If circulating information is to be believed, The Black Unity Trio’s sole album Al-Fatihah dates back to 1971. Characteristically for an avant garde jazz group whose history has remained an enigma, the date is incorrect by three years. Titled after the Qur’an’s first Sura, Arabic for “The Opening”, Al-Fatihah was in fact taped in 1968, during free jazz’s heavy years, and released in 1969. The Black Unity Trio were not based in the music’s epicentres but in the industrial northeastern edge of the Midwest, in Cleveland, Ohio. Assuredly, the music is on par with what was happening in New York, Chicago or Paris, but comparisons would miss the point as this music speaks in a most distinct voice of life, time and mysteries.

Saxophonist and double bassist Yusuf Mumin, cellist Abdul Wadud and drummer Hasan Shahid came together some six months before recording Al-Fatihah and disbanded in 1969. Al-Fatihah bears witness to those months of highly intense musical activity. “I haven’t experienced a total situation like that since then, the combination of music and philosophy and life all in one. I’ve been coasting on that experience for 15 years,” Abdul Wadud once told Coda magazine. Shahid says much the same below.

Released in a run of 500 copies by the musicians themselves well before doing so became common practice, Al-Fatihah has become a legendary recording, eagerly sought after by collectors prepared to part with a thousand dollars to get hold of a copy. Now an official reissue by Cleveland based label Gotta Groove Records, cut from the original master tape, is about to return the focus to the music. Scheduled for late 2020, it’s available by subscription at blackunitytrio.com. Any other versions of the record are unauthorised copies defrauding artists and listeners alike with makeshift bootleg product.

The story of The Black Unity Trio is told here by Hasan Abdus Shahid, born Amos Franklin Gordon Jr on 12 March 1944 in Montgomery, Alabama. Shahid is credited as Haasan-Al-Hut on the original record. This interview is a composite of a series of long distance late night phone calls from France to Atlanta, Georgia initiated in March 2019. Several references are made to a Wire interview with bassist Mutawaf A Shaheed, to whom special thanks go for providing the initial contact.

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Hasan Shahid: I appear on Al-Fatihah as Haasan-Al-Hut. My father Amos Gordon in the 40s was first chair saxophone with Louis Armstrong, Andy Kirk, Lucky Millinder and Bull Moose Jackson. He also played in the quintet of Erskine Hawkins, with whom he went to Industrial High School in Birmingham, Alabama and to Alabama State College. Another of my father’s high school buddies was Sonny Blount, whom the world knows as Sun Ra. It goes back that far. So I’ve been around music all my life. I had pictures that were stolen, from my mother, sitting on Billie Holiday’s lap, Lil Armstrong’s lap. A lot of people are not aware of the strong emphasis that Birmingham has played on the jazz scene. We lived in New York on 186th and St Nick on the second floor. And on the fourth floor happened to live Billie Holiday and a trumpet player from Birmingham named Joe Guy. Unless you’re a real jazz enthusiast, Joe Guy doesn’t ring a bell to you – a piano player from Birmingham named Teddy Hill was hired by the brother who owned Minton’s Playhouse to arrange the musical shows, and the first group to play in Minton’s, where bebop was developed, was Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Nick Fenton, and Joe Guy. How did Dizzy Gillespie and Bird get into it? Joe Guy had beat Billie up pretty badly and she called the police, so he had to get out of town. They chose Bird to replace him, and Bird brought Diz. And the rest is history. So that’s where the crux of my beginning came from. Birmingham has a heck of a history that has not been exposed. I grew up there after Pops came off the road in 1949. That’s when the quartet with Bird became so popular and club owners realised, ‘Well, I can pay trios and quartets and quintets... With the big band I've got 13, 14, 15 people to pay, so it's cheaper to hire what?’ This is what broke up most of the big bands. Before that, my father appeared in the movie New Orleans with Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and the movie Boarding House Blues with Lucky Millinder and Moms Mabley.

Pierre Crépon: When did you move out of Alabama?

