From the late 19^th to the early 20^th centuries, African American musicians inhabited a world of hustle on ecumenical fronts.  Long before our present-day ideas about genre had become stubborn, calcified categories, a more porous performance culture existed.  And black musicians rarely “stayed in their place” but rather worked across invisible boundaries.  Opera singers like Sissieretta Jones with a legendary career on the international concert stage could find easy work on the minstrelsy circuit.  The classically trained violinist Will Marion Cook unapologetically wrote, in collaboration with poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the pioneering musical-comedy sketch Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, which premiered on Broadway in 1898.  Scott Joplin, the ragtime pianist/composer who got American audiences dancing their way out of Victorianism, also composed the groundbreaking opera Treemonisha in 1911.  You get the picture; it was all about stretching, as they say.  So every time I read Jason Moran tagged simply as “jazz pianist,” I think: “wait a minute—he’s so much more.”  He’s genius personified, and he never stays in his place.

Moran, a recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur “genius” award, has done much in his career thus far to challenge the idea of category, indeed, to push out at the edges of jazz’s sometimes defensive palisade by crisscrossing artistic medium and by turning this family of idioms on its head.  Some would, indeed, call such audacious attitude, genius.  The term is such a slippery concept.  It’s a label that gets tossed around musical circles usually to describe an artist with a highly visible and prolific content.  We also use it to talk about people with an unusually profound endowment of technical facility through which they express something that audiences perceive as “universal,” “timeless,” or transcending the moment in which they experience them.  But musical genius is always in the ears, hearts, and heads of the beholder.  Experiencing it, in my view, is not a matter of transcendence.  It’s about using one’s mechanics of delivery and sense of social constitution—knowledge of how musical codes “work”—to anchor listeners in a deep sense of the “present tense.”  Genius, despite its reputation, is never a matter of isolated, rugged individualism.  As Moran demonstrates time and time again, it can also be a collaborative affair, one in which artistic communities in motion become living models of thoughtful and meaningful social interaction, something that we all, I believe, are born to desire and witness.

How’s he do it?  Moran’s artistic palette encompasses more than music.  It interrogates how all of the arts—music, film, poetry, architecture, dance, and painting—can directly inform each another.  Because of his ecumenical approach, his work has helped to expand not only the language but also the large possibilities of the contemporary jazz scene.  Over the last ten years, his recordings as both leader and sideman, trace the development of an artist exploring new and eclectic sound worlds.  In his performance rhetoric—one that is instantly recognizable—you can hear many of his wide influences: the Southwest blues, traditional jazz, contemporary modal, and even traces of Berg, Monk, and Webern and more.  I can think on no other young pianist on the jazz scene today who seems to be in perpetual artistic motion—constantly searching, forever challenging and chiding his muse.  He has engaged collaborations with museums, choreographers, art historians, poets, performance artists, and the result has been adventurous projects that embrace the power derived from unusual juxtapositions.  He is, arguably, the most critically engaged pianist to emerge on the jazz scene in years.

Last year, I caught Moran live in performance with his band of ten years, the Bandwagon, and even that highlighted both boundary crossing and collaboration.   Surrounded by a clutter of written scores, they moved up something serious through an adventurous set of compositions from past projects and their latest CD, Ten.  They opened with a powerful reading of a song written by Alicia Hall Moran, Jason’s talented and very soprano spouse.  “Blessing the Boats” was packed with sly ostinato figures in the piano, pushy pop musical gestures, and sinewy melodies winding through tricky harmonic environments.  It was an exploration of composition in process that worked well, preparing us for the meal in the guise of a meaningful gracing of the table.

The empathetic and telepathic virtuosity demonstrated among his colleagues drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen simply astounded.  These very strong musical personalities are not simply a backdrop for Moran’s musings: they are part and parcel of the sonic mosaic that has become his vehicle in much the same way as Duke Ellington’s orchestra was for his.  Moran’s compositional signature and improvisation rhetoric also leave a lasting impression long after the last strains were heard.  I’ve seen this band on several occasions, and all three of these qualities were present and rewarding every time.

