The universe, that notoriously shoddy venue, has just lost its most elegant tenant. Abdullah Ibrahim, the man who made a piano sing with the voice of a continent, has died at 91. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, he has finally completed his solo and stepped into the silence that awaits us all.
As a satirical correspondent who has been known to measure time in gin and vinyl, I feel a rare stab of genuine melancholy. But let's not get maudlin. Let's get real.
Ibrahim, born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town, was more than a musician. He was a geological tremor dressed in a suit. He was the sound of District Six before the bulldozers came, the echo of a Sophiatown jazz club at 3 a.
m., the quiet defiance of a man who refused to let apartheid dictate his chord progressions. His composition "
Mannenberg" isn't a song. It's a national anthem for a country that forgot to write one.
And now he's gone. But let's savour the irony: a man who spent his life making the intangible tangible has himself become intangible. I can already hear the gin-soaked tributes: 'He was a giant.
' 'He was a legend.' 'He was the voice of a generation.' All true.
All insufficient. The man who once said, 'I don't play jazz. I play life.
' has taken his final bow. But here's the thing. His music isn't dead.
It's lurking in the crackles of old vinyl, in the hum of a midnight radio, in the memory of a rain-soaked street corner. So raise a glass. Not to his death.
To his life. To the man who taught us that the blues can also be a prayer. To Abdullah Ibrahim.
The high priest has left the building. But the building is still vibrating.
