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S02E03 Jazz, Africa & Islam - Part One: 'Uhuru Afrika'
78 Plays1 month ago
The late 1950s and 60s are associated with Black Americans developing pride in their African heritage, an association that had its roots in the activism of Marcus Garvey and Paul Robeson in earlier decades. At different points during the 20th Century, the domestic Civil Rights struggle was viewed as intertwined with the fate of Africa and anti-colonialism more broadly.
During this period Jazz music went through a period of intense ‘Africanization’ in what could be seen as re-valourization of the African legacy. Music Professor Ingrid Monson writes about how “Afrocentrism and cultural nationalism added to a mass of experiences, memories, and references that make up the psycho-mythological cultural heritage of the African-American community”.
This Africanization in the social outlook of Black Americans and the influence of American Islamic organisations is reflected in the Jazz music of the time, both in the style and character of the music itself and the religious and political activities of the leading Jazz musicians. Artists such as Art Blakey, Max Roach, Bilal Abdurrahmann, Randy Weston, and John Coltrane chronicled the changing social and political landscape of America during the Civil Rights movement and facilitated a celebration of African and Islamic culture that had not been possible during decades of intense racism, segregation, discrimination, and brutality.
Tracks:
Art Blakey - 'The Feast' (Holiday for Skins) / 'Cubano Chant' (Drum Suite) / The Freedom Rider
Duke Ellington - 'Take The A Train'
Randy Weston - 'Kucheza Blues' (Uhuru Afrika)
Abdul Abdurrahmann - 'The Night'
Ahmed Abdul-Malik - 'Wakida Hena' (Jazz Sounds of Africa)
East New York Ensemble of Music - 'Ti-Ti' (At The Helm)
EMCK
Recommended
Transcript
Embracing African Heritage and Cultural Nationalism
00:00:02
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The late 1950s and early 1960s were associated with black Americans developing pride in their African heritage, an association that had its roots in the activism of Marcus Garvey and Paul Robeson in earlier decades.
00:00:14
Speaker
Throughout the 20th century, the domestic civil rights struggle was consistently viewed as intertwined with the fate of Africa and anti-colonialism more broadly.
Jazz and Civil Rights Movement's African Influence
00:00:24
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It was common for leaders of black political movements in the US and bands to publicly discuss Africa.
00:00:30
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Eldridge Cleaver wrote that all blacks have known a phase of cultural nationalism, more or less starting in 1956, when Ghana became an independent country, when the bus boycott started in Montgomery, Alabama, and when the black Muslims were beginning to be known.
00:00:45
Speaker
During this period, jazz music went through a period of intense Africanization and what could be seen as a revalorization of the African legacy. Afrocentrism and cultural nationalism added to a mass of experiences, memories and references that make up the psycho-mythological cultural heritage of the African American community.
00:01:04
Speaker
This Africanization and the social outlook of black Americans is reflected in the jazz music of the time, both in the style and character of the music itself and the religious and political activities of the leading jazz musicians.
00:01:17
Speaker
Artists such as Art Blakey, Max Roach and John Coltrane chronicled the changing social and political landscape of America during the civil rights movement and facilitated a celebration of African culture that had not been possible during decades of intense racism, segregation, discrimination and brutality.
00:01:34
Speaker
The history of jazz music is filled with references to the African continent. The theme of Africa was invoked by a long list of artists, including Sonra on American Ethiopia, Sonny Murray on his homage to Africa, John Coltrane's Africa Brass, Duke Ellington's A Night in Tunisia, Dizzy Gillespie's 1954 record Afro,
00:01:54
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By the late 1960s, the notion of Africa expressed by these jazz artists was located in unerric and mythical regions.
Challenges of Returning to Africa and Cultural Unity
00:02:02
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The intense political climate of the late 1960s and the crackdown on black nationalist movements such as the Black Panthers, making the physical return to Africa for black Americans espoused of by the likes of Marcus Garvey in earlier decades a seemingly unrealistic goal.
00:02:17
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as artists like Ornette Coleman, Albert Eiler and Cecil Tealer emerged under the banner of what would be described as free jazz. African styling was on full display, both in how the artists frequently dressed and presented themselves, shikis, caftans and Afro hairstyles being increasingly popular among musicians.
00:02:35
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and the West African instrumentation, like the Ngoni harp lute and gamelan percussion instruments played by Don Cherry. Jazz critics also identify the vocality of instrumentation and free jazz music as being something derived from African influence.
