page_title: Rashied Ali
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Rashied Ali / Biography / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Rashied Ali at Koncepts Cultural Gallery, Oakland CA 7/26/91 in duo with Billy Bang. Photo by Brian McMillen / brianmcmillen@hotmail.com
context_page_description: Rashied Ali, born Robert Patterson was an American free jazz and avant-garde drummer best known for playing with John Coltrane in the last years of Coltrane's life.
context_section_description: Ali moved to New York in 1963 and worked in groups with Bill Dixon and Paul Bley. He was scheduled to be the second drummer alongside Elvin Jones on John Coltrane's free jazz album Ascension, but he dropped out just before the recording was to take place. Coltrane did not replace him and settled for one drummer. Ali recorded with Coltrane beginning in 1965 on the album Meditations.
  Among his credits are the last recorded work by Coltrane (The Olatunji Concert) and Interstellar Space, an album of duets recorded earlier in 1967. Ali "became important in stimulating the most avant-garde kinds of jazz activitie," playing what Coltrane described as "multi-directional rhythms". After Coltrane's death, Ali performed with his widow, pianist Alice Coltrane. During the early 1970s, he ran Ali's Alley, a loft club in New York City.
  He was a visiting artist at Wesleyan University, sponsored by Clifford Thornton. He also briefly formed a non-jazz group called Purple Trap with Japanese experimental guitarist Keiji Haino and jazz-fusion bassist Bill Laswell. Their album, Decided...Already the Motionless Heart of Tranquility, Tangling the Prayer Called "I", was released by Tzadik Records in March 1999.
  In the 1980s, he was member of Phalanx, a group with guitarist James Blood Ulmer, tenor saxophonist George Adams, and bassist Sirone. From 1997–2003 he played extensively with Tisziji Munoz in a group that usually included Pharoah Sanders.
  Though known for his work in jazz, Ali contributed to other experimental art forms, including multi-media performances with the Gift of Eagle Orchestra and Cosmic Legends, performances such as Devachan and the Monads, Dwarf of Oblivion, which took place at the Kitchen Center for Performance Art, and a tribute to John Cage in Central Park. Other artists of the orchestra and Cosmic Legends have included Hayes Greenfield (sax), Perry Robinson (clarinet), Wayne Lopes (guitar), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Gloria Tropp (vocals), Louise Landes Levi (sarangi)director/pianist Sylvie Degiez along with poets and actors Ira Cohen, Taylor Mead, and Judith Malina.
caption: Rashied Ali in a duo with Billy Bang at the Koncept Cultural Gallery, Oakland, California, July 26, 1991
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