Ubadah McConner

Bassist Ubadah McConner recounts the evolution and history of this home based cultural, educational, and music center in Pontiac, Michigan that embraced the revolutionary spirit of the 60s and 70s Black artistic renaissance through all night sessions of fire music, mutual support and conversation. 

McConner’s weekend sessions lasted thirty years, until 2002, and were open to everyone so there is name-dropping galore, but the reader may not be familiar with many of the names. As patrick brennan notes, “Faruq Z. Bey, Donald Washington and James Carter ... [came] through regularly,” but what about Abdul Jalil Bey, Abdul Halim, Umam Saladim, Scott Pinkston, Melvin Price, Ted Russell, Fareed McKnight, Joel Letvin, and scores of other musicians who outside of the Detroit/Pontiac orbit, may not be known at all? What McConner reminds us is that most music is local, and that there everywhere there are local communities who play below the radar of what we might call the music industry per se., the music organized and sustained by the dedication of a very few people (in fact, it reminds me of the improvising series that saxophonist Eric Stach put on just down the road from Pontiac, in London, Ontario from the 1960s until recent years, which managed to involve literally hundreds of musicians in improvised music who otherwise never would have connected). There would be physical intimacy, the meetings of strangers, very good nights and very bad ones; in short, a real musical phenomenon. With in-person performance communities more and more precarious and endangered since the Covid-19 pandemic, in retrospect what McConner did seems more valuable than ever.
–David Neil Lee