There was much to reflect on.

The special screening of the new independent film Pariah inspired on a number of levels.  A Focus Features release that was critically acclaimed at the Sundance Film Festival, it opens in select theaters nationally on December 28.  The story depicts a coming out and coming of age story of a young woman finishing high school.  She just happens to be black and a talented and quickly developing poet.  Director and writer Dee Rees’ breakout film stars Adepero Oduye and Kim Wayans (playing her mother) together with a brilliant ensemble cast whom all bring believability to a story of courage, fear, beauty and ugliness.  Complex characters abound in this film bereft of the cartoonish, stereotypical figures that often lavish films with majority black casts.  None of the main characters are “settled” into any stereotypical groove in particular—each one questioning and searching for an illusive “comfort zone” in the larger scheme of things.

Kim Wayans (l) and Aasha Davis (r) being interviewed after the screening

I was particularly interested in the how music in the film (none of which I believe was written specifically for Pariah) worked to illuminate the main character Alike’s journey into self-actualization.  The compiled score features some of the stunning music of Tamar-kali, a black female artist who ventures into many genres including punk and rock.  Moving in and out of diegetic and extra diegetic narrative positions, the alternative rock element is introduced to Alike’s by a love interest, Bina (played by Aasha Davis).  Because “non-black” extra diegetic music is used to score her inner-subjectivity even before she’s formally introduced to genres marked as “bohemian,” we are encouraged to consider her complex and emerging identity as marginal to not only her family but also to the salacious culture of after-hours strip clubs in which we meet her at the beginning of the film.   Speaking to Ms. Wayans after the screening, the comedic actress expressed joy about being able to demonstrate her formidable dramatic skills in a movie that runs against many grains.  It showcases a storyline that through nuance and detail (and not to mention superb acting) highlights the universality of “becoming,” of the need for acceptance, and the shape shifting quality of margins and centers.

Host Dominique DiPrima (l) with guests in the studio

A brutal 5:00 am call time had me on the freeway en route to KJLH to chat with host/producer Dominique DiPrima of the classic talk show The Front Page.   What’s cool about the program, which also streams online from 4:30am-6:00am PST, is how its community of activist-minded listeners constantly call in to express views, debate a topic, shout out to heroes or critique perceived enemies.  Ms. DiPrima rocks in this forum, deftly forwarding her own vision of spiritual, economic, political and cultural empowerment to her devoted listeners.  I was on the show to talk about my new CD project The Colored Waiting Room and Jason Moran’s appearance that night at the Hammer Museum at which I would interview him.

Early morning posing, chatting, and tweeting (before coffee!) with Dominique and Kellie Jones

On the way to the station, at 4:30 in the morning, Stevie Wonder’s song from 2005 “Moon Blue” came on.  Its delicate though powerful compositional structure buttress Stevie Wonder’s intensely personal and playful vocal virtuosity that wind through the verses and choruses.  An enticing study of time, timbre, and instrumental (analogue and digital) mimicry, the piece was on my mind during the interview.  I took the opportunity to explain to listeners why I found the song so moving.  Songs from my 2007 recording were played as well.  It was a very enjoyable time responding to listeners but went over the top when Stevie Wonder himself called into the station at the end of the show to request one of my CDs.  Umm, like, incredible experience.  But more than Stevie’s reaching out, what’s really impressive is that The Front Page reminds me of how radio used to be: in tune with a local community and serving with intelligence, integrity and purpose beyond corporate formulas and outmoded slap stick antics posing as ethnic bonding.

Jason Moran and Sarah Johnson backstage before the performance

“Conceptual” pianist Jason Moran performed at the Hammer Museum that evening as part of the programming for the exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980.  I was on-hand for an after-concert interview/discussion.  To call Moran simply a jazz pianist is to surrender lazily to a somewhat narrow labeling process that serves little purpose but to limit the expressive horizon of musicians.  True, he can, at any given moment embody jazz gestures and sonic rhetoric but, as he demonstrated at the concert, there’s more swimming below the surface of his art. His work included the use of recordings from a Mac computer with which he engaged as invocation, as bandmate, as foil, as counterpoint and as context.  Relaxed and telling stories, one got the feeling of being with a trusted guide of previously unexplored soundworlds.  Joined for two numbers by Sarah Johnson, a brilliantly gifted young flautist and composer, the evening turned “high life” at the museum into a cozy family affair: she’s his cousin.

Sarah Johnson, Jason Moran, and jazz legend Charles Lloyd

For me that act of human connection is what makes Mr. Moran’s music compelling. There’s a sense that no matter how challenging his musical deconstructions and variations on the American musical landscape feel at first brush, his purpose is to touch something in his listeners, indeed, to channel his vision to us with kind patience.  For all of his sly juxtapositions, incongruent gestural references and palimpsest-like sonic arrangements there’s, at bottom, a guy that really wants you to dig what he’s saying. It might just take a moment.

Moran and Ramsey

And, by the way, as a cherry on top of my big week there, the exhibition Now Dig This! was named “Best in Art” of 2011 by the LA Times.  The Left Coast got it going on, and I do dig that!

