Music – Anthony G. Flood

Happy Birthday, Wé Ani, My Musical Tonic and Oasis

Wé Ani turns 25 today. Last spring when she auditioned for American Idol her protean voice began drilling a hole in my soul.

Due more to what was going on in my life than her talent, her equally powerful performances on The Voice in 2016 didn’t have that lasting effect.

Her career is a story of strong family support, raw talent (dancing, acting, classical voice training), and diligence (wé ani in Swahili).

I’ll let my notes from 2023’s last post introduce the rest of this one:

. . . Harlem-born performer Wé Ani (b. 1999) [is] the most versatile, and powerful, pop singer I’ve ever heard, whose voice salves my charred soul and never fails to plaster a smile on my face. My wife and I had first seen her in 2016 on The Voice (when she went by “Wé McDonald”).

A physically different (almost unrecognizably so) Wé competed in last season’s (2023) American Idol . . . She can belt like nobody’s business, folk her way through any ballad (guitar and all), or rock it out, or out-Broadway any veteran of The Great White Wé, I mean, Way.

There seem to be at least a half dozen Wé Anis: after watching any two videos, I sincerely wonder, “Is that the same singer?” . . .

And then there’s the uncanny sonic chasm between her childlike speaking pitch and her robust, gritty singing voice: she says she wants to be taken seriously, but “it’s not easy sounding like a 12-year-old at 23.” The simile that comes to my mind is fiction’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (minus the creepy associations): she makes a fool of anyone who prejudges her talent on that basis. . . .

She’s also a modest and charming interviewee (sans tatoos, nose ring, acrylic claws and other accoutrements of female celebrityhood): consider one from 2018 and another from September.

Varleton McDonald (Wé’s father and manager), Wé Ani McDonald, and Michael Amorgianos (Lawrence Middle School psychologist), January 2023

Wé’s voice and musical choices take me back to the day, about sixty years, when pop music entered my life, washing away life’s dirt as images of war, assassinations, and race riots washed across the TV screen.

Her voice is more than pleasant: it’s a delivery system for aesthetic endorphins, an oasis and tonic for my soul.

But the above text is so much blather. Why not taste and see for yourself?

Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Wé Ani, My Musical Tonic and Oasis”

On “color-blindness” and artistic merit: the power of The Righteous Brothers

The Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley (b. 1940) and Bobby Hatfield (1940-2003)

Lately, I’ve stumbled upon an unexpected joy—watching “reaction videos” on YouTube where young podcasters experience great musical artists for the first time. My focus has been on their reactions to The Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. I recall seeing their grainy masterpieces, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, and Unchained Melody, when they were broadcast on TV in ’64-’65. Their sonic power is undiminished to this day.

Reaction quality varies wildly; many are shallow. It never occurs to these tech-savvy kids to research answers to their simple questions, like, “Are they really brothers?” (when viewing Unchained Melody, Hatfield’s solo effort) “Where’s the other brother?” Almost all of them remember hearing the latter in a movie (Ghost, 1990), but none can name it.

In any case, I find myself enjoying their reaction to the money-making notes that I see coming (having seen the videos hundreds of times). The females, black and white, American, European, and Asian, invariably melt, even shed tears. Sometimes their accents make their English unintelligible to me, but the emotion is undeniable. Some male viewers, rendered speechless, are content in that silence; others, metaphysically shocked. “I thought they were black,” some mutter, followed by “Soul got no color!” or the equivalent.

There are similar reactions to Tom Jones and other exemplars of “blue-eyed soul.” I will not litter this post with links. Interested readers can find them easily enough. Anyone in need of suggestions may ask for them in the comment box.

What these viewers would likely reject is the notion that by enjoying and sharing these performances, they are complicit in the “cultural appropriation” allegedly committed by The Righteous Brothers, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, and others.

It’s as good a day as any to appreciate that we judge singers not by the color of their skin but by the profound emotions their vocal cords convey. Globally, there are millions of young people with whom I might have very little else in common, yet they and I delight in the same vibrations; in that commonality, however qualified, I take some comfort.

Retrospects and Prospects

This year will be better than next year. Yes, that may reflect more my mood than reality, but it’s a mood that reality reinforces daily.

