Fifty years ago, Nasar Abadey learned his first lesson in composition—the hard way. “I was warned not to try to put everything that you know in one song, which I made a mistake of doing in my first composition,” the drummer-composer-bandleader recalls. He’s referring to the song “India,” a tune he recorded in 1975 with his then-band, Birthright, on their long out-of-print second album, Breath of Life. “I knew nothing about composition. I put everything in it that I wanted to play. Now, I have a better understanding, harmonically and rhythmically, of what I want to do,” Abadey tells City Paper. “But I find myself back at the same place: I want to enlist a kaleidoscope of things.”
Indeed, Abadey’s ambition as a composer has never gone away; his epic 2010 work Diamond in the Rough, for big band and strings, made that clear. But he has learned how to distribute in more digestible, less self-indulgent packages. A suite, Diamond in the Rough is a large composition, but in the form of multiple smaller pieces that can also stand alone. In other words, while one can say that he still stuffs everything into one composition, it’s equally true that he spreads it across six compositions.
This continues to be the case—albeit in only three parts—with Point of View, the triptych suite he plans to both premiere and record at Blues Alley on Nov. 25. With him will be his longtime band Supernova, featuring Joe Ford on tenor saxophone, Allyn Johnson on piano, James King on bass, and special guest, the mighty Sean Jones on trumpet.
Those with even a casual eye on the local scene know Abadey, 77, as a top-call drummer about town, the incumbent dean of D.C. jazz musicians. If you’re a bit more in the know, you’ll probably be aware of Supernova. However, Abadey is very judicious—one might even say stingy—about booking his ensemble. “I don’t want to be overexposed,” he explains. “People don’t want to come out if they know they can hear you down the street this week and up the street next week.” He wants every Supernova performance to be an event.
The upcoming show is a prime example: a rare Supernova concert, a premiere of new work, and a live album recording, all rolled up into one. That’s an event.
It’s also a glimpse into an even rarer-seen aspect of Abadey’s work, that of the composer. The last time he held a premiere concert was for Diamond in the Rough—15 years ago, during the 2009 edition of the DC Jazz Festival.
Even if he was more prolific and public about it, though, Abadey would probably remain overlooked as a composer; there’s an inherent bias even among jazz nerds that drummers don’t write. (That needle has moved a bit recently, especially with the ascent of drummer Tyshawn Sorey, a New Jersey native who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Music.) Yet he’s been writing for quite a long time. In fact, he’s been specifically writing Point of View for a long time; just days before the scheduled concert, it’s still a work in progress.
The title refers to Abadey’s own earned wisdom. He feels he’s reached a point in both age and experience where his perspective has some default value. “What I have to say, musically, is a position that I’m taking on creation and where we are in creation,” he says. “How long the earth has been here, how long the human element has been here, who and what was here before us, and what’s going to happen after us.
“My feelings about that, my beliefs, I want to project that. Because at the age I am now, I feel pretty confident at grabbing a young person by the collar, holding them back, and saying, ‘Listen, let me tell you something. You need to know this, and I’m telling you this based upon my experience, not based upon what I believe, or what I think.’”
About the music itself, Abadey gives few hints, falling back on the old Miles Davis aphorism “If you want to hear the song, buy the record.” But, he says, “I’m combining modal jazz, post-bop, and avant-garde. And I’m thinking about the way Ornette [Coleman] organized his music: using his concepts of moving things around and having musicians more or less feed off each other.”
In addition to composing music, Abadey is writing text—explaining his intentions behind each piece—to go along with Point of View. It’s not yet clear how that text will manifest: as program or CD liner notes to the audience? Instructions in the musicians’ written parts? “It could be either,” Abadey says.
Writing extended pieces of music is a challenge under any circumstances; it’s especially so in jazz. The composer needs to write enough to communicate their ideas, but also leave enough room for the musicians to improvise. These jazz pieces will definitionally be more elaborate than most tunes in the composer’s repertoire—but they can’t demand too many rehearsals, or else the spontaneity that is part and parcel of improvised music will be lost. That’s already a lot of nuance to observe.
This is another advantage of not booking Supernova very often, Abadey says: Their approach remains fresh. “We want to always be in a position of exploring the unknown, of reaching that part of the music that you just don’t know, because you’ve never been there before,” he says. “And of getting lost. [Saxophonist and composer] Wayne Shorter said that sometimes getting lost was the best part.” (Of course, the fact that Abadey’s coming down to the wire in terms of writing the music for Point of View also means the band can’t possibly over-rehearse it.)
It’s a safe bet that at Blues Alley, we’re not going to hear these solid professionals getting lost, technically speaking, in Abadey’s music. (If they do, you’ll never know; they’re so smart, they’ll make you assume the music’s supposed to sound like what they’re doing.) That said, there’s a good chance you’ll hear them getting lost in the other sense: The one in which they forsake our world to fully inhabit the one they’re creating. That’s a point of view anyone can get behind.
Nasar Abadey and Supernova with Sean Jones play (and record) at 7 and 9:30 p.m. on Nov. 25 at Blues Alley. bluesalley.com. $32.