South African jazz pianist, composer and improviser who cast a spell on audiences all over the world
The pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who has died aged 91, was among the first musicians from South Africa to achieve and sustain a major reputation with the international jazz audience. Listeners around the world, at first in small clubs and later in the grandest concert halls, fell under the spell of his compositions and improvisations, which took a sophisticated idiom originally created by the descendants of enslaved Africans and reinfused it with a primal warmth.
He was still known as Dollar Brand, a combination of his nickname and his family surname, when he and his wife-to-be, the singer Bea Benjamin, arrived in Europe in 1962 as refugees from the apartheid state.
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