Abdullah Ibrahim was born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town on October 9, 1934, and was long known as Dollar Brand. He grew up in the port districts of the city and attended Trafalgar High School in District Six. He began piano lessons at seven and made his professional debut at fifteen. Under apartheid he was classified as Coloured. His mother played piano in a church, and the gospel of the AME Church stayed with him alongside marabi, mbaqanga, and the American jazz records he learned from. By the late 1950s he was a recognized name in the jazz scenes of Cape Town and Johannesburg.

In 1959 and 1960 he played in the Jazz Epistles in Sophiatown, a sextet with altoist Kippie Moeketsi, trombonist Jonas Gwangwa, trumpeter Hugh Masekela, bassist Johnny Gertze, and drummer Makaya Ntshoko, drawn largely from the orchestra of the musical King Kong. In January 1960 they recorded Jazz Epistle Verse 1 at the Gallo studio, a pressing of 500 copies that is generally described as the first full-length jazz LP by Black South African musicians. After the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960 the authorities cracked down on jazz groups and the band broke up. Brand left South Africa in 1962 for Europe. In February 1963 the singer Sathima Bea Benjamin, whom he married in 1965, persuaded Duke Ellington, who was on tour in Zürich, to hear the Dollar Brand Trio at the Africana Club. Ellington then helped arrange a session for Reprise Records in Paris, issued as Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, and the trio went on to play European festivals.

He and Benjamin moved to New York in 1965, the year he played the Newport Jazz Festival and made his first American tour. In 1966 he stood in for Ellington on five dates, leading the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and that March he played on drummer Elvin Jones's Atlantic album Midnight Walk, which includes his tune "Tintiyana." A Rockefeller Foundation grant paid for study at the Juilliard School in 1967. In New York he met many of the music's progressives, including Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, and Archie Shepp, and the cultural nationalism of the Black Power years pushed him to bring African material into his jazz. He recorded Hamba Khale! in 1968 with tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri.

Later in 1968 he made a short return to Cape Town, converted to Islam, and took the name Abdullah Ibrahim, and in 1970 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the early 1970s he met Rashid Vally, who ran the Kohinoor record shop in Johannesburg and produced his South African albums. Underground in Africa (1974), made with the band Oswietie, moved away from his earlier folk-inflected jazz toward a mix of jazz, rock, and township pop, and it sold well. In June 1974, on a visit home, he recorded "Mannenberg" in a Cape Town studio in one take with a band assembled by tenor saxophonist Basil Coetzee that included altoist Robbie Jansen. The piece takes its name from the Cape Flats township where many families removed from District Six were resettled. It was issued in the United States as "Capetown Fringe," became widely regarded as the unofficial national anthem of South Africa and the theme of the anti-apartheid movement, and helped define the style called Cape jazz. After the Soweto Uprising began on June 16, 1976, he and Benjamin publicly backed the then-banned African National Congress and helped organize an illegal benefit concert. Back in New York, they founded the Ekapa record label in 1981, and from 1983 he led the band Ekaya, alongside trios, occasional big bands, and special projects.

He returned to South Africa in the early 1990s after Nelson Mandela urged him to in a 1990 meeting in Germany, and played symphony-orchestra concerts, one in honor of Mandela's 1994 inauguration as president; Mandela reportedly called him South Africa's Mozart. He toured with Max Roach in 1997, went on a world tour with the Munich Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in 1998, founded the M7 academy for South African musicians in Cape Town in 1999, and started the 18-piece Cape Town Jazz Orchestra in 2006. He wrote the scores for Claire Denis's films Chocolat (1988) and No Fear, No Die (1990). In 2016 he and Masekela played together for the first time in sixty years at Emperors Palace in Johannesburg, reuniting the Jazz Epistles for the 40th anniversary of the Soweto uprising. His last albums were The Balance (2019, with Ekaya), Solotude, and 3 (2024), and his last public performance was at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival on March 27, 2026.

Ibrahim passed away on June 15, 2026, at a hospital in Prien am Chiemsee, Bavaria, Germany, at the age of 91, after a short illness; his partner, Marina Umari, said in tribute that he died peacefully with South Africa and its people in his heart. He was the father, with Benjamin, of the rapper Jean Grae (Tsidi) and of the artist Tsakwe. His honors include the South African Music Lifetime Achievement Award (2007), the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver and an honorary doctorate of music from the University of the Witwatersrand (both 2009), the German Jazz Trophy (2017), and an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship (announced in 2018 and celebrated at the Kennedy Center on April 15, 2019). For his solo album Senzo he won Best Male Artist at the 2009 MTN South African Music Awards.

Ibrahim's music drew on the sounds of his Cape Town childhood: church hymns, marabi and township song, ragas, and the modern jazz of the American records he collected. His writing reflects Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington above all, and he counted Fats Waller among his idols. A London critic once called him an African Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk combined. In his solo concerts he often played without pause, in unbroken sets that echoed the old marabi pianists and the classical impressionists and ran his own pieces into snatches of Ellington, Monk, and Waller. His small groups and his Ekaya band, usually a septet with several horns, carried the same themes into ensemble form. Moving between township music, gospel, and the New York avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s, he is considered the leading figure of Cape jazz, and "Mannenberg" remains his best-known piece.