I’m an eschatological optimist—Christ’s saving work has given me peace (true union) with God, which is all that really matters—but a secular pessimist. The intermittent news of resistance to the totalitarianism that’s coming like Christmas may be accurate, but “So, cheer up, old boy!” doesn’t make me feel better (and making me feel better is no one’s obligation). Things will change for the better, or they won’t; I’ll know which soon enough, should I live so long.

Those charged with preventing with catastrophes (e.g., my country’s invasion) are in fact facilitating them, thereby undermining the good of order that makes the regular enjoyment of other goods possible. I cannot train my attention on the facilitators, however, if the criminal invaders in my vicinity are concentrating my mind wonderfully. Like them, the criminal overlords can be dealt with only by violence; I see no timely way to exercise legitimate violence against either class of criminal. So, I pray each day for safety but, failing that, at least for the opportunity to take a few of the bastards with me.

I will write until I can no longer, content with the probability that what I write might be picked up, if it ever will be, by people who won’t be born until after I’m dead. Perhaps 2024 will see the publication of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers (the latest draft of which I’m sharing with beta readers) and of the second, expanded edition of Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. Maybe I’ll get around to mining the 25 diaries (1970-1994) that record my interactions with the remarkable people I’ve met (and the mistakes they couldn’t prevent me from making).

Ultradispensationalist that I am, even the great Reformed Baptist apologist James R. White (b. 1962), whom I’ve been reading and listening to for about ten years has not been able to make a Calvinist out of me (not that he’s tried), but he certainly has ruined any Roman Catholic apologist’s chance of winning me back. Auditing many of his over 180 moderated debates over the past ten years, White always strikes me as having the better of the argument. To the task he always brings not only great learning and preparation, but also grit and not a little humor. A student of history, he teaches biblical Hebrew and Greek, yet wears his learning lightly, if I’m any judge of such things.

A couple of diamonds in the cultural dung heap, however, postpone utter esthetic despair.

One is the Bebop guitar virtuoso Pasquale Grasso (b. 1988) who, after the passing of my teacher and friend Pat Martino (1944-2021), showed me I could get excited about a player again. Here’s a great example.

The other gem is Harlem-born performer Wé Ani (b. 1999), the most versatile, and powerful, pop singer I’ve ever heard, whose voice salves my charred soul and never fails to plaster a smile on my face. My wife and I had first seen her in 2016 on The Voice (when she went by “Wé McDonald”). A physically different (almost unrecognizably so) Wé competed in last season’s (2023) American Idol, making it into the top five. Research revealed she was indeed the same person. What she did this year, however, hooked me. She can belt like nobody’s business, folk her way through any ballad (guitar and all), or rock it out, or out-Broadway any veteran of The Great White Wé, I mean, Way.

There seem to be at least a half dozen Wé Anis: after watching any two videos, I sincerely wonder, “Is that the same singer?” Without, I stress, impersonating any of them, she can put you in mind of Nina Simone, or Mary J. Blige, or Idina Menzel, or Whitney Houston, or Aretha Franklin, or Barbra Streisand. (This list is not exhaustive, but it risked becoming exhausting).

And she gave off a different vibe when belting out a Stevie Wonder classic for Tony Bennett (who clearly inspired her final tonal choice), bringing the Kennedy Center audience to their feet.

She’s also a modest and charming interviewee (sans tatoos, nose ring, acrylic claws and other accoutrements of female celebrityhood): consider one from 2018 and another from September. The Standard, her latest, will drop on January 12, 2024.

Such are my few oases of refreshment these days. I feel better having shared these sentiments. However quixotic it may sound, I wish all my subscribers and visitors a happy and safe 2024.

Pat Martino and Herbert Aptheker: Half-century Memories

Pat Martino (L) and yours truly, January 1, 1973, 3:20 A.M., Folk City, 130 West 3rd Street, NYC.

This photo was taken on January 1, 1973 at Folk City, 130 West Third Street, in Manhattan.[1] After several months of screwing up the courage to ask Jazz guitar legend Pat Martino (1944-2021) for a lesson (I had first spoken to him there on September 9, 1972), he agreed earlier that New Year’s Day to give me a lesson if I’d be willing to travel to his home in Philadelphia. Before taking the train at New York’s Penn Station on January 24th, I noticed the headlines of the newspapers that day: the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam War would be signed three days later.

A philosophy student at New York University (NYU)—where I took Sidney Hook’s last course—I had spent 1972 worrying about how I might avoid the military draft. Although my Selective Service (SS) number was 40, I heard they weren’t going to call higher than 25. Shortly after that, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced the end of the draft.