In September of 1961 I enrolled at Howard University in Washington, DC. One of my freshman orientation programmes was a debate between Malcolm X and [close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr] Bayard Rustin [held on 30 October 1961]. It was there that I became very close friends with Stokely Carmichael. We were in an organisation called SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Stokely Carmichael has talked about the importance of this particular debate, because of the impact it ended up having on SNCC, and because of the impact SNCC ultimately had nationally.

I would have to say that the Malcolm X debate was the experience that changed my life and started me on my journey toward Islam. The second was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham [perpetrated by Ku Klux Klan terrorists on 15 September 1963]. Carol Robertson, one of the four little girls who were killed, was a cousin. If you see the pictures of her funeral, my father is the first pallbearer on the right hand side. That year was, as I see it now, a pivotal year for the world.

Were you still at Howard at that time?

At that time I had just moved out of the dorm and was living in my own apartment with two other students. In the apartment was a very small record player. I owned at that time two albums: the Cannonball [Adderley] album with “Sack o’ Woe” [At The Lighthouse] and Father John [Coltrane]’s My Favorite Things. It was there that I noticed something different from the normal 4/4 swing and bop drums. Ron Carter said in a conversation that there was before Elvin [Jones] and after Elvin. Before Elvin was Kenny Clarke, whose 4/4 jab on the ride cymbal is still in use today. Max Roach expanded it. It is accompanied with a heavy accent on 2 and 4 on the sock cymbal, and a conversation between the snare and the bass drum relating to the conversation with the other musicians. Now here comes Elvin. I knew when I first heard My Favorite Things that this was different. I then got back to Birmingham in 1964 and met a tenor player by the name of Jessie Taylor. Jessie was a music major graduating from Tennessee State University [in Nashville] and fresh out of the army. He had been stationed all over Europe and was free of US influence. He was a Trane disciple. This is who passed it on and allowed me to grow. We did not start with Trane, we started with Miles [Davis]’s tunes “Teo”, “Neo” [from the albums Someday My Prince Will Come and In Person]. I think these were 6/8. We started noticing a different thing that you could do, getting away from 4/4. We did not play Brubeck’s 5/4 “Take Five”, because we were entering the black nationalist probe. At this point we were into Trane’s Live At Birdland album with “Afro Blue” and “The Promise”. These were our march out the door tunes to fight the revolution. Trane’s “Alabama” was inspiring even living in Alabama. Then there was “Out Of This World”, “Africa”, “India”, with Eric Dolphy, “The Inch Worm,” “After the Rain”, “Wise One”, and so many more. People who were skeptical of our expressions always said that if you start ‘out’ then there is no place to go. That is true if you limit yourself. Those who thought that there was no place to go did not realise that you go so far out that you leave gravity – you are no longer playing the music, the music is playing you.

How did you arrive in Cleveland?

I graduated from Miles College in Alabama in January of 1968 and moved to New York. I was admitted to the New School for Social Research. Attending my first class, out of 200 students in the lecture I was the only African, and I knew that this was not about me. I did not have a set of drums and was very depressed. Allah sent an angel to New York in the form of vocalist Countess Felder. We were very close friends in Birmingham and both loved the music very much. She had started to sing, she knew all the standards well. Countess had just signed a contract with one of the big hotels in downtown Cleveland for a year with a jazz trio behind her. She also had a gig at a jazz joint called The Jamaican Breeze. She offered me a job, drove me back to Cleveland, and gave me a place to stay. She was out one day walking in the neighbourhood and, passing by, looked at a window, and there was a jazz record shop by the name of… Cosmic Music! And Yusuf [Mumin] – Joseph Phillips – is the proprietor. On this wall all he had were the latest releases of this label called ESP that sponsored Sun Ra from Birmingham, Alabama, and Albert Ayler from Cleveland, Ohio, and all the avant garde people. As they were talking, Joseph was explaining to Countess that he had a group with a cello player, and that they were trying to find other musicians who wanted to play. She said ‘Hey, I got a brother that loves Trane that’s right down here at my house, whom I just brought back from New York, would you like to meet him?’ And boom! I go up there with my drums – the same set the album was recorded on – set up, we play, and you’ve heard of the expression love at first sight? This was love at first hear. We all knew, after we got through playing, for about 30 minutes, nonstop, blistering. Yusuf turned around and asked Abdul Wadud, ‘What do you think?’ Abdul Wadud said, ‘Yeah, man.’ That was the beginning. Just like Jessie and I were missing that third link, so were Abdul and Yusuf.

