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S02E05 Jazz, Africa & Islam - Part Three: ‘Search for a New Land’
55 Plays5 days ago
The involvement of progressive Jazz musicians with Islam in the 1950s and 60s was shaped by the practices of Sunni Islam and the Black internationalism of several African American Muslim communities formed in the early 20th Century, notably the Islamic Mission of America (1939), the Addeynu Allahe-Universal Arabic Association (1938) and the First Cleveland Mosque (1937). These Sunni organisations emphasised the importance of pride in African ancestry, and their goals of self-reliance, empowerment and spiritual uplift through independent Islamic programs, institutions, and networks appealed to growing numbers of young Black Americans, including outsider Jazz musicians. The full roster of Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, pianist Ahmad Jamal, saxophonist Sahib Shihab, McCoy Tyner and many others all converted to Islam during this period.
Growing militancy within the American Islamic communities and the wider Civil Rights movement aided the expansion of the Nation of Islam, spearheaded by its charismatic national spokesman Malcolm X. Famous Hard Bop musicians Grant Green and Lee Morgan and soul and blues legend Etta James were all NOI members, producing some of the greatest American music of the 20th Century.
The international reach of the American Islamic movements put them on a collision course with the counterrevolutionary efforts of the FBI and CIA during the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement had its most profound successes but experienced its greatest tragedies.
Books:
What The Music Said: Black Popular Music & Black Popular Culture - Mark Anthony Neal
Soundtrack to A Movement: African American Islam, Jazz & Black Internationalism - Richard Brent Turner
A Love Supreme - Ashley Khan
Giant Steps / Cookin' - Kenny Mathieson
3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans & The Lost Empire of Cool - James Kaplan
Jazz & Justice - Gerald Horne
Tracks:
The Call - Sahib Shihab
Hannibal’s Cannibals - Ahmed Abdul-Malik
Poinciana - Ahmad Jamal
Cease The Bombing / Alone, Together – Grant Green
Search for A New Land / Mr Kenyetta - Lee Morgan
Anything to Say You’re Mine – Etta James
EMCK
Recommended
Transcript
The Impact of Islam on Jazz
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to Rail Gone. We are continuing to talk about the influence of Islam on jazz music, and this episode goes into some detail about the Islamic organizations operating in America in the early 20th century.
00:00:13
Speaker
These were mosques and Islamic centers that counted a long list of prominent jazz musicians among their number and exerted considerable social and political influence. Thank you.
00:00:26
Speaker
shipped by the practices of sunni islam and the black internationalism of several african american muslim communities which began in the early twentieth century most notably the islamic mission of america the Adenu Alaa Universal Arabic Association and the First Cleveland Mosque.
00:00:40
Speaker
These Sunni organisations emphasised the importance of pride in African ancestry, the need for unity among American Islamic groups, the empowerment of women, and the goal of self-reliance through independent Islamic programmes, institutions and networks.
Key Figures and Cultural Hubs
00:00:54
Speaker
The Islamic Mission of America, also known as the State Street Mosque, was founded in Brooklyn in 1939 by Sheikh Dawud Ahmed Faisal and his wife Saida. The sheik was a professional violinist who had emigrated from the Caribbean to the US in 1913.
00:01:09
Speaker
Black American converts were granted birth certificates that affirmed their true identities as people of African-Asian origin, descendants of people who had been enslaved against their will, then freed. The reclaiming of lost identity was central to the attraction of the Islamic mission for black Americans.
00:01:25
Speaker
Sheikh Faisal was highly connected, and Arabic officials at the United Nations bestowed observer privileges on the Islamic mission of America, enabling them to attend the UN General Assembly. Faisal used these connections to preach how Islam's global spiritual and economic consciousness could uplift colonised oppressed peoples.
00:01:42
Speaker
Both Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali would become honorary partners of the Islamic mission, signifying its cultural weight. The Adenu Alaa Universal Arabic Association was founded in 1938 by Professor Muhammad Ezeldeen, formerly known as James Lomax Bay.
00:01:57
Speaker
He used this transnational experience from living in Egypt to teach followers about the spiritual relationship between black American music and Arab Sunni Islamic consciousness in this new religious community.
00:02:08
Speaker
By 1938, the AAUAA had branches in Philadelphia, Camden, New Jersey, Buffalo in the West Valley, New York.
Islamic Ideologies and Movements
00:02:16
Speaker
Further units opened in Jacksonville, Florida, Rochester, New York, Youngstown, Ohio, Detroit, and its headquarters in New York, New Jersey in the 1940s.
00:02:25
Speaker
The first Cleveland mosque was established in 1936 by African-American Wally Akram, who believed that Sunni Islam's global consciousness could contribute to African-American liberation and economic uplift.
00:02:37
Speaker
In 1937, he published his Muslim Ten-Year Plan, which advocated for ownership of homes and businesses by black Americans as a means of achieving self-determination. In 1943, Akram established their national organisation, the Uniting Islamic Society of America.
00:02:53
Speaker
The Ahmadiyya Muslim movement was closely linked to the followers of Marcus Garvey and champions of pan-Africanism. Ahmadiyya missionaries advocated universality, racial equality, and transnationalism, circulating their message across the US, Europe, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Ghana.
00:03:10
Speaker
A large number of converts were bebop and later hardbop musicians, and listeners who, as the 60s approached, began to see themselves within the wider global context of international liberation struggles of black people in Africa and the African diaspora.
