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A cursory glance at the music industry reveals a diverse group
of musical styles. Sadly, hardliners are unwilling to cross the
boundaries of musical genre, viewing such action as tantamount to
treachery.
As a student and musical observer, I face the perplexing question
of why so many musical genres exist and why people's tastes vary with
such inconsistency. We humans share fundamental perceptions
concerning rhythm, pitch, and tonality. Nonetheless, we manage to
disagree on how these elements should be employed and what
combinations produce a desirable outcome.
Surely we all know people who listen exclusively to opera, rap or
anything else with religious fervor. There is a logic behind this.
It's the way an undulating bass line can take hold of your senses,
it's the ethereal limits a singer's voice can guide you toward,
ultimately, it's the way something makes you feel and the pleasure or
displeasure that ensues. This emotional response often derives
directly from the music, but music is more than the physical
properties of amplitude and wavelength. The musician has a unique
interpretation or specific approach to how the music should be
performed. While this addition may entail absolutely nothing for
certain listeners, many believe that its inclusion provides a
defining dimension that makes the music a complete art form.
I was recently awarded the opportunity to talk with Kahil El
Zabar, whose latest forays include an extended stay in Europe. Kahil
exhibits an artistic knowledge that recognizes few boundaries. He
claims that in the past music was about being a good musician and the
ability to perform in different styles; the stark divisions of today
did not exist. Kahil's intimate concern for the music has garnered
his reputation as a highly respected musician whose work reflects
true art.
AB: You've been doing stuff in Europe recently?
KEZ: Yeah, in Bordeaux in the south of France
AB: And what were you doing exactly?
KEZ: Artist in residence
AB: Artist in residence. At a university?
KEZ: Through the Ministry of Culture and an organization
called Musiquse de Nuit which is actually an organization for
social engineering
AB: Well I was reading up on you on your background, and
you've got a pretty impressive resume. I was reading some of the guys
you played with. What was your involvement with guys like Stevie
Wonder, Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie
KEZ: I was in all of their bands.
AB: How did you get from, playing with guys like Cannonball
Adderley and Dizzy Gillespie to playing with the Ethnic Heritage
Ensemble and the whole Avant Garde movement. I mean, some of those
guys were pretty straight ahead.
KEZ: Well you know when I was growing up, there weren't so
many divisions in the music, it was about being a good musician and
developing the skills and the languages to perform in different
styles. Today people are much more specific, you know, some guys are
really strict so called Be Bop guys, some guys Avant Garde nothing
else, some guys R&B and nothing else, you know when you hear my
bands, things like Ethnic Heritage, you might hear some R&B
influences you might hear some so called Avant Garde influences or
straight ahead, that's cause those have been all my experiences and
my resume speaks to the caliber of the people I've played with in
every area of music, and what they've helped me do through those
associations is to develop the skills so that I can work with Ritual
Trio or someone can hire me to arrange the music for Elton John's
The Lion King which I did
AB: Wow, The Lion King? That's pretty big.
KEZ: Yeah. The Lion King wasn't the movie, I did the
play. The movie was something else. But for the play, the director
Julie Taymor, I had worked with her before, so they wanted someone
who could score on a symphonic level but also someone who could
understand west African music, and I went to school in Ghana in West
Africa, so I'm one of the few people that can do that so it was kind
of hard to get around not hiring me.
AB: When did you go to West Africa and what did you do
there?
KEZ: I was going to Lake Forest College, and I had a music
major and theater minor, and I was invited to study pantomime with
Marcel Marceau in Paris, and I didn't want to do that. And there was
an ongoing exchange program that Lake Forest had with that school in
Paris. So I wrote to a professor named Nana Nketia, and said I would
like to come to Legon in Ghana and study and after corresponding for
a few months, it was done, so the money that was used to exchange to
go to Paris, I used that money to exchange to go to Ghana.
AB: How long where you there for?
KEZ: Nine months, first time
AB: What other artists do you like listening to nowadays?
KEZ: Oh I always like listening to John Coltrane. I like
listening to D'Angelo.
AB: Do you like any young guys in particular?
KEZ: Do you mean jazz guys? D'Angelo is about 24.
AB: Yeah anything really
KEZ: I like Primeridian, a hip-hop group out of Chicago that's
pretty political. Intelligent hip hop. I like Roy Hargrove, when he's
in town he usually comes to my house to practice. I like Steve
Coleman's ideas, you know, I like lots of people. I like Busta
Rhyme's use of rhythm, I like Snoop Doggy Dog's use of rhythm. You
know I always listen to Sun Ra, I always listen to Louis Armstrong.
I'll be hanging with James Brown in about 2 weeks
AB: Ok this may sound kind of trite, but all the things I read
about you, it always like you know, Kahil was apart of AACM. Do you
see that another movement is evolving now? I mean you were a part of
something--do you think that's manifested in younger generations now,
and now, music is taking another turn?
