“I’m a bird, I’m a bird!” I’ve been querying singer and songwriter Zaki Ibrahim about her extended absence from Toronto and this is her mock-defensive response. There’s truth to her assertion, though, as her father — South African radio pioneer and activist Zane Ibrahim — often calls her “Zakbird.” South Africa has been Zaki Ibrahim’s home base for the past few years since leaving Toronto, while she worked on her new and much-anticipated debut album Every Opposite. The album was recorded in eight different locales, utilizing producers from the UK, U.S. and South Africa, as well as Torontonians like Rich Kidd (who produced the low-key head-nodder “Everything”). If the record’s genesis spans geography, the end result inimitably and effortlessly straddles genres. On her two previously released EPs, Ibrahim’s engaging, versatile voice navigated an uplifting fusion of R&B, pop, jazz and electronic music that revelled in defying classification. Every Opposite expands this sonic template while applying the same syncretic yet organic theory.
“Something in the Water,” Every Opposite‘s initial sonic missive issued at the tail end of 2011, casts Ibrahim’s assuring vocals over Toronto producer Alister “DJ Catalist” Johnson’s dissonant and foreboding dubstep terrain. The coolly ambient and self-affirming “Draw the Line,” which opens the album, meshes classic pop sensibilities with vocal arrangements inspired by Khoisan chants. And the Back to the Future-referencing “Flux Capacitor” serves up a pre-emptive strike to those who (like me) may want to inquire about her whereabouts. As a gorgeous acoustic guitar unfurls, Ibrahim opens the track singing “I’ll be late / Trying to find fault in a perfect space.” The chorus refrain “I’m on time” explicitly underlines, if there was any question, her stoic adherence to an internal clock.
It turns out the themes of time and space are recurring and dominant themes undergirding the concept of Every Opposite. In the immediate future, though, those factors dictate that Ibrahim will be back in Toronto to perform songs from the new album (which has just been made available on Bandcamp) at Harbourfront Centre on Canada Day. Ibrahim sees the show as a musical homecoming of sorts. “I was born in Vancouver, but Toronto is where my music was born,” says Ibrahim, speaking on the phone from New York in early May, days before flying back to South Africa. “It was my foundation. It gave me the courage, it gave me the tools that I needed to jump off with this career of music and actually being an artist. It’s a really big deal to come back and have an album to come and share.”
At the time of Ibrahim’s last EP release, 2008’s Eclectica: Episodes in Purple, she seemed poised for a quick breakthrough, ticking off items on the to-do list for success with apparent ease. She had made an impression locally, appearing on the cover of NOW Magazine in 2008 after the magazine had named her the city’s best R&B performer in 2007. The EP’s Afrobeat-tinged house foray “Money,” produced by noted veteran Philadelphia producer and remixer King Britt, went on to garner her a 2009 Juno nomination for Best R&B Recording. She also contributed a song to the soundtrack of Tyler Perry’s film For Colored Girls and opened for Erykah Badu at Massey Hall.
Ibrahim achieved this after moving away from B.C. and her hairstylist past to Toronto. She collaborated with local hip-hop bands and became an integral part of Toronto’s District Six artistic collective, named after the racially integrated area of Cape Town where some of Ibrahim’s family members once lived. It was eventually destroyed by the South African government during the apartheid era. The District Six crew, which counted a pre-stardom K’naan among its affiliates, helped Ibrahim to build momentum for her increasingly crowded and visually captivating live shows. Eclectica was the first release from Ibrahim’s arrangement with Sony Music Canada, with Every Opposite slated to follow months later at the end of 2008, but something didn’t quite feel right to Ibrahim.
“I can’t imagine what [Every Opposite] would have been if I had released at the time right after that EP, you know,” says Ibrahim. “Something in me was like, ‘This isn’t quite there. There’s a lot of things I need to put into this.’ ”
She insists she has nothing bad to say about her major label experience, but admits there were “little signs” that arose when dealing with the presentation of her music to the public. “There were moments when I was like, perhaps we just don’t know how to place it, where to place it, how to market it I guess. Or how to get behind it, because it’s almost like it’s the genre-defying thing, it’s the eclecticness of it, y’know, constantly trying to find [radio] spins. How to really basically place this artist and this kind of music. And I also think a lot of it had to do with my learning how to manage my creative self and how to deal with, how to work with the team. I think it was [a learning experience] for all of the people I worked with and built with and came up with.” After touring the Eclectica EP across North America, Ibrahim was called up by noted Toronto house producer and frequent collaborator Nick Holder, who produced the “Heartbeat” remix on Every Opposite, and asked to accompany him on a tour of South Africa.
“I got to experience a different part of South Africa which was like the house world, the Kwaito world,” says Ibrahim of the slowed-down indigenous house music variant. “It was the first time I had experienced that and the plan at the time was like ‘OK, cool, this has been great. Now I’ve just experienced something that has inspired me in an interesting way,’ and I decided to hang back for a second and hang with my family and figure out what happens next.” While Ibrahim had spent her childhood in various places, such as Paris, Beirut, the U.K. and Nanaimo with her English/Scottish mother, she also logged a significant amount of her youth in South Africa.