At what point in 68 was that?

That was in the early summer, late spring of 1968. See, the album celebrated its 50th year this December, because we recorded December 24, 1968. Now, people will say, if you really listen to what we are doing, how did we get that tight, mentally? It’s because, from the day that we met until the day that we recorded the album, we practised every day, for a minimum of four hours. My father always said… he became a music teacher, he taught in elementary secondary and college, his favourite thing was ‘practice makes perfect’. What we simply did was, we played so much together that either one of us could start an expression, and the others knew what the expression was going to be. Yusuf didn’t have to play but one note and I knew what the rest of the expression was going to be. I didn’t have to play but one rhythm and Abdul knew what my next accompanying rhythm was going to be. We were that close.

Elvin remained your main starting point on the drums?

Elvin was my real breaking point with Kenny Clarke and the bop, Max, [Art] Blakey and the funk bottom, Roy Haynes, all of those cats. Elvin was a Virgo, so Elvin played like an explosion. I’m a Pisces, like Rashied Ali with Trane, who was a Cancer, so what I wanted to sound like was continuous water. The four parts of my body are all moving on a different pattern, I’m trying to hold it together to sound like a waterfall. What I was trying to do was the continuation of the sound, plus the tempo and the rhythms. I had a tom-tom that was attached to the bass drum, a snare, two floor tom-toms, two cymbals, a crash and two sock cymbals. Are you familiar with the pentatonic scale? That's the African scale, five notes, not eight notes like the European scale. I had my drums tuned in a descending pentatonic scale, and my cymbals tuned in an ascending chromatic scale. So whenever I would hear the cello or the alto play a chromatic scale, I knew where I could get that same sound on my cymbals and my drums, and accompany the scale while keeping the motion and the momentum going, and continue the rhythm. What I found out was that if you got three cats concentrating on that, you can do what is called square-rooting of the sound. I heard Trane in New York, he didn’t have McCoy [Tyner] and Elvin, he had Rashied, Alice [Coltrane] and Pharoah [Sanders]… It was five or six cats playing, sounding like 36 playing. So when The Black Unity Trio played and we locked on this thing, it sounded like nine people playing, man. The thing was that powerful.

Do you remember where that Trane gig could have happened?

The time I remember most was at The Village Theatre, in 1966 [12 August]. This was the first time I heard the new group with Alice, Pharoah and Rashied. We were backstage with the group, the tenor player with us, Jessie, reached out to shake Trane’s hand, and when they touched, his legs gave away and he slid down to the floor. We were talking to Trane about his music and what it meant to us. With tears in his eyes Trane was saying how hard he was just trying to get it together and could not get it there. We were telling him that if he didn’t have it already, it was just not attainable. He was so humble. An alto player by the name of Marion Brown, from Atlanta, opened the show. This was the first time I saw the music completely take over the audience. Everybody was up on their feet in the seats. There were some people making prostration on the floor. I’d never seen that before, man, that's when I saw that the music could be used as a healing feeling, positively.

Something great with the sound of The Black Unity is how Abdul is able to move across the frequency range with the cello, and how it matches with both the sax and the drums.