00:02:49
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Saxophonists like Albert Eiler and John Coltrane made their instruments scream, moan and vibrate intensely, mimicking the qualities of the human voice in a way that was absent from the more streamlined stylings of the commercially successful jazz of the early nineteen fifty s Originally, the championing of African heritage had been a vehicle for asserting and strengthening the unity of black Americans.
00:03:11
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The influential social philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois had participated in the Pan-African Conferences of 1945-46, and celebration of Africa had been encouraged by promoters of cultural nationalism like Leroy Jones.
00:03:24
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later to become Amiri Baraka. Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, the UNIA, had electrified Harlem in the 20s and stressed the urgency of a migration back to Africa for black people, black entrepreneurship and a spiritualised vision of black global unity.
00:03:42
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Various musical projects inspired by the independence of Ghana, Congo, and the admission of 16 new African countries to the United Nations in 1960 gave cause for celebration within the Pan-African movement, as did the new music arising from the influence of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants throughout various American cities, including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
Marcus Garvey's Impact on Civil Rights and Jazz
00:04:03
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Ghana's independence in 1957 was an indicator of a wider trend in the demise of colonialism on the African continent, but also a beacon of hope for the American civil rights movement. Ghana's sophisticated technology, education system, and its metropolitan culture was reported on to challenge the American presumption of African backwardness.
00:04:23
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In the 1950s, news from Africa was reported on in newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, and significant visits to the US by Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, and William Tubman, the President of Liberia, were significant in reviving pride in those descendants of the African diaspora living in America.
00:04:44
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Later, Malcolm X's rise to prominence within the Nation of Islam galvanised the defiant attitude of black people across America, especially those of a more militant younger generation, disillusioned with the moderate approach of organisations like the NAACP, which had failed to protect the leaders of the civil rights movement from assassination and the onslaught of systemic racism.
00:05:34
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At the end of the 1910s, Marcus Garvey started his nationalist separatist movement, which advocated for racial pride, resistance to white oppression, and the unity and organization of Negro people in America.
00:05:46
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Garvey arrived at the conclusion that only an independent black state outside of America could solve the social problems of millions of black Americans, who had been traumatized by their experience in the USA. Garvey launched the Negro World newspaper, which proposed a literal return to Africa for black Americans.
00:06:03
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The paper struck a chord with the black masses, particularly those who had migrated from the southern states of the US s and were then struggling in the industrial ghettos of northern cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and New York.
00:06:16
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Max Roach, bebop drummer, recalled Brooklyn, New York is a place where Marcus Garvey's legacy was strong. Garvey's interest in Africa, global black unity and economic self-determinism inspired Roach's own interest in Africa and culture in his early years.
00:06:30
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Garvey was born and raised in Jamaica but had lived in London between 1912 and 1914 before returning home. He founded the United Negro Improvement Association which he moved to Harlem in 1916.
00:06:43
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During the 1920s, his spellbinding oratory mass meetings, parades and his newspaper in the Negro World earned him the respect and support of thousands of black New Yorkers of African and West Indian descent.
00:06:55
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Garvey's legacy was important in linking the spiritual, political and Afrocentric interests in African American culture, which massively impacted on the jazz world of the nineteen sixty s The militancy of Garvey's movement was enshrined in paramilitary organisations known as the Universal African Legion and its female auxiliary counterpart, the Universal African Motor Corps.
00:07:15
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Garvey denounced colonisation and suggested his army would free African nations from their white colonial oppressors. The reaction of those colonial powers was furious. Garvey's newspaper was banned in several African countries, and the US government was pressured into curbing Garvey's influence.
Harlem Renaissance and Jazz as Expression of Black Life
00:07:31
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Nonetheless, funds were raised which enabled Garvey to create a transport fleet, and he negotiated with the Liberian government to acquire territory, going so far as to send a crew of technicians to commence building a city where black immigrants from America would reside.
00:07:46
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The colonial powers launched accusations at Garvey that his actual plan was to overthrow the Liberian government and he was charged with fraud in the US. All the movement's possessions were seized, sold off or destroyed and Garvey was jailed.
00:08:00
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The dream of a return to Africa collapsed and the shock of Garvey's imprisonment paralysed the movement for some time. Garvey had, however, lit a fire that made black Americans realise their strength when used collectively.
