If you Google the jazz pianist and composer Yusuf Salim, one of the first results is a grainy 1979 clip from a program called Arts in Durham. The interviewer begins with a question: “Why Durham, North Carolina?”
“That’s a beautiful question. I didn’t choose Durham. Durham chose me,” says the wiry Salim, known broadly as Brother Yusuf. His answer wasn’t merely a sentimental or rhetorical flourish: Salim’s 1974 move from Baltimore to the Bull City was a dramatic catalyst that ushered in a new chapter of his life, one filled with music, spirituality, and friendship.e
That interview is preserved through DigitalNC’s North Carolina Sites and Sounds Collection and, until now, has been one of the scant few pieces of ephemera you can find online regarding Salim, who died in 2008.
That sliver of representation broadens widely with Moonchild: The Life and Music of Yusuf Salim, a new documentary produced and directed by veteran local filmmaker Kenny Dalsheimer, which premiered in mid-April at Winston-Salem’s River Run International Film Festival and will see an April 30 Durham premiere at the Hayti Heritage Center.
The project is many years in the making: Dalsheimer said he was first compelled by Salim’s story in the early eighties, when he heard him play music for the first time. In the early 2000s, Dalsheimer began to plot a film and take footage of Salim; the project stalled out, but Dalsheimer decided to pick it back up in 2021, when several key figures agreed to participate.
Dalsheimer is no stranger to making work that holds local legend up to the light—over the past three decades, he’s produced documentaries on Durhamites like bluesman Richard Trice, weaver Silvia Heyden, and folksinger Alice Gerrard. With Moonchild, he pulls on two central threads—Salim’s legacy of mentorship, and the impact of Durham’s Muslim community on his life.
“This is an important part of the untold Black Islamic history in the United States, which has been very pushed down … these are not the films that are greenlit,” co-director Rafael Samanez told the INDY, adding, “Films with these social justice subjects are not easily absorbed into the big distributors.”
Salim was born Joseph Oliver Blair in Baltimore in 1929. There, he came up in the big band world, brushing shoulders with the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Charlie Parker, eventually converting to Islam and changing his name to Yusuf Salim. When a heroin addiction began to eat away at his life, his old bandmate, Kenneth Murray, encouraged him to move to Durham. Salim made the move, quit drugs, and built a new life with faith at the center.
Murray was a childhood friend of Salim’s from Baltimore who had moved to Durham in the 1950s, helping to establish the state’s first Mosque, now called the Ar-Razzaq Islamic Center, in a Pettigrew Street storefront. There, as Imam Kenneth Murray Muhammad, he led a Nation of Islam group of less than a dozen that grew into a thriving congregation.
In 1972, the mosque moved to its present location on West Chapel Hill Street; over the next few years, the congregation transitioned from Nation of Islam to Al-Islam.
“I think Durham needs to have these stories out there, because it’s changing so much,” Dalsheimer said, on a recent afternoon from a table outside the Durham Co-op, just down the block from Ar-Razzaq. “If we don’t have the archive now, it’s an archive people won’t know.”
This stretch of West End storefronts has changed considerably over the past few decades: The mosque’s modest exterior and forest-green lettering might now be easy to miss, lost between the neons of the neighboring vape store and the hip crowds filing out of the nearby record, bagel, and vintage shops. At the height of Ar-Razzaq’s prominence, though, it was the neighborhood’s center of gravity—a hub for basic needs and Civil Rights activism alike.
“I think Durham needs to have these stories out there, because it’s changing so much. If we don’t have the archive now, it’s an archive people won’t know.”
Kenny dalsheimer, director, Moonchild: The Life and Music of Yusuf Salim
Ar-Razzaq’s robust community drew in renowned activists, and with that, racist community and the attention of the FBI. In one fascinating sequence in the film, Murray Muhammad’s children, Rhonda Muhammad and Kenneth Mutaqqi ibn Muhammad, recount the time that Malcolm X stayed with their family.
This was April of 1963, the same tense month that Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and Malcolm X received an icy reception from area universities. After the City of Durham revoked permission for the activist to speak at a city-owned space, the community hosted him on their own turf—a room above a Roxboro Road taxi hub, where over a hundred people crowded to hear him speak.
