Poet and writer Honoree Jeffers has written a meditation on this idea from a woman’s perspective.  Check it out—then stream or download an mp3 to hear and enjoy vocalist Denise King’s sultry and subtle vibe!  To do this you must visit the project’s new home which launches today: www.thecoloredwaitingroom.com.! Stay tuned to find out how you can participate and join us in the Colored Waiting Room with your own contributions.

Mark Anthony Neal

This project has quickly grown in exciting directions as other artists and writers join in with their own thoughts and reflections about the ideas driving The Colored Waiting Room.  Mark Anthony Neal, a leading and innovative scholar (and not to mention social media maverick who hosts the groundbreaking internet TV show Left of Black) in the black cultural studies tradition, has written some powerful liner notes for the CD, which will drop in a couple of weeks.  He recalls a personal experience of traveling from New York to the Deep South with his father. Along the way, he achieves what he does so well—getting us to understand why and how music matters to us.  It’s a moving piece of work that you can preview here.

♦

 We’ve Been Here Before: Notes on The Colored Waiting Room

Mark Anthony Neal

I love trains. In another life, I might have been a Pullman porter or a big band musician, who had the opportunity to travel the country, albeit in segregated coach cars like the one Homer A. Plessy helped transform into the legal precedent that we were forced to live with for more than half-a-century—a move that created the conditions for what was called the Chitlin’ Circuit.

One of my most precious childhood memories is of traveling back down South to my father’s home state of Georgia.  This was 1970. My family rode the old Pennsylvania Central line a year before the government-subsidized Amtrak began service. I was literally a child of the Civil Rights Movement and oblivious about segregation and colored waiting rooms. This was a brave new world for my parents, who both had vivid memories of colored waiting rooms and colored coach cars.  I suspect that part of the interest in the trip for them was to see just how things might have changed.

At four, I was not that much attuned to my father’s gestures.  But looking back some forty years later, I imagine it was quite a different experience for him as he had migrated to New York City only a decade earlier.  Indeed, this was one of my father’s first trips back to Georgia, and save for his father’s death two years later, it would be his last time to visit the South.  I recall this time so many decades later because it was the only trip I ever took with my father to the South; I’ve spent much of the past few years since his death wishing I had had that opportunity to return with him to the land that birthed him.

As Guthrie Ramsey well understands, those colored waiting rooms, that necessary evil of interstate travel for far too many Black folks in the years before desegregation, were a source of shame, frustration, pain and trauma.  Yet as a broad metaphor for the private life of Blackness—a Blackness underneath the veil, underground and behind closed doors—it still gives us the tools and the resources to dream a world that some (including ourselves) once tried to deny us and others.  Some still try to get us to forget.  Community. Family.

Pullman Porters

And it is in this will to forget that The Colored Waiting Room Presents Dr. Guy’s Musiqology stands its ground: in this remembering of remembering, this remembering of the forgetting, this remembering of the dreams, too countless to really remember, but that gets evoked with every bent note, every soulful gesture, every moan half-past the minute of midnight.  A seamless travel, buttressed by clickety-clack of those trains, through a history of our emotions, where terms like Soul, Jazz, Classical, Neo-Soul, Hip-Hop and R&B, are really just names on a page, woefully inadequate to describe the that that we feel.

This breathlessness of Blackness where the stank air of the status quo and the suffocating stench of “all deliberate speed” gets transformed to give us the air of life, liberty and the pursuit of justice.  This is what freedom sounds like.  This is what freedom smells like.  This is what freedom feels like.  A freedom that Little London, Guthrie’s granddaughter, intuitively understands is hers, as it was her mother’s and her grandfather’s. Yes, we’ve been here before.

♦

For other liner notes and information on the project click here. Stay tuned for news about more collaborations and information about the project!

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!

