Inside Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s unique fusion of jazz and Arabic music

Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s relationship with jazz was sacred in every sense, but less enigmatic; he was clear in his intention to make music with and for his creator. To know Abdul-Malik’s music is to know his devotion.

“How can you play beauty without knowing what beauty is, what it really is?” he told a DownBeat magazine interviewer in 1963. “Understanding the Creator leads to understanding the creations, and better understanding what you play comes from this.”

Often, what most listeners think of as sacred jazz still lies shrouded in a haze of Christianity, earned or not. But that narrowness can hinder hearing deeper layers of veneration. Yes, we understand the trumpet, the piano, the saxophone, or the trombone, but what about the oud, the surbahar, the qanun, or the darbuka? In the 1950s, Abdul-Malik’s ambition to fuse jazz and Arabic music seemed too avant-garde to the listeners, musicians, and club bookers in his orbit. But he remained determined to conjure all the sounds of praise; his music was his way to widen his world and deepen his devotion. In his book, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, historian Robin D. G. Kelley writes that for Abdul-Malik, “The infusion of North African and Middle Eastern music wasn’t merely a matter of artistic experimentation; his primary goal was to create sacred, devotional music, the music of Islam.” He had worked towards that goal nearly his entire life.

Expanding the idea of what sounds could be a part of musical worship also meant being able to tell a story, not just about these lesser seen instruments, but also a new story about himself. He wanted to remake himself into a reflection of that sanctity, someone worthy of being a messenger, one turning holy words into notes that somehow shape the world into another space — if only for a moment.

In most accounts of his life (including the original liner notes for this album) it’s said that Ahmed Abdul-Malik was born January 30th, 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, raised by his Sudanese father. Then there’s the truth. As Kelley explains, Abdul-Malik was born Jonathan Tim Jr., the son of Matilda and Jonathan Tim Sr., both immigrants from St. Vincent, an island in the Caribbean. And it would be easy to call Abdul-Malik’s tall family tale a lie, a myth to deepen the intrigue around his music. Everyone needs a story to tell, after all. But as Kelley continues, “Ahmed Abdul-Malik cannot be dismissed as a fabrication; he was a product of a time and place, a manifestation of a Bedford Stuyvesant renaissance where a transplanted African culture thrived, Islam took root, and the international movement for Afro-Arab solidarity found its American champions.”

Black Americans have a long history with Islam, and, for many converts, it wasn’t turning away from one religion toward another, but rejoining a faith that had been severed. The long, brutal history of American slavery is one of not just physical violence, but ancestral violence. It is the kind of violence that strips away names, uproots family trees, and lets traditions wither away on distant shores. It extinguished their very memories.

But all was not forgotten. Lips still formed familiar curves around the sounds of a faraway homeland. And hearts still clung to that familiar faith. An estimated 30 percent of enslaved West Africans were Muslim and brought Islam to America. Although they were forced to abandon their religion and its music, its echoes couldn’t be silenced.

The call to prayer reverberated across fields and hollers and rang out in folk songs and eventually the blues, heard unmistakably in how those notes bent and blended. As historian Sylviane A. Diouf explains in her book, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, “The same ornamented notes, elongated syllables sung with wavy intonations, melisma, and pauses” spanned both the shores of West Africa and the banks of the Mississippi. Poet and critic Amiri Baraka perhaps put it best in his book, Black Music: “The first music Negroes made in this country had to be African.”

And though these threads grew more fragile as the space between the past and their presents grew more distant, they still existed. And people like Abdul-Malik wanted to close the gap, strengthen the bond. “All music has its own history,” Abdul-Malik told DownBeat. “I have studied all of the elements: animals, insects, plants, space — the universe — old and new jazz but most importantly the Creator.” Abdul-Malik was reaching back in order to move forward.

