Introducing Aziz Ibrahim 

Aziz Ibrahim is a guitarist whose career has taken him both into the heart of Manchester’s multicultural traditions, and on international performing and discovery tours, most famously with Simply Red and the Manchester alt-rock band Stone Roses. In his current work he is enthusiastically exploring the world of broadcasting. 

Background and identity 

Aziz was born in Longsight, Manchester to parents who had themselves been born in India, but who became Pakistani citizens after Partition. He feels that his identity is shaped by development, rather than categories. 

“I don’t believe an identity is given to me in a Bento box to select from… I think a lot of people, migrants, we understand improvisation, so as an artist I understand improvisation, but as a migrant (or the son of migrants) I understand what it’s like to be faced with situations, adverse conditions that you have to cope with, how can you still be productive, how can you still be prolific, how can you still smile… which I don’t think it’s that common in people who enjoy privileges. I enjoy privileges, but I don’t take them for granted, I never take them for granted. To play music is a privilege!“ 

One of the strongest influences on his development has been the city where he was born and grew up, in particular the reggae bands of Moss Side and Hulme. 

“I had about 10 years of just playing reggae music and dub, and understanding rhythm … understanding the roots of the rhythms and I can’t say that I fully understand it even though I spent 10 years in it! But I was taught by people from the Caribbean … playing in the bands I think I got the gist of this … obviously even though the Caribbean has its own kind of migrant populations from South Asia. I had a real education, shall we say, in understanding rhythm sections like Roots Radix, or er Sly and Robbie, Black Uhuru. Even The Lovers and so forth, whether it was Gregory Isaacs or finally actually working with artists like Dennis Brown and Barrington Levy or Freddie McGregor, and supporting Errol Dunkley. So I had a real education in that. Manchester has that legacy, you know it’s not just all Tony Wilson and Factory Records, a big part of it is very multicultural.” 

Journey into music Aziz remembers his individual musical journey starting with a schoolteacher playing the guitar while the children drank their milk, and persuading his parents to buy him one. “

I was just mesmerized by this silver-stringed instrument. And I just pursued it. You know, I persisted with, you know, annoying my Mum and Dad, for my birthday ‘oh I want a guitar I want a guitar’. I lived on a Council estate in Longsight, in Manchester, and um on Beresford Road which is on the Aniston estate there was a shop called Joytown, which was just general store, and they had a guitar in the window for £5. And that’s where the journey began when my mother and father bought me that.” 

Picking up the guitar was soon entangled with complex questions of identity, and expectations of what he should do with his life. 

“I should point out the music was actually a response to the kind of anger that was in me. Um, and the anger came from people stereotyping me and generalizing about what occupations I should pursue. Even sports! I mean, if you looked at what I do, you'd see kind of a reaction to people telling me that ‘Hey, you should play badminton and cricket because you're, you know, an Asian’ (as they call me) and, um, ‘you should stick to, you know, pursuing medicine’ or, um, you know, dentistry or law or something… accountancy! So I really used to get angry about those things. So I took up the guitar because I thought that guitar was a symbol of rebellion, a symbol of kind of, um, breaking the stereotype. Um, maybe I didn't think that far in advance, but I certainly pursued it by channeling anger into positivity. That positivity was research and a lust to achieve results. Um, to say that: ‘Hey, look what I can do’. And, you know, two fingers up at the world, that was trying to keep me down.“ 

Nevertheless, part of Aziz’s creative research has bene into the heritage enjoyed by his parents, the multicoloured resonances of Indian tonal systems and the voices of Bollywood. 

“I think my ears became attuned to um kind of two standards of music. One is a western standard which was kind of based on… let’s not talk about fretless instruments but let’s talk about the piano. Black and white tone systems. Whereas at home, listening to my, the music of my parents it was based upon microtonal notes. Or not based upon but it included quarter tones and eighth tones so my ears were accustomed to that. I didn’t grow up with that kind of feeling of oh that that’s out of tune. I just grew up with that feeling of a finer quantization of notes within musical systems. So I grew up like that, not feeling that this was out of tune and it wasn’t all black and white, life wasn’t black and white, it was colourful.” 

