Ahmed Abdullah: When you came in you came to a long room, there was a bar to the right, the bandstand was in the back, there were seats much like [restaurant booths] seats in front of the bandstand, and so you played out to either the bar if you were on the bandstand to the left,

or you played to the row of seats that were situated right in front of the bandstand. I played there with Roger Blank, Ronnie Boykins, and an alto player named Bugs Dyer, that was my connection to Sun Ra.

We used to rehearse… in the 1970s many of the musicians lived aroundWilliamsburg, around Broadway and Bedford. Rashied Ali had a group there called the Melodic Art-Tet, and the group actually consisted of Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank and we used to rehearse at Rashied Ali’s place; he had a loft in Brooklyn. This was before he got his loft in Soho that became Ali’s Alley that was the mid-70s; this is early 70s [in Brooklyn].

Also there was Art Lewis, a drummer from San Francisco, they all lived right along Broadway inWilliamsburg; Roger Blank, Daoud Haroon a trombonist; there were manymusicians, there was a musicians’ enclave right there around Broadway [in Brooklyn].