Denise King

It’s here!  This week on Friday, January 20 we will release the first single from the CD The Colored Waiting Room!  This event will be a free download for a limited time only.  Let’s call it Free Follow Friday. The song is an arrangement of Oliver Nelson’s classic piece “Stolen Moments.”  My version features the delectable and infectious vocals of Denise King, a singer with an international presence in the jazz world. The track reimagines the song as a funky–spunky showcase in which jazz and neo-soul-like qualities collide.

DK in Action at Le Cochon Noir Jazz Club, Philadelphia

I met Denise shortly after I moved to Philadelphia in 1998.  As I familiarized myself with the jazz scene her name was mentioned over and over as one of city’s unique forces.  When I first heard her—well, all I could say was wow! With a vocal arsenal that includes sonic and spiritual references to everyone from Dinah Washington, Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin, and Joe Williams (yes, I said it, she can belt a blues like nobody’s business), she has as much range as anyone around.   Her wide knowledge of repertoire spans blues, jazz, R&B and gospel.  And her stage presence—a mix of disarming charm and grab you by the nap of your neck stomp and romp—rivets her audiences from set to set and gig after gig.

DK and Jamal Parker, Le Cochon Noir Jazz Club owner, during her 2011 Toy Drive

It was a great pleasure to contribute some piano tracks and arrangements to her CD Fever a few years ago.  With this work she throws me back a solid with her stellar, sultry, and understated riff on “Stolen Moments.”  Think a combination of world traveler and the round-the-way girl. When you hear this piece—a song that moves her a little outside the zone that her many fans around the world have come to expect—you’ll understand why she was recently nominated this past year in the category of Best Jazz Vocalist in Europe. Her chart-topping new release No Tricks features some of her original compositions and was recorded in Paris. Ms. King, a tireless promoter of good jazz and strong community, also has a weekly radio show on WPEB 88.1.

And that’s not all.

Honoree F. Jeffers Spends a Few Moments in the Colored Waiting Room

Poet and Professor Honoree Jeffers came by the Colored Waiting Room and contributed a little something more to ponder.  Her words, a meditation titled “Stolen Moments” as well, responds artistically to what she hears as the sentiment embodying the song, the performance, and the singer making the artifice tick.  The author of three books of poetry and the writer of the popular blog Phyllis Re-mastered, she brings it short and sweet, laying down the laws of love grown-up style: “I like to steal sometimes. But I do give back, willingly.  And I want, but I never tell. No one has to know.  That’s what makes us grown.”  You see? Like that: smooth, whispered, assured.   Her riff on the single will appear on all my social media the day the single drops. Stay tuned for Denise King’s and Honoree Jeffers’ great contributions to The Colored Waiting Room CD project. What are you waiting for?  Take a quick look for what you’ll experience, and we’ll see you on JANUARY 2o!

Before MTV videos, You Tube, digital downloads, nickelodeons, and television variety shows, fans of American popular music had to go to live music venues to enjoy their favorite artists.  From the stages of these spaces, both large and small, audiences experienced the larger-than-life talents behind the

recorded music that had enthralled them as they listened intently at home.  As much as the technology of recording had changed the musical experience, for many Americans, it could never replace the excitement of a live show.  Glamour, drama, comedy, dancing, and, most important, a good song combined to make these events erupt with pleasures and delights as well as brim with social and cultural significance.  A stellar example that towers above all others in its singularity is the Apollo Theater.

When it opened the Apollo was a quintessentially American institution, drawing on several important strands of the country’s history.  The cultural force of these strands coalesced at the nexus of the Apollo and contributed to its significance.  Throughout the nineteenth century, our musical culture gradually lost its European pedigree and became more “American” in its style, tenor, and goals.  As the focus of music making became less centered on home parlors and more on public entertainment, venues were built to accommodate this shifting sensibility.  Part of this appeal could be attributed to the allure of the specific musical culture of black citizens, who had since the days of blackface minstrelsy provided a foundational aesthetic for what was considered the “popular.”

Publishing: The Beginning of the Industry

The loose network of varied and sundry popular entertainments gradually coalesced into an integrated system of songwriters, performers, agents, managers, attorneys, publishers, theater owners, and recording labels—a modern industry that challenged the preciously held notion that art and commerce were irreconcilable forces.  Indeed, before its latest status as a foundation, the success of the Apollo’s formula had always rested on resolving this complicated, wholly American, assumption about artistry and its presentation and dissemination.  Thus, the Apollo’s legacy was built, on the one hand, by harnessing the variety show format familiar to American audiences, and on the other, by challenging the notion that art and economics could not be reconciled easily.  It is perhaps only in the context of Jim Crow separatism, indeed, within an environment in which black bodies were policed by law and custom that such an experiment could succeed.  Black artists were making brilliant artistic worlds within an environment that tried to contain them to status quo, second-class social positions.  As they turned the world on its ear, their work became true commodities, turning profits for all involved.  The dam burst at the Apollo, and the flood is still flowing.

