a left hand that works as the floor for everything happening above it.
Rating: 8.4/10
Text by Aina Torrents