Ibrahim

Abdullah Ibrahim (1934-2026) Abdullah Ibrahim, pianist, now follows James Blood Ulmer, guitarist, who died a few weeks ago; Sonny Rollins, saxophonist, who passed a few weeks before Ulmer; Gunter Hampel, multi-instrumentalist, former husband of Jeanne Lee, who passed a few weeks before Rollins; David Henderson, poet, who wrote so much of the music, and who passed a few days before Hampel; Éliane Radigue, composer, who passed a few months prior to Henderson. From the music and back into it, the song they have all become. I sometimes wonder, speculatively, if the reasons these artists are dying now, the way that they are, falling like dominoes, it seems, is not just because of the gradual loss of generation, the inevitable factor of ageing—that “natural” fact that is also never not socially experienced, socially produced—but because the world they spoke into and of has not come to pass, because we are letting the world as it exists now continue, because that world continues in “our”…