Fireside Chat

Abdullah Ibrahim

Enja, Cape Town

The story of Abdullah Ibrahim starts in Cape Town, South Africa, where he was born in 1934 under the name of Adolph Johannes Brand. He started taking piano lessons as a child and was already playing jazz professionally by the end of the 1940's under the name Dollar Brand, shaping much of Cape Town's short-lived flowering of bebop-inspired jazz in the 1950s. By 1962 he first left South Africa, melding the influences of his youth in South Africa and his deep love for Duke Ellington in a style uniquely his own in countless tours through Europe and Northern America; and in sessions with people like Gato Barbieri, Don Cherry, Elvin Jones and Ellington himself. Converting to Islam in the seventies, he took on the name Abdullah Ibrahim and returned to live in South Africa long enough to work on some iconic Cape Jazz records (most notably sax player Basil Coetzee's classic 'Mannenberg'). Since the end of apartheid he has been dividing his time between New York and South Africa, where he founded the M7 academy for musicians in Cape Town.