Duke Ellington

Charlie Parker: Celebrating a Century of the Genius Who Changed Jazz Forever

Though he lived hard and died young, Bird’s genre-busting style of sax playing ignited jazz’s bebop revolution.

His audience knew him as “Yardbird”, or more usually, just “Bird”. The variety of sobriquets given to jazz alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, who would have turned 100 on August 29, 2020, is indicative of his different personae – most important, of course, his musical personalities.

Parker was a legendary soloist, inspiring bandleader, daring composer, ingenious innovator and a source of inspiration for many generations still. A jazz idol, full stop. But his off-stage personality revealed a more tragic figure: a drug addict and alcoholic.

Bird lived hard and lost his performance licence, several jobs and attempted suicide twice. All in all, his physical and mental health were already waning at an early age. That he died young then, at just 34 years old, was not really a shock. He passed away a week after his last public performance, on March 12, 1955. This last concert took place in the famous New York nightclub Birdland – aptly named in his honour.

Charlie Parker is considered “one of the most striking performers in the entire history of jazz, and one of the most influential”, according to the Rough Guide to Jazz. The more authoritative encyclopedia in academic circles, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, qualifies him in comparable terms and characterises Bird as a “supremely creative improviser”.

Early bird

Parker was born and raised in a musical family in Kansas City, Missouri, which was known for its vibrant music scene. He started to play the saxophone when he was 11 years old, taking lessons at a local music school and joining high school bands.

But he chiefly developed as a musician by carefully studying his older peers. Inspired by the big bands of Bennie Moten and Count Basie, Parker embarked on the blues and swing tradition of his time. Yet he felt something was missing.

The First Black Arts Festival Was Shaped by Cold War Politics

While the Soviets and the Americans raced to conquer space, the “black world” gathered together in Dakar, Senegal, to find its soul.

Duke Ellington at his piano in 1954. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In April 1966, legendary jazz musician Duke Ellington travelled to Dakar, Senegal, with his orchestra to play at the first World Festival of Negro Arts. Organised against the backdrop of African decolonisation and the push for civil rights in the US, the festival was hailed as the inaugural cultural gathering of the black world.

More than 2,500 artists, musicians, performers and writers gathered in Dakar that month. The event spanned literature, theatre, music, dance, film, as well as the visual arts. Duke’s concerts were a highlight and, several years later, he still recalled them with great affection: “The cats in the bleachers really dig it … it gives us a once-in-a-lifetime feeling of having broken through to our brothers.” Ellington’s visit to Africa gave him the sense of coming home.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, president of Senegal, in Dakar, April 1966. Credit: Quai Branly

An exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris is currently marking the 50th anniversary of the festival, the first state-sponsored showcase of work by black artists. Dakar 66: Chronicle of a Pan-African Festival tells the story of the event using photographs, rarely seen documentary films and newly filmed interviews with participants. It captures the festival’s idealism and practical successes but does not shy away from thornier issues, such as its entanglement in Cold War politics or the criticism it received at subsequent, more radical, festivals in Algiers (1969) and Lagos (1977).

The participation of artists and musicians from the US was of particular importance to the Senegalese president (and poet) Léopold Senghor. In 1930s Paris, Senghor and fellow French-speaking students from Africa and the Caribbean had been inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and the jazz age to launch the Negritude movement, which promoted black pride among France’s colonial subjects. Ellington was therefore among the most eagerly anticipated guests in Dakar, as were Langston Hughes, the elder statesman of African-American literature, and an ageing Josephine Baker, the “black Venus” from Missouri, who had wowed Paris in the 1920s with her sexually charged dance routines. For Senghor, these figures embodied the cultural bond between Africa and people of African descent.

Festival poster by Senegalese artist Ibrahima Diouf. Credit: Quai Branly

But it did not go unnoticed that participants were largely drawn from an older generation, viewed as politically and aesthetically conservative by younger, more militant figures. The US authorities, conscious that the racism exposed by the civil rights struggle had tarnished America’s global reputation, ensured that no radicals would travel to Dakar to “make trouble”. And the participation of Ellington’s orchestra was in fact funded by the US State Department, which had been using its Jazz Ambassadors programme for over a decade as part of its Cold War diplomacy. They sent black artists around the world to represent the US while, back home, they didn’t enjoy even the most basic civil rights.

Cold War politics

The US also saw the moderate Senghor as a key ally in its struggle for influence with the Soviet Union in West Africa. Without a black diaspora of their own, the Soviets could not play a formal role in the festival, but they did help the beleaguered hosts, desperate for hotel accommodation, by lending them a cruise ship. A New York Times reporter wryly reported:

As the guests sip their vodka on the main deck, they are also treated to an exhibit extolling Russian-Negro brotherhood. Several display boards highlight the fact that the Russians never engaged in the slave trade while guess-who did.

Dakar in April 1966. Credit: Quai Branly

The Soviets also sent their distinguished, charismatic poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who enjoyed rock star status in the mid-1960s. Without any formal role to play, Yevtushenko promptly teamed up with fellow poet Langston Hughes and they spent afternoons driving around town in a limousine, getting drunk on Georgian champagne. So much for Cold War politics.

For Senghor, “the real heart of the festival” was a vast exhibition of “classical” African artworks, entitled Negro Art, at the newly built Musée Dynamique, a monumental Classical structure, perched on a promontory overlooking the sea. Negro Art assembled some of the finest examples of “traditional” African art, almost 600 pieces, borrowed from over 50 museums and private collectors from around the world. These were exhibited alongside a selection of works by Picasso, Léger and Modigliani, borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, in a fascinating contrast between traditional sources and the modern masterpieces inspired by them. Who could imagine Western museums lending such priceless items to African partners today?

Exhibition visitors at Negro Art. Credit: Quai Branly

Senghor’s idealism about culture may have been largely misplaced — today, the Musée Dynamique houses Senegal’s Supreme Court. But the festival marked one of the high-points of black modernism in the 20th century. In his opening speech, Senghor claimed that the event was “an undertaking much more revolutionary than the exploration of the cosmos”. While the Soviets and the Americans raced to conquer space, the “black world” was gathered together to find its soul.

David Murphy, Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies, University of Stirling

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Marginalised African Songbird Who Was Finally Heard Again

Jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin is rarely mentioned in the pantheon of South African artists, despite a half-century in the music business, praise from none other than Duke Ellington and her deep involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle.

Jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin is rarely mentioned in the pantheon of South African artists, despite a half-century in the music business, praise from none other than Duke Ellington and her deep involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle.

Sathima Bea Benjamin. Credit: The Conversation

In 1948, the National Party came to power in South Africa and immediately implemented legislation intended to weaken struggles for social democracy, labour rights and racial equality. These apartheid laws further codified racial segregation and severely limited rights of black people in the country.

There was no room for “natives”, except as maids, cooks and labourers. In this severely segregated context, something modern and international, like jazz, was considered anathema by the apartheid state. As mass opposition to the regime grew during the 1950s, jazz served as one of the prevailing soundtracks of struggle.

This social and political cauldron produced some of South Africa’s greatest musical figures, notably Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Chris McGregor, Letta Mbulu and Abdullah Ibrahim. And it was that same cauldron that provoked them to flee their country.

Recognition in the American jazz world

One of those exiles, Sathima Bea Benjamin – a singer and composer, and Ibrahim’s life partner – is rarely mentioned in the pantheon of South African artists. This is despite a half-century in the music business and praise from none other than American jazz great Duke Ellington. Nor has she earned full acceptance and recognition in the American jazz world.

Some might glance at her career and chalk it up to bad luck.

In 1959, Benjamin recorded My Songs for You – what should have been the first jazz LP in the history of South African music. But it was never released. Besides the predictable problem of finding a distributor amid rising racial tensions and state repression, the session just wasn’t up to par.

Four years later, Ellington produced a historic recording session with her for Reprise Records. But the label decided she wasn’t commercial enough and shelved the record. It was finally released in 1997 as A Morning in Paris.

The few critics who have paid attention to Benjamin regard her as one of the great musical storytellers.

Scuffle for work

Benjamin is known for delivering lyrics with the kind of patience and emotion that leaves audiences hanging onto every word. As Jon Pareles, a critic for the New York Times, wrote in 1983, “in song after song, Miss Benjamin could make a word cry out with just a flicker of vibrato”. And yet, from the time she left South Africa in 1962 until close to her death on August 20 2013, Benjamin always had to scuffle for work.

Benjamin was not “African” enough to be marketable, and too “African” or exotic to be taken seriously as a great jazz vocalist. Under apartheid she was classified as a “coloured”. Racial classification was the foundation of all apartheid laws, placing individuals in one of four groups: “native”, “coloured”, “Asian” or “white”.

She once complained in an interview with me on March 5, 2004: “People write books and things about jazz singing and they don’t include me. So what is the reason? Sometimes I think it’s because I don’t come from Georgia.”

As a coloured South African whose repertoire excluded township music or traditional isiXhosa songs, Benjamin has been considered less authentic than, say, Makeba. Although late in her career, she began to sing standards over Cape Town’s unique shuffle rhythms. She fashioned herself as a jazz vocalist and remained squarely in the idiom. Yet Benjamin was as much a product of the struggle to overthrow apartheid as Makeba was. She too composed liberation songs and paeans to her homeland, and worked tirelessly in support of the African National Congress (ANC).

Expression of defiance

Benjamin and Makeba both became professional singers during apartheid’s formative years, when jazz was hailed as a music of freedom. Jazz in South Africa was an expression of the nation’s defiant present and liberatory future – thoroughly modern, urban, sophisticated and non-racial.

