Good news this morning from Nasar Abadey, D.C. jazz drummer and leader of the ensemble Supernova. Abadey and Supernova (this time in quartet form) have been accepted as part of the U.S. State Department’s international cultural-exchange program (in partnership with Jazz At Lincoln Center), “The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad” for 2010.

They, and nine other groups performing American musical styles, were selected out of 130 applicants, 35 of whom were invited to audition in New York City this summer.

This means that next year, over the course of eight months, Abadey and Supernova (saxophonist Joe Ford, pianist Allyn Johnson, and bassist James King) will be touring 40 countries across the world, bunched into several tours of approximately four weeks. Abadey reports that he’s most excited about a visit to Central America that may last a full six weeks. Meantime they’ll also squeeze in free performances at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola in New York, and the National Geographic Society’s Grosvenor Auditorium in D.C.

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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