s4e24 An Evolving Open Fortress Built With Love
Explore the sacred power of music and poetry with Ahmed Abdullah and Monique Ngozi Nri as they share stories on Sun Ra, Harlem roots, and the Greenhouse Creators Consortium....
https://listenandbeheard.net/2026/07/30/lbhs4e24-2/
"What I am still learning is the power of the feminine side of our being. This is an anti-feminine society, it's a patriarchal society, and it was founded on that. From its inception, it was anti-human. As a black male in this country, it has seeped into me.
Sun Ra would say very casually. there's something wrong with male and female in this country, something wrong with accepting that as your identity. And I didn't quite get what he was talking about, but if it is just accepting the fact that you are Black, that means that somebody else is white. But if we think of ourselves as African or Asian, think of ourselves as coming from the place that we come from as opposed to the color of our skin, we would be thinking very, very differently. I got to understand that I can really appreciate the feminine part of my being as well as the masculine part of my being. And when those things are working together, I can do the impossible."
Ahmed Abdullah (with Louis Reyes Rivera) — A Strange Celestial Road (Blank Forms Editions)
In "A Strange Celestial Road" trumpeter, improviser, composer and band leader Ahmed Abdullah recounts his life in music, much of which was influenced and guided by his on-off membership in Sun Ra's Arkestra from 1975 till 1983, when Sun Ra left this planet. Co-written in plain and concise prose with renowned poet Louis Reyes Rivera, the book is a page-turner, compelling the reader onward through 581 pages of anecdotes spanning not just the Arkestra and Sun Ra, but offering a first-hand account of life in New York's Black avant-garde jazz community during the heady times following World War Two.
Abdullah was born 1946 in Harlem, where he spent his formative years and began playing trumpet there at the age of 13. By the early 1960s he was venturing into New York's jazz clubs, hearing virtually all the practitioners of where this music had been and where it was going. His first contact with Sun Ra and the Arkestra came in 1966 at a concert in Slugs' Saloon on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. The music impressed and startled the young Abdullah to such a degree that he went out right after the show and bought a copy of Sun Ra's latest record "We Travel the Spaceways."
In comparison to the wild concert he had just experienced at Slugs', Abdullah was initially so disappointed with the record that he went straight to the Arkestra's house on East Third Street to personally register his disapproval with Sun Ra. Abdullah told Sun Ra that he was expecting to hear more avant-garde music on Sun Ra's record, like in the Arkestra's performances at Slugs' or John Coltrane's "Ascension" record. Sun Ra patiently listened to Abdullah's critique then dismissed him with, "The music you're looking for is on this record. 'It's in there.' " And closed the door in Abdullah's face. So began a long, complicated and, at times, fractious relationship with Sun Ra the person, his sounds, philosophy and a life that revolved more around the spiritual search for that unheard frequency than of any commonly accepted notions of success or accomplishment.
This isn't to say that Abdullah's life reflected some altruistic approach to his craft and art. He had kids to feed, rent to pay and found himself in the fast-moving era of the 1960s where, for one brief moment, it seemed like real social change in America could be possible. These hopes came crashing down with the deaths of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the disarray of radical political engagement as the 1970s wore on into the wasteland of the 1980s, where Abdullah found himself challenged not just by drug dependency but, in the face of a public more interested in a kind of sanitized repertory jazz, rapidly narrowing horizons of economic opportunity for his music as well.
Going back to the beginning, it all started when out of the blue one morning in April 1975, Sun Ra phoned Abdullah to ask him about playing a gig at the legendary Brooklyn venue The East. This would mark the initiation into Abdullah's enduring odyssey with the Arkestra, appearing on over twenty-five releases and traveling with them to Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Japan, through nearly every country in Europe and all across North America. Parallel to his activity with the Arkestra over the years, Abdullah also led his own groups, such as Abdullah, The Solomonic Unit, Diaspora and Ebonic Tones; or was a member of collective ensembles like the Melodic Art-Tet or The Group. The book reads like a who's who of avant-garde jazz. Practically anyone you've read about or heard a record from in this period from the early 1960s through the 1980s will make an appearance in Abdullah's telling. This alone makes the book an exceedingly valuable historical document.
Having seen Sun Ra with the Arkestra several times in the 1980s, I was particularly interested in hearing some inside information on the workings of this enigmatic group and its fabled leader. I'd read John F. Szwed's "Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra" but this left me with an even more heightened sense of outside looking in. Abdullah's autobiography will fill in many questions enthusiasts of Sun Ra's music may have been asking, giving not just intimate details of how Ra worked with his musicians and shaped the Arkestra's music, but first-hand accounts of Sun Ra the person, his philosophy and some of the more challenging sides of working in a group exclusively defined by its leader but internally thriving from the extremely complex social dynamics created by a large pool of incredibly gifted musicians, many of whom were utterly dependent on Sun Ra not just for their room and board, but in some cases their musical identities as well.
