The African OmniDevelopment Space Complex/We New is the brief—66 pages long—but engaging memoir of Ronald Ubadah McConner, aka Ra’maat Ubadah Hotep Ankh McConner Iheru (1939-2020), a bassist, creative music advocate, and community catalyst who ran a music and cultural center out of his home in Pontiac, Michigan for several decades.

In the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s Pontiac, and the Detroit area more generally, was a hotbed of jazz, being home to many fine players such as the Jones brothers—one of whose nieces McConner married. McConner writes about being exposed to the music as a child through the records his mother played at home, and by his teens he and his twin brother Rashid began building extensive jazz libraries of their own.