Ahmed Abdullah: He does workshops on Saturdays – the first and last Saturday of every month. He’s not doing the jazzoetry anymore, we stopped that about 3 or 4 years ago; but he still has a connection. He’s able to help us publicize what we do at Sista’s Place on his radio show onWBAI on Thursdays.

We have many different forums at Sista’s Place; I’m constantly trying to figure out ways to get people in the place. As you said, the music is still a mystery; we, artists, work at honing our craft for hours and hours…most people don’t do that with what it is that they do in life. So to expect that somebody’s gonna come and really be open to what you’re doing, when you’re doing something that they’re not necessarily involved with is absurd. You’ve gotta be able to bridge that gap, and if you are the smartest person in the room – or so you think – then you need to

reach out and try to personalize what you do. I think that the artist onstage has to be able to talk to the people through the music.

[Drummer] Andrew Cyrille, when he played there [Sista’s Place] last Saturday with the 

Haitian Fascination, was a classic example of that. He talked about his background, his parents

coming from Haiti, talked about the musicians that were there and how he had a relationship

with them, where they came from, where they met… All that is important stuff that makes you

as a member of the audience feel a part of what it is that person is doing. This music requires an

educational forum. As an educator this is one of the things I’m doing.

When I started working at the New School I realized that we didn’t have a lot of black kids

coming there, we still don’t and probably never will because of the amount of money it takes to

go there. So my thing is to start them at a young age with music. At PS3 we have instruments

there, we have a very, very advanced elementary school music program and I pride myself in

having done that for the last five years. I’m trying to get these kids to know; they know about 

Sun Ra, they know about Duke Ellington, Mary LouWilliams, Benny Carter… right in

Bedford-Stuyvesant, right down the street from Sista’s Place.

It is a very important thing, the educational part of the music. I’m going up now to Lehman College to teach a class on jazz, I call it Jazz a Music of the Spirit. I didn’t call it that until 2004 when a promoter in Milan asked us to bring what we were doing at Sista’s Place to his venue, Teatro Manzoni [Milano] in Milan. He took five different groups; he wanted us to broker a relationship with the artists we have come to Sista’s Place to have them come to his larger stage, a 1,000 seat, beautiful venue in Milan. The first group we took over was one we had put together at Sista’s Place called One for Trane, with John Hicks, Reggie Workman, Sonny Fortune, Odean Pope, and Rashied Ali. And we had several other groups; my group [Ahmed Abdullah's Diaspora] went over, Hamiet Bluiett’s group…

One of the things that we realized was that they saw an opportunity in what we were doing,

and what we had to do was name what we were doing; so that’s when the name Jazz a Music of

the Spirit came about. So we say this is what you like so much about what we are doing at 

Sista’s Place; there has to be a relationship between the artist and the audience for that to

happen.