Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) - The Dream (1979 Japanese Trio Records Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: VG+
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: None

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Dollar Brand - The Dream | Vinyl LP - 1979 Japanese Trio Records / Freedom Original (PA-9736, Giants of Jazz 1500 Series)

By January 1965 Dollar Brand had already lived three lives in jazz. He had been the pianist on the first significant South African jazz album, Jazz Epistle Verse 1, recorded in Johannesburg in 1959 with Hugh Masekela, Kippie Moeketsi and Jonas Gwangwa. He had left South Africa with his wife Sathima Bea Benjamin in 1962 to escape the tightening apartheid restrictions on mixed-race performance, and reassembled the trio with Gertze and Ntshoko in Zurich. He had been heard there by Duke Ellington, who in February 1963 produced the trio's first studio album in Paris and effectively launched his European career. The Copenhagen Montmartre date captures the trio at full stride. Brand's piano language at this point draws openly on Ellington and Monk, but the Cape Jazz vocabulary that would define his later work is already present in the rhythmic phrasing of "The Stride" and the lyrical melody of "Tintinyana". Gertze and Ntshoko are unobtrusive, supple, and locked into the leader's sense of space.

The 30 January 1965 concert was recorded by Jazzhus Montmartre's house engineer Birger Svan and the tapes were then carved up across multiple labels in the years that followed. Fontana's Anatomy of a South African Village used part of the evening for a 1965 LP. The remainder sat unreleased for fourteen years until Alan Bates' Freedom Records licensed the material and gathered these six pieces under the title The Dream. Bates' UK Freedom label and Trio Records in Japan released sister pressings in 1979 — this is the Japanese Trio copy, sequenced into their Giants of Jazz 1500 series alongside other licensed material from the Freedom and Black Lion catalogue. Brand was already three years into his life as Abdullah Ibrahim by the time this came out, but the sleeve retained his earlier name for continuity with the 1965 recording credits.