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BROOKLYN JAZZ CONNECT
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BROOKLYN'S JAZZ RENAISSANCE ~ By Robin D.G. Kelley
Of course, critics like Heckman who look for “politics” in song titles, explicit references to world events, or musicians’ commentary, invariably reduce politics to protest. But during the forum, Baraka insisted that the language of “social protest” obscures the real political meaning of the music. Indeed, the entire panel discussed jazz in terms of building community and sustaining African American culture, mentoring new generations in the tradition, recognizing the democratic, communal, even spiritual nature of jazz performance, and reclaiming and preserving this great African American art form.
If these issues really lie at the heart of the politics of jazz, then a revolution is taking place in Brooklyn. While predominantly white “downtown” audiences squeeze into the Blue Note or the Vanguard to be entertained by the hip, across the bridge Brooklyn’s black activists and artists are reclaiming the music’s roots and employing it for the political, social and spiritual uplift of the community. Jazz is everywhere in Central Brooklyn—at intimate nightclubs like Up Over Jazz Cafe, Pumpkins, and The Jazz Spot; at local coffeehouses like Sistas’ Place; in community centers; even in the house of the Lord. Brooklyn has its own black-oriented jazz magazine, Pure Jazz, edited by the tireless JoAnn Cheatham. And as anyone who has attended the annual Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival can tell you, the audiences for the music are predominantly black, representing all classes and ages. Quiet as it seems, reaffirming the music’s links to black community struggles and social transformation marks a radical challenge to jazz’s current trajectory, which has become deeply commercialized, rendered color-blind and apolitical, and promoted as American high culture.
The key force behind the Brooklyn revolution is the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium. Founded about five years ago by a group of black artists, activists, and entrepreneurs, including the late singer Torrie McCartney, trumpeter and composer Ahmed Abdullah, and veteran black community activists Viola Plummer and Jitu Weusi, the CBJC set out to promote “African American classical music” as a collective, community project. The CBJC is made up of several club owners, nearly half a dozen churches, and a variety of community centers. More than a business venture, the CBJC was created to spread positive cultural values through the music. Bob Myers, owner of Up Over Jazz Cafe and original CBJC member, explained, “This is the African way, to promote the culture through the music and arts, and to do so not in competition but in cooperation.”2
What the CBJC is attempting to do has deep roots in Brooklyn’s history and its rich jazz heritage. Back in the day, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Lee Morgan, and others played at Brooklyn venues like Putnam Central, the Blue Coronet, the Baby Grand, Club La Marchal, or Tony’s Club Grandean. Trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan helped put Brooklyn on the global jazz map in 1965 with the release of Night of the Cookers, vols. 1 and 2, recorded live at the Club La Marchal on Nostrand Avenue and President Street. Brooklynites enjoyed occasional concerts at the Paramount Theater, and many danced to big bands at the Elks or Sonia ballrooms. But this barely scratches the surface, for as long-time Brooklyn resident and former musician Freddie Robinson told me, “The music was everywhere. Every little corner bar had jazz.” Some of the better known joints were the Pleasant Lounge, Club 78, Kingston Lounge, and Club Continental.3
Brooklyn jazz musicians have also been working cooperatively for at least a half-century. Indeed, one of Myers’s models for the CBJC was Club Jest Us, a group of jazz musicians’ wives living in Brooklyn during the 1960s who worked collectively in order to secure gigs for their husbands. A decade earlier, Brooklyn-born pianist and composer Randy Weston recalled working with his neighborhood pals, including drummer Max Roach, to organize musicians’ collectives. Weston and other musicians learned a great deal about cooperation and self-reliance from his father, Frank Weston, who inspired young musicians at his restaurant with stories of Marcus Garvey, Africa, and the continuing struggle to uplift the black community.4
During the 1960s and early 1970s, the late Cal Massey, an extraordinary composer and trumpeter, turned his Brooklyn home into a veritable community center. Besides writing explicitly revolutionary pieces like “The Black Liberation Suite,” Massey organized benefit concerts for the Black Panther Party that encouraged the full participation of the community, especially youth, by banning alcohol and providing free childcare. Around the same time, Jitu Weusi, founder and current chairman of the CBJC, promoted jazz as a cultural and political force to mobilize Brooklyn’s black community when he founded The East in 1969. Located in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant, The East was a black cultural center where artists such as bassist Reggie Workman performed and held workshops for youth.5
During the 1970s and 1980s, in the wake of the borough’s decline due to high unemployment, federal cutbacks, and drugs, black activists who sought to revitalize Brooklyn once again turned to jazz. The Bed-Stuy Restoration Corporation was one of those institutions that helped pave the way for the current Brooklyn renaissance. The Center for Arts and Culture at Bed-Stuy Restoration Corp, for example, trains young people in the art of jazz and runs the Skylight Gallery where musicians frequently perform. Myers’s Up Over Jazz Cafe is also a space for community building. Neighborhood musicians work out ideas through open jam sessions, and Myers has even hosted several nights of “Hip Hop Meets Jazz,” where singing sensation Bilal jammed with friends, including the equally sensational pianist Jason Moran.
Perhaps the best-known and most politicized community space for jazz is Sistas’ Place on Nostrand and Jefferson Avenues. Run by a collective whose members have ties to political organizations such as the December 12th Movement and the Harriet Tubman/Fannie Lou Hamer Collective, Sistas’ Place hosts a wide range of cultural activities. Any given week one might hear the Sun Ra Arkestra or
saxophonist René McLean, or check out a Sunday afternoon panel discussion on reparations for slavery or police brutality.6
The jazz revolution in Brooklyn has not led to a distinctive “Brooklyn aesthetic,” largely because virtually all genres are represented—from bebop to avant-garde. Nevertheless, some general characteristics of the music and artists deserve comment.
The CBJC encourages young artists by hosting frequent open jam sessions and promoting conversations between jazz and other musical genres. During the 2003 festival, for example, BRIC Studio on Rockwell Place hosted DJ Logic performing with jazz musicians, and The Jazz Spot committed its entire March calendar to young women instrumentalists. The most important characteristic of the CBJC’s artistic vision is its reverence for black music and musicians throughout the African Diaspora and on the continent. Following in the footsteps of native son Randy Weston, a pioneer in the movement to reconnect Africa with African American musical traditions, several of the festival performers incorporate African instruments, Afro-Latin and Caribbean rhythms, as well as various forms of black sacred music. Ultimately, if there is any essential principle behind the movement, it is to celebrate and reclaim black music for Brooklyn’s black community.
For CBJC co-founder Ahmed Abdullah, the very existence of black, community-based spaces for jazz is “regenerating.”7 Abdullah himself has helped to create these spaces by working closely with schools and churches. In February 2003, Concord Baptist Church held a well-attended tribute to Gigi Gryce and Randy Weston, at which elementary school kids sang Gryce’s “Social Call” and a teenaged band known as Friends and Strangers struggled valiantly with Weston’s best-known compositions. The predominantly black crowd embraced this music with the enthusiasm of a Sunday morning revival. For the last two springs, Concord hosted “100 Golden Fingers in Praise,” a concert of sacred music led by pianist Barry Harris and at least nine other pianists, including Bertha Hope, Gil Coggins, and Valerie Capers. Besides Concord Baptist Church, several other religious institutions including St. Philips Episcopal Church, Our Lady of Victory
Roman Catholic Church, Jane’s United Methodist, First Pres-byterian Church,
and Hanson Place Central United Methodist Church have hosted performances as part
of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival. Last year, Brooklyn’s 651 ARTS and musical director Akua Dixon brought together a jazz ensemble featuring trombonist Craig Harris with the Total Praise Choir and rocked Emmanuel Baptist Church.
