Tag: jazz

Uncategorized

Black History Month: Black music beyond hip-hop

Posted on by Beau Dure

“Black culture is hip-hop culture.”

That’s a controversial statement that opens either a can of worms or a contentious set of discourses — the latter being academicese for “can of worms.” If you’d like to read more about hip-hop history and the uneasiness some people — in my experience, mostly Black people — have with letting hip-hop stand as the primary representation of Black culture, read these …

For the UK’s Academy of Music and Sound, academic/journalist Isobel Trott untangles the complex history and sociology of hip-hop, from parties to protests to problematic violence and misogyny. But she sees more good — and more complexity — than most observers, and she points a finger for hip-hop’s muddled reputation at white audiences embracing its worst aspects: “Once hip-hop entered the mainstream it became increasingly commoditised and increasingly consumed by white audiences. The ‘gangsta image’ was seized on in pop culture, and in this became a popular and essentialist way to view this generation of Black youth.”

https://www.academyofmusic.ac.uk/what-is-hip-hop-and-why-does-it-matter/

In City Journal, Black academic John H. McWhorter is strongly dismissive, even of “harmless” pioneers such as the Sugar Hill Gang, and he takes aim at Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson, whom I vividly remember giving a graduation speech at North Carolina in which he made incorrect references to his alleged field of pop culture. (No, Alanis Morissette was not talking about the back seat of a car.) At times, it’s tempting to reply “OK, Boomer,” but it’s hard not to empathize with his concern that the best-selling violent/misogynist rap songs, bought and lauded by a lot of white people, paint an ugly picture of Black people in America.

https://www.academyofmusic.ac.uk/what-is-hip-hop-and-why-does-it-matter/

Journalist Juwan Lee insists that the focus on material things represent aspiration to rise above poverty and that violent lyrics are meant to deter violence, not celebrate it. (It’s safe to say I’m skeptical that the violence in hip-hop deters violence, and I’m personally a fan of Rina Sawayama’s skewering of capitalist overreach in the song xS. Whether hip-hop has played a role in the unwise money-management that has led many athletes — certainly not just Black athletes, but the hip-hop audience isn’t just Black — would be an interesting academic study.)

https://www.academyofmusic.ac.uk/what-is-hip-hop-and-why-does-it-matter/

?uestlove, the drummer for the Roots and therefore a steady presence on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, points to a paradox — as hip-hop has become ubiquitous and therefore synonymous with Black culture, it becomes meaningless: “Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere.”

On the other hand, ?uestlove has defended hip-hop against cultural appropriation on Saturday Night Live, smacking around some white posers. But it seems to me his point is that there’s more to Black culture than hip-hop, particularly the misogynist sex (no wonder Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion got such attention for pushing back with the filthy WAP), weed and commercialism that dominates the charts.

Back in the late ’80s, when I graduated high school, you could count the number of black musical artists that weren’t in hip-hop on two hands — maybe. You had folksingers like Tracy Chapman, rock bands like Living Colour, pop acts like Lionel Richie, many kinds of soul singers — and that doesn’t even contend with megastars like Michael Jackson and Prince, who thwarted any easy categorization.

https://www.academyofmusic.ac.uk/what-is-hip-hop-and-why-does-it-matter/

If you know anything at all about the history of American music, you know that the contributions of Black musicians didn’t start with a couple of turntables in New York. Nearly every genre that has been on the charts since 1960 or so was built on the foundations of what Black musicians did.

https://www.academyofmusic.ac.uk/what-is-hip-hop-and-why-does-it-matter/

So for Black History Month, let’s celebrate those who prove Black culture isn’t limited to hip-hop, and Black musicians aren’t limited to whatever “beats” are belched out by a few synth loops and an 808 drum machine. I’ll stick to people who are still alive, with apologies to Prince, Michael Jackson and Jimi Hendrix.

Some of the musicians incorporate aspects of hip-hop, which just proves the point that no one should be placing any limits on any musicians.

Living Colour

Since ?uestlove mentioned them, let’s start here. You might know Cult of Personality, an appropriate song for the Trump era. They also ripped through some sociopolitics on songs like Open Letter (To A Landlord) and Type, propelled by a tight, blazing power trio of guitarist Vernon Reid, bassist Muzz Skillings (later Doug Wimbish) and drummer Will Calhoun, backing the powerhouse vocals of Corey Glover, who has dabbled in film (Platoon) and stage (Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, one of the best roles a singer can take).

The song that blows me away is This Is The Life, which builds quickly to a thunderous Calhoun fill and then Glover singing two verses that empathize with a downtrodden person (“in another life, you might have been a genius”) before turning the tables with a verse urging that person to look on the bright side (“in another life, you’re always lonely”) and a carpe diem pre-chorus (“in your real life, treat it like it’s special”).

