AHMED ABDULLAH FOR A STRANGE CELESTIAL ROAD | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
Oct 8, 2023 5:00 pm
Location
Takoma
235 Carroll St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20012
Oct 8, 2023 5:00 pm
Takoma
In this captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. Richly illustrated with more than fifty pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author’s own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra. Originally written in the 1990s with the help of Nuyorican poet Louis Reyes Rivera and published now for the first time, with a foreword by Salim Washington, A Strange Celestial Road is not only an autobiography, but a history of a remarkable and under-documented movement in music.
The legendary Ahmed Abdullah is joining us on the Busboys stage to share his experiences as trumpeter in the Sun Ra Arkestra. He will be in conversation with writer and poet Monique Ngozi Nri, and joined by special musical guests during the program. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Abdullah will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 5:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of A STRANGE CELESTIAL ROAD will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is IN PERSON and will not be livestreamed
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Ahmed Abdullah joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years. Born in Harlem in 1947, he became an important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, forming the group Abdullah in 1972, and going on to found the Melodic Art-Tet with Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank in the early 1970s and The Group with Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille in 1986. Abdullah is a co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, has been the music director of Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion Dance Company, and is currently music director at the historic venue Sistas’ Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He has been a music instructor at Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and teaches at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in central Brooklyn.
Monique Ngozi Nri has spent many years involved in community development and activism, both here in the United States and abroad. Monique is currently the director of CUNY EDGE at Brooklyn College. As a partner in Melchizedek Music Productions , she works to bring the music of the spirit back into the community of Brooklyn and to ensure that the music is kept alive in our hearts and minds. Nri is a member of Ahmed Abdullah's band Diaspora, in which she sings and reads her poetry. She recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry at Brooklyn College and has begun teaching English 1010. She serves as a co-editor of the nonfiction section of the Brooklyn Review. Her work has won the 2021 Himan Brown Award in Creative Writing. Her writing has been published in the literary journal, And Then, The Brooklyn Review, and The New York City Jazz Record. She is an active member of the BIPOC Writing Party and a founding member of The Black Lives Matter Poetry Alliance (BLMPA).
