Reading Bowie’s NYTimes obit this morning, I felt such a pang of nostalgia, of recognition when I got to these words: “Mr. Bowie wrote songs, above all, about being an outsider, an alien, a misfit….”
I’m happy, hope you’re happy too…
Reading Bowie’s NYTimes obit this morning, I felt such a pang of nostalgia, of recognition when I got to these words: “Mr. Bowie wrote songs, above all, about being an outsider, an alien, a misfit….”
I’m happy, hope you’re happy too…
The ICA here in Philly is paying tribute to one of the city’s most profound angels…Essex Hemphill. Today, world aids day, they are streaming Tiona McClodden’s “Af-fixing Ceremony: Four Movements for Essay.”
Watch here: icaphila.org
Essex Hemphill (born 1957, Chicago; died 1995, Philadelphia) was a poet
and performer who openly addressed race, identity, sexuality, HIV/AIDS,
and the family, voicing issues central to the African-American gay
community. His first collections of poems were the self-published
chapbooks Earth Life (1985) and Conditions (1986). His first full-length
collection, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (1992), won the National Library
Association’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award. His work is
included in the anthologies Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1986)
and Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS (1993). Hemphill’s poetry
and his performances with the group Cinque were featured in the films
Looking for Langston (1989), Tongues Untied (1989), and Black Is … Black
Ain’t (1994). He received fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts and grants from the Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in the Arts
and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He was a visiting
scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in
Santa Monica, California.
I love that young brother Kamasi had the nerve to launch a three disk release called The Epic and folks are losing their minds behind it. I have so many thoughts and feelings about all that’s happened this week…the sorrow is so deep and yet I hope somebody’s been playing Mingus’s Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting loud, unafraid of the glory and joy in that piece because that kind of soul force must have also been present in the radical hospitality our departed African Methodist Episcopal brothers and sisters extended to their assassin. I played Kamasi’s album for the first time yesterday and was so full up with gratitude for the life force unleashed by this saxophonist I’ve been watching since he was in high school (maybe junior high?). Amazing to hear and reflect on all he must have absorbed from the brilliance, rigor, and imagination of the many musical education encounters, both organized and organic, he experienced. I’m thinking of jazz education programs once helmed by beloved ancestors Billy Higgins, Buddy Collette, and Horace Tapscott (P.A.P.A. is ringing so clear throughout the Epic) and those still rockin’ from East L.A. to the Watts Towers to Leimert to the Westside with generous geniuses like Patrice Rushen, Nedra Wheeler, Lesa Terry, Bobby Rodriguez and all the UCLA heavyweights like Kenny Burrell, James Newton and Roberto Miranda…
Washington dedicates his sonic dance with Debussy to Maestro Gerald Wilson. Still when I heard it I remembered the time Dwight Trible told me that Oscar Brown Jr was working on vocal arrangement of Clair de Lune before he died that he thought Dwight might be able to handle….and all of those thoughts flood me with the majesty of these sacred, multi-genre/generational transmissions that keep all of these musics alive. Then I get a chill hearing Dwight and Patrice Quinn sing Ossie Davis’s Eulogy for Malcolm X…and I am returned to the dirge so heavy in all our hearts behind the 9 extinguished hopes in Charleston, SC. Seem too soon for a second line, still Kamasi’s epic keep giving me the fire to remember and know and keep speaking our glory.
Happy New Year!!!
I had hoped to post a few days ago to remember the greats who became ancestors in 2014 and this morning Charlie Haden is on my mind especially. Throughout the painful days of this past couple months regarding racial violence and police brutality, it’s guys like Charlie Haden who help me. He helps me remember there are courageous white men who actually love, value, revere, deeply listen to, study from and celebrate black people. I’m pretty sure the last time I saw him play was in L.A. with Alice Coltrane who he loved so deeply. I think of the time he lifted up the black liberation movements in Mozambique and Angola and got himself arrested after a gig with Ornette in Portugal. And this morning I reread these beautiful lines from an old piece by Rafi Zabor in Musician magazine (published in the great anthology of jazz writings from that magazine: The Jazz Musician: 15 years of interviews edited by Mark Rowland and Tony Scherman). Dig this:
“People ask me what I think about when I’m improvising, and I have to tell them there’s no thought process. You have to get to know music as you would a person, and get close to music as you would to a friend, and the closer you get, the nearer you are to touching music, and when you’re really playing, when you’re really touching music, if you try to remember back you’ll see that your ears become your mind, your feelings become you mind, and there is no thought process as far as the intellect is concerned. It’s coming from the emotions and from whatever energy is passing from the music to you. The ego goes away. Or should I say, you reach a place where there is no ego, and in doing that you see yourself in relation to the rest of the universe, and you see your unimportance in relation to the rest of the universe, and in seeing your unimportance you begin to see your importance. You see that it’s important to have respect and reverence for life and music, and in being able to do that you get close to being honest in your playing.”
I miss Jimmy Scott to the core, miss Horace Silver too…still I am heaviest with the loss of Haden because these times need men like him so much, to model this kind of humanity. Deep deep bows of gratitude for what you modeled Mr. Haden. I’ll go listen to Steal Away now and imagine you and Hank Jones swinging in the New Year wherever you are…
And never G.I.V.E. U.P and keep your H.E.A.D U.P….
