Saturday, February 3, 2018

Faruq Z. Bey (1942-2012): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, music theorist, poet, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS



AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE





EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU





WINTER, 2018





VOLUME FIVE     NUMBER TWO


GERI ALLEN


Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

TOMEKA REID
(January 27--February 2)

FARUQ Z. BEY
(February 3--9)

HANK JONES
(February 10--16)

STANLEY COWELL
(February 17–23)

GEORGE RUSSELL
(February 24—March 2)

ALICE COLTRANE
(March 3–9)

DON CHERRY
(March 10–16)

MAL WALDRON
(March 17–23)

JON HENDRICKS
(March 24–30)

MATTHEW SHIPP
(April 1–7)

PHAROAH SANDERS
(April 8–14)

WALT DICKERSON
(April 15–21)

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/faruq-z-bey-mn0000593829

Faruq Z. Bey

(1942-2012)

Artist Biography by

One of the visionaries of Detroit's modern jazz scene, saxophonist, flutist, composer, and poet Faruq Z. Bey faithfully carried on in the post-John Coltrane era as a unique and original performer, enduring cultural, sociological, and physical difficulties that would have stifled a individual of less strength and fortitude. Bey was born Jesse Davis in Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 1942, and his parents were vocalists in church and gospel choirs, his father a city bus driver, his mom a stay-at-home housewife. His cousins Charles Rowland and Sherrell Rowland were also musicians. The eldest of five children, Bey grew up in the Conant Gardens district and was educated in the public school systems, attending Holy Ghost and Atkinson secondary schools, and Pershing and Wilbur Wright high schools. He studied existentialism at Wayne County Community College and was a disciple of the Moorish Science Temple. He was originally trained on the upright string bass, and one of his music instructors in school was pianist James Tatum. A neighborhood influence was legendary rhythm & blues singer Eddie Floyd when he was with the Falcons. 

 He heard the John Coltrane/Pharoah Sanders ensemble at the Drome Lounge in 1966, a year before Coltrane passed away, and it profoundly changed his life. So did the infamous race riots in the summer of 1967. Bey was a serviceman in the Air Force, and upon release, changed his name to Malik, then Faruq Zinji Bey. In the late '60s and early '70s Bey emerged as a member of the developing progressive jazz scene, and participated in concerts sponsored by the Detroit Artists Workshop and the Creative Arts Collective. As a member of the Bey Brothers with Sadiq Muhammad and Jalil Bey (all of whom adopted the surname), they played regularly at the Concept East Theatre. He performed prominently with drummer Roy Brooks, the Sun Ra Arkestra, and various bands like Black Choreology, the First Afrikan Primal Rhythm Arkestra, As (Is), the World Space Ensemble, and Onyxz. 

 Originally established in 1972 with Elreta Dodds, Kenn Thomas, and Kafi Patrice Nassoma, the seminal progressive jazz ensemble Griot Galaxy were founded by Bey. The group changed to sport a three-horn front line with David McMurray and Anthony Holland, supported by guitarist A. Spencer Barefield, bassist Jaribu Shahid, and drummer Tani Tabbal. As Detroit's answer to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Griot Galaxy stood club and concert audiences on their collective ears with a fiery, passionate, and driven multi-layered and polyrhythmic music that was revolutionary for its time in the 1980s. 

But health and physical issues due to a serious motorcycle accident plagued Bey, and when Griot Galaxy were disbanded in 1991, the saxophonist, in recovery, was determined to forge new pathways for expressionism. He formed a partnership with the Northwoods Improvisers from mid-Michigan, merging their world fusion sound with his creative concepts. The combination added saxophonists Mike Carey and Skeeter Shelton to revive the three-saxophone collective that made Griot Galaxy such a potent band. As Bey's health allowed, he also formed several new groups including the Conspiracy Winds and Speaking in Tongues. Bey accompanied M.L. Liebler's Magic Poetry Band, Hakim Jami's Street Band, Kindred with keyboardist Kenneth Greene, Ajaramu, and bluesman Robert B. Jones, and was a member of the Odu Afrobeat Orchestra. Bey published the poetry compendiums Year of the Iron Sheep and Etudes in Wanton Nasses, and the theory instructional Toward a Rational Aesthetic. Faruq Z. Bey died at his home on June 1, 2012 at 70 years of age. 
 



Faruq Z. Bey
by



 

Throughout the history of jazz, Detroit has produced world-class jazz artists, iconic individualists and ubiquitous sidemen alike. Many have moved to New York or other cities to pursue their career. A handful of great artists remained in Detroit, keeping the creative energy alive there (and consequently Detroit continues to produce incredible talent). One artist who has remained in Detroit over the decades, overcoming social and personal disaster to continue his creative pursuits, is saxophonist and composer Faruq Z. Bey.

His story has many chapters and some unexpected twists and turns. Born Jesse Davis in 1942, Bey took much inspiration from an older cousin's musical activities and picked up the bass as a teenager, studying with esteemed jazz educator James Tatum: "I was interested in following Monk Montgomery's example to pick up the Fender bass, but everything changed when I heard John Coltrane's 'My Favorite Things.' That really showed me something new." This new sound resonated with Bey and finally, after he attended a Detroit performance by John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders in 1966, Bey's switch to saxophone took place—amidst the infamous 1967 Detroit riots.

Many historical accounts of the aftermath of the 1967 riots focus on the destruction and the flight from centralized urban life in Detroit. For the many who remained dedicated to the city, though, it was a time of heightened social consciousness and artistic innovation.

During this time of renewed cultural awareness, a group of like-minded thinkers gathered together and formed a collective—living together, making art and sharing ideas. They recreated their culture, adopted new names and new ideas. A family name of Bey was chosen and the Bey Brothers—Faruq, Jalil and Sadiq—each subsequently made their mark in Detroit and around the world as writers, poets and musicians. Formed in the '70s, Griot Galaxy was Faruq Z. Bey's main outlet for his interest in combining traditional elements of musical composition with the open-form improvisational ideas that had initially inspired his transition to saxophone. "There was a lot of great free playing going on, but I wanted to put that together with the traditional elements. I was influenced by what Roscoe Mitchell was doing; I wanted to explore new compositional forms," Bey recalls. Early Griot Galaxy members included brother Sadiq and guitarist Spencer Barefield.

A more consistent lineup came into place and flourished in the '80s, when drummer Tani Tabbal, bassist Jaribu Shahid and saxophonists Dave McMurray and Tony Holland all joined. This secure lineup combined formal rigor with conceptual fire, driven by Bey's charismatic iconoclasm and compositional inventiveness and grounded by the exceptional rhythm section of Shahid and Tabbal. AACM-inspired experimentalism and abstraction combined with a sense of groove and pulse that was uniquely Detroit. Though dancers and poetry had always been a component of Griot Galaxy's work, this version of the band significantly upped the ante, adopting futurist science-fiction imagery, wardrobe and theatrics. This look, combined with the blistering intensity of the playing and the futuristic vibe of Shahid's effects-laden bass, resonated with local audiences, drawing huge crowds.

Bey's own persona seemed larger-than-life, with a giant mane of dreadlocks and leather jacket. Bey's WDET radio show, "Met Aesthetics," was hugely popular. Northwoods Improvisers founder Mike Johnston tells a story about how one listener, Ron DeCorte, happened to catch a recording of Albert Ayler on the show: "DeCorte was a dedicated listener from then on. He ended up becoming a huge fan of Griot Galaxy and recorded tons of their live gigs. He set up the sessions for Kins." (This recording was the band's debut, which DeCorte released himself.) Two live recordings followed, including one from the group's European tour: "We went to Austria and played in Nickelsdorf and that became the Opus Krampus record, which came out on Sound Aspects," Faruq said. Recently, another DeCorte live recording was released on Entropy Stereo, Live at the D.I.A.

Sadly, just as success and much wider appeal became imminent, tragedy struck. Bey's adventurous lifestyle took a toll and he ended up in a motorcycle accident that left him in a coma. Griot Galaxy worked to continue in his absence during his long and difficult recovery, but something was missing. Tabbal and Shahid were finding it increasingly difficult to make a living in Detroit and, ultimately, both heeded the call to New York. After recovering, Faruq pursued various projects throughout the '90s, including the Conspiracy Wind Ensemble and Speaking In Tongues.

Then, in the late '90s, Bey was approached by members of the Northwoods Improvisers. "The trio version of Northwoods shared a bill with Griot Galaxy back in the '80s and Faruq and I played together on sessions once in a while," Johnston related. "When our friend Len Bukowski came to town, we encouraged him to meet up with Faruq for sax lessons and that led to Faruq and Northwoods gigging together." 19 Moons, the first cooperative release by Faruq Z. Bey and the Northwoods Improvisers, was released on Entropy Stereo in 2001 and since then the group has expanded to include saxophonists Skeeter Shelton and Mike Carey. More performances followed, along with further releases on Entropy and on vinyl-only label Qbico (including the recent Hymn for Tomasz Stanko, adding trumpeter Dennis González).

The upcoming appearance by the Northwoods Improvisers with Faruq Z. Bey at Issue Project Room promises to bring much of the intensity and colorful flare that the collective has developed with Bey. It will be a well-overdue opportunity for New Yorkers to hear Bey's distinctive approach to the saxophone and his unique blend of Detroit groove, melodic angularity and compositional intrigue.

Selected Discography:

Griot Galaxy, Kins (Black and White, 1981)

Griot Galaxy, Live at the D.I.A. (Entropy, 1983)

Griot Galaxy, Opus Krampus (Sound Aspects, 1984)

Faruq Z. Bey/Northwoods Improvisers, 19 Moons (Entropy, 2001)

Faruq Z. Bey/Northwoods Improvisers, Ashirai Pattern (Entropy, 2002)

Faruq Z. Bey/Northwoods Improvisers, Journey Into The Valley (Entropy, 2004)

https://www.metrotimes.com/city-slang/archives/2012/06/02/detroit-jazz-and-avant-scenes-lose-icon-in-passing-of-faruq-z-bey

City Slang

Saturday, June 2, 2012


Detroit jazz and avant scenes lose icon in passing of Faruq Z. Bey


by   

June 2, 2012

Detroit Metro Times


faruq-12-09jpg

Faruq Z. Bey, local legend and icon of avant garde music in Detroit, has died after years of emphysema and other ailments. A friend who spoke to Bey regularly last heard from him Thursday and was unable to reach him on Friday. Her concerns lead to other friends entering his residence with police on Saturday and finding that he had died.  The cause of death has not been determined. He was around 70 years old.

(Update on funeral arrangements below.)

Bey was the leader of the group Griot Galaxy, a sprawling group into which dozens of musicians fell in and out between 1972 and the time it stabilized mid-decade and slowly distilled to a classic quintet around 1980. With saxophonists Bey, Tony Holland and David McMurray, drummer Tani Tabbal and bassist Jaribu Shahid, the group donned silver face paint and African garb, dubbing themselves a science fiction band. The name harkened to the African traditional bearers of tradition and history, on one hand, and the reaches of space and the future, on the other.

While they were clearly rooted in the jazz avant garde – in artists like John Coltrane, Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago – the members of Griot Galaxy were extending that tradition in their own voices and in their collective sound. In fact, with their theatric edge and their penchant for hypnotic, layered rhythm, they were an avant garde group for people who didn’t particularly like the avant garde, or maybe even jazz. They were one of a kind. Sorry if that’s a cliché. But they really were.

The group made only a few recordings and was little known beyond Detroit when Bey was involved in a near-fatal motorcycle accident. The group dissolved rancorously in the aftermath, but in the ensuing years, Bey slowly returned to playing.

By the early 2000s, his music career entered a new phase, leading his own groups and collaborating with others, particularly the Northwoods Improvisers, with whom he did at least  nine records. Griot Galaxy had released only two vinyl records back in its hey day, although the release of live Griot tapes from the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2003 made the group’s music available on CD for the first time.
Bey had been in ill health for years, his oxygen and breathing apparatus a constant companion. The news of his passing still came as a shock, a blow. Several generations of Detroiters spoke of hm in terms that had an element of reverence for what he had achieved and represented. The “end of an era,” lamented one friend and admirer who had followed his career back to the early 1970s at Cobb’s Corner.

There’ll be more later. And for those who have memories or thoughts, please add them below.

In the meantime, here’s a 2003 profile of Bey and a blog that riffed from the earlier piece.

Update: Jim Gallert forwarded this link to an hour-long Detroit JazzStage podcast from 2006 featuring an interview with Faruq along with his music and poetry. More links: Griot Galaxy discography. Discs with Northwoods Improvisers.

Update: Sesheta Hanible, a longtime friend of Faruq's, and Jim Gallert both confirm Faruq's date of birth as Feb. 4, 1942. Hanible wrote in an e-mail: "As the news swirl around the community, there are people working on services. ... Faruq was very private. I hope that everyone take a moment or more and listen to his music, read a poem of his and remember the gifts that he has shared with all of us. " We'll share details as they become available.

Update: Faruq performed publicly as recently as April 5 with the Box Deserter group at Popp’s Packing Lo and Behold in Hamtramack. Thollem McDonas, who played piano that night, uploaded this video to Vimeo. (Below, Maurice Greenia writes of playing with Faruq as recently as May 18.)


Update:  The funeral services for Faruq Z. Bey will be held on Tuesday, June 5, at 1 p.m. at the Muslim Center, 1605 W. Davison, corner of Woodrow Wilson. That evening, from 6-10 p.m., Pat Frisco will dedicate his Spirits Rejoice program to Faruq. The Henry Ford Community College station's signal at 89.3 FM hardly blankets the metro area, but you can listen to the stream at whfr,fm. ... Also this July's Concert of Colors was to have included Faruq in the Don Was Detroit All-Star Revue as well as in the poetry readings at the Scarab Club. Festival organizers announced Monday that a special Faruq tribute will be part of the July 14-17 event. Here's a link to Faruq's 2008 appearance as part of the revue.



https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/musician-interrupted/Content?oid=2176369

 




Musician interrupted 

by
June 25, 2003
Detroit Metro Times 
 


He’d gone to see saxophonists John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders the year before at a place on Dexter called the Drome Lounge, and their wail was like nothing he’d ever experienced before: magnificent, powerful, polyrhythmic, polytonal, polychromatic, emotional, form-shattering … the purest music he’d ever experienced before or since.

 And when the word went out that Coltrane had died on a Monday in July — or gotten so heavy he’d fallen off the planet, as some wags would have it — it was only fitting to call for a memorial party. A dozen or so fans worshipfully played records and made music through Saturday night at the cramped apartment on Chicago Boulevard where he lived with his wife. Around daybreak came the sound of cars speeding away from Lord knew what, and being reckless guys, they went to check out the commotion and soon found themselves at the epicenter of the brewing Detroit rebellion of 1967. It was a revelation:

 “The people who were rioting in the street, they moved like one mind. It was almost like a hive of insects moves. It was like a wave; it just moved, but that whole episode put me in a frame of mind of thinking about our position here as a — quote — subculture, and how to deal with that. And since music was always an interest of mine and seeing how our music defined itself and our relationship to the greater environment as well … ”

 The issues all seemed intertwined.

 A couple days later with the riot still raging he became the owner of his first saxophone, a Martin tenor, for the uncharacteristically low price of $80.

 Asked whether, in the parlance of the time, the saxophone had been “liberated,” he laughs dryly. “I got it during the riot,” he repeats.

 Asked whether this all seemed prophetic — Coltrane dying, the memorial, the riot, the saxophone — his eyes widen as if it’s obvious. He laughs again: “It was significant, I’ll put it that way.”

 Life seemed to take on a new seriousness. “Before that I was just floating and having fun doing what was expected of me by the culture at large and the tradition and yadda yadda,” he says.

 Within a few years, Jesse Davis would have new names. He would become Malik Z. Bey then Faruq Z. Bey. His marriage would dissolve, as would two more during the ’70s. He’d become part of an artistic, spiritualist, pan-African political milieu; he’d eventually become a sort of poster boy for that set. He’d read his poetry to rapt listeners, pontificate on the meaning of life and culture, play in more bands and jams than anyone can be expected to keep track of. He’d impress a lot of folks as brilliant and charismatic; he’d attract talent like a magnet. He’d garner a rep as a ladies’ man. He’d live wildly, nearly die, watch much of what he’d worked for unravel, and slowly recover.

 And roughly two decades after its demise, one of his bands, arguably the best jazz band to never make it out of Detroit, just may be on the verge of getting its due.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- At 6-foot-4, lean with a slow gait and a slight stoop at 61, Faruq looks like a human question mark when he bends forward.

 He can be alternately comically terse and loquacious. To talk to him is to realize how his own premeditated take on things is wrung from his own questioning. A word as simple as “hey” in a conversation can lead to a digression on its origins. Back in the ’80s his friend, the writer and magazine editor Kofi Natambu, interviewed him for hours and published pages of the transcript, which looped through Faruq’s thoughts on the origin of the word jazz (“It’s obviously an Arabic word”) to his hopes as an artist (“to communicate some positive forces in the environment”) to the quandaries of the musical life (“placed on some kind of pedestal … and on the other hand starve to death”).

 Talking over coffee at a suburban Borders store, he takes a listener on a similarly wide-ranging conversational trip. He talks about his youth, growing up in Detroit’s Conant Gardens neighborhood, the eldest of five children of a city bus driver and his stay-at-home wife who would find their artistic and wayward son increasingly hard to comprehend. Neighborhood role models included Eddie Floyd, then of the doo-wop group the Falcons, later to have the hit “Knock on Wood.”

