Compositions/Improvisations of/on African Rhythms

What Randy Weston called “African rhythms” are all around us. They are the foundation of diasporic music, even as this music has evolved and entered new terrains. The “Africa” in jazz music is best exemplified in the ways that multi-instrumentalist Nicholas Payton locates its essential nature as that sound which has a lineage, a genealogy. In this formulation labels matter less or not at all and in particular the term “jazz” fails, for it “has no roots.” But rhythms do. They are found, heard, and felt in the ancestral energy that guides the healing power of the beat. As is true of most ancient traditions, the drumbeat is the heartbeat. It is in that beat where we find life, where we live.The beauty of all of this is—to borrow from the title of a Kamasi Washington tune—“the rhythm changes.” In the music we chart that “change” not through album sales or popularity, but in the state of improvisation—and its relationship to composition. What does it mean to compose/improvise in/within/upon African rhythms? And what might thinking and tracing those moments where we find space devoted to improvisations reveal about our collective struggle for liberation?[1]

We are in the midst of a generation of artists committed again to addressing these concerns. This is not to say that we are in the midst of renaissance, which too often gets read as a unique moment, and obscures the reality that we are seeing artists within a genealogy that never stopped moving within the tradition and toward our ancestors. Indeed, the renaissance never ended; we are in the midst of a generation of artists so committed to these concerns, because we always are. That does not negate the need to note what is coming to pass, for such notations can effectively allow us to understand and realize the meaning and implications of these sounds, for it this time around the cycle which is unique.Here, Greg Carr’s “Inscribing African World History,” is instructive in allowing us to be able to speak to significance of what we are now seeing and hearing. In that he essay, Carr writes,

“The process of using these speeches [of those who have heard] to guide contemporary behavior can usefully be referred to as “improvisation,” or, in the words of African musician John Birks Gillespie, “a gathering together of all the evidence you have of how to resolve going from here to here to here.” The technique of mastering a musical instrument (in Gillespie's case, the trumpet) by apprenticing in the best of the “speeches” (read: statements of wisdom and mastery) in the antecedent genealogy (in Gillespie's case, he apprentices/repeats and improvises upon/extends the trumpet style, phrasings and range of Roy Eldridge, Louis Armstrong and Joseph “King” Oliver) is evident. Also, when viewed from “Mekhet” (a Kemetic term indicating the past, present and future, captured in the word “after”), Gillespie's repetition and improvisation fits recognizably into the long genealogy (latitude) and widely influential (longitude) of his particular genre of African intellectual work (music).”[2]

Carr states further,

“… moments of ritualized reinforcement seem to suspend time/space, allowing for pause, comparison and assessment of the change in the nature of the individual or group according to the cultural grammar and vocabulary of the group. In this fashion, the cultural memory and identity of the individual and the group (or nation) is extended through time and space while remaining deeply connected vertically to an enduring past and future.”[3]

Music—composition and improvisation—is both the instantiation and narration of memory, and the feeling of and commentary on the meaning of the now. Each generation is connected to their own time and space, and to all of time and space. The question for us is to think and imagine the work of now and ask questions about the nature of the present and its connections to the tradition. In the 1990s, a period in which cultural critics began to speak of a renaissance in the music, with the likes of the now transitioned Roy Hargrove, Christian McBride, Nicholas Payton, Antonio Hart, Joshua Redman, and others bursting onto the scene, a coterie of artists began to chart an eclectic way forward.[4]

The shape that jazz was taking under the imprimatur of “American classical music” became increasingly cathedralized in the elite arts scene, but the Chicago-bred saxophonist, Steve Coleman, and the M-Base collective, were after something different.[5] They began to imagine the meaning of African rhythms. Coleman developed an artistic imagination that sought to connect the expressive worlds of cosmology, history, science and technology, to various theories of music. It was oriented toward thinking through space and time and crafting ways of hearing what exists in this world and the larger universe of which it was a part. But in order to do this, he drew upon the ancient traditions that gathered together those conversations, including classical Africa.With his 1999 record, The Sonic Language of Myth, Coleman developed the sound of African deep thought through a rigorous immersion in the wisdom, religious, scientific texts of Kemet. He describes the project as

“being derived from Kemetic astrological, astronomical and metaphysical sources, all of which are symbolized through the use of sonic structures (forms, rhythms and tones plus intent, emotion and intuition) that masquerade as compositions. It is my belief that this form of communication can be a more direct transmission of information than ordinary language.”

As we study and learn the language, we might also think with artists like Coleman who try to map upon its meaning, that which can be felt through rhythm—African rhythms. For it is true, as Coleman argues “music communicates information, emotions, consciousness and spirit in a direct and abstract manner. It is the perfect language to express life in all its manifest forms because everything is vibration and one can present vibration directly as sound.” Over the course of seven compositions, titled, “Precession, “Maat,” “The Twelve Powers,” “The Gate,” “Seth,” “Ausar (Reincarnation),” and “Heru” (Redemption),” Coleman and an array of special guests, including a young Jason Moran and Ravi Coltrane, walk us through the Kemetic expressions of the meaning of this experience we call life. On an earlier record, The Sign and the Seal (1996), Coleman had utilized his experiences of traveling to Cuba to work with the group, AfroCuba de Matanzas, to connect various African diasporic threads together. Understanding the centrality of the Yoruba, Bakongo, and other African spiritual systems to these diasporic contexts, Coleman followed a long path of artists like Dizzy Gillespie and Katherine Dunham, in composing works that sought to express the power of African diasporic spirituality, not as muses, but as companions to living in harmony and excavating common understandings of the nature of the universe. Again, the album demonstrates that it was rhythm that underlay the potential of arriving at African diasporic cultural unity, what Coleman called “rhythmic-tonal figurations” that move in cycles. The Sign and Seal is the sound of the African diaspora aware of itself in time and space.

A decade or so later with Coleman, Hargrove, Payton, and others serving as direct influences, the emergence of artists like the Oakland-born trumpeter, Ambrose Akinmusire began to take their places. The child of Africans from Mississippi and Nigeria, Akinmusire’s sound might be best understood as meditative. It is a sound that caught the attention of Coleman who subsequently invited him on tour as a teenager. Listening to that sound generates a solemnity that is driven by the urgency of reflecting on the realities of strife around us, in particular the seeming ubiquity of violence of all kinds: the severity of state sanctioned police brutality and the more deliberate violence of neoliberal poverty and dispossession. Though branded by some critics as a “Black Lives Matter” artist of sorts, there is of course much more than this movement to meditate on, and in his work, this comes through in the development of his compositions.What we might be absent the violence of this world is confronted and revealed very clearly in his first two albums with songs like “Dreams of the Manbahsniese,” “M.I.S.T.A.G. (My inappropriate Soundtrack To a Genocide),” and “Henya.” In these compositions, we are ushered into the meditative realm through what he called “the sustain,” an attempt to extend the length of the notes that are possible in jazz compositions. A strategy he continued most glaringly in the imagined savior is far easier to paint released in 2014. Of that project, Akinmusire remarked, “Composition is what I’ve been focusing on the last few years, I want to be able to write a song and not have it need improvisation.” This is perhaps also to say that the work of composition is to create the beauty and force of improvisation. That sense of the sustain and the question of the composition as improvisation, generated a momentum that allowed his sound to reach yet another level of possibility, which is best seen in his live performances.