There are some sounds at one point, the cello and mallets – instead of sticks –, you couldn’t tell which one of us was playing. A bass is tuned in fourths, but a cello is tuned in fifths. The pentatonic scale is five. So Abdul and I could do some things with mallets that blended phenomenally. And Yusuf could do it, with the highs and the lows on the alto. He also had a soprano and a flute, I wish we would have recorded more instruments on the album than we did. He also had a bass clarinet, he'd sound like Eric [Dolphy] on that. What we were trying to do was blend all this together with the rhythm, where it became one heartbeat, one sound, one motion, one expression. And you play so long, I’m telling you, man, where you get on this thing and it ain’t you playing no more, you’re sitting out there looking at it, saying goddamn! If you want to see what we were doing, study Ravi Shankar with his tabla player. They just start playing, they lock their mind in. That’s the same thing we were doing. It’s all mental. I tell people this all the time: when a reporter was in the studio in Chicago, with Louis [Armstrong], and he came in and asked one of them brilliant questions, he said ‘Louis, do you read music?’ Louis said, ‘Yeah, as long as it doesn’t get in the way.’ See, the mind, it started off like the tune that Cannonball wrote, “Spontaneous Combustion”. The mind. Instant creation, art. Creating as you go. Now, it has become… I have no complaint, no criticism of any other artist, living or dead, but now it has become a discussion. A topic of discussion, instead of raw creativity, if that makes any sense to you.

I see what you mean.

And that can be… If you got some wonderful musicians who are capable of doing that, they can be just as dynamic, but…

Regarding the first track of the album, “Birth, Life, And Death”, I get the impression that there is a clear structure in three parts, right?

Yeah.

So I was wondering how much of the structure was planned ahead and how much was improvised?

All that was there previously was [sings opening saxophone line]. Everything else came off that. And when you hear the little things going on at the beginning, you’re focusing on the child as an embryo, the child being born, the child crawling, the child walking, the child speaking, then you hear that take off, with all the struggle that’s going on with living, all the stress, all the turmoil, all the hatred, all the evilness, all the violence, everything that has been done to the people, for 500 years. Now, after you go through the beautiful birth, the young childhood life, you get that part of life, the stress – it’s stressful to raise a family, if this is your first child you’re about to have, in the next ten–15 years, you’ll say, ‘Hasan, you were right, man.’

I’m pretty sure it will be the case.

Yeah, stressful, huh? But you got to learn how to live with it. So, after you go through all the turmoil of life, all of a sudden, it returns. It returns because if you’ve been around an elder person who could no longer walk, was dying, you take the cover off of them, they’re lying there in bed, in the same position they began with. The embryo position. So you hear the music going through the embryo, through the struggle, and come back to the embryo. And at the end, you hear Abdul Wadud and myself play the last heartbeats. And it’s gone, man. It’s gone.

Wow.

Now, here is the big mistake that a number of people have been making: that is not Abdul Wadud playing bass on the album, that’s Yusuf playing bass. On a tune [“In Light Of Blackness”], you hear a short bass solo going on, the cello might still be playing, but everybody says Abdul Wadud doubles on bass and cello. That’s false. That was Yusuf playing on that particular album. I want to correct that.

Where does the text recited by Yusuf on “Opening Prayer” come from?

That’s an Ayat. Ayat means sign or verse of the Qur’an. That’s the prayer of Abraham, where he’s saying, “I’m turning myself upright, I’m not among the polytheists, I’m of those who submit. My prayers, my sacrifices, my life, and my death, are all for Allah, Lord of the worlds”. That comes out of the Qur’an [6:162].

Was the title “John’s Vision” for Trane?

Yusuf wrote “John’s Vision”, and he related to the way John [the Apostle] was cast off on an island [Patmos, where he had the visions described in the book of Revelation] in exile. To me, and I’ve discussed it with him, “John’s Vision” was always saying, to the public, ‘That’s what Trane saw.’ As crazy as it might sound, we were honestly convinced, by the grace of Allah – there’s nothing great about us, man, we’re just a speck in the spectrum – we believed in our hearts that this was Trane’s vision. That this is after Trane.

And “Al-Nisa”?