Throughout the set Moran’s performance rhetoric included full voiced gospel-style chords in the right hand with single note doublings with Mateen; Earl Hines’ “trumpet style”; Bud Powell-esque bebop lines; Cecil Taylor-like passages of dissonant, florid, pianism; and gutsy tremolo passages that sound like a vocalized field hollers straight out of the ring shout rituals of black expressive culture.  His most intense solos move rapidly between arpeggios superimposed over dissonant harmonic structures and spirited scales.  As Moran combines this rhetoric over the course of several songs, one experiences in real time a white-knuckled virtuosity awash in dizzying counterpoints of melodies, timbres, and polyrhythms that ebb and flow in apparent spontaneity.

His compositions are studies in the economic use of emotional momentum.  Many move from precious, pithy statements into grand pronouncements and back again.  Some leave you on the mountaintop, breathless.  The Bandwagon achieves these in the context of grooves that while infectious, are not easily digested.  That is, one has to concentrate to perceive the large structures of their form.  They are not built on smallish cyclic harmonic patterns but on larger scale patterns of repetition. Moreover, because of their length, they can sound like seamless multi-movement jazz suites.  Their grooves take on many rhythm configurations: from soupy, down-home blues, hard bop swing, or rhythm rhetoric from more contemporary sound worlds.  Moran’s occasional use of onstage pre-recorded sounds give the effect of an installation art piece, where we in the audience are snapped out of our typical listening positions and drawn into a more intense listening and visual relationship with the band.

And speaking of art pieces, Moran’s various collaborations with artists such as Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, and Glenn Ligon together with his impressive commissions in the museum world recall and extend black American musical cultures of the past in which artistic expression was a way to transgress boundaries, not reify them.  Maybe it was the tenor of times.  But in the decades leading up to high and heavy years of the Civil Rights and Black Consciousness Movements, African American artists across the board believed that their work could collectively engage, interrogate and challenge the status quo.  This quote from the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks captures this energy:

“My husband and I knew writers, knew pianists and dancers and actresses, knew photographers galore.  There were always weekend parties to be attended where we merry Bronzevillians could find each other and earnestly philosophise sometimes on into the dawn, over martinis and Scotch and coffee and an ample buffet.  Great social decisions were reached.  Great solutions for great problems were provided . . .. Of course, in that time, it was believed, still, that the society could be prettied, quieted, cradled, sweetened, if only people talked enough, glared at each other yearningly enough, waited enough.”

Glenn Ligon

I’ve attended a Jason and Alicia Hall Moran house party and can testify that this kind of energy still thrives.  There’s more at stake in his circle than socializing and collaborating for the hell of it; it’s even larger than making art objects for their own sake.  Rather, the whole enterprise—the art, the music, the building of a collective—is about what art historian and curator Kellie Jones has recently called “community archive,” a quest for a larger meaning through art.  For her, the idea describes “how artistic communities –be they families of origin [or families by marriage], groups, movements, neighborhoods, and so on—create and theorize their pasts, illuminating the dialogic among individuals and the collectives to which they belong, and in which artistic meaning is derived.”  (But please don’t think there’s not good food and music, too!).

Adrian Piper

Jones was asked in Artnews back in 2007 to predict who the art world would be looking at 105 years hence.  She said Jason Moran, and many of us agreed.  Since that time he’s continued to experiment, traversing sonic, literary, and visual art worlds, and then comes back to share what he’s learned.  Like his predecessors from well over a century ago, Moran’s approach obliterates boundaries, colors outside the lines, and poses a critical question: “Whose worlds are they anyway?”

Attendance to live musical events is a part of my “Jazz Is a Woman” course at UPenn.  Here, a student details her reactions to hearing jazz great Eddie Palmieri in concert for the first time. Enjoy!

By Joy McKinley

Walking into the Annenberg Center to see the Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Band, I truthfully had no idea what to expect. I’d heard jazz before, certainly. I had also been somewhat familiar with “Latin” music. What I hadn’t heard before was the two genres fused together. I had also never been to a concert in such a formal setting. I must admit I felt a bit of trepidation along with my excitement when taking my seat. What if I didn’t like it? Did that mean I wasn’t cultured enough to recognize pure genius when I heard it? Needless to say, as the lights dimmed I was literally on the edge of my seat.

