SHAPE of Things
The to Come p. 8
TAPROOT
Music Festival p. 23
Compared to What? Jazz and Politics p. 34
IT TAKES TWO p. 44
gateway ROBERT AND MARGRIT MONDAVI CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS UC DAVIS FALL Issue 2019–20
Mind over Matter: The Psychology of the Stage p. 12
Those of you who regularly attend Mondavi Center events know that art can entertain, can stimulate—and can, as well, be an expression of intense reaction to the issues of our time. One art form that has often been a conduit for such expression is jazz. I know that many of you were at Terence Blanchard’s last appearance here—and were struck by the political context of his concert and the video art that accompanied it. For many, that context enriched Blanchard’s work, while some preferred to just focus on the music, but it caused everyone there to think. Indeed, we are grateful that our Mondavi Center audiences are open to hearing the strong and at times controversial expressions of the artists and speakers we present, and are willing to engage in the dialogue. In the spirit of recognizing the importance of this expression and these conversations, Marcus Crowder penned the following piece chronicling the history of political expression in jazz. I’m old enough to remember my first hearing of the McCann/Harris “Compared to What” and its impact on me, which was in equal part social, political and musical. What a great starting point for this incisive essay. —Don Roth, Executive Director, Mondavi Center
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Compared to
What? Jazz and Politics
BY MARCUS CROWDER
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In truth, protest music is equally synonymous with, and as American as, well, jazz.
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“The President, he's got his war Folks don't know just what it's for Nobody gives us rhyme or reason Have one doubt, they call it treason We're chicken-feathers, all without one nut. God damn it! Tryin' to make it real, compared to what? —Gene McDaniels, 1969
Photograph of Benny Jones Sr.’s father, Chester Jones (Ralston Crawford: Courtesy the Hogan Jazz Archive).
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ifty years ago, “Compared to What,” Gene McDaniels’ funky rant against the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson and mainstream American culture, strutted into our musical consciousness. Exuberantly performed by the gospel-leaning pianist and vocalist Les McCann at the Montreux Jazz Festival with soulful accents from saxophonist Eddie Harris and a blistering solo cameo by expatriate trumpeter Benny Bailey, the song became an unlikely protest statement of the times. And a jazz hit. The ‘60s were synonymous with protest music. In truth, protest music is equally synonymous with, and as American as, well, jazz. The album Swiss Movement was the apotheosis in the heady careers of both McCann and Harris. (The year after the album came out McCann and Harris capitalized on its success with a college tour that brought them to UC Davis, where I attended my first-ever jazz concert at Freeborn Hall.) Any jazz-based song becoming a hit after the music moved out the mainstream in the ‘40s could be called unlikely. But
this audacious mélange of funk, soul and contemporary politics would galvanize listeners (and dancers) for years after its release, inspiring over 270 remakes. What explains the enduring appeal of a sarcastic angry song tossed off by a group of men who had never played together before that historic recording in Montreux, Switzerland? “Compared to What” by Les McCann and Eddie Harris is still a singular goose bump-inducing experience. The song opens with McCann rapping out a single note, repeating an insistent rhythm that drummer Donald Dean joins with a cowbell accent. Simple and primal. After nearly a minute McCann, layers in bluesy chords and Dean switches to a snapping snare. With bassist Leroy Vinnegar dropping in they reach an ecstatic crescendo before Harris even comes in at the two-minute mark. It’s four minutes in before McCann even starts singing McDaniels’ lyrics of modern anxiety and frustration: Hanging on we push and shove, possession is the motivation hanging
up the whole damn nation. After about five and half minutes, the trumpeter Benny Bailey blows in fiery, unrepentant. It’s what you would expect from a jazz artist exiled from his home but needing to be heard. The music was born in New Orleans of cultural comingling based on West African rhythms and song forms filtered through available European instruments. It was first made by Africans enslaved in America and consciously stripped of their culture, which survived more or less intact nearby in the Caribbean islands. Throughout its dense history jazz has been innately connected to the lives and times of its makers. Creating jazz has been considered a political act. “I think it was always subversive,” trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard told me last year from his home in New Orleans. He considers the rise of early jazz a “counter measure” to what was going on in American music, spurred on by “a need to express feelings.” 2019–20 SEASON / GATEWAY
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j LISTEN Compared to What?
spoti.fi/gatewayjazzpolitics
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The music was born in New Orleans of cultural comingling based on West African rhythms and song forms filtered through available European instruments. It was first made by Africans enslaved in America and consciously stripped of their culture. Creating jazz has been considered a political act.
