A few years ago, a respected South African piano player named Dollar Brand became a convert to Islam, changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim and set out to make his own version of the hajj, the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca. For this artist, it was a much longer journey than most.

Born in Cape Town's notorious slum section, District Six, in 1934, Brand was soon prancing the streets with the "coon carnivals" (vulgar displays of organized black buffoonery), from which he graduated into serious piano studies. After migrating to Johannesburg, where South Africa's best jazz musicians were playing, he toured Europe in the early Sixties, establishing himself as a popular jazz attraction in Germany, France and Scandinavia. Later, Duke Ellington helped him launch a new career in America, where he went on to work with Elvin Jones and Max Roach, among many others. Brand's fluid solo piano style, heard on Manfred Eicher's German Japo recordings, is often pointed to as one of the inspirations for Keith Jarrett's ideas.

Now based in New York, Dollar Brand has emerged as a first-rate composer and bandleader. The Journey is the description of his personal hajj, written as a kind of aural novel. Brand's magical piano figures—rolling like lines of blue hills—maintain their mystical authority under a precise, contemplative horn quartet (Don Cherry, Hamiet Bluiett, Carlos Ward, Talib Rhynie). The listener is carried along and sometimes gets that bluesy feeling—discomfort, grit, peril—about the traveler's hardships as well as his eventual exaltation and sense of completion at the end of the road. To the armchair hajji, this album is like a comfortable hump on the next camel headed East. (RS 286)

STEPHEN DAVIS