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Remembering Abdul Wadud
(Wednesday, April 30, 1947 – Wednesday, August 10, 2022)
Born Ronald Earsall DeVaughn in Cleveland, Ohio, Abdul Wadud was a Black American cellist who helped change how the cello could be heard inside jazz. He was raised in a Cleveland housing project, the youngest of twelve children born to Alberta Miller and Edward DeVaughn. Music was already alive in the home: his father played trumpet and French horn, and Cleveland itself gave him a rich musical environment. Leo’s Casino, one of the city’s important Black music venues, was near the DeVaughn family’s East Cleveland home, placing young Wadud close to the sound-world that would shape him.
Wadud began studying music early, playing both saxophone and cello through Cleveland’s public-school music system. By fourth grade, he was studying cello and classical music more seriously, including private lessons with Cleveland Symphony Orchestra cellist Martin Simon at the Sutphen School of Music. His brother Edward also helped guide him into jazz, giving Wadud the rare foundation of both formal classical training and living Black musical culture.
While studying at Oberlin, Wadud embraced Islam, entering a Cleveland-based Black Muslim circle connected to the Black Unity Trio and the wider Masjid al-Mumin / Islamic Revivalist Movement milieu. The available sources point more toward a Black Sunni / Islamic Revivalist context, though Wadud himself is most often described simply as having embraced Islam. He became part of the Black Unity Trio with Yusuf Mumin and Hasan Shahid, also referred to as Hasan Al Hut. Their album “Al-Fatihah,” recorded in Cleveland on December 24, 1968 and released in May 1969 on Salaam Records, placed Black spiritual urgency, free jazz, and Islamic framing into one rare document of late-1960s Black experimental music.
Across his later work with Julius Hemphill, Arthur Blythe, Anthony Davis, James Newton, Muhal Richard Abrams, and others, Wadud proved that the cello did not have to remain trapped inside European classical expectation. In his hands, it bowed, plucked, mourned, argued, swung, and testified.
His landmark solo album “By Myself” made the point plainly: Black classical discipline and Black avant-garde experimentation were not opposites. They became one language.
Abdul Wadud transitioned on Wednesday, August 10, 2022, at age 75, with his passing announced by his son, @Raheem_DeVaughn. No public cause of death was specified, but Wadud’s legacy remains clear: he left behind a body of work that stretched the cello beyond convention and placed it firmly inside Black American creative freedom.
This was one for the books! Floetry—the iconic duo of
@MarshaAmbrosius & @THE_FLOACIST— spent two nights in Newark, setting the NJPAC stage on fire! Bringing the heat with them were Raheem DeVaughn and Teedra Moses. We're never going to forget how epic this moment was.
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