If you sit down in the dark, put those earphones on, and listen to “Al-Nisa”, which means “The Woman”, you’ll see your girlfriend in that tune, if you just listen. Then there was a little three minutes skit [“Final Expression”] we just put together because the engineer told us, ‘I got three minutes left.’ When the engineer’s waving his hand, you can hear Abdul say, ‘One minute’, because the tape is running out. It was just to fill out that album. And I don’t know if you heard that sound, it’s somewhere at the end of the record [imitates strange cosmic sound] [laughter]. I’m telling you, it ain’t us, man! Where did that come from? That’s the Spirit in there! In the motherland, the drums are believed to be able to call the spirits in, and that’s what we were asking for. We were asking for the spirits to come in, and make this your music.

You told me that there was another tune that was not recorded because there was not enough tape.

That particular tune was going to be… Don’t think we’re crazy, now, you promise? That tune was going to be called, if I remember correctly, “The Day before They Told The Lie That Jesus Christ Was Born”, because that album was cut December 24 of 1968. See, there were riots going on, in Cleveland, in Detroit, Watts, Philly, everywhere. Some of the things that I’m doing on drums, I was trying to imitate an automatic weapon fire. You get my drift? And the bass drum, I was trying to get the feeling of an explosion. I was in Cleveland, July 23, 1968, when Cleveland erupted [with the Glenville shootout and riots]. I was about a half mile away from it, and I heard from people who have been to Vietnam that’s what it sounded like that night. Rapid gunfire, people running. That’s what that was all about. It was called “The Day before They Told The Lie That Jesus Christ Was Born”. How we came up with that, I have no idea.

What kind of live gigs did the group play?

In 68, 69, point of reference, we never one time played at a nightclub, we refused to do that. What we did when we cut the 500 copies of the first album… The brother who was over at Black Studies at Case Western Reserve University [in Cleveland, John McCluskey Jr] – whom I knew from Miles College – gave us a directory to all the black student societies in the country. We sent a nice introductory letter and an album to each one of these societies, and got work out of it. We were making at a minimum $500 apiece. We played one 45 minutes set – just like Trane – that went through many different moods, take a 30 minutes break, and close out with a 45 minutes set. So about an hour and a half work. It was unheard of then, in big bad New York, in badass Paris, nobody making that kind of money, man.

How did the audiences react when you went to the colleges?

Some people were into it from the revolutionary standpoint. The younger generation was there and understood that. Most people… If you look at that prom shot that Mutawaf [A Shaheed] sent you [reproduced in Shaheed’s March 2019 Wire interview], you can see a few of those young kids, the way they’re looking at us: some people looked at us like we were totally out of our mind.

Were there other things done with that prom trio with Mutawaf and [saxophonist] Hasan Abdur-Razzaq?

That prom situation was just a one-time affair. Hasan Abdur-Razzaq was just starting to play, he and another brother, a tenor player named Amin Khafiz. My wife and I were staying in the back of the [Cosmic Music] record shop. That’s where The Black Unity Trio used to practice, downstairs, which was a small basement room, no windows, all cement, and the sound used to just vibrate around, on the walls, and when we stopped playing, it could still be heard. Hasan and Amin were teenagers and they were interested in the free music, so after Abdul and Yusuf would leave to go home, they would come by, late at night, at 11 or 12 o’clock. And we would play. The music inspired them so much that they held on to it. Abdur-Razzaq is still actively dealing with the free music. But that particular prom situation, that was a one-time shot, it was never really an active group.

OK.

But the music of The Black Unity Trio was so powerful, we used to come off stage, man, and people would part just like we’re Moses at the Red Sea, and they’d reach out like they want to say something to you, and they’re scared to touch you and stuff. That’s how powerful the music was, I’m telling you. Are you familiar with The 5th Dimension?

No.

