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Home , Little Niles, Randy Weston

A rranger’s Preface

Writing this book with has been a life-​altering experience. How did Randy and I get started down this road? Why an autobiography as opposed to the more typical great-ma​ n biography? How did we arrive at the “composer-​arranger” relationship? The way this journey commenced rather mirrors the ancestral spirit-​driven path that Randy Weston has trav- eled. Randy Weston’s music has long been personally stimulating, rewarding, and revealing, full of images and portrayals both ancient and future, laden with the raw materials that make great music. Ironically—as you will dis- cover later from Randy’s recollections of the session he has long considered his “only hit record”—my immersion in his music began in 1972. Certainly I knew him from “,” “Pam’s Waltz,” and “Hi-​Fly,” and as a Monk devotee, but my knowledge before that pivotal point was still relatively lim- ited. As a student at Kent State University I frequently climbed in whatever beater I was driving at the time and headed north on I-​271 to nearby Cleve- land to a long-g​ one place called Record Rendezvous downtown on Prospect Avenue, intrepidly surfing the bins for new LPs to continue my educa- tion. At the time Creed Taylor’s series of recordings for CTI, with a rotating stable of exceptional musicians and striking, glossy gatefold packages with photos by Pete Turner, were laden with the kind of good grooves that were quite amenable to a college-​life soundtrack. So when Randy Weston’s lone CTI date, , showed up in the bins in ’72 it quickly made its way to the cash register. With , Grover Washington, Hubert Laws, , and Airto along for Randy’s journey, Blue Moses was an irre- sistible purchase. Gently applying vinyl disc to turntable, I remember soon being taken with the haunting quality of the tracks “Ganawa—Blue Moses” and “A Night in Medina”—that is, after wearing out the grooves on the rambunc- tious opener “Ifran.” Blue Moses was quickly joined in the collection by Randy’s even more substantive big-ba​ nd LP Tanjah (1973), with memorable contributions from Candido, , and , all framed by ’s . (Little did I know that Melba had also written the original arrangements for Blue Moses, which Creed Taylor scrapped in favor of ’s . . . but we’ll save that story for later.) Randy Weston moved to the upper echelons of my jazz consciousness. Ahead to 1995 and a magazine assignment to cover the peerless Montreal Jazz Festival; the creative heart of any Montreal Jazz Festival is its Invita- tion Series, which engages particularly versatile artists in consecutive eve- nings of concerts, each with a different configuration or theme. The Invi- tation Series artists for 1995 were David Murray and Randy Weston, whose offerings were bridged by a duo concert reprising their Black Saint record The Healers (1993), accomplishing the sort of neat and logical handoff that is a hallmark of that great festival. For his concert evenings Randy kicked things off with a superlative trio performance featuring Billy Higgins, Chris- tian McBride, and strings that resulted in the record Earth Birth (Verve/ Gitanes). That date includes a gorgeous ballad treatment of “Hi-​Fly,” which I later employed as a radio show theme on WPFW in Washington. The en- suing evenings featured performances by Randy’s African Rhythms Sex- tet, and an evening that drew on material from his Volcano Blues (Verve/ Gitanes) date, with the Cleveland blues legend Robert Lockwood Jr. sitting in for an ailing Johnny Copeland. That took us through Friday night; one more evening remained on Weston’s Invitation Series. But our travel reservation called for us to split on Saturday afternoon, sadly leaving that tantalizing morsel on the plate. After checking out of our hotel my wife and I had some time to kill before our airport transfer, so we headed over to the festival press office to wile away a few moments. We arrived just in time to hear Randy Weston give a press conference. Afterwards my wife Suzan walked up to Randy to tell him how much she had enjoyed his three concerts, but alas, we were about to leave. In typical Randy fashion, eyebrows raised, with certainty, he admon- ished, “But you can’t leave now, we’re going to Africa tonight!” That eve- ning would feature the sextet collaborating with the Gnawa Master Musi- cians of , who at that point were unfamiliar to us both. As I stood small-​talking with Weston, Suzan dashed away on some unspoken errand. A few moments later she returned with news that she had rebooked us into our hotel, changed our air reservations to Sunday . . . and by God we were staying for Randy’s spiritual trip to North Africa that evening! Need- less to say it was an incredible evening in Montreal, and the music of Randy Weston was even more deeply embedded in my playlist. Meanwhile, dur- xii Arranger’s Preface ing a trip to the Pan Jazz Festival in Trinidad, at which we were pleasantly awakened each morning by an insistent saxophonist and flutist practicing diligently in the hotel room next door, we also struck up a lasting friend- ship with Weston’s longtime music director, that same saxophonist-​flutist TK (Talib Kibwe) Blue, another catalyst for this project. Little did I realize at the time that the seeds for this book had been sown. In ’98 the perceptive arts administrator Mikki Shepard engaged me to help curate a week of programming for her presenting organization 651 Arts in . On tap were some oral history interviews and panel dis- cussions with some of Brooklyn’s black jazz cognoscenti and historic fig- ures, including Randy. The centerpiece was to be a reprise at the Majestic Theatre of Weston’s (1960), a landmark recording which at the time was long out of print but has since been reissued by Michael Cus- cuna of Mosaic Records, an avowed Randy Weston enthusiast. The plan was for me to work with Randy to assemble the surviving personnel from the amazing orchestra that made Uhuru Afrika (stay tuned: there’s a chap- ter on that session in the coming pages). The oral history interview session in January at Medgar Evers College marked our first extensive interview. I was immediately struck by the many compelling facets of Weston’s life, his warm storytelling skills, and his impressive recall. That same year yielded another energizing encounter between the Gnawa Master Musicians of Morocco and Randy Weston’s African Rhythms, this time at the Kennedy Center in Washington. About a year later I was contracted to write web site content by the Na- tional Endowment for the Arts for its Jazz Masters program. (This was be- fore Randy received an NEA Jazz Master fellowship in ’01.) As I assembled each Master’s biography, discography, bibliography, and videography, I was struck by how few of these great lives had been chronicled in book form. I’d been pondering a book project after writing periodical jazz com- mentary since 1969. Revelations of the bibliographical disparities of so many of the NEA Jazz Masters somehow hastened persistent thoughts of Randy Weston, though he had yet to be honored by that august program. I spoke with TK Blue to gauge an approach to Weston, memories of our 651 Arts oral history interview still fresh. In ’99 I was again engaged by 651 Arts, this time to help curate the concert at Lafayette Church in Brooklyn on September 24 that resulted in Weston’s Verve release Spirit! The Power of Music, his first performance in the New York area with the Gnawa from and Marrakech. Sufficiently encouraged, I broached the subject with Randy in 2000, and

