Jazz legend Abdullah Ibrahim waited at the piano, listening intently, while his bandmates, Cleave Guyton on flute and Noah Jackson on bass, finished a quietly acrobatic rendering of a Duke Ellington classic that was also a nod to Ibrahim’s past. Guyton and Jackson finished, and left the stage. Then Ibrahim began, slowly, deliberately, with exquisite touch and gorgeous dynamic control, the product of decades of playing. He took his time working through his theme, and as the large audience at the Shubert Tuesday was struck silent, seemed to stop time itself.
Ibrahim’s performance — organized jointly between the Shubert and the Schwarzman Center — was part of a string of performances carrying the venerable College Street theater through the end of the year.
On Nov. 13 the Shubert will host a screening of Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse with a live score by a full orchestra, a DJ, and electronic instrumentalists. The Broadway smash Dear Evan Hansen runs Nov. 22 to Nov. 24. Nov. 30 features an evening of dance and storytelling exploring the history of identity of the central African nation of Chad. On Dec. 5, the Irish-inspired Christmas concert Fairytale of New York comes to town, followed by a run of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol on Dec. 7 and 8. Finally, from Dec. 13 to Dec. 15 the New Haven Ballet returns with a full-length production of The Nutcracker.
The Shubert also closes out 2024 by finishing a modification to the theater that was first proposed at the Shubert’s centennial, a decade ago: to create an additional, smaller performance space inside the theater building. The Shubert staff set its sights on a space on the second floor, used to hold gatherings before shows. That renovation was part of a much larger plan to revamp the theater’s heating and air conditioning system, its lighting and sound system, and other building improvements, including making the theater more energy efficient and repointing some of the theater’s original exterior walls from 1914.
“These things have all been in the planning stages for a very long time,” said Anthony Lupinacci, the Shubert’s director of advertising and community relations.
At the end of last year the Shubert secured nearly $5 million in state funds, and renovations were underway. “Now we have an enclosed space that we can use for smaller performances,” said Lupinacci. In addition, “it can be used by community groups if they need a rehearsal space. It can be used by businesses in the area for business meetings,” or “office holiday parties.” U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro rented it for her election night campaign party. It can also be used as a lobby for bigger shows.
“One of the main points was to make it affordable for community artists to be able to come in, do a show, and succeed,” said Matt Terzigni, the Shubert’s director of operations, who has overseen the renovations. Depending on arrangements in the space that range from cabaret to various theater-seating and stage configurations, the space can seat between 65 and 110 people. “It was made to be acoustically sound so that the room itself will sound live without much amplification,” Terzigni said. “A lot of thought went into the acoustics of the room.”
Construction will be complete by the end of December. In January the space already has three rentals booked. One is for a new musical written about the Amistad. Another rental is for a set of monologues; another is for a jazz trio. “Once we started to get the word out to people, more and more people wanted to do stuff” in the space.
The Shubert itself also has plans for the space. It aims to book more jazz, country, and smaller theater acts, some of which will play there. “We’ve looked at doing things multiple nights” as well, said Terzigni. It also wants to host events, like paint and sips or trivia nights, “to bring more people into the building,” Terzigni said.
“It goes along with why the Shubert was reopened in the early ’80s,” said Lupinacci, as part of a greater plan for downtown revitalization. “If you ask any restaurant in the area, they’ll tell you that when we’re busy, they’re busy.” These days, on Friday nights, when both the Shubert and College Street have shows, “this downtown is activated more than I’ve ever seen it,” Lupinacci said. Smaller events on weeknights, Lupinacci hopes, will bring similar effects.
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On Tuesday night, the effect was nothing short of hypnotic, as Abdullah Ibrahim on piano, Cleave Guyton on flute, piccolo, and saxophone, and Noah Jackson on bass and cello worked through an evening of music that gave a rapt audience jazz at its most sparse and, in many ways, most meaningful.
As his bio relates, Ibrahim’s “distinctive sound and musical vocabulary” is both of a “blend of the secular and religious” from South Africa and the United States: “African traditional music, Christian hymns, gospel tunes and spirituals, as well as American jazz, township and classical music.” Born in 1934, he began playing piano as a child in Cape Town and was playing professionally by the time he was 15 and formed his own trio, Dollar Brand, in 1958 to play his own compositions. The following year found him in the Jazz Epistles septet in Johannesburg, alongside South African jazz legend Hugh Masekela.
He left South Africa in 1960 to escape apartheid, setting off a career as a gifted pianist and outspoken critic of South Africa’s regime that spanned Europe and the United States and involved music with a roster of jazz giants: John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Duke Ellington, Don Cherry, and Ornette Coleman, among others.
When apartheid ended, he returned to South Africa and played at Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration in 1994. He has recorded over 100 albums and written over 300 compositions; his latest release, Solotude, came out in 2021; All About Jazz praised it for its “aching sense of seclusion and repose.… The meditative strength of this outing is born of one who recognizes martial arts, medicine and movement as key elements. Ibrahim offers his symphonic poems to us here with quiet reverence. Who could refuse such a gift?”
Such a gift was offered in the Shubert on Tuesday. During Ibrahim’s first beautifully sparse solo excursion, Guyton and Jackson returned to the stage, but waited for a signal from Ibrahim. The musical handoff was seamless, with Ibrahim letting his bandmates run with it. Guyton fluttered with the theme on flute, while Jackson was off like a shot on bass. Ibrahim let some ghostly passages waft through as Jackson charged beneath him. Then flute and piano returned with a flourish, a signal for another beautifully pensive solo piece from Ibrahim.
This started off hymnlike, until the harmonies curled into greater complexity without losing an ounce of their direct emotionality. Ibrahim transformed his figures and arrived in a different, no less beautiful place, setting up Guyton and Jackson again to return with an easy swing. Jackson’s bass solo was full of humor; then he moved to cello, and he and Guyton proceeded through a sweet duet of deceptive complexity.
Ibrahim’s next solo outing filled the Shubert’s vast space somehow with both sound and silence, in gestures full of bold phrases and sharp note choices. Pedaling a bass note with his left hand, he let his right hand do much of the talking, and let out a few audible exclamations, as if in conversation with ideas from somewhere else, as his right hand unfurled fractured, tight melodies. It came to a surprising, and entirely earned, resolution, a long journey home.
For the last piece of the program, the three musicians finally played together, a rich moment. It made the audience demand an encore, which they delivered. Ibrahim executed his most muscular playing yet. Guyton and Jackson joined him for the second half of this piece, and in a sense took over. They ended on an interval of ambiguity. Ibrahim listened, and played exactly one note, the one that solved the ambiguity, and the only one that was needed.
Original article written by Brian Slattery on New Haven Independent