00:08:12
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Garvey had the vision to link the struggles of black Americans to the liberation struggles of colonised people in Africa and across the world. The Garveyite movement had the strongest impact in Harlem, a centre for black economic and cultural organisation.
00:08:26
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Many of the writers and poets within what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Alan Locke among them, were deeply influenced by Marcus Garvey, the writings of W.E.B. Dubois and their love of jazz music, which they saw as the cultural expression of black life in America.
00:08:41
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The eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro's soul. The tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world. A world of subway trains and workwork work, work, work. The tom-tom of joy and laughter and pain swallowed in a smile.
00:08:54
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Arthur A. Schoenberg wrote, The American Negro must rebuild the past in order to make his future. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generation must repair and offset.
00:09:08
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Garveyism and black Muslims attention to the cultural and political importance of Africa predates the prominence of black nationalist movements during the 1960s. Eventually, more easily attainable cultural return to Africa replace Garvey's positive physical return.
00:09:23
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And this was reflected in the jazz music of the time. Paul Robeson drew the admiration of jazz musicians as an actor, political activist, and as a singer of African-American spirituals and international folk music in the 1920s.
00:09:36
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He starred in a famous version of Shakespeare's Othello on Broadway in 1943 and notably refused to sing opera or anything from the classical reportry. In the 1930s, Robeson became interested in African culture and politics while living in London.
00:09:51
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He met several future leaders of Africa's independence movement, including Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, and political activists involved with India's nationalist movement, close to future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1937, Robeson and African-American activist Max Juergen founded the International Committee on African Affairs, reorganized in 1942 as the Council of African Affairs to educate the American public about Africa and facilitate the studies of African students in the U.S.
Jazz's Connection to Anti-Colonialism and Pan-Africanism
00:10:21
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During the 1940s, Robeson connected the domestic struggle for civil rights in America with the anti-colonialist struggle making headway in Africa and other parts of the developing world.
00:10:32
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Robeson sponsored benefit concerts and rallies in New York that drew attention to anti-colonialist issues such as the annexation of what is now Namibia by South Africa. The Council of African Affairs staged the Big Three Unity Rally in Madison Square Garden on 6 June 1946 to support famine relief in South Africa, where 19,000 people attended.
00:10:53
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Robeson's 40th birthday celebrations were attended by Count Basie, Mary Lee Williams and Duke Ellington. His speech emphasised the need of colonial peoples for self-determination and called for international solidarity.
00:11:06
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When Ben Davis Jr., a member of the Communist Party, ran for a seat in the New York City Council in late 1943, Robeson performed a scene from Othello at the Victory Rally, where he was joined by an all-star roster of Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Hazel Scott and Ella Fitzgerald.
00:11:23
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By 1950, Robeson's passport had been revoked for his outspoken criticism of the Korean War. By 1951, W.E.B. Dubois had been indicted as an unregistered foreign agent for his work criticising the Cold War.
00:11:37
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With both men identified as communists, liberals who had aligned themselves with the CAA began leaving the organisation in 1958. Going forward, efforts to tie the civil rights movement to anti-colonialist struggles in Africa and elsewhere were abandoned by the mainstream leadership and supported only by those more radical left-wing activists within the movement.
00:11:57
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Nonetheless, mainstream civil rights leaders formulated an argument as to how the anti-communist approach of the US government and the civil rights struggle could be aligned.
00:12:09
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Duke Ellington undertook to make what he called American Negro music, centering his themes around black life and history. Songs like A Night in Harlem and Harlem River Quiver. One of the all-time great American musicians, Duke Ellington's music incorporated Afro-American, Caribbean and Latino styles.
00:12:27
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He played in Harlem's segregated cotton club from 1927 until the early 1930s and achieved international fame, helped along by CBS radio broadcasts of his performances. Ellington saw jazz music as an interpretive lens for understanding the mystical connections between African American ancestral wisdom and larger black resistance struggles.
00:12:48
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Zoot Suit Style and Lindy Hop dance performances were representative of a new black urban identity, subtle strategies for black dignity and expression. In Ellington's words, what we could not say openly we expressed in music, and what we know as jazz is more than just dance music.
00:13:04
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Our souls react to the elemental but eternal rhythm.
00:13:11
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Duke Ellington's music was hugely popular among the disciples of Marcus Garvey. In 1947 he composed Liberation Suite for the government of Liberia to celebrate the centenary of the African nation's independence, which was achieved by emancipated black people who had been enslaved in the United States.
