PERCY MABANDU

On the afternoon of June 15, the world learned that jazz pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim had died after a short illness. He was 91 years old, at peace and surrounded by loved ones at a hospital near his home in the Bavarian town of Prien am Chiemsee, Germany.

The news of Ibrahim’s passing sent the world of jazz and cultural pundits on a search for neat narratives to account for one of the most effusive and consequential lives of the last century.

Musically Ibrahim built a unique piano language by expanding the possibilities of South African cultural syncretism into a global creative polyglot, thereby helping to liberate jazz from the parochial confines of American provincialism into a global black modernist form. In his hands, the music sounded equally at home, whether it was played in New York or Kyoto, Munich or Manenberg.

Ibrahim’s broad musical vision led to his being lionised as the one true heir to the legacy of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. A remarkable feat because in jazz lore, the future of the music has been said to reside with the two African-American giants. Symbolically Ellington carried the sustenance of tradition while Monk possessed the providential power of innovation; Ibrahim embodied the best of both and more.

As a pianist Ibrahim mastered a rare ability to invent singable melodies out of quirky note choices and off-kilter rhythms. “He could make the piano sound like an African singer by combining unusual notes to suggest the sounds between the keys; making wide leaps across the scales, and by knowing when to play and when not to play,” Geoffrey Himes once noted in Downbeat Magazine.

Ibrahim’s unique parting with the jazz idiom as developed in North America can be heard with great clarity on the song Chisa, which appears on African River 1989. As opposed to American post-bop pianists’ preference for interacting with the drums and a walking bass, Ibrahim maintains the central motif with slight variations throughout the performance. He sustains a droning tonic throughout; his chords never thicken beyond soulful minor seventh. This leaves the horn players free to solo over his foundation. Importantly Ibrahim keeps his hands deep in African soil. It’s an approach that has made it possible for his often simple harmonies to convey great emotional power.

For all his rough beginnings, there was arguably no more positive catalytic influence on Ibrahim’s life journey than his former wife Sathima Bea Benjamin

Ibrahim’s musical journey began early, about seven years after he was born in 1934 in Kensington, Cape Town. His mother, Rachel, was a mixed-race woman about whom Ibrahim once told an interviewer: “I grew up thinking that my mother was my sister.” His father, Sentso, was a MoSotho man killed by a thug when Ibrahim was only four years old. Ibrahim blamed “anti-African racism in the coloured community” at the time. It burdened him with a lot of bitterness at an early age.

Ibrahim was baptised Adolph Johannes Brand. “My grandparents gave me their name so I’d be classified as ‘coloured’.” In colonial-apartheid South Africa, this would’ve given him a slightly higher social status in a racial hierarchy that placed Africans at the bottom and Europeans at the helm, with Indian and mixed-race people in the middle. Ibrahim ran away from home at the age of 17, which “led to a lot of trouble on the streets”, he’d later remember.

For all his rough beginnings, there was arguably no more positive catalytic influence on Ibrahim’s life journey than his former wife Sathima Bea Benjamin. They met in the early 1950s during what would have been the lowest point in his life.

“When I met Sathima I was sleeping on the streets of Cape Town. I had to leave home because the people couldn’t deal with this music,” he says in the documentary film, Brother with Perfect Timing. The pair performed together through the 1950s. Benjamin was one of the better jazz vocalists to come out of South Africa.

Throughout this season, along with a growing respect for his piano playing, Ibrahim gained repute for his record collection as well. He was buying jazz records from American sailors at the Cape Town docks. This symbolic American connection earned him the nickname, Dollar. He took on the name and entered jazz history with the Dollar Brand moniker.

In 1954, Mackay Davashe’s Shantytown Septet was on a national tour with a stopover in Cape Town. Their pianist, Todd Matshikiza, left the band suddenly. Their prodigious alto saxophonist, Kippie Moeketsi, who had been hanging out with Dollar, insisted that he take over from Matshikiza. Already performing as Dollar Brand, Ibrahim would be heavily inspired by Moeketsi’s idea to base their music on Southern African cultural traditions and songs. The band continued their tour, heading into the Eastern Cape with Ibrahim as pianist. They were a hit. His relationship with Moeketsi deepened.

Later in 1959, they co-founded The Jazz Epistles, a seminal bebop band credited as the first recorded jazz band in South Africa. The outfit included Moeketsi on alto saxophone, Jonas Gwangwa on trombone, Hugh Masekela on trumpet, Johnny Gertze on bass, and Early Mabuza or Makaya Ntshoko on drums. The rhythm section had been working together as the Dollar Brand Trio. Their collective breakthroughs represented a successful commercial register of modern improvised music, from South Africa to the world.