 Faruq talks about being one of those insatiably curious kids who stayed up after bedtime, hid in the closet and read with a flashlight. He started writing poetry at 13. He fell under the influence of beboppers as a teen and studied string bass at school (jazz educator James Tatum was one of his teachers). At various times, he wanted to be an auto designer, a physicist or a scholar instead of a jazz bassist; it all depended on the position of the moon, he says. He had a relatively uneventful Air Force stint, had a daughter with one woman and married another, worked factory jobs, studied existentialism at community college — all in the time leading up to the riot, which ignited when he was 25.
And he talks and talks about music and language, and music as language, and how those relate to society. Here is some of what he has to say about jazz:

 “In jazz — quote-unquote — the model is text (which is the melody or the construct, you dig, the tune, if you will) and commentary (which is the improvisatory thing). Now you’ve got people at different ends of spectrum. You’ve got people who are really concerned with text, so their improvisatory comment sounds more and more textual. They follow or allow rules that are more and more locked down and concrete, which is leading away from the intent of the whole thing. On the other hand, you’ve got people who do away with text entirely. How are you gonna talk about something when there’s nothing to talk about? You’re just out there babbling, in other words.”

 He often talks about the meaning of intervals in language, both musical and verbal. Most African languages, for instance, use tone to convey meaning. Even in largely atonal English, the interval — or note-to-note leap — called a flatted fifth describes the rising tone of the typical question. The meanings of these intervals in language and music fascinate Faruq to no end. He’d like to develop a universal catalog of languages “to find which intervals persist in their meaning about the planet.”

 And his music is informed by a long study of modes, which are ways of stacking intervals. “Doe, a deer, a female deer,” describes one mode. Any five consecutive black keys on the piano are another. And the variations are limitless.
Faruq recalls that the writer Amiri Baraka once said that, in essence, a language is a logic. “It is a logic you speak,” Faruq continues. “And when you get into what they call music, now you get into a different language. And with a different logic, you deal with different syllogistic principles and different conclusions.”

 This language-equals-logic equation is long out of fashion among academic linguists, but not to Faruq. As on many subjects, he’s worked through his sources to his own conclusions with an evident rigor. That’s one reason why so many of his friends and acquaintances describe him in similar terms. “One of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met in my life,” says one. “Frankly, I thought he was a genius,” says another of their first encounter.

 “A lot of people don’t know the depth of his intellect and his studies,” says the poet M.L. Liebler, a collaborator since the mid-’80s who has also published Faruq’s poetry and his music theory book.

 “He has this really intense understanding of surrealism and history because he’s reading all the time,” adds Liebler. (Faruq names as his favorite poets T.S. Eliot and the Negritude writers Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire.)

 “An incident comes to mind,” says Liebler . “Not too long ago, we were playing up North in Petoskey. We’re sitting in the van, and he’s sitting there with some sort of super-duper science calculator, like the ones the brainy kids use in calculus or something. He’s reading a book on Egyptian mathematics, and he’s doing all these math figures and writing musical notes down in another book.” Liebler pauses, hard-pressed to quite convey his awe at this scene.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For all the destruction of the riots — 43 dead and $45 million in property damage — for all the dread that shook liberals and conservatives, there were plenty of blacks (often young, but not always) who felt the slogan “burn, baby, burn” to be a metaphoric match lighting their imaginations.

 “It was post-riot Detroit. It was all wide open,” says Sadiq Bey — sometimes known instead as Sadiq Muhammad, sometimes as just Sadiq — now a performer and writer in New York City. “We were brand-new people. Whatever we wanted to be, we could be. We were making jewelry, making art, performing. It was a renaissance. Everybody was a renaissance man. It was incredible.”

 In the scene from which Sadiq and Faruq emerged, you could shed your old lifestyles and even your old names; they worked together for more than a decade.

 “There was an intense period of intellectual fervor, if you will,” says Faruq, who talks of studying religion with members of the Moorish Science Temple (a sort of forerunner to the Nation of Islam) who had adopted the name Bey; he later studied Islam. “Things just kind of grew from that. But then that’s the way I remember it. Other people might remember it totally differently.”

 Sadiq recalls being with Faruq at a jam session of poetry and music at a private residence around ’68. In a sense, that jam went on for years.

 “It was such an incredible connection that we just decided to live together as a commune sort of thing. It just grew from that. Guys brought their girlfriends in and people started having kids, and it was just this huge family, and we all decided to be Beys,” he says.

 There were a half dozen or more Bey families in an informal cooperative, Faruq says.

 Several self-appointed Beys — chiefly Faruq, Sadiq and Jalil — became known as the Bey Brothers as they performed poetry and music together at places like the old Concept East Theater, a hotbed for new, politicized voices in black theater.

 “They’d be around black nationalist things and events and institutions,” recalls Geoffrey Jacques, a poet, former WDET-FM jazz host and now a New York-based writer and teacher. “And even then they were sort of the kings of the musicians — for relatively younger musicians in their 20s. They always had this aura of mystery about them.”

 The Bey Brothers gave way to the First African Primal Rhythm Orchestra, playing what Sadiq described as “basically free improv.” But some members of that group moved on. “I sort of left and moved on and got married and had a family, and everybody sort of split up,” says Sadiq.

 “Then it was Faruq’s idea to bring this group back together,” says Sadiq, “and he named it Griot Galaxy.” And rather than total improvisation, Faruq wanted to bring composition and structure to bear. Meanwhile, he had been working on his saxophone chops, primarily on his own, but he’d also sought out guidance from sympathetic older musicians like Leon Henderson (brother of the famous Joe Henderson).

 If — big IF — Griot Galaxy had been part of Ken Burns’ 19-hour, 10-part documentary, “Jazz,” the group would have been jammed into the couple of dismissive minutes that covered the avant-garde that flourished between Coltrane’s death in 1967 and the back-to-tradition revival that Wynton Marsalis heralded 15 years later. Bands like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra challenged preconceptions about what jazz should be; in turn, they were accused of alienating the jazz audience — especially the African-American audience — and driving the music into obscurity. Or so goes one version of jazz history. Those were the bands that influenced Griot. And like so many bands in the avant-garde, the members of Griot wore their sense of history on their musical sleeves and later on their faces. (For the record, Faruq detests the term “avant-garde,” citing its military roots, a designation for advancing troops doomed to take the highest casualties.)

 In traditional West African societies the griot — pronounced gree-oh — is a praise singer, historian, preserver of culture. In Alex Haley’s epic Roots, it’s a village griot who confirms the story of Haley’s ancestor’s capture generations earlier.
So much for the past. According to Faruq, the “galaxy” signified: “We were the griots of the galaxy period … our quadrant anyway.”

 But one former member jokingly suggested that it might as well have referred to the dozens of musicians who fell in and out of the ranks over the 10 years or so that followed the group’s formation in 1972.

A key stretch in the group’s development came with a mid-’70s residency at Cobb’s Corner on Cass at Willis. In this Corridor pregentrification period, Griot helped make Cobb’s the epicenter of jazz in Detroit. It was about the third edition of Griot Galaxy by Faruq’s count, the first with the chance to grow week-to-week with a steady gig.

 One member of the band remembers that when they started there, Cobb’s was rough; fistfights were common. But it became the focal point for bands led by funky organist Lyman Woodard and trumpeter Marcus Belgrave. Griot found its own crowd, practically a “cult” at the beginning, as Natambu recalls.

 “They had a small, highly energetic and very supportive group of people who loved what they were doing … a lot of artists, painters, a lot of poets, a lot of writers were interested in the band,” says Natambu, now based in Oakland, Calif., and author of a recent Malcolm X biography. The followers were drawn to “the visionary aspect of what Griot Galaxy was doing,” not to mention their charisma and theatricality. And with eight or more musicians crowded on the stage, it was quite a sight and a glorious sound. (And when they’d leave the club for a concert gig, they’d add dancers and such to magnify the spectacle.)

 Patrice Williams (then known as Kafi Patrice Nassoma), who played flute and harp with the band, recalls the company of such musicians as pianist Ken Thomas and clarinetist-saxophonist Elreta “Duchess” Dodds. Then there was drummer Tariq, who could play the exact accents to complement the actions around him. “He could finish all my thoughts,” Williams says.

 Free jazz was an influence, Sadiq says, but the band worked from compositions, mostly Faruq’s, and used “all sorts of visual cues and musical cues” to move the music along. On the best nights the interactions seemed telepathic. Music like that, Sadiq explains, “is an act of worship.”

 One night in Ann Arbor, the band played between sets by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Some members say the band held its own in following the AEC — in itself a considerable achievement. Others, like Sadiq, say they kicked AEC’s ass for the first set with a “pinnacle performance” embracing poetry and drama along with the music. (On the other hand, all the band members interviewed for this piece agreed the AEC reclaimed top-dog billing. Their second set, says Faruq, had an undeniable message: “That was nice, kids; this is how it’s really done.”)

 “It was just truly spontaneous, energetic expression,” says Williams of the group. Offstage it was a musical community, she adds, “willing and brave to try something new.” She and others recall “rehearsals” where not a note would be played — there’d be philosophical discussions instead. At listening sessions, members would play records of everything from Andean pan pipes to the sound of hundreds of men chanting like monkeys in a Balinese courtyard. “We were exposing ourselves to everything,” she says.

 But there were, eventually, tensions within the group, musical and personal, conflicting pursuits. Sadiq left to lead an edgy reggae band, Aziz, which included Faruq. Guitarist Spencer Barefield left to concentrate on his Creative Arts Collective, which presented more than 100 concerts at the Detroit Institute of Arts and presented the Griot circle and fostered collaborations with out-of-towners such as Anthony Braxton and the Art Ensemble’s Roscoe Mitchell.

 Williams says that when she and Dodds were eased out, she felt that maybe they had been exploited for the novelty of having women in a jazz band; yet she credits Faruq for at least having given her and Dodds that much exposure.

 But the shifts also involved a vision that Faruq and the other remaining members had for the band. “There were too many variables when the group was big,” says Faruq. As a composer, the smaller group meant he could better “manipulate the forces.”

 Drummer Tani Tabbal is blunt. He says the members were becoming impressed with their cultural stardom. Meanwhile, the fans didn’t know what they were missing: “The stuff was not turning out right, and Jaribu [bassist Jaribu Shahid] and I used to come home and listen to the stuff [on tape] and it used to just drive us crazy. We couldn’t stand it.”

 And they didn’t. From Tabbal’s perspective, the contraction amounted to “a little power play.”

 The downsizing ushered in the ultimate phase of Griot, featuring Faruq — now the sole Bey in the lineup and the eldest member by a decade — with four relatively late additions. There was Pontiac saxophonist Tony Holland. There was saxophonist David McMurray, the rare musician who can play for the avant-garde set and record with pop acts as big as the Rolling Stones. The backbone was the team of Tabbal and Shahid, who locked as tightly as any bassist and drummer in recent decades of jazz.

 Both had played with that mystical showman of jazz, Sun Ra. A big band leader with an affection, at different stages in his career, for Egyptian-style regalia and silver lamé space suits, “Sunny” played music as intriguing as it was wide-ranging. Tabbal, originally from Chicago, had furthermore played extensively with a former Sun Ra sideman named Phil Cohran. Though barely a footnote in most jazz books — and virtually unrecorded outside of Ra’s band — the Chicago cornetist is a visionary giant to Tabbal.

 Through the influences of Ra and Cohran, Jaribu and Tabbal augmented Faruq’s interest in modes and in the myriad ways of grouping musical beats into meters. Ideas that had long been part of Griot Galaxy were being refined and pushed toward their limits.

 Through the ’60s, most jazz, like most pop even to this day, flows in a familiar four beats to a bar — pat your foot, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. There had been jazz waltzes at three beats to the bar (1-2-3, 1-2-3), and Dave Brubeck made five-to-the-bar a ’50s hit with “Take Five.” But odd meters became pervasive in jazz starting in the ’60s. Griot made metric juggling acts — layering these different meters, shifting from meter to meter — as dizzily compelling as anyone before or since.

 Faruq, says Tabbal, “would sit there and write continuously”; he remained the group’s chief composer, even though all of the members made contributions. But the execution was a group affair.

 “Faruq would say, ‘I want the drums in seven and the bass in five,’ and we just said, ‘Cool,’ and we did it,” says Shahid. “Stuff would be like swirling, swirling, swirling,” says Holland, describing the effect and the challenges of Griot’s music.

 They played long sections that explored spaces with no discernible beat at all, sometimes softly, sometimes with almost volcanic eruptions in what Jacques calls “ecstatic energy space.” But the prototypical Griot sound, more than anything else, was one of these odd-meter excursions that still rocked the house.

 They augmented the more pointed music with a more defined stage presence. Faruq’s poetry stayed. But now they donned silver face paint and called themselves the science fiction band.

 Members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago wore African-style face paints to evoke performances as rituals. It was the ultimate statement of their “Great Black Music,” linking the most “far out” extrapolations to bop, swing, blues, field hollers … all the way back to the music of the African motherland.

 But in industrial Detroit, Griot’s face paint was metallic. This was ritual, yes, but as Faruq puts it, “a response to a more modern environment speaking about androids and robots and that sort of thing.”

 Less frequently a bar band now, this edition of Griot Galaxy drove audiences wild at Hart Plaza during such events as the African World Festival and what in the early ’80s was the Montreux-Detroit International Jazz Festival.
Without an actual manager, the band’s business dealings were always ad hoc — creating a tension between Faruq’s laid-back approach and Tabbal and Shahid’s feeling that the band should be more aggressive about getting beyond Detroit. Yet, there was a feeling among the fans that the rest of the music world had to catch on to what Detroiters knew.

 At one point, band fan and friend Ron DeCorte figured he’d be part of that process. He followed the band frequently, lugging a 65-pound, Crown SX 800 reel-to-reel tape recorder. Other times, he took them into the studio, including for the 1981 release, Kins, on his own Black and White label. He pressed 2,000 copies to little avail. Shortly after, he was laid up in a motorcycle accident; during his convalescence, 1,500 or so of those copies were hauled from storage at a relative’s house and set out with the trash.

 With or without a release, Griot’s reputation continued to build. Tabbal and Shahid (plus Barefield) toured Europe as the rhythm section for the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Roscoe Mitchell. That led in the spring of ’84 to an Austria-Germany tour and live recordings for both Griot (minus McMurray, who didn’t have a passport) and the trio of Holland, Tabbal and Barefield. Things were looking up that fall.

 Then, as Tabbal puts it, “Faruq fell on his head.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Faruq was a striking figure in the run-up to the crash, the African-style garb now replaced with biker’s leather, his dreadlocks having grown into a leonine mane cascading well past the shoulders of his tall frame. The sensitive, emotional guy that many attest to was at least superficially masked by the image of a mystery-man badass. He was a regular at the Cass Corridor watering hole Alvin’s, drinking, playing in reggae bands, talking it up, dancing. There are women from those days who talk about their long-lasting, soulful relations with Faruq; graffiti in Alvin’s upstairs women’s bathroom celebrated his quick magnetism and sexual prowess.

 Natambu dedicated a poem to his “friend and brother” Faruq and titled it “We Think We Know You or The Roving Enigma Blues.” One section reads:
 
But what is it that we know? That the shining grey / mask you seem to wear is an affirmation of our fears? That the melodies you ponder and furtively reveal are cultural readymades for us to wear then / discard when the houselights come on? / Is this our history you sing as your grinning groupies / crawl in for the delicious kill? What about the painters / who buy you too much beer as we finger that aching saxophone / sweating between sets in the corner?
Faruq himself talks vaguely about that chapter — Griot on the verge of wider success — as “a rough period for me socially and artistically and every other way … there was just a lot of confusion.” He describes it as a time of “bad habits,” and asked if he means drugs, he answers, “All that stuff that didn’t have to do with the music itself.”
One friend suggests that deep down, Faruq was afraid of success, or of possible disappointment. Another friend suggests that something like the accident was inevitable and could have been worse.

 Faruq doesn’t remember the accident itself. He’d left Alvin’s, with a young woman riding on the back of his souped-up Yamaha 750 Triple.

 “Somebody told me it had something to do with some railroad tracks,” he says, “but the fact of the matter was a bad mix of alcohol and motorcycles.”

 His rider was uninjured. Faruq was in a coma at Receiving Hospital for more than two weeks while a circus swirled around him.

 A piece of thinly veiled fiction by Sadiq, “Excerpts from the Jesse Davis Medical Fund,” captures his version of events. (It was published in a long out-of-print anthology edited by Natambu and titled Nostalgia for the Present: An Anthology of Writings (From Detroit).)

 In the story, the accident is reported in the “the dailies and the rags,” conferring star status on the musician. Friends, lovers and blood relatives crowd the waiting room and vie for access to the comatose patient; at times they nearly come to blows over “who was who” in his life.

 Sadiq, the narrator — here called Coodeek — tells one friend that the accident is a sign: “I mean, we’re all abusing our bodies to the hilt.” The friend has to agree.

 “I saw Jesse sprawled on the roller bed,” Sadiq/Coodeek observes at one point. “His dreadlocks scattered like black yarn over the pillow. There was a majestic, regal quality about him. He jerked and struggled a little, almost like he knew we were there. … He had every imaginable tube and needle in his body. A fucking Frankenstein Monster sniffing the flowers of death. A 6’ 4”, 185 lb. black grass eater reduced to a sleeping menace. A menace to our love for him.”

 The story invokes the Egyptian myth of Osiris in which a god is betrayed and dismembered but ultimately regains his wholeness. And the story suggests Faruq eventually does too. But in life the reconstitution dragged on for years.
Even as Faruq worked through rehabilitation for a closed head injury and eventually returned to music, the band disintegrated. Among the personal conflicts and dramas was a clash over whether Faruq was up to the demands of the music — and whether there could be a Griot Galaxy without Faruq.

 After some Faruq-less gigs, the band went on hiatus for a couple of years. When Faruq rejoined, there were problems.

 “He wasn’t quite there yet,” says McMurray. Tabbal says Faruq’s drinking problems complicated his recovery and return to playing.

 Adds McMurray: “It was just going into turmoil because this was basically Faruq’s group, but the keeper of the music was Jaribu — always. And he would keep everything going because he was organized; a lot of that music might have gotten destroyed, but he guarded it … and because of him the music still exists, the written music.”

 Tabbal and Shahid also said they felt obligated to register the name Griot Galaxy — and themselves as owners — to safeguard it. Eventually the group resumed playing without Faruq — sometimes with the up-and-coming Detroit saxophonist James Carter in his stead.