Fishbone

I’m not qualified to say how much the album The Reality of My Surroundings is representative of Black peoples’ lives. But it’s certainly a vivid tour of someone’s life, from despairing over violence (Fight the Youth), scoffing at junkies (Junkies Prayer starts as a Lord’s Prayer parody beginning with “My pusher, who are in the crack house / hallowed be thy bitches and hos”), daily chores (Housework) and sex (the weakest part of the album and perhaps a tinge homophobic).

The closer is the brilliant Sunless Saturday, which they tore through on Saturday Night Live and have continued to use as an anthem through several personnel changes around bassist John Norwood Fisher and frontman Angelo Moore, who opens this performance in Bordeaux with a long jump into the crowd, perhaps taking the “trust fall” to new heights. Or lengths.

Mark White, Spin Doctors

Before dismissing Spin Doctors as a white jam band, listen to the way Mark White’s bass funks up the band to this day.

Josh Winstead, Metric

Before dismissing Metric as a white Canadian band, listen to the way Josh Winstead’s bass anchors the dreamy Gimme Sympathy.

60% of the Dave Matthews Band

Before dismissing the Dave Matthews Band as a white jam band … wait, were you seriously dismissing DMB as a white jam band?

Carter Beauford’s drum kit looks like it’d fit right home in a prog-rock band.

Darius Rucker / Hootie and the Blowfish

I’m not wading into the country charts to see what sort of impact Darius Rucker has had as a solo artist, though it’s clear the CMA voters love him, but you might remember his pop-rock band.

Kele Okereke, Bloc Party

One of the more intriguing alt-rock bands to emerge from Britain is fronted by the son of Nigerian immigrants.

George Benson

Maybe “smooth jazz” isn’t your thing, but he has recorded a few songs that are difficult to resist.

Branford Marsalis

Other styles of jazz may not be your thing, but rather than point toward Sting’s multiracial band from his early solo days, I’m going to go with a fun album with bassist Milt “The Judge” Hinton, who was pushing 80 at the time.

Tracy Wormworth, bass

Also played with Sting at one time and has toured with the B-52s, but let’s check out this iconic bass line you’ve all heard many a winter. (Sadly, I can’t find a performance video, but this will do.)

And finally …

Stevie Wonder

The opening hi-hat (played by Stevie himself) on Superstition says more than most songs of the 21st century.

You get the idea. And this list is just a sampling to show the diversity of Black musicians worth celebrating. In Black History Month, it’s worth going back in time to see how Black musicians inspired every genre we have today (yes, even country, which has some roots in what was called “blues” in the early 20th century), but Black musicians aren’t limited to one time period or one genre.

0
music, personal

Paul Jeffrey, Duke jazzman

Posted on by Beau Dure

I was in over my head. I knew it, and so did the man sitting across the desk from me.

He was a legitimate jazz man who ran in the same circles as Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. I was a 17-year-old kid from a lily-white private school whose “jazz band” started with two teachers and two students playing nothing that sounded like jazz. We were popular, at least, because we debuted by stretching the Hawaii Five-O theme with so many self-indulgent solos that the assembly ran long and several tests scheduled for the next period had to be rescheduled. All I really knew of jazz was what I’d read in Musician magazine, which had encouraged me to pick up a couple of cassettes by Miles Davis and various Marsalis brothers.

In that high school “jazz” group, being a jack of all trades and master of none was fine. I’d quickly gathered that the Duke Jazz Ensemble was a little different.

But he humored me as I worked my way through several instruments. I was a competent classical piano player who could get through some complex arrangements of Rush songs. I was competent on clarinet, which I would later play in marching band, though it’s strange that he let me audition on an instrument that they didn’t really use in the jazz ensemble. I could play Stand By Me and a few other tunes on bass, though I’d never been trained in doing the “walking bass” so essential to a jazz ensemble. He got a good laugh out of my drum set audition.

As intimidating as he was, a compliment from him went a long way. Two of us auditioned on guitar, and he tested our ears by playing a note on piano and asking us to match it. The first kid had no clue. I had built up a decent relative pitch — something that would help me boost my GPA in music classes — by figuring out rock riffs on my guitar, so once I found the first note he played, I was able to follow him with no trouble. He tried to trick me with a tritone that went nowhere near the key in which he was playing, but I got it right away.

He nodded. “You have a good ear,” he said.

My audition also led to one of those freak coincidences that changed my college years. I needed to find a string bass on which to audition, and I asked an older gentleman in the equipment room for help. “Oh, you play bass?” he asked? That man was Paul Bryan, who had led the Duke Wind Symphony for decades and was getting ready to take most of the group on one last semester-long trip to Vienna. He also liked having string bass in the Wind Symphony, as counterintuitive as that sounds. No, I didn’t go to Vienna, but the man they called “PB” recruited me to play in the “scab” Wind Symphony that stayed home, and I stuck around to play seven of my eight semesters. The conductors who replaced PB — who still sometimes plays with the group at the age of 95 — decided they needed a percussionist more than they needed a bass player, so I switched instruments.

