Tonéx: High Profile Heretic, Prolific Musician

In a stunning article titled “Revelations,” journalist Kelefa Sanneh detailed the scandal surrounding contemporary gospel artist Tonéx’s (b. Anthony Charles Williams II) coming out as a gay man in a 2009 interview.   The prolific singer/songwriter whose body of expansive work is exemplar of the intersection of hip-hop production sensibilities and traditional gospel, had taken the gospel industry by storm.  Successfully reaching a young market committed to the church, he was at the time of his announcement an award winning, groundbreaking musician, recognized with six Stellar Awards for the presciently named double CD, Out the Box (2005).  His music videos like “Fail U” feature him in edgy hip-hop gear, a Prince-like wig (the Artist, not William), bandana, and a necklace of spikes dancing like Janet Jackson with some other saints through an outdoor postindustrial scenario.  With a wide ranging musical arsenal at this command, Tonéx could out traditional the traditionalists (he was raised in a gospel church) and could give hip-hop producers a run for their money because of his rich knowledge of harmony and vocal arrangement, a quality that separates secular and sacred hip-hop output, in my view.

Of course, his coming out sent ripples through the industry and has severely impacted his career.  Although it is a crucial issue to discuss, I’m less interested here in hashing over well-worn debates about sexuality and religious belief.  What I do wish to think about, however, is what the man’s music and his admission can suggest for music analysis on gospel music with its long history of “the open secrets” that surround the style.  What does it say about the politics of identity in gospel music?  What can it teach us about understanding the role of gender and sexuality in our work on gospel music as a genre?  For this I turn to a trusted guide, the work of feminist musicologist Susan McClary.

Pastor Williams Punkin' Out

Working against the privileging of “chronology” in music history, McClary proposed in her book Feminine Endings an alternative approach.  Historical chronology tends to flatten out issues of power and struggle (i.e., gender, sexuality, race, and class) in music history to the service of organic style development.  But even the supposedly nonrepresentational instrumental music of the canon, she argued, could be analyzed with respect to its registration of historically contingent social energies.   Such analysis uncovers, among other things, how institutions and power structures have sought to police knowledge, expressive culture, sexuality, the body, and so on and how historical agents have resisted these efforts by fighting back.   As a viable factor in these struggles, music circulates social energies throughout society in potent, and, of course, pleasurable ways.

Much of this energy occurs at the borders of a perceived musical style or genre.   And here is where the case for gender study gets compelling with regard to artists like Tonéx and others producing on the edge of convention.  McClary argued that “[g]enres and conventions crystallize because they are embraced as natural by a certain community: they define the limits of what counts as proper musical behavior.”  Thus, the occasions of stylistic disruption—those times when musicians seemed to push the limit of acceptable generic expectations—are important sites to tease out gendered meanings because in the space between convention and innovation exists the stories of power struggles through experimentation.  In other words, as musicians push against a listening community’s acceptable codes of musical behavior, they are usually articulating who they believe they are in the world through displays of musical prowess, stylistic challenge, and experimentation.

Working His Sunday Best

As I said, in the artist Tonéx we have a large body of work available for cultural analysis.  But this work should develop from understanding how the Western system of tonality has governed musical creativity, reception, and interpretation.  These supposedly abstract conventions have, in fact, socialized audiences to experience struggle, fulfillment, repose, and climax, among other states of being, as part and parcel of the listening experience.  Backed by a codified body of theoretical treatises seeped in conventions that assigned masculine and feminine identities to various musical procedures, analysts have shown how Western music helped to shape the social realities of its Subjects.  These ideals were further fortified as they were employed in the narrative conventions of opera, an art world in which gender roles were central to its dramaturgy and made larger than life through its glorification of the spectacular.  All of this has circulated, by the way, within a network of ideologies in which popular and “Other” cultures were historically rendered “feminine,” providing another example how musicality and gender were policed diligently.

Of course, we know from the degree of fallout surrounding Tonéx that such analysis must take into account the specific modes of policing gender and sexuality that take place in the black church, this, in conjunction with its appetite for gender bending artists. How do we account for this tension in our analysis?  A theory of gender and sexuality in gospel would necessarily need to situate ideologies of musicality, masculinity, femininity, tonality, and even “the popular” in terms that are historically and socially specific to black musical practice specifically (and not just “Western” music generally).  Does phallic power—in the guise of spiritual transcendence—operate the same way in an out gospel artists’ work as it does, say, in the Western traditions in which McClary’s brand of feminist musical criticism first emerged?  This question and others can only be answered by moving through these musicians’ rich catalogues with the right toolbox.  Indeed, for all the doors that have been closed to Tonéx recently, many more have been opened for those of us who want to venture ideas about the complex cultural work his music achieves in the social world.

Contemporary gospel, a sub-style of the black gospel music genre, has its roots in the style’s insatiable

Karen Clark Sheard: Blends Styles

proclivity for absorbing and re-contextualizing the conventions of multiple genres.  One can observe this cross traffic from the very beginnings of gospel’s recognized emergence some eighty years ago in Chicago.  The shared formal conventions of blues and gospel made them sonically connected in time, timbre, and force.  Gospel’s recognized “father,” Thomas A. Dorsey made his career as a blues performer before making a name for himself as a pianist and prolific songwriter in the genre.  And Mahalia Jackson, easily the music’s first “superstar,” confessed to being stylistically indebted to blues singer Bessie Smith.  Yet given the black church’s body of innovators, musical entrepreneurs, charismatic personalities, and profound influence in many social and cultural matters in Afro-Americana, one can easily argue for gospel music’s influence over secular forms as well.

