Talking about magazines I forgot to mention Ebony magazine and Jet. They came out of Chicago. Ebony and Jet were like, projecting the new black middle class. Once in a while they delve into controversial issues but they were usually you know like, this is how the new elite, black elite would fit in.

Dumas took me to this concert in Brooklyn where Sun Ra's band was performing on stage during Leroy Joseph's play, Black Mass (1965). A very revolutionary play that was a take off on Yakub (nation of Islam) who had been you know, like, a cross between a black Muslim and a nationalist and it was like a discovery, rediscovery of himself. And later on, Leroy Jones was to say that Sun Ra was the only musician that intellectually and culturally could project the kind of feeling that the play was all about. Now having said that, when I went up to Sun Ra and I said to him, you know you need more people to listen to your music and then I said something to him which kind of, a bit startled him. I said you know what Sun Ra? I hear elements of Africa, not just contemporary Africa, deep culture in your music, but you've never been to Africa. How come you have that? You know what he said? Because I’m in tune with nature.

Now that started my mind working. When he says that how does music take you to a place of memory that is both futuristic and in the past? And then I got to understand through Sun Ra, alluding to the fact that the black American musicians at that time were concentrating too much on music for the west and not enough on music for the head. That tripped me out, that got me thinking because while we were in school here they were trying to Europeanize us. They give us colleges in classical music, but I didn't quite get into classical music. I felt it wasn't in my genes. But when I heard jazz music...I mean and blues music...I knew this was it.

So when Sun Ra raised that point and then he made this point about ancient Egypt. I was fascinated, we knew about Egypt but not on the level he was coming from. You know, he was saying that Egypt was the past and the future. Then he got me to realise things that later on I was able to relate to Nkrumah that a lot of things in quote unquote "western civilization" like, mathematics, astrology, medicine, came from ancient Egypt. And now it raised that point, critical point, who were the ancient Egyptians? That was where Sun Ra and the writer called Theodore Ford who wrote a very interesting book called God Wills the Negroe. They were expostulating that black Americans came from Egypt. Of course, Ford's book was dismissed. And Sun Ra went into hieroglyphics understanding and he kept making this point that the ancient Egyptians were futurologists. They were astrologists. They were able to sit on Earth and map out the whole universe and that it was possible, if you trained your mind, to be able to go somewhere there. Because he had this poem, imagination is the magic carpet upon which we can soar to different lands and climbs. If we came from nowhere here, why can't we go somewhere there. And that was the puzzle.

How did that relationship with Sun Ra develop?

Yes, after you know, Sun Ra was a very very perceptive person. He really was a kind of hungry African looking for himself. Looking for his roots, so he kind of coerced me to say So, you know all these things about my music, why don't you come and visit me in the commune? He had a commune, 48^th street (between 6^th and 7^th Avenue, where the best music stores were in the 1960’s until 1990’s) where a few of the musicians lived and that was the like, the song studio. So of course, I went to visit him and next thing I knew I was staying in the commune.

And then?

And then I became Sun Ra's secretary and manager and part of my confidence as an African, I said to Sun Ra I think more people need to hear your music and he gave me the challenge. So, what did I do? I got a scrapbook together and I got a list of all the Universities in America and Canada and I was writing...., I wrote to all of them. Sun Ra's Orchestra and so and so and so we would like you to invite us to come and perform. And before we knew it one or two responded and I’m proud to say that when I met Sun Ra his regular gig was at somewhere called Slugs'. Slug’s Saloon was like a sawdust floor hideout for musicians, you know and in the east village it was in a very popular place but that was where most of the heavyweights were like Allen Ginsberg, all those guys who I got to know, Jackson Pollock all the, you know.

So I got, Sun Ra was playing there and I remember at the end of the gig, once a week we'd probably earn $200 to share amongst 16 of us. But we had this communal spirit. And this thing that I learned from him, which I’ve also learned from you, which is that you must have a sense of social responsibility and not think money. See, Sun Ra was driven by the fact that he believed that it was his duty to spread this space music, first and foremost to his immediate audience which was the black community. Because that was what he was doing with Chicago.

An I remember in this book by Norman Mailer Cannibals and Christians, he mentioned that in 1956 in Chicago he was coming down with a cold and a friend said "Oh, let's take you to the south side". Wanted to listen to weird musician. So, I got into Normal Mailer and his book, it's like the music sounded like an electric drill in the middle of a hash trumpet. And that in 5 minutes the energy of the music burnt out the code in his head you know?

You get to America. How do you see yourself before America and what did America do to you?

Before America I was like, you know, confident but also, I felt that being an African was not quite the way I should be. What America did for me was that it gave me that confidence of being an African. I realised that my black contemporaries were not thinking the same way I was thinking. They were not confident, in America that's one thing that Sun Ra and them, you know, once in a while when they were...Sun Ra would turn around and said “This young man came all the way from Africa. He came here, he understood what I was doing, while there are a lot of black intellectuals here who did not. And he has been able to take us to places we never dreamed about. Carnegie Hall, prestigious Universities.” So, America gave me, thanks to Sun Ra, gave me that confidence and I was able to because in America now I felt elevated as an African and I also felt a bit disappointed that the, why the African and Americans or black Americans there were not as assertive as they should have been. So, America made me proud of being an African and it made me realise that in many way Africa would feel like, would lead America into realisation as black people.

How so?

Because we still kept up with our cultural past. We did not let the Western culture or civilisation leave out faith in our past and we did not let it erode our confidence of being civilised. Now I’m careful here because I see what the French were able to do in Africa was to change the concept of civilisation for black French people to lean too much towards francophone which then, kind of an assimilator mentality which would later on you'd see in Angola and Mozambique and those who wanted to be accepted had to have French. But for us in British...