Back in jazz ensemble, things weren’t going well. Somehow, we settled on having me play bass clarinet, on which I would play tenor sax parts. I simply couldn’t keep up — at times, I was playing every other phrase and letting my section-mates handle the rest. A lot of the time, I just hoped Jeffrey couldn’t hear me.

He was a unique conductor. He tucked his arms in close to his body and flapped his hands in 4/4 time like a bird making a really weak effort to fly. If the tune was in 5/4, he’d add a little beat as his hands swung out. And if we sounded horrible, he’d let us know — he’d remind us how long he spent writing out the charts for us to play and tell us he needed a few shots after our last rehearsal.

Before one concert, a pad fell off the bass clarinet. He growled and offered little help in fixing it, so I just went back to my dorm and missed it.

That wouldn’t be the last I saw or heard of Paul Jeffrey, though. We overlapped in another of the activities I sought out upon arrival at Duke, DJing at the campus radio station. I went through DJ training, where the one thing they emphasized was that we should never leave “dead air” — you play a song, you speak as soon as it’s finished, and you speak until you play the next song.

Paul Jeffrey had a different approach:

(song ends … silence … a few more seconds …)

That was ……. Impressions …… by John Coltrane …………….. from North Carolina …… Coltrane ……………….. he’s from North Carolina ………… and that was ………………….. Impressions.

I actually thought his show was more interesting than the rest.

My extracurriculars changed after that first semester. I never got called to take a DJ shift at WXDU for some reason. Nor did the people at Cable 13 ever get back to me. I joined the marching band my sophomore year, though I ran out of time to stick with it the next year. I stayed with the wind symphony until my last semester.

And after that first semester, I walked away from the jazz ensemble and walked into the office at The Chronicle, where it’s no exaggeration to say my life changed — I found friends, memories and a career.

The paper needed more arts coverage, and so I wound up frequently calling on Paul Jeffrey, often with a bit of trepidation. Big things were happening with jazz at Duke — the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz was coming to Durham and would be affiliated with the school. I wound up in Jeffrey’s office on the phone with people who were setting up the institute, and he growled at me once when I asked someone to tell me about the interest in the project outside Durham. I insisted I was trying to get across to the Duke audience how big this really was; he wanted to get across to me that the South was jazz’s heart and soul, a point re-emphasized when I wound up on the phone listening to Thelonious Monk Jr. for about 30 minutes, trying to scribble down quotes as he went through an enthusiastic monologue about jazz and the South.

This was the big time. I wound up standing on a stage trying to do interviews and getting elbowed aside by photographers getting pictures of Clint Eastwood, who had come to Duke along with Steve Allen and Clark Terry to kick-start the institute.

I crossed paths a few other times with Jeffrey due to scheduling conflicts back in the days before the music department figured out how to avoid such problems. I wound up playing in pit orchestras for the stage musical group Hoof n Horn, where my “jack of all trades, master of none” traits were put to good use. I played woodwinds in one show, drums in a couple of others, and bass in a couple more. One day after exams and before our Graduation Weekend shows, I went to the equipment room at Duke to find that Jeffrey had taken all of the string basses — some Italian jazz buddies were in town, and it was his right to take them. I wound up playing bass parts on a keyboard for the final shows.

My senior percussion recital was scheduled a few hours before a jazz performance in Baldwin Auditorium. I walked in before my performance to find my equipment shoved to the side, with the stage set up for the jazz show. I managed to get my stuff up to the front of the stage to play. After my recital, which went surprisingly well despite the vibraphone falling over, I recruited audience members to help me reset the stage. “We don’t want to make Paul Jeffrey mad,” I said.

But Jeffrey’s honesty meant his compliments and his willingness to help out were sincere. If I needed to get in touch with someone, he’d help me track that person down. One day at The Chronicle, I called Jeffrey to ask something for the next story on the institute, just a couple of days after my last one. “I read your story,” he said. “You’re a good writer.”

To this day, I don’t know if I’ve ever been prouder to hear that.

I saw Paul Jeffrey at least once in the year after graduation. I was bouncing up to The Chronicle office, having not yet cut the cord from the group I considered family. He was probably headed to Page Auditorium next door. He smiled and greeted me warmly, and we chatted for a few minutes about the arts at Duke. I think he and I recognized that we shared a passion for the subject, even if our experiences differed greatly.

The Thelonious Monk Institute never got off the ground in Durham for some reason. But Jeffrey stuck around Duke for a couple of decades, leading the jazz ensemble and teaching a jazz history course that was well-known for being one of the easier classes at Duke. He didn’t care about that rep, he’d say, as long as kids were listening to the music.

Listening to the music was what mattered.

Paul Jeffrey passed away on Friday at age 81. And while I never became a great jazz musician or even a great jazz writer, I’m glad I listened to him. I’m sure thousands of Duke alumni feel the same way.

3