Thomas Dorsey: Blending, Bending

The tensions created by the audibly obvious connections and the heated public battles about their socially assigned “sacred vs. secular” meanings have been, I would argue, part and parcel of their appeal, a locus of their pleasure.  Indeed, the overwhelming popularity of Dorsey’s and Jackson’s “blue spirituality,” the jazz experiments of guitarist Rosetta Tharpe in the 1940s and 50s, and the adoption of R&B and pop styles in the late 1960s’ of the Edwin Hawkins singers Family, and the polished soul of the Winans in the early 1980s—to name just a few examples—provide evidence of the secular world’s unabated appetite for these blends.  The most recent iterations of gospel’s “will to blend,” then, are part of such a long and consistent history that one must consider them but the latest evidence of the genre’s modus operandi, it’s fusion aesthetic, if you will.  And I have discussed in another place how both hip-hop and gospel muses share this fusion aesthetic, this will to blend.

Dorsey: Before the Gospel Got "Em

I’d like to speak briefly here to this aesthetic principle in the work of Karen Clark Sheard.  Because gospel music has remained a province of female mastery, I think it is useful to consider the performance rhetoric of this uniquely female-dominated creative space as linked indelibly to the notion of women’s work: their labor as canon builders, as culture bearers, as innovators and leaders.  What emerges, then, is a larger picture of how social history governs the creation and reception of music meaning; yet in the present case, these histories are animated and materialized within the discourses of individual, technical, and spectacular music masteries (sometimes referred to as “genius”).  Rather than view this genius as the result of “natural talent,” (or even “extravagant religious emotions” as one historical actor called performance in the black church) we might think about it better as the result of intellectual work—as conscious artistic choices grounded both in an engagement with African American cultural history and in contemporaneous styles.

The close readings of contemporary gospel music follow my plan from earlier work for black music criticism that, first, identifies a song’s most significant musical structures and gestures.  Then those soundings are positioned within a broader field of musical rhetoric, conventions, and social contracts that we think about as “genre.” Lastly, I theorize all of these observations with respect to grand systems of cultural knowledge such as historical and geographical contexts, etc., as well as the lived experiences of audiences, composers, performers, and dancers.

The New Church Lady

Karen Clark Sheard, whose performance I analyze here is the youngest of the Clark Sisters, a group hailing from Detroit, Michigan and who have been one of the most endearing and enduring contemporary gospel groups of the last thirty years.  Their fans and colleagues consider them musically exceptional: their songwriting and spectacular singing abilities coupled with a commitment to the gospel genre have inspired the awe and affection of legions of fans, both inside the church and without.  They are considered to be the gold standard of gospel music performance and the best at what they do.  Their trademark embrace of contemporaneous secular styles, their profound impact on secular music, their collective and individual improvisational abilities, and their steadfast adherence to central stylistic markers of traditional gospel allow for a fascinating look at contemporary gospel as an expressive practice.

Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. provided us in the early 1990s a sonic roadmap for identifying “black” musical rhetoric.  Derivative from the singing sonic world of slave culture, his template comprises the constant use of the following, among others qualities:

Ø    Calls, cries, hollers, whoops, hums, moans, groans, oral declamation

Ø    Melismas (many notes on one syllable)

Ø    Riffs (short repeated melodic phrases)

Ø    Moving from speaking to singing mode

Ø    Endless improvisation

Ø    Repetition in the melodic, harmonic, and rhythm parameters

There are many more of conceptualizations in Floyd’s theory to which I would add here Olly Wilson’s notion of the heterogeneous sound ideal—the idea that a mosaic of timbres saturate typical black vernacular “musiking” from top to bottom.

Clark-Sheard, the singer under consider here, exploits these qualities as foundational to her rhetoric.  She also prioritizes the mashing of genres—blues, gospel, jazz, R&B—to maximum effect.  Near the end of the clip she demonstrates a technique in which she imitates an echo effect, a move that calls attention to (rather than obscures or naturalizes) her microphone technique.  One might interpret this move as connected to hip-hop era provocative and transparent uses of technology, and not to mention a nod to another genre.

The following clip was taken from a live performance event of gospel producer Donald Lawrence’s group, The Tri-City Singers.  During the reprise, a number of virtuoso singers in the audience are asked to “blow a little” during the vamp, to make the song their own, to encourage the audience through extemporaneous exhortation.  Sheard’s contribution is a marvel in its rhetorical density.  I’ve tried to capture some of it with the key below ascribing symbols and various fonts to her various techniques.  Executed in the context of an 8-bar cyclic progression, her improvisation shows a mastery of how to manage the emotional teleology of the six broad sections charted.

Section 1 is the set up, comparatively subdued.  Section 2 brings in a higher vocal range coupled with more rhetorical excess. The next section, the most dramatic, is sung against the choir’s added background and gives the section a “shout chorus” feeling ala 1930s big band music. While Sheard’s textual improvisation depends on stock phrases from black church rhetoric during this section, musically she compresses loads of dynamism through melisma, timbral shading, range, and note choices.   Section 4 presents a “riff fest” in which the singer uses the ideal of repetition with a difference—each phrase, though similar in text, features different pitch sets.  She creates what might be called “self-reflexive call and response” with her own interpolations.  When she jokingly during this section apologizes to Donald Lawrence for seemingly being in the process of tearing the roof off the auditorium, she uses “meta song text,” a way of momentarily stepping outside the standard convention of address in the “song” to make commentary on the proceedings.  Section 5 moves in and out of speech and melodic mode, setting the table and drawing the audience in for the next passages, in which she sonically represents the divine.  And indeed in the last section her echo effect portends to speak from the heavens to the listeners present—“you’re not alone.”

