December 31, 2002
A Great Day in Oakland
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| cheo tyehimba More articles by cheo... |
Historical Note: In 1960 Max Roach and Charles Mingus assembled a group of musicians to play outside of the Newport Jazz Festival in an anti-festival as protest of Newport's commercial exploitation and whitening of jazz.
In the tradition of this protest, a panel of jazz musicians, educators, broadcasters, critics and aficionados met last Saturday at the Sankofa Cultural Center, a spacious loft in West Oakland, to spark dialogue about the African roots of jazz.
Most folks agree that jazz has been repackaged and commercialized to such an extent it is seldom recognized as an African-based music. Dressed up and given an air of economic sophistication that far too few African Americans can afford, jazz music has become our unrecognizable African prodigal son.
Recent media coverage on jazz, like the Ken Burns PBS documentary, the book "White Chords" by Richard Sudhalter, and last month's panel discussion on "Race and Jazz," hosted by the San Francisco Jazz Festival have done little to acknowledge jazz as a music with African origins.
Acclaimed jazz drummer E.W. Wainwright, founder of the "African Roots of Jazz" ensemble moderated the live taping (with studio audience) of the panel discussion. Wainwright, a musician who has played with everyone from McCoy Tyner and Pharaoh Sanders to Oakland's own Earl "Fatha" Hines, set the panel's tone by providing a foundation on the origins of jazz.
"The rhythms found in the Bata drums from Nigeria and countless other drums from throughout Africa have a [jazz] structure and creative element built in," says Wainwright. "The first musical instruments came out of Africa before the existence of the word "jazz," before the middle passage. They were duplications of sounds of life, of nature, of animals, but always inherent in the music was the creative element which comes directly from an African people."
This creative element, the panel argued, is what makes jazz "African."
The panelists included Babatunde Lea, leader, percussionist; Greg Bridges, jazz broadcaster for KPFA and KCSM; Ted Vincent, author of "Keep Cool: The Black Activists that Built the Jazz Age"; Rudy Mwongozi, a jazz pianist and composer; Wanda Sabir, columnist for San Francisco Bay View and others.
Hosted by the Sankofa Cultural Center, an Oakland-based group that provides university-level services focused on Afrikan Diaspora Studies to the community, the lively discussion tackled questions like "What are the major impediments to an accurate portrayal of the significance of jazz?" "How can jazz be redefined as an Afrikan expression in light of its worldwide influence?" "Who have historically been the commentators of jazz history?"
Issues ranging from the Mafia and its influence and control of Harlem jazz venues during the 30s and 40s to manipulative recording companies, cabaret cards, the police, drugs and white supremacy in the form of economic control were discussed at length.
"For the last fifty years, as jazz has moved away from the black community and its social roots to an environment where the audience is increasingly white, critics have written about jazz in an isolated, elevated almost classical sense, said author Ted Vincent."
"What we saw in the PBS documentary about jazz was an immediate attempt to disassociate jazz from Africa," said Rudy Mwongozi. "So that the statement is made that jazz is not an African music, it was created by black people in America. This is another function of the pathological need of the white ruling class to take credit for everything. When jazz first came out, it didn't appeal to the white aesthetic so it was cast aside, but when it was realized that jazz was going to take hold they had to find a way to take credit for it."
"I remember watching the movie "Bird," adds Greg Bridges, a local jazz broadcaster. "Unfortunately the way Charlie Parker was portrayed in that movie, he was nothing but a drug addict. I really couldn't be too disappointed in that movie because I had to think about who wrote and produced it. So white supremacy and its economic control has created a lot of misconceptions about what jazz is and what jazz life is like."
So what's the secret ingredient that makes jazz a black thing? "It's the groove that Africans bring to the music," said Doug Edwards, a longtime jazz broadcaster for KPFA. "If you take a jazz singer and put her with an all white band it will take three weeks for them to catch up with her. That's simply the groove and the swing. The African approach."
"European music is metric," adds Mwongozi. "They'll say 'this song is in 4/4 time and such,' the music is in strict metrical terms, like walking. All African music is the establishment of a rhythmic continuance. Components of rhythm placed on each other such that they fit together and then they accelerate each other. It is the feeling that you are being propelled. That is what makes it African music."
That makes sense to me. Take for example, the style of Earl Hines, the "Fatha" of modern piano, who played trumpet-like solo lines in octaves with his right hand and spurred them on with chords from his left. Or Dizzy Gillespie, whose spirit of invention on his horn formed the bedrock for Afro-Cuban jazz. It is the groove that runs through ancestral bloodlines and cultural legacies that form jazz's main ingredient.
Audience members raised relevant questions about ways to reconnect the black community to jazz through jazz education programs in schools and the economic and class strata that inhibit access and appreciation of jazz. The aspirations of the panel's creator's, husband-and-wife team Duane and Adeeba Deterville, is that the soon-to-be televised forum aids in returning the power to define jazz to the black community, the cats who created it.
For more information on the Sankofa Cultural Center and where to watch for "Jazz: The Black Aesthetic" panel discussion call Sankofa Cultural Center, (510) 536-6234 or visit the website: www.sankofaculturalcenter.org
Copyright © 2000 Cheo Taylor Tyehimba. All Rights Reserved.
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Posted at December 31, 2002 10:39 AM