Arranger’s Preface xiii he was pleasantly enthusiastic. Weston’s busy schedule precluded all but occasional exploratory conversations for several months to lay the ground- work for our project. It was during these conversations that Weston made clear his intent that our book would be his autobiography, as opposed to the more typical jazz biography. My research clarified that at some point in the project a journey to Africa, preferably with Randy, was a necessity. I had to experience some of the ele- ments of the continent that have so indelibly shaped his existence. We con- tinued to discuss the project and began putting his thoughts down on tape. In May 2001 I’m sitting at home relaxing on Memorial Day when the tele- phone rings. At the other end is the now-​familiar baritone voice of Randy Weston, who asks, “Are you ready to go to Africa?” “Sure,” I played along, “why not.” “OK,” he said, “we leave on June 7!” Turns out, in what I’ve come to recognize as typical Randy Weston serendipity, the Moroccan tele- vision producer Mustapha Mellouk sought to make a documentary film on Randy’s life in Morocco, focusing specifically on his thirty-​year kinship with the Gnawa spiritual brotherhood. Having never been to the Mother- land, I eagerly adjusted my schedule to join him on this journey. Randy had craftily arranged for me to accompany him, to conduct on-​camera inter- views with him for the documentary. What ensued was a remarkable ten-​day journey that commenced in Casablanca and then continued to Fes, where I experienced an enchant- ing evening at the renowned Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, to the Middle Atlas Mountain town of Ifran, where I spent a night in a dorm room at Al Akhawayn University (Randy was recognized at a commencement ceremony the next day, after which we devoured one of the trip’s many splendid repasts), and on to a week in the magical city of Marrakech, dur- ing which we experienced a mind-b​ lowing Lila, an all-ni​ ght Gnawa spiri- tual ceremony—all filmed by the crew. We even took a side trip west to the Atlantic coast for one evening of the amazing Gnawa Festival in teem- ing Essaouira, running into the visiting musicians Joseph Bowie, Adam Rudolph, Hamid Drake, and Cheikh Tidiane Seck, all there to musically interact with the Gnawa and all delighted to see Randy. The trip to Essaouira further revealed the adulation that so many Mo- roccans have for Weston. He’s basically a shy man, though one with an outgoing personality. The constant recognition in Essaouira among the hundreds of thousands who gathered there in June for the festival rather overwhelmed him . . . and deeply fascinated me. The morning after we ar- xiv Arranger’s Preface Randy Weston (left) and Willard Jenkins sitting between two Gnawa gentlemen in Randy’s hotel room in Marrakech. rived in the town, about three hours west of Marrakech, Randy couldn’t walk five feet in the medina without encountering shouted greetings from fellow strollers and sidewalk café patrons, or hugs from well-wis​ hers. Every corner we turned it seemed we were greeted by incessant calls of “Randy, Randy, Randy.” One loving fan cajoled us into an enormous aromatic shop laden with cedarwood boxes of staggering variety, and insisted on buying us gifts. I’d already had tastes of such adulation throughout the trip. One after- noon, as we ambled down one of Marrakech’s modern, tree-​lined boule- vards in search of a phone card, the city’s distinctive reddish architecture on either side, a motorcyclist raced up alongside us, jumped off his bike in heavy traffic, and gave Randy a huge bear hug, joyously exclaiming, “Thank you, Randy Weston, for what you’ve done for our culture.” Blessed with the extended opportunity afforded by this trip and an ex- ceedingly pleasant few days in the lush confines of Riad El-​Arsat in the Marrakech medina, in addition to our on-​camera interviews for the pro- posed Moroccan documentary (which to our knowledge, despite extensive still and video filming on the trip, curiously has yet to see the light of day), we began our intensive daily interviewing for this book.