This was an R&B group that cut a tune called “The Age Of Aquarius”. We were very much into all kinds of mysticism at that time. Astrology, numerology, The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, The I Ching, Kabbalah. We were reading everything. The word that’s supposed to represent Aquarius is ‘I know’, so the Age of Aquarius was about seeking knowledge, but in new ways, that had never been sought before. We were trying sounds that you could not tap your feet, snap your fingers, or dance to, sounds that you had never heard before. We came there to take your mind – positively, not negatively – and make you think about the cosmos. We used to pass out a sheet that was entitled “Cosmic Music”. And it was a good explanation of what we were trying to do. I have no knowledge where it came from or where it is today. If I could put my hands on it, you wouldn’t need me anymore, cause it explains the whole thing.

You passed out that sheet at the concerts before you played?

Yes, we came in to set the whole mood. We had some little square incense called Sheherazade that this brother Zaid made, he was an Ahmadiyya Pakistani in Cleveland. It had one of the most beautiful fragrances that you’ve ever smelt in your life. We’d always get there about an hour early, and we’d set the stage up, start burning the incense, and we’d have someone pass out this sheet called “Cosmic Music” to try to give an advance explanation of what you were about to witness. Cause most people that witnessed our music… If I had a camera to show you the front row, I’d say 90 per cent of the people were sitting up there with their mouth wide open.

How did you meet Mutawaf?

Here’s what happened with Mutawaf and his crew, with the poets. I don’t necessarily use the word nationalists, but all of the musicians, dancers and poets were what I call culturalists – we were interested in promoting the culture. So, every weekend, the nationalist movement there would have a get together called a bimshi, meaning gathering. All of the musicians, poets, dancers, jewellery makers, garment sellers, would have this three or four hours affair like on Saturday night, where everybody would perform. And we would be the musical group there. Mutawaf and his organisation would be the poets. When I first met Mutawaf, he came there with his bass, which he played while they were reciting poetry. He had a fez on, and a long air force army surplus overcoat that stretched down to the ground. He was observing when we were playing. I don’t think he or myself had become Muslims at that point. Yusuf had been involved in the Nation of Islam. Ask Mutawaf next time you talk to him if his fingers weren't smoking when we got through playing together. My hands were bleeding, but his were smoking, like they've been in a fire. I see why Albert selected him. He's one of the most powerful bass players I've ever played with in my life, man.

In the interview we did, Mutawaf mentioned an unreleased Black Unity recording session on which he played with you guys.

Yes, at Boddie’s, I don’t know what happened to that. We also did a live recording at a concert at Western Reserve [on 10 February 1969]. It got as far as the album being printed, with the picture of us playing, and we ran out of money. The one with Mutawaf… This brother [Thomas Boddie] had a little piecemeal studio called Boddie [Recording Company]. He died, and our understanding is the tapes were sold or thrown in the garbage can. So all of that is lost, man. It’s gone.

It was with Mutawaf and a flute player, also?

Abdul Lateef, Jacques, his name was Jacques [Roulette]. He was an alto flute player. It’s the only brother I played “Naima” with. We played it at the University of Toledo [Ohio] and at an university in Cleveland. Good brother, but something snapped in him many years later. Yeah, Jacques, Abdul Lateef, that was his name. So those are lost.

So there were once three Black Unity albums instead of one.

Man, have you heard of Arthur Doyle and Charles Stephens? Those were two young cats my age, from Birmingham. Art Doyle played with Milford Graves. Charles Stephens was a fantastic trombone player. We were all in a band that my father had. He was an Elk, and they had an Elk jazz youth band. We were all in high school, there were about 13 members in this band and ten out of the 13 became professional musicians. Arthur Doyle and Charles Stephens were in that group. The last concert we did as The Black Unity Trio was at Oberlin Conservatory and we had those two cats as special guests, we’d invited them in. It was out of sight. They had that thing, I don’t know whether they started it or Sun Ra started it, but we’d be playing, blistering, I used to get into it with my eyes closed, and they would leave the stage – people were so much into the music, they were not paying attention – and all of a sudden you hear somebody playing to you, in the balcony, or in the back of the audience, and they’d walk back to the stage. And man, you’re talking about some combustion. I don’t know why we did not attempt to record that, because that was an outstanding concert.

Yeah, it’s really sad that we don’t have more music from the group.