 For the group’s final Detroit gig, in March 1991 at the DIA, a couple of picketers protested that the group was being hijacked; the behind-the-scenes conflict was embarrassingly out in the open.

 The band played as “Griot Galaxy” just once after that — at a festival in Holland with a lineup featuring Carter, according to Tabbal. When Carter’s career subsequently took off — he was lauded by some critics as the most important voice of his generation — Tabbal and Shahid worked with him for years. Detroit listeners couldn’t help but think of the Griot connection when the Carter band sizzled.

 And what does Faruq say about the last days of Griot?
He pauses when asked if he felt betrayed, then turns philosophical: “I was very uncomfortable with it, but what it came down to was everybody has a different view of what the thing is, especially something as complex as that band at that time because that wasn’t a popular recording band … or even your traditional jazz band. That was a very different social and cultural experiment. Everybody has a different view. The reality of their different views manifested themselves. Yeah, I was disappointed, but that was because of the view of the band that I had that didn’t match with everybody else in the band.”

 A little later, he consigns Griot Galaxy to the great flux — all “playing environments” are “just transitory states, part of the changing same.”

 Faruq’s personal recovery was arduous. He left the hospital with his left side paralyzed, uncertain whether he’d ever play again. Asked how he made it, he laughs and says, “Poorly, not well at all, but I did what was necessary. I did jobs. I did day jobs. I availed myself of whatever benefits were, you know, and that kind of thing. …

 “After that period of the accident and all that I went underground and woodshedded for a few years. I kept a low profile to try to regroup. … Then I started coming out here and there doing a few things.”

 He sought help for his chemical dependencies: “The accident and events that happened after let me see I was actually operating in a mental fog and I had to come out of that and get to a clear mind again.”

 But for Faruq, the lessons of the accident and its aftermath go beyond avoiding booze and bikes, or the volatile dynamics of great bands, or kicking bad habits. There was something he grasped in the coma that he’s still trying to come to grips with, let alone explain:

 “I came away with another knowledge, another knowing about this condition we call life, so I can understand things now that I didn’t understand before about my personal reality and about my social reality, about my cultural and political reality, the reality of my collective past. All of that I see differently now.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When the group disbanded, DeCorte lost track of Faruq and the other Griots.

 At his home in Toledo, his 50 hours or so of old tapes “just sat for years and years and years. I listened to them from time to time, but that was it. They were for my own private use.”

 About a year ago, on a whim, he searched the Internet to see whether any of those rare copies of the Kins disc were being sold as collectibles. It was still the only full-length Griot record aside from the ’84 tour record, Opus Krampus, which had been released to rave reviews on the Sound Aspects label. DeCorte found bootleg Kins tapes being sold in Europe, but none of the rare vinyl. And DeCorte stumbled onto something much more important, references to a new record, 19 Moons on the Entropy Stereo label, by Faruq Z. Bey in collaboration with a group called the Northwoods Improvisers.

 Through e-mail, DeCorte got in touch with Entropy’s Mike Khoury, one of those label owners who has carved out a niche on the far margins of the industry, where the music is fascinating and the market is small. Khoury has released material from some of the leading lights in improvisational music — including England’s Derek Bailey and Australia’s Jon Rose — and boosted the visibility of the Northwoods group, whose members were musical mentors during Khoury’s youth in Mt. Pleasant.

 Shortly after that e-mail, Khoury and Faruq trekked to Toledo to listen to DeCorte’s tape cache. They zeroed in on a performance that captured the group in peak form. Faruq’s poetry is missing, but the nearly 90 minutes of music, recently released as Live at the D.I.A. 1983, include everything else that made the group distinctive. The music draws on the roots of jazz, on the sounds of the New York and Chicago-St. Louis avant-gardes — and offers something specific to Detroit in the ’80s.

 There are compositions from Bey, Tabbal and Shahid, two cover versions of Sun Ra pieces and an explosive interlude with guest drummers — Sadiq and Fahali Igbo — joining Tabbal. At times, collages of instrumental sounds float as if in search of a larger picture to attach themselves to — and finally coalesce in dramatic shapes and structures.

 The key performance may be Faruq’s “Fosters,” a crowd-pleasing paean to a down-home Detroit eatery that sustained him when a marriage had gone kaput and his culinary skills were nil. It starts off with a braying horn line — a sort of allusion to blues so old they creak — works into hum-along mid-tempo stomp, then raises the tension and ante each time it circles back to the theme.

 “I feel I missed a lot when I listen to this music,” says Khoury, who moved to the Detroit area after Griot Galaxy had passed from gigdom to local-legend status. “I can’t believe the levels they reached. You hear people just going crazy in the audience. It was a special time for some special music.”

 You’ll get no dissent from the five Griot members on the disc. Some of them hadn’t spoken in years, but all readily signed on to the idea of putting this music out. In fact, they all say that they’d consider — if not welcome — performing together again.

 The time may be oddly ripe for this record and any hoopla it generates. The jazz avant-garde never had a commercial heyday, yet the interest endures. Sun Ra, for instance, is by some measures more popular — consider the number of records commercially available, a biography, a book-length discography, an Internet listserv — than when he was alive a decade ago. Faruq and, even more so, Griot as a whole, certainly have a link to all of that.

 Several weeks ago, Faruq joined the Northwoods Improvisers at Xhedos Café in Ferndale to celebrate the release of the live Griot disc and Ashirai Pattern, their follow-up to 19 Moons. Their two sets captivated a standing-room-only crowd.

“Sun Ra-tastic!” a 21-year-old hooted after one tune, a cover of Sun Ra’s “Shadow World.” He would have been all of a year old when Faruq and Griot Galaxy recorded that same piece at the DIA.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “It ought to be a book, Natambu says, waxing about Griot Galaxy and “that particular cultural matrix.”

 There are certainly enough personalities to chart. Natambu is now working on a book of essays to be titled A Brand New Bag to examine “the centrality of black artists in America as a cultural force from 1955 to 1975.”

The former Griot flutist and harpist Williams is a librarian for the Detroit Free Press.

 Another band member from that period, reed player Dodds, writes Christian tracts, the most recent being Is God a Chauvinist?, which has a nice display at local Borders stores.

Any number of the ’70s members remain active musically. At least one seems to be MIA; one became a lawyer.
Of the Griot Galaxy quintet heard on the record, McMurray remains in demand for recording sessions and touring and puts out his own records in a commercial jazz vein. Holland works locally with jazz groups and with a steel drum band whose leader, Hugh Borde, was discovered years ago by Liberace.

 Tabbal lives in Woodstock, N.Y., where he has rebounded after the removal of a benign brain tumor a year and a half ago. He plays in the dance department of Bard College and tours with David “Fathead” Newman, among others.

 Shahid lives in Long Beach, N.J., and tours with saxophonist David Murray and other name musicians.
Of the original Bey Brothers, the poet Jalil moved to Florida where he battled hypertension and related ailments and passed away some years ago. Sadiq is busy in New York; among his recent projects is a libretto for a radically reconfigured “Othello” in which Shakespeare’s Moor becomes Sadiq’s “mean fuck” opium addict. He’s hoping it will be performed in the future at the Vienna Biennale, an ultra-prestigious international art gathering.

 Over the phone Sadiq talks frankly about drug addiction, alcoholism, getting clean. He says his experiences in Detroit made him the person that he is: “If it wasn’t for my spiritual growth with those people, I would probably be sleeping in Central Park right now.”

 And Faruq, during the long interview for this article, talks about his many projects, a sort of personal renaissance he’s entered during the last couple of years. He has a band, Speaking in Tongues, and an all-reeds ensemble, the Conspiracy Winds. Besides the Northwoods collaborations, other projects include working with Liebler’s Magic Poetry Band and in a trio with Liebler and the blues musician (and former WDET-FM host) Robert Jones. He’s working on a new book of poetry, revising a music theory book. The list goes on.

 But after all that, Faruq also reminisces about his daughter — he concedes he’s never been as close to her as he would have liked — and her three children. One day Faruq had an epiphany seeing the eldest of that trio, a boy now 7 years old, move with the same body language as Faruq and Faruq’s now-deceased dad before him. “I guess that blew me away. I sat there just staring. I was just in awe, like wwwoowww,” he says.

 The lesson being that “as much as I tried to forge an iconoclastic persona, I guess I’m a regular guy after all, I’m not superman of the mind and spirit. I’m just a regular guy.”

 Later, being driven back to his home in a tattered stretch of Detroit’s east side, his interviewer puts on an advance copy of the DIA release. The three Griot horns shout a theme, and Faruq identifies it as “Shadow World.”

 “One of Sunny’s tunes,” he adds, as in Sun Ra.
“Boo-wah-du-ooh,” he sings along with the cascading melody, the text, as he’d put it. Then he falls silent.

 After the theme, a tenor saxophone solo begins torrentially.
Who is that? he is asked.

 “Oh, that’s me,” he says and smiles his half smile.

 “Commentary,” he explains, translating his fevered notes and overtones. “What is that? … What do you mean?”

 Then he falls silent again as if nothing more can be conveyed in our workaday tongue.
 
The Northwoods Improvisers and Faruq Z. Bey perform Saturday, June 28, at Kerrytown Concerthouse, 415 North Fourth Avenue, Ann Arbor. Call 734-769-2999.

W. Kim Heron is the managing editor of Metro Times. E-mail wkheron@metrotimes.com.

https://allevents.in/detroit/bey-bey-in-concert-sadiq-bey-faruq-z-bey-an-electro-acoustic duet/194469897285799


BEY/BEY IN CONCERT / Sadiq Bey + Faruq Z. Bey/ An Electro-Acoustic Duet


  • Time Sun Sep 11 2011 at 08:00 pm 
  • to Mon Sep 12 2011 at 12:00 am
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  • Venue Cliff Bell's 8pm-12am, 2030 Park Avenue, Detroit, United States
Event Details

Judy Adams Music Proudly Presents

BEY/BEY In Concert

Percussionist/Composer Sadiq Bey presents an electro-acoustic duet with lifelong musical partner and friend, saxophonist Faruq Z. Bey.

This will be an historical event, in Detroit cultural terms, particularly since they began performing together at the Concept East Theatre doing the Amiri Baraka version of Black Mass in 1968; not to mention their erstwhile collaborations in the initial stages of Griot Galaxy, the First African Primal Rhythm Arkestra, the Marz Society and Aziz Reggae Band. A hardware/software improvisational offering of intense unity. $15 cover

Having met initially, during the most turbulent times in Detroit history, 1968 post-insurrection Detroit, they have forged a forty-year kinship in music, poetry and study. An outgrowth of the original Bey Family, an extended family of artists, male and female, with children, not related by blood but by philosophy, identity, creativity and performance activism. It was the closest thing to a commune the Black community had witnessed in 1969 Detroit. A house of culture in the Cortland/Woodrow Wilson neighborhood. Painters, activists, jewelry makers, singers, musicians, poets, fashion designers...all welcome visitors to the Bey Family jam sessions or heated debates on the future of the Black cultural revolution.

Both Faruq and Sadiq along with late poet-saxophonist Jalilu Bey (aka Slick Campbell) began playing hand drums and percussion together in groups like the Black Choreologia, which not only included naked breast female dancers but a tap dancing poet reciting Langston Hughes and the Ashanti Drummers and Dancers. Soon after taking up study of other instruments, the three amigos created the First African Primal Rhythm Arkestra with Faruq Playing tenor sax, Jalilu playing alto sax and Sadiq playing euphonium, which functioned as orchestra for a production of A Black Mass, by a Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) at Concept East Theatre on Adams Street. Virtually all music produced by this band was free and improvised, in the advanced guard of the musical revolution that included John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Milford Graves and Sonny Sharock. Even Jimi Hendrix and Ritchie Havens played a roll in the group’s development and identity. They listened to all kinds of music together, inventing their own lyric and vocabulary. Hamza el-Din was a house favorite. Abu Bey, the resident poet laureate of the Beys, teamed with Sadiq and Nubia Kai Salaam to form the Cresent Poets and then the Shango Poets under Ron Milner’s aegis of the Shango Theatre at the then Concidine Center on Woodward Avenue

After the unfortunate passing of Jalilu, the band desolved into education, wood shedding and family. In the mid 70’s Sadiq founded the Marz Society. A masked guerilla performance group of percussionists who would create their costumes, instruments and cadences from their immediate environment. The Marz Society would show up anywhere at just about any time to dazzle and amaze for a few moments of urbane culture shock even in the lunchtime lobby of the General Motors building and were a treat for school kids. sadiq then began to take touring gigs with the Fifth Dimension, Neal Creque, and Detroit City Dance Company. As Faruq gained finesse with his compositions and experimentations with different reed instruments, he also tinkered with the sitar and tablas in search of his polymodal indentity, eventually forming Griot Galaxy after many “attic” sessions with the immeasurable Charles Miles, Tariq Abdussamad, Abdul Khafiz, Barbara Huby (Mama Hoodoo) and Sadiq. Ultimately, by 1977-78 Griot Galaxy was a full fleged working band that included Patrice Nasoma on Irish harp and flute, Elreta Dodds playing the Bass clarinet, Darryl Pierce at the drums (Tani Tabbal replaces Pierce in 1979), Jaribu Shahid on acoustic bass, percussionist Mubarak Hakim, Sadiq playing congas and Faruq playing tenor, alto and soprano saxes. This group established the reputation for intense musicality and rhythm and captured the force of creativity for many nights at Cobbs Corner. Often inviting greats like Marcus Belgrave, Donald Walden and A. Spencer Barefield among many others, to sit in.

This was not the last manifestation of the brothers’ Bey collaborations. The early 80’s felt the influence of Africa and Jamaica on popular music and the Beys loved it. Aziz was the reggae band that Sadiq and Faruq put together around 1981-82 that played originals and covers all over the Detroit area, even for an Armenian wedding.

The September 11 concert features what can only be described as electro-acoustic improvisation that includes hints of hip hop, jazzstep and, of course, Sufi poetry and song. The culmination of many years of sharing ups and downs, as families do in their respective lives, children and grandchildren, politics and laughter, gigs and nonpayments, blues and birthdays. In a word, historical.

Detroiter Sadiq Bey is a performance poet, percussionist, composer, essayist and recording artist living and working in New York and Berlin. His work has appeared in print, electronic and recorded media for over thirty years. He has performed and recorded with Geri Allen, Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Fifth Dimension, Eartha Kitt, Brandon Ross, the Mbase Group, MFA Kera (DE), Scatology (DE), Gebhard Ullmann (DE), Dinamitri (IT), Uri Caine (USA) (Othello Syndrome, Bach: Goldberg Variations) and Don Byron (USA) (NuBlaxploitation, Tuskeegee Experiments) among many others in the Jazz, Classical and Alternative idioms in the spirit of the avantgarde. Listen to his music @

www.soundcloud.com/sadiq
www.myspace.com/schwartzegeist
www.myspace.com/grienmaan

OPEN LETTER FROM RAYFIELD WALLER:
Detroit Writer, Poet, Critic, Journalist, and Artist
We have lost a giant not only of instrumental Black Creative Music, but a giant of the theory of The Music.  A philosopher not just of music as physics, as theory, as form and method and modality, all of which he wrote about lectured on and demonstrated, but a Black man who possessed great literary and rhetorical powers, who wrote and spoke about aesthetics, metaphysics, and history; who provided for our community the all too often missing element in public contemporary life: revolutionary energy, ala Antonio Gramsci and Ogotemmêli, revolutionary energy through intellectual theory and practice; traditional wisdom  arising from the collective past, and the dynamic courage we need for the transformation of the living present. He will be terribly missed but his music and legacy of gifts to us all will live on.
Rayfield Waller
Detroit
June 5, 2012

Faruq Z. Bey, 1942-2012

by Kim D. Hunter

Solidarity

 


FARUQ Z. BEY, the recently deceased saxophonist, poet and visionary, was at the heart of a tremendous ensemble in the 1970s and ’80s called Griot Galaxy. They were also called “the best band that never left Detroit.” That may seem faint, even damning praise unless you take stock of Detroit’s disproportionate influence on the nation’s music scene. Strictly speaking, it also wasn’t true as the band and its members were travelers of the European festival circuit and had fans around the world.

 Born Jesse Davis in February 1942, Bey described himself as being “ruined” in 1967 after hearing a John Coltrane recording. By the mid-’70s when I heard him, he had all but mastered the advanced speed and tonal aspects of the jazz avant-garde. A high school friend of mine had invited him and a small group to play in the context of a music and poetry event, on what used to be Detroit’s Kern Block. I was amazed that anyone in Detroit was playing jazz outside of the mainstream. Little did I know.

 Bey was the center of an Afro-centric cultural group like no other in the city. It was as much a family of choice as it was a cauldron of advanced music. It’s been duly chronicled by W. Kim Heron in the (Detroit) Metro Times article, “Bey Watch”:

(http://www2.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=5001). 

 Besides being mesmerized by his music, my most vivid personal recollections of him involve listening in on and sifting through a fairly involved musical conversation he had with the great Anthony Braxton at University of Michigan, and Bey greeting and joining the African Liberation Day parade with a group of musicians he’d organized for the occasion.

 Bey, like many great artists, was a paradox: a tall, dreadlocked charismatic, motorcycle-riding ladies’ man, with a dry, acerbic wit, who was also a devout Muslim instrumental in establishing mosques throughout the city and bringing many into the faith. His poetry always exacting, dense and ironic became even more so after a motorcycle accident in the mid-1980s that put him into a coma where he hovered for days between life and death.

 The accident was the end of the second and most formidable incarnation of Griot Galaxy. The band had been honed down from a reed and percussion army of sometimes seven or eight to a quintet with drummer Tani Tabbal, bassist Jaribu Shahid, and sax players Anthony Holland, David McMurray and Bey. The accident not only effectively dissolved the group — just as it was starting to be ranked with the likes of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Julius Hemphill — but the closed head injury forced Bey to virtually relearn the sax.