Many of Benjamin’s contemporaries and compatriots, including Makeba, abandoned jazz for township music or indigenous folk songs, or attempted to fuse the genres in an effort to root their music in South African soil. But Benjamin never strayed from her devotion to modern jazz as “the most liberating music on the planet”.

Ironically, that same commitment ensured her marginalisation, as beautiful romantic ballads and torch songs lost their relevance in a highly nationalistic era of urban militancy. And as a coloured South African woman working in a genre too often construed as black – and as white, male and essentially American – Benjamin had to struggle just to be heard.

No recordings

In the late 1950s the South African political situation was tense, as confrontations between the state and liberation movements escalated in frequency and ferocity.

As with many politically conscious musicians at the time, Benjamin and Ibrahim’s main priority was to leave South Africa. In January 1962 they began a decade in exile in Europe, southern Africa and the US. During this time Ibrahim made several albums. Benjamin, by contrast, made no recordings except for a single track on one of Ibrahim’s unreleased transcription records.

The combination of solitary study, reflection, motherhood and travel back and forth to southern Africa inspired her to write poetry and compose her own music. In 1974 she composed Music as a tribute to her husband.

She also composed Africa, a homage to the continent and a celebration of her return. The next year she penned African Songbird to honour the memory of Duke Ellington, who had passed away in 1974.

After moving back to South Africa in 1973, Ibrahim and impresario Rashid Vally co-founded The Sun record label (also known by the Arabic name As-Shams). African Songbird, comprising Benjamin’s three compositions, was recorded at a session that took place in March 1976 at Gallo Studios in Johannesburg. She was backed by an ensemble made up of two drummers, three bass players, the African-American trumpeter Billy Brooks and the popular South African saxophonist Basil Coetzee, led by Ibrahim on electric piano. Faced with the task of filling an LP with just three songs, the soloists stretched out on Africa, turning it into a 21-minute virtuoso performance.

Ibrahim and Vally wasted no time putting out African Songbird, which hit South African record shops in the local winter of 1976. At 40, Benjamin finally saw the release of her first LP. The landmark recording not only unveiled her talent as a composer but it revealed her deep and abiding interest in the freedom struggle in South Africa.

Soweto uprising

Her interest became a full-blown engagement in June 1976, after some 20 000 schoolchildren of Soweto rose up to protest the state’s decision to teach math and social studies in Afrikaans instead of English. The police retaliated against the protesters: between 300 and 500 Africans were killed and more than 2000 were wounded.

A few months later Ibrahim and Benjamin fled South Africa – again. They returned to New York and became politically active on behalf of the African National Congress.

Between 1979 and 2006, Benjamin released a further eight albums. Each of these received rave reviews, and one, Dedications, was nominated for a Grammy in 1982.

Under apartheid, many black artists and intellectuals turned to either modern jazz or township music (or both) as a way forward, in opposition to the retrograde “native” policies of the regime. It was in this context that former nightclub singers such as Makeba, Dolly Rathebe and Dorothy Masuka embraced township music and created popular protest songs. These singers also symbolised a new, urban, female sexuality, including glamorous photos and profiles of them in Drum magazine.

Not African enough

Essentialist notions of culture had rendered Benjamin illegible — not African enough for some, not American enough for others, and certainly not commercial enough for a market that traffics in familiar, digestible commodities. Perhaps most importantly, Benjamin was not man enough to sustain her own music on her terms – at least not until she launched Ekapa Records, began booking her own gigs and seized control of all aspects of her career. In other words, in her long struggle for visibility, gender was decisive.

She was initiated into a world where she put up with sexual harassment from musicians on whom she depended for practical skills, gigs, and even transportation. As a female balladeer in an era when South Africa’s modernists sought ways to express the cry of freedom and the cadences of mass resistance, Benjamin’s sensitive love songs were often drowned out.

One poignant story speaks volumes of the depths of her marginalisation.

Although she had spent the better part of a decade working for the African National Congress’s cultural wing and composing paeans to the movement, including Winnie Mandela, Beloved Heroine, Benjamin was not invited to perform at President Nelson Mandela’s inauguration in 1994. Ibrahim was, however, and in her words she had to “steal” one minute from his five allotted minutes so that she could sing for her new president.

Sathima Bea Benjamin’s dedication to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela from the 2006 album, Song Spirit.

Fortunately she has finally earned the kinds of accolades befitting an artist of her stature. In October 2004, South African president Thabo Mbeki honoured her with the Order of Ikhamanga Silver Award in recognition for her “excellent contribution as a jazz artist” as well as for her contribution “to the struggle against apartheid”.

In May 2013 a few months before Benjamin’s death her debut, African Songbird, was lovingly reissued on vinyl, CD and digital download. Described as a spiritual jazz masterpiece, the reissue remedied the fact that this important keystone of South Africa’s jazz heritage was unavailable for decades. It has undoubtedly contributed to making her more visible.

This is an edited extract from the book “Africa Speaks, America Answers – Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times” by Robin DG Kelley.

Robin Kelley is Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.