Remembering Abdullah Ibrahim (1934–2026)

Sean Jacobs on the life of the South African pianist

By the end of the apartheid era, wrote Sean Jacobs in the NYR Online on June 7, the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim had “established himself as perhaps South Africa’s greatest musical innovator and composer of the twentieth century.” Across his years in Cape Town’s jazz scene and his long periods of exile in New York, Ibrahim developed a distinctive synthesis of musical traditions: “the church music of his grandmother, the film music his mother played, the music he heard in the city’s shebeens, the songs of dance bands and carnival troupes, the pieces he learned from schoolteachers, and the techniques he learned by collaborating with leading American jazz musicians.” What drew all these styles and genres together, Jacobs writes, was “his delicate, lyrical touch at the piano.”

On Monday, eight days after Jacobs’s essay appeared, Ibrahim’s family announced that he had died at his home in Germany, age ninety-one. His work has long stood, Jacobs writes, as “a song of defiance” against oppression in his home country, from his early work in Cape Town with the legendary Jazz Epistles to his anti-apartheid anthem “Mannenberg.” The full story of his life, work, and collaborators—foremost among them the pioneering jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin—is also a story of twentieth-century South Africa itself.

Below, alongside Jacobs’s article, are five essays about the American jazz musicians and South African political upheavals that shaped Ibrahim’s life and work.

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Songs of Liberation

Sean Jacobs

In 1960 the writer Bessie Head—yet to publish the novels that would make her a leading figure in South African and Batswana literature—interviewed a young Cape Town pianist named Adolf Johannes Brand, who went by Dollar Brand. In her manuscript, which never appeared in print but resurfaced in 1995, she called him “a most surprising phenomenon of South African life.” The country, she insisted, was little but “a desert of gold mines” and “an advertiser’s paradise” with “no tradition of serious thought or culture.” The few exceptions were “independent spirits” like Brand, “a powerful, vitally alive and creative man” who stood out like “a complete and perfect flower in this desert”: “He hurls a challenge at you; disturbs you; teaches and expects perfection from you.”

Brand was twenty-six. The year before, he had formed the Jazz Epistles, a six-piece band that quickly developed a reputation in and around Cape Town’s vibrant music scene and briefly in Johannesburg, playing American-influenced hard bop to sold-out audiences at hotels and small concert venues. At a time when apartheid was intensifying and South African music mostly imitated American pop, the Epistles were a kind of countercultural force. Two months before Head interviewed him, they became the first all-black group in South Africa to release a jazz album.

One of the Epistles, Hugh Masekela, described their sound in his autobiography as a fusion of “tireless energy, complex arrangements, tight ensemble play, languid slow ballads, and heart-melting, hymn-like dirges.”

The music itself remained close to American bebop, but some of the song titles hinted that the group was also hoping to develop a distinctly South African jazz idiom: one was in the Zulu language; another made references to slavery (which for at least 170 years had been the country’s dominant economic system) and Islam (which had been brought to South Africa by enslaved believers). Some of the references were more direct: in “Blues for Hughie,” dedicated to Masekela, listeners could detect what the liner notes called the “deep winging rhythm” of the Pedi people, from whom the pianist Kippie Moeketsi, another crucial member, descended.

All the Jazz Epistles would have success to varying degrees, but it was Brand who would become the single most visible representative of black South African jazz cosmopolitanism. The group’s influence stayed with him as he moved on to Europe and then to the US, changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim, and established himself as perhaps South Africa’s greatest musical innovator and composer of the twentieth century, not to mention one of its most successful cultural exports. Nelson Mandela once called him “our Mozart.” When in 2019 the US National Endowment for the Arts named Ibrahim a “Jazz Master,” he became the only such honoree born in Africa.

Read the full article on the Review’s website here.

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From the Archives: Where It’s Happening

• Nadine Gordimer on the Soweto uprising

• J.M. Coetzee on Nelson Mandela in prison

• Geoffrey O’Brien on the world according to Duke Ellington

• Geoff Dyer on Ornette Coleman’s “gut-bucket” jazz

• Adam Shatz on Don Cherry’s non-Western influences

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