 But relearn it he did, and went on to reinvent himself as the elder statesmen of Detroit’s jazz scene in general and the avant-garde in particular, playing with the likes of Magic Poetry Band and the Northwoods Improvisors among others.

 I had the honor of presenting him read poetry and play sax on many occasions. I read at a poetry event with him some two weeks before his death on June 1. Hobbled by the emphysema that finally took his life, he sat through the evening and performed with drummer James Hart and poet Will Alexander on keyboard.

 It was always amazing to hear anyone play as well as he did, but doubly so for someone hooked to a portable oxygen tank. Certainly his speed was diminished but tone was as clear as ever and his poetry, an ironic paean reflecting on John Coltrane playing to a puzzled audience, as pointed as ever.

 September/October 2012, ATC 160
 
https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Faruq%20Z.%20Bey&item_type=topic


Faruq Z. Bey (born Jesse Davis, February 4, 1942 – June 1, 2012)[1] was an American jazz saxophonist and composer from Detroit, Michigan. Bey was known for his work with Griot Galaxy, which played distinct compositions, often by Bey. Odd meters and polyrhythms were a frequent feature of the group's tunes, which would give way to free sections. Originally started in 1972, Griot Galaxy settled into its most stable line-up around 1980, when Bey was joined by saxophonists David McMurray and Anthony Holland, as well as bassist Jaribu Shahid and drummer Tani Tabbal. Griot Galaxy played at the 1983 Detroit Montreux Jazz Festival (now the Detroit Jazz Festival), and toured Europe in the mid-1980s.

In the mid-1980s Bey was in a serious motorcycle accident that left him in a coma.[2] Almost a decade passed before he returned to performing. He re-emerged with an all woodwind ensemble called The Conspiracy Winds Ensemble. He began to play in Speaking in Tongues and Hakim Jami's Street Band. He joined forces with The Northwoods Improvisers, who devoted several releases to Bey's music. His frequent collaborators, saxophonists Michael Carey and Skeeter Shelton, joined him on most of the Northwoods Improviser's recordings. He also played in Kindred, a quartet with Kennith Green, Kevin Callaway and Joel Peterson, and in Odu Afrobeat Orchestra. Among Bey's last ensembles was The Absolute Tonalist Society with Carey, Peterson and drummer Kurt Prisbe.

Some of his most noted releases are Kins, Opus Krampus and Live at the DIA with Griot Galaxy, and Auzar and Ashirai Pattern with The Northwoods Improvisers. Bey published two books of poetry, Year of the Iron Sheep and Etudes in Wanton Nesses, in addition to a theoretical/aesthetic manifesto Toward a "Ratio"nal Aesthetic (1989). Bey died on June 1, 2012.[3] He had experienced long-term health issues including emphysema.[3] 

Discography:
 
With Griot Galaxy

  • Kins (Black & White, 1982)
  • Live at the D.I.A. (Entropy Stereo, 1983)
  • The Montreux/Detroit Collection- Volume Three: Motor City Modernists (1983)
  • Opus Krampus (Sound Aspects, 1985)
With Northwoods Improvisers

  • 19 Moons (Entropy Stereo, 2001)
  • Ashirai Pattern (Entropy Stereo, 2002)
  • Auzar (Entropy Stereo, 2004)
  • Journey Into The Valley (Entropy Stereo, 2004)
  • Hymn for Tomasz Stanko (Qbico, 2005)
  • Rwanda (Qbico, 2005)
  • Infa'a (Qbico, 2006)
  • Emerging Field (Entropy Stereo, 2009)
  • Primal Waters (Sagittarius A-Star, 2011)
With His Name Is Alive

  • Detrola (Track 8 Only) (Silver Mountain, 2006)
  • Silver Dragon (Silver Mountain, 2010)
With Synchron

  • Synchron (Sagittarius A-Star, 2012)
With Faruq Z. Bey 4et

  • Live at the Detroit Art Space (Sagittarius A-Star, 2012)
Faruq's Poetry

  • Hymn Book of the Anciency (Entropy/Codex, 2006)
With Phil Ranelin

  • Vibes From The Tribe (Tribe, 1975)
With Leroy Jenkins

  • Beneath Detroit: The Creative Arts Collective Concerts at The Detroit Institute Of Arts 1979-92 (Geodesic)
With M.L. Liebler

  • The Kurl of the Butterfly's Tongue (Detroit Radio Company, 2008)
  • Gasoline: The Detroit Legacy Sessions (Detroit Radio Company, 2009)
With K.A.S. Serenity

  • Return to Rainbow Bridge (POPP, 1996)
References

  1. Nastos, Michael G. Faruq Z. Bey at AllMusic
  2. Heron, W. Kim (June 25, 2003). "Musician interrupted: The story of Griot Galaxy & a renaissance for Faruq Z. Bey". Metro Times. Retrieved August 11, 2010.
  3. Heron, W. Kim (June 2, 2012). "Detroit jazz and avant scenes lose icon in passing of Faruq Z. Bey". Metro Times. Archived f rom the original on June 6, 2012. Retrieved June 3, 2012.
External links



 


Monday, June 11, 2012


FARUQ Z. BEY, 1942-2012: Visionary Jazz Saxophonist, Composer, Poet, Critic, Public Intellectual, and Philosopher --A TRIBUTE TO HIS LIFE AND WORK

 


Faruq Z. Bey in Performance at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, December 26, 1981

Kofi Natambu and Faruq Z. Bey in Detroit
July 15, 1988
FARUQ Z. BEY at Detroit Public Library, April, 1981
Kofi and Faruq in Live Poetry and Music Performance at Detroit Public Library, April 12, 1981

All,

On June 1, 2012 Faruq Z. Bey, an extraordinary musician and composer, as well as outstanding poet, music theorist, critic, public intellectual, and philosopher, died at the age of 70 in our mutual hometown of Detroit, Michigan. Faruq was also an inspiring spiritual leader and legendary artistic figure to thousands of lovers of great art and music throughout the world. The fact that this man and artist also happened to be not only a very close friend and comrade of mine for nearly 40 years, but a wonderful mentor, collaborator, and confidante as well means that the loss of this contemporary giant and protean creative force is especially painful to acknowledge, accept, and embrace. Since his passing last week there continues to be a deeply heartfelt outpouring of love and appreciation for this man and his work in the form of an endless stream of online commentary, widespread posting of classic recording and video performances as a musician and composer from many friends and fans of Faruq's dynamic and profound musical and literary art throughout the United States, and especially from Detroit where Faruq remains an iconic figure who left us a towering legacy culled from more than three decades of intense and prolific public activity. Fittingly despite encountering and combatting a number of severe health challenges over the years Faruq's indomitable spirit continued to play and strive for genuine communication and illumination through his art. Thus it only appropriate and most gratifying for me to make a formal tribute to this wonderful human being whose great intelligence, insight, warmth, humor, emotional depth, wisdom, knowledge, wit, power, gravitas, and discipline housed a soaring and truly luminous spirit and artistic force who brought me and so many others such great joy and exhileration through his boundless and unending creativity over the years.

So the following tribute to the life and work of Faruq Z. Bey is humbly offered as an esteemed token of my great love and respect for this wonderful man and the bedrock principles and values that his rich and compelling art as musician, composer, poet, thinker, and prophetic witness so clearly embodied and represented via the always fecund African American cultural tradition in the realms of sound, language, philosophy, and spiritual expression. This rich compendium of sounds, words, gestures, and other ritual offerings in the form of recordings, videos, writings, interviews, pictures, and philosophical musings by and about Faruq are taken from a number of treasured materials contributed from my own personal archive in addition to other sources. Enjoy....
Faruq Z. Bey, 1942-2012
May you Rest in Eternal Peace Brother Faruq. We will miss you.

 
Love Always,

Kofi

 
The Visionary Consciousness Of Faruq Z. Bey and the Long Revolution of the Black Creative Music Tradition
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review
 

"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. "
--Charlie Parker

"What is there to say about the instrument? It's my voice--that's all it is."
--Miles Davis

"I recognize an individual when I see his contribution; and when I know a man's sound, well to me that's him, that's the man. That's the way I look at it. Labels I don't bother with."
--John Coltrane

"There are some intervals that carry that human quality if you play them in the right pitch. I don't care how many intervals a person can play on an instrument; you can always reach into the human sound of a voice on your horn if you're actually hearing and trying to express the warmth of the human voice."
--Ornette Coleman

"I say play your own way. Don't play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing--even if it does take them fifteen or twenty years."
--Thelonious Monk

"There is no such thing as an "avant-garde." There are only people who are a little late"
--Edgard Varese

"Once you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, into the air. You can never capture it again."
--Eric Dolphy

"There is no music on paper because music is sound, wave form, vibration form. You can only refer to it. People mistake the symbol all too often, not only in music but in all walks of life they mistake the symbol for reality...If you mistake the symbol for the reality, you wind up with a two dimensional reality instead of the multidimensional reality that is given us at birth. This is our birthright, our spiritual birthright."
--Faruq Z. Bey


In the revolutionary panorama of global 20th and 21st century art and culture the endlessly dynamic and multivaried creative matrices, structural forms, and stylistic expressions known popularly as 'Jazz' have consistently served as a beacon for a very wide array of artists, cultural workers, and intellectuals throughout the world, including musicians, composers, painters, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers, dancers, architects, writers, poets, critics, and philosophers as well as regular connoisseurs and active supporters of the arts and sciences. The typically innovative character and critical expressiveness of this music has been--and remains-- an essential element of its complex and ever evolving identity throughout its history, and nowhere is this more readily apparent and central to our contextual understanding of its historical praxis and social reality than in African American aesthetic and cultural traditions (and its myriad diasporic extensions). These expressive and spiritual traditions, modalities, and structures are (ideally) never static, fixed, or reductive in either form or content but are resolutely dynamic, mutable, and transformative in their ongoing engagements with all given or received materials, conceptions, and creative orthodoxies. The individual musical artists and ensembles who consciously seek and work to maintain an experiential, (meta)physical and ideational/philosophical connection and fidelity to these principles and values (psychologically rooted in an ongoing quest for genuine self determination through arduous struggle, deep research, and personal discipline) are inevitably the artists and groups who provide us with a compelling musical/sound experience that imaginatively critiques or independently goes well beyond what we are conventionally accustomed to hearing.

Thus our knowledge, acceptance, and appreciation of these artists and their works constitute a history of an ongoing dialectical link between their music and our own individual as well as collective aesthetic and visceral desires and needs. In the specific history of the many different and varied vernacular styles that have emerged in this music since the early 1900s there have been a corresponding series of major individual musicians and composers who literally served as pivotal transformative forces in the music's extraordinarily rapid evolution and development. These pioneering revolutionary figures: Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie from the groundbreaking 1920-1945 period established the fundamental template that nearly all subsequent 'Jazz' artists and composers have followed since. Ironically, this template was also unavoidably deeply rooted in what was always considered an essentially 'avant-garde' sensibility and creative point of view in terms of modern art in Western culture--whether there was any actual outright affinity or bonding with other such self identified 'advanced' groups and aesthetic formations in Europe and the United States among these revolutionary African American musical figures or not.

It was this widespread perception of the music's advanced modernity intricately connected to its deeply rooted black vernacular themes and sources from its various globalized African diasporic identities throughout the West that has deeply influenced--and continues to impact--the general reception of the music's power and authority in both critical and popular artistic circles. Out of this ongoing tension between the contending (and contentious) interpretations and framing(s) of the music's aesthetic and thus philosophical relation to the largely Western societies and cultures it has grown up in since the late 19th century has emerged the virtual explosion of the many outstanding and clearly 'advanced' ensembles and individual figures within the music since 1945. These leading younger and later legendary (and equally revolutionary) black musicians and composers from the 'golden age' that defined the 1945-1980 era: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Clifford Brown, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, Horace Silver, Modern Jazz Quartet, Herbie Nichols, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Julius Hemphill, David Murray, and the World Saxophone Quartet etc. constitutes both the 'modern' and 'postmodern' foundation and launching pads for what became ironically one of the major and yet relatively unknown individual musician/composers (outside the local Jazz cognoscenti in Michigan and in certain 'avant-garde' circles in Europe) as well as one of the most important but largely unheralded groups in the country in the rich canonical history of the music since 1980.

That individual musician and composer was Faruq Z. Bey a Detroit born and bred saxophonist and music theorist. The group was a legendary Detroit based andso-called 'free jazz' musical ensemble that Bey founded in 1972 called Griot Galaxy. Over the next 12 years until a near fatal motorcycle accident in 1984 that put Mr. Bey in a coma for nearly a month, Faruq and his cohorts in the various incarnations of Griot Galaxy blazed a singular path of richly innovative and creatively independent approaches to the use and expansion of melodic ideas, harmonic structures, and polyrhythms that relied greatly on Bey's unique and highly idiosyncratic musical syntheses and extensions of conceptual modes pioneered by such major 'New Jazz' artists of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s as Coltrane, Ayler, Coleman, Braxton, the Art Ensemble, Roscoe Mitchell, Julius Hemphill, and Sun Ra. What distinguished Bey's individual contribution to this recent tradition was an equally committed and creative appropriation and extension of ancient traditional modes, expressive forms, and structures culled from North and West African sources as well as 'Middle Eastern' ideas and modes from Arabic and Islamic traditions. Through engaging in deep collaborations and creative exchanges with such important members of Griot Galaxy as the drummer and percussionist Tani Tabbal and bassist Jaribu Shahid as well as the other saxophonists and multi-instrumentalists in the band like Anthony Holland and David McMurray (as well as such earlier players in the group from the mid and late 1970s as the clarinetists, flautists, harpists, and percussionists Elreta Dodds, Kafi Nassoma, and Sadiq Muhammad), Bey created the basic compositional and improvisational template that subsequently became the structural and spiritual foundation of the powerfully original, hypnotic, and electrifying music that captured and enthralled listeners in hundreds of legendary SRO live music performances in Detroit clubs, bars, concert venues, theatres, and music festivals.


ALBERT AYLER: 1936-1970 
by FARUQ Z. BEY 



they did not need you, Albert
they did not need and
we could not bear
the awful weight of
your song Albert
of Ancient Dynasties
of occult stellar
communities, of Ausars
insistant transmigration
& cosmic parody they
prefer to stare blank-eyed
into the god-damned maw
of instransigence, we
could not hold nor protect
you, Albert
we who are raw &
debauched would not
suffer for your
brutally olympian sweetness,
the invocation of power
ghosts, your untimely
candor, the burden of your
martyrdom
and so they come
loudspeakers in the nite
with jarring angular
voices comes red mists
& sulphiric yellow rains
so we sweat pus &
languid oils from the east
comes prophets unacquainted
with sin
comes the anti-cristo
comes in halting
arhythmic steps, & we're
to assume them dancers
they come with stones
& equations they claim
to love the brilliant imago

if you are the dali lama
then your light is dispursed
among raggedy-assed
saxophonists under the
evasive streetlights of
tomorrow

As for Me I must forage


PUBLISHED IN:SOLID GROUND: A New World Journal
Fall 1981
Volume 1 Number 1
Page 39

Reprinted in Nostalgia For The Present: An Anthology of Writings (From Detroit)
April 1985
Editor: Kofi Natambu

  
Faruq Z. Bey & GRIOT GALAXY--"Song Of The Khemti Nobles"--OPUS KRUMPUS, 1984:

Drums, Djembe -- Tani Tabbal Percussion,
Djembe-- Panda O'Bryan
Soprano Saxophone, Alto Saxophone -- Anthony Holland
Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone -- Faruq Z. Bey
Acoustic Bass, Electric Bass -- Jaribu Shahid
Album:"Opus Krampus"
Recorded live July 1st, 1984 at Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen, Nickelsdorf, Austria. 
 
FARUQ Z. BEY
AT THE BELCREST HOTEL
DETROIT, MICHIGAN
INTERVIEWED BY KOFI NATAMBU, EDITOR

SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL
Volume 1 Number 3/4
Winter/Spring 1983

March 17, 1982: Part I

 Solid Ground: We're talking to Faruq Z. Bey at the fabulous Belcrest Hotel (mutual laughter) here In the city of Detroit. We're going to be talking about music and life. Faruq, when you first got involved with the idea of music, what was your intention?

Faruq Z. Bey: (Pause) . . . I got involved with the "idea" of music before I knew what it was. I didn't have any intention, I was just affected by it. It was something that affected me. When I became involved with the idea of playing it in high school, I guess I just wanted to be a "jazz bass player." That's what I started on, string bass. Later on when I started playing the saxophone, music became a functional metaphor for a. way to live. And that's what I was trying to do then, affect life, my life and the life of people around me, using the music as a metaphor. Some kind of magical system of dealing with things.

S.G.: When you started playing instrumentally, did you find that music served as a scientific concept or was it a question of trying to express some personal values?

Faruq: Well, I don't see a real dichotomy there. I mean it was a scientific way of expressing personal values. Anything that you get involved in serious enough can be analyzed scientifically, methodologically or whatever. As a method of analysis, it can then be projected based on whatever principles you arrive at. So "scientifically speaking," it's a mode of expression. I guess any artist does that. He has his own or commonly agreed upon system of analysis. Either you're taught it by somebody elseoryou're fortunate enough to perceive it by yourself. More or less.

S.G.: You are described, along with many other people, in the media primarily, as being a "jazz musician." But there seems to be some confusion, from my point of view, over what "jazz" is supposed to be about. How would you describe what you do?