Well, like Mutawaf said, it’s what Eric said about the music being gone. The only thing that stops me from crying, 50 years later, is that I fully accept what we call the sixth article of faith, which is predestination. I believe that we were sent here to do that, and Allah said that’s it, and that was it. Otherwise I’d just be sitting up crying for the rest of my life. I couldn’t listen to the album for about ten years, because every time I played it I just thought about what could have been. Because, if we had stayed together and went on to New York, the rest would be history, brother.

How did the group come to an end?

What basically interrupted the group was a disagreement, really, a religious disagreement. And then my career was ended abruptly, on January 13th of 1970, in Cleveland. I was taken out of the mosque in chains by the FBI, and that was because I was a conscientious objector and I had refused to participate in the Vietnam War. That's why I used the Haasan-Al-Hut name on the album, because I was wanted by the federal government. Al-Hut is Arabic for fish, so since I am Pisces, I just said “Haasan-Al-Hut”. So I was finally convicted in a conspiracy against the United States of America, and that’s what really ended the possibility of doing something else with The Black Unity Trio at that time, because they took me back to Alabama. They took me back for trial in September 1970. Muhammad Ali had just won his case before the Supreme Court [Ali’s conviction and five year prison sentence for refusing military induction were reversed on 28 June 1971]. I had the exact same case. I never will forget, this judge told me, “Well, Muhammad Ali has just won the case, so there’s no need to go to prison, but I just can’t let you go.’ So they put me on probation for several years and I could not leave the state of Alabama. I couldn’t get back to Cleveland, I couldn’t get back to New York. When I went back to Alabama, there was nobody playing the new music. Everybody said, ‘Goddamn, Hasan, you solo all the way through the tune, and you play too loud and too long.’ So if you go to Alabama right now and ask them, ‘You know Hasan that was in Black Unity Trio? Amos Gordon?’ ‘Yeah I know him, he can’t play.’ I’m telling you. Albert witnessed the same thing with his peers in Cleveland. There was a tenor player there, again from Birmingham, Alabama, baddest horn player who had ever been in Cleveland, named Big Joe Alexander. They would talk about Albert like a dog when people let him come on stage to sit in. So Albert's peer group, they never felt that Albert could play. Still today they don't give him any credit. He didn't become a leader and an inspirer of the younger cats like us until he went to New York and went to Europe.

You told me that the Black Unity maybe could have signed with ESP in New York?

Yeah, we never did, but that was the overall intention. See, when Abdul Wadud decided to get his master’s at [the State University of New York at] Stony Brook, in Long Island, the original intention before we started having these differences about Islam was to all move to New York. Where everything is supposed to be, if you’re gonna get at it. We were going at it. Totally. The total scope, we were going at it. But like I said, that situation came in. And my father told me, ‘Son, in your lifetime, there are two things that you are never to get into an argument about: religion, and politics.’ I did just the opposite, and I regretted it for 50 years. But, just like the music, when Islam is stamped on your heart, man, nothing else has any effect on you, and you’re gonna deny everything but it. When it hits you, it grabs you regardless of the consequences, like with Malcolm X, Martin Luther, same thing. When religion grabs you, you ain’t scared of nobody, man. Mutawaf and I were talking about it, all the things we did that were so dangerous back then. And we just both came to the conclusion that we were young. But that’s what the music was about, man, our youth. Our determination, our psyche. Seeking, that was all about seeking something new. But when Trane died, it looked like everybody made an about-face, like they were scared to go on. At that particular time, that’s how the Creator chose it should go down.

Who are some of the other musicians from that time you crossed paths with?

You know The Art Ensemble Of Chicago? You know Lester Bowie?

Yeah, sure.

And Anthony Braxton?

Yeah.

You should have heard some stuff we did… A monster group, monster group, man. We did some things, not The Black Unity Trio, but I happened to be in Chicago with Jessie [Taylor] and we played at the Charlie Parker Drug Abuse Center in the spring of 1969, a Sunday afternoon matinee.