Ibrahim wrote a column called ‘The World of Dollar’ for the Cape Herald in which he railed against the Cape coloured community’s tendency to disavow its African heritage, calling on his readers to be proud of their unique Cape features and to embrace a deeper Pan-Africanist worldview

By 1962, as history entered a period often referred to as “high apartheid”, a time defined by greater brutality and suppression of black life by the state, Ibrahim left South Africa to go into exile. He settled in Zurich, Switzerland, where his trio scored a standing residency at the Club Africana.

In 1963, his would-be wife, Sathima, persuaded Duke Ellington to come to a performance. The American star obliged and was so impressed with Ibrahim that he invited the band to Paris and eventually recorded their breakout album, Duke Ellington presents the Dollar Brand Trio. The success that followed allowed Ibrahim and Benjamin to move to the US in 1965 and finally get married.

However, the strange alchemy of success, exile, and ill-health sparked a deeper search for meaning in Ibrahim, a search that would compel him to return home to Cape Town in 1968. Once on home soil, he quit smoking and drinking, embraced Islam, and changed his name from Dollar Brand to Abdullah Ibrahim.

This search for meaning allowed him to develop his voice as a writer, too. Ibrahim wrote a column called The World of Dollar for the Cape Herald in which he railed against the Cape coloured community’s tendency to disavow its African heritage, calling on his readers to be proud of their unique Cape features and to embrace a deeper Pan-Africanist worldview.

The pianist also wrote poetry. He was first published by Classic, the literary magazine, around 1965, and later in Staffrider and other periodicals. Ibrahim’s poems notably appeared in Seven South African Poets, edited by poet, playwright, and critic Cosmo Pieterse, in 1971, for the African Writers Series published by Heinemann. The anthology places Ibrahim’s poems alongside those of luminaries like Denis Brutus, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Timothy Holmes.

If the 1960s were about reaching out to the world to find his voice, the 1970s were about making home. His music flourished with an even deeper-rooted flavour. His collaborations with the great bassist, Johnny Dyani, led to releases such as Good News From Africa, which celebrated the unique expression of Islamic and Christian heritages rooted in Southern Africa.

In 1974 he released the iconic Mannenberg. It would become one of the bestselling jazz albums in South African history, and the unofficial anthem of resistance against apartheid following the birth of Black Consciousness politics. The record included Paul Michaels on bass, Monty Weber on drums, Morris Goldberg and Robbie Jansen on flute and alto saxophone and Basil Coetzee on tenor sax.

By the time of his death, Ibrahim held a 10th-degree black belt and was the only non-Japanese martial artist to receive full mastership (Sodenke) in the nearly 500-year-old history of the system of Bujutsu Kodosoku-Kai Yakami-ryu Taijutsu

Anyone hearing Ibrahim’s inspired tune quickly becomes aware of its exhilarating alchemy. Relying on simple but extremely effective structures, it opens with the piano stating the melodic theme, quickly joined by Michaels’s marching bass. Together with Weber’s pulsating brushwork on drums, they launch the rhythm section into a repetitive, cyclic groove. This becomes the base upon which Coetzee’s improvised tenor saxophone flourishes with the aid of periodic chorus lines from Goldberg and Jansen’s altos.

The propulsive groove develops into a sustained intensity, wrapped by the sax and metallic piano sound, exchanging in a basic call-and-response pattern. They all weave into each other like a group of friends laughing and sharing tasty gossip at the shebeen. It’s a home run!

By 1977, after years of itinerant living, Ibrahim settled in New York, taking an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. He and Benjamin had two children, a daughter, Tshidi, who performs as rapper Jean Grae, and a lesser-known son and pianist, Tsakwe. Around 1990, Ibrahim moved out and returned to South Africa, initiating their separation. Their divorce was finalised in 2011. Benjamin passed away on August 20 2013.

Alongside his musical pursuits, Ibrahim maintained a career as martial artist. He was a life-long student of the Japanese grandmaster Soke Sensei Tonegawa from 1967. By the time of his death, Ibrahim held a 10th-degree black belt and was the only non-Japanese martial artist to receive full mastership (Sodenke) in the nearly 500-year-old history of the system of Bujutsu Kodosoku-Kai Yakami-ryu Taijutsu. Over the years, this dedication to karate and its related spiritual practice has merged with his submission to Islam and his African roots to give Ibrahim a unique voice in life and jazz.

It gave him a long life that allowed him to keep performing well into old age. His death concludes a career that produced close to 75 recordings and more than 300 original compositions; he led performances in Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia with his band Ekhaya and various orchestras.

In 2019 Ibrahim was the only African-born musician inducted as an NEA Jazz Master, the highest honour for jazz artists in the US. In 2009 he was awarded South Africa’s national honour, the Order of Ikhamanga (Silver). He received multiple Sama awards along with multiple honorary doctorates from various universities.

Ibrahim’s death was announced by his partner, Dr Marina Umari, who said: “Abdullah passed away peacefully with South Africa and its people in his heart.”