Faruq: Well, to begin with, and I've said this a number of times in the past. . . having a kind of passing acquaintance with the Arabic language, I came to find out that "jazz" itself is an Arabic word. And it seems that scholars and pundits here, for various reasons, a lot of which are social-political, tend to want to bury the etymology of the word under a lot of nonsense and myths, and they usually come up saying that they don't know where it came from. But it's obvious where it came from. The question is: How did it come to be here? It's obviously an Arabic word, and the Arabic meaning of the word JAZZ means to cut a thing short. Now applied to music, it means "to syncopate." The problem is socially, politically, you raise serious questions when you start asking: How was a music that was generated by black people come to be identified by an Arabic term, unless these people spoke Arabic rather fluently, and if so, then what does that mean? To me it means that a lot of people who were brought over here as slaves (so-called) were Muslims, and that has its own implications and ramifications. But getting back to what you were saying . . . "jazz" . . . I'm proud of the "jazz tradition," you know, the music that came to be called "jazz." But for what I want to do with music, to limit it to simply a "person who syncopates" seems rather dumb. I mean a lot of people syncopate. Some betterthan others. But then a lot of stuff I do Is not syncopated at all. I mean, syncopation is just one toolamong a number of tools or devices that I use. I guess I'm nit-picking, but I don't like definitions of any kind. I'm a musician. I'm trying to become a better composer. But that's it as far as I'm concerned. I'm a person. I don't even like the terms "art" or "artist." I don't think they define anything so why bother? But that's where we live so...

S.G.: So when you're doing what you do as a musician, what is the idea behind creative expression for you?

Faruq: For me? To communicate. Hopefully to communicate some positive forces in the environment. To hopefully reach some responsive chord in the people around you through the quality of your existence. Beyond that, it's a means of, in the kind of society that we live in and the way that the music has been turned into some kind of commodity, some kind of "thing" that you use to make money. . . I think that's beneath most intelligent people's efforts. To use something like that with those kind of possibilities, those kind of forces, an analog like music or any other so-called art form as a means of controlling the minds of other people to ends that may or may not be to their best advantage, I think that's beneath an intelligent person. Anything I would do, if I was a plumber I would try to use plumbing to improve my life and the lives of those people around me. I think any energy that a human has in this universe is to be used for that.

S.G.: Let's talk a little bit about the whole idea of the development of the music and the role of the artist in that development. When you look at the question of "evolution" in music, what does that mean to you?

Faruq: I question whether evolution is possible in music. I question whether it exists in music. You see, in order to have evolution as I understand it, there has to be some goal, there has to be some point where the thing that is evolving is completely what it can be. I think any piece of music is perfect as it is, as it's performed at that time, that's at any time. If the musicians, the performers, are conscientious and are doing the best they can at that moment, and they're taking into account all of the factors that are in the environment at that time, and they're using them to the best of their ability, then every performance is as perfect as it can be. So how can it "evolve"? A person can evolve as a person toward some goal that they may have in mind; for instance, I would like to be a better composer. Now what that means to me does not necessarily carry over to anyone else. That is a better composer for me. A better composer for me is one who has better control of the elements that I would have to express the metaphors that I'm trying to express. But in terms of the music itself evolving, I've heard music that they call "primitive" from Africa and other parts of the world, South India, the Aborigines, the so-called "primitive people," and in terms of the production of the music, in terms of the conception of the music, in terms of the emotional feelings that are expressed in the music and the response of the people, this is the most perfect music that you can conceive of. I think this attitude is another effect of the elitism of certain social groups to set up a hierarchy of standards and then compare the works of entire cultures to some arbitrary standards that were set up by people who don't even understand the cultures that they're commenting on. In other words, to say that this music is primitive and therefore substandard, say the music of the Bantu people, which is some of the most highly evolved harmonic, melodic and most definitely rhythmic music in the world or that the world has ever seen, and then to compare itto European symphonic music and say that.the Bantu music is inferior to European music is just sheer arrogance and racism, really.S.G.: You've raised an interesting question that's often been raised throughout the history of the West, and that is the question of criteria, creative criteria or cultural criteria in this context. This whole idea of "standards." Do you think there is a need for standards, and, if so, what is its actual relationship to the music itself?

Faruq: Well, my feeling on that is that these human activities that have come to be known as "art," any of them, any of these analogs such as music, the visual and graphic arts, or poetry, or what is called poetry, is entirely too complex as a process to have these "standards" applied to them. Again, it gets back to in order to have a standard you have to have a goal. You have to have an objective. You have to have some concrete example of a thing by which to compare it. If you don't have that, then you can't have a standard, you can't have any way of measuring it; because most "critics," most "pundits," most so-called "scholars" have no idea of the composer's or the performer's or the improvisor's intent, have none whatsoever, and most of them are too arrogant to approach the performer and ask him what his intent was. But they still insist on applying these standards, whatever that means, to the works of other, and for all practical purposes, alien souls. They're alien because no one's ever bothered to find out what they really think about what they're trying to do. The only person you can really ask what his objective is in terms of something that is close to a person's entire life force, his whole soul, his spirit, the only person you can really ask and establish any kind of measurement is the person himself. If you aren't willing to do that, then you have no right to say anything about it, really, nothing at all. Because there are no standards for a person's spirit. There's only standards for things that are measurable like technological stuff, like you can measure an automobile; you can measure any number of things that are out there, but these things are by their own definition different than the activities of the spirit. Which in this part of the world is called "art."

The point is there is no standard that is applicable to creative work. Consequently, establishing arbitrary standards are the whims of people who have set themselves up as "critics" or "scholars," "pundits" and so forth. Those standards only apply to them and whatever they are trying to arrive at. Now, if people want to know what that's about, then they should ask them: "What are you trying to achieve?" But in order to understand what the artist is trying to achieve, you can only ask the artist. Because that whole process, as I said before, is too complex. There are too many factors that the artist or performer or composer has to bring into a certain relationship in his own mind and spirit in order to produce this thing for someone outside of that to have anything to say about it one way or the other. All they can say is whether they can respond to it positively or not, and that's subjective, that's open to everyone. I don't value the opinion of the scholar any more than someone off the street. Because I'm reaching at something deeper than a person's intellect.

But I think the whole thing arises out of this particular social and economic situation that we live in where there's a necessity to standardize in order to understand. But that leads to mediocrity as far as I'm concerned. That leads to everything being knocked to one bland level so that it can be marketed. That's what the whole thrust of the thing is. Marketing. In the first place. Because the people who merchandise things don't trust the average person to be able to ascertain things to their own understanding and concerns. So consequently they set themselves up as the arbiters of culture and art and creative works and so forth. But actually all they are are the arbiters of money. They decide who makes the money and who doesn't, who gets the social play. They establish who people will listen to. It's no accident that the cultural mobsters are the people that they pick as their knights errant so to speak also are the people who make the most money in their chosen fields. They're also the ones who nine times out of ten or more often than that, say, 99 times out of 100, are the ones who come closest to whatever the particular political party line is at the time.

S.G: So, looking at the Western world's perception again from the perspective of these self-appointed critics and arbiters of taste in these societies, when we look at the historical development of what is called Western Art Music, vis-a-vis "Jazz," "Pop" and other forms of cultural expression, why is it, do you suppose, that the development of what we call "jazz" in the 20th century has been denigrated from a cultural point of view? Aside from the obvious question of political control.

Faruq: Well, there's a number of factors involved in that, but they all stem from the same thing, that this is essentially a racist system to begin with. You have again a group of people who mostly out of their own ignorance insist that because they produced it or, rather usually they didn't produce it, they co-opted the people who did produce it, but because they had something to do with the production of a certain form of music or a certain approach to music that this is the superior form. Consequently, it doesn't matter what anyone else produces; it doesn't matter in terms of the real value of any form in relation to another form, they're going to insist that they're superior. It's like the whole situation about "jazz," the whole "up the river" myth, the whole New Orleans as the birthplace of the music blah, and all that. You see, part of that equation is that jazz was born in the whorehouses of New Orleans and so forth. However, if this is not a deliberate effort of certain people, then it's a case of a very deeply rooted bias against the cultural achievements of any people other than themselves. It's just tribalism grown large. But the point is, by saying that this music comes out of the whorehouses this makes it "unsuitable" for presentation in the world "culture markets" and so forth. The world concert halls, etc. This is saying that this music is a vulgar form, and that it's doomed to stay that way forever.

Personally, I think music that's structurally based in improvisation speaks more to the reality of the times than a music that speaks to conditions and an environment that existed four or five hundred years ago. Any musician who is sensitive to the nuances of the music can tell you that the notation system is a very shallow interpretation of music. Again, there's so many factors that go into it, and it's so complex, that the notation only gives you the skeleton of what the music really was. That music that was produced by Bach, Beethoven and those people is gone. It will never happen again. Any music that happens is gone and will never happen again, just like Eric Dolphy said. And what you got by the notation system is just a very meager reference to what happened, a very meager reference.

Because music is sound and not paper. There is no music on paper. There's no music on paper because music is sound, wave form, vibration form. You can only refer to it. People mistake the symbol all too often, not only in music but in all walks of life they mistake the symbol for reality. The symbol is merely the symbol and should never be mistaken for the reality. If you mistake the symbol for the reality, you wind up with a two-dimensional reality instead of the multidimensional reality that is given to us at birth. This is our birthright, our spiritual birthright. I just say all that to say I think music that is centered around improvisation speaks more to the necessities of the times. This is a music, if you could translate it into an analog in terms of your life style, then it would be more responsive to the conditions that you have to live with.

S.G: When you look at the whole tradition of "folk music" and the idea of "folk art" generally as a concrete form, what is your perception of folk elements, folk values in terms of the principle of sound organization?

Faruq: Well, I have problems with terms like folk music now, because, first of all, you have this world-wide media machine at work, and if representatives of folk culture had anything to do with it, had any kind of control over what went out over the airwaves, or what went out in the name of folk music, then that would be a valid term. But you have a media machine that is controlled again by an elite. A self-appointed elite who have set themselves apart from ,everybody, and they decide what even becomes popular. Usually folk music represents that music that came out of the so-called "vulgar" sources, the masses really. That music was identified as folk music, and it defined the aspirations and the needs of the masses of the people, most of the people. The majority of the people. But now with this media machine at work, you can't even say what defines what anymore! Because most of the stuff that we're hit with only defines what the merchants, working hand in hand with the political forces, people who are trying to manipulate the direction of the large majority of the people in the world who feel for some reason, "manifest destiny" or "divine right of slobs" (laughter) or whatever, that it's their right to determine for other people what their lives should be like. Or what symbols should represent their lives. And that's why we're being hit with so much garbage, I mean literally garbage! Because these people don't understand the forces that they're messing with to begin with. They don't care. The market is such that people will buy what is available. Especially when you've got a captive audience. When you have a captive audience like you do in this country, what the hell: you put it on the market, they buy it. What else are they gonna buy? Marketability is the whole name of the game.

S.G.: I remember one time you an I had a very interesting conversation about the whole idea of "crystallization." What do you mean by the concept of the crystallization of ideas in music and how does that affect our perception of process?

Faruq: The crystallization of a form to me represents the form at its least effective, because at that point the form itself has ceased to grow and change. It has ceased to be affected by other forces around it. So consequently it's locked in. It's dead. It's as simple as that. Life is motion, death is stasis. And once you crystallize a form then it's dead. Now that's not to say it has no value. A crystal has value. People love diamonds and diamonds are crystals (laughter). But in terms of being translated into working metaphors for living people, living forces, that is no longer useful except as a reference. In my estimation, since I'm alive and caught up in the thralldom of living, I'm only interested in those things that are alive. I will take time out to observe crystallized forms as reference, but I can't spend my life studying death.

S.G.: Can you give an example of what you mean by crystallized form in the Western context in terms of music?Faruq: Most art in the Western context is crystallized. Because that seems to be the only way that the Western elite mentality, now I'm not talking about the average person from the West, I'm talking about the ones who decide that they want to run everything. That seems to be the only way they can understand things. I think it has something to do with the politics of it, in that it's the difference in building a house out of mud if you live in a tropical area, because it's cheap and it's functional and it's more efficient than bricks or wood because it keeps you cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. As opposed to building a house anywhere or everywhere you go out of bricks because "that's the way you did it at home." And not only that but "bricks last a long time." It's a certain insecurity to me. If you ever notice banks were built out of granite . . . I mean formerly, now they're just built out of anything because I guess it reflects the state of the dollar (laughter). But they used to build them out of very rich material, these giant pillars, etc. They looked like Greek temples, and it was like an imitation of that as though it was what is known as "sympathetic magic." As if we put this thought out here, this thing, this system, and the thought that brought this about will last forever. Or as long as these rocks will. But the Great Depression proved that to be bullshit.

The point is what has come to be called "classical music" in this part of the world is a crystallized form. I knew this small European music ensemble of strings, and they had this one very talented violinist who insisted on interpreting the written music as though it were alive, and he stood out. It was immediately noticeable in the context of the group, because his music sang as opposed to everyone else's cold rendition of exactly what was written on the page. And this guy insisted on trying to playthis stuff with warmth and feeling. So, therefore, he didn't really work well with them, even though in my estimation he was a real musician, whereas the others weren't real musicians to me; they were more like technicians. A computer can do the same thing. As a matter of fact, if they keep going, computers might replace all of those people. But in my opinion what they call "classical music" is a crystallized form.

But the art institutes and museums and so forth are full of this crystallized art. Camera photography is a boon to artists because it released them from that necessity so that they could use that particular wave form, the graphic wave form, because all art is wave form manipulation. You can use the graphic wave form to express other things than what a camera could do. Because the camera will crystallize that instance of time in two-dimensional form exactly with the precision that no artist could ever approach. So that released man again to pursue other areas. Those sort of things are the value of technology. But to confuse that with the act of creation, the process of creation, is backwards. It goes against what the whole force is about. They're doing the same thing with what was called "Be-Bop" music. They've turned it into a classical, crystallized form. And consequently killing it. It can't live and grow, because every step you make toward locking the form in is a step toward killing the form itself because it's no longer spiritually alive.

S.G.: So that gets back to the whole question that scientists are mulling over these days. Physicists particularly. The idea expressed by mathematicians like Godel or scientists like Heisenberg of "indeterminacy" and its relationship to the very idea of creation. The process of creation as being informed by the notion of change occurring, that as you attempt to develop a particular form you run into the immediate question of the change of that form. It's constantly regenerating itself in another form...

Faruq: Right! That's the meaning of life itself. I don't know about indeterminacy. I used to think of (this process) as indeterminate, as I understand the term, but now I'm starting to think in terms of long and short rhythm cycles. I think that any pattern that exists in the universe is on a rhythm cycle; it's just that some are longer than others. It's just like any wave form. You have short wave forms, micro-wave forms, and then you have these extremely long wave forms. Then if you subscribe to this idea of the expanding universe, then for our purposes we're dealing with this one really long wave form (laughter) .. . You know that goes all the way from the "Big Bang" to the "Final Contraction." It'll probably happen again but we won't know about it. Whatever form we're in. The point is that I'm now toying with this idea or theory of long and short rhythm cycles, because as a musician I'm forced to be sensitive to these rhythm cycles. No matter how angular a pattern might appear, if you watch it long enough it will turn itself over and repeat itself. And dealing with the peripheral patterning cycles that I like, personally I find that as long as you deal with certain mechanisms, like the saxophone which is achromatic 12-tone instrument, there are a finite number of patterns on that instrument. That is something we can never get away from. These things (instruments) are machines. They are limited by definition. The patterns are long, don't get me wrong, but there will be a time when all of that will run out. We'll exhaust it. In my experience watching the short rhythm cycles, when that happens these patterns will repeat themselves. Now you can call that indeterminacy, it appears indeterminate to us because we don't know what's coming up next. But that's because the more we penetrate that area, the more we are exposed to ever longer and longer rhythm cycles. With longer and longer patterning systems and so forth. That's how I see it now.

S.G.: That has some very interesting implications for the concept of "function" and "meaning," because it appears that in African cultures, traditional cultures, etc., they have a different attitude toward and a perception of function and meaning in the spiritual communication of values. In terms of the idea of improvisation in relationship to what we've been talking about, how do you think function and meaning is expressed in terms of the idea of improvisation as a language form?

Faruq: Well, in the first place, improvisation is a term that only vaguely describes the process. Again, if you mistake the symbol for the reality, you're going to wind up in a cul-de-sac because it's two- dimensional in a multi-dimensional process. So you can only extend it as far as it will go. But it goes back to the objective of all humans, not only artists and so-called creative people, but all humans since we're all using the same process whether we know it or not, and we're all trying to achieve the same end. The objective is to attune yourself as closely as possible to those forces in the universe that make for the betterment of life. This is obvious to some people that you come into this life at point A, and the rest of your life from that point on is spent in trying to improve the quality of what you're doing. However you approach that. Some people think they can only do it by destroying the quality of someone else's life. Then some of us believe that that's not necessarily so, that it would get better and better for all of us if we all just work at it.

I see what is called "improvisation" as the process of making living music. I only see that asa metaphor, and the mere you can stretch that metaphor the more meanings you can give it in a positive way. The more people on one level or another in their own creative process can convert into what can be called concrete mechanisms for existing in the environment that we're living in now. In other words, if you voted the same way that you listened to music, then we'd have a different kind of government. Unless you listened to stupid music, then you'll wind up with the same kind of government you've got now (we both crack up).

S.G.: In having conversations with various musicians like Sam Rivers, Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, etc., I've often tried to raise the question of how do they view the idea of environmental structures, which some people might generally refer to as social-political structures or hierarchies. How do these environmental factors affect the development of the music in terms of communication?

Faruq: (Pause) Ummmm...that's a good question. That's what people say when they can't think of an answer (laughter) . . . I see that any piece of music I write I try to make it a microcosmic equation for the macrocosmic equation that I'm living in. I try to have it reflect my own existence in terms of my environment. So all the forces in my environment are brought to bear on it. Consequently, in terms of the "classical" approach to composing music, I have to break a lot of laws. Because that approach to making music does not apply to the times that I'm living in. There are too many factors that are outside of that particular experience, that particular equation. There are too many factors that are brought to bear on me that have no analogs in that equation. So consequently my music is contantIy changing, and I hope that it continues to until I die, and that shows me that it's still alive and capable of responding to the environment itself as I live in it. But I guess that's a natural thing.A lot of the forces are negative. The kind of environmental position I'm placed in forces me to struggle against forces that are for all practical purposes trying to stop what I'm trying to say. They perceive some kind of destruction of their own ends if I'm allowed to continue. That's the way they see it. I think they should relax and everything will be all right. But that's neither here nor there, because they're not going to do it. That's any artist's responsibility to attempt to reflect his reality as best he can. Now reality itself, as you know it if you're striving to attain the truth, then there's a universality involved because I don't believe in contingent truth. I believe that there is a truth that holds all of this together. The so-called "laws of science" that the scientists keep claiming for themselves are really just forces that we have all come to recognize at various points in time. To me that's the fallacy of the myth of super- technology that we're living under. That these suckers are claiming to have damn near invented singlehandedly these laws that actually govern the whole universe. When you leave earth, the same stuff is in effect; I mean, they didn't invent this shit, who are they?