A Charles White painting and Mel Edwards sculpture greet visitors in the first room of Now Dig This! until January 8, 2012

The following comprises an overview about my new album, The Colored Waiting Room, which will be released next month. In the coming weeks, we’ll release a series of film vignettes about the project and some of the musicians and production crew involved in the project on various social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Tumblr.       

During the Jim Crow Era, the practice of the colored waiting room was a custom that segregated black passengers from the general population as they waited to board various modes of public transportation. They represented in the public sphere a space of containment and even the presumption of contamination. Yet on the flip side, it was also a place where one was free to be one’s self, where one could express things beyond the scrutiny of a broader, suspicious, though voraciously consuming public.

The apparently unforgiving, real, and metaphorical boundary encircling “colored-ness” at this time, then, was not all that it was intended to be nor all that it seemed.  Cultural forms and fascinations flourished behind the veil for which the colored waiting room stood. And the sensibilities embedded in these expressions could never, in fact, be “pure,” or free from the cross-contamination so feared in a racially nervous society. 

Everyone and everything, you see, was present inside the colored waiting room, especially in its music. Music is, indeed, a space where people can join together in creative, communal exchange and transformation—where musicians create sounds that embody their own musical voices and aspirations and forge them with others.

This recording expresses the eclectic vibe that was the spirit of the colored waiting room. It is clearly ironic that black citizens who were “fixin’ to get up” or travel to their various destinations would be forced to launch from spaces of restriction.  But they made these rooms something else: they became places pregnant with possibilities.

Indeed, they were transformed into something akin to what the poet Elizabeth Alexander has called the “black interior” or “dream space.”  For her, this is “the great hopeful space of African American creativity. . . . [one] outside of the parameters of how we are seen in this culture . . . .‘The black interior’ is not an inscrutable zone, nor colonial fantasy. Rather, I see it as an inner space in which black artists have found selves that go far, far beyond the limited expectations and definitions of what black is, isn’t or should be.

The music here, like any identity in the colored waiting rooms, is not restricted and refuses to pin itself down to a specific genre. Each song’s message of life, love, desire, and joy are the result, in part, of providing talented individuals from different backgrounds and musical dispositions material through which they could dream, interpret, and execute. Ranging over various themes and inspired by sundry experiences, it tries to move beyond aesthetic containment and toward the freedom spirit that those former inhabitants of colored waiting rooms imagined for themselves, their descendants, and for us all.

Step into the experience of The Colored Waiting Room. Enjoy and imagine together with us.

The remix of this project serves as a measuring stick for the growing sophistication, theoretical rigor, international purview, and commitment of “the hip-hop generation” to the highest standards of scholarship.  The two-part event, Author Meets the Critics: That’s The Joint 2^nd Edition at the Hiphop Archive, featured the editors in pubic dialogue with a group of scholars or “critics,” was punctuated with a showing of a independent film titled The Wonder Year, a critically acclaimed work about the producer 9^th Wonder (Patrick Douthit).

The Wonder Year – Trailer from LRG on Vimeo.

The conversation was shaped by the multi-disciplinary stances of Trinity College’s Vijay Prashad, Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive Fellow Joycelyn Wilson, University of Kansas’s Nicole Hodges Persley, and myself.  Observations ranged from the authors addressing our various “wish lists” for inclusion to ruminations on what we appreciated about the volume.  For all the talk about its contribution to the field of hip hop studies, a more appropriate assessment in my view is that this compilation has been central to the formation of the field, second to perhaps only Tricia Roses’ opening salvo, Black Noise.  (Her work might be thought of as the theme upon which the symphony of voices in That’s the Joint! riff, ride, and respond).

One of the interesting things about this observation is that from a black cultural studies standpoint, hip hop studies are ubiquitous, or at least, seemingly so.  Is it because hip-hop artists attract so much attention in the media?  Or, maybe because so many of the young scholars use it as a cultural reference—a frame that can at once serve as a philosophical platform, anecdotal evidence, and sites for both literary close readings, ethnographic field work, and social activism.

One of the more compelling points that was raised on the panel and revisited at dinner was the transportability of hip hop’s sonic conventions and political sensibilities around the world.  As Vijay pointed out this “thickness” has become one of the more compelling aspects of U.S.-based hip hop, one that demands greater attention.  Other ideas that were circulated dealt with the use of hip hop as a model for teaching acting technique, the need for more sound studies, as well as the fruitful on-the-ground uses of the music and scholarship among at-risk populations, particularly poor black males.

The take away for all of this is the vital and energetic quality of thought surrounding hip hop.  It can no longer claim a purely marginal status—an endowed archive at “the H,” a vetted and canonized bibliography and discography, and its status as the darling of social media traffic among other black popular forms, a plethora of course offerings in the academy, and more affirm its mainstream profile.  And if that isn’t enough I recently learned that the rapper Lupe Fiasco and I attended the same high school. He was inducted into our alma mater’s Hall of Fame a year before me, the Ivy League professor.

Hip hop, to quote a cliché, must be here to stay.  And as hip hop’s avant-garde careens toward middle age, tenured professorships, Rogaine treatments, the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, and “where have they been?” episodes, a question looms. Will the time come when one has to trade in one’s hip-hop generation I.D. for an AARP card? Just asking.