Hold onto your seats.  Here comes Karen, mastering and taking no prisoners. And she’s really not sorry about it.

Finally: Clark Sheard's first solo project

KEY:

^^^^^^^^^^^ = dramatic melisma

bold, large font = harmonic upper extensions and dissonance

italic = rhetorical riff-based repetition

strikethrough = squall/growl

large font = melisma on single word

( )=meta song text

1.

1. It’s your time
2. It’s your time
3. Oh-oh-oh-It’s your time
4. Oh^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

2.

5. It’s your time
6. Oh, you might have to cry sometime
7. Oh,^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
8. It’s your time, it’s your time , Oh^^^^^^^^^^^

3. [Choir sings “it’s your time” in 3-part harmony]

9. You might have to cry sometime
10. Oh, he might not come when you want him
11. But, oh-oh-oh, he’s right on time
12. Yeah, oh, it may look a little dreary
13. Oh, it’s not over, ‘til God says it over
14. It’s not over—^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
15. It’s your time—yeah-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
16. Your time

4.

17. It’s yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo time
18. Hmm- it’s yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo tme
19. (I’m sorry Donald) it’s yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-time
20. Yeah-yeah-yeah–it’s yo-woawoa-woa-woa-woa-woa-woa-yo time

5.

21. And then when you get down on your knees and pray
22. And it feel like you’re all alone
23. But God will come in a little small voice like this
24. And he’ll say

6.

25. You’re not alone (echo effect)
26. Yeah-yeah-yeah
27. You’re not alone (echo)
28. Oh-whoa-oh-oh (echo-elided)
29. Yeah-yeah-yeah—(echo)
30. Yeah-yeah-yeah
31. Oh-ba-ba-ba-oh-ah—(echo)
32. Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah

FILM REVIEW

Rejoice and Shout (2010)

Director Don McGlynn

Begins June 24 ,2011  Ritz at the Bourse, Philadelphia

Rejoice and Shout opens with a showstopper.  A young, adorable brown skin girl sitting in a church pew, lovingly cloistered by many of her mostly female family members, sings “Amazing Grace” with a conviction

and poise of someone twenty years her senior.  As she croons, head tilted, eyes closed, the smiles and rapt gazes of her family beam rays of warm sunshine-praise in her direction.  She has theirs and the camera’s attention, and she knows what to do with it. She’s been here before.  The film’s audience this sneak preview night—mostly African Americans from eight to eighty and probably with much simpatico for the feeling being generated on screen—offers up sacrifices of warm, subdued, communal, affirmation—moans, chuckles, “yes,” and “well.”  As these sounds zigzag through the theater like a sprite, we’re drawn in.  We’re connected.  We are one.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Laying the Foundation of Rock

I’m no expert in the capacities of the inner lives of children.  But there was so much “living” expressed in small one’s rendition, the “feeling-full-ness,” the level of depth in her vocalized expression so profound, that your first reaction is to question.  How?  With no reasonable and “natural” explanation at hand, one turns to the mysterious, the ineffable, to the heavenly.  This documentary on the history of gospel music turns on this very premise: on the power of African-American gospel singing practices to affirm belief in the unseen, to have faith in the seemingly impossible.

“Little mama’s” prodigious gospel singing was drenched with much of what put this singing practice on the map: slides, bent notes, subtle turns on the “blue notes” of the scale, tasteful melismas constituting crafty embellishments on the original melody, and a dramatic sense of how to use dynamics to shape the emotional contour of a phrase.  And not to mention a most important ideal that we see in virtually all of the singers

First Lady of Gospel Song (she could fry and dye some hair, too)

profiled in this film: an “aesthetic of the cool,” a cultural priority detailed by scholar Robert Farris Thompson describing an African-derived standard of composure maintained by performers, especially in ecstatic or “trancing” ritual events.

The strength of Rejoice and Shout leans heavily on precious archival footage.  Organized chronologically, it spans the entire twentieth century-plus more. There’s so much to enjoy here.  As other reviewers have pointed out, the film lingers on the music itself, mostly live performance events that allow the viewer to take the same ride that contemporaneous audiences did.  The examples are so long, in fact, that at key points Rejoice and Shout feels like a concert film—Woodstock and WattStax come to mind.  There was a good reason for this decision.  A core aesthetic and functional priority in gospel music performance is the establishment of a spiritual, communal, and cultural connection with listeners.  As call and response permeates every architectural level of the sound event—between the lead and background singers, between the musicians and the singers, between the audience and the performers—the song becomes more than a composition.  It serves as a model for community building in real time.  Indeed, all this “making” takes time; and as the bodily interactions among the performers teach us, it takes some space and stunning microphone technique, too.

In performance after performance by Mahalia Jackson, the Staple Singers, the Blind Boys of Alabama and Mississippi, the Clara Ward Singers, the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, the Dixie Hummingbirds, Rosetta Tharpe, Shirley Caeser, James Cleveland, Andre Crouch and more, the film shows how gospel as a genre, has always balanced—sometimes daringly so—historical time-honored praxis with up-to-the-minute engagement with contemporary sounds.  This film touches on this idea but without pushing an important point: these performers were highly influential to the realm of secular music as their techniques often shaped the aesthetic choices of the music industry at large.