00:03:24
Speaker
A number of those converts, like bebop drummer Kenny Clark, had served as soldiers for the Allied forces in World War II, where they had a positive experience of racial toleration, but were then stunned by the racism of the Jim Crow climate on their return to the US.
00:03:38
Speaker
The Ahmadiyya movement appealed to those who had been historically and culturally disenfranchised. In the 1920s, the Ahmadis sent Mufti Mohammed Sadiq from England to work on their first missionary in the United States, located in New Jersey.
00:03:51
Speaker
After a two-year period of incarceration, he was released, subject to insurances that he would not preach the practice of polygamy. He had managed to convert 19 inmates to Islam during his time in prison.
00:04:03
Speaker
This was at a time of hostile treatment for Asiatic people. The Immigration Act of 1917 had just been passed, which excluded workers from what was called the Asiatic Barred Zone, including Afghanistan, India, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern and Asian countries.
00:04:18
Speaker
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had already barred Chinese labourers from immigrating into the United States. and the Immigration Act of 1924 then included the majority of non-European em immigrants by creating essentially racist origin quotas that closed the door to Africans and Asians in the labour market and funded the legal deportation of barred migrants in the US.
00:04:41
Speaker
Citizenship for Indian Americans was revoked in by the Supreme Court decision of U.S. v. Bagat Singh Thind, which decided that Indians were not eligible for U.S. citizenship because they were not white.
00:04:54
Speaker
All of this might sound very familiar if you listen to the news for more than 10 seconds. Once released from prison, Sadiq moved to Highland Park, Michigan, and opened the Akhmatia Mission House on the south side of Chicago, converting more than 1,000 Americans to Islam by 1925.
Conversions and Cultural Shifts
00:05:09
Speaker
He would later remark that, under US immigration laws, Jesus would be refused entry into the United States. Sadiq established the Muslim Sunrise newspaper and wrote periodicals which appeared in other American newspapers.
00:05:22
Speaker
He encouraged Americans to move away from Christianity and to em embrace Islam's universal brotherhood, presenting Islam as a religion that was opposed to both sexism and racism. This message was convincing, and the majority of women who converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in the 1920s were black southern migrants.
00:05:41
Speaker
The success of the Akhmedea movement was aided by a group of African-American converts in the early 1920s who had ties to Marcus Garvey's UNIA in Chicago, St. Louis, Missouri, Detroit, Michigan and Gary, Indiana.
00:05:54
Speaker
These activists asked black Americans to consider more carefully their links to Africa and the coloured races of the world. the aim to recraft American culture and identity in the African diaspora and pushed for the emigration of diasporic peoples back to Africa.
00:06:09
Speaker
In Chicago, Sadiq promoted pan-Africanism and worked closely with Marcus Garvey to spread the UNIA message. The Ahmadiyya Muslims circulated Muhammad Ali's first English translation of the Koran among African-American communities, converting several thousand Americans by 1940 through their mission houses in north-eastern and mid-western cities.
00:06:28
Speaker
The movement's popularity continued to grow in the 40s, the Muslim Sunrise condemning racism as the source of the 1943 Harlem riots which we mentioned in the last episode when its global membership reached 2 million people.
00:06:41
Speaker
The lynching of black people and Jim Crow policies in the southern US states were cited by the Indian Ahmadiyya missionary Sufi Bengali as a reason to join the Ahmadiyya movement. Global political events in the 1950s reinvigorated public perspectives on self-determination in Africa and the Muslim world.
00:06:58
Speaker
In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser became the Muslim president of Egypt and constructed a post-colonial identity that emphasised pan-Arab Islamic unity, socialism and solidarity with the Third World.
00:07:11
Speaker
This led to increased contact between African-American Islamic leaders in Egypt. In 1956 57, Nasser's reputation was boosted by his nationalisation of the Suez Canal, which forced Britain to leave the zone.
00:07:25
Speaker
Egypt's withstanding military attacks from Israel, Britain and France and his opposition to American influence was a major affirmation of Islamic political power at the time. Those jazz musicians that joined the Ahmadiyya movement changed their Christian names to Arabic names, Yusuf Latif and Ahmad Jamal among them.
00:07:42
Speaker
Their conversion was also visible in the style of dress they adopted, Islamic robes, headscarves, keffies, skullcaps and long beards. Eddie Gregory was a bebop musician originally from Georgia who had studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music and played flute and saxophone with a wide range of jazz musicians, including Quincy Jones, Fletcher Henderson and Thelonious Monk.
00:08:03
Speaker
He joined the Ahmadiyya Muslims and adopted the name Sahib Shihab. He said that Islam seemed to offer all that Christianity had failed to give him. He left the US in 1959, joining South Asian Ahmadiyya missionaries in Scandinavia, always a popular location for jazz emigres, to recruit new converts.
00:08:21
Speaker
He continued to live and perform in Sweden and Denmark well into the 1970s. This is The Call from sahib Shihab's 1972 album
00:08:57
Speaker
Gladstone Scott was a tenor saxophonist and World War II veteran who played in the Army Band for the entertainment of Marines during USO shows in Japan. Prior to that, he had been a child prodigy, playing in Coleman Hawkins' band when he was 12 years old.
00:09:11
Speaker
eventually attending the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music. On returning to America after the war, he converted to the Ahmadiyya Islamic movement in Boston and became known as Ghulam Sadiq. He was a close friend of trumpeter Malcolm Shorty Jarvis, who was a member of the Nation of Islam and a close confidant of Malcolm X.
00:09:29
Speaker
Bashir Ahmad was an Ahmadiyya missionary born in Philadelphia. He preached in Boston's black community during the 1940s and 50s. One of his converts was a jazz pianist named Stephen Peters, who joined the Ahmadiyya movement in 1945, adopting the name Khalil Mahmud.
00:09:46
Speaker
He utilised his connections to the jazz world of the South End to spread the Ahmadiyya message among its numerous bebop musicians. Mahmud's missionary work would eventually take him to London and West Africa. Despite his success in recruiting converts to the Ahmadiyya movement and the cross-connections he established with Sunni Muslim networks in suburban Boston, his work stalled in the early It was the more militant nation of Islam that would establish itself as the dominant strain of American Islamic philosophy, after its most famous member, Malcolm X, returned to Boston in 1953.
00:10:20
Speaker
The Akhmatia movement would, however, continue to expand in New York City, converting bebop musicians as part of its strategy for growth. These musicians were drawn to the values of racial affirmation, liberation and social justice that jazz musicians and Islamic missionaries shared, as well as to the African-American religious internationalism and the Akhmati sense of transnationalism and universal brotherhood.
00:10:44
Speaker
In the 1940s, a teenage jazz bassist and violinist named Jonathan Tim Jr., the son of Afro-Caribbean immigrants, converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community by way of the jazz-influenced Muslim Brotherhood, located in Bedford-Stew, Brooklyn.
00:10:58
Speaker
He adopted the name Ahmed Abdul-Malik. He learned to speak Arabic and adopted Eastern instruments in his music, interacting with other Arab musicians on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
00:11:10
Speaker
Malik would become close friends with pianist Randy Weston, another jazz musician with Afro-Caribbean heritage, whose father had been a Garveyite activist in Brooklyn, and alto saxophonist Bilal Abdurrahman, another convert to the Ahmadiyya movement.
00:11:25
Speaker
Malik spent time in Art Blakey's band in the 40s before embarking on a solo career that fused jazz with Middle Eastern and North African musical styles. The two albums he created in 1958 and 59, Jazz Sahara and East Meets West, effectively established a new sub-genre of jazz that combined bebop with Arabic musical sounds, something that would influence the later music of Yusuf Latif and John Coltrane.
00:11:49
Speaker
This is the track Hannibal's Carnivals from the 1961 album The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik.
00:11:57
Speaker
so
00:12:23
Speaker
Kenny Clark, a jazz drummer from Pittsburgh, had been fundamental
Nation of Islam and Jazz
00:12:27
Speaker
to the creation of bebop, playing at venues like Minton's Playhouse in New York in the 1940s. He was another convert to the Ahmadiyya movement in 1946 and took the name Liyakwat Ali Salaam.
00:12:40
Speaker
Clark had served in the US Army during World War II and was disturbed on his return to see the level of racism in the southern states towards black military veterans who had served their country. He had performed in England, Germany, Belgium and Paris, France during the war.
00:12:55
Speaker
He would return to Paris as part of Dizzy Gillespie's band in 1948 and eventually settle there permanently. In 1958, after a career playing for some of the greatest jazz bands and band leaders,
00:13:06
Speaker
Miles Davis, Donald Byrd, Sonny Rollins and the modern jazz quartet among them. Referring to musicians like Kenny Clark who had converted to Islam, Dizzy Gillespie stated that part of their motivation for doing so was to erase the stigma of their coloured Jim Crow identity and to have W for white printed on their identification cards to protect them from racial violence.
00:13:27
Speaker
Ahmadiyyas could declare themselves to be black international people. Muslims in a global Islamic community, as we had illegally and psychologically detached themselves from the intergenerational trauma of the African-American experience.
00:13:43
Speaker
During the 1960s, the Nation of Islam became a wealthy and powerful African-American religious group, with its own temples, bank, newspaper, schools, farms and houses. It was a success story within the wider Black Power movement.
00:13:57
Speaker
This community-based economic autonomy appealed to jazz musicians who had been consistently exploited by white-owned clubs and record companies since the very inception of the music. Lewis X, minister at Temple No. 11 in Boston. Malcolm X, national spokesperson and minister at Harlem, Temple No. 8.
00:14:16
Speaker
and founder Elijah Muhammad were all jazz fans. Louis X was a former violinist and calypso singer. In the 1940s, the Nation of Islam made its first appearance in the prisons of the United States of America and found an audience ready to embrace its message of Afro-American religious internationalism, resistance to systemic racism, and advocacy for racial separatism.
00:14:39
Speaker
The NOI offered incarcerated men an opportunity to rise above their situation and to break the cycle of bitterness that many prisoners had found themselves in. The Nation of Islam's modern presentation of the Asiatic identity combined elements of Afro-Eurasian Islamic traditions, especially Sunni traditions, with African religious practices, creating a form of Islamic practice that resonated with global agency, creativity and the improvisational forms of bebop jazz.
00:15:05
Speaker
The NOI appealed to beboppers like the black men in Massachusetts prisons because it was a new urban transnational religion that, like jazz, critiqued and challenged Christianity and presented creative non-Western versions of blackness, freedom and self-determination.
00:15:21
Speaker
This rejection of Christianity was consistent with what Richard Brent Turner refers to as musical antagonism that developed because of what many saw as the appropriation of African American jazz by the white mainstream.
00:15:34
Speaker
Its global black religious consciousness resonated with the pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism that emerged in some places after Marcus Garvey's incarceration and exile from the United States in the late 1920s, which forced him to abandon his executive headquarters in Harlem.
00:15:50
Speaker
The Nation of Islam began with the missionary work of Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in Detroit, Michigan in 1930. W. D. Fard's ethnic background is undocumented, but he was believed to have been a Pakistani Muslim and originally a missionary of the Lahore Ahmadiyya movement.
00:16:06
Speaker
Although NOI became a black nationalist movement, it espoused the same rhetoric in relation to black religious internationalism. that had excited the followers of Marcus Garvey in order to broaden its pace.
00:16:18
Speaker
Farr had preached to southern migrants in Detroit. His teaching connected the experiences black Americans had with racism to the internationalist struggle of the darker races of the world. The Nation of Islam would eventually extend to include Latino and Native American people.
00:16:33
Speaker
He convinced many black Muslim converts whose ancestors were taken from Africa and enslaved that they were not Americans but Asiatics, members of the lost tribe of Shabazz, stolen from the holy city of Mecca over 350 years before.
00:16:47
Speaker
Caucasians were the devil's white race responsible for the enslavement and colonization of the original people, who were all the colored people of the earth. Farrar led the Nation of Islam for four years, converted thousands of black people in Chicago and Detroit before he was arrested in 1953.
00:17:03
Speaker
He disappeared soon after, on June 30th, 1934. The Nation of Islam cultivated its own aesthetics of purification, black Atlantic coolness, black family and masculinity within what were patriarchal religious communities.
00:17:19
Speaker
Women captains and lieutenants led Muslim girls training and general civilisation classes to cultivate the Nation of Islam's gendered practices among female counterparts. Muslim women were teachers who administered the Muhammad University of Islam, a school for children.
00:17:35
Speaker
Boys and men learned about the Nation of Islam's core religious teachings, black masculine practices, self-defense and recruitment strategies in the fruit of Islam education centers. It emphasized the stylish but strict dress code and the stoic, controlled approach in matters of public discourse.
00:17:51
Speaker
Also, dietary practices where no pork or alcohol were permitted. In the early 1930s, Elijah Poole, a black migrant from Georgia and an admirer of Marcus Garvey, converted to the Nation of Islam with his wife Clara.
00:18:05
Speaker
He became W.D. Farrad's most trusted supreme minister and was renamed Elijah Muhammad. Farrad was deified after his disappearance in 1934 and Elijah Muhammad then designated himself as a messenger of Allah.
00:18:18
Speaker
Muhammad moved to Chicago where he established Temple No. 2, partly to escape dangerous factionalism with other ministers who wrestled for control of the NOI leadership. Temple No. 3 was established in Milwaukee, with Temple No. 4 established in Washington, D.C. soon after.
00:18:33
Speaker
In 1942, Elijah Muhammad and his son Emmanuel were arrested and convicted of refusing to register for the wartime draft for military service and for influencing NOI followers in Chicago to do likewise.
00:18:45
Speaker
FBI raids on African-American Muslim institutions were becoming increasingly common, and Muhammad was incarcerated in federal prison in Michigan between 1942 to 1946. Muhammad's time in prison helped him identify the radio and those black men incarcerated in American prisons as the means by which he could grow the NOI's strength.
00:19:04
Speaker
Elijah Muhammad said his favourite recording was Ponchiana, from Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing, but not for me.
00:19:36
Speaker
Vernel Fernier, the New Orleans-born drummer in that album, was part of a jazz group that played regularly at Elijah Muhammad's restaurants in the 1960s. Muhammad influenced Fernier to convert to the Nation of Islam, where he adopted the name Amir Rushdan.
00:19:49
Speaker
and In the late 50s, music played an increasingly significant role in the Nation of Islam's social and cultural programs. They were motivated to attract successful jazzmen and women to the movement. A low admired by the Nation of Islam leader, Elijah Muhammad, Ahmad Jamal was seen as exemplifying the universal qualities of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, such as black internationalism, and was later introduced to Islam by hard-bop trumpeter Idris Suleiman during a stint playing at the Harlem Apollo.
00:20:17
Speaker
Jamal and his wife, Virginia Wilkins, converted to the Ahmadiyya movement in 1950. Ahmad Jamal formed the Three Strings in 1951, with drummer Vernail Furnier and bassist Israel Crosby.
00:20:29
Speaker
They recorded several albums, including the best-selling 1958 live album, But Not For Me, Live at the Pershing, released on Argo Records, recorded live at the Pershing Jazz Club on the south side of Chicago.
00:20:40
Speaker
The popularity of this album drew attention towards Jamal's religious identity as a devout Muslim. He made public statements crediting his creativity to his Islamic faith, stating how the religion had given him purpose and direction.
00:20:54
Speaker
He travelled to Sudan and Egypt in 1958 to learn about Africa and spent time learning from Dr. Mahmud Youssef Shawarbi, the Sunni Egyptian intellectual and professor of Islam who would go on to become an advisor to the United Nations. so After returning to the US, Jamal opened a jazz supper club on the south side of Chicago called the Alhambra.
00:21:14
Speaker
The venue did not sell alcohol, as per Islamic practice, but served food from the Middle East, India, Pakistan and other Islamic cultures. afforded a certain level of freedom by his commercial success, it was Jamal's intention to run an independent business, free from the usual industry constraints.
00:21:30
Speaker
In doing so, he was embracing the goal of self-determination that had been central to the teachings of those leaders within the African-American Islamic movement, which had picked up the mantle of Marcus Garvey and Paul Robeson. After his divorce in 1962, Jamal moved in New York and formed a new group with drummer Frank Grant and Muslim bassist Jamil Nasser, who had played with Lester Young, Hank Mobley and Randy Weston.
00:21:53
Speaker
Nasser, who admired Jamal's independent businesses and demand for respectable performance conditions, spoke of how his Islamic faith had enabled him to avoid the self-destructive vices that other jazz musicians had fallen prey to, primarily alcohol and heroin.
00:22:08
Speaker
Notwithstanding, Nasser also spoke publicly of how some of the organisations within the American Islamic movement had been over-controlling of their members. He embraced Sunni Islam and attended the Riverside Drive Mosque on the Upper West Side of New York, a site that was reputedly attended by many jazz musicians.
00:22:24
Speaker
Coincidentally, this mosque was operated by Dr. Mahmud Youssef Shawarbi, who had befriended Ahmad Jamal while working in Egypt.
Influence of Islam on Prominent Figures
00:22:33
Speaker
The Boston Police Department arrested Malcolm Detroit Red Little in Roxbury on 12th January 1946. He confessed to several household robberies in the Boston suburbs and identified his friends who were also arrested.
00:22:47
Speaker
Malcolm and Shorty Jarvis were sentenced to serve four consecutive eight-year prison terms for larceny and breaking and entering. While in prison for the period of 1946 to 1952, Malcolm and Shorty both converted to Islam and underwent a spiritual transformation.
00:23:03
Speaker
Malcolm was inspired by his friend Shorty Jarvis and visits from his family at Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, which held an extensive prison library and a prison orchestra, where Shorty played piano. The prison also ran education programs from Boston University and Harvard.
00:23:18
Speaker
Malcolm's brother Wilfred had converted to the Nation of Islam, and his siblings, Filbert, Reginald, Wesley and Hilda, all of whom visited Malcolm in prison, followed suit. Malcolm and Shorty's conversion to Islam coincided with the beginning of the Second Great Migration during the period between the late 40s and early 70s, in which more than 5 million black Americans moved from the southern states to the cities of the urban north.
00:23:41
Speaker
In addition to transforming and reinterpreting African American culture and their new urban environment, these migrants also faced myriad problems, which they transformed into a new social and musical identities. In letters to his family, Malcolm referred to his Zoot Suit Des in Boston and Harlem and the influence of jazz on his social consciousness as he completed his conversion to the Nation of Islam.
00:24:00
Speaker
Some of his letters, which were published in 2000, refer to his friendships with Billie Holiday and visits from Lionel Hampton, who he knew from Detroit. By the 1960s, the Nation of Islam accounted for almost 50% of all operating Muslim congregations in the United States.
00:24:17
Speaker
On the 7th of August 1952, Malcolm Little was paroled and released from prison at 27 years old. He lived with his brother Wilfred in Detroit and became a Nation of Islam minister in December 1953. He was encouraged by Elijah Muhammad to recruit youth, and he started to seek converts in Detroit's jazz venues.
00:24:34
Speaker
By the end of 1953, Malcolm was sent to Boston to establish a new temple in Roxbury, where black jazz musicians were shaping both the Islamic community and jazz music in the city. Malcolm began a recruitment drive in Boston's South End and Roxbury Jazz Spaces, at this point his friend, Shorty Jarvis.
00:24:53
Speaker
Ed also returned to Boston and resumed his career as a jazz trumpeter. Malcolm's charismatic delivery won over young men, impressed by his mesmerising performance strategies of black Atlantic cool and his message of global black consciousness to challenge systemic racism.
00:25:07
Speaker
The Massachusetts restaurant Chicken Lane was popular among Muslims and musicians because it accommodated the dietary restrictions of Muslims and was located between two jazz clubs, the Savoy and Wally's Paradise.
00:25:19
Speaker
Malcolm would meet potential converts here and at the address of 5 Wellington Street in the South End, the home of jazz trumpeter Lloyd X. Rodney Smith, a saxophonist student at Northeastern University who had converted to the Nation of Islam, had influenced the conversion of another young musician, a Boston Calypso singer and musician named Lewis Eugene Walcott.
00:25:39
Speaker
Walcott would convert to the Nation of Islam after meeting Malcolm X at the Chicken Lane restaurant. He adopted the name Louis Farrakhan and would become a significant leader in the NOI as Minister of Harlem's Temple No. 7 in 1957, as well as a rival to the leadership of Malcolm X. I mentioned in an earlier episode that on 15th September 1974, the Nation of Islam hosted its Saviour's Day celebration on Randalls Island, in New York, on a bill that included Jamaican SCA legend Jimmy Cliff, Gil Scott Heron, and Cuban stars Celia Cruz and Eddie Palmieri, who sadly died in the last few weeks.
00:26:14
Speaker
The most prominent figure in the Nation of Islam at that point, black nationalist leader and NOI figurehead, Brother Reverend Louis Farrakhan, addressed a crowd of over 20,000 people calling for black unity and denouncing the United States as the wickedest nation on the face of the earth.
00:26:28
Speaker
Born in the Bronx to Caribbean immigrants, Farrakhan had been a Calypso singer prior to joining the original Nation of Islam in 1955. In 1964, he had become a minister of the NOI's Harlem Temple No. 7.
00:26:41
Speaker
controversial figure, Farrakhan was fully aware of New York's cultural importance for black Americans on the national and global stage. He would use this to consolidate his own position within the organisation, ultimately becoming its leader, and to expand the reach of the NOI throughout the United States and abroad.
00:26:57
Speaker
Despite some highly questionable politics, including blatant anti-Semitism, homophobia, and championing of Dianetics in the Church of Scientology, not to mention the Nation of Islam's involvement in the assassination of Malcolm X,
00:27:09
Speaker
Farrakhan Wood by the 1990s emerged as a prominent African-American cultural leader, exercising a wide influence over black culture, notably in hip-hop. The NOI would be instrumental in brokering the LA Gang Truce of 1992 and in organising the celebratory Million Man March in Washington DC in 1995.
00:27:28
Speaker
Malcolm X's success in mentoring young bebop musicians included Charles X Williams and Jimmy X Diamond. His recruitment of these men would influence the spread of NOI temples. Charles X opened Temple No. 10 in Atlantic City in 1953.
00:27:43
Speaker
Malcolm X's missionary work in Boston saw the local Muslim community grow with Temple No. 11, opening in March 1954. Malcolm had established another Nation of Islam temple in Philadelphia in May 1954, and while the Nation of Islam initially drew strength from those incarcerated African American men,
00:28:00
Speaker
who populated the prisons of America's urban north. Research indicates that a large number of the NOI's early converts also consisted of black internationalists, economic migrants, World War I and Korean War veterans, and academically educated musicians with intellectual ties to Boston and Cambridge colleges and universities such as the Berkeley College of Music, the Boston Conservatory, the New England Conservatory of Music, Northeastern University, and Harvard.
00:28:28
Speaker
Jamil Nasser would eventually befriend Malcolm X after he left the Nation of Islam in 1964. Nasser summarised the political philosophy of jazz musicians who had converted to Islam as follows. Our revolution was a quiet one, as it lacked the collective organisation and mobilisation to dramatise its agenda.
00:28:46
Speaker
It was led by courageous individuals who resented the plantation-like nature of the jazz business and desired to make their own music. In 1958, Jamil Nasser joined the New York Jazz Quartet, which included Idris Suleiman on trumpet, Oscar Dennard on piano and Buster Smith on drums.
00:29:02
Speaker
Suleiman had been blacklisted in New York because of his religion, which contributed to the band's departure for Paris in 1959 for a two-month stay. While in France, they connected with bebop drummer Kenny Clark, who was living there at the time.
00:29:15
Speaker
They moved on to play at concerts in Tangier, and Morocco, where Dennard and Smith both converted to Islam. The band declined to play at concerts organised by the US Intelligence Agency, which would have brought them into the American government's diplomatic efforts during the Cold War, which we discussed in earlier episodes.
00:29:31
Speaker
Nasser would harbour suspicions that this refusal, on the part of the musicians, to do the bidding of the American government was the cause of misfortune that subsequently befell the band. After touring in Tunisia, they were refused entry to Algeria after it was suspected the promoter that had invited them was an American spy.
00:29:47
Speaker
following a tour of Egypt. In 1960, the band's pianist Oscar Dennard contracted typhoid fever and died in Cairo. Nasser believed the CIA were somehow involved in Dennard's death and the group soon disbanded afterwards.
00:30:00
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Jamil Nasser would maintain maintain a professional relationship with Ahmad Jamal, playing in Jamal's group from 1964 onwards. He would then become vice president of Ahmad Jamal Productions and Ahmad Jamal Publishing in 1969.
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Alfonso Nelson Rainey was a jazz trumpeter from Antigua who had played in Dizzy Gillespie's band. After converting to Islam, he changed his name to Talib Dawood. He formed the Muslim Brotherhood USA in the early nineteen fifty s which linked together mosques located in Providence, Rhode Island, Boston and Washington, D.C.
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The organisation faced police crackdowns in Philadelphia after having the temerity to advertise their existence and opposition from the Nation of Islam when they attempted to move into Detroit, where the NOI exercised strong influence.
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Talib Dawood pushed for international solidarity as opposed to the racial exclusivity of the separatist nation of Islam. He was also publicly critical of NOI leader Elijah Muhammad, commenting that the NOI had essentially prioritised politics ahead of the religious devotion and practices of universality, which he saw as more essential for the successful expansion of the Muslim faith.
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Talib Dawood married jazz vocalist Dakota Staten in 1959 and his wife converted to the Ahmadiyya religion. Staten and Dawood were lead hosts of the 1959 Harlem reception for Sekou Toure, the Pan-African Muslim president of Guinea, an anti-colonial nation that gained independence in 1958. Nation of Islam members were not invited to the reception, prompting a severe response.
00:31:33
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NOI members attacked Dawood, throwing acid over him when his reception was finished. Talib Dawood had inspired tenor saxophonist Yusuf Latif, a friend of John Coltrane's, to join the Akhmatia movement in Chicago in 1946.
00:31:47
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Latif was born in Tennessee and raised in Detroit. He studied Islam at the Akhmatia Mission House in Chicago, and after moving to New York with continuous studies in the apartment of drummer Art Blakey.
Jazz, Islam, and Artistic Freedom
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While playing in Dizzy Gillespie's band, Lateef contributed to the growth of bebop, but he was highly critical of those musicians who dabbled in narcotics, of which there were many. His view was that drug addiction destroyed artistic freedom and self-determination.
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It was certainly the case that the prevalence of drug addiction in the jazz community Latif felt that the quality jazz music was such that musicians should resist the marginalisation of music smoky nightclubs cabarets, the influence of the criminal underworld evident at every turn.
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when negotiating performance contracts and profit splits lateif felt that the quality of jazz music was such that musicians should resist the marginalization of their music to smoking nightclubs and cabaetst but the influence of the criminal underworld was evident at every turn In the mid-1950s, Yusuf Latif studied music at Wayne State University in Detroit.
00:32:45
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He discovered Arab and Middle Eastern reed instruments on visits to Syrian stores in the city's eastern markets. Latif learned to play instruments from all over the world. He formed his first band, and by 1957 had recorded two albums, Other Sounds and Jazz for the Thinker, in New Jersey and New York City.
00:33:02
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The diversity of global musical styles reflected his religious internationalism. His album cover saw him wearing a keffy, and the liner notes described as Islamic spirituality. After a brutal physical assault by police in Detroit, he embarked for New York City, where he enjoyed a career playing for some of the greats of American jazz music, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Randy Weston, Grant Green, and Babatunde Ola Tunji among them.
00:33:38
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Guitarist Grant Green was a St. Louis musician.
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guitarist grant green was a st louis musician prompted to join the Nation of Islam during the mid-50s by Islamic bass player Herschel Morris. He became devoted to NOI practice, including vegetarianism, and eventually established a nation temple in his hometown.
00:34:21
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Green moved in New York in 1960 and recorded an album for Blueno titled Green Street. Unfortunately, his heroin habit severely affected his health, marriage and financial livelihood. Most of the paychecks went to heroin, and he struggled to send money to his wife Anne and four children.
00:34:37
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His daughter-in-law described him as a man of pure contradiction, extolling the wonders of Islam and eating healthy meals while simultaneously destroying his body with heroin. It's reported that Green was a favourite musician of Elijah Muhammad, and this is cited as a possible reason for his escaping disciplinary action within the Nation of Islam, which was dished out to other drug addicts and those who broke strict disciplinary codes within the movement.
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during During the period 1960-65, Grant Green was the most recorded artist on Blue Note Records. His track Cease the Bombing anticipates the emergence of soul jazz-infused hip-hop and groups like A Tribe Called Quest.
00:35:45
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But the beautiful albums he made could sustain him for only so long. In 1968, Grant Green served a prison sentence in New York for narcotics possession. He was released in 1969 and returned to Brooklyn to live with his family.
00:35:59
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Green became excited by the music of James Brown, his vocal style and polyrhythmic drumming. This funk influence was reflected in his two albums, Soul Brotherhood and Love Bug, which later a run of albums on Blue Note in the soul jazz style in the neighbourhood of Roy Ayers.
00:36:15
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Green moved to Detroit in 1970 after his divorce, where he remarried, but fell into heavy cocaine addiction. Because of his drug use and reputation for womanising, he did not attend the Nation of Islam Temple, but he did play at concerts for Muslim businessmen.
00:36:29
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He hired African-American Muslim manager hey Glover to help recharge his career in 1975.
00:36:36
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Glover insisted that Green give up his religion as a strategic measure for improving his chances of commercial success. Islamophobia had been fuelled by the intense surveillance tactics of the FBI, which had effectively gone to war with the Black Power movement and the Nation of Islam.
00:36:51
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Grant Green was 43 years old when he died of a heart attack in 1979. The Black Power
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Movement
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Thank
00:37:28
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Philadelphia trumpeter Lee Morgan, one of the definitive musicians of hard bop, became a Muslim in the early 1960s. However, as with Grant Green, his problems with drug addiction kept him from reaching exalted status within the American Islamic movement.
00:37:43
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In 1956, he got his big break with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and it was reportedly Morgan that persuaded Blakey to hire a young sax player named Wayne Shorter after Benny Goldson had left the Jazz Messengers around his time.
00:37:56
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Morgan moved in New York in 1956 to play in Dizzy Gillespie's band. He recorded his first two albums on Blue Note and Savoy, and played as a sideman on John Coltrane's album Blue Train, showcasing his precise, robust, funky, upbeat style.
00:38:10
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His run of solo albums in 1957 to 58 are simply incredible, especially Candy from 1958. This is Who Do You Love, I hope, from that album.
00:38:43
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Morgan's musical brilliance would not be enough to save him from being sacked by Art Blakey in 1961. To compound his misery, he was attacked with a hammer in the summer of 1961 and lost several teeth, a real problem for a trumpet player.
Challenges and Surveillance
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He returned to his hometown of Philadelphia and was recruited for membership in the Nation of Islam's Philadelphia Mosque No. 12. His drug habit persisted, but he continued to record and he made the Jazzland Records album Take 12 with sax player Jimmy Heath.
00:39:11
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Lee Morgan returned to New York in 1963, where he managed to score a huge hit with The Sidewinder on Blue Note Records, the crossover appeal of the track based on its fusion of jazz, soul, blues and R&B influences.
00:39:23
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This prompted a return to Art Blakey's band, and he began to compose new music. that identified with black, Islamic, and African themes. The classic Search for a New Land, released on Blue Note in 1966, was recorded with fellow Nation of Islam member Grant Green.
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The opening title track's atmospheric production seemed like a precursor to the cinematic production style of Norman Whitfield and his work with The Temptations a few years later on tracks like Law of the Land and Papa was a Rolling Stone, and serves as a perfect example of the heights to which American jazz music had risen by this stage of the nineteen sixty s
00:40:32
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Again, the influence of Marcus Garvey shines through, and the rest of the album manages to live up to its brilliant opening, including on a thematic level. Mr Kenyatta, off that same album, is a tribute to James Kenyatta, the anti-colonialist and first president of Kenya between 1964 and 1978.