00:13:28
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Ellington and his orchestra would later tour through Africa, the Middle East, India and Pakistan by way of the musical tours funded by the US State Department in the late 1950s as part of a diplomatic exercise to demonstrate America's cultural richness and sophistication during the Cold War.
00:13:43
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Ellington was a Protestant Christian but his music ultimately influenced the inclusion of Islamic elements in jazz that black youth identified with in the 40s and 50s. His work influenced the conversion of many jazz musicians to American Islamic movements and the adoption of Islamic musical styles, most notably heard in the music of John Coltrane.
00:14:02
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This is Take the A Train, one of Duke Ellington's better-known songs.
Pan-Africanism's Influence on Jazz in Brooklyn
00:14:27
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you
00:14:35
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Culturally, Brooklyn was also a community that was hugely receptive to the message of pan-Africanism, espoused by Marcus Garvey, and nascent Islamic movements that had been taking root in the newly industrial American cities like New York, Boston, Detroit and Chicago, which saw massive influx of African American migrants from the Jim Crow southern states of the US in what was called the Great Migration.
00:14:56
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It's worth considering the community work and legacy of Bilal Abdurrahman, pioneer of a new form of jazz in the 50s and 60s. He collaborated on pioneering works by Ahmed Abdul Malik and brushed shoulders with the likes of Charles Mingus and Max Roach.
00:15:10
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As a community leader, he created spaces visited by figures such as Malcolm X. He was an author and an illustrator and a dedicated husband and father. In addition to having hand in fashion shows, television, the restaurant business and religious mission work, he also helped find institutions for education and heritage preservation.
00:15:29
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Born in 1928 in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stew neighbourhood, Abdurrahman worked throughout the 40s as an illustrator for Brooklyn newspapers, Harper's Magazine, Scholastic Magazine and Folkway Records.
00:15:40
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By the 1950s, Abdurrahman was developing a keen interest in African music and the percussion instruments that shaped his career. He began exploring African history and spiritualism, gravitating toward Islam and the thriving Akhmadea movement taking place in forward-thinking black communities in Brooklyn.
00:15:57
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largely as a rejection of the oppression rooted in white American Christianity.
00:16:03
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Embracing the community that was founded by Sheikh Dawood Ahmed Faisal and his wife, Bilal regularly attended the Brooklyn Street Mosque which was frequented by a growing number of jazz musicians. This included Bilal's neighbour, the double bass and ode player, Ahmed Abdul Malik.
00:16:19
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Between 1958 and 1963, Abdurrahman, Abdul Malik and various other players cut five albums together. Among them, the Eastern Moods of Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Sounds of Africa.
00:16:31
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Controversial and underappreciated at the time, they're now increasingly recognised as paradigm shifting, not to mention beautiful works. They also attended jam sessions at the now legendary Putnam Central Club, playing alongside Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Randy Westall, Cecil Payne and a number of others in largely unrecorded but nonetheless legendary sessions.
00:16:51
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It was one of the few places they could play in New York. Though many of their fellow musicians respected them, the work that Bilal and Abdul Malik were doing was still roundly misunderstood. This is the track Wakita Hena from Jazz Sounds of Africa by Ahmed Abdul Malik.
00:17:17
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Thank you.
00:17:32
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Abdurrahman took matters into his own hands and together with his wife Rekia and their three children he created two spaces. The first was the African Quarter, a restaurant located on Fulton Street opposite Fulton Park that served African food and hosted live music, dance and fashion shows featuring African clothing.
00:17:49
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The African Quarter was a beloved space not only for socialising, music and education but also community activism. The restaurant was visited by African dignitaries, increasingly so during the 1960s, and on at least one occasion by Malcolm X, who was then central to the operations of the Nation of Islam.
00:18:07
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The second space Abdurrahman founded was the Ethnomodes Folkloric Workshop, a cultural community centre dedicated to the traditions of African and Islamic culture. An early and significant contributor to the practice that became known as ethnomusicology, the workshop was a place for advocates of non-Western culture to gather, research and discuss.
00:18:26
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There was music here too, of course, and even a band, the Ethnomodes Music Ensemble, who performed their findings in Mode Afri-Oriental for the community. This developed into the East New York Ensemble de Music, who, with Abdurrahman as bandleader, released one album, 1974's At the Helm, and performed its eclectic yet deeply groove-orientated sound throughout Brooklyn.
