Ibrahim’s collection, Eclectica: Episodes in Purple, is a testament to its title (recorded over one year). I would like to make music using everything but the kitchen sink.” “In early adolescence, the same time I’m listening to Whitney Houston and Anita Baker, I’m also listening to Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones. At the same time that her music is danceable soul with traces of Soul to Soul, Eclectica is Cocteau Twins ghostwriting Erykah Badu, with sounds dug up from Tom Waits’s boneyard. She’s of the new school of songstresses, like Georgia Anne Muldrow and Tiombe Lockhart, who use their voices as the raw elements to build sticky beats.Īround the edges are the exposed bones of a Sadé and Floetry framework, but Ibrahim is informed by a much broader and elemental palette of rhythm and heartbeat, a global pulse covered in gauzy layers of synths and ethereal kalimbas and guitars. Using her voice as an instrument, she constructs the skeletons of her tracks with vocals on what Ibrahim calls her “looper” and lets the harmonies create rhythms, scaffolding of pulse and soul uniquely hers. Sometimes there isn’t a word there’s just a sound to describe what you’re trying to say.” “I’m kind of making up my own language, in a way. But passports, borders, and travels don’t begin to describe Zaki Ibrahim or her music.
“I’d describe myself as an explorer of music rooted in hip-hop and jazz with a lot of love for a lot of folk music, just like classic stuff.”Ī Canadian born to a South African father and English/Scottish mother, Ibrahim has lived in Vancouver, Toronto, and South Africa, working with Tumi and The Volume and Bedouin Soundclash. The tune, “Love-Like,” thrusts you into Ibrahim’s dream and she wants you to experience the surreal, awake. A probing horn wanders in, as if misplaced from Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, while an udu burbles over backward snares. ‘Wake up, wake up…’ Zaki Ibrahim’s sinewy vocal intones.
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