In 2016, he released A Rift in Decorum which was recorded live and demonstrated an intense meditation that was now driven by rhythm, adding to the layers achieved in his earlier music. Fellow Oakland native and drummer Justin Brown, punctuated the space cleared by Akinmusire’s trumpet in songs like “Taymoor’s World,” and the bass lines of “Umteyo” force us to reckon with strength and power. And repetition—repetition of the very thing that provides us with room to breathe, to be. This past year we witnessed his most “experimental” turn, an attempt to fuse worlds of classical music and hip hop, with Origami Harvest. Together with a twenty-two minute companion video, the project takes Black life to be a question of survival and possibility—but it relishes in the possibility.In perhaps one of his most striking and relatively unheralded projects, Akinmusire takes up the history and memory of what it might have sounded like to suffer under the exploitative regime of prison labor camps, focusing on the sound of Black women. Commissioned by the Berlin Jazz Festival, “Mae/Mae” takes the voice of an imprisoned seamstress, Mattie Mae Thomas, who was recorded as she worked by the Works Progress Administration worker, Herbert Halpert in 1939. Her voice was archived in a collection, called “Workhouse Blues,” and Akinmusire plays with her voice, as the generative force of a suite that features a sextet of blues interpreters: Gerald Clayton on piano, Joe Sanders on bass, Marvin Sewell on guitar, Dean Bowman on additional vocals, and Kendrick Scott on the drums as well as the co-composer. Thomas is credited, too, of course as the “voice, live and spirit.” The three movements in the suite are also dedicated to Akinmusire’s mother, Cora Mae, who grew up ten minutes down the road from the infamous Parchman Penitentiary, where Mattie Mae was recorded. Each component of the suite speaks to the necessity of allowing spirit the space to narrate life’s meaning, the patience to listen for such narrations is arranged through the meditative, the sustainment of the note. But it is in its compositional value, its attempt to direct us to possibility inherent in even the most dire circumstances that mark Mae/Mae as significant. It is as if Akinmusire wanted to articulate the meaning of liberation as imagined and understood by those Black women who sustained life in ways that we would never know, unless we knew them intimately. And it is from that intimate knowing that Akinmusire “inscribes meaning.”

Also working through these meanings on the trumpet is the heir apparent to the New Orleans tradition on that instrument, the 36-year old Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah. The nephew of saxophonist Donald Harrison, who like Christian is an initiated chief in the Afro-Indian spiritual systems of the region, his music has been known to “stretch.” Indeed, stretch music is the name given to the sounds that Scott has developed over the last five years. Building on his earlier works in and around jazz, Scott after having taken the name aTunde Adjuah on his 2012 record self-titled record, sought to imaginatively blend sounds from the indigenous peoples of North America, Africans from the Caribbean, as well as from West Africa. And sometimes with a Trap beat. With bands that have alternatively deployed guitar and alto saxophone players along with his trumpet, records like his 2015 album Stretch Music and his Centennial Trilogy—three albums that were released in 2017—showcased a demonstrable focus on these rhythmic influences. And as with earlier works, like his Anthem (2006) and Yesterday You Said Tomorrow (2011) the focus on questions of justice remained.

To describe Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s playing is to explore the connection between sound and breath. In some of his most moving solos, we reach a point where it seems as if he has lost all of his breath, as if the instrument itself has come alive and taken more than what he had bargained for, ushering him to a place where it seems he will never recover. And then at the critical moment, the sound returns with a flourish that seems to leave both player and audience stunned. Much like Akinmusire, aTunde Adjuah is comfortable extending long notes of lament. But with a sound that is unmistakably his, it is a lament that soon reverts to echoes of what Louis Armstrong mastered in the resolution to the blues. We hearers leave the improvisatory moment fortified. The first time I witnessed this sort of exchange, was in Washington, D.C. around 2014, when in the middle of his solo, aTunde Adjuah drooped over seemingly in pain dropped out of the moment. Or so it seemed. He urged the band to continue, yelling, “I’m okay, keep playing. Keep playing. I’m good.” Something had overwhelmed him in the moment. As the rest of the set unfolded, we all knew what it was: it could be nothing but spirit. But not just any spirit— we might reject this assumption that all spirit is the same spirit. No. What we witnessed was a spirit of release, not of binding.