I had been anxious about the future. Fighting my Vietnamese comrades was out of the question, but the various “draft-dodging” (or court martial-inviting) options were not much more congenial. You see, I was from 1971 to 1975 a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (CP), one who had registered with SS and was then assisting Communist writer and theoretician Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) with finding various books and articles pursuant to his literary executorship of W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers.[2]

That’s whom Pat Martino was posing with on New Year’s Day 1973. For the nearly five decades I knew him, I hasten to add, he was never aware of my politics.

On the advice of CP attorney John Abt, who urged me to claim my First Amendment right of freedom of association, I declined to answer the Army’s questions about my political affiliation. After isolating me from other registrants for a few hours and then interrogating me, the SS officers dropped the matter and let me go home. I never heard from them again. I returned to my NYU classes the next day. They probably have a thick file on me.

January 1973 is also the month Aptheker acknowledged my assistance and that of others in his introduction to The Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (Kraus-Thomson Limited, 1973), which he edited along with an additional 40 volumes of Du Bois’s writings.

In 1946 Aptheker returned from Europe where, rising to the rank of Major, he had commanded the all-Black 350th artillery unit. That’s the year Du Bois (1868-1963) made Aptheker—unable to secure an academic position in the Cold War’s the first year—the executor of his literary estate. In that introduction my name appeared in a scholarly publication for the first time.[3]

Herbert Aptheker signing over W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers to the University of Massachusetts in 1973 (that is, the portion that had been entrusted to him: the rest went to Fisk University and to Ghana, where Du Bois took up residence in 1961, never to return to the country of his birth).

In a few years I’d part company with him, a story for another time. I eventually settled accounts with my erstwhile political conscience in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness.

Over the last fifty years I pursued philosophical, political, and musical studies in ways I could never have imagined (or, if I could, would necessarily have welcomed). At 19, a half century (a reasonable unit of historical account) seemed impossibly long to me. It does not feel that way today.

Aptheker, a widower in his last four years, passed away at age 87 almost two decades ago; Pat, having made a seemingly miraculous comeback from amnesia-inducing brain surgery in the early ’80s, succumbed to a long illness last year, age 78.

Socially isolated, I left the Party in 1975 and Marxism altogether a couple of years later; I never became either a professional guitarist (not for want of trying) or a professor of philosophy. Each man left his mark on my sense of life. I enter the new year appreciative of their influence and hope by God’s grace to continue to build on what I’ve learned from knowing them and so many others.

I wish all my subscribers and visitors a happy, prosperous, and healthy new year!

Anthony G. Flood

January 1, 2023

My wife Gloria, Pat Martino, and me, September 9, 1995, Blue Note Club, NYC, directly across the street from where Folk City was, 23 years to the day after I had first spoken with him.

Notes

[1] The Fat Black Pussycat night club/comedy venue does business there now. Before Folk City, there was Tony Pastor’s Downtown (1939-1967).

[2] Of the countless requests he gave me over the years, here are four.

[3]

“Summer of Soul”: A Harlem Cultural Festival Attendee Laments a Missed Opportunity

The following review appeared on Amazon today, but without the links. Please visit it and give it a “helpful” nod if you’re so inclined. Thanks so much!

From over 40 hours of precious historical footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival (HCF), archived for a half-century for lack of corporate interest, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson had the daunting task of selecting only two. He cannot be faulted for his choice of performances for Summer of Soul. He couldn’t please everyone.

But there was other, post-festival material available to him, and in his decisions here, I detect a narrative at work.

As I watched the documentary, I noticed that the sea of black and brown in Mount Morris Park was flecked with white. (Four years later, the venue was renamed to honor America’s self-proclaimed leader of the world’s “first fascists.”*) The fact that those few “not-of-color” folks traveled safely to and from Harlem to enjoy music is worth noting, given that they did so not many months after the post-MLK assassination riots. (They were luckier than Diana Ross’s fans whom “bands of roving youths” beat and robbed after leaving her ’83 Central Park concert [New York Times, July 24, 1983]).

HCF’s white attendees, though few, represented millions who in the preceding decade had voted with their pocketbooks to help these artists achieve a level of success that their Black fan base alone could not support.

