Black People

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Horace Tapscott, a Force in L.A. Jazz, Is Celebrated in a New Set

      by

      “60 Years,” a compilation marking the 60th anniversary of his Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, spotlights the pianist and community organizer, who died in 1999.There’s a name engraved in the sidewalk along Degnan Boulevard in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park neighborhood: Horace Tapscott, the local pianist and organizer whose ensemble, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, gave many musicians their first gigs and helped heal a community impacted by racism.“He saved Los Angeles when it comes to progressive music,” said the vocalist Dwight Trible, a performer with the Arkestra since 1987, in a telephone interview. “Because if you were going to get involved in that, you had to come through Horace Tapscott.”Tapscott started the group in 1961 and maintained it until his death in 1999, at 64. Yet his name has never rung as loudly outside of L.A. He didn’t tour much and his albums of vigorous Afrocentric jazz weren’t released on mainstream record labels. A new compilation titled “60 Years,” out Friday, may change that.The double LP set collects unreleased songs from every decade of the Arkestra’s existence, up to its present-day iteration with the drummer Mekala Session at the helm. Through a mix of home and live recordings, along with written track-by-track breakdowns from past and present members in the album’s liner notes, “60 Years” offers perspective on a group that’s largely flown under the radar.Featuring Bill Madison on drums; David Bryant on bass; Lester Robertson on trombone; and Arthur Blythe, Jimmy Woods and Guido Sinclair on saxophone; the Arkestra started in Tapscott’s garage and grew dramatically over the following 17 years.Tapscott founded the band and the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension, an artists’ collective, to provide more gigs for progressive jazz musicians living in L.A., and to get local children involved in the arts. His own journey in music began when he was young; his mother, Mary Lou Malone, was a stride pianist and tuba player and as a teen he played trombone locally before entering the Air Force.After a tour of the South with the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton’s band, he wasn’t enamored with life on the road. During a stop in L.A., where Tapscott had lived since he was 9, he hopped off Hampton’s tour bus for good. “No one discovered I was gone until they got to Arizona,” he said in a 1982 interview.“He was way more interested in feeling and sounding like himself with his friends, who were also really unique,” Session said on a video call from Los Angeles. Still, Tapscott’s mission stretched beyond music. During the Watts riots in 1965, he had the band play in the middle of the road on a flatbed truck. (Police responded, with guns drawn.) They group would often perform in churches, community centers, prisons and hospitals for little to no money, and at benefits for Black Panther leaders, drawing attention from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Though Tapscott released his first album, “The Giant Is Awakened,” with a separate quintet in 1969, his debut LP with the Arkestra didn’t arrive until “The Call,” a mix of bluesy ballads and orchestral arrangements with grand flourishes, in 1978. Along the way, noted musicians and vocalists like Nate Morgan, Kamau Daaood, Adele Sebastian and Phil Ranelin played in the band.Trible came across Tapscott in the late 1980s as a singer in another group who wanted to work with the Arkestra. Two weeks after they performed separately at a festival, Tapscott offered an invitation. “He said, ‘I want you to come to my house tomorrow at 3 o’clock,’ and he hung up the phone,” Trible remembered with a laugh. “And just about every concert that Horace played from that time on, I sang with him in some capacity.”Trible performed a fiery rendition of “Little Africa,” a rapturous gospel song, with the current version of the Arkestra at National Sawdust in Brooklyn earlier this month. The festive night of shouts and praise featured older and younger Arkestra members, and served as a showcase for Session, the band’s leader since 2018; Mekala is the son of the saxophonist Michael Session, who led the band before him.In an interview before the gig, Session recalled joining the band as a teen. “I’m 13 and my first gig with the Ark is with Azar Lawrence,” he exclaimed, referring to the noted saxophonist and sideman to Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner and Freddie Hubbard. “It’s actually a very humbling thing to be a medium, a conduit for the ancestors trying to spread this vibration as far and as hard as possible.”The idea for the compilation arose shortly after the band’s 50th anniversary, which came and went without much fanfare. The collective vowed to not let that happen for its 60th. “We were like, ‘We’re going to make a product that will introduce a bunch of people to this band in a way that’s comprehensive and concise,” Session said. “This is for us, by us. We wanted to present something to the people from the band that can directly pay the band and support the band, and then be turned into other projects. It’s the first time the Ark has been able to do that, really.”Renewed interest in Tapscott and the Arkestra dates back at least seven years, when a new crop of L.A. jazz musicians — including the bassist Thundercat, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington and the producer and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin — helped the superstar rapper Kendrick Lamar create his avant jazz-rap opus “To Pimp a Butterfly,” shedding light on the city’s still-fertile jazz scene. Since then, various labels have reissued Tapscott’s work. But the music on “60 Years,” remastered from old cassettes and CDs, hasn’t been heard beyond the Arkestra.Six decades since Tapscott formed the band, Session said the group’s mission hasn’t changed, and he vowed to continue pushing forward. “I want to get weirder. I want to get back to how Horace did shows at prisons and high schools and colleges for free,” he said. “We could sell out Carnegie Hall and then come home and do the same set for 50, 60 cats. I want that balance. It sounds impossible, but we can do it.” More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Menace II Society’ at 30: A Bleak Nightmare Then, a Milestone Now