—Terence Blanchard
I think it was always subversive.
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The music ... was also created out of a need—a burning desire to have something to say—the music itself was a statement on American culture.
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—Terence Blanchard
“Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, those guys—even before—the music they were creating was a reaction to the societal norms of their times,” Blanchard says.
The composer has often put his music to work in politicized settings. As director Spike Lee’s “house composer,” Blanchard has penned music for films such as Malcolm X (1992) through BlacKKKlansman (2018). Of the many films in between there was also a score for When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Lee’s documentary exploring the devastation of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Blanchard revised the film music for his album A Tale of God’s Will (Requiem for Katrina). It is his most personal album reflecting feelings about the devastation of his hometown and his government’s failure to protect the people who live there. (Blanchard’s own mother and aunt lost their homes.) Blanchard has said the music is draining for him to play because it such personal emotional underpinning. Blanchard also wrote music for Lee’s documentary 4 Little Girls about the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Alabama, which killed four African American girls: Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Rosamond Robertson. The horrific incident inspired John Coltrane to compose one of the most memorable pieces of his career, the elegiac “Alabama,” which he recorded with his quartet on Nov. 18, 1963, at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey three months after the murders occurred. Of “Alabama” Coltrane said, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” The melodic lines were developed from the rhythmic inflections of a speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a funeral for three of the four girls. In his essential 1963 essay “Jazz and the White Critic” Amiri Imamu Baraka (Leroi Jones) writes, “The catalysts and necessity of Coltrane’s music must be understood as they exist even before they are expressed as music. The music is the result of the attitude, the stance. Just as Negroes made the blues and other people did not because of the Negroes’ particular way of looking at the world.” Baraka’s argument that it is impossible to separate the lives, the
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backgrounds, the sensibilities of artists (particularly those of color in America) from the work they make informs Blanchard’s deep knowledge of the music’s infancy, including his hometown predecessors Joe “King” Oliver and Louis Armstrong.
“The music those guys made was also created out of a need—a burning desire to have something to say— the music itself was a statement on American culture,” Blanchard observes. In 2018 Blanchard was a central figure in multi-evening program at SFJAZZ curated around the theme of “jazz and social justice.” Also included was the outspoken Bay Area vocalist Paula West. West came on the scene as a thoughtful interpreter of lesser known gems from the Great American Songbook. Lately, West has been inserting more provocative contemporary songs into her set lists. “I’m just being myself,” West says. “You have to choose what you want to do and it’s kind of interesting how the songs change (over the years) because of what’s going on—but to me I think this stuff is really important to do.”
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West sees the 1929 Fats Waller lament “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue” in the same thematic vein as John Lennon’s 1971 protest litany “Gimme Some Truth” and has performed both. Bob Dylan has become central to her sets with songs such as “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” “Blowing In the Wind” and “Masters of War” all receiving West’s passionate contemplative treatments. Her program at SFJAZZ opened with “Back In the USSR,” a poke at Russia
and its interference in our 2016 election and included a tribute to the blacklisted Paul Robeson with “Scandalize My Name” and Nina Simone’s incendiary “Mississippi Goddam.” Of Simone’s tune, West says, “You don’t have to change the lyrics to that or anything—it’s all still there.”
When Duke Ellington premiered his ambitious long form suite “Black, Brown and Beige” at his first ever performance at Carnegie Hall in 1943, he announced to the mainly white audience, “We would like to say that this is a parallel to the history of the American Negro. And of course, it tells a long story.”
The great Dave Brubeck refused to have his integrated quartet booked into segregated venues in the ‘60s. Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra performed Spanish Civil War folk songs in fascist countries and also a pointed reworking of “America the Beautiful” meshed with “Lift Every Voice and Sing” here in the U.S. Charles Mingus trolled the racist governor of Louisiana with his brilliant “Fables of Faubus.”
One of the most famous of all cominglings of jazz and politics remains Billie Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit.” Holiday was 24 when she recorded the haunting words by poet Abel Meeropole (under the pseudonym Lewis Allen), which he put to music in 1939. Referencing the lynchings of African Americans Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, Holiday couldn’t record the song for Columbia, the company to which she was contracted at the time. They feared negative reactions to the tragic imagery of the lyrics but gave Holiday leave to record it with another company, Commodore records, which she did—twice. In her seminal 1998 book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Dr. Angela Davis writes of Holiday’s recording: “It almost singlehandedly changed the politics of American popular culture and put the elements of protest and resistance back at the center of contemporary black musical culture.” Examples of Davis’ observation are plentiful in both the content of jazz and in its presentation. Her ideas are pertinent even as jazz crosses cultures and absorbs racial differences.
