African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston (Refiguring American Music) - Hardcover

Weston, Randy; Jenkins, Willard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822347849 ISBN 13: 9780822347842

Verlag: Combined Academic Publ., 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The pianist, composer, and bandleader Randy Weston is one of the world’s most influential jazz musicians and a remarkable storyteller whose career has spanned five continents and more than six decades. Packed with fascinating anecdotes, African Rhythms is Weston’s life story, as told by him to the music journalist Willard Jenkins. It encompasses Weston’s childhood in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood—where his parents and other members of their generation imbued him with pride in his African heritage—and his introduction to jazz and early years as a musician in the artistic ferment of mid-twentieth-century New York. His music has taken him around the world: he has performed in eighteen African countries, in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, in the Canterbury Cathedral, and at the grand opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina: The New Library of Alexandria.

Africa is at the core of Weston’s music and spirituality. He has traversed the continent on a continuous quest to learn about its musical traditions, produced its first major jazz festival, and lived for years in Morocco, where he opened a popular jazz club, the African Rhythms Club, in Tangier. Weston’s narrative is replete with tales of the people he has met and befriended, and with whom he has worked. He describes his unique partnerships with Langston Hughes, the musician and arranger Melba Liston, and the jazz scholar Marshall Stearns, as well as his friendships and collaborations with Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, the novelist Paul Bowles, the Cuban percussionist Candido Camero, the Ghanaian jazz artist Kofi Ghanaba, the Gnawa musicians of Morocco, and many others. With African Rhythms, an international jazz virtuoso continues to create cultural history.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Randy Weston is an internationally renowned pianist, composer, and bandleader living in Brooklyn, New York. He has made more than forty albums and performed throughout the world. Weston has been inducted into the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame, designated a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and named Jazz Composer of the Year three times by DownBeat magazine. He is the recipient of many other honors and awards, including France’s Order of Arts and Letters, the Black Star Award from the Arts Critics and Reviewers Association of Ghana, and a five-night tribute at the Montreal Jazz Festival.

Willard Jenkins is an independent arts consultant, producer, educator, and print and broadcast journalist. His writing has been featured in JazzTimes, DownBeat, Jazz Report, Jazz Forum, All About Jazz, Jazzwise, and many other publications. He contributed two chapters to Ain’t Nothing like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment.

Randy Weston is an internationally renowned pianist, composer, and bandleader living in Brooklyn, New York. He has made more than forty albums and performed throughout the world. Weston has been inducted into the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame, designated a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and named Jazz Composer of the Year three times by DownBeat magazine. He is the recipient of many other honors and awards, including France’s Order of Arts and Letters, the Black Star Award from the Arts Critics and Reviewers Association of Ghana, and a five-night tribute at the Montreal Jazz Festival.

Willard Jenkins is an independent arts consultant, producer, educator, and print and broadcast journalist. His writing has been featured in JazzTimes, DownBeat, Jazz Report, Jazz Forum, All About Jazz, Jazzwise, and many other publications. He contributed two chapters to Ain’t Nothing like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""African Rhythms" is unlike anything I've ever read. Randy Weston--pianist, composer, bandleader, activist, ambassador, visionary, griot--takes the reader on a most spectacular spiritual journey from Brooklyn to Africa, around the world and back again. He tells a story of this great music that has never been told in print: tracing its African roots and branches, acknowledging the ancestors who helped bring him to the music and draw the music from his soul, singing praise songs for those artistic and intellectual giants whose paths he crossed, from Langston Hughes to Melba Liston, Dizzy to Monk, Marshall Stearns to Cheikh Anta Diop. And in the process, Mr. Weston bares his soul, revealing a man overflowing with ancient wisdom, humility, respect for history, and a capacity for creating some of the most astoundingly beautiful music the modern world has ever experienced."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of "Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original "

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

AFRICAN RHYTHMS

The Autobiography of Randy WestonBy Randy Weston Willard Jenkins

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Randy Weston and Willard Jenkins
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4784-2

Contents

Arranger's Preface............................................................xiAcknowledgments...............................................................xixIntroduction..................................................................11 : Origins...................................................................52 : Growing Up in Brooklyn....................................................183 : The Scene Shifts to the Pacific...........................................284 : Postwar: Escaping the Panic...............................................375 : Post-Berkshires: Succumbing to the Irresistible Lure......................556 : Enter Melba Liston........................................................707 : Uhuru Afrika: Freedom Africa..............................................828 : Making the Pilgrimage.....................................................1029 : Touring the Motherland....................................................11410 : Making a Home in Africa..................................................13511 : Connecting with the Gnawa................................................17112 : Building a Life in Tangier: The African Rhythms Club.....................18313 : Festival Blues, Then Divine Intervention: Blue Moses.....................19414 : Post-Morocco and the Ellington Connection................................20615 : Compositions and Sessions................................................21816 : The African Rhythms Quintet..............................................23317 : The African Queen........................................................25018 : The Adventures of Randy Weston...........................................26019 : Ancient Future...........................................................276Conclusion: Randy Weston ... Philosophically Yours............................297Discography...................................................................303Awards and Citations..........................................................321Index.........................................................................323

