"Ahmed Abdullah (born Leroy Bland; May 10, 1947) is a jazz trumpeter who was a prominent member of Sun Ra's band.

Leroy Bland began performing at age 13 in his native New York City. By the 1970s he was performing in New York's loft scene, and joined the Sun Ra Arkestra in 1976, working there on and off until 1993, when Sun Ra died. During that time Abdullah participated in more than 25 recordings and traveled extensively with Sun Ra. He has performed with Chico Freeman, Charles Brackeen, Steve Reid, John Hicks and Marion Brown, among others. He led his own "Solomonic Quintet" and recorded for Silkheart and Cadence Jazz."

"Marion Brown (September 8, 1931 - October 18, 2010) was an American jazz alto saxophonist and ethnomusicologist. He is most well known as a member of the 1960s avant-garde jazz scene in New York City, playing alongside musicians such as John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and John Tchicai. He performed on Coltrane's landmark 1965 album Ascension.

Brown was born in Atlanta, in 1931. He joined the Army in 1953 and in 1956 went to Clark College to study music. In 1960 Brown left Atlanta and studied pre-law at Howard University for two years. He moved in 1962 to New York, where he befriended poet Amiri Baraka and musicians including Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Paul Bley, Clifford Thornton, and Rashied Ali. He appeared on several important albums from this period, such as Shepp's Fire Music and Attica Blues, but most notably John Coltrane's Ascension.

In 1967, Brown travelled to Paris, where he developed an interest in architecture, Impressionistic art, African music and the music of Erik Satie. In the late 1960s, he was an American Fellow in Music Composition and Performance at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Around 1970, he provided the soundtrack for Marcel Camus' film Le temps fou, a soundtrack featuring Steve McCall, Barre Phillips, Ambrose Jackson and Gunter Hampel.

Brown returned to the US in 1970, where he felt a newfound sense of creative drive. He moved to New Haven, Connecticut, to serve as a resource teacher in a child study center in the city's public school system until 1971. He composed and performed incidental music for a Georg Büchner play, Woyzeck. In 1971, Brown was an assistant professor of music at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, a position he held until he attained his Bachelor's degree in 1974. In addition to this role, he held faculty positions at Brandeis University (1971-74), Colby College (1973-74), and Amherst College (1974-75), as well as a graduate assistant position at Wesleyan University (1974-76). Brown earned a Master's degree in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan in 1976. His master's thesis was entitled "Faces and Places: The Music and Travels of a Contemporary Jazz Musician".

Throughout his tenure as an educator, Brown continued to compose, perform and record. Notable recordings during this period included Afternoon of a Georgia Faun for the ECM label in 1970 and three albums for the Impulse! label between 1973 and 1975. He played alto saxophone on the composition "Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim" from Harold Budd's 1976 release The Pavilion of Dreams, a piece originally written by Budd for Brown's Vista LP, released the previous year.

In 1972 and 1976, Brown received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, which he used to compose and publish several pieces for solo piano, one of which was based on the poetry of Jean Toomer in his book Cane. He also transcribed some piano and organ music by Erik Satie including his Messe des pauvres and Pages mysterieuses, and arranged the composer's Le Fils des étoiles for two guitars and violin.

In 1981, Brown began focusing on drawing and painting. His charcoal portrait of blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson was included in a New York City Kenkeleba Gallery art show called Jus' Jass, which also included works by artists such as Romare Bearden, Charles Searles and Joe Overstreet.

By the 2000s, Brown had fallen ill; due to a series of surgeries and a partial leg amputation, Brown resided for a time in a nursing home in New York. By 2005 he had moved to an assisted living facility in Hollywood, Florida, where he died in 2010, aged 79."

"Billy Bang (September 20, 1947 � April 11, 2011), born William Vincent Walker, was an American free jazz violinist and composer.

Bang's family moved to New York City's Bronx neighborhood while he was still an infant, and as a child he attended a special school for musicians in nearby Harlem. At that school, students were assigned instruments based on their physical size. Bang was fairly small, so he received a violin instead of either of his first choices, the saxophone or the drums. It was around this time that he acquired the nickname of "Billy Bang", derived from a popular cartoon character.

Bang studied the violin until he earned a hardship scholarship to the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, at which point he abandoned the instrument because the school did not have a music program. He had difficulty adjusting to life at the school, where he encountered racism and developed confusion about his identity, which he later blamed for his onset of schizophrenia. Bang felt that he had little in common with the largely privileged children at the school, who included Jackie Robinson, Jr. (son of baseball star Jackie Robinson) and Arlo Guthrie, and he struggled to reconcile the disparity between the wealth of the school and the poverty of his home in New York. He left the school after two years and attended a school in the Bronx. He did not graduate, decided not to return to school after receiving his draft papers, and at the age of 18, he was drafted into the United States Army.

Bang spent six months in basic training and another two weeks learning jungle warfare, arriving in Vietnam just in time for the Tet Offensive. Starting out as an infantryman, he did one tour of combat duty, rising to the rank of sergeant before he mustered out.

After Bang returned from the war, his life lacked direction. The job he had held before the army had been filled in his absence. He pursued and then abandoned a law degree, before becoming politically active and falling in with an underground group of revolutionaries. The group recognized Bang's knowledge of weapons from his time in the Army, and they used him to procure firearms for the group during trips to Maryland and Virginia, buying from pawnshops and other small operators who did not conduct extensive background checks. During one of these trips, Bang spotted three violins hanging at the back of a pawnshop, and he impulsively purchased one.