His neighborhood was an important factor in his personal and artistic growth (“There were ten different nationalities just in the neighborhood,” he told DownBeat. “Your ears just had to open up.”) Arabic musicians played on street corners. He took violin lessons beginning at age seven, which were taught by a teacher who, as Abdul-Malik told writer Dan Morgenstern for the album’s liner notes, insisted “that I acquaint myself with as many different kinds of music as possible.” He took that advice to heart. He took lessons from bassist Franklin Skeete, whose own diverse skill set led him to play with R&B vocalist Wynonie Harris, blues singer and saxophonist Bull Moose Jackson, and jazz stalwarts like pianist Bud Powell and saxophonist Charlie Parker. Later, while attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and following the death of his father, he had a paid gig as part of a band that played Syrian, Greek, and Roma weddings. He began his professional jazz career around this time, too, as the bassist in Fess Williams’ band. “The widest experience is most important,” he told DownBeat.

He let the sounds of the world take his music to new places, and let the world take his soul to new places. He converted to Islam, likely sometime in high school. By this time, he had also learned to speak Arabic and began experimenting with eastern sounds, picking up the oud — a Middle Eastern stringed instrument similar to the lute and the qanun. Fellow musician, pianist Randy Weston, also recalled that Abdul-Malik would often take him to “the Arab neighborhood around Atlantic Avenue in downtown Brooklyn to hear North African musicians.” By at least 1949, he had officially changed his name to reflect his commitment to his faith. A copy of the Local 802 American Federation of Musicians directory from that year lists him as “Ahmad H. Abdul-Malik [sic].” He was hardly alone — according to Robin D. G. Kelley, by 1953, nearly 200 jazz musicians had converted to Islam and taken on Arabic names. He was in the company of Yusef Lateef, Abdullah Ibn Buhaina (Art Blakey), and Ahmad Jamal.

Though levels of devotion obviously varied from person to person, Islam and the idea of an “exotic” Arab world were also marketing gimmicks of the time, a vague sort of labeling that conflated and erased cultures. In the 1950s, nightclubs in the U.S. were filled with the sounds of music of the Middle East, creating a “kind of musical caricature of the Orient,” per ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen in an article in the journal Asian Music. The fad also saw the rise of “belly dancing” records, which, as Kelley writes, were “kitschy album covers depict[ing] scantily clad or semi-nude women.” All of which only served to further exoticize mixtures of eastern and western music.

But whatever the market forces may have been pushing, Abdul-Malik’s sincerity in his faith was strong and unwavering. And though he doesn’t specifically mention those trends in his DownBeat interview, he bemoans the state of music: “So much of jazz has become surface music because it hasn’t searched for ultimate truth … The artificial living of today — the slightness of understanding, the easy patterning — all of that ends up in sterility.” Music needed to mean something more. It needed to reject the cheap veneer of an exotic east, instead exploring the realities of place and sound. For him, this wasn’t a costume or a fad, it was his soul speaking the words his creator had placed there. “I feel it is my job to know as much as I can about the feeling, language, customs, and characteristics of the people, and then to interpret these musically.” This is what he felt was required, he told Morgenstern, before he attempted to blend cultures and sounds.

— — — — —

In the fall of 1957 after stints playing with Randy Weston, German pianist Jutta Hipp, and Thelonious Monk, Abdul-Malik was ready to set out on his own to create the music he’d been hearing in his head for so long. It was saxophonist John Coltrane (with whom Abdul-Malik shared the stage as part of Monk’s quartet) who encouraged him to go deeper into his studies of eastern music. “If you really want to know what’s going on,” Coltrane told him of his dabbling with the oud, “you need to study the instrument.” Taking that advice, he formed his own group, playing a fusion of eastern and western sounds with instruments like the qanun, the daf (a handheld percussion instrument similar to a tambourine), and the darbuka (a hand drum). Abdul-Malik played both the bass and the oud in the group. They played in (alcohol-free) venues across New York City, but didn’t really break out, and Abdul-Malik left for another gig playing bass for Monk’s residency at the Five Spot Café in Manhattan. It was during this second run with Monk that Abdul-Malik got his first solo recording date. Monk and Abdul-Malik’s old friend, Randy Weston, convinced Riverside Records owners and producers Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer to record him.

His first album, 1958’s Jazz Sahara, stayed true to Abdul-Malik’s vision, with Keepnews writing in the liner notes that “this LP may possibly point the way to a whole new direction of musical growth.” The “possibly” in that statement hangs heavily. There is something that feels full of possibility with this album, but it also feels tentative, as if he hasn’t quite figured out how to blend the sounds seamlessly or set himself apart as a player beyond the hook of the album’s cultural and musical blend.

