Concerto - Abdullah Ibrahim by Various, No (2023/2023), Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany

He is South Africa's most important pianist and a jazz icon: Abdullah Ibrahim. Born in a ghetto in Cape Town in 1934, Ibrahim left the country in the early 1960s, played in the USA with Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and developed into a musician and composer who was valued all over the world. In South Africa, too, he remained an important musical and political voice. His composition "Mannenberg" became a kind of anthem of the anti-apartheid movement. Nelson Mandela, at whose inauguration he played in 1994, called him »our Mozart«. Musically, Abdullah Ibrahim, who called himself "Dollar Brand" at the beginning of his career, was surrounded by many influences early on: African traditional music, Christian hymns, gospels and spirituals as well as American jazz, township and classical music. His unmistakable sound and musical repertoire arose from this mixture of the secular and the religious, the traditional and the modern. He has been playing solo concerts all over the world for decades. He is "a magician of repetition", writes Die Zeit, "and behind every note there is a whole landscape".