We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of South African pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim. Also known as Dollar Brand, his music draws on the diverse sounds of his childhood in Cape Town’s multicultural port districts. Traditional African song, AME Church gospel, ragas, alongside modern jazz and other Western idioms.
Ibrahim is widely regarded as the leading figure of Cape jazz, with Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington standing out as his principal jazz influences. He is best known for “Mannenberg,” a composition that became an enduring anthem of the anti-apartheid movement.
During the apartheid era in the 1960s, Ibrahim moved to New York City and, apart from a brief return to South Africa in the 1970s, remained in exile until the early 1990s. Over the decades, he toured the world extensively, appearing at major venues either as a solo artist or playing with other renowned musicians, including Max Roach, Carlos Ward and Randy Weston, as well as collaborating with classical orchestras in Europe.
"Being black is a creative act. You have to create your world every single day because the world wasn't built for you. That makes us the ultimate architects."- Andre 3000.
2 Chainz & Timbaland react to Mach-Hommy’s “The G.A.T…”
“What’s special about it is that it’s a lathe cut… depending on how you position it on the record, it’s gonna play a different track… He only made 30 of them.”
“He had to chase down the guy who had the patent on this technology for years. Took forever for him to agree to license him the patent so he could press his record like this. He’s only granted it to Mach-Hommy… It’s a lathe cut, it doesn’t even get pressed, the music gets cut directly into this piece of plastic, it’s like a master lacquer.”
2 Chainz & Timbaland then continue to examine the records (The G.A.T… & H.B.O.) and praise Mach’s artistry.
BREAKING: IT'S MURDER! Death of a 31-year-old woman dropped by ICE at a Pittsburgh bus stop in freezing weather with no coat ruled a homicide!
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s office has ruled the death by hypothermia of Haitian immigrant Daphy Michel, who spent more than 30 hours shivering at a Pittsburgh bus stop after being dumped by ICE, a homicide.
Three days earlier, Michel had been in Washington County Jail on misdemeanor charges that a judge dismissed. Her family was waiting to pick her up in Charleroi – just a 40-minute drive away.
But because ICE had placed a detainer on her, instead of releasing her to loved ones, authorities handed her over to immigration enforcement.
ICE fitted her with an ankle monitor, put her in their “Alternatives to Detention” program, and then dropped her off on the South Side of Pittsburgh, far from home, in February cold, wearing only light clothing. She never made it back.
“When you release someone like that that far from home, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Her attorney Joseph Murphy said. “She would have been in her own environment. She wouldn’t have been sitting around a bus stop [with no coat] in February, and she’d be alive now.”
The death at the hands of ICE was no accident. It was the direct result of cold, bureaucratic cruelty, with immigration officials choosing enforcement theater over basic human decency.
County Executive Sara Innamorato said the death was “a tragedy that appears that with a little humanity, it could have been completely avoidable.”
After the death, friends and family gathered at the bus stop where she died and held a vigil for her (photo, right).
This horror is part of a pattern under Trump’s ICE that hasn’t dissipated since the agency has fallen from the headlines: they still treat people as disposable, and appear to get perverse satisfaction making life as difficult as possible for the people they harass, like dropping vulnerable individuals in unfamiliar places with no support.
Michel didn’t deserve to die alone in the cold on a bench because the system cared more about optics than people. Her death should haunt every official who signed off on this cruel process. Each one should be worried about the pendulum of justice swinging in their direction now that the ruling is official.
If this preventable, heartbreaking tragedy makes you furious, like and share this post.
No one should die abandoned in brutal winter's cold because ICE decided their life didn’t matter.
To all the racists who have threatened me, filled my inbox with hateful messages, told me to kill myself, and compared me to animals…there is absolutely nothing you can say that will ever make me hate myself or hate being Black.
I love every inch of who I am.
I love the fact that my existence, my confidence, and my pride bother you so much that you feel compelled to spend your time under my pictures, my tweets, and in my inbox trying to tear me down.
You mock features that people spend thousands of dollars trying to recreate. You mock skin that people lay in the sun trying to achieve. You mock hair that is so versatile, creative, and beautiful that the entire world imitates it. I’ve worn wigs, weaves, cut it all off, and grown it back. I love my hair. I love its strength, its beauty, and the endless ways we can express ourselves through it.
Most importantly, I love being Black.
No amount of hate will ever stop me from celebrating Black excellence. No amount of hate will stop me from uplifting my people. And no amount of hate will stop me from exposing the kind of people you choose to be.
So keep wasting your time sending hateful messages from behind locked profiles and fake pictures. Keep showing the world who you are. While you’re consumed with hatred, I’m thriving. While you’re obsessing over me, I’m building, growing, and living my life.
I know exactly who I am, and none of your words have the power to define me.
So have the day you truly deserve.
— From a proud Black, disabled woman veteran from the Eastside of Detroit.