Throughout the month I thought it was more important to “get it out there” rather than wait until each sentence was polished enough for, say, a print publication.  I wanted to do an epistle-like missive each day, on the run and rushed to publish.  It was a great exercise. There were so many rich topics to explore–films, recordings, historical figures, interviews, concerts, genres, identity issues, music videos, genres, and so on.  One could write everyday for a year and never run out of ideas because the subjects are so rich.  Here are the links below.

Pure Gold: Though We’re Tried in the Fi-yuh

Bebop: Abstracting American Popular Song

Tryin’ to Git Over: Curtis Mayfield’s Cinematic Muse

She Plays Like a Girl: Why We Love Patrice Rushen

“A Rough Set of Negroes”: Francis Johnson’s Antebellum New Jack Swing

A Drummer, The Key Signature, and the Holy Ghost: The Anointing as Musical Practice

Between an Art Song and the Church Mother: Nina Simone Sings the Nation

Black Musical Figuration in the 1940s: Lessons from Visual Culture

But Chain$ and Whip$ Excite Me: Female Pulchritude, Rape, and Music Videos as Public Service Announcement

Message to Michael: On Sound, Space, and Architecture in Bubble Gum Soul

His Mic Sound Nice: Remembering the Whistling Coon

You Say You Want a Revolution?: The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, and Musical Genius as Moral Authority

Git Down to Get Over: Rejoice, Twist, and Shout on the Gospel Highway

Interstate 57, ML3556, and Drastic Interpretations: Where I’m Coming From

To the Left: Ramsey on Music, Museums, and Keepin’ Up With the Joneses

Scoring Africa and the World: A Film by Tukufu Zuberi

Funky Electric Goddesses—Ramsey Lewis Looks Back to the Future

A Song from a Father: Little London’s Lullaby

When the Master is a Woman: Rhetoric and Device in Karen Clark Sheard’s Will to Blend

On Yard Work, Public Musicology, and the Roots of Drastic Interpretation

Gender, Sexuality and Tonéx: Toward a Queer Criticism of Gospel Music

Step in the Name of Culture: The Dancing Body and Local Knowledge

Jazz on My Mind@ The Clifford Brown Jazz Fest 2011

Take Six Takes House: Sounding History, Channeling the Ancestors

Mental Health and Jazz Musicians: Looking for Bud Powell

Live!: The Apollo Theater and the Black Star System

How Small is a Piece of Funk?: Beats, Loops and Turntables in the Digital Divide

Breeze/Madness/Time: Notes on the Musical Semiotics of Summer

Note: This is my final 2011 Black Music Month post.  Tomorrow, I will publish an index to the entire series. I hope you have enjoyed the writing and the music. Happy Summer!–GR

Fish are jumping...

Although the official calendar doesn’t agree, for most of us, July is the start of summer. What better time to think about some musical meditations on this month when “the living is easy,” as one songwriter put it?  Each of these pieces—“Summer Breeze” performed by the Isley Brothers, “Summer Madness” by Kool and the Gang, and “Summertime” performed by Bridget Ramsey—originated in different cultural settings.  What links them, however, is how each through sound organization attempts to evoke the warmth, pace, and peacefulness of those lazy, hazy days of our memories.

~BREEZE

Seals and Crofts

“Summer Breeze,” written by soft rockers Jim Seals and Dash Crofts, enjoyed hit status in the summer of 1972.  The piece eases along at a medium tempo with a “storytelling” narrative full of simplistic everyday scenes of summer.  There’s nothing particularly nostalgic about the lyrics but the music renders them so.  Although the song seems to toggle between two keys—g and its relative minor e (chorus and verse respectively), a structure that would suggest a certainly level of complexity, the toy piano heard in the interlude denotes something else.  Against a rolling arpeggio on another instrument, the melody on the piano suggests memory, time passing, and childhood, a gesture that seems to override any idea of adult complexity in the recording.

The Isley Brothers, an R&B group, covered the song the very next year, dipping it in molasses and honey butter.  Slowing it down to almost half its original tempo, their “Summer Breeze” takes on a different character by toying with the form and other elements of the original song.  Two gestures stand out here. They take the smallish toy piano interlude and stretch it out, repeating the i-iv chord progression to make a groove at the top and a hard-rock jam by Ernie Isley (guitarist) at the end.  (This is a version of the I-IV progression that one hears in shouting music in black Pentecostal churches).  Although the vocals are generally a more complicated matter in the Seals and Croft version, the contrast between Ronald Isley soulfully sung improvisations (with all the bells and whistles) and the pared down presentation of the chorus material give the latter section an almost communal “let’s all sing along at camp” feeling.  Or let’s, umm, do something else.  It’s the minimalist open structure that gives this version of the song such wide-ranging interpretive potential.  That is until the Ernie starts wailing at the end.  Then it sounds like a summer outdoor concert.