A Happy Fan Club

Back in January 0f this year I wrote a piece about soprano Alicia Hall Moran’s Motown Project, her intriguing re-visiting of some of the label’s most memorable hits, interspersed with a few opera chestnuts and impressively staged in a performance/theater melodrama.  I wrote about the work in the context of “Things to See, Hear, and Read” in 2011.  The Motown Project has grown in great directions: she’s nipped, tucked, and added with each of its performed iterations.  In other words, Hall Moran has treated it as a running work-in-progress, as a living entity that invites reconfiguration and rethinking. That’s what artists do.

Singing and Signing

On the first day of Kwanzaa, the Blackberry buzzed in my pocket with a vigorous hot-off-the-press text from the conceptual pianist Jason Moran, Hall Moran’s partner: “Alicia is Bess tonight on Broadway. Many tix available. I have a babysitter and a night out. YES!  Come thru if you’re . . . free.”  A quick bite and an hour later, I’m in a yellow heading uptown into a shoulder-to-shoulder crush of holiday Time-Squarers for some rare Monday night Broadway (it’s usually closed on Monday).   I’ve wanted to catch this musical theater version of the famed all-American opera Porgy and Bess ever since it premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts back in October.  Now in previews on Broadway, more people can see for themselves what has become something of a controversy.

Miles had his shot at Porgy and Bess, too.

Back in the summertime of 2011 when the living was supposed to be easy, the criticism was jumping and the tensions were high when none other than Stephen Sondheim openly criticized the female creative team of director Diane Paulus, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and composer Diedre Murray for revamping the popular 1935 opera for a different forum (Broadway musical theater) and for contemporary sensibilities.  Of course, the work has always attracted high praise, strained critique, and endless dialogue on myriad grounds including, the Jewish George Gershwin’s meditation on black culture, ideas of race and opera, and the black singers who have traditionally sung its roles.  The past year, for example, witnessed a sustained and engaging conversation about Porgy and Bess on the important web-group the African American Art Song Alliance (founded by the abundantly talented tenor, Dr. Darryl Taylor, a professor at the University of California, Irvine).

While I’ve found some of the lasting contentions surrounding the opera somewhat baffling, this latest—the so-called “audacity” of daring to be creative with it—hard to take seriously.  It’s great to present a work—an opera, a symphony, a Duke Ellington recording—as a historical artifact worthy of an attempted replication or as facsimile of the composer’s “intention.”  But I also appreciate artistic license: the courage to imagine other possibilities for a work.  Whether the work is better or worse off by this repurposing is best left to the judgments of the individual contemplating the matter.  This interpretive free-for-all represents a huge part of the pleasure of encountering “the new” or the kind of new, indeed, the theme and variation of it all.

Stage Door!

As understudy for the lovely and formidable Tony-Award-winning Audra McDonald (sorry readers, in this writer’s estimation some ladies have earned lots of adjectives!), “Alicia’s Bess” made all of us who dropped everything and grabbed a ticket burst and strut with pride as she shows vocal growth and an expanding sense of “ownership” of the audience’s gaze every time I see her.

This versioning of Porgy, then, is on some levels what American musical culture is all about.  How many versions of “Summertime” can one appreciate with its sultry blues-like chord structure?  How many African American singers have sustained serious careers after they got their shot in one of the historical productions of this work?  Why should this text be deemed more sacred and untouchable than the Motown songs that Hall Moran’s operatic versions pulled in the other direction on the art/pop continuum.  (Apparently, part of this tempest in a teapot controversy is high opera’s Porgy slumming around in the tourist trap of “mere” musical theater).

We are all richer when artists force us to think beyond the envelope—even when it feels “peculiar” at first brush.  And despite what so-called arbiters of culture might insist, it ain’t necessarily so that some forms, songs, and repertoire are off limits to this “will to version” whether it be a pop song that made your booty shake and America aesthetically integrate or a folk-opera that transformed South Carolina blues culture into an iconic force that was singular in helping to integrate America’s opera stage.

I’m thrilled to see a singer that I know get her shot. I loves you Porgy.

Holla! umm, I mean Brava!!!

 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.

Jones confering with curatorial assistant Naima Keith now with the Studio Museum in Harlem

“Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” the stunning exhibition conceived and organized by Kellie Jones and now showing at the Hammer Museum, UCLA as part of PST is now up ready to be dug until January 2012.  The show’s opening night hosted a record-breaking crowd of two thousand or so revelers eager to view the much-anticipated show and, of course, to party with the people and lovers of art.