The Staple Singers: Bridging Gospel, Folk, and the Blues

As documentary filmmakers know, if you can land someone like icon Smokey Robinson as a talking head, audiences will relate, funders will respond, and theaters will be more inclined to pick you up.  We learn of Robinson’s abiding faith, how the physical manifestations of the Holy Ghost spooked him as a kid, and of his emphatic defense of young gospel musicians who do what innovator Thomas Dorsey did with the blues in the 1930s: respond to all musical stimuli to craft an original voice.  Mavis Staples and others “who were there” offer similar insights into their faith and specific recollections of eras past.

But for all the beauty of this film and for all of the charismatic performances to which we are treated, in some ways it was a teaser, this despite its Herculean attempt to present a full chronological sweep.  It would have been great to learn, for example, the degree to which gospel music influenced Smokey Robinson’s compositional approach.  He was one of the most influential and prolific songwriters of his day.  What did he learn musically from gospel?

I’ve already mentioned the rewards in viewing the fascinating performances played at-length.  (They really are gems).  What about the world in which these aesthetic objects circulated?  Gospel is also a business, one that could be just as exploitative as the secular industry.  In fact, many of these artists recorded on small labels that were not gospel specific.  The gospel highway was a rough ride for many; more of this struggle as a labor practice could have only enhanced our appreciation for what these artists achieved in a context beyond “faith.”  Show me the money.

Furthermore, gospel music practice is not only singing but also an instrumental practice.  The musicians, often thanklessly, played hour after hour of services, packed up their instruments and took to the road not only to spread the good news but to feed families as well in an underground cash economy.  Their work, always heard and felt but rarely focused on, deserves consideration.

The Dixie Hummingbirds: Power, Precision, and Praise

Delving more deeply into the on-the-ground practicalities of social life, one had a veritable field day trying to parse through the codes and visual cues of coupling conventions in the film.  Viewers, for example, were left to only ponder what the nature of the relationship was with the woman who Rosetta Tharpe “picked up” as a lifelong traveling companion.  When we learn that the way-past-grown Clara Ward would have any potential romantic relationship blocked by her overbearing mother and then witness she and her group move up one of those shouting church bumpers, you can’t help but wonder what happens to all that explosive sensual energy when she leaves church and puts down the tambourine, what with mama tenaciously blocking the men.  Readers, trust me, this observation only makes sense when you see this for yourself.  At one point, the Ward singers suddenly hike up their elegant gowns above their knees and move into a high gear Holy dance that looks like a cross between the River Dance, a syncopated Can-Can, and a reverse Running Man.  Tina Turner, sit down. I could go on about the open secrets about sexuality that abound in the gospel world, none of which are tackled in the film, but you get my point.  Another film, another commentary.

Clara Ward: Gospel Diva

We learn at the end that the young virtuoso in our opening belongs to a dynamic family gospel group whose music is used to represent the most contemporary extension of this tradition.  After traversing a century-plus of music, we get the deep sense of awe and pride she inspires in her family; we understand our perceptions of her powers.  We hear in her voice the historical traces of a tradition that became an anchor for a people who have struggled for social, economic, and political equality.  The elements present in her performance practice have through social practice become key symbols of not just aesthetic beauty but of struggle, of hope, of victory.  It symbolizes, to quote a classic gospel song, how we got over.

Nina Simone’s performance of the spiritual “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” enjoys several aesthetic and ideological tributaries that contribute to its power, its riveting grip on listeners (check out the youtube comments).  Simone’s alto voice combines with her own piano accompaniment to convey an emotional arch that doesn’t ebb and flow but remains placid until the build up and climax during the last refrain and tag.

Her Badness Herself: Nina Simone

The subtle techniques she uses to achieve this are discussed below. Equally compelling, though, are the ideological streams flowing and give life.  The song channels, in my view, an African American art song tradition and the Pentecostal “church song.”

Although black Pentecostal churches have changed over the years, but the use of the so-called “congregational songs” (also known as “praise songs”) have remained an integral component of the service.  Although hymns are also sung today, congregational or church songs have never been discarded.  The origins of many congregational songs are, as with many spirituals, unknown.  They cannot be attributed to a single composer.  Scholar Queen Booker said that Pentecostals believe congregational songs are God-given–a natural outgrowth of “glossolalic singing” or “singing in the spirit.”

Nobody's Song But Her's

However, other traditions were also present.  In their heavy reliance on call-and-response, improvisation, foot-stomping, and hand-clapping, the songs signal a grassroots origin.  “Pentecostal singing,” Booker argues, “freed the black worshippers to draw on the African traditions that the plantation ‘invisible church’ had kept alive. The songs have become canonized over the years, with each church developing its own repertory, although one might say, as a church musician once told me, if “you know one, you know them all.”  The songs are so similar, in fact, that any Pentecostal church congregation can easily learn an unfamiliar one within a couple choruses.

Like “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” many of these songs comprise one-line refrains, with the song leader improvising both melodically and textually.  The leader’s improvising sometimes overlaps the response of the congregation, thus creating a dense texture.  Intensity is achieved by the repetitive nature of the songs, the level of emotional fervor achieved within them, and the level of group participation in the music making: “A song might last as long as an hour or more, for different song leaders or soloists would ‘pick up’ where the previous one had “left off,” and the singing would continue.”  Clearly, the character of these songs and their standardized performance practices allows the entire congregation to participate fully and enthusiastically. The repetitive musical style and the simply presented principles within the texts of these songs belie an underlying complexity.  The songs contain elaborate rules of musical performance practice as well as a philosophy that is a unique blend of Christian theology and an African-American worldview.  All of these together serve to teach group values on many levels and to engender communal solidarity or in anthropologist Victor Turner’s term, communitas, an important concept in the study of black vernacular music.

In her essay “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” writer Zora Neale Hurston differentiates the aesthetic conventions of authentic spirituals and pieces of music “basedon the spirituals.”  Included in the latter group, according to Hurston, were the art song spiritual settings of composers like Harry T. Burleigh, J. Rosamond

Zora: Knew a good spiritual when she heard one

Johnson, Nathaniel Dett, and Hall Johnson.  Their work, Hurston argues, exhibit a set craftsmanship and beauty while the others embody “unceasing variations around a theme,” new creations every time.  While Hurston does not explicitly state that qualities of authentic spirituals embodied an African sensibility, the Pan-African theme unifying Nancy Cunard’s, Negro: An Anthology (1934), the book where her essay first appeared, supports this assertion.  The African American art song tradition identified by Hurston came to the fore as a tide of cultural nationalism swelled and washed through black American arts and letters during the Harlem Renaissance reflecting what was known as the “New Negro” sensibility of the 1920s and 1930s.

I sense all of these historical and social energies in Simone’s performance. If you’ve ever heard one of the old church mothers get up and raise a song during testimony service, you know what I mean.  They are usually not virtuosos in the typical sense of this word.  Yes, the voice might not overpower these days; a mic is needed. No unearthly melismas, unusually large ranges, or vocal acrobatics to wow the crowd—just flatfooted singing with boatloads of nuance.   And such nuance.  In the first verse Nina restrains—a couple of turns on the first and third scale degrees, ending the last phrase on a very funk-ti-fied, Ray-Charles-esque minor third. Throughout the song she leaves off the “t” on fault, softening and “vernacular-izing” its presentation.  In general Simone’s voice intrigues. It seems unsupported, being produced between throat and nose, which disallows the open, hollow sound “head voice” that many prefer to hear, thrown instead, forward through the nasal cavity.  The vibrato is unsettlingly wide at the end of phrases suggesting a vulnerability, a little come-what-may, why bother.   Some awwright, yeahyeahs, and heynows tossed in and you get the idea: this thing is about more than the notes, more than the lyrics, more than aesthetic sanctification. It’s about unrushed soul-sister-ism without the “please adore and objectify me.”

But, what about art song?  Nina’s accompaniment, an understated support for her vocals, recalls some of the spiritual settings from the Harlem Renaissance forward.  Although she’s loading this puppy down with blues licks, the moving inner voicings, and delicately marinated voicings on the i-V-I7-IV-VI-I chord lexicon of the song, seem so artful and crafty.  As a classically trained pianist, how many of those art-song spirituals do you think she’d heard?  When she ends with the descending passage and evenly articulated pianism beneath her belted and repeated “If I die and my soul be lost,” we are left to question any hint of vulnerability we’ve sense before.  This is Nina: at the crossroads of charisma and restraint, artifice and earthiness.  Clearly, it’s nobody’s song but hers.

Flash of the Spirit is about visual and philosophic streams of creativity and imagination, running parallel to the massive musical and choreographic modalities that connect black persons of the western hemisphere, as well as the millions of European and Asian people attracted to and performing their styles, to Mother Africa. . . . The rise, development, and achievement of Yoruba, Kongo, Fon, Mande, and Ejagham art and philosophy fused with new elements overseas, shaping and defining the black Atlantic visual tradition.

These sentiments, developed during the high years of the Black Consciousness Movement, are from the “Caucasian black cultural nationalist” and art historian Robert Farris Thompson, or “Master T,” as he is affectionately called by his legions of former students. This formidable list includes the path-breaking African American art historians Rick Powell, Michael Harris, Kellie Jones, Judith Wilson, and the late Sylvia Boone, among many others. The words describe his view of the inter-textual relationships in New World black

Visual representations of 19th century church services often depicted similar body language

cultural expressions such as dance, music and visual culture, including vernacular yard work and burial practices.  Rather than depict a set of modalities untouched by history and the social world, as some critics of “African retentions” claim, they urge us to view these relationships as representing historical processes of communal identity building through conscious and selective identification.

The Modest Urban Paradise UpSouth

Nowhere do we see this theory of culture more robustly evident than in traditional black preaching styles.  These epic speech/music events combine the semantic ingenuity of rapping, the musical virtuosity of gospel singing, and the body grammar and mechanics of delivery of the “Soul Man,” a cultural archetype codified in the work of Mark Anthony Neal.  All presented in a contemporary Italian V-collar shirt with extended cuffs and a business suit.  (I can’t see the shoes in the video example below, but I know those “kicks” must be killing; I just know it).  I’d be missing an important point not to mention that this brand of preaching style draws heavily from singing techniques developed by females in the tradition.  In turn, when females occupy this cultural space of whoop and tune, they adopt the growls typically associated with codes of masculinity. (And you thought contemporary gospel star Tonex’s announcement was news?).

To make historical sense of this dynamic tradition, we can look to well-known accounts of the ring shout ritual, a transplanted and transformed cultural practice observed during slavery in the “invisible church”:

About this time I attended a “bush meeting,” where I went to please the pastor whose circuit I was visiting.  After the sermon they formed a ring, and with coats off, sung, clapped their hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way . . . I then went, and taking the leader by the arm, requested him to desist and to sit down and sing in a rational manner . . . He replied: “The Spirit of God works upon people in different ways…there must be a ring here, a ring there, a ring over yonder, or sinners will not get converted.

If thousands of black Southerners flooding urban centers in the North during the twentieth century’s great migration left worldly possessions, they brought with them a profound sense of cultural identification, and of course, an openness to the shifts that occurred when these traditions met “modernity.”  Check out this description of a hot 1929 storefront church service:

It is night.  My errand brings me through a busy street of the Negro section in a city having a colored population of seven thousand.  Suddenly I am arrested by bedlam which proceeds from the open transom of a store front whose show windows are smeared to intransparency.  What issues forth is conglomeration itself – a syncopated rhythmic mess of tune accompanied by strumming guitars and jingling tambourines and frequently punctuated by wild shrieks and stamping feet.  Above the din occasionally emerge such words as “Jesus”, “God”, “Hallelujah”, “Glory”, and then I realize that this frenzy is being perpetrated in the name of religion.  A young man of my own race who has stopped in amazement turns to me half-quizzically and says, “What do you know about that? Jazzin’ God.”

Today’s twenty-first century preachers are still valued for their ability to “shout the congregation.”  They need not be seminary trained, nor formally educated, but they must acknowledge a divine “call to preach” which is usually the result of a vision of an “inner witness.” The most successful preachers excel at expressive singing, as the climax of great sermons become powerful musical events.  This ability is sometimes referred to as one aspect of “the anointing.”  The most popular among the “vernacular-styled” black preachers’ singing could rival Otis Redding, James Brown, or Joe Williams in their vocal quality and in power and impact.

Mega-Churchin'

In the example below of Prophet Brian Carn, we see this cultural formation in high gear.  The sheer power of his voice, his management of all musical parameters comprising this stage of the ritual, and the congregants knowing and enthusiastic expertise in maintaining their labor role in it is a thing of beauty to my ears and eyes.  Note how his crafty modulations ratchet up the intensity of his storyline. (In all fairness, we’re coming in near the end of the event; this sermon was probably not only about Jesus wanting everyone there to have a new house. I hope that Fannie Mae didn’t base its deplorable moves on this thinking).  When he implores the drummer—at mid-sermon!–that he’d rather have him punctuate his phrasing with a crash symbol and not the high-hat without missing a beat, Carn is insisting that the soundscape be filled with a more dynamic mosaic of timbres.  (Umm, very African).  He even upbraids him at one point to push him more “Come on drummer, you ain’t pushing me, you act like you on a break or something.”  This meta-song text in the performance event, the message of everyday uplift, the apparently repurposed building fully loaded with a concert level sound system, the colorful visual backdrop comprised of blue pews and walls, white nurses’ uniforms and grand piano, perfume and pastel church hats, and, of course, the red, black, and white robes are not haphazard.  They work together and purpose to charm every sense.  Indeed, they ground these participants in a common history, comfort them in a challenging present, and encourage to a brighter future.  Y’all don’t hear me. Yeah-ah! Yeah-yeah-ee-yeah!

P.S. I feel for that drummer. This was probably hour five of the shift at his station.  All that Holy Ghost moving can be a little hard on the wrists. (#don’tbeputtingmeinyoursermons).

Preaching, Teaching, and Reaching

Let’s give the first ladies of gospel genius, The Clark Sisters, some love.

The Clark Sisters: Riffing, Rumbling, and Taking House

From 1997, this is actually a remix of one of Twinkie’s chestnuts from back in the day.  The form is tricky—two long sections that sound like two separate verses (Twinkie was always musically unorthodox).  The first features unison (who does it better, smoother?) and part singing with timbres and breathing in absolute sync (nobody does it better).  When Karen sings the lead we hear signature Up South virtuosity: falling pentatonic sequences, sassy blues riffs, instinctual pitch bending, diphthong exploitation, a growl here and a squall there, tongue flat, throat open (technique is everything) and chromaticism tossed in just because “she got it like that.” When we get to the drive or special chorus (though we’re tried in the “fi-yuh”—repeat and stir), notice that although the lyrics repeat, she always shifts the quality of sound, changes the pitch choices.  That’s repetition with a difference, playas.  Analyst’s choice: her bebop riff @3:09 and their salute to the land of “Funk” that they helped to cultivate @4:19. National treasures, unsurpassed.   Later this month, I’ll talk about the bands in contemporary gospel, the ensembles who have quite simply colonized funk and taken it to new levels of stank.

–Dr. Guy

In the lobby of Shutters, a hotel on the beach in Santa Monica, I walked passed an empty drum set and grand piano and entered the dining room without too much of a second thought.  Someone had recommended this spot to enjoy a special meal in a great atmosphere with some jazz as a plus.  I didn’t have high hopes for the music. Too often “hotel lobby jazz” gigs are recipes for musical disasters, nonmythic in proportion yet quite annoying   One can hear musicians from the burnt out to the simply uninterested. Touristy flat interpretations of well-worn jazz standards are what one can usually find in hotel lobbies and even some jazz clubs, unfortunately.   What a knockout to find something hot and creative.

The group that took the makeshift bandstand comprised pianist Ron Avant and the aptly named “Supa Lowery Brothers,” trumpeter Chris on trumpet and his twin brother Wes on drums.  Together the trio pressed out an acoustic set so enjoyable that I stayed until they quit.  Their refreshing take on a broad range of unlikely songs from pop, hip hop, R&B, New Jack Swing, neo-soul, and jazz standards by the Isley Brothers, Jay-Z, R. Kelley, Freddie Hubbard, the Jackson 5, Digital Underground, and others satisfied the soul.  I could never have dreamed that some of their chosen repertoire would work as vehicles for dynamic improvised interpretations.  But these gentlemen twisted and turned their song list inside out and upside-down with buoyant spirit and thoughtfulness.

Wes played brushes the entire evening (this was the lobby, after all, and well, you know the complaint department) but you could still feel the rhythmic fire.  Chris carried front line duties with ample dexterity, playing familiar melodies with just enough discipline for ease of recognition but with improvisations that explored just how far one could take things within idiomatic stability.  Ron Avant’s piano approach infused jazz, gospel, hip-hop, and R&B gestures with ease.  His left-hand was so amply charged with rock solid bass lines and flush accompanying harmonies, the Lowery brothers informed me that Avant had actually named it.  (Forgive me, I’m better with faces than names but it sounded like a kid’s imaginary friend).  Their first recordings are available on iTunes—sly and polished original compositions sweeping across the same stylistic spectrum of their live set.  Musicians of this generation from their hometown of Philadelphia are known for this kind of musical code switching.  Indeed, the land of hard bop, neo soul, spoken word, and conscious rap continues to produce gifted musicians who dare to ignore the jazz cops’ yellow tape so diligently policed by record labels and pundits.  They were excited to announce their upcoming CD release.  I’d love to write the liner notes.  It’s easy to discuss quality.

Dr. Guy

Art lives here

Last week was not only my time to wind up my fall classes. (Yes!)  It was also a great time to get out on the town and enjoy an eclectic mix of wintertime musicking in Philly.  Although one hears many laments about what the music scene here (and everywhere, it seems) lacks, if you’re persistent and consistent, there’s always something to take in.  You just have to get out of the box.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Wadud Ahmad, Terry Adkins, and Webb Thomas. Not Pictured, Yoichi Uzeki

First, there was another installment of J. Michael Harrison’s live music series at the Vivant Art Gallery.  Featuring Jamaaladeen Tacuma, a local bass-thumping hero, this CD release event played to a packed house full of enthusiasm and good vibes.  Tacuma’s new music is the virgin voyage for his label JAM-ALL.  Yoichi Uzeki, Webb Thomas, Terry Adkins, and Wadud Ahmad filled out the roster with verve.  Tacuma’s new music spans and combines the wide range of his compositional signature: avant-garde modernism, funky grooves framed in disjunctive, though infectious ositnato patterns all overlaid with tricky melodic statements that flirt on the edges of “catchy.”

Visual artist and Penn colleague Terry Adkins performed admirably on alto sax

The ultimate Afro-futurist, Tacuma is actively pursuing the twin tracks of pushy creativity and pushier entrepreneurialism with verve.  Dug the crowd, and the feeling.  Mr. Ahmad opened the set admirably with a cerebral spoken word performance that was set as a call-response with the pre-recorded voice of Ornette Coleman, Mr. Tacuma’s mentor.  An inspired “art” move.

At the Annenberg Theater, U of Penn,

Preservation Hall Jazz Band sound checking at Annenberg

the Preservation Hall Jazz Band was back for a sold out engagement.  Philly digs this group, and here’s the reason.  During a public pre-concert interview that I conducted with the group’s musical director, Ben Jaffe, he stressed the underlying spirituality of the band’s philosophy.  Jaffe, whose parents started the band in the 1960s, made a point that PHJB is not a repertory ensemble. They don’t’ transcribe and play, verbatim, old recordings. (Glad to hear that one).  They believe music heals, as they are exporting a holistic attitude about the power of music making and its connection to life from their native New Orleans.  The repertory is delivered with an earnestness that sweeps one up not into nostalgia, but into a spirit of “let’s enjoy our present” together. Musicianship is at a premium in this band as members move easily between virtuoso instrumentality and molasses-dipped vocals, often in one song.

The legend and lore of Dave Holland, bassist supreme, was confirmed during his recent performance at the Painted Bride Arts Center.  The venue was perfect for his big band project, which was formed in 2000 and has since been nominated for a Grammy.

The quiet before Dave Holland's storm at the Painted Bride

It was a special treat to hear many of today’s brightest stars—Chris Potter, Josh Roseman, Craig Taborn, Nate Smith, and Antonio Hart, to name a few—on this set of inspired music.  Holland’s compositional palette combines the typical scoring techniques of big band—interlocking interplay between solos, soli, and tutti practice. (If this makes no sense to you, take my history of jazz course, LOL: trust me, he’s doing it).

Dave Holland, jazz legend who's still innovating and educating

But he also has a very singular way of combining certain timbres that make you sit up and listen.  I was particularly struck by his beautiful use of alto sax and muted trumpet in some of the lines.  Another key factor driving the concept of this ensemble, of course, is how one can experience the different soloing styles of, say, Chris Potter’s hyper-modernism with emotion and Antonio Hart’s emotion-charged, blues-drenched modernism in a single song.  And Holland’s looping exploration of cyclic patterns with constantly shifting harmonic centers provides a challenging terrain for his soloists.

Instead of a 15-page paper, double-spaced, 12-point font, (with a bibliography), as their capstone experience in my History of American music class, my students made music.  The course surveys American music life from the colonial period to the present.  If you ever wondered what the 19^th century Swedish soprano Jenny Lind and Lady Gaga have in common, take this class.  Or if you ever think about the connection between Master P and PT Barnum—you got it.  We put on a benefit concert for the Penn Music Mentoring Program, a community service group dedicated to providing West Philadelphia with

Final Exam: Ramsey and students Joshua and Alex play some 1970s-style fusion. The young boys were into it.

music lessons and education.  The concert featured William Billings chorale music from 1770, a late 19^th-century string quartet, Gershwin songs, jazz, solo piano music, a guest Glee Club appearance, and more.  I participated as well, performing Jean-Luc Ponty’s “Question with No Answer,” with Josh Levy (violin) and Alex Utay (guitar).  I’ve wanted to perform that piece since the late 197os.  Life is good.  Sarah Van Sciver, a sophomore, gave us a sneak peak at her original musical based on Hamlet—definitely a high point—gotta’ love living composers.  And I’d be remiss not to mention that a student performed 4’33’’ by John Cage.  If you don’t know that piece, youtube it and turn your speakers up.  Way up.

Composer/pianist Sarah Van Sciver, a Carole King for our time, performs a work-in-progress

I left that concert and headed twenty blocks up Walnut into West Philly to a Sunday night event: the 35^th Pastoral Anniversary and 81^st birthday celebration of Bishop Audrey F. Bronson.

The doors of the church are open, and Jerry ThompSon's B-3 was bumpin'

My friend, producer, engineer, and music master Jerry ThompSon was “subbing” on the Hammond B-3 for the regular organist at the Sanctuary Church of the Open Door.  We know that there’s no such thing as a good African American Pentecostal service without the filtering sounds of a B-3 through some well-oiled Leslie speakers.  The Spirit don’t like that.  So JT was holding it down in the beautiful world of what my sister-in-law, writer Lisa Jones, calls “black pageantry.”  I was late (are you ever really  late for such celebrations?) and heard the last of the preaching, some exhortation, some good ole, impromptu, sanctified church songs, and the

This usher board is never bored moving to the beat

offering.  Yes, I said it: I “heard” the offering, always a good excuse for some soul stirring, down home, Up South musicking from the rhythm section.  Led by JT, the soul brothers did not disappoint the listener in this re-purposed sanctuary, once a huge and high cathedral designed acoustically for chant and hymn, now tailored for reprise and stomp . The female ushers were rocking and directing traffic, as JT was working the drawbars for varying timbres, riffing off of melodies in the upper register like Chick Corea, working over the inner voices with upper extensions of chords, and driving the songs forward, ahead of the beat. Yeah, and Amen, as they say.

And I was back home in time to catch the last half of Sunday Night Football.  Who says you can’t have it all in Philly?

Dr. Guy

Everybody Needs the Blues

book is used almost as a “passport to adventure” in contemporary studies of African American music.  Indeed, the blues have informed many genres—rock, gospel, jazz, and extends to even hip-hop.

Although rooted in African American communities of the early 20^th century, the blues’ influence has since its inception become a cross-cultural, intra-ethnic, poly-nation, and very fluid phenomenon, with too many iterations, versions, and inversions to name.  Click to hear a conversation I had on NPR recently about how we can all be considered “blues people” when you consider the matter closely.

In the controversial video “Window Seat, a work that she described as installation art, Erykah Badu, the modern hoodoo blues woman, is all fed up and sighs:

“On this porch I’m rockin’ by and forth like Lightnin’ Hopkins, can somebody speak to Scotty and beam me up…”

On the other hand, a powerful Karen Clark Sheard, the undisputed top-of-line gospel diva, sanctifies and then electrifies blues tributaries in “Couldn’t Help It If I Tried.” Buckle your seat belts, kids, she ain’t playing with this stuff.

Dr. Guy

Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye

Stevie Wonder – Superstition

The music that we hear now will be the basis of the music that we will be listening to twenty years from now.  Musical genres are constantly evolving from and influencing one another.  This trend is evident simply by examining the roots of the musical genres that have emerged during the past century .  Two musical movements that shared similar beginnings, but also have fundamental differences in their musical objectives was the Motown movement of the 1960s and today’s Indie rock movement.  Both emerged from existing musical genres (Motown from soul, rhythm, and blues; Indie rock from the punk movement as well as contemporary pop-rock music) and further defined the existing genres into more specific terms.

Marvin Gaye – Heard It Through the Grapevine

Motown began in Detroit in the 1960s, when Berry Gordy, Jr. founded Motown Record Corporation.  Motown Records had a profound influence on the music scene, and it is widely considered the first truly successful mainstream record label to be owned by an African American.  Motown is responsible for introducing many famous black artists, such as Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5, and Marvin Gaye, into the “pop” music scene.  Motown music was considered to be on the simpler side, as the label tended to avoid producing songs that were overly complex or difficult to understand musically.  The Motown sound was suited to pop music and optimized to be embraced by the masses.  Motown Records was very successful at not only integrating black musicians into mainstream music culture but also in helping them achieve commercial success.

Vampire Weekend – Cousins

Another movement, which is more contemporary, is the indie rock movement, which began in the 80s but really took off in the late 90s and during the new millennium.  The indie rock movement is not so much a change in musical style as it is a change in the way that artists think about marketing and promoting themselves and their music.  Whereas Motown was trying to take the genres of soul, gospel, and blues and introduce them to the mainstream, indie rock is trying to do the exact opposite, taking control of the music away from the record labels and putting it back into the hands of the musicians.  Indie rock bands primarily generate popularity and interest for themselves via word-of-mouth and the internet through social media such as Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook.  Artists of the indie rock movement place retention of their creative licenses as their number one priority, choosing to forgo  popularity and success on the mainstream music scene in exchange for the ability to have  control over the production and promotion of their  music.

NICK BARETTA