~MADNESS

Kool and the Gang: Still Going Strong

The funk/jazz group Kool and the Gang released “Summer Madness” in 1974.  An example of what might be called “minimalist soul,” the song has been sampled by many artists, most prolifically during early 1990s when hip hop producers became enamored with “jazz”—here meaning any musical style from black Diasporic traditions that emphasize instrumental improvisation in the accompaniment or, of course, in the solos.  Producers during this period were particularly attracted to tracks that used rich and robust Fender Rhodes sounds.

This piece has only three chords: i-ii-V, each played with lots of gravy on top thanks to keyboardist Rick Westfield.  What has charmed folk about “Summer Madness” I think is this minimalism.  Scaled back soul.  Draw in and groove to this.  The synthesizer pitch bending that opens the piece—imitations of the indefinite pitch inflections of black vernacular singing traditions—is an important emotional focal point here.  On close listening you can hear the fret noise from bassist Robert “Kool” Bell.  This affect could have easily been engineered out of the mix.  But it adds intimacy to an electric track.  And when guitarist Claydes Charles Smith moves from his hypnotic and emblematic rhythm lick to a solo, we hear it in dialogue with the synth solo.  Neither one of these solos embody displays of burning virtuoso runs.  If they had, we probably would not have been hearing this chestnut on the radio for this many years.  So, in the end it’s the modest quality of the gestures in this piece that slows one down to a proper summer’s pace.

~TIME

How it flies; especially when I think about this next example featuring a performance by my daughter, Bridget.  It is well known that George Gershwin, the composer of “Summertime,” listened to a lot of black music to write authoritatively for his “folk opera” Porgy and Bess, which premiered in (1935).  He died two years later and could not have known how many times this piece would be performed (and in countless musical settings).

For the average listener, it is probably best known as a jazz standard.  Its appeal rests not so much in the complex originality of its design, but in its simplicity.  Astute listeners will hear the poetry structure as a/b/a/c.  The harmonic structure toys with the blues but frustrates such a hearing with a quick flirt with the relative major and then turns around back to minor key.  All that to say this: Gershwin wanted “Summertime” to be sing-able, memorable, and feeling-full, something that westerners have been socialized to associate with blues structure.  Again, beyond the truth claim of the lyric, minimalism in structure, poetic form, and tempo conjoin to signify summer.

Father and Daughter: Doing What We Do

In this performance, Miss Bridget moves in an out of bel canto singing to dialogue with the song’s operatic history, the jazz setting (and, of course, the undergraduate degree requirement for which this performance was conducted—wink).  I’ve done a little re-harmonizing to “update” the piece slightly and Dwayne Dugger II on sax (and since this time on tour with Bruno Mars) adds tasteful lines to the mix.

Like Bridget, July is dressed up and playing a tune…

Stay tuned for the release of my CD THE  COLORED WAITING ROOM.

HAVE A GREAT SUMMER from DR. GUY’S MUSIQOLOGY!

Drastic Interpretations

own intellectual and musical terrain there are several: the dichotomy of musician/scholar; the division between formal scholarly methodology and the idea of “living” with/in the music; the economies of prestige among blogging, print journalism, and scholarship; identity politics in insider/outsider debates; and the gaps between local knowledge and larger communal issues in African American expressive practice.

Here’s a little of my take on some of these matters, couched in some of the experiences

High School Music Camp: Gnostic-in-Training

I’ve had navigating the sometimes tricky waters of finding “voice” in a field notoriously void of diversity and benevolence for intellectual abstraction.  Yet my search for “real music,” which was, of course, the “scene of the crime” as it were, continues unabated.

To be musically bi-cultural—certainly an “old school” characterization—was simply how one mused in the old neighborhood.  Although I grew up in a primarily segregated community (the only whites I remember seeing regularly before high school were the teaching staff at elementary school, the insurance man who collected payments door-to-door, my violin teacher, and schoolmates from a nearby, all-white mobile home neighborhood), the accepted standard among musicians was to read music and to play by ear.  It was a rich sonic world saturated with diversity: blues songs (“I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water”); anthems (“Lift Up Your Heads All Ye Gates”); soul-jazz (“In Crowd”); early

No Satisfaction: "Black" Enough for Us

R&B (“Let the Good Times Roll”); rock (“I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”), and much more.  Female musicians were everywhere, and their leadership, gifts, and expertise were respected.  Elders encouraged young performers to learn the traditions but also to extend them through creativity and experimentation. Dancers were prized and praised.

One of the things I’ve insisted on throughout my journey in musicology is to remain connected to this vibrant system of music making and culture sharing.  I’m reluctant to call these numerous experiences “field work” because card-carrying ethnomusicologists maintain that this describes a specific methodological approach to living with music.  I joke to myself it must be “yard work” then.  It also bemuses me to read laments about how African American communities on both sides of the sacred/secular “divide” have lost their aesthetic way.  How they, for example, have forsaken jazz for less “serious” music or how they disdain traditional spirituals for the rock, funk, rumble, and stomp of contemporary gospel.  I insist that this is not the case: just visit a good, hot Pentecostal church service with a top-notch music staff and you’ll get all the jazz one needs.  You have to look for such things beyond a marketing category called “jazz.”