As the partner of historian and curator Prof. Jones, I’ve experienced the show from many angles—as idea, as process, as context, and as subtext.  Indeed, from my birds-eye view and earshot range, I had a singular opportunity to contemplate these themes as well as witness some of the immediacy, if not, urgency of their impact on the ground as “Now Dig This!” premiered the first weekend in October.  “Revelatory,” “amazing,” “awesome,” “historic,” “rigorous,” “beautiful,” “game-changer” were some of the words expressed to Jones as she moved around PST events and negotiated the thick buzz surrounding her new show.  Drawing supporters from across the country—renown art historians, curators, artists, colleagues and collectors, dealers and museum directors—everybody it seems was, indeed, digging this, that, and a third.

Artist Ian White and Kellie speak at the book celebration for LA Object

Photographer Deb Willis and KJ's great aunt Elise

The show’s only conceptual constraints are its Los Angeles focus and the demarcation of its historical arch, 1960-80.  Otherwise, its brilliance disciplines the various media of abstraction, sculpture, video, painting, assemblage, installation, performance art, music, and because of the show’s ephemera and the lavish illustrations in the exhibition’s catalogue, photography. Unless you’ve been exposed to what goes into such a feat, it’s probably difficult to grasp the intellectual and creative fortitude it takes to pull off something like “Now Dig This!”

Family members Candace, Celia and KJ's mother, poet Hettie Jones

One has to do the research and then conceive of the vision.  Once funders and museums sign on, there’s the coordination of essayists, archives, artists and their families, the permanent museum staff, the press, book and exhibition designers, other museums, dealers, private collectors, foggy memories, oral histories, curators, conservators, exhibition designers, a team of gallery preparetors, public relations people, and more.  Beyond an encyclopedic knowledge of the physical, historical and aesthetic dimensions of art objects (and not to mention the

Kellie and Franklin Sirmans, Chief Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA

Kellie Jones and Naima Keith: Job Well Done!

stories of their creators), curating on this level takes commitment, curiosity, and love.  This kind of love: as we were leaving for the last time a huge Houston gallery that displayed paintings of the Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition she had co-curated, Prof. KJ turned to me and said “wait, I have to walk through one more time. I’ll never see them together like this again.”

Okay?  This was the moment I began to understand the weight of such exhibitions, particularly for an art historian specializing in non-canonical yet brilliant and intrinsically provocative works that are sometimes owned and collected by major institutions but not shown and in an area in which once active artists vanish into obscurity only to be unearthed, historicized, theorized and presented in context by “eye-minded” scholars like Jones.  “I put this piece in the show because I often teach it,” she said in passing during one of her curator’s tours.  “Now I won’t have to only teach it from the page.”

Kellie interviewed by KJLH's Dominique DiPrima

Kim Wayans and other celebrants toast Now Dig This!

And thanks to Prof. KJ’s vision, the Hammer’s crackerjack team (trust me, they can really throw a party!), and the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, we can until January 8, 2012 stand in the galleries and try to hear what these objects are communicating to the rest of us.  More than one observer has mentioned the rich diversity of people who showed up, showed off, and showed out as they celebrated the opening of “Now Dig This!”  The average Joe and Jane, the Hollywood elite and everybody in between knew this was the hot spot.  Indeed, one of the show’s focuses is how the cultural space of black Los Angeles during this period was one in which artistic alliances were cultivated across racial lines, despite the obvious tensions of these times.  I believe that in herconviction to represent these intercultural connections in the exhibition, some of which were revealed to her through copious archival research and interviews, Prof. KJ modeled an important principle.  Life really can imitate art.  Or is art, life itself? Either way, if you don’t know, now you know and now dig this: this lady KJ got some serious game.

