Piano | b. 1934

The piano language Ibrahim developed draws on so many sources that it resists easy placement: the gospel and AME church music of his Cape Town childhood, Khoi-san folk melodies, Thelonious Monk's rhythmic displacement, Duke Ellington's orchestral colour, and the communal energy of South African township music all run through it simultaneously. Growing up in Cape Town as Adolph Johannes Brand, he made his professional debut at fifteen and helped form the Jazz Epistles in 1959, a short-lived but important septet with Hugh Masekela, Kippie Moeketsi, and Jonas Gwangwa that produced the first jazz album recorded by Black South African musicians. He left for Europe in 1962 following the Sharpeville massacre, and it was Ellington who heard the Dollar Brand Trio in Zurich the following year and arranged the Reprise session that first documented his playing for an international label. After converting to Islam in 1968 and taking the name Abdullah Ibrahim, he recorded "Mannenberg" in Cape Town in 1974, a piece that became inseparable from the anti-apartheid struggle. The Enja label recordings, from "African Sketchbook" (1973) through to "Water From an Ancient Well" (1985), are where most collectors begin.