Abdullah Ibrahim (born Adolph Johannes Brand; 9 October 1934 – 15 June 2026), was perhaps South Africa’s greatest pianist and composer, and while his loss is being deeply felt around the world this week, his legacy will outlast us all. I had the honor of interviewing Ibrahim just once. It was New York City in 2017, and he had been scheduled to play with Hugh Masekela. The two musicians were once part of South Africa’s first bebop band, the short-lived Jazz Epistles in the mid-1950s. The original lineup was an A-list of South African musical giants, including Masekela, Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand), Kippie Moeketsi and Jonas Gwangwa.
I met Ibrahim amid a series of Jazz Epistle reunion concerts that had taken place in Europe. Continuing that landmark reunion, he was scheduled to perform with Masekela at the Town Hall. However, Masekela was sick, nearing his end, and could not make the concert. Instead, Ibrahim would play a tribute to the ond band, and then perform a set with his own band Ekaya.
I met him in a midtown rehearsal studio, with the idea that I would get a preview of the concert. Little did I imagine that we would end up talking about Bushmen cosmology, trance dances, Astro-tourism, Budo boxing and the timeless nature of Nelson Mandela. I started out with a point of connection. The first time Sean Barlow and I went to South Africa, in 1987, we met saxophonist Basil Coetzee, and heard the story of how he and Ibrahim had composed the timeless song “Mannenberg” a wistful evocation of township life that helped establish a Cape Town jazz sound that came to be known as Goema.
Thanks to Simon Rentner, then of WBGO, for making this interview possible.
Banning Eyre: The first time we went to South Africa way back in 1987 we met and spent some time with Basil Coetzee at his house, and we talked about the recording of “Mannenberg.” This was all very new to me, part of my first trip into Africa, so it was a great moment of discovery. I’ve always held that song in my mind, as a kind of cultural landmark.
On a much more recent trip just two years ago, I interviewed the composer Mac McKenzie, quite a character. He’s an amazing person to have made that journey from Goema street music to rock ‘n’ roll with The Geniuses, and now, modern classical composition. He played for me your wife Sathima [Bea Benjamin]’s performance with his Cape Town ensemble, which I suppose is one of her last works. It was very impressive.
Then this morning I watched Hugh’s hospital video announcing that he can’t be here for this show. Despite that sad news, I do want to ask you a couple of questions about Hugh. Hopefully that reunion will happen in the future. Can you tell me your very earliest memories of Hugh Masekela?
Abdullah Ibrahim: Well, I was in Cape Town. There was a group called the Manhattan Brothers, they were a vocal group, and they were on tour. Todd Matshikiza was one of our great composers but when they came to play, Todd couldn’t make it. There were five lady singers in the Manhattan Brothers. These were the top singers at that time. They had a band called the Jazz Dazzlers. Kippie Moeketsi was one of them, it was at that time in Johannesburg, all over South Africa, when people created small combos. And Jazz Dazzlers were one of those combos. So Kippie was part of this, they came to Cape Town and then Todd Matshikiza, the piano player, had to go back to South Africa and they asked me. So that’s when I met Hugh and we did a tour of the Eastern Cape.
This would be the early 1950s, right?
Yes.
So what do you remember about Hugh from back then?
If you say I have Ekaya, my group here, Cleve [Guyton Jr.], my alto player; we’ve been together for 40 years. Lance [Bryant], tenor player; we’ve been about 30, 35 years. Our relationship as people has got nothing to do with music. It’s very dangerous. Our relationship with people, how we understand each other and what our mutual goals, what it is that we’re striving for… So I never had much interaction with Hugh or many of the South African players. Basil Coetzee was the only one. We were very close, yeah.
I see. It was the music, the art, not the personal relationship.
That’s got nothing to do with art. People ask me why I don’t write my biography, but I’m writing my biography. My life is my biography. And on that day when the Creator reveals my biography of what I’ve done, then I have to answer for it. So this is what our relationship is with people and musicians.
For me, my closest relationship is not necessarily with musicians. It’s with people. My martial arts teacher in Japan; I’ve been training with him for 50 years. Because once you narrow yourself to one genre, there are many others you miss. So I try to interact with people, regardless of what they do.
But you say it was different with Basil. That was the time when you returned to South Africa and created “Mannenberg” and other songs. It’s a moment that really stands out in the history of South African music, and really, African music. But for you, it seems like it was special also in a more personal way. Can you talk about that?
