BRUBECK: BACK-TO-BLACK

Jazz: The "Existential" Music?? 

The world I was born into was dominated by Music (the music of a People who built and evolved the Americas).  From Church to School and throughout our existence, what white people called "Race Music" was our greatest sustainer.

 

From my home town, in the late 1800's, Scott Joplin created a style or type of music that changed fundamentally the music of the world.  Rag-time, his invention, became the underpinnings for JAZZ, after it travelled down to New Orleans and came back "up-river".

 

Brubeck, born 19 years before me, "introduced" (they say) Jazz to whites, and made them like it.

Before then, it was an unspecified form of "Race Music" with a most-foul stigma. 

It was the "beat", the "rhythm", the "ritmo", after all, that was the issue.  The drum- beat-in-the-night, was what struck the most terror among whites during the days of chattel slavery; keeping racism and fear of all things black alive in our society.  Whites called it the "music of the devil".

 

Among my thousands of recordings collected over my life-time (78's, 45's, LP's, CD's, tapes) almost no white artists were included, mostly because they didn't record our music before Dave came along.

Remember, it was the extreme wealth provided by the slave trade that funded "Classical" white music between the early 1500's and the late 1800's.

 

Dave and his "5/4" rhythmic hook for white folk, created what has been a marginal following; but also began the "mining" of black artist's works by whites.  "Cross-over" became a dream for black artists, leading to the break-up of groups.  Before Dave, artists like Nat-King-Cole were known to have "built" businesses like Capitol Records.  The ban of race music from the air-waves persisted into my early college years, when the Columbia Record Club carried Dave's albums.

 

Because whites spurned our music beforeElvis and the Beatles came along, I was able to not only hear and meet people like Duke Ellington, Pearl Bailey, Miles Davis; I also partied with them, and have recordings and pictures they autographed.  Post-Beatles, the era of Jazz performers began to die out, as great black icons passed away: great voices like Billie Holliday, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington ... the list is long.  We will never again see a period of such rich variation in black talent in music.  Needless to say, the "pale" copiers made a lot of money, while their darker progenitors (like Little Richard) had to stand by and watch their art get ripped off.  Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Brubeck reports that Dave was aware of this and was troubled by it.  We can say R.I.P. for Dave, assured that he was not a part of the 47%, the 2012 election shows, still haunts us.

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