Ahmed Abdullah's Diaspora and Isaiah Collier + The Chosen Few

Co-presented by FourOneOne.

AHMED ABDULLAH’S DIASPORA has been the primary ensemble of its namesake since ’90s, fusing a stellar repertoire of songs by Sun Ra, the music of the South African diaspora, standards, and much more. Ahmed is a crucial figure in the New York loft jazz movement, forming the group Abdullah in 1972 and going on to found the Melodic Art-Tet with Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank in the early 1970s and The Group with Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille in 1986. He was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter for more than twenty years, beginning 1974, a journey that was the subject of his memoir A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra (Blank Forms Editions, 2023). 

Raised by a family of musicians on Chicago’s south side, ISAIAH COLLIER picked up the saxophone at age eleven and went on to attend both the Jazz Institute of Chicago and the Chicago High School for the Arts. As an improviser, he evokes the sound of Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, his idiosyncratic overblowing forebears. In parallel, Collier has pursued the compositional and collective impulses of his hometown’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, many members of which—Ernest Dawkins and Ari Brown among them—were instrumental in his musical development. Following an AACM tradition (he is now a member) Collier leads workshops and jazz masterclasses in public schools and juvenile detention centers, addressing the many intersections of Black music and struggles for freedom. He will be joined by his group THE CHOSEN FEW, which features a rotating ensemble of top-notch accompanists.