We are again experiencing what it is like to live in that release through the compositional approach on his recent album, aptly titled Ancestral Recall (2018). This is an effort driven almost totally by rhythm. Employing djembe and bata[6] masters like Weedie Braimah, the music utilizes rhythm to invite our ancestors back into the realm of feeling and experiencing. Not that they were ever absent, but this work is an explicit and open invitation to remind everyone who might hear this music that one simply does not arrive on one’s own, that improvisation does not occur without invitation—as my brother Anyabwile Love always says.[7] We needed those reminders, and in the ethereal moments that appear on this album, in the tunes “Diviner,” “Songs She Never Heard,” and “Before”, aTunde Adjuah, who plays twelve instruments on the album, draws our focus to the possibilities of ancestral communication as jazz sound. And they not only appear as the drum beat, they are often present in the sounds of the wind, the synths deployed to arrange this moment of oneness with all of the forces of the nature and the humans who must live in harmony with them.There are many others we might invoke and perhaps in future conversations we should explore their connections to this genealogy. A long list, they include Nicholas Payton, Esperanza Spalding, Nubya Garcia, James Brandon Lewis, Elena Pinderhughes, Marcus Gilmore, and others, connected by the need and desire to make meaningful interventions to the world of sound, to the only possibility we have of transcending a world that tries to mute us.

Earlier this week, the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim visited Howard University to offer a master class. After listening to young piano students play original arrangements of jazz standards, he sat in the front of the room and dispensed advice to them driven by what we heard. He argued and then illustrated that artists do not really create, we simply release what already exists. True artistry is revealing that which always was. For Ibrahim, the artist must be observant of this fact and not “be captured by the illusion” because “when you are captured by the illusion you’re trapped.” His comments to the young musicians revolved around the central idea that “the origin of music is breath.” And we affirm, that it is breath that informs both composition and improvisation, it is as Ibrahim reminded us, “the only thing that we can actually control.”[8]Another illusion is that this music is dead or declining, it is an illusion driven by the commodification of the form, but there is something that resists commodification, as Nicholas Payton often writes. We need ways of listening and opening ourselves up to that something, because it is all around us. For Randy Weston’s legacy lives—as it can only live.

(paper presented at the ASCAC 36th Ancient Kemetic Studies Conference, Medgar Evers College, April 19, 2019)

[1] This is not remotely close to a new question. See for instance, the work of Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) as well as Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw, eds. Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). While I’m not concerned about the question of improvisation producing “political” changes per se, those who want to thank about the materiality of transformation and jazz might consult some of this work. Fred Moten is instructive here: "To release all the notes of the chromatic scale back into something like a musical free range is not just to denote but also to court, even if in the interest of a certain renewal of the regulative, both the theoretical and practical coexistence of all possible notes that can be played and, moreover, of all the impossible notes that can't be played. This flirtation with a certain inhabitation of and in a newly resaturated musical space in which the copresence of all the notes calls into existence new structures of regulative musical rationality precisely be announcing itself in and as a regime of uncut musical differences is not the kind of encounter that is easily gotten over." The Universal Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 154.

[2] Greg Carr, “Inscribing African World History: Intergenerational Repetition and Improvisation of Ancestral Instructions,” in The African World History Project, Volume 1: African Historiography (forthcoming), 12.

[3] Ibid, 18.

[4] See Nate Chinen, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), for the latest iteration of this narration.

[5] See Ibid, 77-80.

[6] Among numerous other percussion instruments, see the liner notes to Ancestral Recall.

[7] See Leonard Brown, “You Have to Be Invited: Reflections on Music Making and Musician Creation in Black American Culture,” in John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom, ed. Leonard Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3-9.

[8] Thanks to Muriel Balla for reminding me that this is also found in Ancient Kemetic cosmology, with shu, the force that represents breath/air, and is also translated by Jacob Carruthers, as “space,” which I have begun to think with, in a series of poems here and here. See Jacob Carruthers, Mdw Ntr (London: Karnak House, 1996), 34.