Ahmed Abdul-Malik
Ahmed Abdul -Malik ( born January 30, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, † October 2, 1993 in Long Branch, New Jersey ) was an American jazz musician. In jazz, he established himself first as a bassist before he started in the mid 1950s, to draw attention to themselves as oud player. Abdul -Malik is one of the pioneers of what became known as world music.
- 2.2.1 with Randy Weston
- 2.2.2 with Thelonious Monk
- 2.2.3 Other
Life
Although this assumption would be obvious to a jazz musician of the middle of the last century, Ahmed Abdul -Malik was not about an adopted when joining the Nation of Islam name. Abdul -Malik came in 1927 as the son of a Sudanese Muslim immigrant in New York City to the world. The to-find in older reference works providing his birth name as Sam Gill is based on a confusion, according to recent research. He grew up in the Arab quarter of Brooklyn.
The first instrument he learned was eight years old the violin; on this instrument, he also gained in this very young age his first professional experience as a musician in predominantly commercial engagements. In the samples working with a youth orchestra was found for Abdul -Malik by chance the opportunity to change over to the double bass.
But mainly in jazz and popular music - - As a bassist he considers relevant, were more career options open; This, among other things because the major classical orchestras were still locked in the U.S. at that time due to the segregation black musicians in practice.
Abdul -Malik worked first (1945 to 1948) in an early band of drummer Art Blakey, with the tenors Don Byas and in various ensembles of his childhood friend, pianist Randy Weston. Since around 1950, the boundaries between jazz and rhythm and blues were still flowing, it is not surprising that from the collaboration with Weston an engagement with Sam " The Man" Taylor, a popular tenor saxophonist in the context of the R & B and early rock 'n ' roll revealed.
Nor was it unusual at that time to be able to out of the camp of the more commercially oriented Afro-American music " change " in an artistically sophisticated bands. The rhythmic rock solid at Taylor demonstrated bass work Abdul- Malik was also attractive to the well-known to be very abstract pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. In his band Abdul -Malik played together with the crème of the then avant-garde jazz, including the saxophonists John Coltrane and Johnny Griffin and drummer Roy Haynes. With Monk's trio of bassist was also seen in the ( available to this day as DVD) Follow The Sound of Jazz as part of the CBS - TV show " Seven Lively Arts " and listen.
The musically most consequential and most original creative creation Abdul- Malik was the foundation of the ensemble Middle Eastern Music, which existed in different occupations from 1957 to 1964. In this pioneering project for the first time conscious stylistic elements of jazz and Arabic music were fused. Abdul -Malik played in this band is not always exclusively bass, but also various traditional Arabic instruments, which he had studied. Above all, he can be described as the first major oud player of jazz. Middle Eastern Music moved to the early 1960s, a significant media attention and was repeatedly presented in U.S. television. When Abdul- Malik's first projects also fell slightly during the emergence of the world music fashion since the mid-1960s into oblivion, remembered in his later, when he was awarded the BMI Pioneer in Jazz Award in 1984.
Abdul -Malik remained active primarily as a bassist, despite the relative success of his project in the coming decades, including with such diverse musicians as originating from Leipzig pianist Jutta Hipp, flutist Herbie Mann, pianist Earl Hines and the avant-garde baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett.
Outside the U.S., Abdul -Malik had comparatively few, but quite renomméeträchtige commitment. He guested on a tour organized by the State Department in 1961 in many cities of Latin America and in 1972 at the International Jazz Festival in Tangier.
Since 1970, he taught in the context of a government-sponsored music education program, various stringed instruments in general education schools of his native city of New York; In 1973 he was a lecturer in Middle Eastern and African music at Brooklyn College.