I found, about two minutes into the performance in fact, that not only was the slight unease I had been feeling completely unfounded, but that I was entirely incapable of holding onto to such feelings in the audience of one Eddie Palmieri. The band walked onto the stage, set up behind their instruments, began to play, and were promptly cut off by a simple flick of the hand. Something was wrong.

Silence before the storm

There were many different ways Mr. Palmieri could have handled a technical issue on stage. The audience was palpably distressed by the situation, and the night could have gone any number of ways with a simple change in attitude. He chose to handle the issue with patience, sincerity, and a warm welcoming sense of humor that invited me to be a participant in the experience of the night, rather than a simple observer. His conversation and light-hearted banter set the tone for the entire performance. He created a space of fellowship, of commonality and community, even before the music began.

But oh, when the music began…

It was a fiery blend of smooth and percussive, staccato and marcato; a texture of sounds that inspired movement of the body and soul. The congo and bongo drums (and cow bell) reflected Mr. Palmieri’s self-proclaimed Latino roots. The trumpet and alto sax recognizable in almost every jazz ensemble, whose dulcet tones gave way to rough growls and tremulous high notes, added layers of meaning to Mr. Palmieri’s expressive tickling of the ivories. The harmonies were well recognized as those often associated with Latin music and the rhythms were all geared toward movement and energy. It was a veritable volleying of the emotional focal point, repetition used as a tool to highlight creative  improvisation. Mr. Palmieri’s silences were just as loud as his booming crescendos.

Pre-concert interview with the great Eddie Palmieri

Though each of the musicians showed virtuosity in their own right, it was the feeling of community created by their interactions with each other and with the audience that brought the music to heights of emotion that are unattainable outside of live performance. It was a show I’ll not soon forget; spectacular because of its flaws, and not in spite of them. I couldn’t have asked for anything better, and will never again expect anything less from Mr. Eddie Palmieri.

Photo: Mike Schreiber

In my previous two posts on the Robert Glasper CD Black Radio (Blue Note) I laid out some broad ways to think about sound organization in the project, the notion of branding in today’s music as well as some ideas about how we can begin to think about it as “post-genre” black music.  As the cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal has written in his insightful review of the CD, my usage of this term might seem like an oxymoron.  What he is indicating, of course, is that the concept “genre” operates as an index of sound and the social ideas assigned to it.  In other words, people socially agree on what sounds mean, to what community they “belong,” and what extra-musical connotations they might convey and so on.  So, if it’s post-genre, where does the idea of black fit in?

One of the things that’s got me going about Black Radio (particularly after Neal’s meditation of it in the context of historical “black radio” (yes!) is that it reminds me of growing up listening to WVON (Voice of the Negro).  Leonard and Phil Chess of Chess Records owned the Chicago-based AM station for a time in the 1960s.  We heard it all: gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, pop, and because it was Chicago, some more blues. (And if you were a churchgoer and fortunate enough to employ a “note-reading” musician, you heard classical anthems on first Sunday, too.)  A musical eclecticism defined this community of listeners, linking the generations with an “open-eared,” aesthetically patient temperament: one of your songs was coming up next.  Interestingly, when I visited Houston, Glasper’s hometown a while back, I noticed the same historical consciousness on its radio stations.

Photo: Mike Schreiber

Somehow we lost that.  (Program directors under corporate pressure are primarily responsible, I think).  And that’s the reason I’m digging this project’s look back to that moment and why I’m, at the same time, thinking about the forward-looking term “post-genre” to capture Black Radio’s pulse, contour, and impact.

Let’s go to the music.

For my money, every track is rewarding, and that’s hard to find these days particularly with projects of this size.  To my ears, the most attractive sonic features, as I’ve stated in Part 1 of this review, are (1) how the digital aspects of the recording are foregrounded and (2) how Glasper’s signature harmonic approach shares equal sonic footing—but with an ideal that heroic virtuoso solos need not dominate the message.