      by

      With a tragic hero at its heart, the Hughes brothers’ debut drama painted nuanced portraits of characters rarely fleshed out in other films.When it was released 30 years ago, “Menace II Society” was a shock to the system.Maybe because the trailer conveyed a sense of optimism amid scenes of Black urban life, many moviegoers were expecting another “Boyz N the Hood,” which had met with universal acclaim two years earlier. Both were coming-of-age dramas set in tough Los Angeles neighborhoods. And both involved a hero who is put to the test and a key character who dies.In “Boyz,” that hero, Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Tre, survives. Hell, he thrives: the movie ends with him leaving to attend Morehouse College. In that hopeful narrative, the main character escapes. Not so in “Menace.” It is about those who cannot escape, the thousands of boys who grow into men trapped by circumstances. If “Boyz N the Hood” was a dream that few got to experience, “Menace II Society” was the reality of those who were left behind.The debut of the directors Albert and Allen Hughes with a script by Tyger Williams — all in their 20s at the time — “Menace” tells the story of Caine (Tyrin Turner), who moves in with his grandparents after his mother dies of a drug overdose and his father is killed in a drug deal gone wrong. But he’s really raised by Pernell, played by Glenn Plummer, and other denizens of the streets. Caine himself is dealing drugs and stealing cars to get by. He’s best friends with the unapologetic killer O-Dog, played magnificently by Larenz Tate, and has feelings for Ronnie (Jada Pinkett), who has a baby with the now-imprisoned Pernell. But Caine makes decisions that prove to be his undoing. In true tragic-hero fashion, he brings about his own demise. He fathers a baby, then refuses to claim it, setting out on a path that ultimately leads to his death at the hands of a cousin of the baby’s mother.Partly what makes “Menace” (available on most major platforms) such a rich film is the surprising number of characters who are fully fleshed out — not just Caine but also O-Dog, a murderer who is also supportive of friends and gentle with children. Even the man who kills Caine is given layers: he is tender with his cousin, and his love for her sets him on a collision course with Caine. The cousin goes unnamed but he isn’t depicted like the antagonists in “Boyz N the Hood,” who are treated with as much care as gangsters in Grand Theft Auto.John Singleton, second from right, working with Ice Cube, in the car, and Cuba Gooding Jr. on “Boyz N the Hood.”Columbia PicturesThe film makes a point of exploring how Caine’s circumstances plays a major role in shaping him — whether it’s his upbringing by an addicted mother and dealer father, or his boyhood interactions with Pernell, who allows him to drink beer and hold his first gun. He then witnesses his father murder a man over a card game. It’s clear that Caine did not choose this life; this is the world as he found it. And though his determination not to care for his child is unquestionably the wrong decision, he is using the logic he inherited. We hear his inner monologue. He is trying to do the right thing, he just does not know how. Compared with the others around him, Caine is relatively moral.“Menace” was part of a ’90s wave of gritty urban films centered on Black leads that included “South Central” (1992) as well as “Boyz.” The $3 million “Menace” was a success with audiences (making $30 million at the box office) and critics alike. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly called it “brilliant, and unsparing,” and both Siskel and Ebert put the film on their lists of the best films of 1993.Thanks to their initial hit, the Hughes brothers were able to make “Dead Presidents” two years later, about a Black Vietnam veteran who resorts to robbing banks to feed his poverty-stricken family. Both films show filmmakers interested in exploring the systemic conditions in America that give rise to the tragedy at the core of the Black experience.Albert Hughes has said that “Menace” was made for white people, and it was lampooned as part of an overall goof on the genre in “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” (1996). Still, Gucci Mane, A$AP Rocky and Lil Wayne have all referenced “Menace” in their music, and a younger Kanye West noted that it was one of his “most watched” films.Kiese Laymon, the novelist and author of “Heavy: An American Memoir,” told me, “It was the first film that my friends and I memorized every word.” He added, “O-Dog was mesmerizing. Some of us liked talking like him. A few of us liked acting like him. That had deadly consequences for one or two of us.”Indeed “Menace II Society” has become a cornerstone in Black households, required watching alongside “The Color Purple,” “Malcolm X” and, yes, “Boyz N the Hood.”“Menace” isn’t perfect, of course. The women are hardly three-dimensional. Caine’s mother is no more than a crackhead who fails to raise him, while Ronnie has little to do other than be a dutiful mother and romantic interest. But the legacy of this film cannot be overstated. As the critic Caryn James wrote in The New York Times when the film was released, “The movie’s very bleakness — not the moviemakers’ youth — is what makes ‘Menace II Society’ so radical, so rare and so important.” More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘Wannabe,’ by Aisha Harris

      by

      In her essay collection “Wannabe,” Aisha Harris argues that Black critics can both appreciate, and demand more from, shifts in popular culture.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me, by Aisha HarrisBeing a Black critic in a time of exceptional art made by Black people has immense rewards and myriad risks. “Wannabe,” the debut essay collection from Aisha Harris, a co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” is at its best when engaging with those risks and the thorny questions of her profession. In what ways does identity inform a critic’s work? And should it?Harris can laugh about the demands of endorsing positive representations of Blackness, no matter how trite (“When encountering Black art out in the wild, be on the lookout for Black Girl Magic, Black Love, Black Excellence and the direct involvement of Common and/or John Legend”). She cheekily pushes Issa Rae’s now-famous awards show proclamation — “I’m rooting for everybody Black” — to its most absurd extent: “It’s only right we take her at her literal word and support all Black artists and art, no matter how questionable, incompetent or just plain offensive they might be.” But when a podcast listener chastises Harris for finding the Will Smith movie “King Richard” middling, she roars back. “I don’t want to ‘just be happy’ about ‘King Richard,’” she insists. “I want interiority and surprise and characters who feel as though they have a reason to exist beyond retelling history.”It’s complicated, though. Harris recounts conflictedness about being disappointed by “A Wrinkle in Time,” which was directed by Ava DuVernay, whose film career was firmly on the rise. Harris, who wrote movie reviews for Slate and is a former editor at The New York Times, worried that a lukewarm piece could mean it would “be decades before another studio handed a movie of this stature to a woman of color.” Looking back, she arrived at a place that was “true to my own reactions to the movie without being scathing.”“Wannabe” is a blend of memoir and cultural analysis, framed as “reckonings with the pop culture that shapes me.” Harris flaunts a wide range of references, moving easily between decades and arenas. She makes smart use of Roger Ebert on Fellini, revisits “Key & Peele” sketches and dissects bell hooks’s analysis of the experimental film hero Stan Brakhage. The book is especially effective when its author leans on her personal experience. Harris grew up in Connecticut, in “predominantly white and suburban circles,” and she tenderly illustrates the trials of growing up “The Black Friend” in white environments.“These Black Friends,” Harris offers, “were a reminder of my isolation and the fact that I often felt as if I was a blip on the radar of the many white peers I attempted to befriend.”Harris braids her personal pain with incisive critiques of the trope and its limitations, constructing internal monologues for famous pop culture examples, like Gabrielle Union’s Katie in “She’s All That” and Lamorne Morris’s Winston in “New Girl.” She deftly connects the rise of the personal brand and the toxic cultures of online fandom (“The overpersonalization of pop culture begets acrimony and pathological obsession”); confronts her decision to not have kids through the prism of “The Brady Bunch” and Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up”; and quotes from her own LiveJournal about a hurtful memory involving an oft-forgotten scene in Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls.”Still, for all its range, “Wannabe” contains occasions that demand more rigorous engagement. Contending with Dave Chappelle’s thorny legacy is limited to an aside: “While I recognize that present-day Dave Chappelle suffers from transphobic diarrhea of the mouth,” Harris writes, “I cannot pretend as though some of his old jokes no longer slap.” (She goes on to quote several of them.)And the recency of the pop references in “Wannabe” is both a strength and a weakness, and risks dating the book.The groundbreaking success of Disney’s “Encanto” and the multiple Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is likely to matter for a long time; Warner Bros. Discovery’s cancellation of the “Batgirl” film or the Harper’s letter on “Justice and Open Debate” might lose potency for the reader not engaged with the mostly-online #discourse.But enlisting movies and TV to explain the world is Harris’s expertise, arriving at “inadvertent self-formation by way of popular culture.” For readers already inclined to read culture to understand themselves, “Wannabe” is a compelling affirmation that they’re looking in the right place.Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a podcaster and the author of “Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces,” a New York Times Notable Book in 2022.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me | By Aisha Harris | 280 pp. | HarperOne | $29.99 More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Jessie Maple, Pathbreaking Filmmaker, Is Dead at 86

      by

      She was believed to be the first Black woman to produce, write and direct an independent feature film. She also broke ground as a union cinematographer.Jessie Maple, who built careers as a camerawoman and an independent filmmaker when Black women were almost nonexistent in those fields, and who then left meticulous instructions for later generations to follow in her footsteps, died on May 30 at her home in Atlanta. She was 86.Her death was confirmed by E. Danielle Butler, her longtime assistant and the co-author of her self-published 2019 memoir, “The Maple Crew.”Director and camerawoman were just two of Ms. Maple’s many jobs. She also worked as a bacteriologist; wrote a newspaper column; owned coffee shops; baked vegan cookies; and ran a 50-seat theater in the basement of her Harlem brownstone.Ms. Maple had been writing a column called Jessie’s Grapevine for The New York Courier, a Harlem newspaper, when she moved to broadcast journalism from print in the early 1970s because she wanted to reach more people.After studying film editing in programs at WNET, New York’s public television station, and Third World Cinema, the actor Ossie Davis’s film company, and working as an apprentice editor on the Gordon Parks films “Shaft’s Big Score!” (1972) and “The Super Cops” (1974), Ms. Maple realized that she yearned to be behind the camera.In 1975 she became the first African American woman to join New York’s cinematographers union (now called the International Cinematographers Guild), according to Indiana University’s Black Film Center and Archive, which holds a collection of her papers and films. But, she said, the union banned her after she fought to change rules that required her to complete a lengthy apprenticeship.“If I had waited, I never would have become a cameraperson,” Ms. Maple told The New York Times for a 2016 article about women who broke barriers to work on film crews. “So I took ’em to court.”Ms. Maple with cast members on the set of her second feature film, “Twice as Nice,” the story of twin sisters who are college basketball stars.Black Film Center Archive, Indiana University, BloomingtonShe sued several New York television stations for gender and racial discrimination in the mid-1970s, and she won a lawsuit against WCBS in 1977 that earned her a trial period with the station. That blossomed into a freelance career there and at the local ABC and NBC stations.Ms. Maple wrote that she faced crew members who did not want to work with her and nasty whispers, sometimes quite audible, behind her back. But she persevered, even when she got assignments that felt especially difficult — for example, flying in a helicopter to get aerial footage on a near-daily basis even though she had motion sickness.In 1977 Ms. Maple wrote about her experiences in “How to Become a Union Camerawoman,” a detailed guide to succeeding in a forbidding industry.But as TV news moved from film to video, Ms. Maple decided that she would rather become an independent filmmaker, with complete control of her work. She made short documentaries with Leroy Patton, her husband, including “Methadone: Wonder Drug or Evil Spirit?,” before turning to features.Ms. Maple said she wanted to shoot films about issues that were important to her community.“I want to tell the stories about things that bother me which may not otherwise be told,” she wrote in her memoir. “I strive to use the resources that are around me. Most importantly, I work to give voice to my people and the challenges we face.”According to the Black Film Center and Archive, Ms. Maple was the first known African American woman to produce, write and direct an independent feature film. That film, “Will” (1981), followed a former college basketball player struggling with addiction (played by Obaka Adedunyo) who takes in a 12-year-old boy to prevent him from developing a habit of his own. Loretta Devine, in her first film role, played Will’s significant other.Ms. Maple said she wanted to shoot films in her community about issues that were important to it. “I work, she said, “to give voice to my people and the challenges we face.”Black Film Center Archive, Indiana University, BloomingtonMs. Maple’s second feature, “Twice as Nice” (1989), was the story of twin sisters, both college basketball standouts, who are preparing to take part in a professional draft. The movie starred Pamela and Paula McGee, twins who won back-to-back N.C.A.A. basketball championships at the University of Southern California but were not professional actors.In 1982 Ms. Maple and Mr. Patton opened a theater to show “Will” and other independent films in the basement of their brownstone on 120th Street in Harlem. They called it 20 West, billed it as “the home of Black cinema” and featured movies by up-and-comers like Spike Lee. They closed it about a decade later — because, she said, she wanted to focus more on her own films.Ms. Maple’s films have achieved greater recognition in recent years than they did when they were released. In 2015 the Museum of Modern Art screened “Will”; that same year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center (now Film at Lincoln Center) showed both her features as part of a series called “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986.”Ms. Maple in 2016. A year earlier, her films had been shown at both the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesMs. Maple was born on Feb. 14, 1937, in McComb, Miss., about 80 miles south of Jackson, the second oldest of 12 children. Her father was a farmer, her mother a teacher and dietitian.Her father died when she was 13, and her mother sent her and many of her siblings to the Northeast, where she went to high school.After high school she studied medical technology and then started working in bacteriology. She eventually ran a lab at the Hospital for Joint Diseases and Medical Center (now part of New York University’s hospital system) in Manhattan while the hospital administration searched for a permanent replacement because, she wrote, she did not have a Ph.D. She was credited with leading the preliminary identification of a new strain of bacteria; on her lunch breaks, she joined other, lower-paid workers who were trying to organize.It was a steady, well-paying job, but Ms. Maple, who was married and had a young daughter, tired of the work and left bacteriology in 1968 to pursue journalism. She was on assignment for a magazine in Texas when she met Mr. Patton, a photographer for Jet and Ebony magazines who lived in Los Angeles, and they developed a bicoastal relationship.Ms. Maple had separated from her husband; Mr. Patton was still living with his wife. In time they divorced their spouses and married, and Mr. Patton moved to Manhattan. (Ms. Maple was sometimes billed as Jessie Maple Patton in her film work.)Ms. Maple is survived by her husband; her daughter, Audrey Snipes; five sisters, Lorrain Crosby, Peggy Lincoln, Debbie Reed, Camilla Clarke Doremus and Stephanie Robinson; and a grandson.Ms. Maple worked relentlessly to accomplish her dreams. She supplemented her income through ventures including two Harlem coffee shops she ran with Mr. Patton and a line of vegan cookies she made in the 1990s, which were eventually available at retailers on the East Coast.“I was too busy doing the work to slow down,” she wrote in her memoir. “I’d like to believe that my efforts have paved the way for the people behind me to work just as hard but struggle a little less.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Cisco Swank Puts His Spin on Jazz-Rap on ‘More Better’

      by

      The 23-year-old pianist, drummer and rapper puts a pandemic-era spin on jazz-rap on his debut, “More Better,” and he always keeps the faith.At a recent Sunday afternoon performance in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood, the pianist Francisco Haye sat behind a piano at Emmanuel Baptist Church, leading his quintet through a number of recognizable jazz standards. Yet they weren’t straight-ahead: Songs like “All the Things You Are,” “Little Sunflower” and “My Favorite Things” each had wrinkles — a bouncy backbeat or a near-frenetic breakdown — that made them feel fresh.It was the kind of set that might rankle those who prefer to hear Ella Fitzgerald, Freddie Hubbard and John Coltrane without frills, yet these listeners — made up of elders who have known Haye since he was a child growing up in the congregation there — seemed to embrace what he was trying to do.The goal, he told them, was to take “cliché jazz tunes and not make them boring.”Haye’s artistry is informed by artists like Robert Glasper and Roy Hargrove, both classically trained jazz musicians who have blended the genre with hip-hop, R&B and rock, aligning the music with alternative rap and the neo-soul movement that emerged in the late 1990s. Haye, performing under the name Cisco Swank, plays melodic piano chords over lush soul and trap-inspired drums and raps in a manner that recalls the weary lethargy of Mike and Earl Sweatshirt, but with the polish of a Village Vanguard headliner.Jazz-rap hybrids aren’t new, of course, but Haye, 23, without pandering to any audience, is tapping into a subset who dig lo-fi underground rap.Haye’s earliest musical memories involve playing drums and piano at the church, when he was only 3 or 4 years old. Lindsay Perryman for The New York Times“He’s sitting right in the center of a lot of points,” said the noted trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire in a telephone interview. “And it doesn’t seem like he’s trying to. It’s just who he is. He is Black music. All of it. It’s in every note.”Haye runs through the tapestry of jazz, R&B and rap on his recently released debut album, “More Better,” which at times ruminates on the pandemic but without wallowing in despair.“Teary-eyed still thinkin’ ’bout 2020/Quarantined, bro, the streets eerie,” he raps on “If You’re Out There.” “City full of dreams, concrete, but I see it when I look in the sky.” On “What Came From Above,” over a melancholic piano loop and stuttering electronic drums, Haye admits he is “renewed” back at home with his family. (He returned to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, from the Berklee College of Music, where he studied piano performance and contemporary writing and production when the pandemic took hold.) On “Over Now,” he laments the end of a romantic relationship with keen self-awareness. “I try to smile through it,” Haye raps with an exhausted tone. “I don’t really like fast moving/I try not to commit, bro, I’m last to it.” Even the LP’s title — thought of randomly during a rehearsal — is meant to convey perseverance in dark times.Haye, tall and skinny with long dreads and a boyish charm, peppers his conversation with affirmations like “facts” and “fire,” and speaks easily and expertly about a wide range of musicians — Beethoven and Bach, Kirk Franklin and Richard Smallwood. While growing up in Flatbush, he was exposed to all of this music by his mother, Adriane, who directed the youth choir at Emmanuel, and his father, Frank, who was the director of music there.Haye’s earliest musical memories involve playing drums and piano at the church, when he was only 3 or 4 years old. Seeing his father in action in front of large congregations sparked a real interest in music. “I feel like it played an important role in how I see people present music and how you interact with people,” he said during a lunch interview. “The whole idea of just music being more than just notes and harmony. It’s serving a bigger purpose, whether it’s bringing someone out of a wack week or bringing them closer to God.”Music can serve “a bigger purpose,” Haye said, “whether it’s bringing someone out of a wack week or bringing them closer to God.”Lindsay Perryman for The New York TimesAt home, he said, there were “mad musical instruments everywhere,” which made being an artist seem like the coolest job ever. He absorbed Baroque music, Stevie Wonder and other Motown soul, as well as old-school rap. (His mother grew up in the Bronx at the beginning of hip-hop culture and used to rhyme under the name Micki Dee.)Haye started thinking about blending genres during his freshman year at LaGuardia High School: His favorite rapper, Kendrick Lamar, merged rap and psychedelic jazz on his 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and Glasper’s song “Portrait of an Angel” doubled as his alarm clock. “That really was the point where I was like, ‘I’m trying to do something very much like this,’” Haye said.He formed a jazz fusion band and started playing around the city. He began rapping as a student at Berklee, tinkering with the conversational cadences heard on “More Better” while releasing music on SoundCloud. “I was like, ‘Oh, maybe we should just play this song with the band but put a trap groove over it,’” Haye recalled. “Slowly, it just started merging into what it is today.”He met the Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Luke Titus over social media at the start of lockdown in 2020 and started sharing audio files with him, which led to the collaborative album “Some Things Take Time,” released two years later. “The narrative was definitely about being patient during a time with so much uncertainty,” Titus said over the phone. “It was about not forcing things and allowing things to come when they come.” Those themes are also relayed on “More Better” in Haye’s singular voice.“He draws from so much influence of being from New York,” Titus added, pointing to the city’s renowned jazz and rap scenes. “He might have all these jazz chops, but he’ll pick the simple melody and play what needs to be there in a very lyrical way.” He added, “He’s one of those rare guys who doesn’t overthink things too much.”Haye noted that while his album was born of the pandemic, it’s rooted in a sense of uplift rather than resignation. “It’s just like seeing the clouds in the distance, like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “It’s being able to say, ‘Oh, I can make it as long as I have faith.’ Even if it’s not a spiritual faith, if it’s just faith that things will get better, it will work out.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Michelle Ebanks Named President and CEO of the Apollo

      by

      Michelle Ebanks, who most recently served as the president of Essence Communications, will assume the role in July.Michelle Ebanks, who most recently served as the president of Essence Communications, the global media and communications company dedicated to Black women, will be the next president and chief executive of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the organization announced on Tuesday.“I have a deep understanding of the value of cultural institutions and their profound impact on individual lives and society, and the Apollo Theater as one of the nation’s greatest cultural institutions,” Ebanks said in an interview on Monday.Ebanks, 61, replaces the theater’s longtime leader, Jonelle Procope, who announced last year that she planned to step down this summer after nearly 20 years steering the Harlem organization, which she transformed from a struggling nonprofit to the largest African American performing arts presenting organization in the country.The appointment comes at a critical time for the theater, which is wrapping up an $80 million capital fund-raising campaign to fully renovate its 109-year-old building, with construction set to begin next year and the first cultural programs in the new space planned for spring 2025. Along with a new lobby cafe and bar that will be open to the public, plans include added and upgraded seating, new lighting and audio systems and updates to the building’s exterior. The main theater will be closed during at least part of the renovation, but programming will be presented at the Victoria theaters, and will also continue at the Apollo.Ebanks, who holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Florida, led Essence Communications for 18 years and helped grow the company into a global franchise that now includes Essence, the life-style magazine for Black women; Essence.com; and the Essence Festival, the brand’s annual live music event that draws hundreds of thousands of people to New Orleans each year.It was her experience with the Essence Festival specifically that was one of the primary draws for the Apollo, said Charles E. Phillips, chairman of the theater’s board.“She understood really well the kind of artistic content that people would respond to with the Essence Festival,” he said in a phone interview on Monday. “At the same time, she has business experience as well.”Her focus, she said, will be on continuing the existing partnerships the Apollo has with early-career creators and organizations in Harlem and the nation, and expanding them.“I want to reach as many different audiences as possible,” she said. “The impact of arts and music on society is immeasurable, and we need as many stories told from those emerging artists as possible.”Ebanks will assume her new position in July. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Bill Lee, Bassist and Composer of Son Spike Lee’s Films, Dies at 94

      by

      He accompanied a wide range of jazz and folk musicians and scored “She’s Gotta Have It,” “School Daze” “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo’ Better Blues.”Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored the early films of his son Spike Lee, wrote folk-jazz operas, led an acclaimed ensemble of bassists and was a prolific sideman for Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and others, died on Wednesday morning at his home in Brooklyn. He was 94. Spike Lee confirmed the death.Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, including as well Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.Mr. Lee wrote the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, a musical challenge that called for capturing the independence of a romantic Black woman in “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), a satirical look at life at a Black college in “School Daze” (1988), racial violence in “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and the poignant hardships of a Black jazz musician in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990).Bill Lee had small parts in all but “Do the Right Thing,” and Spike Lee’s sister, Joie, had roles in all four. Bill Lee also scored an early Spike Lee short, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” the first student film to be showcased at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival, in 1983.The feature films won largely positive reviews and reaped sizable profits. Bill and Spike Lee had a falling-out in the early 1990s, over family matters, money and other issues, that ended their collaboration. Later Spike Lee films — he has directed more than 30, appearing in many of them himself — were scored by the trumpeter Terence Blanchard.Mr. Lee, right, on bass, at the Five Spot in New York in 1960 with the saxophonist John Handy’s quartet. Don Friedman was on piano and Joe Hunt on drums.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesBorn into an Alabama family of musicians and educators who instilled a passion for music in him and his siblings, Bill Lee learned drums, piano and flute early on. He attended segregated small-town public schools and studied music at historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta.Inspired in his early 20s by listening to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Mr. Lee mastered the double bass, the largest and lowest-pitched stringed instrument, and performed with small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago before migrating to New York City in 1959.Over the next decade, Mr. Lee, who favored a battered straw hat and often recited his own poetry between numbers, performed often in piano-bass duos and piano-bass-drums trios in smoky clubs that served soul food with jazz, many on the western edge of Greenwich Village, squeezed among meatpacking houses and trucking depots on Manhattan’s Hudson River shoreline.He recorded extensively on Strata-East Records, a musician-owned label, and founded and directed the New York Bass Violin Choir, a troupe of seven basses, sometimes accompanied by piano or saxophone. Critics lauded the ensemble for weaving an agile harmony of pastel and harsh moods in performing Mr. Lee’s folk operas at Town Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival.His numerous operas, including “One Mile East,” “The Depot” and “Baby Sweets,” were based on people and events from his early life in the South. They sometimes drew on the singing talents of Mr. Lee and his two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorehead, a jazz pianist and music teacher at Hampton University in Virginia, and Grace Lee Mims, a librarian, whose voices lent grandiloquent color to the tales.In a review of a performance by the Violin Choir at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1971, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Lee served as bassist, singer and narrator of his sketches of small-town life in Snow Hill, Ala., building both his stories and his music from a rich vein of folk sources. His team of bassists, bending over their unwieldy instruments, produced ensemble passages that were by turns gorgeously warm and singing or so surprisingly light and airy that one suspected a couple of flutes might be hiding among them.”Mr. Lee in an undated portrait. His numerous operas were based on people and events from his early life in the South.David LeeIn the 1970s, when the electric bass became an instrument of choice in many jazz ensembles because its thumping tones suited the commercial sounds of jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Lee, an acoustic bass purist, refused to go along and lost work as a result. “Some things you just can’t live with,” he told The Boston Globe in 1992. “Just thinking about doing it, my gut reaction hit me so hard in the stomach. I knew I could never live with myself.”Spike Lee explored the problem of commercialism, with its racial implications, in “Mo’ Better Blues,” which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who fights exploitation by white club owners.“Musicians are low-priced slaves, whereas athletes and entertainers are high-priced slaves,” Spike Lee told The Times when the film opened. “It’s their music, but it’s not their nightclub, it’s not their record company. They have an understanding only of the music, not of the business, so they get treated any old way.”Despite other differences, Bill and Spike Lee agreed about integrity. “Everything I know about jazz I got from my father,” Spike Lee told The Times in 1990. “I saw his integrity, how he was not going to play just any kind of music, no matter how much money he could make.”Bill Lee in front of his brownstone across from Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in 2013. The house was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night. Michael Nagle for The New York TimesWilliam James Edwards Lee was born in Snow Hill on July 23, 1928, to Arnold Lee, a cornet player and band director at Florida A&M University, and Alberta Grace (Edwards) Lee, a classical concert pianist and teacher. In addition to his sisters Consuela and Grace, he had four other siblings, Clifton, Arnold Jr., Leonard and Clarence.Their maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, a graduate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded a log-cabin arts school for Black students in Snow Hill in 1893. By 1918, the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute had 24 buildings and 300 to 400 students pursuing academic subjects and vocational training. Mr. Edwards died a few years later, but the institute survived as a segregated public school until 1973, when it closed. Bill Lee graduated from there in the mid-1940s.Mr. Lee and his first wife, Jacquelyn (Shelton) Lee, an art teacher, had five children: Shelton (Spike), Christopher, David, Joie and Cinque. After Jacquelyn’s death in 1976, Mr. Lee married Susan Kaplan. They had one son, Arnold. Christopher died in 2013. Mr. Lee’s sister Consuela died at 83 in 2009.In addition to Spike Lee, he is survived by his wife; his sons David, Cinque and Arnold; his daughter, Joie; a brother, A. Clifton Lee; and two grandchildren.After arriving in New York, Mr. Lee settled in Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighborhood that became a magnet for Black musicians and other creative artists who took pride in their lifestyles and their art. The neighborhood was the setting for “She’s Gotta Have It.”Mr. Lee with his son Spike in 2009 for a 20th-anniversary screening of the Spike Lee movie “Do the Right Thing,” for which Bill Lee wrote the soundtrack.Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan via Getty ImagesThe Lee household, overlooking Fort Greene Park, all but banished television but was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night, prompting noise complaints from neighbors but spawning jazz artists who found their sounds in the heart of Brooklyn.During a 2008 interview with The Times at his home, Mr. Lee played piano and double bass. “His music has the complex harmonies of bebop and hard bop, but it also has a sincere, down-home, churchy feel,” the reporter Corey Kilgannon wrote. “His passages move in interesting and unexpected places, but they resolve before long in a way that is simple and sincere, earthy and somehow very satisfying.” More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      James de Jongh, Who Put Stories of Slavery Onstage, Dies at 80

