May 26, 2026 11:08 AM
Sonny Rollins Passes Away at 95
Sonny Rollins, the iconic saxophonist, composer and improviser whose career stretched from the origins of bebop to 21st…
Ibrahim was an early jazz acolyte, studying the music via 78s he would buy from soldiers stationed in South Africa — who also gave him the nickname “Dollar.”
(Photo: Michael Jackson)Pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, the NEA Jazz Master from South Africa who helped fuse the folk music of his home country with modern jazz and was reportedly called the “South African Mozart” by Nelson Mandela, died June 15 at his home in Germany, according to his family. He was 91.
Adolph Johannes Brand was born in 1934 in the northern suburb of Cape Town known as Kensington. He was raised primarily by his grandparents and grew up mistakenly believing his mother, Rachel, was his sister. It wasn’t until he was 17 that he learned the truth, and learned of the fate of his father, Senzo, a member of the Sotho people who was murdered when Ibrahim was only 4 years old.
More positively, Ibrahim’s grandmother and mother were responsible for fueling his interest in music from an early age. Both women were church pianists, introducing him to spirituals and gospel through their membership in the African Methodist Episcopalian Church. He had to beg his family for piano lessons, but it was through that instrument that Ibrahim found his lifeline within apartheid-era South Africa. As he told The Guardian’s Maya Jaggi in 2001, “I lost a lot of close friends to gangs and prison; they died of addiction or were murdered. The thing that saved me was the music. In all that horror it was a least clean; you were dealing with something beautiful.”
Ibrahim was an early jazz acolyte, studying the music via 78s he would buy from soldiers stationed in South Africa — who also gave him the nickname “Dollar” — and playing with big bands around the city. But he eventually fell under the sway of bebop, starting small combos like the Dollar Brand Trio and leading the Jazz Epistles, a hard-bop septet featuring Hugh Masekela and saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi. The latter would go on to record Jazz Epistle Verse 1, the first album by a South African jazz group, in 1960.
As conditions worsened in South Africa, Ibrahim and his wife, singer Sathima Bea Benjamin, left the country and settled in Switzerland. It was there that the pianist would meet his greatest mentor Duke Ellington, who brought Ibrahim and his band to a studio in Paris for a session that yielded the album Duke Ellington Presents The Dollar Brand Trio. The album was so well-received that Ibrahim felt emboldened to move to New York, where he started rubbing shoulders with many fellow jazz greats.
“[It] was like living in the golden ages,” Ibrahim told DownBeat in 2019. “I met everyone. I hung out with Coleman Hawkins an entire day, just listening to him play ‘Picasso.’ And then I met Monk … I introduced myself. I said, ‘I’m from South Africa. I think you’re great and thank you very much for inspiring me.’ He looked at me quizzically and walked around the room a couple of times and came back again and said that I was the first piano player to tell him that.”
The pianist truly came into his own in the late ’60s. During this period, he converted to Islam, and took on the name Abdullah Ibrahim and started to more definitively fold in the music that he has absorbed and studied over the course of his life. His compositions stuck to the core foundation of gospel but were driven by the rhythms of African street music, big band jazz and more avant garde expressions fueled by his friendship and collaboration with artists like Pharoah Sanders and Don Cherry. Ibrahim also began returning to Africa during this period — settling first in Swaziland where he established a music school and then returning to South Africa. It was in his home country that he began to record his most politically motivated music, like “Mannenberg,” a swirling funky anthem written in honor of the families that were forcibly relocated by the apartheid government.
As Ibrahim became more involved in the anti-apartheid movement, including organizing a benefit concert for the African National Congress, he fled South Africa with his family. He wouldn’t return until 1990, at the behest of Nelson Mandela. But in spite of his ability to move around the country freely and record with local musicians, Ibrahim didn’t fully feel at home until 1994 when he played Mandela’s inauguration as South Africa’s president.
While Ibrahim had residences in South Africa and Germany, he spent much of his time away from home, performing with his ever-evolving ensemble Ekaya and collaborating with musicians young and old. Through it all, he never sat still, constantly adapting and evolving his material and jazz standards as he saw fit. Towards the end of his life, that included working with youth orchestras in Milan and South Africa for the first performances of his original compositions with lyrics. As he told DownBeat in 2019, it was a challenge reflective of his artistic life.
“It’s a mental exercise where sometimes we paint ourselves into a corner. But it is very simple and profound at the same time. It is the profundity of simplicity. That’s been my career.” DB
Onstage, Rollins would move about restlessly, thrusting his tenor sax in the air as he blew.
May 26, 2026 11:08 AM
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