00:18:48
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This is the track TT from that album.
Hard Bop and Afro-Cuban Influences in Jazz
00:19:04
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Oh
00:19:40
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In the early bebop drummer Art Blakey, born in Pittsburgh, began to question his Christianity and moved into protesting systemic racism after being severely beaten by white men in the South while working in the Fletcher Henderson Band in 1943. This beating resulted in a head injury that required the insertion of a steel plate in his head.
00:20:01
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In 1947, Blakey converted to Islam and held meetings in his New York apartment of jazz musicians who had joined the Ahmadiyya Islamic movement. He said that Islam made me feel like a man, really free.
00:20:14
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In 1947, he travelled to West Africa, stopping in Nigeria and Ghana, where the Ahmadiyya movement had branches, to study African religions and Arabic language. He returned to the US in 1948, and his new drumming style was infused with African polyrhythms and musical inflections, conveying what was a sophisticated sense of blackness that influenced a new genre of jazz known as hard bop.
00:20:39
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Early hard-bop leaders included Art Blakey, Yusuf Lateef and Kenny Clark, all of whom would become converts to Islam. These musicians combined emotions from Black American, Caribbean, African and Eastern musical forms with innovative harmonies and compositions.
00:20:55
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Hardbop was a soulful, aggressive, urban sound that resonated with the aspirational culture of black Atlantic cool that had, as its hallmarks, an appreciation for stylish aesthetics, a global political consciousness, and the promotion of black affirmation and self-determination for new generations of black Americans who were coming of age in the industrial northeastern cities of the United States.
00:21:17
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This music was part of a trend for black people to seek out cultural and spiritual inspiration from tradition traditions developed outside the United States, often in African and Caribbean countries that their parents, grandparents and ancestors had emigrated from.
00:21:30
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Hard bop became popular in black urban communities between the mid-50s to late-60s. The overt blackness of hard bop is historically seen as a reaction to the mellow whitening of West Coast cool jazz and third-stream music, acts like Chet Baker, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Dave Brubeck.
00:21:46
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which represented the growing intrusion of more European classical and orchestral styles. From 1958, hard bop turned churchy, funky and soulful, and so many symbolic assertions of its black ownership, references to Africa increased, as did references to the black church, slavery, protest and black vernacular.
00:22:07
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Art Blakey's loud and hard-driving drumming and the Islamic, African and Afro-Diasporic musical motifs, exemplified by his band The Jazz Messengers, led the way in shaping the rhythms and sounds of hard bop.
00:22:19
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The origins of The Jazz Messengers can be traced back to 1948 when Blakey established The Seventeen Messengers, an Islamic brotherhood of local bebop artists including Yusuf Latif on tenor sax, Abdul Hamid, Sahib Shihab and other non-Muslim musicians like Sonny Rollins.
00:22:35
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By the 1950s, Blakey was staging bebop music in a larger, global context, framing the music in African and Afro-Cuban musical styles, which were constantly being reshaped by the shifting line-up of musicians in his band, which worked as a kind of training academy for jazz music.
00:22:51
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Lou Donaldson, Clifford Brown, Horace Silver and Wayne Shorter all passed through the ranks of the jazz messengers at different stages. Art Blakey's message from Kenya features a dramatic duel with percussionist Sabu Martinez, conga player who had been influenced by the Cuban dancer and percussionist Chano Pozo.
00:23:09
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Martinez had replaced Pozo in Dizzy Gillespie's band after his death in 1948. Martinez collaborated with Blakey in some of the most famous Afro-Diasporic projects. the majority recorded in the cultural and musical melting pot of New York City.
00:23:22
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These included Orgy and Rhythm from 1956, recorded the day after Ghana's independence celebrations, Q-bop and Drum Suite in 1957, and Holiday for Skins 1958. This is The Feast from the album.
00:24:14
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On the album Ritual from 1957, Blakey reconfigured his band featuring saxophonist Jackie McLean into an Afro-Cuban rhythm section, playing cowbell, marambas, maracas and claves instead of their usual instruments.
00:24:28
Speaker
Orgy and rhythm had seen four drum set players taking solos with interactive accompaniment, as opposed to the standalone solos traditionally taken by jazz drummers during their solo sections. One week later, they recorded Drum Suite, which featured Sabi Martinez and Bongos, and Cuban Congero, Candido Camaro.