      by

      His play “Do Lord Remember Me,” constructed from interviews with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, was first staged in 1978 and has been revived multiple times since.James de Jongh, a scholar and playwright best known for fashioning oral histories left by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s into “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an unflinching picture of the human cost of slavery, died on May 5 in the Bronx. He was 80.Robert deJongh Jr., a nephew, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Professor de Jongh was a longtime member of the English department faculty at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he specialized in African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. But briefly in his early career he had been an actor, and he continued to maintain an interest in the theater. In 1975, together with Carles Cleveland, he wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about a Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.“I wanted to go in a completely different direction for the second play,” he told the public-access cable channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a recent interview.He was drawn to a book called “The Negro in Virginia,” a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people started by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal, and completed in 1940 by the Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, he said, his idea was to construct a fictional story using that material as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, his thinking changed.“Many of them were quite eloquent, were quite moving, were quite touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of the people themselves,” he said. “In other words, the interviewers had actually recorded word for word, rather than simply summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”He realized that he could create a play made primarily of the recollections of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented by the words of Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, and by some gospel and work songs. The result was “Do Lord Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater on East Third Street in Manhattan, with a cast that included Frances Foster, a leading actress of the day.“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for The New York Times. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman in the American Place Theater production of “Do Lord Remember Me” in 1982.Bert Andrews, via The New Federal TheaterA revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater in Midtown, with a cast that included Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman. In a fresh review, Mr. Gussow called it “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”The play, which has been restaged a number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and a theme of triumphing over adversity. But it is also blunt in its language and its depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the kind of historical realism that is being erased from educational curriculums in some schools and libraries today. In one scene, a woman shares the back story of her facial disfigurement: As a child, she was punished for taking a peppermint stick by having her head placed beneath the rocker of a rocking chair and crushed.In the interview with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Professor de Jongh said that although he was not a particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort of calling.“Somehow, I felt I had a task,” he said, “and the task had found me.”James Laurence de Jongh was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His father, Percy, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a poultry farm and plant store.Professor de Jongh attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas and then Williams College in Massachusetts, where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a master’s degree from Yale in 1967 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983.Professor de Jongh continued to act for a time after his days at Williams College, but teaching was his vocation beginning in 1969, when he spent a year as an instructor at Rutgers University. The next year he joined the CUNY faculty; he remained there for decades and added the Graduate Center to his portfolio in 1990. He took emeritus status in 2011.Professor de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Black theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990, he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination.” He also served on the board of the New Federal Theater, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Van Dyke, called him “a quiet, gracious powerhouse.”Professor de Jongh, who lived in the Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates at Rikers Island — according to news accounts, it was the first complete professional production staged at the prison. Professor de Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.“There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told The Times that year. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.” More