It works well and makes the recording sound fresh.  Glasper’s proclivity for a progressive post-bop vocabulary—close, infectious harmonies that pivot around common tones and shifting tonal centers is instantly recognizable.  The project collapses this approach, however, with another aesthetic: gospel music.  One can’t help but associate the way that his talented band—Derrick Hodge (bass), Casey Benjamin (vocoder, flutes, saxophone) and Chris Dave, (drums)—hit strong pocket grooves with all the deep soul of a good Pentecostal sanctified band.  They languish over the rhythmic and harmonic possibilities of these grooves, subtly twisting, turning, and burning as if this was the point of the whole matter.  With all the dramatic innovations that have occurred in gospel music of late, one thing has held strong: the love of repetitive grooves that work the spirit, providing a platform for some of the most moving singing and instrumental improvisations in the industry. This CD brims with this aesthetic. (If you want to hear an example in contemporary gospel, check out a Fred Hammond track—groove city).

Soul's Child, Lalah Hathaway

Take “Cherish the Day,” the cover from the chanting, groove-tress herself, Sade.  The song, released in 1993, is emblematic of a core aesthetic of styles that have occurred in the last, say, twenty years in urban pop: verse/chorus song forms that are built on identical chord structures.  This quality has become ubiquitous in R&B/urban soul song writing because of the spillover effect of hip-hop’s cyclic loops.  What separates this band’s take on this overused technique, however, is that they’ve taken the concept—an analogue interpretation of a digital concept—and injected the improvisational freedom of jazz/fusion/funk sonic complex. It sounds like a very hip church fanning up some community spirit.  Why rush through it for radio’s sake?  Moving something up takes a little time.

I’m partial to female singers, and it’s great to hear Ledisi (firebrand with riffs and range), Me’Shell Ndegeocello’s (whispering, warm molasses), Chrisette Michele (breath/croon/sigh), Erykah Badu (Badu-ism, ‘nuff said), and the Lalah Hathaway—yes, Lalah.  Her reworking of “Cherish the Day” features everything that’s appealing about her vocal presentation: an open-throated, well-supported, and sultry alto voice that the engineer captures excellently.  Breathy vowels abound as she moves through tasty melodic lines, working over chords like her Daddy but with more economy. Lesser-known female singers, sisters Amber and Paris Strother and Anita Bias provide a neo-soul-ish warmth to the project.  One more note on “Cherish the Day”: Mr. Benjamin’s synth solo—doubled in parallel intervals throughout is a gutsy statement reminiscent of Chick Corea’s Elektric Band in the 1980s.  And how the band keeps the groove pitched just above simmer beneath it? Wow.

I’m laughing to myself because I have to stop writing about this project for now. Once it’s nominated for a Grammy and is mentioned as one of the most important “post-genre” projects to appear, I’ll get with it again).   For now, just a few other highlights, quickly—Scouts honor.

I dig how the drums were recorded in some places to sound as if they were from an early 1990s hip-hop track.  The lavish background vocals on the old school slow jam “Oh, Yeah” featuring Musiq Soulchild and Ms. Michele demonstrate that the world still needs a duet—thinking here about Donny and Roberta but with the complexity of a Jaguar Wright multi-track vocal symphony. And Glasper’s acoustic solo after minute four of the track—a tasty ride over a Fender Rhodes drenched soundscape—suggests how this recording would have sounded if long instrumental solos had been the emotional focal point of this project.  (I sure hope one day they release the modulating sequences that begin during the fade out: more, more!)

Vocalist Bilal, featured on the CD and in live performances

Male voices—Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, Shafiq Husayn, Stokely, Mos Def together with the turntablism of Jahi Sundance—are showcased in the most experimental tracks that crisscross generic makers with dizzying aplomb.  Scattered unusual mixes, spoken word, electronic effects, stylistic juxtapositions, fade-ins, oral declamations and rhythmic chants, and so on, combine to frustrate efforts to “place” this music.  Coupled with a written statement in the CD by writer Angelika Beener—less liner note than manifesto—this project announces itself as something new, a turn toward breaking out of sonic/marketing formulas so prevalent in today’s industry offerings.  The most important aspect of this “announcement,” however, is this important idea. For the most part, Black Radio allows the sonic to do the preaching.  Thus, we hear their “post-genre” move as a suggestion and not a mandate.  In other words, only the music in the totality of our experience, music that is boundary-less, market-resistant, artistically adventurous, and conceptually focused can take black music back.  Free Black music!

