For Abdullah Ibrahim (1934–2026)

by Fritz Byers

In 2005 I traveled with my oldest daughter to South Africa for a bit of work and a lot of what Duke Ellington called the “Tourist Point of View.” One afternoon during our interlude in Cape Town we were hosted for tea and dessert at a Cape Malay home. I’ve lost most of the small facts about the visit, but I recall the mood, the laughter, and the warmth of our hosts.

This I really do recall: the sensation, as the hours unwound, of having been in that room, or at least having felt its ambience, before. Of course I had not physically been there, or anywhere in South Africa, until that trip.  But for the better part of the previous twenty years, Abdullah Ibrahim’s music — his compositions, his orchestrations, and, most powerfully, his piano-playing — had been carrying that room to me, the warmth and the light and the ache of it. I had not understood until that afternoon that what I'd been hearing all those years was place, and that one day I would actually be there. The Cape Malay afternoon did not introduce me to Cape Town. I realize now, as I recall it through the haze of the intervening decades, that it confirmed Abdullah had been telling me the truth about the city, the country, the culture, for years, through the medium of a turntable in Toledo.

Abdullah Ibrahim as the world knew him is easy enough to summon, and the obituaries this week have summoned him well. (Sample Giovanni Russonello’s in the New York Times if you’re of a mind to read one.) Born in Cape Town in 1934 and christened Adolph Brand, he played piano as Dollar Brand before he took the name Abdullah Ibrahim with his conversion to Islam in 1968. He was there at the birth of modern South African jazz with the Jazz Epistles; he was found by Duke Ellington in a Zurich club in 1963, an encounter that opened first Europe and then America to him. Apartheid drove him into a long exile, and out of that exile he sent back "Mannenberg," a loping, hymn-haunted theme his countrymen took up as an unofficial anthem in the dark last years of the regime. He lived to see the regime fall, and he played his singular music at Nelson Mandela's inauguration in 1994; Mandela called him our Mozart. He died on Monday, in Germany, his adopted home, at ninety-one. An exile's geography, one last time.

A remarkable life, but the Abdullah I lived with did not arrive through the anthem or the inauguration. He arrived in 1986, on the suggestion of a friend. I was at the time resuming an immersion in jazz after a few years away, and my friend told me to rush out to get Water from an Ancient Well, Abdullah’s new record with his band Ekaya. The record opens with "Mandela," a tune so lilting and joyous that it caught me on first hearing and has never let go. (This Friday’s Jazz Spectrum opens with the tune.) It remains the track of his I have reached for most often, and the album of his I return to most. In time I came to hear what Carlos Ward's alto flute and Ricky Ford's tenor saxophone were doing in and around Abdullah's piano, the way the horns built the architecture of that band's sound. But on the first night it was simply "Mandela," and the door it opened.

What followed was the thing I invariably do when a record reaches in and rearranges something in my appreciations: I went looking for all of Abdullah’s work. I found: Dollar Brand at Montreux, with Carlos Ward again and Craig Harris's trombone; the 1977 duet with Max Roach and the 1978 duet with Archie Shepp — Abdullah with only drums, and then with only a horn, his company beginning to thin; a solo Ode to Duke Ellington that I came across in, of all places, a cut-out bin, somebody's discard that became one of my treasures.

Once, in the late 1980s — I cannot give you the year, only that it was after Water from an Ancient Well — I saw him in the flesh, leading Ekaya at Sweet Basil in the Village. I recall that they played one or two of his original compositions that were, as his so often are, marked by the unmistakable signature of what has come to be known as Cape Jazz; a tribute of some kind to Thelonious Monk; and at least one Ellington cover. I did not know then that Sweet Basil was his New York sanctuary, the room where, on another night, Kenny Barron heard him and went home and wrote "Song for Abdullah." I knew only that his band Ekaya, whose name translates as “home,” was making a home of that small dark room, a long way from his heartland.

As the years went on, and I continued to listen to Abdullah, his musical settings kept thinning. The more I listened, the more it felt as though I was following him inward. On a Friday this past April, I devoted the 10 p.m. hour to Yarona, a live trio date recorded at Sweet Basil and, after Water from an Ancient Well, my favorite of all his records — not knowing, of course, that I would be playing him in farewell within two months. From the trio it was a short way to the solo recordings, which is where, in the end, I have spent most of my time with him: the early Reflections (aka This Is Dollar Brand), African Dawn, Desert Flowers, Senzo, and, near the very end of his long life, Solotude. One man at a piano. That, finally, is the Abdullah I know best and appreciate most.

His debts to Ellington were many, and he never troubled to hide them; the 1973 Ode to Duke Ellington was only the most explicit of them. But he was no copyist. The percussiveness of his attack, set against his mastery of touch and cadence and dynamics, and the strange, generous harmonies he found in what amounted to a United Nations of sources — all of it adds up not to imitation but to something I can only call a forward-gazing tribute to Duke's musicality, Ellington carried somewhere new that he would have reveled in.  

I never met him, and the one Cape Malay table I shared was not his. Where I lived with Abdullah Ibrahim was here — in the records, on the air, in the late hours when his solo piano filled a small den in Ohio the way it once filled a small room in the Village, and the way, I have to believe, it once filled a home in Cape Town. That, despite his decades of exile, is where he shared himself with the world, and where he shares himself still. The man is gone, as of Monday. But the well has not run dry. You have only to set the needle down.