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Reviews
| The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles. By Steven L. Isoardi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xxi + 356 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth).
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Two recent events in New York City prepared me for this book review. The first was witnessing the Los Angeles cornetist and composer Lawrence "Butch" Morris create one of his conducted improvisation pieces with New York's NuBlu Orchestra at a Brooklyn theater. The second was a DVD reissue of the 1972 Wattstax festival featuring the star soul singers of the Memphis-based Stax/Volt recording label at the Los Angeles Coliseum. |
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Connecting these disparate art events is the profuse creativity of the African American community in Los Angeles during the 1970s and the way in which the creative arts can help revitalize a community's spirit in the face of trying social circumstances. For decades, the African American community in Los Angeles has endured notoriously severe institutional racism and police brutality. The community's artistic creativity helped it to survive. |
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The ability of creative arts to galvanize a community's spirit of resistance and survival is made abundantly clear in Steven Isoardi's excellent The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles, which chronicles the pianist and composer Horace Tapscott and his community-based musical collectives: the Pan-Afrikan People's Orchestra and the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA). Tapscott turned his back on the world of commercialized jazz and used his musical talent to serve his South-Central Los Angeles community to help strengthen and channel its creativity. His efforts eventually energized the national jazz scene through the relocation of some of the collective's most innovative musicians—Butch Morris, Arthur Blythe, David Murray, and others—to New York City in the mid-1970s. At this time, these musicians continue to be counted among the most innovative voices in modern jazz. |
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Two quotes epitomize the political and cultural wellsprings of these musicians' inspiration. The trombonist Lester Robertson stated, "This horn is a weapon and I'm prepared to use it like that" (p. 89). Robertson speaks directly to the sociopolitical background of Tapscott's musical challenge to the prevailing social order in the 1960s. It intersected in both membership and social vision with religious or political organizations such as the Nation of Islam, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Black Panther Party, and others. |
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The second quote is saxophonist Will Connell Jr.'s: "After I learned the harmonic minor scale, there was no holding me, man" (p. 91). There is nothing fundamentally political or non-Western about this scale, but after John Coltrane's search for new melodic materials led him to African and Asian music, scales that had been rarely used in jazz became invested with the kinds of exoticist cultural and political associations tied to the broader mood of African American cultural nationalism. |
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Although music is its subject, this is not a book of musical analysis. It includes a compact disc of selected and rare recordings of the Arkestra. Overall, however, this is a work of oral history interspersed with socio-historical context that is well suited to document collective organizations of this kind, with individual voices given ample space to nuance the basic historical record. Isoardi has done an excellent job weaving these strands into a narrative that is at once colorful and critical. |
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It takes decades to digest and historicize cultural moments, as suggested by the slow acknowledgement of these African American jazz-based collectives. Isoardi provides an extremely important contribution to the growing literature on the jazz avant-garde, which arrives with other overdue studies of similarly conceived collectives, such as the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group (Benjamin Looker), the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (George Lewis, forthcoming), and the Sun Ra Arkestra (John Szwed). |
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Because of their grassroots orientation, Tapscott's organizations never achieved the national and international recognition commensurate with their achievements. Their recordings have never been widely circulated, and one senses that what has been documented is a mere fraction of what was actually created. Isoardi's book will do much to rectify this lack of coverage—at least among jazz scholars, journalists, and musicians—and stimulate the commercial release of this very important music. But this book constitutes a tremendous achievement in and of itself.
Michael E. Veal
Yale University
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