That Abdullah Ibrahim is not only still with us in his 90th year but continues to make magisterial music is one of the blessings of our troubled times – as anyone who saw his concert at London’s Barbican last year will testify.

The South African pianist whom Nelson Mandela reportedly once called “our Mozart” has been a professional musician for a staggering 75 years since he started his career playing in Cape Town’s District Six township in the shadow of Table Mountain.

Due to apartheid, he had to wait until he was 60 before he finally got to see the stunning views over Cape Town from the mountain’s top as the cable car was for ‘whites only.’ He finally got to make the ascent after the ending of apartheid in 1994 and celebrated the occasion in the title-track of his album Knysna Blue. ‘Through many decades of traumatic experience in South Africa we were denied many things,’ he recited over a haunting Afro-jazz vamp. ‘We didn’t even know our own country.’

Yet, if life was hard in District Six where he was born Adolphus Johannes Brand in 1934, the area in which he grew up was also a vibrant musical melting pot. Taking piano lessons from the age of seven, he learnt hymns, gospel songs and spirituals ‘from his grandmother… pianist for the local African Methodist Episcopalian church, and his mother, who led the choir.’

He heard folk musicians singing the traditional Khoisan songs of South Africa’s Indigenous peoples and marabi dance music spilt out of the shebeens. Then there was the swing of US jazz, which made its way to Cape Town on 78s by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington via the US sailors whose ships docked in the bay on their way around the Cape of Good Hope.

The sound was eagerly absorbed by township musicians and mixed with local styles to create a unique form of Cape jazz. So entranced by the imported US records was the youthful Ibrahim that his friends nicknamed him ‘Dollar’. All his early albums appeared under the name Dollar Brand until he changed his name after converting to Islam at the end of the 1960s.

By the time he was 15, he was making his living playing piano in shebeens, fusing the local styles of marabi and mbaqanga with US jazz until he was discovered by the saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi. One of the giants of South African music, Moeketsi introduced him to the piano playing of Thelonious Monk, whose work was to have an enduring influence, and persuaded him to move to Johannesburg to join his band, The Jazz Epistles.

With a line-up that also included Jonas Gwangwa on trombone, Hugh Masekela on trumpet, drummer Makaya Ntshoko and Johnny Gertze on bass, the group’s jam sessions in Joburg’s Sophiatown became famous and led to 1959’s Jazz Epistle: Verse 1, the first ever album recorded by a Black South African band.

There was to be no Verse 2 as The Epistles broke up the following year when Masekela and Gwangwa left to travel abroad with the jazz musical King Kong. Ibrahim turned down the opportunity to join them, arguing that he had a musical destiny to fulfil at home and that his place was with his people.

Yet it was not to be, as the apartheid state grew more brutal and violent. In March 1960, 69 defenceless demonstrators were shot dead and many more injured in what became known as the Sharpeville massacre. Martial law was declared, the ANC (African National Congress) political party was banned, and Nelson Mandela would soon be put on trial – and so with a heavy heart, Ibrahim left for Zurich. He was soon joined by fellow Epistles Ntshoko and Gertze and it was there in 1963, while playing as a trio at the city’s Africana Club, that Duke Ellington heard the group and swiftly recorded an album with them in Paris.

In 1965, Ibrahim moved to New York, where he played with the likes of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival and even led Ellington’s orchestra on several dates when the great man was indisposed. Ibrahim was a regular fixture in DownBeat magazine’s critic polls for decades, testament to his technique and compositional invention and showed how America had taken Black South African émigré musicians to its heart; both Masekela and Miriam Makeba were also making their careers in the US at the time.

Yet for all his immersion in US jazz, Ibrahim’s African roots remained fundamental in his playing and by the end of the 1960s the call of home saw him making regular visits back to South Africa, where he recorded some of his finest work, including the 1974 album Mannenberg is Where It’s Happening. The 14-minute title-track was an eloquent protest against the forced removals from District Six, which was being bulldozed to make way for an upscale whites-only development, and was adopted by the ANC as an unofficial anthem. When the record was smuggled by a lawyer to Mandela on Robben Island, he reportedly remarked on hearing it that “liberation is near.”

Sadly, the long march to freedom would take another two decades and after another crackdown in which schoolchildren were massacred in Soweto in 1976, Ibrahim was forced back into exile. He continued to explore the interface between African music and US jazz on albums such as Africa – Tears and Laughter (1979), African Dawn (1982), Water from an Ancient Well (1986) and African River (1989) before he was able to return home again following Mandela’s release from prison in 1990.

He has continued to record prolifically ever since, releasing solo piano albums and full band recordings – his last album, 3, on Gearbox Records, came out in January this year and captured Ibrahim and his trio before and during their 2023 show at London’s Barbican. The years have also seen him mourn the passing of his contemporaries Miriam Makeba in 2008, Masekela in 2018, Gwangwa in 2021 and Ntshoko in May 2024… until he became the last of the original generation of great South African jazz musicians.

He’s still touring and will celebrate his 90th birthday with a series of concerts in Europe this coming October. Let’s cherish him while we can.

BEST ALBUMS

Mannenberg is Where It’s Happening

(The Sun, 1974)

Spiritual Afro-jazz featuring Ibrahim with a quintet including the great Basil Coetzee on tenor sax. The title-track became an ANC anthem, with Nelson Mandela remarking, “Bach? Beethoven? We’ve got better,” when Ibrahim performed at his inauguration in 1994.

Africa – Tears and Laughter

(Enja, 1979)

Recorded in exile, Ibrahim is in prime form on this varied set ranging from meditative solo piano pieces (‘The Perfumed Forest Wet with Rain’) to the full-on township jive of ‘Liberation Dance (When Tarzan Met the African Freedom Fighter)’.

Knysna Blue

(Enja, 1994)

A bittersweet set that celebrates South Africa’s newfound freedom, but acknowledges the pain and trauma along the way with tributes to those who triumphed over adversity in the townships of Sophiatown and District Six.

Ekapa Lodumo

(Enja, 2001)

Recorded in Germany, this is mature Ibrahim in a big band setting. Highlights include ‘Mindif’, which he composed for the soundtrack of the 1988 film Chocolat and the joyous 17-minute tour de force ‘African Market’.

Cape Town Songs – The Very Best of Abdullah Ibrahim

(Nascente, 2000)

For an overview of Ibrahim’s vast catalogue, try this compilation of 14 tracks recorded between 1979 and 1997 arranged chronologically as ‘a map of a spiritual, political and musical journey.’

This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today