Continue reading ““Summer of Soul”: A Harlem Cultural Festival Attendee Laments a Missed Opportunity”

Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca

As an amateur Jazz guitarist, it’s my pleasure to take a break from theology and philosophy to note the 70th anniversary of the original Birdland club.

First, happy birthday to Barry Harris (b. 1929) and Curtis Fuller (b. 1934)!

70 years ago, December 15, 1949, a basement Jazz club—following the Ubangi, the Ebony, and The Clique—opened as “Birdland: The Jazz Corner of the World.” Its birth coincided with the demise of “The Street,” i.e., the serendipitous concatenation of jazz clubs that sprung up on 52nd Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues in the wake of Prohibition. (See Patrick Burke’s scholarly Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Arnold Shaw’s 52nd Street: The Street of Jazz makes an excellent companion reader.) Continue reading “Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca”

July 20, 1969: I was there

Not the Moon, on which the crew of the Apollo 11 spacecraft would land as that Sunday drew to a close (almost 11:00 P.M. Eastern Time). No, Mount Morris Park (renamed Marcus Garvey Park four years later) for one very memorable afternoon, part of that summer’s Harlem Cultural Festival.

On my way home from high school a few days before, I saw an ad on the No. 27 Bronx bus that took me from the IRT’s Sound View Avenue Station on Westchester Avenue and dropped me off at the Academy Gardens (at the Randall Avenue stop just before the bus makes a left turn onto Rosedale Avenue).

By Gind2005 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25730097

Around noon the day Neil Armstrong would do the first “Moonwalk,” I took the No. 6 train (of J.Lo’s debut album fame; she was born four days later) from the same station (now Morrison-Sound View Avenues) to 125th Street to enjoy a Soul Music concert of arguably historic proportions. After the Beatles craze, to which I had succumbed as a pre-teen in 1964, my musical tastes migrated, not to Rock, but to Soul. That set me up for my first Jazz concert in 1971.

If there were other white people among the myriads of black folks forming a sea of ebony across the green field, I didn’t see them. When I asked a gentleman for directions back to the 6 after the show, he nearly lost the cigarette that dangled from his lips. That sort of thing. Distributors of The Black Panther—the newspaper of the The Black Panther Party, not the superhero comic book, which actually predates the Party—hawked their wares indiscriminately and therefore to me.

According to blogger kamau [whose blog has since been deleted from the web] in 2009, “producer Hal Tulchin took over 50 hours of footage of the festival, but was unable to get it aired on the American TV networks of the day. Currently that footage lies languishing in vaults; apart from Nina Simone’s performance [on August 17th] that is making the rounds of YouTube . . . most of that footage has not seen the light of day.”

Below is the text of the original press release. (The area code for the whole city then was “212”; “718” for the “outer boroughs” came in 1984.)

The “headliner,” Stevie Wonder, was just 18; Chuck Jackson, now 81, turned 32 two days later.

UPDATE: In 2017, Bryan Greene, General Deputy Assistant Secretary at U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and fellow soul music fan emailed me about my post as it appeared on an old jazz site. We set up a time for a phone interview about my experience; he wrote up the result in an article that captures the time’s politics and culture. It’s in the April-June 2017 issue of his newsletter, Poverty & Race, available online. I hope some of you will take a peek.

The festival is also Greene’s point of departure for a recent Smithsonian article about the Moon anding and the alternative uses that he and others wish NASA’s funds would be put. As you might guess, I’m against governmental boondoggles on principle, but at least the $24 billion mulcted from taxpayers led to a Moon landing; $15 trillion later, U.S. poverty rates are about what they were when President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty.”

And the beat goes on. (Yeah, that was from ten years later.)

The above modifies and expands a 2009 post on another site.

City of New York
Administration of Parks,
Recreation and
Cultural Affairs
Arsenal, Central Park 10021

For Release

UPON RECEIPT

For Further Information:

Janice Brophy – 360-8141

SOUL FESTIVAL IN HARLEM

Harlem will host the sounds of soul this Sunday, July 20th, at 2:00 p.m. at Mount Morris Park, 124th Street and Fifth Avenue. The concert climaxes “Soul Music Festival Week.” proclaimed by Mayor Lindsay for July 15th to July 20th.

Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Chuck Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and the Lou Parks Dancers are featured at the Soul Festival, the third concert in the Harlem Cultural Festival 1969, sponsored by the New York City’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration and Maxwell House Coffee, and produced and directed by Tony Lawrence. Admission is free.

