Ahmed Abdullah: Roger Blank and Ronnie Boykin were former members, they were not in the Sun Ra Arkestra in the 1970s when we formed the Melodic Art-Tet, and they were in the

Sun Ra Arkestra in the 1960s. So they had formed this collective group we called the Melodic Art-Tet, which consisted of Charles Brackeen, Roger [Blank] and Ronnie [Boykin]. In 1974 we went and played at Germantown Park in Philadelphia and it was at that point that I met Sun Ra. I had met him years before when I was a young kid, about 18 or 19 years old and full of myself. In fact I went up to him and gave him a record I had bought of his and gave the record back because I thought it wasn’t any good, with my young dumb ignorance. I tried to get my money back but he gave me a lesson then which was one of the shortest lessons he ever gave me; he said ‘it’s all in there,’ and that’s all he said. I needed to take my young, dumb ass back home and listen to it, which I did for many years.

I did a record in 2005 called “Traveling the Spaceways,” and that was the record – me traveling the spaceways. I bought that record in 1966 but it had actually been recorded in 1956. When I heard him [Sun Ra] in 1966 he had been far advanced fromwhere he had been in 1956, so what I heard on the record wasn’t indicative of what he was doing at the time. So I was saying ‘what is this’? This is not the adventurous music I heard. But he [Sun Ra] was right because the fundamental idea of his music philosophy was right there in that record, he [Sun Ra] just had moved beyond that but it was all right there. I just needed a clearing out of my ears to hear that it was all in there, and in time I did hear.