You see, we grew up playing traditional music, traditional dance music. Then came along the jazz players. These were young, sophisticated, Ivy League people, even in South Africa. And for them, it was, and it still is, a class question, right? So traditional music people come from the rural areas; they don’t know anything, so there’s this disparity, and it still exists. I come from the hood. I come from the street. My great-grandfather was a stable boy, the chief stable boy for the first Afrikaner president, Paul Kruger. My great-grandfather spoke all the Southern African languages, very fluently. He taught us all about the herbs and plants. This is our cosmology, dealing with people. So in our tradition, when we try to play traditional music, the sophisticated people in the cities, like these jazz musicians, they didn’t want to play the music because it was below their dignity. And at that time, I tried to get South African musicians to play tradition, they didn’t want to play traditional music.
Why not?
No, they didn’t want to play. You would go and ask them, why didn’t they? They would tell you, “We didn’t want to play the traditional music because it was too simple.” You see? This is fantastic brainwashing.
Yeah, that’s what it is, isn’t it?
To say that we are worthless. So Basil, when I first introduced him to the music, he said to me, “Ah man, this music is very simple.” I said, “Okay, let’s go play.” And he started playing. And then he realized the complexity and the difficulty. So what you had to do, if you play in our genre, you had to study the tradition. And you had to know it inside out. And then when you play, you see we had no point of reference. In jazz, we had Charlie Parker; we had Monk; but in our tradition, there was nobody there.
No figures to serve as models.
Those were people who really did improvisation. What shall we do with tradition? You can only sell it. You can’t love it. But the idea is that you have to develop the tradition. So the young people can’t… What are you gonna do with young people’s tradition? They can’t go looking the same way. So this is my project. I call my project “Ancient Tradition, New Relevance.” This is the mindset that we have to adapt and adopt in order that if we are going to survive here.
When you talk about tradition in the context of the Cape, are talking about Goema?
Goema is a term that people have used. This is some urban thing. Do you know anything about the Khoi people? The Khoi and the San people?
Yes, the original people of the region.
Well, this is my people. This is our tradition where we are trance-dance healers.
So the term Goema is a modern invention?
Okay, let me explain to you what we do in terms of our music. Our San people, every year at full moon, we have ceremony, a trance dance. There used to be a team from the medical school in University of Cape Town. They used to go up every full moon and see this, right? So they’re doing the trance. These are our healers, our traditional healers. So people would gather those who are ill and we perform the ceremony. And the healer will go into trance. And then this medical team would examine him, and he would fall into the fire. But, no burn marks. And to examine him, he would be claimed medically dead. There’s no heartbeat; there’s no breath. And it’s in this condition that he heals.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, so we asked we asked the healer, “What happens when you go into trance?” He said, “I die.” So when he dies, the healer is in heaven and he asks God’s permission to heal, and he’s given the permission to come and heal. That is the ceremony, and then when the healing is done he comes back out of trance. This is a little bit of our tradition, nothing to do with Goema.
Goema is modern.
I don’t know what it is.
I think the first time I heard that word it was from Basil in that first interview and then Mac McKenzie throws it around a lot. Maybe it’s one of those modern simplifications of something much more complicated.
What’s modern? What is that? What the hell is this modern? The universe right now is only 10 seconds old. The universe is 10 seconds old. We were doing a project in the green Kalahari. We were working with the SKA [Square Kilometer Array] You know? That’s a Telescope that is developed for looking into the universe. Last year, we graduated 170 young astrophysicists. This is what we’re dealing with.
Hmm.
And Goema? (We laugh.)
I heard you say just earlier when you were talking to Simon about how exile is hard. I wrote a biography of Thomas Mapfumo from Zimbabwe, who’s been in exile in the U.S. now for over 15 years. You had the experience of going into exile and not knowing what was going to happen, and then things changed and you were able to go back, and now you have this life where you can return home when you like. I guess my question is, what feels like home to you now?
I’m home. Here. New York. I’m home. Wherever I am. Wherever you are. The university is a safe place. I’m home.
Does going back to South Africa now after things have sort of settled, does it have a special resonance? What’s it like?
Humanity is all over the world; we are all in exile. People live behind bars. Security walls. They live in exile. You live in the city. There are people there in exile. You drive past them. You see they’re living in exile. They’re behind bars and walls. Exile has got nothing to do with… If you can’t be free in jail, you can’t be free anywhere else. This is what Mandela taught us. It’s the same thing with the music.
How so?
If you can’t be free in 12 bars… Duke Ellington used to say… This guy is a band with 50 musicians. If he can’t say it with two, how can he say it with 50?
Let’s talk about the concert at Town Hall that’s going to happen in a couple of days. Tell me about the young gentleman who’s going to be stepping in in Hugh’s place. I don’t know much about him.