Chapter One

ORIGINS

My dad, Frank Edward Weston, came from a Jamaican family that was descended from the Maroons, a fierce and legendary people who never surrendered to the English during colonization. The Maroons were ferocious fighters-they escaped captivity and preferred freedom in the Blue Mountains over bondage-and that spirit was deep in my dad's blood, but he was actually born and grew up in Panama. My paternal grandmother, who I never knew, had a bakery near the Panama Canal. My dad and his cousin Frisco, the famous entertainer and bon vivant Frisco of Europe who I'll get to later, grew up together as kids. They used to take the train across the canal all the time. According to dad, Frisco was forever the clown, always the actor, the singer, and the dancer ... obviously a budding showman, even as a child. On this train Frisco would dance and perform for the passengers' amusement, and my father and another young guy would come behind him and collect the money. My dad was a true West Indian man through and through: he had a potent combination of Panama and Jamaica, Spanish and Caribbean.

Dad and Frisco left Panama as teenagers and my father spent the next seven years living in Cuba. Then he came up to Brooklyn, where he eventually met my mother, Vivian Moore, a wise but unassuming woman who was from Meredithville, Virginia. They got together, eventually got married, and they produced me. I was born April 6, 1926, at Peck Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn. My dad used to claim I was just about the first black baby born in that hospital. Remember, segregation was real deep back then. My mother and father separated when I was just three years old, and I went to live with my dad, though my mother and I remained close and were often together. Eventually my dad remarried two more times, but my mother never did. You would think my parents separating would have been a traumatic experience for such a young kid, but to tell you the truth it really wasn't. In retrospect their separation and eventual divorce was probably a good thing. Because my dad was such a powerhouse, such a thoroughly domineering man; he was a real strong, totally macho Caribbean brother. On the other hand, my mother was this quiet, demure southern sister from Virginia: a very peaceful, spiritual lady who never once asked me for anything in my entire life. Whatever I wanted to do she supported me 100 percent. I don't want to suggest that my father was physically abusive toward mom, but he was a powerful and all-consuming presence. Luckily my mother and father always loved each other in such a way that they never said a disparaging word about each other, at least not around me. That was a relief because they had such thoroughly different personalities.

My mother was a very small woman who was very tender, but at the same time she was quite strong and independent in her own sweet way. She was a domestic worker. When I wrote "African Lady" for my 1960 suite Uhuru Afrika she was my inspiration, she and all those strong sisters like her who had to toil and scrub folks' floors to make that measly $15 a week, and they would never complain, never beg; such dignity I can't even begin to describe. Mom was always kinda laid back, but she had a great sense of humor. She and my older sister Gladys always had me cracking up. I found out later, from my sister, that mom used to go dancing at the Savoy Ballroom when she was young, but that part of my mother I never knew, she never talked about that.

My dad was about 6'2?, which in those days was really tall. I guess my eventual 6'7? would have been circus material back then! He was a clean-shaven, handsome, dignified man, always dressed sharply and sort of a ladies' man. My dad raised me from the time I was three years old, and my sister Gladys lived with my mother. I would go and stay with mom and Gladys every weekend, at my father's insistence. My dad and I lived at several locations in Brooklyn, mainly in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area. Our first place was on Albany Avenue, where my mother, father, and sister were living when I was born. Then we moved to Pacific Avenue, and then after that we moved over to Putnam Avenue. My mother, who always lived in Brooklyn too after they split, lived on Decatur Street, on Eastern Parkway near Prospect Place for a while, and her last home was on Empire Avenue. Every weekend I'd be with my mother and my sister, and they'd have me in church every Sunday; that was the law. That church experience proved very important to my music later in life.

My dad loved to cook, and I think one of the reasons I'm so big is because he was such a wonderful cook. Between my dad's African-Caribbean style cooking and my mother's down-home Virginia cooking, I was blessed with great food. Man, we were economically poor but we never felt that, we lived like kings and queens. My dad always had his women, a variety of different ladies, but no matter what woman he was seeing or married to, the first thing he insisted upon is that they had better take good care of his only son. He spoiled me like you would not believe; spoiled me with love, not with material things, so I wasn't corrupted in that way. I never had a whole lot of clothes; I would get one new suit a year, at Easter, that was it ... and I'd better keep that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Combined Academic Publ.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822347849
• ISBN 13: 9780822347842
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar