17/06/2026
Murray remembering Abdullah:
The first time I recorded Abdullah was in the early 1990s, when he came back from exile. I felt nervous before the recording, mainly because Abdullah was a legend in Cape Town, but also because Robbie Jansen had warned me that Abdullah could be hard on sound engineers.
He told me of an incident when Abdullah booked a recording session in New York. After playing the first take, he went into the control room to listen back to his performance. When the engineer started playing the tape, Abdullah stopped him and asked “What is that sound?” “That’s the piano,” the engineer answered. Abdullah took him by the arm, pulled him into the studio, and played a few notes on the piano. “No, THAT’S the piano,” he said, and walked out of the session.
Anticipating something similar, we had the piano tuner on standby at Milestone. When Abdullah arrived, he spent a few minutes playing the piano, asked for a small tweak just to show whose session it was, and then we recorded the music that became the album “Mantra Mode”, which included three of the musicians from the original Mannenberg session — Basil Coetzee, Robbie Jansen, and Monty Weber.
We went on to record dozens of tracks with Abdullah, ranging from complete albums to commissioned pieces like The Eleventh Hour for choreographer Merce Cunningham — and he never said a single hostile word to me. He made some incredible music, and he will be missed.
Here's my tribute to Abdullah: https://open.spotify.com/track/0PPDKvacJNLutXL48Fs1Iu