S.G.: There seems to be a lot of speculation about the direction of what has been called contemporary creative music in terms of its impact on world culture. When you look at a concept that people like Anthony Braxton have advanced about the role of ideas in this part of the.world on what's going on outside of this context, how do you view the impact of the ideas that have been developed here on people's traditional view of music as an art?

Faruq: You know it's been said that black music and musicians, regardless of what form of the music they're playing, have always been considered in the avant garde of world culture. But that's probably because world culture itself is for the most part, without outside forces, stagnant. Consequently, you have North American black music representing a force throughout the world that is all out of proportion to the number of black people who occupy this part of the world. They're playing some form of black music in every nook and cranny of planet Earth at this point. But I'm not so sure about the prophetic implications that are placed on black musicians. When you analyze precolonial African culture, you'll find that this is the role that musicians and the bards and poets, wordsmiths and the graphic craftsmen have. It's a traditional role, so it's really in relation to the regular, mundane workaday routine. But you see, this whole dichotomy of art as opposed to common man is something that is peculiar to the Western experience anyway. Our whole struggle here has been to synthesize that. In trying to develop some kind of workable synthesis. There's no music on paper because music is sound, wave-form, vibration form. You can only refer to it. People mistake the symbol all too often for reality. Which is why on the one hand the musician is placed on some kind of pedestal in the minds of people, but on the other hand starve to death at the same time. Because it's a given that very few honest musicians or musical technologists "make it" into that rarified income realm of the super-wealthy. It's not those people who do it, it's the entertainers who are in a different field altogether. A lot of musicians have that peculiar talent to transform themselves into entertainers, but the two don't necessarily equate. Most musicians don't even see themselves as entertainers. That's not the point of it. So it's an uneasy truce; it's an effort at synthesizing something, trying to create some kind of real life out of all this, which has led to a lot of traditional misconceptions, basically.

I read this book called The Black Aesthetic (Doubleday, 1972). There was this essay by Ron Welburn that postulated that Charlie Parker was the first black American artist. I thought that was very interesting, because before that the cats didn't think of themselves as artists. "Artist" is a peculiar term. I mean, you can search around for the definition of art and artists and nobody really has one. But everyone claims they know what it is. But it's one of those paradoxical things where it can't be nailed down. Personally, I have little patience for that sort of thing. I just use it for the purposes of communication, but I don't think of myself as an artist because I don't know what an artist is. I don't know of anyone who does. If anyone does, please tell me. Write into the magazine, let me know (laughter)...

S.G.: Folks please write in 'c/o 'Faruq Z. Bey' (laughter). 

When you look back at some of the influences or rather some of the people that you've "experienced" in your own music, who are some of those individuals who have had an impact of your own thinking and perception of music?

Faruq: I guess that's a kind of inevitable question. I always cringe when I think of it because it's so hard to say, you know. For one thing it's always changing. I might be influenced by one person today, and depending on his output or my own personal changes, next year I might think it's horrible. And I have to make allowances for that. It may appear contradictory, but to me it's just motion; it's something that you have to put up with. But at various times, of course. At the risk of sounding redundant, the initial impact was Coltrane. I mean, he at that particular phase of my life, he affected me more deeply than anybody else. Then later on I came to appreciate people like Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, those kind of people. I'm trying to achieve a point in my own personal development where I realize that those people are just who they are, "influences" and nothing more. I would rather understand thei( motion, their process, rather than be affected by it. Of course, people like Charlie Parker, it can go on and on, but my development-since it isn't as linear as the chronological history. For instance, I heard Trane before I heard Bird, I mean heard inside. I mean I heard Coltrane because Trane affected me emotionally. While Charlie Parker's virtuosity and imagination were striking, I didn't hear him emotionally until much later. It's like a complex, everything is developing at different rates. Inside even myself. So one thrust might be valuable here and less valuable over there for me. That's why I sort of question "The Cat" concept. You know, the concept of "The Cat" that grew out of the Be-Bop thing. I'm hoping that the music itself will grow and diversify to the point where it won't be necessary to have "A Cat" anymore. A single, monolithic giant that everybody follows. Because I think that works to the detriment of the creative activity of the music. We should be at the point now intellectually and emotionally and spiritually where we can accept a person's output for what it is, on its own terms. I think that's the important thing. That goes back to the standards again. The "Cat" syndrome, the "Cat" system serves the merchants more than it serves the actual creative technicians who are the musicians or the audience. It doesn't serve either of us as well as it serves the people who sell it, because here they have all rolled into one a role model, a pre-packaged entity for everyone to pattern themselves after. So it makes it easier for them to sell again.

S.G.: When you look at all the experiences you have gone through with various manifestations of "Griot Galaxy" over the years and the kind of critical attention and popular attention that these various groupings under the banner of Griot Galaxy have garnered, what do you think has been the role of Griot Galaxy as a collectivity In terms of some of the ideas that you've been expressing?

Faruq: Well, Griot Galaxy has served as a means of making these ideas somewhat concrete. You begin with a perception or a concept, and you do the necessary work to bring this within the realm of your ability to project it, then you go through whatever changes are necessary to create an environment for that. To me that's what Griot Galaxy is. I mean not only for myself but for everybody that participates in it. I've always felt that's the most important thing about a band. That it be a vehicle for everybody's expression. But that has to do with my feelings about charismatic individuals and all that which I don't particularly hold with. It's a collective. And in any state that you see that collective in, it just reflects whatever that equation is calling for at that time. Because of the way we're trained, the way we're tuned, audiences tend to be rather whimsical in their tastes. Because we're all trained to look at externals rather than content. For example, at one point you see a band with two females in it, and it attracts all the people who are concerned with women's liberation and that sort of thing so they are cheering you on. Then the next moment you see five guys running around with silver on their faces, and then there is everyone who's caught up with that.

You see, my view of it is all African art takes place within a dramatic context, and they don't allow any aspect of it to go unused. So the thrust of the band is not the visual, but then we're not willing to neglect the visual at the expense of anything else. We realize that human beings generally have at least five senses to work from, and we try to get to all of them (laughter). So people get caught up in externals. We've lost gigs because we've painted our faces silver. But to me that's cool...

S.G.:. . . Because that's a statement in itself

Faruq: Right, exactly. But on the other hand, I think it's totally stupid. For someone to be so caught up with the fact that we do what we do. I mean, we could have been up there playing a recognized classical piece with "perfect" interpretation, but It's like "your face is silver so you don't work." People are distracted or attracted by externals, but the core of it is something else entirely.

S.G.: Griot obviously uses the idea of expression as, on one level, a totemic reality. How would you sum up or explain that totemic-ritualistic aspect of what you do?

Faruq: In the old sense, ritual is a form of sympathetic magic. We've become so tech noid that we tend to want to scrap all that stuff. But the only parts of tradition that I care to scrap are the parts that have proven themselves useless. Symbolic analog reality which gets diverted under the classification of art in this part of the world has very real functions in what is called the "primitive world." But I believe that the primitive world is the whole world. In that sense, the ritual is to remind the people of the analog nature of the world that we live in. Like the Hindu say: "All is Maya, or illusion." And we have to remember that: Everything is an illusion. And by remembering that and being conscious of that, then the illusion falls under our manipulation, it falls under our sway. We thereby gain a certain amount of control over the nature and the direction of the illusion. So we can use that analog to describe certain things. There will always be ritual in human existence, because ritual is the symbolic analog to an activity that's going on on another level. But if we become so cynical about our lives and our existence that we assume that our total reality is wrapped up In just these few cubic feet of saltwater and slush that we occupy, then we're lost. The reality is like an onion, it's layered. It has all these different layers from the microcosm to the macrocosm. And like these analogs hold throughout that whole structure and that whole hierarchy. This process of relating one level of concreteness to one level of metaphor until you arrive at the core of truth.

(End of Part I)
Faruq Z. Bey in 2003
Photograph: Robert Barclay

Griot Galaxy - "Androgyny", 1984
 
Griot Galaxy in its prime, from left: Anthony Holland, David McMurray, Faruq Z. Bey, Tani Tabbal and Jaribu Shahid. A taping at St. Andrews Hall by director Ken Schramm for a cable presentation of the 1984 Metro Times Music Awards.

Published on Jun 5, 2012 by metrotimes:

Detroit Metro Times' coverage of the passing of Griot Galaxy leader: http://blogs.metrotimes.com/index.php/2012/06/detroit-jazz-and-avant-scenes-l...

SOLID GROUND: A New World Journal Literary Calendar for 1985
(FEBRUARY entry: Faruq Z. Bey)

POEM BY FARUQ Z. BEY

Tales of Zinjanthropus
galacticus
pararealities
grey-brear on g-erz
roiling vapor mists
scudding across the face of the nascent sun rising as if from an electric
toaster
in gods shirt pocket
Sir-real counts dinars
as prayer beads contemplative the pilot of g-erz has
cursed this vessel
tho he be an unlikely
candidate
vain dark androgenous
waddling contemptuous
toward singularity a saint absurd
Sir Real annotates vector rises
for instance under acceleration particles behave
strangely colliding
assuming identity yinyangularities
the analog physique
anaother grey-break
washed pastel tonalities
witnesses dark osirian
travels
nites of pulsing genetalia union of dissolution
g-erz prime myth drama
black october
dark roiling masses
with no blue promise
today I saw a great “U”
in the sky
the sun too caught repose in that
well is it midnite yet
are our fears to go
ungrounded
when are the demons
to present themselves
the witches ride souls
where are the demons our fears
the illuminati
masonics
rothschildren
our captors
is it midnight yet
for this we abandoned
love & Chalie Smith
African to entrophy BIk oct dark roiling
masses harsh & hurting
blue


DETROIT BLACK JOURNAL TV APPEARANCE (PBS): MAY 4, 1978:

Faruq Z. Bey, Griot Galaxy playing "Fosters"
Composition by Faruq Z. Bey:


SOLID GROUND: A New World Journal
Volume 1 Number 3/4
Winter/Spring 1983

CREATIVE ARTS COLLECTIVE CONCERT
HOLLAND & BEY EXPLODE THE "CLASSICAL CONCEIT"
LIVE MUSIC REVIEW
BY RAY WALLER

May 15, 1982: Detroit Institute of Arts
(A Review of "Music For Woodwind Quintet")
 Creative Arts Collective in performance at the Detroit Institute of Arts: A. Spencer Barefield, guitar (left), Jaribu Shahid (bass), Tani Tabbal (drums), Anthony Holland (alto saxophone), Faruq Z. Bey, tenor saxophone (center)--"Music For Woodwind Quintet--Music of Anthony Holland and Faruq Z. Bey" May 15, 1982


Classical musician, composer, conductor, and  historian, Leonard Bernstein, wrote in 1962 in his essay "What Makes Music American?"1 that the first truly "American" music was jazz, and that jazz was "born" about the time of the end of the first world war. Of course it was about that time that jazz became commercially marketable or "whitewashed' to the point that it was suitable for the kind of mass consumption that made the American ruling class want to accept it, and thus it was at this point that jazz "became American."

But that Bernstein should consider this point to be the point at which jazz was "born" betrays a persistent conceit on the part of western musicology, music historians and western classical musiclans: the inability or unwillingness [to honestly deal with folk musical forms in general and with Afro--Amerjcan forms in particular. There Is in fact a tendency to ignore the : historical validity of folk forms, and this tendency manifests itself quite Strongly in the classical sphere. Thus, there is a tendency among American musicologists and American proponents of "art music" to ignore the extent to which "jazz" is a form deeply influenced by African folk traditions. Instead, the European contribution is played up more than it deserves to be.

The fourth and last chamber jazz concert in the "Creative Music at the DIA" series, "Music for Woodwind Quintet-Music of Anthony Holland and Faruq Z. Bey," was held May 15, 1982, at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The compositions performed and the musicianship of the players themselves mocked Bernstein's words as simple conceit. Holland and Bey prove, through their compositions, that it would never be wise to forget the "jazz" is a hybrid of African and Western forms, and that the African gene is the dominant one.

Jazz can at least be partially defined as the African sensibility expressed via western instrumentality, or as "African form in the New World."2 Bernstein, whether he wants to admit it or not, is borrowing mainly from an African sensibility when he borrows from jazz (which he has often done in many of his most famous compositions). The May 15 performance featured Faruq Z. Bey on tenor and alto sax; Kamau Kenyatta on tenor sax; David McMurray on tenor, alto and soprano saxophones and flute; Anthony Holland on soprano and alto sax; and Wallace McMiIlan on baritone sax.

While Kenyatta, Bey and Holland displayed amazing power and depth of tone, David McMurray demonstrated remarkable versatility in a wide range of emotional stances; his more frequent movements from one instrument to another was done with a fine sense of demarcation, and the growling force of his sax solos were a beautiful contrast to his more subtle and flutteringly sharp f lute- which never got lost in the brawnier sounds going on around him but embellished them.

Wallace McMillan's virtuosity on baritone sax was also a standout: his solos typically rose to heights of melodic pathos and mighty, elephantine suspiration only to masterfully dissolve into more subtle ostinato background melody.

Faruq Z. Bey's solo on the first piece of the second set displayed ominous emotional undertones, and each of the players excelled in the ability to evoke powerful emotional states in every composition played. Most notable of the compositions played was "Steen," the second piece of the second set. It began with haunting intro, broke into a long process of embodying the "idea" of steam with its pitch and its "breathy" sectional repetition peppered with incipient homophony. There was a main theme, which was varied several times, and restated several times. McMurray embellishes, his flute floating in and around key phrases. During "Steen," the group made quite effective use of state visuals (standing for solos, standing to focus attention, standing or sitting to signal the end or beginning of a sequence), and near the middle of the piece is where this visual drama signaled a solo taken by McMillan on baritone. He ponderously puffed the simple, two-part theme, varying it and then laying it down as ostinato background. The others joined, playing the theme against itself, each instrument's voice "speaking" it in a unique way.

Kenyatta then took a solo, bringing back the suspirate tone, suggesting humid, escaping steam. There was next a hectic sequence of portamento and interlocking tones, very metallic in affect, almost cinematic in its evocation of images of steam escaping from pipes. Then the theme returned and was quickly covered over by wailing, interlocking tones. The sense of humidity now became a sense of heat, of building pressure. There was homophonic playing over McMurray's flute licks, then a fitful, chaotic interlocking, which suddenly ended the piece, almost like an explosion, or like a "gasp."

On the whole, the music of Holland and Bey relied heavily upon the elements of African form: group melody (what is known in western music as homophony), portamento, interlocking, microtonality, call and response, cross rhythms and improvisation-the hallmarks of jazz form itself. One could wish Bernstein might have been on hand to give his impression of the performance. The music of Holland and Bey explodes not only the Bernstein syndrome but several other western conceits:

CONCEIT #1: That "folk" music is characterized by melodic and rhythmic simplicity; that folk music is only "complex" and sophisticated in those cultures which also possess a strong tradition of "art music." Obviously jazz is African in its perception of time, scale and reality, and is by no means simple. The African element is revealed in interlocking, for example, which was used quite a bit in the Holland/Bey compositions. Interlocking eliminates pulse so that individual cross-rhythms combine into a rapid "cogwheeling" effect: the group as a whole is playing up to 600 or so beats per minute, the number of beats being divided among the players. Such a technique takes a very sophisticated sense of rigor and precision.

Clearly, to say that "complex" folk forms exist only in societies which possess "serious art music" forms is nothing more than the absurd "trickle-down" theory applied to cultural analysis.

CONCEIT #2: Some musicologists want to claim that jazz is American inasmuch as the negro slave was, after all, psychically American and not African. This is true to a limited extent, yet overlooked is the pivotal fact that the musical elements the negro slave had in his bones were decidedly African elements. Even when southern slaves took up western form and western elements (e.g. Irish inflection of song and speech pattern), it was always filtered through an African sensibility. Holland and Bey do use European instruments, but there is no doubt that the source of jazz form is, at least aesthetically, African.

CONCEIT #3: Western thought seeks to declare a false division between folk music and "art" music (classical). This kind of academic bifurcation serves only the conceit of the academy. The fact is that many of the major figures of western "art music" (among them, Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak, Bartok, Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, Brahms, Copland, Gershwin and Stravinsky) either borrowed heavily from various folk forms and elements or, as with Chopin's mazurkas, actually used the forms themselves. Antonin Dvorak, who used native American and Afro-American forms in some of his compositions (e.g. his "New World Symphony") was very vocal in his belief in the power and validity of folk forms, and very critical of American musicians for their elitist attitudes in classical composition.

In reality, as Holland and Bey show, "art music," or classical forms, are not much more than the intense intellectualization of folk music, in the same way that formal logic is simply the rigorous intellectualization/codification of common sense ("folk") intelligence. "Jazz" itself seems an ongoing evolution of an, at root, African mode of perception and expression. In some of jazz's historical incarnations (swing and ragtime, in particular), the European, Appollonian, critical, rational and more diatonic "parent" does dominate. But "New Music" is also one of the incarnations, and it is quite Dionysian, spontaneous, chromatic (the improvisational use of harmonies and melodic structures based on notes outside the key of the piece), and is clearly dominated by the African "parent." With "Music for Woodwind Quintet," Holland and Bey created a JAZZ ATMOSPHERE in which there was a direct projection of the psychesand emotional states of the performers into the performance itself, into the "voices" of the instruments. A controlled and structured improvisation. The spirit of Africa animating the body of Europe.

NOTES:

1. "What Makes Music American?" is from "Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts for Reading and Listening," 1962, by the Leonard Bernstein Foundation, Inc.

