The revered South African jazz musician Abdullah Ibraham, born as Dollar Brand, died last weekend. Impermanence is swift.
Ibraham wasn't as well known or famous as, say, the recently departed Sonny Rollins, but the outpouring of sympathy and tributes I've seen on line is a testament to his humanity, to the way his music touched so many listeners. It seems like everyone who ever heard him has some personal experience of the way his music touched them that they want to express, and the outpouring of respect for a relatively obscure jazz musician is impressive.
The hypnotic rhythm of his Ishmael was a personal favorite of mine. I first heard it on late-night radio (WBUR) in Boston back in the 70s and I remember the feeling of elation I felt every time I heard the opening bass lines (Cecil McBee) and the wash of cymbals (Roy Brooks) on air, knowing the voyage it was about to take me on. I had a copy of his 1976 LP, Banyana – Children of Africa, on which the track appears. I still return to the album often and consider it nothing short of a masterpiece.
I never saw him perform live. But I do have a bootleg recording of a performance (March 7, 1976) from the period of Ishmael and Banyana that a friend had taped at Boston's Emmanuel Church and sent to me literally decades later.
Speaking of digital files, fun fact: Ibraham's Calypso Minor, from his soundtrack to the 1990 Claire Denis film, No Fear, No Die, was the very first track I ever owned on MP3. Back in the mid '90s, I had read something about a new digital music format in the old print-media newspaper, and an online search (keyword: MP3) led me to a file for the track that I downloaded from an AOL bulletin board. Every other digital music file I've ever downloaded or somehow came to own in my life was subsequent to Calypso Minor.
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