Abdullah Ibrahim died at 91

[bluenote61]

What a great musician!
Suffered under Apartheid, left his country and came back to play at Mandela's inauguration in '94.
He lived the last years of his life here in Bavaria and gave concerts from time to time in a small village there, also one celebrating his 90th birthday.

[MarkRhodes]

His "Water from an Ancient Well" was my favorite album for awhile.
RIP.

[Question]

Sad to hear about his passing.

I actually wasn't aware that he was still alive and living in Germany.

I got to play with him for a few weeks sometime in the early 2000's.

He was quite a character; when he came out on stage with his African robes he was like a mystic, and some of his fans seemed to have a special personal reverence for him beyond his music.

[Bob_Ross]

One of my college roommates had a copy of African Portraits, that was my introduction to Mr. Brand/Ibrahim's music. I can still vividly remember being enthralled the first time I heard that record almost 50 years ago.

[dot75]

Sad day, saw him play a couple of times in the 80's, once with Sam Rivers who wore a beautiful tan leather jump suit and sweated appropriately.

I was introduced to him by my mum who sent him a note via a mutual acquaintance & got a long letter back about the almighty, I think he'd just converted to Islam at that point...

[dot75]

From the Financial Times today.



Abdullah Ibrahim, musician, 1934-2026

The South African jazz luminary produced anthems that came to define resistance against apartheid


Abdullah Ibrahim on stage at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival in March © Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Imag
In another life Abdullah Ibrahim might have been a doctor. This was the career he set his heart on in high school. But apartheid South Africa being what it was, he turned to music instead.
The 1950s produced a golden generation of South African jazz musicians, many of whom were scattered into exile and died prematurely. Two of its leading lights survived for much longer, though. Hugh Masekela, who died in 2018, was an earthy showman, equal parts gravel-voiced raconteur and trumpeter. Ibrahim, who has died at the age of 91, went in the other direction. Cerebral, ascetic and mystic, his piano playing started out as a rambunctious exploration of African grooves, and eventually settled into a form of watercolour minimalism.
He was born Adolph Brand in Cape Town in 1934, and raised by his grandparents; for many years he believed his mother to be his older sister. His childhood was steeped in the varied musics of the Cape, from gospel to carnival to tribal rhythms to the American jazz that filled the airwaves. He was known as “Dollar” Brand, perhaps as a simple pun on Adolph or because of his haggling with the American sailors selling records at the quayside. He moved to Johannesburg at the age of 20 to search for the legendary but troubled saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, and joined him and several others, including Masekela, in The Jazz Epistles.

Ibrahim composes with a saxophone in 1977 © Christian Rose/Roger Viollet/Getty ImagesThe group’s only record, Jazz Epistle, Verse 1, proved a hit — not least because of the furious, fast-paced bebop piano runs, notably on “Scullery Department”, named for the only part of hotels where Black musicians were permitted to eat. The Epistles were the toast of Sophiatown, the cultural heart of Black Johannesburg, where writers, boxers, politicians and gangsters (even 50 years later Ibrahim would refer to them only as “young men in the latest fashions”) mingled in the same clubs.
But the high times did not last. Sophiatown was bulldozed as a “black spot” and its inhabitants decanted to the newly built Soweto. Ibrahim’s bandmates left the Epistles to take part in a musical (its orchestrator played his own piano, leaving no room for Ibrahim). When the production toured overseas, most of its cast and musicians went into exile. “Everyone left except me,” Ibrahim later said. “I stayed at home for a year and practised 12, 15 hours a day.”
It was in this period that he married the singer Sathima Bea Benjamin. During a residency at a small club in Zurich, she introduced him to their shared idol, Duke Ellington, who then became the couple’s patron and helped Ibrahim start a new recording career in New York.
Late in the 1960s, he converted to Islam and changed his name. Ibrahim was “drawn to Islam by the concept of Tawhid, of unity. Apartheid was becoming more divisive. I thought, you can’t throw anything out of the universe, we’re all interconnected.”
Back in South Africa, he recorded a series of lengthy instrumental anthems, notably “Black Lightning” and “Mannenberg”. The latter is his finest moment: a slow repeating piano pattern, steeped in the Marabi sound of the early 20th century, over which Basil Coetzee plays a series of saxophone melodies. Ibrahim always maintained that this was just a warm-up accidentally preserved on tape: if so, it was a moment of deep serendipity.
The resistance movement latched on to these tunes, to the disapproval of the state, and Ibrahim found himself in exile again for two decades, rallying African National Congress cadres and fellow musicians in New York.

Upon returning to South Africa after the end of apartheid, he found a country severed from its musical history. He would play solo concerts in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, refining his melodies down, fastening on a phrase and repeating it endlessly, so that listening to them felt like intruding on private prayer. He still commanded huge respect, but felt as if he belonged to another age. “In rehearsals,” he said, “I have to be a reluctant history teacher.”
Ibrahim played at Nelson Mandela’s 1994 presidential inauguration. Mandela described him as “our Mozart” (Kippie Moeketsi, Ibrahim recalled, had loved to play Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto). In 2016 he reunited with Masekela to revive The Jazz Epistles in honour of the 40th anniversary of the Soweto uprising.
He was still performing earlier this year. Alongside standards by Ellington and Thelonious Monk, his twin guiding stars, he often returned to the anthems through which he wrote his own autobiography — “little videoclips of what I’ve experienced” — endlessly revisiting the Cape of his childhood and its whole vanished world.