At the same time that I encountered these narratives of “cultural loss” during my years of graduate study, I continued to hold posts in black Pentecostal and Baptist churches.  There, older traditions were, in fact, in tact and existed cheek-to-jowl with more experimental contemporary sounds; these juxtapositions were not just tolerated but

Ernie Barne's famous depiction of a "service" in high gear

encouraged in most spaces.  Among ourselves, in fact, we endearingly called—Ypsilanti, Michigan—a town adjacent to Ann Arbor and where I held a church post—“Ypsi-tucky” because of the “down home” ethos of its black community.  When I moved to Boston to teach at Tufts University, I found the same.  The students from Berkelee College of Music frequented jam sessions at a club on the South End named Wally’s; and I played for a small and highly, spirited Baptist church that had a “give us the funk,” unpretentious, earthy, and sanctified way about itself.  These sonic communities kept me in touch with my South Side roots and outlook.

In 1998 when I began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in the city where the descendants of DuBois’  “Philadelphia Negroes” were holding it down in their own “souls of black folk” ways.  Coming to town as a musicologist to work in a highly regarded department could have been an excuse to sever my ties to these communities.  Fortunately for me, black Philadelphia was a place that rivaled Chicago in its demographic and cultural composition, and even as a site of “ethno-ghetto-graphic” meditation.  I found this community to be dynamic, historic, and rich with tradition. Shortly after arriving I was taken to Natalie’s Showcase Lounge, a modest

Doing a little yard while jookin' at Natalie's

establishment resting on the western edge of Penn’s urban campus.  Inside the long and narrow nightclub, I found yet another community theater, one that took pride in continuing Philly’s hard bop, gospel-tinged jazz scene, complete with an informed, let the good times roll listening audience that took pride in standing as guardians of their deeply rooted traditions.

Literary and music scholars Gerald Early and Farah Griffin—both natives to the city—have discussed this Philadelphia audience’s sense of its cultural profile and history.  One couldn’t find a better place from which to contemplate post-WWII black music: the bully pulpit of Penn’s historic music department with its progressive twin traditions of scholarship and composition, an institution situated in one of the most vibrant centers of jazz, gospel, R&B, neo-soul, and hip-hop. It was the best of both worlds.  I circulated around the scene, learning its rhythm, rhyme, and ropes mostly accompanying jazz singers whose repertoire spanned jazz standards, blues, and R&B.  Many of them would burst into a black social couples dance called “the bop” on stage, mid-song, with any willing audience member who’d catch the groove with them.  One of the more idiosyncratic things I learned, one seemingly specific to Philly’s jazz set, was that, for some reason, all the female singers’ repertoire included Etta James’ classic R&B ballad from 1961, “At Last,” a song with a tricky modulation in the bridge section.  The crowds always expressed their appreciation vocally in the time-honored, in real time critical response expected in live blues cultures.

Heavy Duty Theorizing at the Clifford Brown Jazz Fest 2008

My new adopted home holds as much potential for sound exploration.  Recently, while walking through the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York (birthplace of pianist Randy Weston and rappers Jay-Z, Biggie Smalls, and Little Kim, among others) on a warm Sunday afternoon, I was struck by the mosaic of musical styles that I encountered.  On block after block, the airwaves were shot through with the Holy sounds of storefronts and cathedrals that sonically testified to Christianity’s meeting, negotiating and rejoining and re-negotiating its contact with and use within contemporary black Diaspora communities.

The “musicking” typically lasts all day long, ebbing only to fuel on the most available local sustenance: Chinese fried rice, fried chicken, pizza slices, and sugary beverages.  Dressed in their Sunday best, the residents reify their belief and relief in loud music

Do or Die Bed-Stuy: Home, Loud, Home

with shimmering tambourines, Hammond B-3 organs, raised voices, and huge speaker systems.  Warm holidays figure more abundantly in public, nonstop music, from dusk to well into the wee hours of the morning, as the pounding bass lines from a wide range of Diaspora grooves frame the celebrations, shake the windowpanes, and set off finicky car alarms.  (I don’t want to sound too romanticizing here. Sometimes you want to go the you-know-what to sleep).

In conjunction with my canonizing and classicizing of jazz studies within the academic industrial complex, this “community participant-observation work” allowed me to witness first-hand how the music’s grass roots connections were kept sturdy and connected to vigorous and specific cultural resources.

Jazz great Jason Moran dropping science in my history of jazz class

Paradoxically, at the university, I participated in another kind of ongoing institutionalization as I wrote and developed courses in the history of jazz, American music, and popular music of all kinds in an Ivy League setting in which one is expected to push a respective field in new (and decidedly abstract) directions.  Engaging graduate students embarking on their journeys into the demands of formal music contemplation—energies, fears, and enthusiasms palpable—have been particularly inspiring.  It was in these stimulating, but often incongruent, settings that I achieved tenure and shortly thereafter celebrated my hard won academic freedom by going the counter intuitive route: by starting my own band, Dr. Guy’s MusiQology.