Arranger’s Preface xv Preparing this book involved conducting scores of taped interviews with important people along Randy’s life path. The majority of our sessions oc- curred at Randy’s brownstone on Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn, the house passed down from his father Frank Edward Weston. A significant number of interviews took place on the road, as I traveled with Randy solo or with his African Rhythms Quintet. In addition to Morocco, in the intervening years we’ve traveled to the St. Lucia Jazz Festival in the Caribbean in 2002, where the band performed and recorded a DVD and CD; to a weeklong residency on the island of Guadeloupe, where we experienced the compelling Gwo-​ka rhythms; to Randy’s old haunts in the Berkshires; to Randy’s wife Fatou’s abode in Paris and, after a high-​speed train trip, to Randy’s former digs in the picturesque Alpine town of Annecy, where the master performed an intimate solo con- cert arranged by his dear friend Colette Giacomotti; to the Tri-​C JazzFest Cleveland in 2002, where Randy had a residency (and where I am artis- tic director); to the in 2004, seizing that opportu- nity to interview Randy’s first , ; and to the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2006. In Guadeloupe, Cleveland, the Berk- shires, and Reno, the gracious Fatou accompanied Randy, and her Sene- galese insights and humor added immeasurably to our conversations, as did my soulmate Suzan on several of our travels. The family aspect of this project has been invaluable, especially the gregarious participation of the guys in the African Rhythms Quintet, whom you are also about to meet. Early on, it became clear that this would not be your conventional jazz book in many respects. Randy and I have each observed that there are rela- tively few true jazz autobiographies, which makes this book all the more unique. It is not a particularly linear book. Randy doesn’t dwell on the tech- nical aspects of his craft, unlike the authors of more typical jazz books. And his apprenticeship as a sideman was not extensive. What is central to the book is Randy’s stress on what defines his musical expression—what he has referred to on record, in composition, and numerous times in conversation as the spirits of our ancestors. Though not a churchgoing man in the tradi- tional sense or an adherent of any one religion, Randy Weston is a deeply spiritual man who believes fervently in the Creator, the ancestral spirits up above, and their ultimate guidance over his life’s experiences. Our interviews were inspired by ongoing research and augmented by the prodigious wealth of materials that Randy has accumulated throughout his journey. He has saved every significant scrap of paper, taped every perfor- xvi Arranger’s Preface mance, and kept every article, letter, and memo, and assorted ephemera, from his career. I transcribed all our conversations and provided Randy with the transcripts. He painstakingly made additions, corrections, and suggestions throughout the process, which would often lead us down new streams of discovery and remembrance, and his comments were subse- quently edited into the transcriptions. One of the hallmarks of our inter- views is that without fail Randy would offhandedly make some new reve- lation or take us down another path. The freshness of each conversation was a marvel, even when we were covering ground that I thought we had sufficiently traversed. There were points in the transcripts where Randy would cross off certain references and sweep away dirt that gave him second thoughts. Admittedly this was sometimes to my chagrin, but this is his story. Once I shaped our conversations into chapters, I had Randy’s explicit permission to condense and reorder his words. Randy would carefully examine chapter drafts all along the way. At one point during our collaboration it became clear that our working relationship rather mirrored his relationship with his longtime arranger and confidante Melba Liston (which in turn resembled that between and Billy Strayhorn), though I don’t presume to equate my efforts with hers. That was when we decided on the credits for this book:

Composed by Randy Weston Arranged by Willard Jenkins

Arranger’s Preface xvii