2. A definition given to me by Mr. Kofi Natambu ("African form in the New World"). 
 

Faruq Z. Bey 1983 Photograph by leni Sinclair




SOLID GROUND: A New World Journal
Spring 1987 Volume 3 Number 2 
Pages 17-20; 30
Editor: Kofi Natambu
 
NOTES ON TONAL PHYSICS 
BY FARUQ Z. BEY

This thesis is an attempt to aid in the evolution of a logically consistent dialectic of musical aesthetics. The problem is, as it has always been, one of translation or transposition of the tonal language to the language of semantics. As usual much is lost in translation but our concerns should be instead with what is gained. The tonal language, like the verbal, is subject to evolutionary change and is possessed of a vernacular that ultimately affects the contour of the 'pure' or 'pristine' parent tongue. Much to the chagrin of certain idealists music is not a "universal language." It is as subject to the formative processes of isolated social and cultural forces as the verbal expression. Though there are points of congruence that cross cultural and ethnic lines these imply a pre-existing logic order common to human perception. This logic order can be expressed mathematically.

There is a measurable difference between what is 'natural' (an event that is the effect of pre-existing laws of physics) and traditional or habitual events that are the effect of an accrued past of social acceptance. Because of the primacy of natural law tradition or social habit often, but not always, exhibits points of agreement with the predicates of natural law. The meaning of evolution in the craft of music and its underlying theory is the degree to which said theory coincides with the pre-existing systems of law.

However, the traditional method of teaching music has not been based, for the most part, on these systems of law, or immutable principles of tonal physics. Rather, the traditional teaching has led students to mimic (imitate) the styles and forms of the past, and to perpetuate at the same time the psycho-social meanings attached to
various musical forms. For example, a "new music" method would introduce and nurture students' sensibilities to certain immutable principles.

There are still other 'immutable principles' - social ramifications - such as the assumption that so-called 'classical' or "intellectual" music was spawned in the rarefied atmosphere of European nobility while 'Jazz' gestated in the sordid whorehouses of New Orleans, that serve to distort or obscure the actual cultural value of certain forms and structures.

Thus the study of music today is purely predicated on the student's ability to mime alone. Ideally the next step in the evolution of applied tonal physics would be the study of relationships of concurrent tonal relationships as well as melody and rhythm (consecutive or sequential relationships).

To effectively postulate and structure a "new" music one must understand, if not execute, the premises of the old. Although improvised music is a fundamental part of the African musical history and its derivatives, the 'x' or change factor is an essential part of improvisation. This factor is a necessary component resulting in ever changing specificities, and ultimately, in spite of the retarding effects of tradition, form. The reluctance with which new forms and extremes are met is an example of the trial and error effects of the human mind. The scientific method or grounding in physics coupled with a thorough understanding of the empirically derived rules and physical tendencies should make the introduction or point of entry of such 'new' forms much less traumatic and accepted as natural evolutionary points in the development of the total sonic spectrum.

Of all the so-called 'art' forms music is the most ephemeral and least material in the fashion of the 'plastic' arts. Music is the study and manipulation of tonal and rhythmic relationships, none of which exist in any substantially 'tangible' sense but are instead the momentary frequency of the surrounding air plasma. I suppose that because of that sense of sheer intangibility along with the obvious complexity involved in creating music this joins to make for the 'spiritual' inferences that are often made about the 'essence' of music.

What must be developed therefore is a logically consistent dialectics of tonal aesthetics, a set of standards, for each musical genre, derived from such aesthetics and adhered to by musicians, teachers and critics alike. Those tone models (tunes) should only be allowed to persist and become part of the traditional literature that, upon analysis, are found to reflect the prime motives and ideals of the code of aesthetics.

II. OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING POPULAR TONAL AESTHETICS
('POP-THETlCS)

In popular aesthetics there seems to be some sort of unholy alliance existing between the performers (composers etc.) and the audience. The performers, in an effort to achieve popular acceptance (a survival necessity in a capitalist ecostructure) accede to popular whim and become purveyors of the then acceptable devices of 'pop'thetics and the audience itself submits to the pervasive law of physics called inertia and is drawn to the least taxing forms. The human brain is surprisingly capable of recognizing and retaining both linear (melodic) and vertical (chordal) sequences. This was the entire thrust of early improvisatory efforts, the whole point of which being subtle linear (melodic) modifications over a recurring vertical (multi-linear) or chordal structure. Also subtle rhythmic modifications over the constant sequential occurences of the prime relationships, rhythmic and tonal, of the multiple known as chords. Of course the final arbiter of 'pop'-thetics is the marketplace.
 
Ill. FARUQISMS

What is called improvisation is actually constant and instantaneous composition, at best (at least at some points) being a logical and intelligent commentary on the preceeding (tone model), in fact if viable laws of composition are ever attained it may be found that some 'solos' may be more intellectually cohesive than the tone model or 'tune' they arise from.

The perfect curve is a Iogrithmic spiral and not a circle. "I am a spirilian in a circle world".

Each life is a parallel universe.
A French saxophone quartet is no longer a meaningful standard nor is their vaunted 'blend'. Any saxophone tone is a complex of partial overtones and subtones. The genius of modern music (jazz) is to establish an environment that can support a multitude of voices, after all a saxophone is only a tool or extension of the human capacity, in this case the voice. The European 'classical' inclination is to dispense entirely with individual propensities and to accept and perpetuate a 'standard' tone. The African inclination, on the other hand, is to celebrate the individual within a grand (musical) scheme.

By denying the psycho-scientific stance of modern music, we relinquish future developments by default.

Be-Bop is the latest and most vital permutation of the western song form. The so called 'Avant-Garde' is the latest and most personal development of Be-Bop.

"THE UNSTRUCK SOUND"

1. In Hindu cosmogyny the unstruck sound is the sound that can exist inside ones head without being generated at any external point. In other words the audial imagination.

2. There is an organ within the human ear that is crucial to our process of hearing. This organ is called the 'basilar membrane'. The ear may even manufacture sounds that do not exist.., as the loudness of a pure tone increases, the ear begins to hear a change of tone color, seemingly caused by harmonics which appear in the tone in increasing number and strength.

Yet an oscilloscope picture of the wave form of the sound shows no trace of these harmonics... These ghostly harmonics arise somehow in the ear itself. The sensitive basilar membrane, where sound is detected by a series of nerve endings, has been proved to respond to different frequencies at different positions along its length... as the same tone grows louder, new disturbances mysteriously appear at the points where the harmonics of this tone would be recorded.
-Physics of Music
Scientific American
Frederick A Saunders
July, 1948

3. There is a circumstance that can arise in wave form event physics wherein two sine waves of different frequences but existing within the same space plasma, can interfere with each other and so produce a third sine wave which is, numerically the product of the original two.

"THE STRUCK SOUND"

The "Equally Tempered" tuning system has been with us (in the West) for, at best, 500 years.

"As early as the sixteenth century musical theorists advocated slight alteration in the size of intervals so that the twelve semitones could be fitted into each octave."
-Golden Encyclopedia of Music Pg. 590

While 500 years is quite a while to we human types, it is but the blinking of an eye in the life cycle of a world, and the 'natural scale' or harmonic overtone series has been with us since the first collision of stars in this sector of the galaxy.

"BODES LAW"

The premise that there is a 'preexisting' logic-order or, in the case of tonal-frequency, ratio order can be supported by 'Bodes Law'.

Titius had noticed that all of the planets known to astronomers in his day possessed mean orbital distances from the innermost planet, Mercury, these orbits becoming progressively greater by the ratio of 2:1 as the planets increased in distance from the sun. That is, earth was twice as far from Mercury's orbit as was Venus, Mars twice as far from Mercury as was Earth, and so on it was as if the planets formed a chain of octaves, each next planet representing one octave. The distances involved were not exactly of the ratio 2:1, but were near enough to suggest to early European astronomers that a definite law of some sort might be involved."
-The Secret Power of Music, David Tame,1984 (P. 237)
The imprecision that existed in the octave or 2:1 ratio sequence can perhaps be explained by:

"... There was a gap in the chain of octaves; there existed no planet between Mars and Jupiter where, according to Bodes Law, there should have been one. Then, in 1801, Giusseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres, a planetoid with a diameter of 480 miles which orbited almost exactly where Bodes Law. had predicted that a planet should."
-The Secret Power of Music, David Tame, P.237)

Now, some cynics may say that the appearance of one ratio factor, the simplest, is merely one of coincidence.

The appearance of a second factor, one much more complex, common to both (tonal and planetary) sequences, should reduce the probability of coincidence sharply.

Neptune has sometimes been cited by reductionist materialists as evidence that the law is no law at all, since the planet does not fall upon an octave position. Yet in fact it is located almost exactly half-way between Uranus and Pluto, as though to fill in the half-octave (tritone) position.

The tritone or 'Neptune Interval' is not a simple ratio in the manner of the octave (2:1) or 5th (3:2) or even the Major 3rd (5:4) But instead one of the most complex ratios that does not appear in the overtone series or natural scale until the 11th point in the sequence.

CONSONANT OR LYRIC INTERVALS AND THEIR RATIO TO FUNDAMENTAL
PRIME 1/1
PERFECT 5th 3/2
PERFECT 4th 4/3
OCTAVE 2/1
MAJOR 3rd 5/4
Minor 3rd 6/5
MAJOR 6th 5/3
Minor 6th 8/5

(It will be noticed that neither the minor
3rd nor the perfect 4th occfur in the
natural overtone series sequence, but
are both instead mathematical postulants the products of inversion.)

"The concept of dissonance is always relative and always changing. A sound that is dissonant to one person might be considered consonant by someone else. . . Seconds, sevenths, and all diminished and augmented intervals have always been used as dissonances."
-The Golden Encyclopedia of Music
INTERVAL RATIOS
FROM A GIVEN
FUNDAMENTAL
OR TONIC
1/1
2/1
3/2
4/3
5/4
6/5
5/3
8/5
15/8
9/5
9/8
10/9
1.5/1

John Coltrane's use of the 'natural scale' i.e., the scale which is the product of tonal physics and mathematical ratio relationships (not the equally tempered scale) and its harmonic consequences, obviously received some popular acceptance because of its scientific and physical 'correctness', yet because there was neither a science of tonal aesthetics nor a codification of the principles thereof, there has been no transposition to semantics nor the evolution of a functional dialectic. The advances made by the logic of Coltrane's 'inner ear' and its acceptance by the 'inner ear' of his audience led not to any substantial advancement in tonal engineering, but the emulation of 'aspects' of his playing by saxophonists who sought only to mimic his popularity and deceive (cheat) an unsuspecting audience. The measure of John Coltrane is an increment on the scale of courage. The realities of the natural scale are implicit to the saxophone (as to the human voice). While it is unlikely that he was the first saxopho iist to hear these 'plateaus of congruence,' he was the first to make them a part of his 'public' expression.

"Fifths were to be made slightly smaller and major thirds a bit larger... . A cappella singing on the other hand, allows the sin gers to modify their pitch so that they can produce acoustically true triads which are slightly larger and brighter than those obtained thru equal temperment."
-The Encyclopedia of Music P.590

UNISON
OCTAVE P.5th P.4th Ma3rd mi3rd Ma 6th mi6th Ma7th mi7th Ma2nd mi2nd

TRITONE
144 DISSONANCES OR"ALYRIC" INTERVALS AND THEIR RATIOS TO
FUNDAMENTAL

MAJOR
2nd
9/8
A sample of this kind of analysis
Minor
2nd
10/9
for the lowest note on the piano
MAJOR
7th,
15/8
keyboard (an A) is given in the
Minor
7th
9/5
illustration... It is evident that
TRITONE
1.5/1

"the partials of the real piano tonebecome sharper - that is, higher in frequency-compared with the partials of a pure harmonic tone. The 16th partial, for example, is a semi-tone sharper- half a step - higher than it would be if it were harmonic. The 23rd partial is more than a whole tone sharp, the 33rd partial is more than two tones sharp and the highest partial in the analysis, the 49th, is 3.65 tones sharp."
-The Physics of Music P.30
While to the practicing musician correct intonation is of the utmost importance, the 'harmonic' tones present in wind and stringed instruments while popularized by musicians such as John Coltrane, those 'harmonics' are in the physics or natural scale. In other words they are 'partials' of the fingered fundamental and as such are part of the overtone series and subject to those mathematical consequences and the attendant psychological meanings to say nothing of being slightly out of tune with the equally tempered system.

Again, the natural scale is a physical phenomenon and as such is subject to the laws of wave-theory no less concretely than the observed laws that govern gravity.1

Because of the physics of wave- theory the right diad will produce a third or unstruck sound within the natural or (physical) overtone scale. Speculation makes me think of the possible sounds or unstruck chords appearing within large emsembles playing a type of music wherein those diads are essential parts of the form. Though the diad can be produced by equally tempered instruments, the third or 'unstruck' sound, being a product of wave form interference (and therefore subject to physical law) will sound in the overtone scale.

The direction in jazz seems to be a sort of quasi-tonality. Not the rigidity of Schoenbergian rows, but a willingness to use the entire tonal and ratio (tension) spectrum. This system seems predicated on making the tonic statement in each chordal progression, and once having made such statement, launching into a series of patterns or sequences, which are rhythmically and intervallically consistent, while begin- fling tonally to diverge from the given chordal substructure. The logic of the pattern or sequence requires 'alyrical' ratios. In the jargon of the profession these are reffered to as 'substitutions'.

We can trace the evolution of this tendency from the early recorded improvisation efforts wherein the performer was found staying close to chordal (harmonic) information, thru the bebop period, that saw the introduction of uncommon, though consonant intervals (ratios) like 6ths, 9ths, 11 ths, and l3ths, to the apparently 'random access period' of 'avant-garde' and the use of alyric ratios and the popularization of methods of improvisation such as patterns and substitutions.

MODALITY 

"Truth is a point of view."
-Jean Paul Sartre
The so-called "modal" method initiated and popularized by Miles Davis in the immediate post-bop developments, with "Birth of The Cool" was perhaps an aesthetic reaction to the extreme cadential-cycle (II V I) excesses of Be-Bop, but, ironically, was made possible because of the harmonic freedoms initiated during the Be-Bop 'time-zone'. The use of harmonically related tones while unstated in the given chordal substructure (6ths, 9ths, liths, l3ths) initiated and refined by Charlie Parker and his cohorts made possible the use of 'lyric' tone ratios generated from any of several 'points of entry' within a given 'key' or fundamental (within the diatonic system). Thus leaving the improvisor free to choose whatever 'color' from the tonic spectrum that they may have seen fit, from the 'darkest' phrygian modality, to the 'brightest' lydian.

As it developed this style brought about the use of one or more 'pedal tone' or fundamental (however transient) allowing the improvisor to utilize the entire psycho-aesthetic palette of the tonic spectrum.

PENTATONIC MODE

The pentatonic mode is historically an older modality than its diatonic counterparts. In fact it has been suggested that the diatonic system is itself an evolution, or derivative of the pentatonic mode. This mode, the pentatonic enjoyed world-wide, tho limited European, pre- diatonic use.

"Some medieval Gregorian chants are primarily pentatonic. . . Because the scale was used in countries outside Europe, there has been no pattern for the harmonization of the tones of the scale. In fact, because of the lack of half steps in the scale, any combination of tones can be sounded together."
-The Encyclopedia of Music P.4 14)
Though there was much interfacing of culture and cultural traditions, among them tone-forms, in the southern part of North America during the slavery period, and while there was much oppression of the cultural expression by the invading Europeans of the Africans and the indiginous natives, both groups (Africans and Natives) though from different parts of the world could claim the pentatonic mode as part of their cultural heritage. And while there was an effort by the Europeans to supplant any and all evidences of cultural tradition other than their own, in spite of those efforts the pentatonic mode survived. While there are certain parrallels and points of congruence ('tonal locus' ratios 5th and dominant 7th) which approach the 'tonic' model sequence of the overtone series (4,5,6,7), because of the congruences or points of similarity the displaced Africans were able to use the pentatonic mode as a substitution or derivative mode in whatever tonic environment.

A mode is a logic.

As far back as Scott Joplin composers and improvisors have used both diatonic and non-diatonic modes in jazz to add interest to their compositions and performances. Players from Joplin thru C. Parker would use the diminished mode (or double diminished) as a deliberate compositional device or as an improvisational 'substitution'. I can only assume that the logic and appeal of this mode and its derivatives (half-diminished, double diminished) are inferred by the existance of thç diatonic sub-set modalities i.e. the prime tetrachord of the phrygian and locrian modes. It will be noted that these modes, phrygian-locrian and double-diminished, are located at the 'dark' end of the tonic spectrum, in fact because of the curious, sequential, grouping of semi-tones and whole- tones only the totally semi-tone sequence is 'darker'.

It will be noted, also, that because of the sequential configuration: 1) There is the presence of the 'Diabolos' (medieval European term) 'Neptune' interval or tritone.2 It is symmetrical. The tonally destabilizing effect of the tritone (complex ratio) and the symmetry of the sequence combine to infer polytonality. It can also be seen the ratio relationships can make the terms 'dark' and 'tense' almost synonymous and as such interchangable. Because, when using a common root, this mode diverges so radically (by minor 2nds or the 'maximum' tension interval) from the overtone scale resolution model (4,5,6, and 7).

POLYTONALITY 

The "Blues Scale" as it has evolved for equally tempered instruments is at least polytonal approaching atonality because the very elements (tone ratios) that re-enforce tonality i.e. the 5th, the Ma 3rd, and the 4th are called into question by the presence of those intervals that destabilize the tonal statement, the tritone (11th partial) and the minor 3rd (which does not show up in the sequence of partials at all). If not atonal the blues scale is at least polytonal because of the presence of the Dom. 7th (a close approximation of a segment of the overtone series sequence [4 thru 7]) and the mi.7th. The dominant 7th (with C as fundamental) the ??? V F Major and the minor 7th being the II of B flat Major.