Forming a group that performed original compositions, starting a blog, working with Philadelphia school teachers, work shopping with children, and mixing live music making into my public lectures represents an example of what I’ve been calling “public musicology.”   An obvious riff on the term public intellectual, this brand of musicology, for me, describes a concern and involvement with directing one’s scholarly and musical activities to audiences beyond the academy.  This attitude doesn’t make me unique.  I’ve noticed that many black music scholars who work on music from within the “Afrological” tradition maintain active performance lives even as they continue their professional activities in research and analysis.  A cursory listing would include: George Lewis, Tammy Kernodle, Salim

Taking a class to the club with me (really). Photo credit: Hope Rose

Washington, Kyra Gaunt, Emmett Price, Horace Maxille, Melvin Butler, Leonard Brown, Portia Maultsby, and Mellonee Burnim, to name but a few.

My colleague Carolyn Abbate, an eminent scholar of opera and other topics, has written eloquently about the difference in considering, on the one hand, the idea of an abstract musical “work,” and on the other, the idea of music’s materiality in actual performance or, “real music.”  In a powerful article, Abbate provocatively wonders if she, as a performer/scholar, is able to consider abstract questions about musical signification and formal structure while in the act of performance or deep listening.  Distinguishing between these two modes of musical engagement—drastic and Gnostic—Abbate describes the first as knowledge derived from action “and not from verbally mediated reasoning,” the latter being “knowledge based on semiosis and disclosed secrets, reserved for the elite and hidden from others.  Abbate argues that Gnostic, loquacious, musicological rumination is “almost impossible and generally uninteresting as long as real music is present—while one is caught up in its temporal wake and its physical demands or effects.”

Q & A at my book signing: Ancient Gnostic Ritual?

For me, the combined acts of performing music in real time and writing about music’s signifying affect has allowed my toggling back and forth between drastic and Gnostic modes of musical perception.  The primary value in this has not been a blind belief in my own interpretations over those of other scholars or even an exalted sense of my own authority or authenticity.  Rather, it has deepened my respect for the mysticism of the musical experience, of its ineffability, flexibility, and imprecision.  It’s the slippery nature of the enterprise that draws me in.  As Abbate argues: “musical sounds are very bad at contradicting or resisting what is ascribed to them. . . they shed associations and hence connotations so very easily, and absorb them, too.” True that.  They undermine our authority every time.  I was stumped when following a public lecture in which I had expounded on the “cultural politics” of a musical genre or some such matter, someone asked from the audience what my own music “meant.”  At a loss, I stumbled around to gather some kind of response.  That lesson affirmed for me why I return time after time to musical performances and attempt explanations.   I guess, I’ll never really know “the” truth.  Sweet surrender.

Hanging with the original "yard worker": Amiri Baraka

Scoring film has been a goal of mine for a long time.  I routinely teach how music enhances the storyworld of a film and how viewers have been socialized to internalize and unconsciously respond to these musical codes.  Hip-hop films and their soundtracks, for example, constitute my primary mode of dealing with hip-hop as a generic code in my book Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip

Scholar, Activist, and Filmmaker Tukufu Zuberi

Hop. But that’s just analyses and cultural criticism. Recently, some great opportunities have been materializing to do some sound-tracking itself (rather than just theorizing about it), and it’s thrilling.

So, my friend and colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Tukufu Zuberi, a demographer by day and filmmaker by night, calls recently with agitated excitement in his voice.  Just back from a trip to Bogata, Columbia, he starts talking about his latest idea to raise funding to complete the final components of his film Africa and the World. The film is a creative and cutting-edge mediation culminating twenty-five years of his research and activism on the continent.  Five minutes into his rumble and ramble about something called Kickstarter—“wait have I told you about this?” he asks.  “No.”  Something tells me its time to get my legal pad out and start scribbling.  (Some of you have friends like this, I know).  Click and check out his pitch about this important film.

Ramsey: Doing Musiqology

When the other shoe dropped somewhere in the middle of the conversation, I was part of a small team—writer, cameraman, editor, composer, and engineer—and had to turn around a score for a pitch film that would be used on the fundraising platform Kickstarter.  Fortunately, we’ve been talking about this film for the last five years, and in particular about our philosophies about music, music licensing, and musical affect in cinema.  I wasn’t starting from scratch.

The film would be short and to the point.  Sonic organization had to work on the viewers without calling attention to itself as discourse.  It had to, in my view, suggest a generalized “Africa” to western listeners; it had to suggest an African American’s take on the subject; and it needed to embody some intrinsically interesting aesthetic elements that would work in and outside the world of this film.

After thinking about what would work generally, I called one of the engineers I work with regularly, Mylon Jones, whose operation The Muzik Store Recording Studio is in Swathmore, Pennsylvania.  Great!—he was available to help me turn this around.  (TZ, having assembled his crew, was already filming).  Working in Logic Pro 8 and Protools 8, we discussed my basic ideas and went at it.  A protégée of my most consistent producer, Jerry ThompSon (JatWorld Studios), Mr. Jones, who is mild-mannered, efficient, and with hints of clairvoyance, suggested, as we always do, to start with the basic beat, in this instance, a drum loop from Logic.  From there, I added a funky/fusion Fender Rhodes eight-bar progression that sounds like a neo-soul-ism because of the non-diatonic chord that ends it.  The Rhodes was generated in Sample Tank, a sound module from IK Multimedia.  I layered in two elements of “padding,” which you might think of as the “pot liquor” in this soundscape: a low string/digital “human” voice and mellow strings.  Three melodic gestures complete the track. A wooden flute in the opening is a non-verbatim nod to Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunter project, a piece that I know has been speaking to TZ since he began thinking about music and his film.  The second, a counter melody “moog-ish” line adds a 1970s buff to the track’s overall feel.  Finally, I played Rhodes solo lines to stir in a little bite and added a little scratching for garnish.