The Harlem Cultural Festival 1969 will continue through the summer with three more concerts at Mount Morris Park, all at 2:00 p.m. A Caribbean Festival on July 27th, featuring Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto, Cal Tjader, Herbie Mann, and the Harlem Festival Calypso Band; a Blues & Jazz Festival on August 17 with Nina Simone, B. B. King, Hugh Masakela, and the Harlem Festival Jazz Band; on August 24th, a Miss Harlem Beauty Pageant & Local Talent Festival, featuring La Rocque Bey & Co., and Listen My Brothers & Co.

Sadik Hakim, 1919-1983: Chance Encounter? A Jazz Digression.

It may be, as the Buddhist proverb has it, that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When Sadik Hakim briefly appeared in my life, however, I wasn’t ready, and wouldn’t be for more than a third of a century, that is, until it was too late. So, maybe he wasn’t supposed to be “the teacher,” right? He was certainly, however, “present at the creation” of arguably the world’s greatest music (well, that’s how I’d argue); if I had known then what I learned later, I could have benefited from our chance encounter even more than I did.

He was christened Argonne Thornton a century ago on July 15th in Duluth, Minnesota. On November 26, 1945, this denizen of 52nd Street in its glorious Bebop period had alternated with Dizzy Gillespie on piano on Charlie Parker’s immortal “Ko-Ko” date. (Britt Aamodt tells the story here.)

According to his Wikipedia entry, “Hakim is credited with co-writing Thelonious Monk’s standard ‘Eronel’ and is rumored to have written a few famous bop tunes credited to other composers. He adopted his Muslim name in 1947.”

The most common, and most apt, adjective associated with Sadik Hakim is “unsung.” Although the average jazz fan cannot recognize his name, I have run into it repeatedly, and unexpectedly, in many jazz biographies. For example, I’ll pick up From Swing to Bop only to read Shelly Manne’s memory of a night at the Onyx on 52nd Street in the early ’40s when big Ben Webster knocked over nearly every table to dissuade some rowdy solider on leave from further pestering his pianist. Or just today, when I consulted Feather and Gitler’s The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazzfor information on a former music teacher of mine, saxist Paul Jeffrey (with whom I took a single, but valuable, lesson in 1974), I learned that Professor Jeffrey had played with Hakim in 1961.

Some of Sadik’s memories of befriending as well as working with Bird are recorded in Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, edited by Robert Reisner. Because I had read this book sometime before November 19, 1976, that I was able to appreciate the good fortune of his striking up a conversation with me, a stranger, that night at Bradley’s (70 University Place, 1969-1996).

I was there to see legendary bop-era guitarist Jimmy Raney, who did not disappoint. (He played Bird’s “Billie’s Bounce” at my request, and his son, Doug, sat in for one or two numbers.) During the second set I was, according to my diary, “joined at my table by Sadik (I think that’s it) who knew all the greats. It was great talking to him. After the second set I walked him over to Sweet Basil’s [88 Seventh Avenue South] where George Coleman was blowing an alto [sax] apart. On the way, I recall [to him] somebody from a book on Charlie Parker who had a Moslem name and who knew Bird well. It turns out it was he!! He doesn’t drink or smoke; he lives his religion. I was very impressed with him. He’s going on tour now with somebody.”

He accomplished much more than I can summarize usefully in a post, but a quick search will bring you to the most salient facts. He passed away in June of 1983, about a year after playing “Round Midnight” at the funeral of Thelonious Monk. (Read Hakim’s “Reflections of an Era: My Experiences with Bird and Prez” on my old philosophy site, where one can also read scans of old clippings.)

In 1976 I could not have imagined paying tribute to him this way. Thank you, Sadik, for going out of your way to touch my life, however fleetingly, not in cyberspace, but at Bradley’s. I wish I had gone out of my way to keep in touch, but my self-esteem, or lack of it, wasn’t up to the task. I had foolishly undervalued the evidence of your accessibility and ruled myself out.

Perhaps I’m learning from you after all, Teacher. Requiescas in pace.

(This post is a slightly modified version of one that appeared on Tony Flood’s House of Hard Bop” on July 15, 2010; you might also check out my other post on Hakim, “Forgotten Duluthian” from May 8, 2012.)