00:40:50
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After leaving Art Blakey's band, Lee Morgan released a series of commercially successful solo albums. As a sideman, he played on some incredible records with other band leaders. Wayne Shorter's Night Dreamer, Freddie Hubbard's The Night of the Cookers, Joe Henderson's Mode for Joe, McCoy Tyner's Tender Moments, and Lonnie Smith's Think and Turning Point.
00:41:11
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Morgan immersed himself in the black nationalist movement. He participated in protest movements, including the Jazz and People's Movement, with saxophonist Roland Rashid-Kirk, where he and other artists picketed live television talk shows to campaign for better representation of black musicians and musical performance for television.
00:41:29
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In the last years of his life, his working band featured reed player Billy Harper and pianist Harold Mayburn. On 19th February 1972, Lee Morgan's band were playing a show at Slug Saloon, a jazz club in New York City's East Village.
00:41:44
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Following an altercation between sets, Morgan's girlfriend, Helen Moore, shot him. He died from his injuries in the ambulance that was taking him to the hospital. He was only 33 years old
00:41:59
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The
00:42:28
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Jamesetta Hawkins was born in Los Angeles in 1938, learning to sing in a Black Baptist church choir. In South Central LA, she quit school in 1953 and ran away to Hollywood with a teenage R&B vocal group, The Peaches.
00:42:42
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She took the stage name Etta James and toured the US in the 1950s as a solo vocalist. In 1960, Etta moved to Chicago and recorded her first album, At Last, with producer Leonard Chess at the legendary Chess Records.
00:42:57
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By the early 1960s, she began using heroin and cocaine, partying with pimps and heavy gangsters after her shows. During one period of sobriety, she converted to Islam and became a member of the Nation of Islam.
00:43:09
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After attending Atlanta's NOI Temple No. 15, She took the name Jamesetta X. Despite the overt, patriarchal nature of the Nation of Islam, she embraced its communal masculinity and expressed how the aesthetic style and sense of brotherhood among the NOI male converts had inspired her to join, referring to the NOI as an exciting beacon of racial uplift and black consciousness.
00:43:30
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This is Anything to Say You're Mine, the opening track off At Last. Each and every day And I haven't heard from you Since you went away
00:44:15
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In 1960, while living at the Teresa Hotel in Harlem, Etta James had a profound experience as a spectator to Fidel Castro's visit to Harlem at the invitation of NOI figurehead Malcolm X. This was during a period where she had been attending NOI Temple No. 7 in Harlem and had come under the spell of Malcolm, drawn to his intense, charismatic preaching and righteous spirituality.
00:44:37
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Castro was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly and had been invited to Harlem following some mildly inhospitable treatment at the Cuban delegation's Midtown Hotel. Nikita Khrushchev, former Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, who was also attending the UN Assembly, would manage to venture uptown to meet Castro and Malcolm X on the streets of Harlem.
00:44:57
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There's some amusing footage of this encounter in the recent Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'etat, which deals primarily with the assassination of newly independent Congo's charismatic leader Patrice Lumumba.
00:45:09
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Khrushchev is giddy with excitement to embrace Castro in the midst of a heaving mass of Harlem onlookers, excited by their famous visitors. These scenes are a perfect demonstration of the truly global outreach of the American Islamic movement at the time, and the extent to which Marcus Garvey's notion of black internationalism would enable African American political and cultural leaders to create connections with non-Western heads of state in the framework of the Cold War.
00:45:33
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For more cynical onlookers, especially those within the FBI and CIA, the interconnectedness of the American Islamic movements with communist activists and the political leaders of non-aligned post-colonial nations like Cuba was a threatening development that necessitated ongoing surveillance.
00:45:49
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As the 1960s progressed, the covert operations of FBI projects like COINTELPRO, which monitored subversive organizations like the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Communist Party USA, would become increasingly repressive and violent.
00:46:06
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The White House has a buzz with final preparation. as was all the capital for the arrival of Russia Premier at 11.30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Khrushchev leaving Russia about midnight Eastern Standard Time.
00:46:21
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Khrushchev will arrive in the Tu-114 turboprovo Russian jet at Andrew Air Force Base. He will have his family and some 40 other Russian officials with him.
00:46:34
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President back to the Blair House, just across the street from the White House. The first chance for two-man summit meeting comes tomorrow at 3.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
00:46:51
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Khrushchev make his first White House call then. Mr. Eisenhower has allotted a 90-minute to Khrushchev. The pair will be alone except for interpreters.
00:47:01
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And Hagerty said the talk could run longer if necessary. Given the impression, the East and West leader will get down to solid talk immediately. Ladies and gentlemen, you just have heard the 4 o'clock latest edition of the Worldwide News, which is compiled and edited here in the studios of W.E.U.P.
00:47:21
Speaker
And your reporter have been Daddy Koo. Yes, sir, Daddy O's and Mama O's, let's get back on the scene. I hope y'all get what mean. I said shoot the juice to my loop, but just don't overload. I'm just like the porter when good to me, boss, and I can't stop.
00:47:34
Speaker
Don't worry about the weather, let's get together, let off a half down and do little weed pulling around. Heh, heh. Yeah, gonna play this number here by Harvey Johanna. This is dedication go out for Mr. and Mrs. Jackson.
00:47:45
Speaker
That's right. Mr. and Mrs. John Jackson. They say they go for this number the most. They heard Sugar Daddy play it a couple of times. And I said I'd go in the stack there and get it out for you, Mr. and Mrs.