Tuliza Fleming and Guthrie Ramsey: co-curators of the touring exhibition on the Apollo Theater "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing."

Since its inception seventy years ago, Harlem’s Apollo Theater has been America’s premiere venue for the showcasing of black entertainment.  Situated in the center of one of the nation’s largest and most diverse black communities, the theater has existed as the “spiritual heartbeat” of New York’s live entertainment in the music industry.  From its inauspicious beginning as a burlesque theater in 1913 with a “whites only” policy, the Apollo opened its doors to black patrons in 1934, and quickly thereafter rose to become the most respected presenter of American popular culture for decades.

James Brown: The Business of Show

As an institution that was instrumental in launching and promoting numerous show business careers, the Apollo is singular.  As such the exhibition celebrates many of the great entertainers who have rocked this house for seven decades.  Through compelling artifacts, photographs, and audio/visual presentations, visitors experience the complex of outsize talent, glamour, and charisma that form the bedrock of American-styled celebrity.  The riff and rumble of a stunning number of genres of American music have been featured at the Apollo as each has moved in and out of vogue.

The Supreme Ones at the Apollo

The jumping beats of swing, the avant-garde sounds of bebop, the infectious rhythms of rhythm and blues, soul and rock n roll, and even the scintillating strains of Latin music have all graced the Apollo’s roster. And although many know the Apollo as a music venue, it also featured other expressive forms—comedy, boxing, spoken-word, and dance are part of the its history.

The myriad themes running through this story are fascinating.  A biography of the theater tells us much about the communities of Americans who developed the country’s culture industry into one of the most influential entities in the world.  As a social space, the industry was one of the arenas in which African Americans and Jews labored in tandem to further each groups’ push for a piece of the American pie.  Black New Yorkers migrated to Harlem in the early twentieth century, and the conditions there created a need for entertainment and respite from their generally harsh existence behind the walls of segregation.  Businessmen like Frank Schiffman understood this and used his expertise to develop a venue that catered to the specific yet varied tastes of the black community.  In other cities with large black communities such as Chicago, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, we see similar developments: migration patterns of racial segregation created the need for black entertainment and white entrepreneurs positioned themselves to supply the demand successfully.

Gowns of the Supremes in the exhibition "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing"

These theaters became important to an emerging black star system; they provided black artists and their audiences with the space to enjoy prestige, income, and visibility separate and apart from their white counterparts with whom they were not considered social equals.  As such, the Apollo and her sister venues throughout the black archipelago provided an incubator for the showcasing and development of black talent—indeed, they became pinnacles of achievement beyond the less prestigious “chittlin’ circuit” venues in which they were forced to perform.  Behind the curtain of segregated performance spaces, black artists honed their respective crafts, created their own artistic standards, tutored one another, competed, thrilled audiences, earned living wages, and ultimately created art that became the musical lingua franca of the world.

Celia Cruz

Embedded in this story, too, is how women performers emerged as a central force in black music.  Artists such as Lena Horne, Dinah Washington, the Supremes, Billie Holiday, Nancy Wilson, Celia Cruz, among many others, forwarded their own brand and standards of beauty, femininity, and expertise that countered prevailing notions of black women’s “natural” suitability for domestic and service work.  Latin musicians from throughout the African Diaspora have contributed significantly to the Apollo’s lore, demonstrating that the Apollo audiences were not only diverse but also “equal-opportunity” minded.  Notoriously vocal and devastatingly discerning, these audiences held whites, blacks, men, and women performers to the same standards of excellence and they were better for it.

James Brown performing “There Was A Time” how he used to do it at the Apollo. Fire and Ice!

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.

But before modernism there was modernity, and modernity—a word ubiquitously used in reference to the most disparate historical moments—is fundamentally characterized by one trait: an intensified self-consciousness. A large group of people bound by a particular combination ethnicity, class, geography, gender or artistic agenda becomes modern the moment they take a deliberate group action. For Afro-Americans the migration embodies such an action. No wonder, either, that their modern moment should take the form of deliberate mass travel: the cradle of Afro-American history was the single most horrifying mass deportation in world history. One can hardly think of a group to who planned and deliberate re-location could hold greater significance.

Of course, it is not the case that the millions of migrants thought of themselves as re-claiming control over their geographical location; part of the significance of the migration has been attributed to it with hindsight. Yet the imagery of the move to a better place—not the longing for the peaceful afterlife that haunts the spirituals, but the actual fantasy of travel itself—haunts countless of the songs of the genre that marks the seam between the southern peasant labour and the first beginnings of the urban struggle: the Delta Blues.