Self-taught, critical exploration 

Aziz is self-taught, and has a deep appreciation for how resources and information were available to him as a child. His ability to develop himself was supported by the resources available to him in Manchester. 

“I was learning to play guitar from umm, a reel-to-reel that my Dad had inherited with the house we bought, which had … Summertime Blues on it and That’ll be the Day, all these kind of rock-a-billy things so I really learned from Elvis and Eddie Cochrane and early kind of rock ‘n roll. So I was probably the first er kind of Pakistani rockabilly in the country! But my progress I actually owe to Longsight Library. They used to have a lending system for vinyl and cassettes. So when I started going to the new Longsight library, the process started to speed up when I could borrow material. There was a resource, because it was impossible in those days. I was borrowing material and by that time I’d moved on like to Blues and Rock and I was borrowing albums like Deep Purple and Genesis, Santana and all these greats of kind of this Blues rock umm and so I can thank the library really that the process got sped up.” 

Aziz has long been wary of the power imbalances inherent to many world music productions. 

“I remember an era in like the eighties. I just, I hated the word ‘fusion’. I just didn't like that word because I felt like it was something that kept us (I want to say, ‘us’ I mean, South Asian musicians in that place outside of Bollywood)… If you are, you know, um, advanced in an instrument, that instrument will be a traditional instrument and it will be in a collaboration with, uh, the hierarchy, elite jazz er musicians or jazz rock musicians of the west. So I think in the guitar I was trying to find my own voice, I was trying to find an identity that says, ‘Hey, you have appropriated other people's music, predominantly black music. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to use my own heritage and I'm going to appropriate the strengths of the west, which is that freedom of expression (like in punk, back in punk rock, to be able to express yourself without thinking about, oh, are these notes correct? Are they in the scale?)’ It's a statement. It's an attitude. It's a youth culture. It's all these things that the west has there, they're the strengths and the freedom to be able to do that. So I thought the combination of my heritage with that would be the ultimate goal for me.” 

For this reason he has always sought new sounds, and tried to shape his own creative work by innovating with those. A profound influence on him was Ali Akhbar Khan, who - thanks to a recommendation by his brother - got him his first experience of the sarod. It was ‘mind-blowing’, and sent him in pursuit of an instrument for himself. How he related to the sarod, and all the other instruments he has tried, is always part of his Manchester root. 

“I had to go to south as Manchester didn't have a musical shop where you could buy these instruments. And it was a time, again, about identity where I felt … I didn't want to pursue the, the sitar, um, because there were plenty of people who were doing it. It was kind of appropriated and the Beatles had… there's this thing about cultural appropriation that really bothers me. It’s got that kind of hippy connection. It's got the Beatles connection and every band wants a sitar, they see it on Top of the Pops. I thought ‘the sarod’s never been seen as much as that, nobody actually knows about it or even knows how to play it’. So I took that up and I've never looked back. I electrified it as well, for a pickup on air transducer, and tried different things, which are kind of blasphemous! At the same time as playing the guitar, I tried, I've tried, you know, oud kind of ideas and I've tried, um, sarod ideas and even koto. So I branched out into other instruments. Um, they’re the influences after the kind of Manchester experience of being in the Stone Roses … yes, Manchester was an influence.” 

The pandemic has brought change to his life, as to all musicians. But Aziz has continued to find ways of reaching audiences, engaging the communities he has developed over years of work. 

"Right now I am in that kind of renaissance period... that I feel, really, I can release any kind of music that I want, but with it I can release the ‘stories’ too, ‘clips-of’, ‘the making of’, the parts that interest people. How did you achieve the result, and what did you use? And all the guitarists want to know what instruments I used, what equipment I used, and how did I record it, and how long did it take… which is fantastic, you know that’s content for me."