Sun., July 23, 2023,
4 pm,
Sistas’ Place,
456 Nostrand Ave.,
Brooklyn, NY 11216
Book Signing of
A Strange Celestial Road: My Time with the Sun Ra Arkestra, a memoir by Ahmed Abdullah
Purchase at https://www.blankforms.org/publications/ahmed-abdullah-a-strange-celestial-road
Release Date: July 25, 2023.
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 a memoir — and a history of a remarkable and underdocumented movement in music.
New review by Matthew Blackwell, The Wire, July 2023 (Issue 473).
“A rare insider’s account reveals the inner workings of Sun Ra’s Arkestra” by Matthew Blackwell.
Read.