Abdullah Ibrahim, South African jazz giant who was acclaimed by Nelson Mandela as ‘our Mozart’

Abdullah Ibrahim, who has died aged 91, was a giant of jazz who was indelibly associated with his people’s struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and with his warm, melodic, soulful style he was hailed by Duke Ellington and Count Basie as one of the great pianists of the genre; Nelson Mandela called him “our Mozart”, and his song Mannenberg became an anthem of resistance.

He wrote the piece in 1974 on a visit home to South Africa, having been in self-imposed exile for 12 years. It was composed – based on a few lines improvised by Ibrahim in the studio – at a time when the apartheid regime was forcibly removing Coloured families from their homes in Cape Town’s District Six.

The album it was on, Mannenberg – Is Where It’s Happening, became a bestseller in South Africa, and the piece itself was played at protests and rallies, inspiring Mandela in prison on Robben Island. When the record was smuggled in and played over the prison loudspeakers, he declared: “Liberation is near.”

Adolph Johannes Brand was born on October 9 1934 in Kensington, a poor area of Cape Town; he was given his grandparents’ surname to make him Coloured rather than Black in the apartheid system. His father, Sentso, was a house painter who was shot dead when the boy was four, and he was brought up by his grandmother Margaret, believing his mother, Rachel, to be his sister.

They both played the piano, Margaret at the local African Methodist Episcopal church, and hymns remained a lifelong influence, alongside the jazz of Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Young Adolph – he was given the nickname “Dollar” by the American soldiers stationed in Cape Town who would sell him jazz records – began learning the piano aged seven and attended Trafalgar High School in Cape Town’s District Six. “I started playing traditional African music, church music, carnival music,” he recalled. “The jazz thing came later.”

He became aware at an early age that the black struggle was not confined to South Africa. “We used to listen to the fights of Joe Louis on the radio, then we watched the work of Dr Martin Luther King,” he recalled. “In the sense of bringing some light into our lives he was the same as Joe Louis. Every time a black American overcame an obstacle, it was a victory for us.”

Young Brand became well-known in jazz circles in Cape Town, and though he had ambitions of becoming a doctor – which were stymied by apartheid – in his teens he began playing professionally with a swing band, the Tuxedo Slickers. South Africa had a healthy jazz scene – although, he recalled, “the recording companies never dug it because they always wanted to doctor the music – they said to make it ‘palatable’.”

Brand moved to Johannesburg, where he formed the Jazz Epistles with the trumpeter Hugh Masekela and saxophonist Kippy Moeketsi in 1959. The following year they released what is thought to be the first South African jazz album of original material, Jazz Epistle Verse 1.

But even though the band were not explicitly political they were harassed by the authorities, especially in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 – and in 1962, with his wife-to-be, the singer Bea Benjamin, Brand left South Africa for Europe; Duke Ellington saw him play in Zurich and took him under his wing, persuading the organisers of the Newport Jazz Festival to give him a slot.

Exile proved to be a stimulus rather than a burden. In 1967 he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study composition at the Juilliard with the pianist and composer Hall Overton, who made him study Bach preludes and fugues, and he played with most of the leading jazz figures as he melded American and African music, reimagining the work of Ellington, Monk et al through the lens of his heritage.

In 1968 he converted to Islam, took the name Abdullah Ibrahim and made a pilgrimage to Mecca. His music acquired yet another dimension. “There are sounds you don’t hear,” he told the New Musical Express in 1975. “We Muslims have something we call Zikr [the meditative remembrance of Allah]. Jazz originally comes from Zikr – the repetition of the divine attributes of God. All sound is sacred. It is we who turn it around and maybe misuse it.”

He returned to South Africa, but after the Soweto uprising of 1976 he left South Africa again following an appearance at an African National Congress benefit that attracted the attention of the government. “Politics is useless stuff,” he later said. “It revolves around material things – and everything is spirit.”

His concerts were often intense, spiritual affairs. In 1982, when he played a gig in Deptford, Mick Brown observed in The Guardian: “Brand approaches his music with an air of studied solemnity, draped over his piano, lost to the surroundings.”

When apartheid fell, the ANC issued a directive that exiled performers should wait for permission to go back, insisting that culture had to be “a weapon of struggle”, and that the ANC should control artists’ activities and movements so that they conformed with “the people’s wishes”. Ibrahim was having none of it, returning to play a triumphant homecoming concert in Johannesburg.

Moving between Europe, South Africa and the US, he compiled a long discography and toured intensively, sometimes solo, sometimes with ensembles of varying sizes. In 1983 he formed the septet Ekaya (“Home” in the Zulu language); in 1988 Don Snowden in LA Weekly wrote that they played “some of the most gloriously serene and spiritual music I’ve ever heard”.

In 1997 Ibrahim undertook a world tour with the Munich Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, and in 2008 he played the Barbican Centre in London with the BBC Concert Orchestra. In 2016, at Emperors Palace near Johannesburg, he performed with Hugh Masekela for the first time in nearly 60 years to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Soweto uprising.

Ibraham was a dedicated student of karate throughout his life, and studied Japanese language and culture. He closely associated Budo – “the martial way”, or “the way of the warrior” – with music-making.

“Karate has nothing to do with fighting,” he once said. “It’s about catching your energy and using it in your life and work.” It was exactly the same with music, he said. “To let that music, or whatever it is, flow through you is like... a state of Zen. You yourself have to be completely composed. This is what composition means – that you must be composed so that that message can flow through.”

Abdullah Ibrahim and Bea Benjamin had a daughter, Tsidi, and son, Tsakwe, who survive him, but divorced (she died in 2013); Tsidi is a rapper known as Jean Grae. He is survived by his partner, Marina Umari.

Abdullah Ibrahim, born October 9 1934, died June 15 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]