Part 2

In a recent interview with Nate Chinen, Robert Glasper detailed an aesthetic strategy that would position him to assuage traditionalists’ criticism of his dual pedigree in hip hop and jazz as well as provide him a space to experiment.  Beginning with an impressive set of trio recordings in the tradition of bebop pianist Bud Powell (always a litmus test for the modern jazz pianist), his recorded work gradually moved into other conceptual and sonic territories.  His CD Black Radio is the latest iteration of this on-going journey.

Brands are powerful entities, particularly in the music industry.  Although he claims roots in gospel, R&B, jazz, and hip-hop, Glasper broke into the public consciousness as a “jazz pianist” and it’s hard to break away from that rubric once it sticks.  The same is true for any artist whose work is marketed in a system that makes money from rigid predictability.  This “agreement” becomes a social contract that ultimately seeks to discipline what artists produce, how companies sell it, and the spending and listening habits of specific demographics.

Let’s think about the musical side of all this.  The historical idea of the jazz musician’s art in which Glasper began his recording career coalesced into its present configuration in the years following the 1940s bebop movement.  As historian Scott DeVeaux explains:

“In the wake of bebop, we no longer think of jazz improvisation as a way of playing tunes but as an exacting art form in itself that happens, as a rule, to use popular music as a point of departure.  In the hands of a jazz improviser, a copyrighted popular song is less text than pretext.  Its crucial identifying feature—melody—is erased in the heat of improvisation, leaving behind the more abstract and malleable level of harmonic pattern.  Out of the ashes of popular song comes a new structure, a new aesthetic order, shaped by the intelligence and virtuosity of the improviser; and it is to that structure, and that structure alone, that our attention should be drawn.”

The new aesthetic order, one grounded in the idea of virtuoso spectacle, has been both blessing and curse, an ideal that has, on the one hand, created expressions of sublime beauty, and on the other, eroded the economic base of the once popular music with exercises in abstraction that some claim are too difficult to decipher.  (Sidebar: thanks, in part, of course, to an educational system that’s tying teachers’ hands behind their backs as they are bullied into teaching to standardized tests and thus denying a generation of potential audience bases access to the idea of sustained artistic engagement on a wide range of expressions. But I digress.)

Another one of Glasper’s pedigrees, the sonic world of hip-hop has its own social contract. Indeed, some of its themes of nihilism and confrontation have tended to eclipse the dynamism of its sonic tendencies. Nonetheless, as a system of sound organization it has (like contemporary gospel music) flaunted an irreverent and irrepressible voracious muse, absorbing sound elements as quickly as they appear in the public sphere. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley traces this tendency—one that reflected the portability, reinforcement and transcendence of ethnic identities as they have been bound to specific sound organizations—back to the early days of hip-hop:

“From the outset, rap music embraced a variety of styles and cultural forms, from reggae and salsa to heavy metal and jazz.  Hip Hop’s hybridity reflected, in part, the increasingly international character of America’s inner cities resulting from immigration, demographic change, and new forms of information, as well as the inventive employment of technology in creating rap music.”

Glasper’s Black Radio project indexes and then tackles all of these histories, including the contested complaints from both sides of the river: that “real” hip-hop and “real” jazz should/should not have greater commercial viability.  Indeed, all of the sonic and social agreements of hip-hop, jazz, and gospel congeal in thoughtful, art-full, groove-based arrangements on this recording (and in the live shows, though in different ways).  When one sinks into the crafty details of the songs, into their conceptual and technological framing, into their harmonic environment and relationship to popular song, and into the ideas of virtuoso performance, accessibility and even spirituality, we can better understand this work as an example of “post-genre” black music.  The project plays with sonic, social, and iconic symbols in a way that recalibrates calcified, boring ideas about genre and turns them on their head, all with a good sense of funky adventure.

Next time, I’ll discuss how all of this works in some specific songs.

Dr. Guy

The show was part of the promotional tour for Glasper’s new release Black Radio (Blue Note).   As New York Times music critic Nate Chinen wrote recently it’s “the rare album of its kind that doesn’t feel strained by compromise or plagued by problems of translation.”  That’s quite a feat given that jazz and hip-hop have supposedly operated under different social contracts since the emergence of hip-hop as a musical commodity in the 1980s and the contemporaneous “young lions” movement that shot Wynton Marsalis’ generation to jazz stardom.