Ah, just before The Art Ensemble left for Europe and started to be known in France.

Man, you’re talking about something blistering. Are you familiar with the brother in Saint Louis, Hamiet Bluiett? And Henry Threadgill? We used to bump heads with all these cats in different cities from time to time. It was The Art Ensemble in Chicago, Henry Threadgill, we were in Cleveland, Saint Louis had Bluiett, Sun Ra was frequently in Chicago but he was living in Philly. There wasn’t too much going on the West Coast, there was nothing going on in the South, until George Adams came out of there with Sirone and Ron Burton, who was Rahsaan [Roland Kirk]’s pianist. George Adams played with Charles Mingus. That group was in Atlanta around 1966, and they were playing all of Trane’s tunes, “Olé”, “Kulu Sé Mama”, “Out Of this World”.

We should mention your R&B background, for the record.

I began performing with R&B artists at 14, with Bobby Day, who recorded a tune called “Rockin’ Robin”. I played with a cat who had a short career by the name of Roscoe Robinson. In high school I performed with Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams, who later became lead singers with The Temptations of Motown fame, and with Mitty Collier, who went on to record a hit in Chicago called “I Had A Talk With My Man”. I also performed with Cleave [Cleveland] Eaton, who was the bass player with Ramsey Lewis for about 20 years and was the last bass player with Count Basie. This is another point about Birmingham history: the first drummer for Basie was Papa Jo Jones, who grew up in Birmingham, and the last bass player was from Birmingham. I did my first recording in 1965 with Little Brenda Duff [“The Army’s Got Me Crying”/“Tell Me Where’er You Going”], at the famous FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. I happen to have married one of her background singers, her sister, and we’ve been married for 52 years.

What did Yusuf and Abdul do when you had to go back to Alabama?

After they sent me back to Birmingham, Abdul Wadud went on to Stony Brook, and Yusuf went everywhere, he was in California, then he ended up living in Milwaukee for a number of years. Before this, he went to New York, and did another album with Norman Howard, a trumpet player that was with Albert [Burn, Baby, Burn, recorded in November 1968]. When Yusuf was in California, he was talking with Horace Tapscott and Arthur Blythe. Horace Tapscott was doing his first album with the Flying Dutchman label, The Giant Is Awakened. Yusuf showed them a copy of Al-Fatihah and brought up the subject of self-determination. How did we get this album released? We just stopped eating for a month, put some money together, went in the studio and did it! Ain’t anything special about it, we just said we wanted to do it, we felt we were ready to do it, and we did it! What makes this so complicated? Like I said, the day Trane died [17 July 1967], man, we played till my fingers bled, we played all day. But then everybody seemingly just got scared, like the prophet was dead or something, and the world was at its end. But Trane left a path, man. All you had to do was follow the path and do your thing. Don’t worry about Trane, do your thing. That’s all we were trying to do. And the Creator decided that he did not want it done, so it wasn’t. That’s why, if we had done something, a new recording, I was going to suggest that one tune, or even the name of the effort be “Unfinished Business”. Because the business is not finished. We got abruptly stopped. But I wouldn’t want to do it if it’s not up to par. I would not embarrass the art form of my father, of Trane, and all the cats who scuffled to get this thing, to Albert, to this point. I wouldn’t do that. Out of respect for the art, that’s all. Cause that’s all Afro-American musicians got left, man, respect for the art. Because it has been taken. It has been taken from us. It says that in the scriptures, “When the Creator sends you the blessing of a talent, an artistic talent, you should strive to perfect it, and cherish it, and honour it, and thank him for sending it to you.” And if you don’t do that, he will do what? He will take it away from you and give it to somebody else. If you don’t remember nothing else I said, you’re good, brother. That’s what has happened with jazz and black folks. Allah has taken the music away from them. Why? Because they have no respect for the art form that was given us, to bring to the world. It’s right there in the Book, I ain’t making this up. I ain’t nobody, man, but that’s what the Book says. And I’ve lived long enough to see it happen. So what can I say?