Abdullah Ibrahim in the 1960s: How the Famous Pianist Began to Shape an African Jazz Sound

The 1960s is a significant era in Abdullah Ibrahim’s story. It’s a time when the South African master’s international career as a jazz pianist was gradually established and he laid the foundations for the signature sound that is recognised today as people reflect on his passing.

He is best remembered for evoking soundscapes that are recognisably South African: harmonisations of church hymns, Cape Town’s ghoema rhythms and Islamic calls to prayer. His delivery in performance was characterised by a sophisticated simplicity and spaciousness.

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This musical turn is mimicked by a spiritual one that culminated in his conversion to Islam and name change from Dollar Brand to Abdullah Ibrahim in 1968.

The World of Dollar Brand was a series of articles that Ibrahim wrote and published in the Cape Herald newspaper in 1968 and 1969. They reveal some of his travails and musical developments after he had gone into exile in Europe in 1962.

As I outline in my study of South African jazz artists and exile, to call this time exile for Ibrahim is perhaps a misnomer. He and his wife, jazz artist and activist Sathima Bea Benjamin, returned to South Africa from July 1968 to May 1969, and again in 1970 and 1974.

As South Africa became remote as a physical presence, however, it gained presence in the poetics of Ibrahim’s sound and discourse. These early years of his absence from South Africa present the lesser known corners of his musical career.

Yet through his music, writing and interviews of this time we can trace how Ibrahim imagined and contructed Africa musically, negotiating an African-rooted sense of identity.

The ‘exile’ years

Born in Cape Town in 1934, Adolph Johannes (Dollar) Brand had been a prolific pianist in the nightclub circuit in South Africa since he was 17 years old.

By the time he and Benjamin left South Africa in 1962, he had a solid reputation. He had collaborated on South Africa’s first bebop record, the Jazz Epistles’ Verse 1, with South African jazz luminaries like Kippie Moeketsi, Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa.

In her biography, Benjamin recalls the couple were “literally starving for lack of opportunities” in a time of white minority rule and apartheid. A state of emergency declared after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 stifled the South African jazz scene. With the help of a personal friend, Paul Meyer, Ibrahim and Benjamin left for Zurich.

They arrived in the bitter cold of a Swiss winter to a room infested with bedbugs, and struggled to find work. Ibrahim wrote in the Cape Herald that his initial point of contact in Zurich was Club Africana, but they found his music “too modern”. He finally “managed to strike the right note” with the club’s managers – implying some form of musical compromise on his part – and secured a residency for four and a half months a year with fellow South Africans Johnny Gertze on bass and Makaya Ntshoko on drums.

Despite these adversities, this was a time of great development in Ibrahim’s sound. He put in intensive hours of piano practice, even turning to physical exercise to “sustain a long period of two-handed attack”. He honed his skills as a solo performer, and changed his approach to composition:

A lot of the (mostly American-derived) forms I had been working with in South Africa had become restrictive. I moulded new pieces which allowed me unfettered freedom and improvisation … lots of rhythmic patterns using the pulse … as the foundation.

Ibrahim’s early compositions The Stride, Machopi or Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro are examples of this sound.

The focus on pulse (the steady, smallest beats of music) as opposed to beats organised into metre (typically blocks of two, three or four beats that form a steady, repeating pattern, for example ONE two three ONE two three) signals that Ibrahim’s ear was trained on African modes of organising sound.

Cyclical repetitions of short riffs in the bass provide the structure of the piece, with the right hand freely improvising over it. This short cycle is a hallmark of many African musical traditions.

An encounter with Duke Ellington

A key event of Ibrahim’s time in Zurich was his encounter with US jazz star Duke Ellington in 1963. The story is well-known. Ellington was performing in Zurich and Benjamin convinced him to come and listen to a set of the Dollar Brand Trio. Clearly impressed, Ellington invited Benjamin and Brand to record with him in Paris a few weeks later.

This resulted in two albums: Duke Ellington presents the Dollar Brand Trio (1964), and Benjamin’s A Morning in Paris (only released in 1997). Ellington’s endorsement undoubtedly opened doors for Ibrahim, though it would be several years before his career took off.

Ibrahim’s travels between 1962 and 1965 reveal the difficulties of securing a living. He performed at European festivals and did residencies. Stints from 1963 to 1965 at Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen resulted in the live recording released as Anatomy of a South African Village (1965) and Round Midnight at the Montmartre (only released in 1988).

Here some of his “new forms” are audible. After a period in London, Ibrahim and Benjamin moved to New York in 1965. The city became their home for the next four decades.

A solo concert

Ibrahim played his first solo concert in the famed Carnegie Hall on 10 October 1965, launching him into the New York jazz scene in a symbolically significant way.

The concert was largely self-arranged, which struck the pianist as remarkably similar to his concert arrangement efforts when he was still in South Africa.

In this concert, his preference for solo piano performance is already noticeable. In the Cape Herald he observed:

The usual line-up of bass and drums was becoming too restricted and it was quite difficult to find a bass player who could play the fast figures I wanted.

These were difficult years for Ibrahim. Despite generous assistance from the Ellingtons, he could find no work. He poured himself into practice, studying scores, remarking:

The solo piano form was beginning to take shape.

Conversion to Islam

Ibrahim and Benjamin returned to South Africa for 10 months in 1968 and 1969. It was during this time that Dollar Brand converted to Islam. Ibrahim recounts a period of cleansing and spiritual exploration that led to his conversion.

It mirrored the technical development in his musical practices, which Ibrahim said in an interview on BBC radio was connected with internal development.

According to a review in the Cape Herald of the first concert he played in Kensington, Cape Town, however, he had left his audience behind in his musical developments. Although the figure that walked onto the stage “was the old scruffy, well-loved Dollar all right”, the reviewer reports that “Dollar began playing for Dollar, way-out stuff started soaring right above the heads of the audience”. The audience whispered, they fidgeted, and then “started shouting ‘Go back to America’.”

If Ibrahim had lost his Cape Town audiences by 1968, his music reconnected with them when he returned in 1974. With producer Rashid Vally he recorded one of his best known albums, Mannenberg – is where it’s happening (1974).

In the track Mannenberg the musical short cycle features again, but this time in the familiar form of the marabi pattern, a mainstay of South African jazz since the 1920s, which forms the backbone of this piece.

Coupled with the distinct saxophone timbres of Cape Town musicians Robbie Jansen and Basil Coetzee, these are the sounds that became synonymous with a home that was only available to Ibrahim imaginatively, sonically, after he left the country in 1974 into what became definitive exile.

They will be the soundtrack to a free memorial concert in honour of his passing in Cape Town on 29 June.

Ibrahim’s writing in the Cape Herald is referenced in this article. The anti-apartheid newspaper closed in 1986 and while these articles are available in archives, there isn’t a link to them online.

Stephanie Vos works for Stellenbosch University.

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