He later joined Sun Ra's band. In 1977, Bang co-founded the String Trio of New York (with guitarist James Emery and double bassist John Lindberg). Billy Bang explored his experience in Vietnam in two albums: Vietnam: The Aftermath (2001) and Vietnam: Reflections (2005), recorded with a band which included several other veterans of that war. The latter album also features two Vietnamese musicians based in the United States (voice and �n tranh zither).

Bang died on April 11, 2011. According to an associate, Bang had suffered from lung cancer. He had been scheduled to perform on the opening day of the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival on June 10, 2011. He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York."

"Norris Jones, better known as Sirone (September 28, 1940 � October 21, 2009) was an American jazz bassist and composer.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Sirone worked in Atlanta late in the 1950s and early in the 1960s with "The Group" alongside George Adams; he also recorded with R&B musicians such as Sam Cooke and Smokey Robinson. He moved to New York City in the middle of the 1960s, where he co-founded the "Untraditional Jazz Improvisational Team" with Dave Burrell. He also worked with Marion Brown, Gato Barbieri, Pharoah Sanders, Noah Howard, Sonny Sharrock, Sunny Murray, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Sun Ra.

He co-founded the Revolutionary Ensemble with Leroy Jenkins and Frank Clayton in 1971; Jerome Cooper later replaced Clayton in the ensemble, which was active for much of the decade. In the 1970s and early 1980s Sirone recorded with Clifford Thornton, Roswell Rudd, Dewey Redman, Cecil Taylor, and Walt Dickerson.

In the 1980s, he was member of Phalanx, a group with guitarist James "Blood" Ulmer, drummer Rashied Ali, and tenor saxophonist George Adams.

From 1989 he lived in Berlin, Germany where he was active with his group 'Concord' (with Ben Abarbanel-Wolff and Ulli Bartel.) He was involved in theater, film, and was a practicing Buddhist.

He died on October 21, 2009."

"Fred Hopkins had one of the most forcefully distinctive sounds of any jazz bass player of the last 30 years. Many practitioners of an instrument that has grown in stature since the war were better known. Hopkins rarely led a band of his own and was involved in an exploratory jazz movement that struggled for recognition. Yet to bass players, and listeners who let his music touch them, Hopkins was a musician of remarkable expressiveness and formidable technique.

He was involved with many playing partners and appeared on innumerable recordings, but it was his work with the trio Air (also featuring saxophonist Henry Threadgill and drummer Steve McCall) that showed how inventive and responsive he could be. Air was a mercurial, sometimes aggressive, utterly ingenious ensemble that sprang out of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an influential Chicago self-help movement for experimental players developing in the wake of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane's approach to jazz which made musician-led infrastructures necessary because the mainstream record industry was terrified of it. The band was the perfect setting for Hopkins, with his big sound, maverick approach and boldness of conception.

Like Ray Brown and Wilbur Ware, he had a loud and lustrous sound, reverberating with overtones. But though he could sustain a dark, billowing backdrop for the work of busier partners, he was also capable of astonishing agility, horn-like flurries of improvised melody full of aching, slurred sounds, plucked effects like percussion, cliff-hanging bowing experiments, and sustained low notes that seemed to rise out of the floor like a church organ. He was an ideal foil for the light, restless McCall and the mercurial, emotional Threadgill.

Fred Hopkins grew up on Chicago's South Side, moved to New York in the 1970s, then returned to Chicago for his last years. For his understanding of group improvisation, and his ability to underpin and embroider spontaneous ensemble performance, he was much in demand and his playing partners included the leading figures of the 1960s and 1970s American avant-garde, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Don Pullen and the multi-faceted saxophone hero David Murray, whose groups turned out to be some of Hopkins's most fruitful outlets.

Like many Chicago jazz luminaries, Hopkins was inspired by Captain Walter Dyett's widely respected music programme at Du Sable High School. He also worked in the city's Civic Orchestra, and studied bass with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Joseph Guastafeste. He included among his lasting inspirations the classical bassist and conductor Serge Koussevitsky, but it was the Chicago free scene that revealed his potential.

The seeds of Air were sown in a 1971 band with the same line-up, called Reflections, the more lasting version being formed in 1975 as a free-improvising ensemble but one guided by the compositional inspiration of Threadgill, and at times exploring the work of elder statesmen such as Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton.

Fred Hopkins was as forceful, vivid and charismatic as his sound, and followed his own path as a performer. Yet he only took to leading bands in his last years, and it was as a supreme accompanist on an instrument he seemed to make both gentle and thunderously assertive that he was in his element."

"Andrew Charles Cyrille (born November 10, 1939) is an American avant-garde jazz drummer. Throughout his career, he has performed both as a leader and a sideman in the bands of Walt Dickerson and Cecil Taylor, among others.

Cyrille was born on November 10, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York into a Haitian family. He began studying science at St. John's University, but was already playing jazz in the evenings and switched his studies to the Juilliard School. His first drum teachers were fellow Brooklyn-based drummers Willie Jones and Lenny McBrowne; through them, Cyrille met Max Roach. Nonetheless, Cyrille became a disciple of Philly Joe Jones, who in some performances such as Time Waits used Cyrille's drum kit.

His first professional engagement was as an accompanist of singer Nellie Lutcher, and he had an early recording session with Coleman Hawkins. Trumpeter Ted Curson introduced him to pianist Cecil Taylor when Cyrille was 18.

He joined the Cecil Taylor unit in 1964, and stayed for about 10 years, eventually performing drum duos with Milford Graves. In addition to recording as a bandleader, he has recorded and/or performed with musicians such as David Murray, Irène Schweizer, Marilyn Crispell, Carla Bley, Butch Morris and Reggie Workman among others. Cyrille is currently a member of the group, Trio 3, with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman."