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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue Staging the Folk: New York City’s Friends of Old Time Music by Ray Allen Music and Identity in Mel Brooks’s The Producers by Katherine Baber In Search of Aaron Copland: Review by Wayne Schneider American Opera: Reviews by Jeff Taylor and Bruce MacIntyre |
Celebrating
Randy Weston by Jeff Taylor and
Hank Williams
Randy Weston Photograph by Ariane Smolderen Honoring a
Brooklyn Son ISAM is delighted to announce that on 1 June 2006 pianist and composer Randy Weston, one of the music world’s greatest treasures, will be receiving an honorary doctorate from Brooklyn College. He will be joined on the dais by Arturo O’Farrill, another sought-after pianist and Director of Lincoln Center’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, who will be receiving a Distinguished Alumnus Award. The preceding evening, Brooklyn College president Christoph Kimmich will welcome both pianists, along with Salim Washington and members of the Brooklyn College Jazz Ensemble, for a special invitation-only concert and cabaret. Celebrating Weston is especially appropriate this year, as he has reached his eightieth birthday (he was born the same year as both Miles Davis and John Coltrane) and shows no signs of slowing down. As he has put it with characteristic humor: “I plan to celebrate my birthday all year long.” The festivities got off to a brilliant start on 12 and 14 January 2006 with two concerts at Long Island University’s Kumble Theater in downtown Brooklyn, both events sponsored by Brooklyn-based presenting organization 651 Arts. For the first concert, in an intimate setting where he was surrounded by the audience onstage, Weston showed why he is one of the few jazz pianists today who can sustain an entire evening of solo piano (his mastery of this demanding art form is further proved by 2002’s brilliant “Ancient-Future,” released with his 1984 solo recording Blue). In the second concert, Weston was joined by longtime compatriots Alex Blake on bass, percussionist Neil Clarke, and trombonist Benny Powell, as well as a variety of musicians from around the world: a Senegalese kora master, a virtuoso on the Chinese pipa, and, perhaps most importantly, Cuban conga legend Candido (Camero), himself eighty-five years young. Typically, in the latter concert, Weston seemed as much listener as participant, delighting in watching and hearing his fellow musicians honor him. They, in return, showed him a combination of love and respect that added an intangible, almost mystical aura to the proceedings. On 14 February, as part of ISAM’s Speaker Series, Weston performed a solo concert of his own works here at Brooklyn College, and engaged in an informal dialogue with the audience. He was honored afterwards with a piano-shaped red velvet cake from Brooklyn’s legendary Cake Man Raven, and a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday,” with our own Distinguished Professor Tania León on piano. It is especially fitting
that Weston will be honored by an institution that bears the name of his
birthplace, for the vibrant cultural scene of Brooklyn—where he still
makes his home—has always remained a crucial force in his art. One
hopes that this celebration will encourage others to investigate Brooklyn’s
rich jazz history and continuing vibrant musical life—one quite
distinct from that of its more famous neighboring borough. (Note: For a detailed study of Brooklyn’s jazz scene, see Robin Kelley’s piece in our Spring 2004 issue.) —Jeff
Taylor Randy Weston and
Brooklyn’s African Village In 1992 pianist and composer Randy Weston explained the genesis of one of his original works on The Spirits of Our Ancestors CD, “African Village Bedford-Stuyvesant”: African Village Bedford-Stuyvesant is that part of
Brooklyn where I grew up as a boy. It was the most popular part because
that’s where most of the clubs were, the ballrooms. … So this
song is just a description of that special community of Black people from
different parts of the world—from the Caribbean, from the southern part
of the United States, from the West. For me it was like an African Village
despite the fact that it was located in Brooklyn, New York.1 The “African Village” is a suitable metaphor for Weston’s musical approach, as he envisions the village in global terms, encompassing the entire African diaspora, from Morocco to Bed-Stuy. Weston has lived in both places, but now spends most of his time in New York. Weston’s introduction to music was rather inauspicious: it involved piano lessons reluctantly taken at his parents’ behest that he later likened to “forced labor.” Fortunately, he endured them and soon became immersed in Brooklyn’s unique jazz world of the 1930s and 1940s. This nurturing environment was key to Weston’s development, as the borough was brimming with musicians and places to hear live performances. Brooklyn’s “African Village” was the perfect setting to coax a reluctant teenager to move beyond private study and actually become part of the music scene. Weston recalled some of the musicians and clubs in a 1970 interview with Art Taylor in Notes and Tones: At one time, the jazz in Brooklyn was unbelievable. We had Tony’s, we had the Baby Grand on Sunday afternoons. Lem Davis and I used to give concerts and we would feature Monk, Bennie Green, and J. J. Johnson in the early forties. The Putnam Central was the spot because everybody was there: Dizzy, Miles, Leo Parker, John Lewis, Milt Jackson.2 Weston credits the sounds of Duke Ellington and Count Basie with shaping his musical approach, but Thelonious Monk was his major early influence. Weston recalls informal lessons at Monk’s apartment, where he and often a few fellow musicians would gather to sit wordlessly and listen to the master play for hours on end. “Monk was the one that really reached me because of his sound. He put the magic, for me, into the music. For me, his music is very natural, very logical, a combination of both,” Weston remembered in a recent interview.3 Part of what impressed him was that Monk “didn’t have to play a lot of notes.” Like his mentor, Weston generally prefers a few well-timed pitches or chords, often percussive and syncopated—with the occasional Monkesque blue note thrown in—rather than a volley of sound. The diasporic crossroads that Brooklyn is today mirrors Weston’s musical approach, which he calls “African Rhythms”—the same name he uses for his ensemble. Weston is ambivalent about the label “jazz,” which he feels isn’t comprehensive enough to fully describe the music he makes. In 1970, Weston told Art Taylor: Today the word jazz doesn’t describe what’s going on in music. Music has become more modern, more rhythmic. It’s more influenced by modern classical music. I think music now has become more personalized. I have been searching for a title to describe my own music and I thought of African Rhythms. Because I play calypso, I play jazz, I play spirituals, I play Latin, and I play African music. So how can anybody just call me a jazz musician? What I do is use the root of all this music, which is Africa and the rhythms of Africa.4 It seems Weston’s philosophy hasn’t changed very much; he answered a question about African/hip hop musical connections directed to him at a recent Brooklyn College performance by referring to the African basis for the rhythms used in both. Weston, the child of a Panamanian father and African American mother, absorbed both musical and non-musical influences from his parents. His father was a follower of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, known for its attempts to return blacks to Africa and also for its pan-African goal of creating a spiritual connection between Africans scattered across the globe, and he would remind young Randy of his African roots and the need to study his heritage, despite his home in the United States. From his mother, Weston received “the black church and the blues.”5 As a result, Weston’s sound is crafted from a variety of sources: “cultural memory … of the black church, of going to calypso dances, dancing to people like the Duke of Iron, of going to the Palladium and hearing the Latin music.”6 His comments reflect the ability of African Rhythms, culled from the experience of the cultural mash-up created every time Africa’s descendants encountered another culture, to transform and yet survive. Weston’s pan-Africanist approach is one that resonates throughout his music and life. From his classic 1960 recording Uhuru Africa!, issued a year before he would travel to the motherland for the first time and recently re-released as part of a boxed set by Mosaic Select, through his 2006 CD on Random Chance Records, Zep Tepi, African themes, melodies, and rhythms permeate Weston’s work. A number of his compositions, including “Blue Moses” and “African Cookbook,” have become jazz standards in their own right, and are based on traditional sacred tunes. “Blue Moses” is based on a Gnawa sacred melody, but is a good example of the deeper African musical connection. Weston explains that “[t]he Gnaoua believe that every person has a color and a note. Blue happens to be the color of the saint of whom this song is about, thus Blue Moses. Blue is also the color that I responded to at a Gnaoua ceremony.”7 Zep Tepi is Weston’s return to the trio format, a staple of his early career, joined by musicians who are now regular sidemen in Weston’s “African Rhythms” ensembles, Neil Clarke (bass) and Alex Blake (African percussion). Other Zep Tepi tracks offer versions of familiar Weston tunes, including “High Fly” and “The Healer,” and pieces composed, appropriately enough, as tributes to his father (“Portrait of Frank Edward Weston”) and Thelonious Monk (“Ballad for T”). As a whole, Zep Tepi has a sound that is often contemplative and introspective, taking advantage of the space allowed by the trio format. Weston’s other
major project this year is a historic reunion with the Gnawa Master Musicians
of Morocco, recreating a 1999 collaboration captured on the live Spirit!
The Power of Music CD (Sunny Side) and documenting the influence of
Gnawan music on him when he lived in Morocco in the early 1970s. In A
Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz, Norman Weinstein comments
on the difficulty faced by artists like Weston in creating Afrocentric music.
Weston has attempted to meld cultures through his inventiveness and
imagination, creating in the process what Weinstein calls an
“intercultural weave based upon a profound respect for the complexity
of music East and West,” resulting in a “hybrid synthesis [that]
does not reduce two [musical] languages to a lowest common
denominator.”8 Through
study, observation, and practice, Weston has been able to bridge the divide
between Brooklyn and Africa, offering a synthesis of styles and flavors that
honors the entire diasporic legacy while allowing each tradition to stand on
its own as a distinct part of a unified whole. The tour with the Gnawan
musicians is a fitting direction for Weston to take, as so much of his career
and life have followed the West African concept of sankofa: the idea
that one needs to recapture and understand the past for the strength and
wisdom necessary to move into the future. —Hank Williams The Graduate Center, CUNY Notes 1 Randy Weston, The Spirits of
Our Ancestors. CD insert booklet. Polygram Records, 1992. 2 Arthur Taylor, Notes and
Tones: Musician to Musician Interviews (Da Capo Press, 1993), 20. 3 Fred Jung, “A
Fireside Chat with Randy Weston.” All About Jazz website
(http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article_print.php?id=386), accessed 4
February 2006. 4 Taylor, Notes and Tones,
29. 5 Elzy Kolb, “Randy
Weston, Still Feeling the Pulse of African Rhythms,” New York Times (22
July 2001, Westchester Weekly, Section 14WC): 10. 6 Jung, “A Fireside
Chat.” 7 Weston, Spirits of Our
Ancestors booklet. 8 Norman C. Weinstein, A
Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (Scarecrow Press, 1992), 114. ISAM home Who we
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