It is safe to say music is the driving force behind our lives while growing up. I consider myself to have been abused, amused and liberated by music. There was a tribal like collusion, you know peer pressure, to embrace Motown as "our" music as a teen. But when you examined the songs, they were all about romance, girl chasing, s*xual desire, having it, getting it, wanting it. If it really happened, we were too young to have babies, our parents would dis-own us, raise our kids for us and we'd be off chasing someone else. The obsession with s*x sold records and we regarded it as entertainment. It was a constant and endless barrage.
I liked jazz, picked up the saxophone but never learned to really play it. I listened to jazz and enjoyed the freedom and creativity. My first day in college started with a challenge to run through all the women before the first dance or they'd will be gone. The later part of the same day I got introduced to John Coltrane's music. I had never heard jazz like this. It was like graduating to a higher form of music. It was strangely uncomfortable yet compellingly adventurous. The Black Power movement was in full swing and all those Motown addicted folks at school tried to be hip and cool. They wrote/read poetry about Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Miles Davis, they talked jazz and said jazzy words. As soon as dance time came around, they borrowed my record player and speakers and spun the boogie get down music. The room was so packed you had to bop, get in sync, match the motion before you slid into the room, else risk knocking everybody down. I'm not against Motown, its just that it seemed so drug like in our culture. My room mate also used my stereo, he had every record by James Brown. I liked James Brown, but not that much. His claim to fame was the sax player in the tight rhythm section, Maceo Parker, who my room mate says was as good as Coltrane.
I got a chance to live off campus with an uncle, had my own room. He was a sax player, old school. At the time I couldn't appreciate that, I was filled with new jazz. I was looking at the cutting edge, the radical players, the explorers. The mainstream musicians were OK, but I was abstract. I listened to Charley Parker, Eddie Harris, Wayne Shorter and Archie Shepp. If you thought John Coltrane was intense, Archie Shepp........!!! Coltrane took familiar tunes and exploded them, I think so that listeners would have recognizable references, thus folks would enjoy his excursions. Archie Shepp was freer and played around the edges of melodies with texture, both smooth and rough, he whispered and he growled. My Coltrane song was "My Favorite Things" and my Archie Shepp songs were, "Mr. Sonnyboy Wilson" and "the Pickaninny or Can You Back Back Doodlebug". These guys were intense but not angry as the critics said, they were fluid and articulate. They played to illustrate the force behind the anger but not the anger itself. It was a driving force, not a rage like madness with abandon, but a display of intelligent power from voices that were being ignored or smothered out.
This was the backdrop I was learning to find myself in. My own painting was awkward. I used acrylics but I thought the colors were too dull. I found some prisma like paint I started to use but my world was collapsing, my uncle was kicking me out after someone broke into the house, they stole his money and my stereo.
I have given up long ago playing the sax, but I learned so much about a kind of music that was not always melody based. I took this into my art. The reasons and situations and priorities of my life channeled me away from traditional art training. I appreciate many forms but will leave most of that to others schooled in those directions. Are there any black abstract artist in the world, don't know other than Sam Gilliam. I hope I see more.
Posted By: Arnold Johnson
Thursday, December 3rd 2009 at 10:22AM
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