For many of the ministers involved with the CBJC, as well as for activists like Abdullah, bringing the music back to its roots in black communities is necessary, both for the music’s survival as well as for the community’s resurrection. No one is saying jazz ought to be the exclusive property of black folk; it never was. Instead, the music needs to be “allowed to grow in the atmosphere that nurtures its creative juices,” Abdullah explained. This is not a tale of protest but a story of social and spiritual liberation. And for Abdullah, and presumably most of the folks behind the Brooklyn revolution, thinking of jazz as a spiritually liberating force for a community in struggle can serve as a model for the rest of the world: “That’s what the music is about anyway. That’s why it’s loved around
the world. That’s why I say in its true essence Jazz is a music of the spirit.”8
—Columbia University
Notes
1 Don Heckman, “Music (and Musicians) as a Force for Change,” Los Angeles Times (21 March 2003): E19.
2 Bob Myers, interview with author, 21 February 2003.
3 K. Leander Williams, “Brooklyn, New York,” in Lost Jazz Shrines (The Lost Shrines Project, 1998), 12-16; Bilal Abdurahman, In the Key of Me: The Bedford Stuyvesant Renaissance, 1940s-60s Revisited (Contemporary Visions, 1993); Randy Weston, interview with author, 20 August 2001; Bob Meyers, interview with author, 21 February 2003.
4 Myers, interview with author; Weston, interview with author; Ira Gitler, “Randy Weston,” Down Beat (February 1964): 16-17; Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews (Da Capo Press, 1993), 20-21; Valerie Wilmer, Jazz People (Da Capo Press, 1977), 79.
5 Fred Ho, “‘The Damned Don’t Cry’: The Life and Music of Calvin Massey” (unpublished paper in author’s possession); Eric Porter, What is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (University of California Press, 2002), 216; Ahmed Abdullah, e-mail message to author, 17 March 2003.
6 Abdullah, e-mail message to author; www.millionsforreparations.com
7 Abdullah, e-mail message to author.
8 Ibid.
SELECTED BROOKLYN JAZZ VENUES
Sistas' Place
456 Nostrand Avenue (Jefferson Avenue)
Brooklyn, NY 11216
(718) 398-1766
www.sistasplace.org
Up Over Jazz Cafe
351 Flatbush Ave (Seventh Avenue)
Brooklyn, NY 11238
(718) 398-5413
www.upoverjazz.com/index.htm
Pumpkins
1448 Nostrand Avenue (Church Avenue)
Brooklyn, NY 11226
(718) 284-9086
The Jazz Spot
375 Kosciuszko Street (Marcus Garvey Blvd.)
Brooklyn, NY 11221
(718) 453-7825
thejazz.8m.com/home.html
Skylight Gallery
Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation
1368 Fulton Street (New York Avenue)
Brooklyn, NY 11216
(718) 636-9671
651 Arts
651 Fulton Street (Ashland Place)
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(718) 636-4181
www.651arts.org
Comment Wall (2 comments)
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Comment by Jeff King on November 26, 2008 at 10:18pm -
Shop Brooklyn
Jazz, Food & Shopping Afroart Designs 316 Stuyvesant Ave Brooklyn NY Saturday Nov 29, 2008 The Jeff King Band 3pm - 8pm
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Comment by Jeff King on April 10, 2008 at 9:27am
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The Jeff King Band Live @ Afroart Designs Saturday April 19th from 4PM to 8Pm Afroart is Celebrating The Fine Art of Jazz Trombonist Dick Griffith( formely with Roland Kirk and many others)
The Affair is free, food served.
Afroart designs
316 Stuyvesant Ave
Brooklyn New York 11233
718- 573-6110
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Tamm E
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Hi Tamm E!
I was just saying that you knocked this out of the park with TGJN. We have needed something like this for so long and I am telling my friends about this.
so much more. This is real. The people here truly love jazz and we know people like that are not your average people.
I said that it is sort of like a myspace for jazz but it is actually
I have felt for a long time that straight-ahead jazz has been slipping away from us. I have hope now that there will be a resurgence (or shall I say an insurgency:-) to bring this baby back full force!
You just knocked it out of the park. Thanks again.
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