Abdullah was never a live-in member of the Arkestra, which often comes across in the book as a kind of cult or, at its most innocuous, a rambling and wild commune. Abdullah writes, "One had to be almost a nonperson in the Arkestra — except, of course, when one was called on to deliver improvisational episodes that spoke to one's individuality. This momentary visibility proved a major contradiction. That brilliance, revealed from time to time, was vigorously suppressed by Sun Ra in most other situations." And for Abdullah this was probably the main reason he kept the Arkestra at arm's length, choosing rather to work with them only when the schedule of his own groups allowed.
This side of Abdullah's life outside his work with Sun Ra provides an interesting counterpoint throughout the book, with much detailed information about New York's short-lived loft scene, of which Abdullah was one of the main players. As a musician myself, I could identify with much of Abdullah's never-ending ordeal involved in running one's own band: the booking, the rehearsals, the petty in-fighting between various micro-scenes, the struggle to get paid, to find a way of releasing recordings, to attract an audience, and to keep a relationship or family life somehow going outside of all this frantic activity. For non-musicians, the book will give a candid, and at times painful, insight into the life of a musician working very much on the fringes of society, experiencing just enough occasional glimpses of recognition or financial success to spur one on to the next stop down the road.
Added to all this is Abdullah's position as a Black American musician, which heaps on many other complexities and frames the music not just in the context of an artistic statement but as a means of self-determination in the face of a system which is unevenly stacked according to one's racial background. As such, "A Strange Celestial Road" is very much about the experience of being a Black person in America and in particular of Sun Ra's afrofuturist vision of a time and place where Black people would finally transcend a repressive social and political system by taking to the spaceways and proudly celebrating their culture in complete freedom.
Unfortunately, women do not seem to share equal footing in Abdullah's vision of self-realization and empowerment. Throughout the book they often make appearances as either objects of Abdullah's affection or as someone to work with in having his various musical projects managed. The only women musicians mentioned in the book are Gerri Allen, which Abdullah by chance hears one day practicing in a rehearsal room next to his, and Amina Claudine Meyers, who he only plays with because she's available and he needs to fill in for a musician who couldn't make a gig. I had to ask myself if the lack of interaction with women musicians was a product of Abdullah's relation with women in general or if this was just an accurate picture of the times. As in the Arkestra, women are only very occasionally included in Abdullah's groups, and then usually only as dancers, singers or reciters of poetry. The book scratches the surface of Sun Ra's sexuality and attitude towards women, but the reader will ultimately be left with more questions than answers in this regard.
As for Abdullah, he's very honest and forthcoming when it comes to, as Salim Washington so euphemistically refers to in his introduction, his poly-amorous lifestyle as a traveling musician. This is often framed in the intersectionality of being in relationships with White versus Black women, where the complex dynamics of race and class most acutely collide. Abdullah often frames these dalliances in the context of a spiritual search, whereby women are the key to some kind of epiphany in himself. This, quite frankly, didn't wash with me and was probably one aspect of the book which I found most distracting from the more fascinating and revealing accounts of working with Sun Ra and Abdullah's coming of age during one of the golden ages of jazz music.
When Sun Ra died in 1993 the Arkestra fell into acute disarray. Of his time with the group Abdullah writes, "The phrase used most often was follow the leader, which in itself was a good idea if there was a leader who knew where he was going, as Sun Ra did. Without Sunny, however, and with no one to replace him, there wasn't a snowball's hope in hell of really delivering the message of Sun Ra's music or moving on to a higher level of organization." This ultimately proved Abdullah's undoing with the Arkestra, which for a time imploded into a dysfunctional tug of war over who should represent the group and who had the legal rights to Sun Ra's estate and legacy. Though Abdullah would occasionally participate in concerts of a post-Ra Arkestra, he had for the most part moved on after Sun Ra's passing.
The strange celestial road taken by Ahmed Abdullah in this book has perhaps less to do with his time with Sun Ra, than the Arkestra as a kind of leitmotif running through Abdullah's life, shining like a beacon of inspiration and hope to persevere as a musician on the very edge of a culture where, against all odds, one in the end might succeed in forging an identity through resistance, self-determination and creative expression. Sun Ra's most famous dictum, "Space is the place," must surely refer to a place of light and freedom. And like Sun Ra, it would seem by the end of the book that Ahmed Abdullah has indeed made peace with the path his life has taken and finally found his place of universal light by traveling the spaceways.