KEZ: What I'm watching happen in most forms of popular music,
is the need to reconnect with live playing. I think the fascination
with the technology has hit a certain plateau, and in rhythm and
blues, rock, electronic dance music, they are reconnecting with the
idea of live performance and the intimacy of an instrument. I think
that the library of sampling has been used to such a degree that
there is a need to reassess the idea of improvising, and I'm watching
musicians of my generation now find more opportunities to work
because the way in which we approach music is extremely
exclusive.
AB: Are you saying there should be more live music? I'm not
sure I completely understand.
KEZ: I'll see if I can say this more simply. Over the last two
decades, the 80's and 90's there's been a lot of music developed
synthetically through electronics and so now it seems that most of
the groups are going back to playing live. You know rappers have live
bands like Roots, groups like REM are back out working and people are
enjoying the idea of the alchemy of live performance, and that hadn't
been popular for 20 years and it seems to be now on more of an
upswing--that experience, and audiences are listening for that and
that's jambands and that whole element. The smaller shows. They're
playing small venues of 1000 to 2000 seats. People are in need of
human contact and I think that's very good.
AB: I heard that you were in Finland recently and met with the
Prime Minister?
KEZ: You know, Finland, even though it's a small country, is a
pretty progressive community artistically. Even though they're far up
near the North Pole, they're pretty abreast of what's happening in
contemporary art. So the president of the country invited me there to
do an official performance..
AB: Interesting.
KEZ: Yeah you know, FYI, when the AACM had its 30th
anniversary, we were invited to the Kremlin in Russia to be awarded
and celebrated, the same thing happened in Paris, France. A lot of
times, Americans are the last to understand the importance of
contributions that are actually made at home. In other parts of the
world that don't have that, they don't take it for granted in the
same way. So the idea of AACM was the first time there was a
grassroots community musicians cooperative in history. And so what
happened from that, it translated into an approach of community
access to artists, of alternative stimulus, new ways to compose, to
play instruments, all of that, and it came out of these guys from the
south side of Chicago. The result of that is we've had more people
that we've taught that have become so called celebrated musicians
than Berklee. So people have found that pretty impressive. The most
impressive thing to me, though is that from that organization, there
are more than 45 homeowners. We can actually take care of children,
send them to college, and with the so called strange music that we
do, that supposedly nobody understands, and we're still pretty much
unknown by the general public.
AB: You say it was a collective. But what exactly did you guys
do. You got together and played obviously but did you have a higher
purpose?
KEZ: No we didn't just get together and play. We discussed how
to get bank loans for one another, we discussed how to get mortgages,
we helped each other get insurance, so it was like things for living.
Since no matter what you may feel aesthetically, you still have to
eat, wash up, have a house and roof. So we were much more progressive
than most organizations, because we dealt with the kinds of
substantial elements of living.
AB: I thought it was a strictly musical association...so this
was also a social organization as well.
KEZ: Well that's because that's what the critics and
academicians have translated but the reality is that we were much
more of a social organization. We then, in turn, did music cause that
was our passion. And then we taught, we educated. Without the AACM,
there would have never been M-Base, Steve Coleman, Greg Osby,
Cassandra Wilson, Smitty Smith, Graham Haynes. It could have never
happened. Steve Coleman was our student at the AACM. He translated
what we did, and then took it to New York, Brooklyn, and then
Branford, and all the guys who were apart of M-Base in the late
80's...
AB: What exactly is M Base?
KEZ: M-Base was an organization started in Brooklyn that had
all the young improvisers that now have become major label artists
like Cassandra Wilson, Steve Coleman, Greg Osby with Blue Note,
Branford Marsalis, Smitty Smith, the drummer on the Tonight Show,
they were all apart of M-Base out of Brooklyn. Steve Coleman started
M-Base and Steve Coleman was a student of the AACM. Darryl Jones, the
bassist of the Rolling Stones was a student of the AACM. We've pretty
much got four decades from Muhal Richard Abrams and Malachi Favors in
their seventies to someone like Reggie Nicholson in his 30's and some
of these other guys like Aaron Getsu in their teens and twenties.
AB: That's really great. If you look at most pop guys, they
came out of nowhere, one hit wonders. There's really no sense of an
establishment like AACM and M-Base
KEZ: Yeah you have a few people who really become institutions
in pop but the main institution in pop is the commercial recording
industry and then the artists are incidental, whereas with us, it's
not necessarily about becoming rich because that hasn't happened, or
becoming famous. We have notoriety, but I would not necessarily
consider ourselves famous. But the idea is we're able to live beyond
our 20's. We want to live, we want to be old because life is very
precious. So you want to keep going at what you do and get
inspiration, and have support, and have long lasting friendships, so
as we mature, the idea of the institution for us has a lot more to do
with people than the constructs of the industry or academia or any of
those things. It's the human being that really creates the
institution.
Alejandro Blei worked at Delmark this summer and attends the
University of Michigan during the school year. He is currently
studying guitar with Bobby Broom. Thanks for your good work Alex.
