Ahmed Abdullah: When I started we were doing jazz every two weeks and from then we went to jazz every week, and then we added different forums; like a forumwe had called “Conversations with Artists”, where we would interview the artists before they came to play, or after they came to play so that there would be an outreach to the community, so that the people would know who these artists were. These were things that I saw as very important because of what I said earlier; I saw nothing adventurous in music in Brooklyn in the 1980s into the 1990s when I was at Sista’s Place and I come frommusical adventure. So I said I wanted to bring some of this [adventurous] music into Sista’s Place, and I said ‘how could I do it’?

You gotta talk to black folks; if you don’ t talk to black folks… it’s a personal thing. ‘Do I know you’? If I know you, then I might come to see you, if I don’t know you then ‘later for you,’ I’ve got

other things to do, I’ve got enough pressure onme.’ So that [the artists conversations] became a real forum to help us bridge the gap to do what we do in Brooklyn because basically we’ve never advertised. We get advertised, the New York Times will give us some play… any number of magazines will write a blurb on us. We’ve always been trying to tap into the community and get the community to support what it is that we’re doing; we call it ‘jazz is the music of the spirit’ and we believe that is the music – and this goes way back to The East and seeing the symbiotic relationship between the community and the artist that was there, and to know that was a very important part of really moving the music forward.

The music has to be rooted in the people in order to move the music forward. All of the things I was involved with in Manhattan never really had that. We were Bohemian artists, we weren’t people who – wemay have been culturally aware but we weren’t involved in our culture in any way, except to play music. The difference in what we’re doing in Brooklyn now is that there is an understanding of the need – there is an active involvement with the community, there’s an active outreach to the community, and it’s making a difference. That’s been the real difference.