It’s a rare jazz musician whose work earns its own name—and rarer still in an enthusiastic but small scene like D.C.’s. Yet Nasar Abadey—the District’s dominant jazz drummer, who performs this weekend at Bohemian Caverns with his Supernova ensemble—calls his music “Multi-D.” It locates its roots in the “spiritual jazz” movement that John Coltrane and his disciples developed in the ’60s and ’70s, but rarely stays there.

The sole Supernova album, 2000’s Mirage, mixes musical elements of bebop, Afro-Cuban and -Brazilian, fusion, funk, Eastern, and even new-age music atop its foundation of avant-garde intensity a la Coltrane.  Abadey, a Cheverly resident and teacher at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, explains that the name “Multi-D” is derived from the music’s questing “in multiple directions, and also in and out of multiple dimensions at the same time.”

A devout Sufi—the mystical branch of the Islamic faith—Abadey finds in his music a means of communion with higher spiritual planes. “Sometimes I’m practicing down in the basement, all by myself, and I hear voices saying ‘Yeah! Yeah, go ‘head, yeah!’” he says. “I open my eyes and I look around…and no one’s there. And that, to me, is spirits in a spirit world who are communicating with me, and they are inspiring me to continue.”
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Andrew over on City Desk posted a smart critique of the Lincoln Memorial concert. The show’s lineup, he wrote, was way too boomercentric. Of course, he’s right. Garth Brooks singing “American Pie” had nothing to do with the future of the American economy, Obama, netroots, etc. It was just Hollywood’s outdated response to the failing economy, Obama, netroots, etc. Mellencamp singing “Pink Houses?” Hasn’t he sung that song enough? And just where were the musicians from say the last decade and a half? Half these people could have played Live Aid. Fuck what did James Taylor have to do with this moment?

The best performances are probably going to be the small ones. I caught Brother Ah at the Aloha Ball over at a small room in the Woodley Park Marriott. The band was tight. He was mystical (in a non-hippie-boomer way) turning the depressing room into a loft party. I half expected Amiri Baraka to walk in. The big ball performance of the weekend was Wyclef. I didn’t think much of it.

I know I missed the freakest moment of the weekend. George Clinton got a small portion of his band together and actually played to a room of like 200 at the Aloha Ball. I had to scope out the scene along U Street. Second prize was catching Usher at Ben’s.