Franky Kong prepares the exhibition with KJ

Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, Michael Rapaport’s new documentary about the super group A Tribe Called Quest, charts their journey from a talented and fun-loving high school crew, to a professional collective that symbolized in its time everything that was “right” about hip hop, to a still talented group of individuals performing the beats and rhymes that shot them to fame in their youth and who now face all the challenges of—it’s hard to say—coming into middle age.

 The best thing about this film is that it captures powerfully the creative, politically-charged, “Can I Kick It?/Yes, You Can” feeling of that moment in the late-1980s to early-1990s when many hip hop artists believed they were summoned to a higher calling than “pop”; when artists thought that record companies believed in this mission; when well-placed radio DJs exercised control over their playlists; when journalists created a specific critical apparatus to mediate it all; and when young people felt empowered, relevant, and affirmed as they connected to the infectious, multi-layered beats and rap’s densely woven narratives.

We hear from many of these cultural workers in the film all testifying to the singularity of Tribes’ artistic and philosophical influence. A wider narrative lens would have placed their work into a broader field of black cultural production.  These were, indeed, heady times across the board.  Think of Spike Lee’s films, writers Lisa Jones’ and Greg Tate’s journalism at the Village Voice, Lorna Simpson’s and Glen Ligon’s conceptual work in visual culture, and even Wynton Marsalis’ charge at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and you get the point.  Tribe was both participant in and a recipient of an insurgence of black creativity at that time, one that worked from an artistic center but found worldwide success.

Back in the day on the boulevard of Linden

A prominent thread in the film tracks the reasons for the group’s breakup in 1998.  The exploration of the personal angst of this process, one depicted in painful blow-by-blow detail (in one scene Q-Tip and Phife, two of the group’s members, actually have a physical confrontation backstage), while perhaps required for narrative honesty, felt too emphasized.  At moments it was like watching Divorce Court despite the measured and thoughtful tenor in which each member expressed his viewpoint. Bands that form in high school, as this one did, will all be challenged by the trials brought on by maturity (i.e, changing personal ambitions, starting families, competition, failing health, and so on).  While these topics certainly address the “life” aspect of the documentary’s title, the somewhat sensationalistic treatment here threatened to overshadow why fans loved and continue to revere the group: their beats and rhymes.

A most compelling feature of Beats, Rhymes, and Life, told in the words of the artists themselves, are explanations of the creative processes that became their stock and trade.  Since the appearance of Tricia Rose’s groundbreaking book about hip hop culture Black Noise (1994), writing on the genre has exploded into a cottage industry. Writers deftly consider the music’s social context with an emphasis on the subject matter of the lyrics.   What is generally lacking, however, is what we get a glimpse of in the film: how the music is put together.

We learn that Tribe constituted a delicate ecology of personal and artistic abilities and connections.  It’s amazing to witness Q-Tip reveal his insatiable appetite for recordings from all genres.  In one scene he’s in a workspace retracing how and from what sources he put together the beat of a track with a turntable.  His command and understanding of sound organization could have been the subject of a documentary itself.  Combining samples from jazz and sources from across the sonic spectrum, this technique worked well within hip hop conventions but was heard as an expression setting Tribe apart from their contemporaries.  As poets, their rhymes or flows cruised the American vernacular for referents that were twisted, cleverly taken out of context, dipped in positive self-awareness, and then employed as wit and “consciousness.”

If Q-Tip is featured as the driven, single-minded artist, then Phife, his rapping counterpart, comes across as the reluctant artist.  He’s just as passionate about sports as he is music, and describes writing some of his most compelling and memorable flows while traveling to the recording on the subway.  The film depicts the group’s DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad as accompanists in the worlds of jazz and classical genres are—as studious, observant, and musically keeping the train on the track with an ample skill set, verve and understatement.  (I wish we could have gotten a close look at the notebooks that he always carried onstage!).   And founding but occasional member Jarobi White says that his participation was about the spirituality of fraternity and support he got from the group.

Such youthful ecologies are difficult to sustain over time.  But as the throngs of screaming fans proved as they turned out for Tribe’s fateful 2008 reunion tour, an event that serves as a frame for this enjoyable documentary: life may change, but rhymes and beats are forever.

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!