00:24:45
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This brilliant album is heavily drenched in Cuban stylings, and the opening track, The Sacrifice, features a Swahili chant and West African drum patterns, played by Sabi Martinez to recreate the atmosphere of an African religious ceremony.
00:24:59
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This is Cubano chant from the Drum Suite album, composed by pianist Ray Bryant.
00:25:37
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Some of the other musicians who played on the series of records included Cuban conga player Carlos Patato Valdez, who would go on to play with the legendary Latin jazz and salsa bands of Tito Puente and Charlie Palmieri.
00:25:49
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Valdez himself would tour Africa on a musical tour funded by the US State Department as part of a band led by Herbie Mann, who had played beautiful flute alongside Valdez's drums on Blakey's Orgy of Rhythm album.
00:26:01
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Holiday for Skins featured a young percussionist named Ray Barato who would go on become a legendary band leader in the Boogaloo style that would develop into salsa. Despite the adventurous experimentation of this series of albums and the brilliance of the numerous musicians pathing through the recording studio,
00:26:16
Speaker
Critical reception was lukewarm, and in some cases openly mocking of the African instrumentation and chants as tokenistic. Critics failed to tie Blakey's effort to the political context of emerging independent African nations, or to appreciate how the character of the albums was intended to convey a celebration of African culture.
00:26:34
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This, coupled with Blakey's own lack of enthusiasm for the albums, is said to have obscured their significance in jazz history. However, Blakey's experimentation, together with the steady emergence of independent African nations and a burgeoning Islamic American identity, would inform a growing sense of militancy and resistance to white supremacy in the jazz music world that would accelerate during the expansion of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, an acceleration that Blakey and other bebop musicians like Max Roach would again be part of.
00:27:04
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Listen to the urgency of the playing and Art Blakey's seven and a half minute drum solo on 1964's Freedom Rider, which combines swing, Latin American and African rhythmic influences and was named in tribute to the Freedom Riders, those activists who participated in the American civil rights movement Freedom Rides beginning in 1961, protesting segregation on the southern transit system.
African Independence and Jazz's Cultural Connections
00:27:26
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African politics and culture would become a kind of framework for a new type of African-American music that would be spread around the world by, among others, Art Bleakie's band, through which a stellar list of incredible musicians would pass, including trumpeter Lee Morgan and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, both of whom played on the 1962 Jazz Messengers album A Night in Tunisia.
00:27:49
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Jazz pianist and composer Randy Weston recorded the seminal Uhuru Africa meeting Freedom Africa in November 1960 at Bell Sound Studio in New York City. This ambitious composition consisted of four movements played by a 24-piece big band.
00:28:04
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with poet Langston Hughes providing the lyrics to accompany the music. The album was recorded as a celebration of the newly emerging independent African nations, including Tunisia, Sudan, Ghana and Congo, and the admission of those 16 newly independent countries to the United Nations earlier that year, significant to the political atmosphere of the time.
00:28:23
Speaker
Significantly, 12 of those African nations issued a public statement at the time asking the Cold War adversaries America and Russia not to confront each other on the African continent. And interestingly, the album was banned at the time by the apartheid government of South Africa, who were presumably less enthusiastic about the notion of decolonisation and national freedom within the African continent.
00:28:45
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Born in Brooklyn in 1926, Randy Weston grew up with drummer Max Roach and spoke of how he was always impressed by the militancy and revolutionary political values expressed in Roach's music and support for black people.
00:28:59
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In the late Weston frequently hired Muslim musicians such as Abdul Malik, Art Blakey and later bassist Jamil Nasser to play in his albums. Weston's father, born in Panama, had emigrated to America from Jamaica.
00:29:12
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He was a passionate devotee of Marcus Garvey and raised his son Randy in the values of Pan-Africanism, which shaped his musical and spiritual identity. Weston described how his father would tell him, Black people would never be free as a people until Africa is free.
00:29:27
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This prompted him later in his career to forge a path that linked American jazz with Africa and the Third World. Weston himself would ultimately settle and live in Morocco later in his life. On Uhuru Africa, several Muslim players featured in what was a stellar list of supporting musicians.
00:29:43
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This included Yusuf Latif and Sahib Shihab in tenor and alto saxophone, Max Roach on drums, trombonist Melba Liston, Cuban Congeros Armando Paraza and Candido Camero, and Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji.
00:29:58
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This diverse range of artists represented various peoples of the African diaspora. Despite the ambitious scale of the project and the skillful musicianship, Uhuru Africa was met with a lukewarm reception, both at critical and commercial level.
00:30:11
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There's a suggestion among jazz historians looking back that 1960 may have been too early to expect the American public to wholeheartedly embrace what was a very deliberate celebration of African-American identity.
00:30:23
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This was the year of the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins and the imprisonment of Martin Luther King, so it would be fair to say the civil rights movement was most definitely at this point not out of the woods. Richard Brent Turner writes that the interest in African liberation and the diaspora was an intensifying presence and aesthetic agency, musical practice and political thinking of musicians in the 1950s, but it was a passionate interest of a relatively small group of people in the African-American artistic and literary scenes.
00:30:52
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As the civil rights movement intensified in the early 1960s, many more people would come to view the link between Africa and jazz as a crucial cultural connection. It should also be noted that the formal structure of the album, leaning into opera and classical forms, may have undermined the chances for commercial success among the black jazz audiences of time who were in the throes of hard bop.
00:31:14
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The album nonetheless serves as a useful indicator if how musician members of the American Islamic movements were drivers in growing the cultural connections between Africa and members of the African diaspora living in the United States.
00:31:27
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Randy Weston's band would later tour Africa in 1967 on the cultural exchange tours funded by the US State Department, these being part of a deliberate governmental strategy for improving America's international standing with Africa in the context of the Cold War.
00:31:42
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This is the track Cuchesa Blues from Uhuru Africa.
Afro-Asian Unity and Islam's Influence on Jazz
00:32:19
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Making connections between Asia and Africa was popular in the late 50s and early 60s for those living in diasporic communities in America, fostered significantly by the growing network of Islamic communities within the US, which presented the anti-colonialist perspective as an important step towards uniting people of colour across the world.
00:32:38
Speaker
In 1955, several African, Asian and Middle Eastern nations wishing to remain neutral during the Cold War organised an Afro-Asian conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, This conference attracted the attention of prominent African-American politicians such as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., also prominent within the NAACP, who attended. Although his request to attend the conference as an official representative of the State Department was denied, this landmark show of strength by people of colour convinced the US government that improving diplomatic relations with countries in attendance would be advantageous to the geopolitical interests of the United States.
00:33:16
Speaker
The cultural linking of Africa and Asia was also a theme emphasised by the Nation of Islam, which sponsored Afro-Asian unity bazaars in the 1960s. Ingrid Monson writes that the cultural theme of linking the East and West in the jazz world of the late 50s and early 60s often had a political subtext that is perhaps best contextualised by the growth of community spaces, events, and networks of individuals interested in exploring the cultural diversity of blackness and its relationship to Africa.
00:33:45
Speaker
Muslim musicians were prominent in several musical projects relating to Africa and the diaspora, and the universalist message of Islam provided an alternative to Western modernism's vision of universality that would play an increasingly important role in the spiritual visions of jazz musicians in the nineteen sixty s Although clearly visible within the jazz communities through American cities close to the eastern seaboard, the Nation of Islam, which advocated for racial separatism as opposed to integration, was not the only show in town in terms of Islamic representation and jazz music.
00:34:17
Speaker
A significant number of Muslim musicians, including Art Blakey, Ahmed Jamal, Yusuf Latif, Sahib Shihab, were all converted to Islam by the more moderate Ahmadiyya movement, which conflicted ideologically with the Nation of Islam in several areas.
00:34:32
Speaker
Others, like the legendary McCoy Tyner, otherwise known as Suleiman Sud, who played piano in John Coltrane's bands, were Sunni Muslims and other Islamic grouping that diverged ideologically from the Nation of Islam.
00:34:44
Speaker
The Sunnis and the Ahmadiyyas represented a more universalist outlook than the radical separatist approach adopted by the NOI. On that basis, they would have been considered moderates, closer to the ideals of integrationism that would characterize the mainstream leaders of what but would become the civil rights movement.
00:35:00
Speaker
In some cases, Art Blakey being one, the embrace of Islam was a form of rebellion for black Americans against the American system that had seen their communities treated so brutally and discriminated against on a constant basis.
00:35:13
Speaker
But for many others, Islam offered a spiritual enlightenment and a pathway to a practical way of living that the Christian churches, so prominent in the mainstream of black communities, had failed to provide them with.
00:35:25
Speaker
In the next few episodes, we'll talk about how the impact of these American Islamic movements impacted on jazz music in the and 1960s. Music