Music Monday: Ahmed Abdul-Malik and His Modern Admirers
Last week, I struggled a bit to get some momentum. I accomplished any number of minor tasks (which combined could have been finished in two days), milked a sense of self-pity connected to a summer cold (and a profound case of the “frog days” of summer), and generally pretended that getting my butt kicked in chess was a form of “self-care.”
I also listened to some really good music.
For whatever reason, my music explorations did not include the Ahmed Abdul-Malik. My discovery of his music came not by digging through some dusty crate at a used record store, but through a very recent album. I was really enjoying the energetic, long form performances by أحمد [Ahmed] on their album Wood Blues (2024). When reading a review of the album, I learned that they got their name from Ahmed Abdul-Malik.
Abdul-Malik was a bass and oud player who had a number of sessions both as leader and as a side man in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He released a little gaggle of albums which blended African percussion and sounds with jazz standards (and some of his own compositions). They’re a bit tricky to find even though they were released by Riverside and Prestige’s New Jazz imprint (which probably deserves its own “Music Monday” post!).
You can get a sense for his style on “Nights on Saturn” the first track from his 1961 release The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik. It starts with a solo perhaps on clarinet played (or “Korean Reed Instrument”) by a guy called Bilal Abdurrahman:
أحمد [Ahmed] named their 2021 album after this track. Happily, it does exist on Youtube with Seymour Wright’s alto playing Bilal Abdurrahman’s opening solo with a bit less “Oriental” flare, but plenty of spirit nonetheless:
أحمد [Ahmed]’s 2019 album interpreted Abdul-Malik’s 1960 album East Meets West.
While East Meets West isn’t quite as exciting as The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, أحمد [Ahmed]’s take on it, on their album Super Majnoon (East Meets West), is perhaps a bit more restrained and approachable:
Abdul-Malik’s music was sufficient grounded in the hard bop tradition to include a version of George Gershwin’s standard “Summertime,” which his recognizable flair on his 1963 album The Eastern Moods of Ahmed Abdul-Malik:
Curiously, he also recorded a version of Manolis Hatzidaki’s “Never On Sunday” on his final solo album, Spellbound (1964) with Ray Nance (from Duke Ellington’s orchestra). It’s much more pleasant than, say, Chubby Checker’s version:
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