Who knew Jaheim would lift me this week but I stumbled on that old tune, “Fabulous” and had to play it about 5 times in a row. The other album that is offering such healing grooves are my dear brothers Neo and Masauko, Blk Sonshine…especially their song of Peter J Harris’ poem, “Fingerpainting a Masterpiece” and the supremely uplifting, “Building”…here’s the youtube for that here.
Thank you all for the healing, hopeful, head-up sounds…
Watching a video of this amazing interview between Bernice Johnson Reagon and the recently late beloved beloved Vincent Harding for his Veterans of Hope project, I was knocked out about what she had to say about a collective “I.”
Starting out by explaining the emphasis in Western choral music on blending, she explains:
…there’s an aim for a blend so you cannot distinguish where the parts are coming from. With congregational singing, I could drive up to the church and they could be singing and I could tell you who was there. Because, the individual timbres of the voice never disappear. And so one of the things I think that’s important for democracy is that congregational style, where the individual does not have to disappear. And it does not operate as an anti-collective expression. There are some others in the repertoire with the I songs: “We shall overcome” was originally “I shall overcome”; “We Shall not Be Moved” was “I shall not be moved.” I’m so glad they didn’t change, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine”…but if you’ve got a group of people, and all of them are saying I, you actually have a group. If you have a group of people and they’re singing WE, you don’t know who’s going to do what. And you know just try to organize something. You say, like this, you know, “We gonna bring food tonight.” And if you are the nervous wreck organizer, you will leave that meeting and you will end up bringing enough food for everybody because you won’t know who or if anybody’s going to bring anything. So you’re the one who comes in, you’ve got the vegetables and the chicken and the cake, just in case because nobody said, “I’m bringing this, I’m bringing…you don’t get a group until you get some individuals who will say, “I’m in.” And so you’ve got these collective expressions in the African American tradition that are “I” songs and those songs are the way to express the group.
However, one of the wonderful things about the evolution of songs, is that the change of some of the songs to “we” document black people coming together with a white left, predominantly white left, that’s heavily intellectual about collectivism and group, and they like to say, tell us very quickly, “I means individualism and we expresses the group. We means we’re together.” And we looked at ’em and we said (chuckles) “Okay, if you need it….because basically the important thing is that you’re here and if in order to be here you need this we, we gonna give you this we, you got this we, we gonna do all the “we”s you need.” And so you get a document of when another presence joined in collaboration and commitment against racism by following the changes in the words of the songs.
Those percussive prayers and unholy screams served then and still serve now as down beat to our antiphonal emancipation meditations, our atlantic-wide ring shout.
When I say whisper, you say listen,
whisper
listen
whisper
listen….
listen say we’re free.
Say we’re free?…CAN IT REALLY BE? is it freedom day?
We gather this week, 20 years almost to the day of the election of Nelson Mandela, and wonder from the Western Cape to Coral Gardens to Old city Philadelphia, when is freedom day? And in our blues we feel at times like Abbey Lincoln, worried and wondering, are these just rumors flying, must be lying because the broken promises, broken bodies, broken hearts in our paths post apartheid, post colonial struggles, post civil rights, post 9/11 do not ring in the key of life, do not sound the bells of liberty.
It is holy week for our Christian brothers and sisters, holy (Maundy) Thursday to be specific, so brokenness is a theme in the meditations of many across the globe tonight. One of my favorite lines on brokenness comes from the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inyat Khan who tells us, god breaks the heart over and over and over until it stays open.
Until it stays open…
Who will eulogize the greatest eulogist we’ve ever known? Week this hit me most was the week I saw him deliver the eulogy for Sekou Sundiata bout 3 days before he offered one up for Max Roach. “For me, writing a eulogy is very much part of a writer’s central purpose, which is not supposed to be serving as a spontaneous reflector of one’s self, but as an investigator of a useful shared vision” -that’s from the intro to his collection of Eulogies. I have no further words at this time–just gratitude for Baraka’s generosity, his generous ears and eyes receiving and revealing our blues…all blues.
(here’s a lovely interview with Baraka on WBGO discussing the 50 year anniversary of Blues People.)
This photo is by Alf Khumalo. I was actually trying to find his image of Hugh Masekela jumping 10 ft in the air holding the new trumpet he’d just received from Louis Armstrong, also by Khumalo, but this one came up first. It will take a while to write more coherently about Madiba’s passing…but I’m just thinking about my gratitude for his teaching, the gift of his wisdom. I’m also moved because just hours before hearing of Mandela’s passing I finished the last “Jazz Speaks for Life” class of the semester, the amazing course I’ve been T.A.-ing for with Dr. Guthrie Ramsey. The applause we had at the end of class and these testimonies from the students we’ve been receiving about how taking this class and being introduced to this music has changed their lives has served as a sweet upbeat to the blues of my grief for our planet’s loss. And all this makes me turn to another wise teacher…this is from Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your community and the World”…part 2 of the Five Touchings of the Earth ceremony…
In gratitude, I bow to all generations of ancestors in my spiritual family. (bell, touch the earth). I see in myself my teachers, the ones who show me the way of love and understanding, the way to breathe, smile, forgive, and live deeply in the present moment….I ask these spiritual ancestors to transmit to me their infinite source of energy, peace, stability, understanding, and love. I vow to practice to transform the suffering in myself and the world, and to transmit their energy to future generations…
My deepest bows and smiles to you dear Madiba. Viva!