Origins: Benoni to Dorkay House

Ismail Mohamed-Jan was born on 10 December 1949 in Benoni, a working-class gold-mining town on the East Rand, about 35 kilometres east of central Johannesburg. His father was a Muslim of Portuguese and Indian heritage; his mother carried Xhosa and Khoisan lineage. That meant four different ancestries in one person, and four cultural worlds he could draw on. Eventually he would do exactly that, not by speaking four languages but by playing music.

The apartheid government had its own ideas about where such a child belonged. By his mid-teens the Group Areas Act (the 1950 law that gave the government power to force people out of mixed neighbourhoods and into segregated suburbs) had pushed the family from Benoni to Reiger Park, then called Stertonville. Reiger Park was a Boksburg suburb the regime had set aside for people the government had classified as "coloured", meaning mixed heritage. The displacement turned out to be musically lucky. Reiger Park sat next door to the Black residential area of Vosloorus and the remains of an informal settlement called Kalamazoo, where, before the bulldozers came, people of every racial classification had lived side by side.

The boy who would become Pops spent his after-school hours travelling with his father to the shebeens of the East Rand. Migrant workers from the gold mines arrived with mbiras and mouth bows; jazz pianists hammered out Count Basie tunes on out-of-tune uprights; and the two worlds met in the middle of the same room. That instinct, the refusal to accept that traditional and modern were separate categories, would define his life's work.

He started his first band, Les Valiants, at the age of 14. The nickname "Pops" had nothing to do with music. As a boy he was obsessed with Popeye the Sailor Man, and his fondness for spinach earned him the cartoon's name. Some sources say he was nicknamed Pops because he loved spinach. Either way, the stage name stuck for life.

The crucial education happened at Dorkay House, a building in central Johannesburg where Black artists rehearsed, taught and met in defiance of apartheid. There, while still in school, the teenage Pops listened to the saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi (a giant of South African jazz from the 1950s onwards) and watched the young Abdullah Ibrahim (the pianist later famous worldwide for the song Mannenberg) work out his ideas in real time. His first guitar teacher, he later recalled, was a man he remembered as Gilbert Strauss. By the early 1970s he had moved from Les Valiants to a new band called The Dynamics, riding the wave of Soweto Soul, the assertive late-1960s style played by groups like The Cannibals and The Beaters (the latter would later rename themselves Harari and become one of the country's biggest acts).

The eighteen instruments

Most musicians spend a lifetime mastering one instrument. Pops Mohamed treated the entire global string and idiophone family as his alphabet. In a 2019 Kaya 959 interview he said he played eighteen instruments in total: popular, ancient, and what he called "deeply historic gems from around the world". His Wikipedia infobox lists eight: berimbau, didgeridoo, guitar, keyboard, kora, mbira, uhadi and mrhubhe.

What follows is the shortlist of the instruments he was best known for and what he did with them.

A career in four acts

A six-decade career resists summary, but Pops Mohamed's working life falls into four broad chapters: the apprenticeship of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Black Disco fusion years of the late 1970s, the Khoisan-archive and world-music decade of the 1990s, and the elder-mentor phase from roughly 2010 onwards. The timeline below picks out the inflection points.

Discography by the decade

Pops Mohamed produced more than 20 studio albums under his own name and dozens more as a sideman, producer and engineer. The graph below tracks his solo and lead-credit output by decade. Notice the surge in the 1990s, the decade that contained the Kalahari expedition and the SAMA-winning Ancestral Healing.

Selected releases

The 1995 Kalahari expedition

If a single thing made Pops Mohamed historically important rather than merely talented, it was the trip he organised into the Kalahari Desert in 1995. He had been looking for original field recordings of San music for years (a "field recording" is an audio recording made out in the world, away from a studio). Nothing in the existing archives satisfied him. Eventually he decided, as he put it himself, that "if people don't understand where they come from, there is a hole in the soul", and that the only solution was to go and make the recordings himself.

He travelled with three companions. Ben Watkins ran the British electronic dance project Juno Reactor; Dick Jewell was a documentary cameraman; and Robert Trunz was the Swiss-born founder of M.E.L.T. 2000, a London-based world-music record label. Together they reached the !Gubi Tietei family on the edge of the dunes outside Gobabis, a town on the Namibian-Botswanan border. They recorded the elders playing their mouth bows, harps and hunting songs, and brought the tapes back to Johannesburg and London.