She had already returned there for extended periods of time, helping to organize self-expression workshops for young offenders in South African prisons (where some inmates mistakenly thought she was Alicia Keys) and hosting a radio show in Cape Town. Her introduction to the country’s Kwaito scene only heightened her already deep appreciation of the arts in South Africa. Recalling a conversation she had with renowned American house and hip-hop artist DJ Spinna about South Africa’s music scene, she says: “[Spinna] was like, ‘I love South Africa because there’s this raw energy you find there what you don’t find anywhere else in the world .’ There’s a raw energy. People let go and people will scream and cry and take their shoes off to music, you know what I mean? It’s raw.” Inspired, Ibrahim soon began a series of collaborations with South African house producers and DJs during her extended sojourn in the country.
“It was a risk. It was taking a leap,” says Ibrahim. “And to a lot of people, like a lot of my friends and family, it was like, ‘Are you sure? You’ve got this momentum, why would you want to go and change the theory altogether and change the whole plan?’ And it’s like, I definitely went with that feeling of I need to be creatively where it feels best. And I felt I’ve been through that whole business, business, business. There’s the whole thing of infrastructure and how to market and all of that kind of stuff. I just felt like I really needed to flow creatively and that’s what I kind of went and did.”
Ibrahim became involved in South Africa’s house music scene, recording songs such as “Sunrise,” an appropriately celestial collaboration with DJ Kent, which resonated on radio in the country. All the while, however, she continued work to develop the concept around Every Opposite with her main collaborator Tiago Correia-Paulo, a member of Tumi and the Volume, a group she’d help to bring to Toronto to perform while with the District Six collective. According to Ibrahim, Every Opposite is the soundtrack to a screenplay she has written about a futuristic yet dystopian vision of Africa.
“It’s a story that’s told sometime in the future, but it’s told in the past tense,” says Ibrahim. “It’s [set] in 2052 and it’s [the story of] a grandmother talking about [a] revolt, [an] uprising. It’s about the world power versus the free thinkers. The world power operates on a grid. With the cellphones and with the Internet, everyone is on a grid and everyone’s thoughts, what they eat, what they drink and what they say are accounted for. It’s all kind of come down to that reality.” Ibrahim’s main character is a regular housewife, able to navigate this reality because she is capable of astral travel, therefore representing a threat to the world order. “She can gather information from both sides of the story, so basically nothing is really secret, and she’s able to travel to different places people can’t even imagine,” says Ibrahim. “So in a way, the title Every Opposite is like being able to see every opposite of perspectives.”
Ibrahim drew inspiration for the character from sangomas, who she says are similar to witch doctors and traditional healers and specifically applied the story to one of Every Opposite‘s most haunting and affecting tracks. “‘The Do’ on [Every Opposite] is kinda talking about her realizing this gift-and-curse kind of thing,” says Ibrahim. “She has to answer her calling and that’s what happens in real life to sangomas in South Africa. You could be your regular nine-to-five working lawyer going to the clubs on weekends and doing whatever. Once you get your calling, you need to answer it.” I mention to Ibrahim that in some ways the story she’s crafted reminds me of Kindred, the time-shifting novel by the late African-American science fiction author Octavia Butler. While she isn’t familiar with it, she readily acknowledges her story is inspired by others, but also very much informed by personal knowledge and experience.
While Ibrahim’s experience also seems to be informed by perpetual motion, albeit in a much less ominous reality than the concept she’s conceived for Every Opposite, it doesn’t mean she’s forgotten where she’s come from. Ibrahim is quick to point out Toronto artists such as her former backup singer Tanika Charles, Slakah the Beatchild, Ayah and DJs Nana and L’OQenz, among many others, for inspiring her. “I feel like I’ve taken Toronto with me in my travels,” she says, talking about their creative endeavours. “It’s constantly inspiring me to transfer and translate everything that I take in my travels and put it down in the way that I do.”
While she jokingly scoffs at the idea of slowing down in the near future (“Settle down? That’s not in my vocabulary”), when she reflects seriously on the matter, it’s evident she may one day stop to literally smell the flowers. “There’s definitely a kind of constant reminder that I’ve gotta kind of dig my roots in, and there’s that romantic idea of building a house and having a garden,” she says. “Those are successes in life too, y’know. Being able to write music for film — I love that idea — and I love the little bits and pieces that I’ve been able to do and to just spend some time and root myself and grow some plants. Grow a tree or something, and that’s a beautiful inspiring thought as well. So, as much as I’m a bird, I also look forward to that in my life.”
Zaki Ibrahim is playing a free Canada Day show at Harbourfront Centre on July 1 (8 pm).
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Del F. Cowie is an Assistant Editor at Exclaim!, where he writes about hip-hop and rap.
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