Brooklyn Jazz Hero
Ahmed Abdullah is a Jazz Hero in many worlds, fueled by what he calls jazz: “the music of the spirit.” Playing trumpet since age 13, and even before that alert to the music’s African roots, he’s a native New Yorker who has traveled the spaceways in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, worked with myriad professional and community organizations, remains an active educator and has established his personal trumpet sound. noted for clarity, gusto, ambition and good cheer.
Abdullah has worked with Young Audiences, The Orchestra of Saint Luke’s, Carnegie Hall, The Brooklyn Philharmonic and he is currently a teaching fellow with the Department of Education, introducing elementary school students to music in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant – the neighborhood he’s also enriched as music director since 1998 (recently retired) of Sista’s Place. Along with the late Viola Plummer (Jazz Hero 2017), Ahmed established this venue as a historic landmark.
Having established himself in New York City’s early ‘70s loft jazz scene (one of the first groups he performed with was The Master Brotherhood), he joined the Sun Ra Arkestra in 1975, and remained intermittently, even after Ra’s transition in 1993 working under John Gilmore and Marshall Allen, touring extensively and recorded over 25 albums.
Abdullah has a Master’s Degree in education and is also an adjunct professor at New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, where he teaches a course on the music and philosophy of Sun Ra. In 1995, he, along with his wife, poet, and vocalist, Monique Ngozi Nri, created Melchizedek Music Productions (MMP).
In 2019, he and his band Diaspora collaborated with former Sun Ra comrade Francisco Mora Catlett’s ensemble AfroHORN to form Diaspora Meets AfroHORN, and create the first recording for Melchizedek Music Productions: Jazz: A Music of the Spirit / Out of Sista’s Place. In 2023, Blank Forms Editions published A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra, in which Abdullah recounts specific colorful details of his participation in the Arkestra, his life experiences in Harlem and his commitment as a musician, teacher, mentor, community activist, father and husband.
That is his second book. During his extensive tenure at Sista’s Place he produced his first, Jazz: A Music of the Spirit, which he has said “is a documentation of how to move forward with this music into the future for generations to acknowledge and follow.” That vision and energy to realize it for the betterment of his community makes Ahmed Abdullah a Jazz Hero.
—Ronald E. Scott
Amsterdam News
