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African Jazz Cocktail:
Shaken Not Stirred
By Maura Kelly
Washingtonpost.com Staff
Friday, July 31, 1998
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Jazz musician David Murray and his Fo Deuk Revue team up with poet Amiri Baraka and others this Saturday.
(Courtesy of Justin Time Records)
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Hybrid forms are always the most exciting. You go to a gallery, you know you're going to see a painting or sculpture. You go to a theater, you know you're going to see a play. But what happens when you enter the performance site and you don't really know quite what to expect? That's what's going to happen to anyone going to see poet-playwright Amiri Baraka, avant-garde jazz musician David Murray and the Fo Deuk Revue this Saturday at the Black Cat. Take some spoken word, add a liberal dose of jazz, a good dollop of African music and a little rap, and you'll have what District Curators, the event's organizer, is calling an "African Jazz Cocktail."
"Fo deuk" translates as "Where do you come from?" in Wolof, an African dialect. District Curators' Sade Turnipseed explains that Murray, a premier tenor saxophonist and a founder of the World Saxophone Quartet, will be executing a "challenge to the listening audience," letting people know where he comes from and, in turn, asking them where they hail from.
Baraka is a longtime advocate of oral performance – dating back to the time before it was called "spoken word." He was a seminal part of the '50s Beat Scene in New York, and in 1964 made a splash with his celebrated play, "The Dutchman." By now his literary output includes 24 plays, two novels, 11 collections of poetry and seven nonfiction works. He received an American Book Award for lifetime achievement in 1987.
Throughout his long career, he's been politically active as well as artistically prolific. After Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, he moved toward black nationalism, changing his name (originally Leroi Jones) and divorcing his wife, Hettie Jones, who is white (and who much later wrote a fascinating memoir, "How I Became Hettie Jones"). He was associated with the Black Arts Movement and subsequently abandoned his black nationalist ideology in favor of Marxism.
In addition to his literary and political interests, Baraka clearly is also a man who knows his jazz. Washington poet Gaston Neal, a friend of Baraka's for 40 years, says the Black Cat audience on Saturday can expect "a great interplay between Baraka and the band." Baraka and Murray recently collaborated on a CD, "Fo Deuk Revue" (Justin Time Records), which mixes traditional and modern African music with jazz and spoken word.
Baraka and Murray are appearing in Washington as part of an international tour to promote the album. The CD grew out of a trip Murray took to Senegal in 1996, and it's an intriguing "mix of jazz, world music and rap," says Jean-Pierre Leduc of Justin Time. Other artists on tour with the writer and the saxophonist include Positive Black Soul, a Senegalese rap group; and Dieuf Dieul, another group from Senegal with a more traditional sound. Although the world-beat twist may be fairly new, the relationship between poetry and music has a long and honorable history.
And that connection resounds even in the contemporary music scene. After all, notes Leduc, "the roots of rap are in street poetry."
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