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Becomes A Bridge. (Scott brings his extraordinary young band Oracle to the Vanderhoef Studio Theatre in October.) Scott was a member of Blanchard’s band, which recorded A Tale of God’s Will, and he understands musical intent. He said he wanted to speak about a “certain president” who many say is “all wall and no bridge.” But Scott sees positives in the myriad of issues raised in response, “All those things are a bridge.” From Louis Armstrong creating a new musical form, Bessie Smith articulating an early feminist agenda, through Nazi bans and civil rights anthems, jazz maintains a political agenda.
Art and music are the mirrors of our social norms.
Blanchard says, “My experience has been that art and music are the mirror of our social norms—when we’re just honest about what we feel. That’s the main thing for us. Just be true to what it is we feel and what it is we see and not shy away from it.” Younger musicians seem to feel this imperative even more so. Earlier this year, drummer and composer Kendrick Scott released A Wall
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—Terence Blanchard On his 2015 album Breathless, Blanchard released a new version of “Compared to What” with his band the E-Collective and vocalist PJ Morton. The clarion call of a song was the lead tune on the album, whose title referenced Eric Garner who died in 2014 after being held in a chokehold by a NYPD officer. Garner repeatedly gasped, “I can’t breathe,” while three other officers held him down. Blanchard re-contextualized “Compared to
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PROF I LE: MC Staff
The UC Davis Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – Campus Community Relations is a proud supporter of the Mondavi Center The Campus Community Book Project was initiated to promote dialogue and build community by encouraging diverse members of the campus and surrounding communities to read the same book and attend related events. The book project advances the mission to improve both campus climate and community relations, to foster diversity and to promote equity and inclusiveness.
ccbp.ucdavis.edu
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Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge, 2019-2020 CCBP featured selection
Chris Oca Sick days. Emergencies. They happen to everyone, and the Mondavi Center is not immune. Stage hands have highly specialized jobs. So what do we do when a stage hand calls in sick? Enter Chris Oca. Oca is what everyone at the Mondavi Center calls the “oh shoot guy,” or “OSG” for short (the original stage hand terminology uses slightly saltier language). After working at the Mondavi Center for 17 years, Oca has covered almost every job. The former UC Davis theatre tech major started working at the Mondavi Center as a student, and says that if he wasn’t doing theatre tech, he would be either an EMT or a teacher (he actually holds a certification as an EMT). In a sense, he gets to use both of those interests in his current role. Oca helped institute a fall protection program at the Mondavi Center which has now been adopted by the entire UC system. When asked about the most meaningful part of his job, Oca says he enjoys seeing crew members pick up new skills while they’re working. “I learn as more and more touring companies come in with different techniques and methodologies. It’s cool for me to learn from them and then to pass that knowledge on to the crew, and especially to the high school groups that perform here.” It turns out that the “OSG” is not only good to have in an emergency; he also does his part to ensure a long legacy of wellprepared theatre professionals.
What” for a new generation that was disappointed in their institutions and disillusioned by their limited prospects.
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The E-Collective’s next record, Live, addressed the cycle of gun violence in America. Blanchard and his band performed the music at the Mondavi Center in 2018. The album was recorded in three cities where there had been tragic confrontations between law enforcement and young African American men: Minneapolis, where 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot during a routine traffic stop in 2016; Cleveland, where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot by police while —Terence Blanchard playing with a toy gun in 2014; and in Dallas, where five policemen were murdered while on duty covering a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest of police shootings in 2016.
Music is a means by which we could help people deal with their frustration.
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Blanchard hadn’t really conceived of the band as a protest vehicle but it was impossible for him and his colleagues to ignore what was happening in the world. “Events were just overcoming all of us,” Blanchard says. “The music we created for the ‘Live’ tour was not just a reaction to it, but also a means by which we could try to help people deal with their frustration.” Blanchard wants his music to work toward more positive outcomes. “We tell people, let the music absorb your anger,” Blanchard says. Marcus Crowder is is an arts and culture critic and writer based in Northern California.
Illustration by Pete Scully
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