Delta Blues has a special link to Chicago as many of its foremost artists migrated there as well as to Detroit. Among the migrants headed to the Windy City stand, most famously, Big Joe Williams, Robert Johnson, Bukka White and the legendary Muddy Waters. Talking about the attribution of historical significance in hindsight, the Delta Blues has the narrative of origin—as the rural beginnings of the blues tradition, but also of country music, bluegrass and as the matrix idiom of the brit rock of the 60s—pinned all over it. It is thus almost ironic that the Delta Blues should be a genre about transition.

Indeed one of the themes that haunt Delta Blues songs is travel, and particularly the train. A gentleman by the name of Wes Modes has compiled a list of train songs, which is fascinating to peruse and is available on Wikipedia. Many of these songs are from Delta Blues artists—a few samples are “All Aboard,” by Muddy Waters and “Black Train Blues“ of Bukka White and Lonnie Johnson’s “Long Black Train.” One of the most famous and widely covered train songs ever written, “Love in Vain,” most famously by the Rolling Stones in 1972 was written and sung by Delta Bluesman Robert Johnson.

The imagery of the train becomes, in a song like ‘Love in Vain’, the very image of distance, as both the imminent geographical distance of the departing beloved woman, and also the sentimental distance of the lover who chooses to leave. A potent image to migrants such as the train became the way to sing about love, women, and loss, and through this allegory it travelled through the guitars and voices of musicians that are continents and generations apart from its original impulse. Sung by these southern bluesmen, the great migration and the stories of those who lived it leave their trace as they keep, well, migrating.

DC

Known originally for his standard, yet catchy pop tunes, John Mayer took a significant risk when he decided to shift his focus toward blues and electric guitar.  He departed, although not completely, from his already successful love/relationship brand of pop:

John Mayer – Clarity

to play his own modern blend of blues, which includes colorful covers of greats like Jimi Hendrix.

John Mayer Trio – Wait Until Tomorrow “Live”

While most guitar playing heard on contemporary radio consists largely of power chords or repeated samples in a basic verse and chorus:

Miley Cyrus – Party In the USA

John Mayer’s raw and lyrical guitar riffs, especially live, push back on the sometimes confining walls of popular music.

John Mayer – Come When I Call

His playing has evoked comparisons to names like Clapton, Hendrix and Vaughan, yet he seems unfazed by the pressure associated with this as shown in this Rolling Stone review of his album Where the Light is: John Mayer Live in Los Angeles.  The ease with which with which he collaborates with Buddy Guy on “Feels Like Rain”, illustrates this seamless blend of old school blues with Mayer’s modern twist.

John Mayer & Buddy Guy – Feels Like Rain

Overall, Mayer seems to be paying tribute to the artists that inspired him; he also provides a successful meshing of blues with his own take to create something fresh and appealing to a variety of audiences.  It is no overstatement to say that Mayer brought back to the spotlight a genre and instrumental style thirty plus years past its golden age.

Alex Ryu

Nina Simone – Backlash Blues

One example is Nina Simone’s Backlash Blues. This 12-bar blues piece opens with an instrumental introduction and includes Nina posing questions to “Mr. Backlash.” This exchange is characterized by a call and response between her and a guitar. In addition to the steady rhythm provided by a guitar, drum, harmonica, and piano, the song has an instrumental solo in the third verse. By returning to the 12-bar blue style, Nina is appealing to the entire African American community to create a united front. She is also implicitly suggesting that the community should draw strength from its rich heritage.

Nina passionately uses blues elements to paint a frustrating picture of racism: “You give me second class houses,/ And second class schools/ Do you think all colored folks/ Are just second class fools?” Yet while she describes her lack of opportunity and her victimization, she raises a civil rights warning: “But the World is Big/ Big and Bright and Round/ And it’s full of folks like me/ Who are Black, Yellow, Beige and Brown,” and ends the song with resonating hope for Civil Rights: “Mr. Backlash, Mr. Backlash,/ Just What do you think I got to lose/ I’m gonna leave you/ With the backlash blues. You’re the one will have the blues not me/ Just wait and see.”

This song is an example of the Civil Rights blues movement that fought against the hegemony of a white, segregated America. The bluesy feel of the song captures the sadness and the pain of inequality, while the African American roots of the genre further empower the message. To this day, there is a struggle to create a more egalitarian world and the work of Nina Simone, as well as other blues and soul artists, has continued to serve as a source of inspiration for modern artists everywhere.

For more examples of the blues, check out the following videos by some blues greats from Sam Cooke to Curtis Mayfield.

Zach Zwarenstein

Nina Simone – Why

Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come

Langston Hughes – The Weary Blues

Curtis Mayfield – Movin’ On Up