What Pops did with those recordings was unusual. The obvious move would have been to slap a drumbeat on them and sell it as a Khoisan dance record. He refused. On Ancestral Healing and How Far Have We Come? he treated the field tapes as the foundation and built spare, respectful musical settings around them. The kora and the keyboards orbit the recorded San voices rather than drowning them out.

Subsequent volumes in the Kalamazoo series, the Bushmen of the Kalahari compilation released in 2000, and the 2021 San Dance soundtrack he made with Dave Reynolds all draw on those original 1995 tapes. He kept returning to the desert throughout his life, building personal relationships with individual healers and instrument-makers, and bringing San musicians into the studio as collaborators rather than ethnographic specimens.

Collaborations and mentorship

Pops Mohamed worked best as part of a wider conversation. Collaborators came from every continent. The handful below give a sense of the range.

He also served on the board of the Johannesburg Youth Orchestra Company and performed regularly with its members, an unusual posting for a jazz musician but consistent with his belief that the classical and the traditional belonged in the same conversation.

Awards and recognition

Cultural legacy

What does Pops Mohamed leave behind? Three things stand out.

1 · A working archive of Khoisan music

The 1995 Kalahari tapes, and the dozens of subsequent recording sessions with San and Nama musicians, constitute one of the most significant private archives of indigenous southern African music ever assembled. Unlike colonial-era field recordings made by anthropologists, Pops's tapes were made with permission, with payment, with names attached to the voices and, crucially, with the musicians' input on how the material would be used.

2 · A new place for the mixed-heritage musician

Before Pops, a South African of his background tended to be sorted by the music industry into one of two boxes: kwaito and Cape jazz on the one side, world-music exotica on the other. He refused both. By insisting that his Xhosa-Khoisan maternal heritage was as audible in his playing as his Indian-Portuguese paternal name, he made room for a generation of younger artists, from Tumi Mogorosi to Sibusile Xaba, to occupy the same hybrid space.

3 · Mentorship of the next generation

As producer of Moses Taiwa Molelekwa's Finding One's Self, board member of the Johannesburg Youth Orchestra Company, and participant in the Music In Africa Foundation's 2020 Vibrations concert alongside Morena Leraba and Sibusile Xaba, Pops spent the last 15 years of his working life pushing instruments and recording opportunities into the hands of younger players. Many South African jazz musicians under 40 have a Pops Mohamed story.

Listen and watch

Written description only goes so far. The recordings below are entry points. Start with the title track of Kalamazoo, the 1990 composition that distils his whole project into seven minutes, then move outward.

Kalamazoo (1990) · the signature composition

The title track from his 1990 album, in the 2024 remaster released via The Orchard. The same composition that opens all five subsequent Kalamazoo volumes.

One Step · Pops Mohamed & Sipho Gumede

The official music video featuring Pops with his long-time bassist collaborator Sipho Gumede.

Naledi · with Coenie de Villiers and !Gubi

Pops on kora and kalimba alongside Coenie de Villiers and an 87-year-old Khoisan elder from the Kalahari, !Gubi. The exact collaboration that defined his project in miniature.

The passing

Pops Mohamed died at his home in Boksburg on the morning of 4 December 2025. He was 75, six days short of his 76th birthday. The cause of death was not publicly confirmed but he had been managing the cumulative health challenges of an ageing body for some time.

Three days earlier he had driven from Boksburg to the Pretoria suburb of Atteridgeville to visit the luthier Bolepu Mathabatha, known affectionately to musicians as the "Kora Doctor", to have his first traditional kora repaired. Mathabatha posted a short video to social media of Pops thanking him for the work, sitting on a veranda in the late summer light. It is now the last public footage of him with his instrument.

A remastered version of Kalamazoo, Vol. 5 (A Dedication to Sipho Gumede), the 2006 album he had dedicated to his old bassist mentor twenty-one years earlier, had been quietly released on digital platforms ahead of an official launch the week he died. It became the unintended valedictory record.

Tributes came from the South African Music Rights Organisation, the Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie, and dozens of fellow musicians. He is survived by three children, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Quick-glance summary

Sources and references