Listening to Prestige 595: Ahmed Abdul-Malik

LISTEN TO ONE: Sa-Ra-Ga' Ya-Hindi

 Ahmed Abdul-Malik moved out of the mainstream and into a stream of his own. At a time when Coleman, Coltrane, Dolphy and others were redefining the mainstream, he was not following their lead, either, although he had played with Coltrane. 

Critics didn't always know what to call his music--which was, like the music of Yusef Lateef, strongly influenced by Middle Eastern music and by his Islamic belief. Even supporters like Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the liner notes for the album, refer to his "Oriental" music, while correctly noting that Abdul-Malik goes his own way:

Thus he has sometimes had to suffer the criticisms of self-styled musicologists on the one hand, and narrow-minded jazz musicians on the other. "These people would say that I was playing things out of place, and that I couldn't discipline myself."

Perhaps these criticisms are part of the reason why Abdul-Malik's recording career was so short. He had essentially stopped recording after 1964, except for a 1973 appearance on a Randy Weston session, where played the oud and took the part of "narrator."

But seen from a distance, Abdul-Malik's music is very much a part of a broader mainstream that has come to encompass world music. It now needs only to be judged as music; and as music, and as jazz, it holds up  very well. 

Morgenstern quotes Abdul-Malik on his attitude toward music:

When I'm playing with a group, my first concern is to blend with it. The objective is to have an open mind -- to try to understand how others feel about music.

Which is interesting in that in his recordings as leader, he is so clearly the leader, creating his own

sound and his own direction. His most constant collaborator is Bilal Abdurrahman, who did not have much of a recording or touring career outside of his work with Abdul-Malik, although he was to have quite a respected career as an educator. But-- again in conversation with Morgenstern, for the liner notes, he talks about wanting to record an album with stride pianist Dick Wellstood, and if that sounds totally fanciful and unlikely, it actually isn't. While they never recorded an album of their own music (whatever that would have been) together, they did play a number of club dates together, and they were part of a band that backed up Odetta on her Odetta Sings the Blues album.

This is a trio session, very much Abdul-Malik's music, and very much, and constantly interesting. The three of them take different roles on different works. Abdul-Malik, who made his mark in jazz as a bassist with enough flexibility to fit in with both Coltrane and Odetta (he's been on Prestige sessions with Walt Dickerson and Dave Pike), also became, as his fascination with Middle Eastern and world music increased, a virtuoso on the oud, an Arabic stringed instrument which is something like a lute, but can also be played as something like a stiar. Aburrahman was adept at a variety of wind instruments, both Western and Eastern; here, he also plays percussion as needed. William Henry Allen was best known for his work with Mongo Santamaria and Roy Ayers. Here he plays bass on the tracks where Abdul-Malik plays oud, and percussion on the other tracks.

The session included four Abdul-Malik compositions and one standard, George Gershwin's "Summertime." Abdul-Malik plays the bass on this one, with Abdurrahman on clarinet and reed flute, and Allen handling the percussion. Abdul-Malik switches to the oud for much of the Middle Eastern-flavored pieces, including "Sa-Ra-Ga' Ya-Hindi," which really qualifies as world music long before the term was coined. "Sa-Ra-Ga" is more or less the Hindi equivalent of "Do-Re-Mi," the names for notes in sur, the Hindustani classical scale of seven notes--the syllables all corresponding to the names of Hindu deities. Abdul-Malik uses the sur scale, and uses the oud in much the way a raga uses the sitar.

I've chosen "Sa-Ra-Ga' Ya-Hindi" for my "Listen to One," because it's so interesting cross-culturally as well as musically, but the whole album is worth some serious listening time. It's a shame that Abdul-Malik recorded so little, because he had so much to offer. And to me, for all its diverse influences, this is very definitely a jazz album, and every cut shows that.

The Eastern Moods of Ahmed Abdul-Malik was a Prestige release. There appears to have been a New Jazz catalog number assigned to it as well, but it was never released on New Jazz. It doesn't appear to have ever been re-released on CD, under the Original Jazz Classics imprint or anywhere else, which is a damn shame bordering on criminal. Ozzie Cadena produced.

 

Listening to Prestige 563: Ahmed Abdul-Malik

LISTEN TO ONE: African Bossa Nova

 Ahmed Abdul-Malik had a brief recording career but an enduring legacy. Raised in New York, he entered the jazz scene in 1956, recording with enigmatic German pianist Jutta Hipp, and contributing to three albums by Randy Weston. Both Abdul-Malik and Weston would go on to develop jazz styles that drew heavily on African and Middle Eastern music, becoming, like Yusef Lateef, pioneers in what would become an increasingly important strain of jazz. He made two albums as a leader in 1958 and 1959, then in 1961 began his association with Prestige, which would last for four years and four albums, after which he essentially quit the recording business. He remained active in music, with a South American tour sponsored by the US State Department and a 1973 performance in Morocco at the first major African

jazz festival. In 1970 he began a teaching career at NYU and Brooklyn College. In 1984, he was honored with BMI's Pioneer in Jazz award for his work in bringing Middle Eastern music into the jazz lexicon.

In this session, he brought together a ten-piece group composed of musicians with solid jazz reputations (Richard Williams, Caio Scott) and others who have no other jazz recording credits (Rupert Alleyne, Edwin Steede). Bilal Aburrahman, like Abdul-Malik, was an early explorer of Middle Eastern sounds in jazz. Taft Chandler is a swing era veteran (Luis Russell), but not much recorded in a small group setting. Together, they made up the sound Abdul-Malik was looking for.

With three percussionists, each of different backgrounds, he got a rhythmic synthesis that combined traditions. If the weaving together of threads from the jazz and classical worlds is known as third stream music, then maybe this is fourth stream. A better name for it would not come until years later, but surely this is an important precursor: world music.

Rudy Collins utilized the traditional trap drum kit that has always been the backbone of jazz combos.

Entering the scene in the late 1950s, he would become a fixture on the jazz scene of the next three decades, playing with traditional (Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge), mainstream modern (Dizzy Gillespie, Gene Ammons) and avant garde (Cecil Taylor) musicians. James Hawthorne (Chief) Bey was an African folklorist as well as a jazz percussionist. Roger "Montego Joe" Sanders took a Caribbean name, but his interests were also deeply African. He had recorded with Babatunde Olatunji, and with Art Blakey's Afro-Cuban group, the Afro-Drum Ensemble.

Abdul-Malik's parents had migrated to Brooklyn from the Caribbean, although he would later invent as Sudanese heritage. and the cradle of world music, as jazz and Africa and Brazil are melded, can be heard in "African Bossa Nova," a rhythmic delight with some superb blowing and a bravura pizzicato cello from Caio.

Sounds of Africa included one track from an earlier (May 23, 1961) session. Esmond Edward produced both this session and the previous one. The album was released on New Jazz.

Listening to Prestige 462: Ahmed Abdul-Malik

Ahmed Abdul-Malik, like Yusef Lateef and Randy Weston, was one of the first jazz musicians to incorporate Middle Eastern and North African influences. Lateef found his way into Middle Eastern music in Detroit, through his conversion to Islam, and his friendship with Arab immigrant factory workers on the auto assembly lines. Weston and Abdul-Malik grew up in Brooklyn, where there was an Arabic population and its own musical scene, overlapping with Manhattan's (the offices of Max Roach and Charles Mingus's short-lived but influential Debut Records were in Brooklyn, over the Putnam Central jazz club), but separate.

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.