Ahmed Abdul-Malik

Ahmed Abdul-Malik ranked among the earliest jazz performers to weave non-Western musical strands into the idiom. Beyond his recognized work as a hard bop bassist, he mastered the oud—an unfretted, double-stringed Middle Eastern lute sounded with a plectrum. On that instrument he appeared on 1950s sessions alongside Johnny Griffin and, in 1961, on one of the albums drawn from John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard dates.

Under his own leadership he cut several sessions for RCA and Prestige that fused Middle Eastern sonorities with jazz and earned strong critical notice. The resulting discs comprise Jazz Sahara (1958), East Meets West (1959), The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1961), Sounds of Africa (1962), Eastern Moods of Ahmed Abdul Malik (1963), and Spellbound (1964).

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Abdul-Malik spent his twenties and thirties as a bassist alongside Art Blakey, Randy Weston, Thelonious Monk, and others. He carried the oud on a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of South America and appeared at one of the earliest major African jazz festivals, held in Morocco in 1972. From 1970 onward he taught at New York University and subsequently at Brooklyn College. In 1984 BMI presented him with its Pioneer in Jazz Award for his role in uniting ancient and modern idioms. Following his death in 1993, the recordings—once known chiefly to devoted jazz listeners—began steady reissue, with the complete catalog restored to print in multiple formats by 2013.