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Gregory wrote: Mon Jun 15, 2026 4:17 pm Abdullah Ibrahim, 91. He lived a long life and stayed musically active till the end. This is up there with Sonny Rollins's recent passing as a loss

Agreed. I picked up The Children Of Africa in the early 80s sight unseen mistakenly thinking it was an ECM release (similar minimalist artwork) and discovered a new label (enja) and artist to collect in the process. Probably still my favorite album by him.

Captain Paranoia wrote: Mon Jun 15, 2026 6:40 pm Musician Oliver Tree ... among others

This is a shocker. I used to deliver his records while he was dj'ing in his bedroom @ his parents house & before he moved to LA. Really nice & unassuming kid, I had no idea he became a pop star or had music videos with over 100M views until someone else on my route pointed it out fairly recently.

Wow. Tree was an interesting figure, I really like a few of his earlier songs (here’s a somewhat bitter one given the current news) and he certainly committed to some consistent and wild looks in his now brief career

Lowry_Sam wrote: Mon Jun 15, 2026 7:12 pm

Gregory wrote: Mon Jun 15, 2026 4:17 pm Abdullah Ibrahim, 91. He lived a long life and stayed musically active till the end. This is up there with Sonny Rollins's recent passing as a loss

Agreed. I picked up The Children Of Africa in the early 80s sight unseen mistakenly thinking it was an ECM release (similar minimalist artwork) and discovered a new label (enja) and artist to collect in the process. Probably still my favorite album by him.

You may already be aware but two of his earlier albums were released by ECM Records' sister label JAPO (Jazz by Post): African Piano and Ancient Africa. I'm going to listen to at least one of those today.

Nick Doob, even if you don't recognize the name, there's a good chance you've seen something he filmed. IMDb continues to make the same bizarre error, mixing him up with his late colleague Jim Desmond, but he began a lifelong friendship with D A Pennebaker on Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and was involved in nearly everything he made after that. (The Criterion edition of The War Room includes an interview with Doob where he discusses working on that.) As the Yale Film Archive mentioned, he maintained a close relationship with the school after graduating from there, going back to teach and mentor students in their film program. He was still making non-fiction films for HBO as late as last year's Country Doctor.

Abdullah Ibrahim gave a farewell concert last year - I couldn't make it, and I knew I would regret it, but that's my fault for discovering his music too late. He had come through NYC before, even recording the essential live album Yarona at a jazz venue that no longer exists (albeit over a decade before I finally visited NYC).

His catalog in the CD era was a bit overwhelming for a variety of reasons - he was very prolific on smaller labels that weren't likely to have stable or broad distribution in the U.S. As a result, it can be a mixed bag of endless compilations that go in and out of print.

One I'd highly recommend is Voice of Africa, which should be easy to find on an inexpensive (and well-mastered) CD. It's possibly the best introduction you can find for his music, partly because it includes the original, definitive version of "Mannenberg."

Strangely, Spotify in the U.S. does not have the original version of "Mannenberg," only later interpretations that to be fair are wonderful to hear. As you can see from the cover art used for this YouTube upload, the recording was also the title track to an album released under his former name, Dollar Brand.

Water from an Ancient Well is another album I would highly recommend, likely the best one he made when he was performing and recording with flautist Carlos Ward. A few years later he released African River with a completely different group that has some overlap in repertoire, but they're great interpretations as well.