In a 1980 interview, the cellist Abdul Wadud laid out a musical manifesto, describing his expansive attitude toward the instrument he had spent decades mastering.
“The cello,” he said, “can be anything that I want it to be.”
Wadud wasn’t just speaking theoretically. A few years earlier, he released a solo LP called “By Myself” on his own label, Bisharra (the name means “good news” in Arabic) that employed vigorous bowing, graceful pizzicato vamps and guitar-like strumming. Its holistic sound drew on his extensive experiences in both jazz and classical, as well as the rich array of Black music he absorbed growing up in Cleveland in the 1950s, and influences from, as he put it in the album’s liner notes, Mother Africa.
Decades later, fellow musicians are still marveling at Wadud’s achievement. “He’s turned the cello into an orchestra,” said the reed player and composer Marty Ehrlich, who worked with him for more than a decade.
“I think he just showed a direction into the galaxy,” said Akua Dixon, a fellow genre-spanning cellist, who played with Wadud in ensembles including the String Reunion, an all-Black string orchestra. “What planets you want to go to and stop on are your choice.”
For decades, though, Wadud’s only solo album, and seemingly the first unaccompanied cello album to combine such disparate vocabularies, was nearly impossible to find. Initially pressed in a limited run — Wadud once estimated between 500 and 1,000 — the LP has long been out of print. For fans of the cellist, cassette dubs or vinyl-sourced MP3s were the only way to hear “By Myself.” The original album became a highly prized collectors' item, with some copies fetching over $800.
This spring, the album will finally be reissued — in an initial LP run of 2,000 copies, with accompanying digital and streaming releases, all out as of the cellist’s birthday on April 30 — by Gotta Groove Records, a Cleveland-based vinyl pressing plant with an in-house imprint focusing on music with Ohio roots. (The original tapes have been restored and the sound subtly enhanced, though not technically remastered, according to the reissue’s executive producer, Matt Earley.)
Plans for the reissue were finalized in 2022, building on a relationship that began in 2019 when the cellist, by then resettled in his hometown, saw a local morning-news segment that mentioned the plant. He called Gotta Groove and expressed interest in re-pressing a self-released 1969 album by the Black Unity Trio, a free-jazz group he had been part of, in which he was credited under a version of his birth name, Ron DeVaughn. Coincidentally, that album, eventually reissued by Gotta Groove in 2020, had already been at the top of Earley’s Ohio-centric wish list.
“‘Holy cow, I’ve been trying to get ahold of you guys for three years,’” Earley recalled telling the cellist over the phone.
But less than three months after Wadud handed over the “By Myself” master tapes, he died at age 75 from complications of multiple illnesses.
The cellist’s son, the R&B singer Raheem DeVaughn, sees the new edition of “By Myself” as key to preserving his father’s legacy. “I think it’s going to warm his heart,” he said, clarifying his belief that those who have died are still spiritually present. “I think that it’s going to mean a lot to a lot of people around the world whose lives he’s touched and changed and influenced.”
Born in 1947, Wadud started out playing saxophone and picked up the cello in fourth grade. Nurtured by what he later called the “dynamite” music-education programs then available in Cleveland’s public schools, he went on to perform in local youth orchestras while also playing alto in a jazz combo. As a teenager, he discovered free jazz, inspired in part by the Cleveland-born saxophonist Albert Ayler, and began exploring the style along with the saxophonist Yusuf Mumin and the drummer then known as Haasan-Al-Hut, his bandmates in the Black Unity Trio.
By the 1970s, after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music performance, he was living in East Orange, N.J., and excelling as a member of the New Jersey Symphony, on Broadway and in studios, and on the cutting edge of the jazz avant-garde, with bandleaders including the multi-instrumentalist Julius Hemphill and the saxophonist Arthur Blythe.
In 1977, when he entered the Manhattan studio Blank Tapes to record “By Myself,” he was ready to synthesize his various musical dialects. On “Expansions,” he sounds like a jazz bassist, walking a brisk line, before switching to arco and summoning scraping cries and heaving groans out of the strings. On “Happiness,” he uses the bow percussively, generating skipping rhythms and foreshadowing a statement he made about his instrument in the 1980 interview: “If I want it to be a drum, it can be a drum.”
As Janel Leppin, another adventurous cellist, said, “You’re taught from a very young age, ‘This is right and this is wrong,’” noting that Wadud’s album “is just a really bold expression of eschewing all that baggage.” James Newton, a flutist who collaborated extensively with Wadud, said the cellist brought African string-instrument techniques into his own language: “In ‘By Myself,’ I hear resonances of the kora, oud and molo, along with their American transplants, including the banjo and acoustic guitar, played with the slide.”
Tomeka Reid, one of today’s leading cellists in jazz and avant-garde music, agreed. “His vehicle is a Western classical instrument,” she said, “but he’s manifesting all of these sounds and experiences that he has as a Black man in America on this instrument.”
The album uses cyclical meditative themes, reminiscent of the elemental bass vamps found in the work of Pharoah Sanders and other jazz seekers active during the same era, which artfully complement the more abstract passages. A particularly lovely line emerges on “Camille,” a track dedicated to Wadud’s wife at the time.
“‘Camille’ is almost like a pop song,” said Tom Skinner, a drummer who works in the Radiohead satellite the Smile as well as the combustible jazz outfit Sons of Kemet and cites “By Myself” as a key influence on his recent solo work. “It’s so melodic and heartfelt and catchy.”
While the “By Myself” liner notes frame the record as the first part of a trilogy, no other Wadud solo albums emerged. The cellist remained busy with various sideman appearances and collaborations until the early ’90s, when he retired for good, later citing health issues and an overall feeling of burnout. In the decades that followed, a scattering of other unaccompanied cello albums have arrived from players operating in the jazz avant-garde, including Dave Holland’s “Life Cycle,” David Eyges’s “Wood” and Erik Friedlander’s “Block Ice & Propane.” But Wadud’s effort still stands as a landmark of self-determination, not just stylistically but also in its DIY production.
Raheem DeVaughn recalled once discussing “By Myself” with Camille, the track’s namesake. “She was just telling me what it was like for my dad doing that album at that time, and him doing it by himself,” he said. “And just how important that was, for him to have ownership of his art at that time and go in the studio and pay for his own studio time and just control his destiny as an artist.”
For Wadud, that independent streak seemed to have a higher purpose. In his “By Myself” liner notes, the cellist expanded on what he called “my mission.” After outlining the various roles that the instrument could play, and stating his refusal to be hemmed in by its conventional functions, he went a step further: “To try to free the instrument and the music,” he wrote, “and in so doing, try to help free ‘US.’”
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