But there is an undeniable thrill when an artist finds his way.

When The Eastern Moods of Ahmed Abdul-Malik was released by Prestige in 1963, Abdul-Malik’s blend of east and west had come together into music that contained the powerful elements of each. He wasn’t playing jazz with eastern influences; he was playing Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s music. He wasn’t rejecting the roots of either sound, but creating his own using the pieces of them. It didn’t matter that his oud playing didn’t sound Middle Eastern or North African. “It is a beautiful instrument,” he told Morgenstern in the original liner notes. “It doesn’t have to sound like it does in Egyptian music.” Likewise, it didn’t matter if the jazz sounds echoed those of bop. Jazz was in a rut anyway, he told DownBeat. “So many cut themselves off from development by sticking to only chords or simple scales.”

From the first track, a reimagining of the classic, “Summertime,” from the musical Porgy and Bess, you understand. This is the album’s only piece that Abdul-Malik didn’t compose, and it feels like a dare, a provocation. Taking a standard and letting it travel, letting it become something else, letting the instrumentation — familiar, yet not — breathe a new life into it. It’s sparse. The album is overall, as it features only three players — Bilal Abdurahman on alto sax, clarinet, Korean reed flute, and percussion; William Henry Allen on bass and percussion; and Abdul-Malik on bass and oud. Abdurahman, a fellow Brooklynite with a love of African music, and Allen, who would go on to record several albums with Cuban jazz great Mongo Santamaria, never try to fill that space. Instead they let it breathe, the sparseness giving us room to revel in the piece’s subtle turns from sultry to funky and back again. It was “an attempt to break away from the set forms and routines in playing a standard,” Abdul-Malik told Morgenstern.

The first original, “Ancient Scene,” finds the trio in what, at first listen, sounds a bit like a traditional jazz conversation. But on repeated listens, there is something unsettled in the interplay between the instruments. Something unusual about the way the sax glides over bass, over drum, building and building, almost at odds with one another. It is Abdul-Malik telling us to listen not just for the familiar but the unknown. “Magrebi” finds a solid east-meets-west groove, Abdul-Malik wielding the oud with subtle confidence. Nothing fights against itself, each instrument settling into its place. “Sa-Ra-Ga’ Ya-Hindi” reflects Abdul-Malik’s burgeoning interest in Indian music, a style, he told DownBeat, that “he wants to devote a record to.” It feels both ancient and new. Of its genre, but not. Abdul-Malik shapes the sound of the oud into one that mimics the sitar. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a lost track from a 1960s psychedelic record. The album closes with “Shoof Habebe,” a bluesy sort of funk that draws its influence from Somalia and Sudan. “The music of Somaliland and Sudan,” he told DownBeat, “has Japanese-like effects and something like the blues.”

Eastern Moods would be followed by the more straight-ahead jazz album, Spellbound, his last as a bandleader. He’d continue to dive further into his studies of eastern music, work as community director for a local community group, and ultimately earned a master’s degree, teaching at both New York University and Brooklyn College. He continued to learn, to seek, to teach, to grow until his death in 1993.

When it was originally released, this album didn’t sell well. The Eastern Moods of Ahmed Abdul-Malik was once confusing, maybe a little unmarketable. But it’s also a tiny piece of the sacred. It is a small offering, Abdul-Malik to you, Abdul-Malik to his creator, the sound of his heart and soul finally being realized in his art.

In the original liner notes, Abdul-Malik insisted that “music is not a selfish thing.” And it can’t be. Anything that is meant to be shared, either between artists or between artist and observer can’t be. And with music, you carry it with you, each listen changing you a little bit. This album is also a piece of you that you’ll later carry into the world — just as Abdul-Malik intended.

“I’m thankful for the privilege of having been given some creative powers,” Abdul-Malik told Dan Morgenstern in the album’s liner notes. “In music,” he continued, “it is a matter of vibrations — to master them, then try to find the right frequencies to transmit them to others . . . like a sender.” Eastern Moods is his message to you. Listen.