Although I thought that this soundscape was already sparse—I could have packed a lot more in—you’ll hear when you compare the music in the film above to my original score below that various elements were moved and shifted around in the editing process to assure that the spoken and visual narratives remained the emotional focal points.  While I prefer to write music to a rough cut comprising the entire cinematic treatment at hand, time didn’t permit this luxury.  We were working simultaneously.

Enjoy, and please consider making a contribution to the film.

Today’s posting is a video of my appearance on Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal’s program, Left of Black.  We’ve all witnessed interviews in which it’s clear that the show’s producers and not the host prepared for show.  Not so here. We chopped it up about  a range of questions: music, my Apollo exhibition (which is now in Los Angeles), music and art literatures, extended family ties and music traditions, inner-city baseball, and even Chicago steppin’ culture–all in under a half-hour.  Enjoy, and see you tomorrow for Day #17′s post.

Black Music Month, Day #15

I first discovered the ML3556 section of the library as an undergraduate and grew enamored of

the literature about black music, a topic that truly charged me up academically.   Browsing the stacks became a favorite pastime as I read books by LeRoi Jones, Charlie Keil, Eileen Southern, Dena Epstein, and other trailblazing writers.  Venturing further into this world of letters, I soon learned about journals that featured the work of groundbreaking scholars such as Portia Maultsby, Samuel Floyd, Josephine Wright, and Olly Wilson, all of whom laid the foundation for black music research’s modern era, beginning in the mid-1970s. The present collection of essays of my own contributions to this field—some previously published, others new—represents a partial view of my intellectual journey since those stack-browsing days (and nights!).

Portia Maultsby: Pioneering Scholar of the Contemporary Era of Black Music Research

As I embarked on graduate studies at the University of Michigan in 1989, there was lots of naiveté.  As a gigging pianist and elementary school educator, I possessed drive but lacked a clear sense of what was really at stake, of what the primary arguments defining the field were, and how the study of black music (my primary interest) fit into the larger scheme of things—how it fit, for instance, into what counted as valuable knowledge in the systematic study of music history.   Pursuit of the PhD. was, for me, simply a logical extension of my interests in the power that many experienced in music making and in deep listening.  There was a lot learn.  My traversing and appreciating the space between being, on

Graduate School Ghetto: Insular, Subcultural, Ritualistic

the one hand, a producer of organized sound, and on the other, a contributor to the world of ideas about sound was the first order of business.  And there were, to be sure, many ideas to contend with at that time as musicology scrambled to reshape its profile to be “new,” that is, more inclusive in both topic and methodology.

As I explained in Race Music(2003), I understood early in life that music was an activity that did important cultural work, although I could not have spoken about it in precisely those terms.  Thus, the book opened by recounting some early experiences in African American communal spaces (“community theaters”) and how music informed them.  The extended community into which I was born and raised—the greater South Side of Chicago—had made an imprint on me but had had implications for the study of American music more generally.

The Creators of UpSouth Culture

The post-migrant, Up-South Delta culture of my youth was, indeed, a sprawling and robust black social world.  It comprised housing projects, tenements, two-flats, storefront churches, cathedrals, barber and beauty shops, political machines, sporting cultures, print mass media, parades, and radical bookstores; and its cultural politics ranged from traditional notions of uplift to unapologetic militancy.  Expressive culture abounded in poetry readings and speech recitations on Sunday afternoon church programs. Street theaters, discos, live music venues, and even high school music programs all specialized in circulating their own brand of music and dance “literacies.”  At communal performance spaces like “midnight” roller rink sessions and

Home, Sweet Tenement: The Living Was Good But Not Easy

church musicals; and in local college gospel choirs and jazz ensembles—we experienced a dynamic social world saturated in cultural forms that worked together to produce a feeling, a structure, an atmosphere in which “blackness” was practiced as a way of being in and thinking about the world.  Not as wholly deterministic, but as a range of options for making identifications.

Of course, the serendipity of one’s birth—no matter how germane to the topic of one’s study—does not solely a scholar make.  Some would even fear that this proximity might endanger the sanctity, objectivity, or even ethics of the process.  Indeed, the fact remains: for every instance of on-the-ground culture-making taking place internally in black Chicago, to the scholar, its social world has been equally “made” by the city’s formal study.  Chicago—particularly its black component—has been the focus of myriad sociological investigations—I’m thinking here most prominently of St Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s monumental Black Metropolis (1945).  Studies like these have helped to make it the perennial black metropolis of the ethnographic imagination.  With such intensive “making” on either side of this social ledger, the relationship between the studied and the ones doing the studying seems to be one of interdependence, and as such, renders any “insider” status but one point of entry into this topic.  Understanding the relationship between these two aspects of the equation has fascinated me and, as readers will see, it has animated some of my published work, hopefully productively so.

