Swing Time: Ahmed Abdullah
The veteran trumpeter and loyal Sun Ra acolyte summons his mentor’s cosmic spirit
with the help of an earthy-yet-mystical cast of characters
Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist jazz is more celebrated today than at almost any time since the keyboardist, composer and bandleader’s 1993 departure from planet Earth. While the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by nonagenarian saxophonist Marshall Allen, continues to travel strange celestial roads with unflagging posthumous power, other former Arkestra members keep Sun Ra’s sound and spirit alive in more personal ways.
One such acolyte, trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah, joined the Arkestra in 1975 and continued to perform with the ensemble for several years after Sun Ra’s death. Since 2006, however, he has been stoking the solar fire at Sistas’ Place in Brooklyn, a New York state landmark devoted to what Abdullah calls “a music of the spirit”—which also happens to be the title of his rollicking, ecstatic and transformative new album in the Great Black Music tradition of Coltrane, Ellington, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and, especially, Sun Ra.
“I only wanted to find fame and fortune in the Sun Ra band,” says Abdullah, who was born in Harlem in 1947. At the time, the ensemble was mostly a rehearsal group, and Abdullah recalls frequent 13-hour practice sessions at the Philadelphia house that Sun Ra shared with several band members. A freedom-loving disciplinarian, Sun Ra would punish his bandmates’ mistakes with lengthy philosophical soliloquies. (“And we didn’t want that rap,” Abdullah quips.) During the ‘70s, Abdullah played lead trumpet with the Arkestra in New York, where he resided with his family, and occasionally toured with the group while working on his own free-styling sounds amid the city’s vibrant loft-jazz scene.
However, Abdullah’s relatively casual relationship with the artist formerly known as Herman Poole Blount changed in 1988. That’s when a dream informed him that Sun Ra was his mentor and that he needed “to go back into the band, sit at his feet and learn everything I could.” After that, “I kind of kept my bags packed. He would call and I wouldn’t even ask where we were going. But everywhere we went was always new and beautiful and fantastic.” While most Arkestra members would retreat to the back of the tour bus to chill following their shows, Abdullah joined Sun Ra up front and listened to him reason and speculate all night long.
A Music of the Spirit/Out of Sistas’ Place boasts an earthy-yet-mystical collaborative blend of musicians from Abdullah’s Diaspora group and the AfroHORN ensemble led by another Arkestra alumnus, percussionist Francisco Mora Catlett. Three Sun Ra compositions—“Discipline 27” (aka “In Some Far Place”), “Love in Outer Space” and “Lights on a Satellite”—serve as both foundations and launching pads for excursions that mix Abdullah’s robust arrangements with political and interplanetary poetry by the late Louis Reyes Rivera and Monique Ngozi Nri, Abdullah’s life partner.
In 1998, Sun Ra came to Abdullah in another dream. “He told me that Diaspora means ‘Dispersions of the Spirit of Ra’ and that ‘You need to play my music.’” And so he does, right alongside his own originals and fiery arrangements of other spiritually progressive works. If Abdullah’s album generally eschews the more literally “spacious” aspects of Sun Ra’s sound, then it’s in the service of a direct current to viscerally potent chakras. Soloists like tenor saxophonist Don Chapman, tubist Bob Stewart and the trumpeter himself channel the spirited mid20th-century swing bands that partially inspired Sun Ra.
Abdullah’s sprawling “Eternal Spiraling Spirit” first appeared 40 years ago on his first album as a leader, Life’s Force. It subsequently became a vehicle for Nri to mourn the passings of several black artists through verse. On A Music of the Spirit, she recites Rivera’s poem “A Place I’ve Never Been”—a powerful account of Malcolm X’s murder as experienced by his wife.
“Because I’m also a wife and a mother, I put myself into the space of Betty Shabazz, who was there the moment her husband was murdered,” Nri says. “It’s a little intense, but it’s important to recognize the spaces women occupy in these things. They’re often overlooked, and I’m bringing my voice to that.” Or, as Rivera writes, and she recites on a track, “inside the face of space, the womb of shape unfolds in a uterus of silence.”
Recorded last year but distilling several lifetimes of practice, A Music of the Spirit resounds with eternal returns and the optimism that Sun Ra undoubtedly felt during the mid-20th-century space age. And while space is no longer the place, as far as government programs go, Abdullah and company continue to make a case for Sun Ra’s music as interstellar transport for the spirit.
Additionally, Abdullah has been recording the music of iconic South African singer Miriam Makeba throughout his career, and his version of “Magwalandini” is a joyous and jubilant return to the African wellspring. “That particular song means ‘you cowards,’” he explains. “You talk about someone’s mother and family and see if they’re ready to fight you.” Pianist Donald Smith’s scrappy solo bedazzles listeners with a dangerous dance.
Each spring, Abdullah teaches a university course on Sun Ra in The New School’s music department; Sun Ra’s music sounds unexpectedly gorgeous, even when performed at less-than-professional skill levels. Abdullah guides his students through Sun Ra’s life and thought, using John Szwed’s 1998 biography of the composer as his text. “You can’t sing ‘Space Is the Place’ without knowing a little something about the person who wrote it,” Abdullah says. Meanwhile, his own account of life with Ra, A Strange Celestial Road (Traveling the Spaceways), awaits an adventurous publisher.
