In the 1950s and early 60s, as many African nations shook off their colonial mantles, African-Americans rallied behind their own civil-rights and black-nationalist movements. Jazz came to serve as a bridge between the two continents and their emancipationist moods.
An influential minority of black American jazz musicians harked to Africa, while in various African countries, jazz riffs accompanied the cry for freedom.
From the hundreds of musicians involved in the exchange, Robin D.G. Kelley has chosen four emblematic figures for his compact, continually surprising Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard University Press). All are figures who “identified with Africa’s struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, the demands for independence and self-determination,” writes the author, a professor of American history at the University of California at Los Angeles. They sought new forms of expression at “a crucial moment when freedom was perhaps the most important word circulating throughout the African diaspora.”
From Brooklyn, the pianist Randy Weston ventured to Africa in quest of ancestral roots and new musical ideas. His friend, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, a bassist and player of the lutelike oud, from childhood nurtured a “dream to make sacred Arab music swing.”
The titles of record albums by those two and their sympathetic American peers reflected empathy for anticolonial movements and “a nostalgic conception of Africa as a lost homeland,” Kelley says. Weston’s 1959 Uhuru Afrika, meaning “Freedom Africa,” was among many “paeans to the continent.” In such projects, Kelley writes, Africa appeared as a source of “the primitive, the unspoiled, the savage, even the sexually charged.” For the American musicians, the continent represented “an ancient, pristine past possessing a higher spiritual order and a modernizing force able to maintain its humanity precisely because it presumably would not relinquish the best elements of its traditional values.”
Conversely, the vitality of jazz appealed to many African musicians. In South Africa, the vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin chose jazz over emerging local popular-music hybrids. For her, as for so many fellow African musicians, jazz appealed as “a particular idiomatic expression of black modernity,” writes Kelley. She “struggled to give beauty and human dignity a voice against a backdrop of apartheid and racial subjugation.” Kelley’s choice of Benjamin is timely, as her reputation is rising. Also recently out from Duke University Press is Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz, based on 20 years of Benjamin’s exchanges with the South African musicologist Carol Ann Muller, a professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania.
For some black African devotees, jazz did not fulfill its promise. From Ghana, the percussionist Guy Warren, also known as Kofi Ghanaba, came to Chicago in 1954 with a personal agenda: He was intent on infusing jazz with West African percussion traditions, convinced that jazz could use the help. An idiosyncratic figure, he befriended titans of American jazz—Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk—but soon returned embittered to Ghana. At a time when American jazz drummers were incorporating African rhythms alongside the Afro-Cuban ones that then predominated in jazz, Warren composed music that collapsed the “boundaries of genre, style, culture, and nation.” Warren was an experimentalist—he developed a kit of African and Western drums that was hardly standard in any musical culture—but he was not happy to see jazz percussionists pick and choose among the expressive possibilities offered by African elements.
Whether or not he would have hired on Ghanaba, Randy Weston was sure he would find fresh inspiration and musical elements in Africa, so pursued a “musical, political, and spiritual journey” to a continent that few American jazz musicians, black or white, then considered visiting. He wished to know African America’s roots more broadly—"to study,” as Kelley puts it, “the accomplishments of his ancestors in order to counter the prevailing racist, colonialist stereotypes” of Africa that held sway in the United States.
Ironically, it was the U.S. State Department’s hiring of jazz musicians like Weston—along with much better-known figures like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie—to undertake “good-will ambassador” tours of developing nations in Africa and other continents that alerted many African-American jazz musicians to black African political aspirations. They came home voicing black-nationalist sentiments about what might be done about inequities at home, much to the consternation of political and cultural observers.
Jazz-related ironies were many in the era Kelley describes. For example, some African musicians, Guy Warren among them, believed that many American jazz musicians were simply jumping on an “African bandwagon” while unequivocally not playing African music. Kelley says that Warren measured American jazz drummers by Ghanaian percussion standards because he was unable to appreciate that jazz had inherited a muddle of African and other musical forms, and was well within its tradition in continuing to borrow just what it liked.
Similarly, Abdul-Malik came under fire from some North African purists for a lack of virtuosity on the oud, or at least for not playing it “properly.” The irony there was that, at the same time, many African-American jazzers were embracing what they thought was a fundamental aspect of traditional African music. As Kelley puts it by phone from his Los Angeles home, they had come to believe that virtuosity must not have been paramount in “a precolonial Africa in which music was not commodified; rather it was something owned by all people.” Weston, for example, rejected the club scene in favor of schools, churches, and other locations that could accommodate a sense of jazz as community.
Disagreements on the relative merits of virtuosity and community-friendly playing “remind us that when it comes to the quest for standards, a certain level of regimentation, precision, and virtuosity—the things we think of as Western standards of music—things are not so simple,” says Kelley.
That should not surprise, he adds, if considered in context. Weston and others were individualists who aspired, consciously or not, to shape new American and African modernities from a jumble of African and American traditional and improvised elements. (Another new study of that phenomenon is Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana, from Duke University Press, by Steven Feld, a professor of anthropology and music at the University of New Mexico.)
Africa Speaks, America Answers is Kelley’s second book focused on cultural resonances of music. His highly regarded 2009 book, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press), came after his earlier works had addressed issues in American political, race, and labor cultures. He wrote about how worthwhile studies of such subjects were in Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997). Kelley’s return to Africa in his new book, like his 2002 study of the African intellectual diaspora, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon), serves as a reminder that he began his career as a historian of Africa.
No one continent seems likely to contain him.
With two colleagues, Kelley is completing a general narrative of African-American history in a global context, for W.W. Norton. With Africa Speaks, America Answers, he writes, he wished to offer a model for writing transnational histories of modern music that sheds light on the “vexing relationship between art, politics, and spirituality,” while at the same time putting jazz in an appropriately global light.
