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Arranger's Preface a rranger’s Preface Writing this book with Randy Weston 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 “Little Niles,” “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 jazz 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, Blue Moses, showed up in the bins in ’72 it quickly made its way to the cash register. With Freddie Hubbard, Grover Washington, Hubert Laws, Billy Cobham, 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, Billy Harper, and Jon Faddis, all framed by Melba Liston’s arrangements. (Little did I know that Melba had also written the original arrangements for Blue Moses, which Creed Taylor scrapped in favor of Don Sebesky’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 Morocco, 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 Brooklyn. 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 Uhuru Afrika (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 Tangier 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.
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