Abdullah Ibrahim, South African Jazz Piano Icon, Dies at 91

Abdullah Ibrahim, the South African jazz pianist deemed his country’s equivalent to Mozart by Nelson Mandela, died Monday in his adopted home of Germany after a short illness. He was 91 years old.

“Abdullah passed away peacefully with South Africa and its people in his heart,” his partner, Marina Umari, said in a statement. “His love for his country never wavered, no matter where in the world he found himself.”

In an extraordinarily accomplished career that spanned eight decades, Ibrahim helped bring bebop stylings to South Africa, and he bonded with Duke Ellington, who produced one of his early, influential recordings. In his later years, he became an idol and an inspiration to new generations of jazz pianists.

Abdullah Ibrahim was born Adolph Johannes Brand in 1934. His mother was a pianist at their church, and he began taking piano lessons at the age of 7. By the time he was 15, he was playing professionally — billed as Dollar Brand — and in the late ’50s formed a group, the Jazz Epistles, that featured trumpeter Hugh Masekela. In January 1960, the group recorded Jazz Epistle Verse One, the first jazz album by an all-Black South African jazz ensemble.

Although the Jazz Epistles weren’t explicitly political in their music, the group suffered harassment from the South African government in the weeks that followed the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Ibrahim moved to Europe, and in 1963, his future wife, Sathima Bea Benjamin, a noted vocalist, introduced him to Ellington, which began an immensely fruitful association. Ellington produced a recording, Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, and the notoriety led to Ibrahim touring the European festival circuit.

Sometimes, the highlight of an Ibrahim concert was less the dazzle of his technique — a style that announced roots in the mastery of Ellington and Thelonious Monk, or even the deft blending of styles from his native Cape Town and the jazz tradition — as much it was the qualities of some of his originals and playing; there was a ruminative quality that could turn a concert hall into an intimate setting and a nightclub into a living room.

“His performances acquired a meditative, hushed mystery of spiritual communing,” pianist Vijay Iyer told NPR. “I appreciate his fearlessness with quiet.

“In his early work, there’s a surreal quality of composure,” Iyer added. “Dissonant forms, sounds, and rhythms would appear with nonchalance, integrated into the whole, in a kind of unhurried modernism.”

The South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini first heard Ibrahim as a teenager and was immediately entranced with his sound.

“I was moved by the closeness of his voice to what was already familiar to me before jazz,” he told NPR. “It’s almost as though his sound intentionally targeted that in-between — to be immersed in your own traditions and folk-ness while open to an entire world of influences.”

Ibrahim married Benjamin in 1965, moved to the United States and played at the Newport Jazz Festival that year. In 1966, he substituted for the maestro, leading the Duke Ellington Orchestra on five American tour dates. A 1967 Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to study at Juilliard, and he began building a circle of friends that included some of the most powerful voices in jazz:, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp. He converted to Islam in 1968, changing his name from Dollar Brand.

His style became more open, and clearer in its synthesis of jazz and South African elements. On a return trip to South Africa in 1974, he wrote “Mannenberg,” which became one of his signature compositions. Reportedly, it was smuggled into the prison on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held, so that it could be played for the future president. Mandela would later call Ibrahim South Africa’s Mozart. The track became known as the unofficial national anthem of South Africa, and after the Soweto uprising in 1976, Ibrahim and Benjamin publicly expressed their support of the African National Congress, which was banned at the time.

During the ’80s, Ibrahim was a prominent international figure in jazz internationally, performing both solo and with his band, Ekaya. In New York he performed frequently at the club Sweet Basil where, one night, the pianist Kenny Barron caught a set that featured duets between Ibrahim and saxophonist Carlos Ward, a longtime member of Ekaya. The experience inspired him to write “Song for Abdullah.”

“The music they produced was so beautiful and prayerful,” Barron told NPR’s Terry Gross on a 1989 edition of Fresh Air. “It was like being in a temple or church, very lyrical and blissful.”

Ibrahim’s music was deeply influential to the generation of pianists who have emerged in the new century. Makhathini noted that Ibrahim inspired him, “to take seriously and prioritize that which defines you and bring it to the center of how you express,” he said.

Iyer said Ibrahim’s influence was especially profound in his early work.

“I used to try to compose music like Ibrahim’s (e.g., some of the eccentric writing on Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio) and tried to create these novel structures and dissonant forms,” he said. “Something about it reminded me of Herbie Nichols – not specifically in the sound or musical language, but more generally in the deeply personal conception.”

Ibrahim wrote the music for two films, Chocolat (1988) and No Fear No Die (1990), and he was the subject of two documentaries, A Brother with Perfect Timing (1987) and A Struggle for Love (2005). He continued to make well-received recordings, and in 2018, he received an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship, one of the highest honors of the form.

The following year, in 2019, Ibrahim spoke with Larry Blumenfeld of the Wall Street Journal, telling him that advice from Ellington had guided his career.

“Duke showed me the importance of presenting old and new material side by side and of performing the older songs as if they were new and the newer ones as if they were familiar,” he said.

He also hinted at the reasons behind his signature calm: “If you are on a long road and you finally think that you have accomplished something, there is this joy, but there is also the knowledge that the quest inevitably and necessarily goes on.”

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