On Saturday, 7 December, a rumour spread that veteran jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim had died, prompting messages to flood my WhatsApp early in the morning.
I later learned that former culture minister, Pallo Jordan, had reached Ibrahim by phone, and the pianist confirmed that he was fine.
By Saturday night, it turns out that it was Rashid Vally, a record label owner and producer who had worked closely with Ibrahim in the Seventies, who had died.
Several of Capetonian Ibrahim’s records, including the iconic Mannenberg: It’s Where It’s Happening, were released on Vally’s As-Shams (The Sun) label, based in Johannesburg.
Vally was so adept at his job, and unobtrusive in his dealings with artists, that only music nerds recognise his name.
In 1973, he started Soultown Records in the basement of a shop called Koh-i-Noor, owned by his father, in central Johannesburg.
One of the first records Vally produced was by the drummer Gideon Nxumalo, considered one of the pioneers of jazz music in South Africa.
By the end of the Sixties, Ibrahim, recording as Dollar Brand, had returned to South Africa and begun making music that distinctly reflected his home city and country.
Noticing Vally’s work with Soultown, Ibrahim asked him to produce some of his records.
Their first collaboration was Peace with Ibrahim backed by Victor Ntoni and Nelson Magwaza.
But the 1974 album Mannenberg: Is Where It’s Happening defined their genius partnership and cemented Ibrahim and Vally’s reputations. The title track became legendary, catapulting Ibrahim and backing musicians Basil Coetzee, Robbie Jansen, Monty Weber and Morris Goldberg into prominence.
The album was remarkable for its personnel and sound, which is said to have helped inaugurate the genre of “Cape jazz”, a fusion of earlier marabi music, Cape Town’s coloured dance music and bebop.
It also featured the only instance of Ibrahim speaking Afrikaans on record: “Julle kan ma’ New York toe gaan. Ons bly hie’ innie Mannenberg.” (You can go to New York. We stay here in Mannenberg.)
Even the album’s cover art reflected its roots. It depicted a group of people — children smiling in the background and an older, dignified, coloured woman in the foreground, her head neatly covered by a “doek” (scarf).
Historian John Edwin Mason, who has written about South African slavery and the country’s history of photography, later wrote in an essay about the making of the album Mannenberg. It sold more copies in 1974 and 1975 than any other jazz LP recorded in South Africa and helped to “reestablish Ibrahim as South Africa’s leading jazz musician”.
More importantly, during the Eighties, a time of mass resistance politics, many embraced the song as a metaphor for townships where trouble brewed. The song gave voice to the dreams of the dispossessed and became known as South Africa’s “unofficial national anthem”, the sound of freedom, according to Mason.
As-Shams produced records for other South African jazz luminaries, including Tete Mbambisa, Sathima Bea Benjamin, Lionel Pillay, Movement in the City (which featured Coetzee, Jansen, Weber, Pops Mohammed and Sipho Gumede), Spirits Rejoice, Mike Makhalamele, Winston Mankunku Ngozi, Barney Rachabane and Kippie Moeketsi. It even extended into the post-apartheid era, releasing Kyle Shepherd, Skyjack and Sisonke Xonti, among others.
On the back album sleeve of Mannenberg: Is Where It’s Happening, is a sentence attributed to Ibrahim: “Is this what Rashid Vally wanted?”
A question worth asking now as we wish him a peaceful rest: “What did Rashid Vally give?”
The answer is a simple: unmeasurably much.