Most of the writing that inspired me was produced during the Black Consciousness period in

Ethnographic Truths: Telling It Like It Is

American history, from the mid-1960s through the 1970s.  While I didn’t engage this literature until some years after it first appeared, the work reminded me of my coming-of-age years, a time in which culture and politics were often entwined with combustion.   Recently while speaking to a colleague in another discipline, an expert in architecture and the cultural politics of urban space, I recalled one of the urban legends we were told heard as young teenagers.  In the basement of a “black book” store lined with literature, incense, posters and the ubiquitous colors of “black liberation”—red, black, and green—some comrades and I were directed to a wall splayed with maps of our surrounding area.  The intense, Afro-ed, twenty-something young man who was directing our “tour” of the space stressed to us, his young and rapt audience, that “the Man’s” plan to extend Interstate 57 into our neighborhood was a ploy to contain our community with military force when “the Revolution” finally hit.  I told this story to my colleague with an air of incredulity. I was taken aback when she, an Australian, said—with no sense of irony—that the ominous sounding plan was at least part of the reason for that highway.

As I reflect back, I realize now that experiences like these—and there were many more—influenced me musically, intellectually, and socially.  I’ve embraced them as a baseline worldview that, for better or worse, has informed the political shades of my musical writing.  I have continually sought out ways to participate in a “project musicology” that would push out at the edges of the standard, “objective,” narrative mode.  Indeed, if nothing else, one of the things I took from those I-57 days was that freedom needed to be pursued at all costs, and that it was always a pressing matter.

Things to See, Hear, and Read in ’11, Part 3

This spring Duke University Press (together with its admirable “editor’s editor,” Ken Wissoker) will release Kellie Jones’ much anticipated collected essays, and folk outside of the close-knit contemporary “fine art” world will see how she’s been, for many years, a fierce and fearless champion of African American, African, and Latin American art.  They will also learn from this book what makes her tick.  An art historian and curator trained at Yale University under the eminent Robert Farris Thompson and now teaching at Columbia University, Dr. Jones has written EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art in a way that explains a lot—a whole lot.

Kellie Jones: Eyeminded and telling about it

One of the first lessons gained here is the power of her words to articulate formal descriptions of the processes, materials, and resulting objects of a wide range of important artists, including Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, David Hammons,

Choosing work in her father's archive for the show "Amiri Baraka Drawings" from 2009 that celebrated his 75th birthday

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Norman Lewis, Jack Whitten, and Kcho.  Her interests in work across a wide range of visual media—sculpture, painting, installation, performance and conceptual art, film and photography—highlight a robust, ecumenical and non-preachy curiosity.  Well, you might ask, “isn’t that what the best ‘eye-minded’ art historians do?”  Indeed.

But EyeMinded furthers other agendas beyond formalism’s

Show and Tell: Baraka and Dr. Kellie

delights.  The often-rarefied air of the contemporary art world, especially as understood by and written about in the Ivy-League circles in which Kellie J trained and teaches, can be penetrated with other pedigrees.  Here, the word “living” in the book’s title tells all.  As the first-born of

In the studio with artist and historian Samella Lewis

poets Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones, Kellie J was raised in a world in which artists, musicians, and writers were actively and quite self-consciously finding voice.  The rich introduction of EyeMinded details the importance of her early years in a milieu in which the social energies of black cultural nationalism and East Village bohemianism collided, shaping her view that art—and the artists themselves—

Bulletproof divas Lisa and Kellie meet and greet at Mom Hettie's book signing

mattered.  In essay after essay readers get to witness the growth of her voice as critic, curator, collector, and historian of living art worlds.  If there’s such thing as

In the Bowery celebrating Doing 70, a book by her beat-chick mom, Hettie Jones

“street-cred” in fine art’s complex ecology of artists, collectors, curators, galleries, dealers, critics, museums, interns, and education programmers, you’ll find it here, flowing through the multicultural purview of Kellie J’s whose play dates as a kid took place in artists’ lofts and exhibition openings.

Talking about her Basquiat exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum

In the abstractionist Ed Clark's studio discussing her exhibition "Energy/Experimentation" for the Studio Museum in Harlem

Her family members, Papa B, Hettie J, sister-bullet-proof-diva Lisa Jones, and myself—provide what might be considered extended epigraphs to each of the book’s ample four sections, On Diaspora, In Visioning, Making Multiculturalism, and Abstract Truths.   Pushing at the edges of the collected essay and monograph traditions, she includes these as examples of the dialogues of living ideas that first inspired her eye-minded-ness long

Sociologist and art collector Tukufu Zuberi gets a lesson in line and design at "Amiri Baraka Drawings"

before the Ph.D. seminar table and the scholarly conference.  But would you expect anything less from the

Interviewing in Betye Saar's studio about Jones's upcoming exhibition at the Hammer Museum, "Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980

gal who babysat for Archie Shepp’s kids, who somersaulted around Al Loving’s abstraction-filled studio, who au-paired for Jack Whitten in Greece, who heard Blues People being pounded out on a typewriter, who danced with Basquiat?

She makes a proper pot of collard greens, too, but no need to get too personal.