Robert Glasper's Black Radio Project, live in Philadelphia

Public discourse pitted the neo-classicist hard bop “analogue nation” against the sample-filled digital soundscapes of hip-hop producers (they’re not even “real” musicians) and their spiting, rhyming counterparts (they’re really not musicians). Although many people could actually find something to praise or disdain in both streams it was easy to find oneself wedged between the polarizing aesthetic/political rhetoric.  That was then.

Changes in the way the “recording” revenue stream of the music industry operates have opened up new creative opportunities for artists.  And musicians are taking them.  Talented engineers and producers—and high quality recording opportunities—abound in all areas of the country.  Many musicians have become equally as astute in engineering, composition and performance, as well as in marketing and promotions.  The clever ones are pushing out the box and crafting projects that are conceptually adventurous.  Some of them purposely share their work around social media sites before they actually “drop.”  Thus, a new kind of art world is emerging in which the shots are not solely being called by “the suits.” Musical collectives that work across the genres lines (those imaginary sonic boundaries that exclude more than they invite) are creating new audience alliances as well.

Although he has a Blue Note record deal, Glasper is on the avant-garde of this new wave.

That is not to say that one cannot find sonic precursors that equally portray what makes Black Radio so appealing and timely.  Chinen mentions a few milestone performers in this regard: Miles Davis, Guru, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Roy Hargrove.  Each produced projects that blended elements of jazz with that of other populist styles.  We can name others.  Let’s push the list back a bit to include someone like Ramsey Lewis who has continued to build a vibrant career sliding easily around the jazz/pop continuum.  And, of course, the clear-headed and creative optimism of Herbie Hancock should certainly count as an important inspiration both in spirit and in technical execution.

MeShell Ndegeocello: Musician Supreme

And we must not forget the important women contributors to this aesthetic sensibility—an oversight that happens a lot.  Gospel great Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark’s songwriting, singing, and instrumental work set that genre on an unapologetic and sonically ecumenical path.  Patrice Rushen’s work as a songwriter, arranger, vocalist, and keyboardist boasted an eclecticism that surely provided neo-soul rhythm tracks some of its harmonic approach.  Bassist and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello’s virtuosity in funk, soul, and jazz—and the singular and courageous way she combines them—must be considered a particularly salient and challenging guidepost.

But what’s going on in the Black Radio project that makes me wonder if we are in the midst of a post-genre moment, a realignment of the traditional social contracts governing music creation, dissemination, and consumption in the industry?  I’ve experienced this project as a subject of written criticism and promotion, as a live performance event, and as a recording.  There’s a lot going on that deserves attention.

Black Radio’s sense of aesthetic balance—of getting it just right—may be derived, in my view, from two provocative musical choices: (1) a self-conscious foregrounding of digital technology in the soundscape that includes tricked out mixes and effects, among other techniques; and (2) a harmonic palette drawn from the progressive post-bop vocabulary—close, infectious harmonies that pivot around common tones and shifting tonal centers.  The songs are otherwise characterized by the careful alignment of sonic symbols from across the historical black popular music soundscape.

Check back in for Part II when I’ll show how these techniques, among many others,  animate the songs on this great project.

Dr. Guy

The Voice: 1963-2012

Perfect vibrato. (Deceivingly) effortless diaphragmic support. Excellent way of “crowding” the cadences with “just enough” sonic information before landing coyly in the next structural part of the song. Widest of ranges: hardly ever “bailed out” by flipping into falsetto. Used the falsetto flip as a subtle garnish. Impeccable intonation (builds “trust” in a listener). Grew more melismatic as time progressed–never overdid this, though–mostly clever twists at the ends of phrases or tossed in between plainly rendered melodic statements that allowed us to sing along at full voice, by ourselves, in the car. Through musical economy and powerful execution could shape the emotional contour of a song whether in long concert-versions or on a 4:00 minute record. A come hither/don’t come another step closer or I’ll call my cousin camera presence. She and “the voice” seemed like two separate entities: she performed it; allowed us to witness it, she obviously enjoyed it herself. But in the end it just couldn’t keep up.

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