Talib Dawud
American musician

Talib Ahmad Dawood (formerly Alfonso Nelson Rainey, born January 26, 1923, on Antigua; died 9 July 1999, New York City) was an American jazz trumpeter.
Career
Dawud came from Antigua and Barbuda, taking lessons from his father, a trumpeter who played in marching bands; his mother was a singer who accompanied herself on piano. Dawud also learned banjo and pipe organ. He had his further education in the United States at a high school and music school he experienced in the United States, came as the end of the 1930s to New York. Because of the support of the Barrymore Foundation, he first took the stage name Barrymore Rainey. After studying at the Juilliard School in 1940, he played with Tiny Bradshaw, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, Andy Kirk, Jimmie Lunceford, Roy Eldridge with further swing orchestras. In Philadelphia he met Sheikh Nasir Ahmad, an Ahmadiyya missionary, through whom he converted to Islam and took the name Talib Dawud. In the second half of the 1940s and again in 1956 he was a member of the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, performing with in 1957 at the Newport Jazz Festival.
In 1954 he married Sayida Fazl of Cleveland, Ohio, his second marriage. They bore a daughter Rafiqa and his second son Idris after having a son Farouq by his first marriage.
“Talib Dawud” enters the record as american musician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Talib, Dawud and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Talib Dawud” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Talib, Dawud and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q18648929. VIAF identifies the subject as 26737846. The Library of Congress control number is no2002083097. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1923, 1999, 1940 and 1956.
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This entry incorporates text from “Talib Dawud” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.