Brooklyn in the 1950s was part of the city, but it still had a provincial feel. It wasn't the Big Apple. Old time residents recall the days when the Brooklyn Dodger stars lived in the neighborhood, would carpool to the games and go to neighborhood block parties. The big stars played clubs in Brooklyn--especially Thelonious Monk, who had been stripped of his cabaret card and couldn't play any of the well-known Manhattan clubs like the Five Spot. They couldn't advertise him when he played in Brooklyn, but no one was looking, and he could get away with it. Jazz Historian Jimmy Morton, a fixture on that Brooklyn scene, once photographed Miles Davis, Monk, Mingus and Roach backing up Etta Jones at Tony's, one of Brooklyn's most popular jazz spots.
Brooklyn also has a long African-American tradition. Urban archaeologists have only recently rediscovered Weeksville, one of the first neighborhoods of black homeowners in America.
And it was the borough where young men like Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Bilal Abdurrahman met, discovered Islam, discovered jazz, and did their apprenticeship. Abdurrahman, in his memoir In the Key of Me, lists 24 jazz clubs active in Brooklyn at that time.
Abdul-Malik, as a young violin and viola prodigy at New York's High School of Music and Art, played in the All-City Orchestra. Switching to the bass, and taking up jazz in the 1940s, he played with Art Blakey, Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas.
He got his first recording gigs in 1956 with Weston, on Riverside and on the short-lived Dawn label; in the same year, he recorded with ultra-hip German pianist Jutta Hipp for Blue Note. The following year, he joined Thelonious Monk's quartet--perhaps they had met during Monk's sojourns in Brooklyn.
He also paid his dues in the Arabic music scene, with two Lebanese vocalists, Mohammed el Bakkar and Djamal Aslan, both of whom were also known for their virtuosity on the oud, a Middle Eastern instrument similar to the lute, one that Abdul-Malik would take up and master. El Bakkar, in particular, was a huge star throughout the Middle East, and had played a featured role (as an Oriental rug seller) in the hit Broadway musical Fanny. And to further his immersion in what would come to be called world music, a field in which he was certainly a pioneer, he worked in the 1940s with the popular calypso artist MacBeth the Great (his parents were immigrants from the British West Indies, although he claimed for a while that they were from Sudan).
In 1957, he began working regularly at the Five Spot in New York, most notably a five-month gig in a group led by Monk and featuring John Coltrane, during a period when Monk had regained his cabaret card (he would lose it again in 1958). Both Monk and Coltrane encouraged him to pursue his interest in Middle Eastern and North African music, and Coltrane particularly encouraged him to keep studying the oud. Later in the year, he formed his first group, using both mainstream jazz musicians and Arabic musicians.
This group, being predominantly Muslim, mostly eschewed the usual jazz clubs--that is to say, places where liquor was served. That made gigs hard to come by, so in early 1958, they came back to Brooklyn, as Abdurrahman and his wife opened an African restaurant--Brooklyn's first--called the African Quarter.
By the time he made his first album as leader (for Riverside) later in the year, his apprenticeship on the oud had borne fruit, and it had become an essential part of his music. The titles of his Riverside album and one in 1959 for RCA Victor are evocative of the kind of music he was already making: Jazz Sahara and East Meets West.
With this album, Prestige would become his home for most of his career as leader. He had experimented with different groupings of musicians on his first two albums, and for this sessionhe pulled together a different and striking combination.
Bilal Abdurrahman had been with him from the beginning, playing the duf (tambourine) on Jazz Sahara, the darabeka (or darbouka, or goblet drum) on East Meets West, the clarinet and various percussion on this session. Abdurrahman would go on to teach and record several albums of Middle Eastern music for young people.
Tommy Turrentine, older brother of saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, had pretty much of a mainstream background, playing in the bands of Benny Carter, Earl Bostic, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie. He had not recorded a lot before this album, but Abdul-Malik was crafting his sound carefully, and liked what Turrentine could contribute. Eric Dixon, best known for a long career with Basie, had appeared on two Prestige albums in the mid-1950s, with Bennie Green and Mal Waldron.
Andrew Cyrille, a Brooklyn native, was new on the scene, but already establishing a reputation of one of the most inventive drummers of the jazz experimentalism, a reputation that would only grow through his work with Walt Dickerson, Cecil Taylor, Oliver Lake, David Murray and others.
Cuban-born Caio Scott's jazz career was limited by his choice of instrument--a cello doesn't fit into every jazz ensemble. But when he was used--by Gato Barbieri, Carla Bley, Archie Shepp, Mal Waldron and others--he delivered. We have heard him once before on Prestige, with Waldron in 1958. Perhaps inspired by his jazz cohorts, he frequently played the cello standing up (he used a saxophonist's neck strap to help steady the instrument). He was in demand for a wide range of avant garde venues in New York, particularly working with dance troupes.
It's hard to pick a Listen to One for this album, because Abdul-Malik does so many things, even dipping into his calypso background for "Hannibal's Carnivals," featuring some strong solo work from Dixon and Turrentine, and and "The Hustlers." Both of these are Abdul-Malik's blending of calypso with high-life, an jazz-influenced updating of a traditional West African folk form which had burst into popularity in Nigeria in 1960, and the latter features Aburrahman on clarinet. "Oud Blues" is interesting because it is just that -- a blues played on the oud, primarily a duet between Abdul-Malik and Scott's pizzicato cello. "Nights in Saturn" is a space age workout that gives the horn players an opportunity to flex their avant garde muscles, but also gives the lead to Abdurrahman on a Korean percussion instrument so obscure, according to the album's liner notes, that neither he nor Abdul-Malik knew exactly what it was. There's even a standard ballad on the set, "Don't Blame Me," by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, recorded by many in the jazz and pop fields, including another Afrocentric performer, Randy Weston. This version has a beautiful bowed cello solo by Scott, and some intricate duet work between Abdul Malik and Scott playing pizzicato. But I think I'll leave you with the real Middle Eastern feel of "La Ibkey," adapted from a traditional Arabic folk song, full of rhythmic ingenuity, broken down by University of Hawaii professor Njoroge Njoroge in his book Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory, and History in the Circum-Caribbean: "the drums play in 7/4 while the soloists alternate between 3/4 and 4/4 and multiples thereof."
Esmond Edwards produced for New Jazz, and the album was called The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik. "The Hustlers" and "La Ibkey" were released on 45. I don't know if they got much jukebox play, or if they were too far out. I like to think they commanded a few nickels in Brooklyn.
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