I don’t know much about him either.
Oh, really? You haven’t met?
Doesn’t matter.
You know he’s good.
(laughing) It’s not a question of good or bad. This is not what we’re living for, whether somebody is good or somebody is bad. We’re dealing with humanity. Let me explain to you. I study Budo. You know boxing, right?
To watch it, yes.
(laughs) Okay. The idea of boxing is you see there’s a left lead, right? So with this left lead you can get closer to the opponent. You can get fast to the opponent, right? So you can keep him at bay until you want to deliver the hay-maker. In boxing it says, if this lead hand takes three seconds to get to the to the opponent, then the other hand will take six seconds. You see but for us with Budo, this is not our mindset. If that takes three seconds, then this also takes three seconds. This is the curvature of time and space. Relativity. This is what we deal with. The curvature of space and time.
When we look at it my project in the green Kalahari, we have one of the world’s largest telescopes, right? We’re looking now past the Milky Way. So when you come to Cape Town, you’ll find 50 or 60 young people sitting there with computers and a console. They’re looking into the universe through this telescope in the Kalahari. And the reason why I’m going to the Kalahari… This is where I have my farm and my project and my academy. It’s one of the most stable locations in the world. If it just moves a split of a millimeter, it’s maybe like three billion light years.
I see. Stable in the sense that there’s no movement. And it’s also far from artificial light.
Stable in the heart.
Interesting. Well, is there anything you’d like to say about the concert that we’ll see, in terms of what you’re planning to play?
If I knew what I was going to play, I would be a millionaire, sir. (laughs)
You decide on the spot?
If I knew what I was going to play, I would be a business man. We had to answer that. The universe is ten seconds old. A concept of jazz is that we broke out of this confined thinking, because that is what they wanted us to understand, what they wanted us to believe. This is what Mandela showed us.
You trace that all the way back to the Jazz Epistles?
The Jazz Epistles was a sometime thing that happened yesterday. We’re talking about millions of years. If you come to our farm we have is a cave that is a two comma five million years old, and a settlement eight hundred and fifty thousand years old. I really invite you to come to the green Kalahari and just experience the stars, and the vastness of self.
That sounds fantastic. I love that idea. I accept. When you say your farm, what sort of farm?
We are developing Astro-tourism. China has just created the world’s largest telescope. We have the second largest one. And the idea is we’re locking with the cosmology of the Bushman people, because they have this knowledge of the stars and the animals.
How do you create that link?
We are animals, aren’t we? We are star people.
How do you tap into that knowledge?
I am a Bushman. I am Mandela. You are Mandela
That feels good.
So, we’re all Bushmen, we’re all Japanese, we’re all… There is this mutual cosmology that we’re dealing with and beyond all of these borders. That’s why our Jazz Epistles was created. In Africa, we never called each other Black.
Just people.
Yeah. (laughing heartily, almost uncontrollably) There were Zulus, there were Shangaan, but there were no Black people. So now suddenly we’ve been told that we are Black and white. So, what is the word? We have to “decontaminate.” This is what the music is about. Every time we hit a note, it’s a process of decontamination. It took me 70 years to learn to play one note. I’m only beginning to understand it now.
Well, I really thank you for your time, I’m certainly looking forward to the concert.
Come to the farm.
That sounds excellent. How often do you go?
I told Simon yesterday, the elders that we’re working with, the Bushman elders can read your DNA in your face. They look at your DNA. This is a power that we have. As humanity we have this, but we’ve forgotten it. So I say to the elder, “Humanity, we’re in a mess. We need water and we need wisdom.” And he says to me, “That’s a very good way that you put it.” You see, Bushman cosmology, we understand that in the universe there’s always conflict between the planets and the stars, but it has to be like this because this is the order. And God put us on earth to maintain this order.
It takes a long time to maintain it and there’s a lot of conflict and suffering involved in maintaining this order, but eventually humanity will have to accept it. And you, like me, we were given the task to tell people about this order, whether they laugh at us or whether they push us aside. And wherever you are, I’m holding your hand. This is who we are. We are here to tell ourselves and tell humanity about the order, and why is there conflict and why is there suffering and why are there wars. It’s because we don’t want to accept the order.
Does music convey that order?
Well, it depends on who plays it, right?
Oh so, there is good and bad.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to speak with you.
This article was originally published by Afropop Worldwide and is republished here with permission. View the original article.
Afropop Worldwide is the Peabody award-winning public radio program and multimedia platform dedicated to music from Africa and the African diaspora.