As the years went on, the mosque was central to the spread of Islam across North Carolina, challenging perceptions of what it means to be Southern and Muslim alike. All this was the devout, electric environment that Salim threw himself into upon his 1974 move to Durham.
“We began to have all the components of community life,” Rhonda Muhammad says in the documentary. “We had a bakery, we had a fish market, we had a school. The missing component was culture, and Yusuf came at just the right time.”
If these elements all seem sprawling, it’s because they are—Dalsheimer and Samanez had their work cut out in telling a story so undersung and yet so greatly symbolic.
In the end, at a feature-length 92 minutes, Moonchild: The Life and Music of Yusuf Salim, is not the tightest watch, but it makes great strides in preserving the gentle, enduring spirit of a musical great—a man who composed more than 53 original works, who was a mainstay of the arts scene known for his warm hugs and the way he always redirected praise to Allah.
“It builds bridges,” Salim said of jazz in a 1982 interview with The Sun Magazine. “Every time it has a resurgence, like a phoenix bird, it’s during a time of depression. The whole feeling of it generates spirit.”
Salim defined himself as an accompanist, and there are few public recordings of him playing. Over a phone call, Darrell Stover, a co-producer for Moonchild, described Salim as having his own “style and posture for playing.”
“Each of those fingers seemed to have their own brain, and they all were linked up to one another,” said Stover, a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at North Carolina State University. “The music came out with a real, I guess you could say, ease.”
In 1977, Salim established the Salaam Cultural Center alongside Suman Bhatia, Billy Stevens, and Roger Tygard. The building’s exterior featured a mural of a Black and white hand shaking; here, he led jazz workshops and hosted events that became foundational for generations of Durham musicians, like Nneena Freelon and Eve Cornelius, and for students coming through North Carolina Central University’s (NCCU) prestigious jazz studies program.
In its last half, the documentary turns to the story of Brian Horton, the Kinston-born director of NCCU’s jazz studies program who died unexpectedly in 2022 at age 46. At the time of his death, he was working on curating a series of concerts at Duke celebrating Salim’s life, and Dalsheimer had intended to feature him as a main character in the film, representing the next generation. Shocked, Dalsheimer said he considered dropping the documentary altogether.
He chose to continue; the result is a poignant portrait of intertwining legacies and layers of mentorship, through Horton’s students at NCCU and beyond.
“People don’t realize what keeps this music alive,” the Grammy-award-winning saxophonist Gary Bartz explains in the film. “It’s through the mentorship of the many unsung great musicians whom you may have never heard of. But in essence, you have heard of them through the musicians you do hear.”
In 2018, Duke University began a years-long initiative called Building Bridges: Muslims in America, which brought in international musical figures and highlighted local ones, including Salim. The 2023 concert Horton had worked on, captured for posterity in Moonchild, paid tribute to Salim’s range. Eve Cornelius’s performance of the playful, halting “My In-Laws Are Outlaws” dialed into Salim’s swing history, while Adia Ledbetter’s rendition of “Moonchild,” the titular song of the film, showcased Salim’s bluesy, searching sounds.
In early April, just a few weeks before the documentary’s Winston-Salem premiere, an NC historic marker was erected across the street from Ar-Razzaq, commemorating the mosque as the first in North Carolina. The recognition comes years after Murray Muhammad, Salim, and the generation who built the community have passed, but it’s a tremendous step forward in keeping that history alive.
Receptive listeners can feel the vibrations of that history throughout Durham and beyond. It’s embodied in Ar-Razzaq, which continues to open its doors to all people of faith, and in clean-ups like the ones Salim organized every year with neighborhood children. It’s embodied in each new achievement of the NCCU jazz band, and in warm summer nights at Durham Central Park concerts, like the ones Salim used to play at. It vibrates through Kingfisher’s Tuesday evening jazz nights, where the Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Trio now gigs in Horton’s stead.
On April 30—International Jazz Day, by no accident—Moonchild joins that legacy with its hometown premiere at the Hayti Heritage Center.
When asked about his role in the film, Stover said it was to keep the focus on “the real story—that there is a jazz community here of significance.”
“And that this man—this man, Yusuf Salim, was essential to it,” Stover said, growing emotional. “We have a major jazz presence on this planet, right in Durham.”
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