"Harmelodics": Ornette Coleman is alledged to have introduced a system of poly-tonalism by simply not transposing from 'concert' for the transposing instruments (B flat and E flat). Though each instrument would be in a given key the total effect of the composition as performed would be one of poly-tonality, if not atonality, in view of the resulting intervallic tensions involved. This system has been called 'harmelodic", I suppose because of the inherent harmonic relationships (if all instruments are playing the same rhythmic and intervallic sequence). The intervals and their relationships would be, Mi 3rd consonant, Perfect 4th consonant and Whole-step dissonant.


http://www.mydamnchannel.com/don_was/2008_detroit_all_star_revue/faruqzbeydragons_1472.aspx

Saxophonist / Poet / Cultural leader Faruq Z Bey founded the seminal jazz ensemble, Griot Galaxy, in the 1970's....he is one of the most innovative musicians to come out of Detroit. At the 2008 Concert of Colors, Faruq performed "Dragons" - a song from his album "Ashirai Patterns".

Faruq Z Bey - saxophone
Michael Carey - flute
Kenny Green - piano
Ed Colburn - bass
Ali Alan Colding - drums

For more information on Faruq, read Kim Heron's article in The Detroit Metro Times.

Performed Live at the
2008 Concert of Colors
Orchestra Hall, Detroit MI
July 20, 2008

Produced by DON WAS

Recorded by ANTHONY CAMPAGNA

Mixed by KRISH SHARMA

Video Directed and Edited by GEMMA CORFIELD

Produced by PAUL HANSEN

Cameras:KIM SIMMS
GARY GLASER
KEVIN LEESER

Production Coordinator:
DALE WILSON

Faruq Z. Bey Trumbull Theater 1986
Photograph: Don Barber


SOLID GROUND: A New World Journal Volume 1 Number 1 Fall 1981, Pages 38-39

“THE MYTH OF THE RHYTHM OF THE TIMES”BY FARUQ Z. BEY

(1)

Jose Buckstar lounged poolside under
the dingy roof of L.A. the dingy roof of L.A.
girl firmly in hand his pirates brain spunthe ice-blue device of tomorrows coup
lives of the music
the sunlit verandah

(2)

Four-eyed Freddie Jackson
dreams heself a glitstar hermophidite
would be that or “what else you got to offer” a media creature
was twice removed from his source victim of a waning fad
he posed at times as spirit-man
while his Ka choked to death
in coke dust
lives of the music
the shadow man

(3)

Captain Ra Bey alias Reggie Brown
he fly high over in ghetto myth wisdom
he be sourcery
his Ka be straight
he be Ma Akheru
he be Kun Fiya Kun
He hooked up straight baàk to Heliopolis
Possessor of the sho nuft magic
carpet ride the sunshine magic-child
ride low thru chaos big chops
& elephant ears he hear everythings & he don’t make sense
he lean hard against the tense
of the black bubble
could be four-eyed & ready.
lives of the music
the sun being
won’t be Buckstar
that drifting image him
Mister Melody the deadly avatar
he didn’t hear the “choon” but speaks
of the rhythm
of the times

we sought an informal god
all us scufflin
Baraka, Tolson, poets, painters
plumbers, pimps copped Out
to the grey worlds
to the mists all
of us scuffhin shufflin
again to the rhythm of the times
to dialectical mammyism
to uridialect anything... all that
scorin and capping of that movement past yesterday, ten years ago
Pharoah, Wayne, Miles
“we reserve the rite
to wear silver lame &
fag scarves & spout spiritchul
plaitudes, to dip around
the corner & snort P coke
in short to change our minds”
we all sought an informal god
for the form had betrayed us
so we tried to slide
heralded but unnoticed into
the rhythm of the times
“what a great sacrifice I’ve made
my brothers, to abandon the secret tongue that I might speak to the masses
only to find that I had nothing
of any consequence to say
except that I’m startled to find
I’ve become rich along the way”

lives of the music
the people undone
lives of slick New York niggas
huddled around fetid pools the “avant garde” talking bout the “saxolympics”
the fifty change dash
or the bloodless bash of memorabilia• time machine “mintons”
my god
my god
my god
welcome to the isolation booth
forevermore quoth the raven
the rhythm of the times
the times alone

III

Captain Ray Bey alias Reggie Brown
copped a deep plea before
the god of informality rode a spirit down
Dexter Street banked a hard tight
right onto Joy Road & home
Jose Buckstar the primo the cream
jammed the glinting barrel of the .357 straight into the roof of his mouth
& blew off the tops of his skull
over & over & over
while Four-Eyed Freddie
well he got he myths
mixed up
the rhythm of the times
the now of tomorrow
the myth of yesterwhen
SOLID GROUND: A New World Journal
Volume 3 Number 2 Spring 1987
Page 63

“MIZIMU” BY FARUQ Z BEY

He is here
The one who looked beneath
The gleaming shell of ether
Behind the deceptive shade
Of the matrix
and saw there
The shining eye of God
He has arrived... we
have smuggled him in by night
Wearing the hateful garb
of your derision bearing
the awful weight of your
threats and boasts, in the dark
the morass we conjured
like fifty year old Brazilian
Pickaninnies huddled around the
cauldron
making Gnagna the spirit
we make and we make
but we do not remake
and so we called him
the one you called the primitive...
savage
and you worked other such
sad and hollow juju
and you bellowed, belching
anguishes and swamp gas
because he was not like you
But we called him anyway
and He came
The GrandFather
Mizimu the watcher
Mizimu the wielder of past
and futures like great and fiery
swords
Mizimu soul of glass
hard with this sheen
untouched by your grey
incredible dullness
Mizimu we are here
in brilliant and florid death
we are Mizimu... here

SOLID GROUND: A New World Journal, Volume 2 Number 2/3, Winter/Spring 1984 Page 73



NOTES: ON SEEING THE SCRAPBOOK OF A FRIEND
BY FARUQ Z. BEY

for R. & others

sinister
the hooded mask
obtains
beneath the carven
lunge
when time has deserted
us, and
the clocks hand turns
staggers in syncopatic
rhythms we
at the breakfast table
mulling over yes
whisper ellingtonia
in askance
dread the ailent encroachment
of cheerios
powdered milk
the misplaced I.U.D.
mysteries of the ching
heart reading songs
lay tangled at my feet
warm tho vapid memories
ghosts of needs
unfulfilled you in the photograph
stern, accusing defiant against crimes
as yet uncommitted
someone rails against
the covering fog
fogfogfogfogfog
fog it is not yet green
pictures in
the scrapbook of a friend
the tender rawnesses
of beauty


TRILOGY
BY FARUQ Z. BEY

To J.S. & Friend

I

This easterly expatriate
whose vocation purveys
other folks damnations
other howls & gibbering moans
lycantropic his face
a lithic grimace
from yellow pus &
still steaming juices.

II

This public symbol
it is a surrogate activity
for some cosmonode
without form
without gender
without weight
dense full
of meaijing with
out volition
excOpt In the secret
acts discommoding
then how shall we deal
with this trenchant metaphor
the public symbol
It Is a gong of awareness
wherefore
shall we sound it?

Ill

“Yet ... the affiant sayeth, yet”
you . . . will see him high
riding crumbling yellow
stairways
[Cakewalk to Carla Bley]
Omuwale the son returns
wid prodigality
you, will see him hi-ride
baroque stairways wid
flaking yellow gilt
the rot beneath
he courts the saints
Orisha, he thank he make
charisma he thank he make
the gods
Omuwale he be denizen
of crumbling yellow
stairwells
SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, VOLUME 2 NUMBER 1 Fall 1983
Page 47


"AND OF THE FIFTH DAY..."
BY FARUQ Z. BEY

in D.Z.
I am the Babalowo
who awaits his fullness
I am the Ifa oracle
who rests in knowing
I am the terrible power
of Mizumu who waxes
with the fecund moon
I want to thank you
for makin me
be mahself . . . again
the circumnabulation
the primary obfuscation
of form the
spirit concrete
the wanderment
the shrewd itities
the fores eeking
grace puzzlementitude
the ten shun
comes (again) the berserkers avoids charm and hex
deals the voidance
avoidance deals the
dalliance dilly dilly
chahmed I'm sure
wid beauty eyes behind
tiny silicone shields
is see king seek
seeking is all
is spirit concrete
is spirit concrete
is heart concrete
is heart concrete
is want understanding
without standing under
is the silent waiting
is the wrenched heart
of meat is wretched
in vain hope love. .
she would not understand love she would stand under not as priority but force . . (I wanta thank you
for makin me
make mahself again)

SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, VOLUME 1 Number 2, Winter/Spring 1982
Page 56

LOVE POEM #2 (or 3)
BY FARUQ Z. BEY

Penumbra
Acts of beauty or
there are glisses
of knowing
like “my father
was a progressive
man of colour”
or
“a man of courage”
gestures of grace
en passant
shades of grace
alifian
shades of acts like
“I speak you nefer”
acts of
worlds of
graceilke
aaaaah
bis
Abyssinia
Abyssinia
Abyssinia
I speak you
& you are poem
nefer
Penumbra if
I did not want
to communicate
would I not open
my mouth
or sing
or further
garble the litany
and you walk up to me
at parties, stand waiting
accusingly why?
when we have agreed
that being deep is just
a weight, Penumbra
when we have spoken
you poem
nefer
when we have acted
words of grace
words of grace
in your name
Penumbra
with these things
to sustain us
in the throes
boredom cigarettes
& drinks
modes
of evasion



Sherrif Sam (Sound by Law) - Faruq Z. Bey & Northwoods


"Mystery of Love" - From the Journey into the Valley concert DVD by Faruq Z. Bey and the Northwoods Improvisers. © Copyright 2005 - Timothy O'Brien and Andrew Bare (Diversified Media)

PERSONNEL:

Faruq Z. Bey - Tenor
Mike Carey - Tenor
Skeeter C.R. Shelton - Tenor
Mike Gilmore - Vibes
Mike Johnston - Bass
Nick Ashton - Drums

Producers: Timothy O'Brien and Andrew Bare

Videography: Andrew Bare, Timothy O'Brien, John Shepherd, Ryan Stahl, Jay Shurtliff

Timothy O'Brien - Recording, Mixing, Mastering, Video Editing, Video Compositing and Effects, DVD Authoring, Camera Operator

Andrew Bare - Director of Photography, Video Editor, Lighting, Camera Operator

Jay Shurtliff - Still Photography, Camera Operator, Production AssistantFor information about ordering the DVD, please contact: info@entropystereo.com


Faruq Z. Bey and the Magic Poetry Band - "Albert Ayler"
by Faruq Z. Bey 

Published on June 4, 2012 
by jefreynolz:
Saxophonist Faruq Z. Bey passed away at the age of 70 on June 2, 2012 after a long fight with emphysema. This song, performed by Faruq as a tribute to legendary sax player Albert Ayler, was featured on the 2007 Magic Poetry Band album "The Kurl of the Butterfly's Tongue".
Faruq Z. Bey with Northwoods Improvisers at the Detroit Institute of Arts 2010 Photo by M. Andren
Toward A "Ratio"nal Aesthetic by Faruq Z. Bey, published by Ridgeway Press in 1989--a brilliant music theory text
Past Tents Press, 1991
Pages 49-50
The following poem was written as Faruq Z. Bey lay comatose for over two weeks following a very serious motorcycle accident in the late summer of 1984. Thus the poem was conceived as an open public prayer for his complete recovery and 'return' to us. Thankfully Faruq survived and he was able to return to playing music again after an extended supervised period of physical rehabilitation. The poem was initially published in the literary anthology Nostalgia For the Present in 1985 and later appeared in the poetry volume The Melody Never Stops in 1991



WE THINK WE KNOW YOU
OR: THE ROVING ENIGMA BLUES
BY KOFI NATAMBU

(For my close friend and brother Faruq Z. Bey) 


"There is no music on paper because music is sound, wave form, vibration form. You can only refer to it. People mistake the symbol all too often, not only In music but in all walks of life theymistake the symbol for reality . . . if you mistake the symbol for the reality, you wind up with a two-dimensional reality instead of the multidimensional reality that is given us at birth. This is our birthright, our spiritual birthright."
--Faruq Z. Bey, March 17, 1982


So strangely we think we know
you. I've even heard it said after
Griot has lain waste to yet another
dying empire. We know this Myth that
calls itself Man. We know this man that
calls itself Musician.
But what is it we know? That the shining grey
mask you appear to wear Is an affirmation of our
fears? That the melodies you ponder and furtively
reveal are cultural readymades for us to wear then
discard when the houselights come on?
Is this our history you sing as your grinning groupies
crawl in for the delicious kill? What about the painters
who buy you too much beer as we finger that aching
saxophone
sweating between sets in the corner?
Do the critics feel your rage when they go to sleep at night
whistling "Foster's"?
And the poets, we of the nagging words, do we offer more than
fat platitudes as we stroke yr growling locks? The dreads that
bring revolutionary dope addicts to yr concerts and neoclassical
composers in search of the perfect rhythm

So strangely we think we know you.
As you beat despair away with a Song.
Fly down crooked avenues in metal wings kicking
yr spinning wheels. (Vaporize cynics with a sullen laugh.
Cut thru pretense with a wicked look.
What is it that we know?
That the beboppers shudder when you do something that
you're not supposed to do, something all yr own, and you do it so well
that they look away whenever your name is mentioned? That the
Youngbioods stand In Hart Plaza and give each other sly looks
as they recite every line from "Zinjanthropus" over the slashing
energy called the ScIence Fiction band? That you love to
hide and seek In public especially In
front of thousands of beings
who call themselves "lovers of Jazz?" That you shoot down
expectations whenever you feel like It (which is all the Time)?
That the men and women who say they need you and love
you also listen to and sometimes participate in
the ugly and beautiful gossip
surrounding yr name?
That we burst out chanting whenever Tani and Jaribu go Into their Groucho and
Harpo stage-act, and you bent
back chortle before breaking into that famous half-step of yours?
The one that undulates when the Music takes over completely and
we see just how strong yr Love really is as it defies the sentimentalists who applaud only when they
recognize some harmony they
think theyíve heard before (and will hear again)?
So strangely we think we know you.
So strangely we think we know you that we tell Zapman stories whenever
we get bored and wonder aloud why you always tell the best ones. That
the bodyguards of the flesh that houses your soaring spirit mistake their desires for your needs. That the
concrete and the metaphorical
merge in the space that surrounds sound and silence. You are that
space: a wandering Interval lost to our demands but loyal to that Instance of passion that sends yr soul
racing thru air
So strangely we think we know you
that we play games in the shadows
of yr pain and call it concern
that we stand In the dry well of
yr flight from us and call it fate
that we pay tribute to yr image
and call it compassion
that we cry and moan and thrash and curse and freak and
posture and grieve
waiting waiting waiting (Yeah) Waiting for yr return for the return
we swear we deserve
o so strangely we think we know you
so strangely we think we know you
so strangely we think we know you
that we would risk our heavy ignorance
to love you (Again ...

SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, VOLUME 1 Number 2, Winter/Spring 1982
page 32


Mathematics of Melody
by Sadiq Muhammad
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Winter/Spring 1982
  
Editor's note: The interview originally appeared in 
 

RENAISSANCE CITY MAGAZINE

July, 1980 
A.) MELODY/MEL'ade/ 1. Agreeable succession of single tones in musical comoositions: 2. air or principal part in HARMONIZED MUSIC: . 2 AIR OR PRINCIPAL PART IN HARMONIZED MUSIC: 3. song or tune// syn harmony//


Disc melody is an arrangement of single notes in succession, serving to express a musical idea; melody also named the principal part of air thus musically formed. Harmony names a combination of notes of different pitch produced simultaneously to form chords or the "concord of sweet sounds" thus created.

B.) Math'e-matics (GK mathemata) NSG. Science that treats of quantities magnitudes, and forms, and their relationship, by the use of numbers and symbols. ..perpetuate an experience laced with agony and delight and pronounce the wedding of man to music.

The tunesmith huddles in the cracks of an iconoclastic society that's bent on a do or die system of reasoning. Hardly moved to describe the amiable qualities of a lethargic and impotent recording industry until recently, most composer who have the creative ability to move the musical thinking of people towards a fresher overview, are shot down based on their ability to influence.

The mathematics of melody reflects the transformation ot creative energy to the ears of the listener. The composer is the musical mathematician, undertaking the tedious assignment of influencing people through music.
Melody and rhythm identifying the particularity of the composers intentions.

Stravinsky and Bartok are primary images of neoclassical composers whose mathematical genius rejuvenated the classical mind. John Cage, in a class of his own, crystalized a musical sentiment that appeared to be extemporaneous, but quality of content, and motivational force in his compositions reoriented the general tide of new composers.

Thelonious Monk, Charlie "Yard bird" Parker, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Cecil Taylor created a musical behemoth whose achievement has yet to be reckoned with. The creative power to influence the world was harnessed by these contemporary jazz composers and influence the world is exactly what they did. but like everyone who is touched, worse, attlicted by the overpowering urge to compose in the creative realm, they had to pay their dues, and in some cases, enormous debts.

The passion associated with creative music drove disagreeable parents to outrage in the late 60s and early 70s. In fact, composers who turned the tide were generally worshipped into popularity by their "new wave" of contemporary music rebels, reiterating the musical upheavel of the late 60's. can we trust that our composers guide us well, into the next century? All composers are intluenced by their environment, but specifics spell out the underlying content of their observations and beliefs. The poetry of their lives take different shapes in terms of music composition and performance. Obviously, all poetry is not sweet and pleasing to the ear, as the lives of even our most talented composers, like some poetry, are not agreeable to society at large. Griot Galaxy, led by Detroit's Faruq Z. Bey, is a group of muscian/composers mat nave survived the insurrection and pacification of contemporary music in the last decade. their force at times is something to contend with, their style is not reminiscent of any one composer, although an influence of several modern contributors is heard in their music. The power to incite the emotions to outright pleasure, pain, and indifference has erupted in the scientific writing of Faruq and Griot Galaxy. Before their performance, one notices galvanized garbage cans, buckets, assorted saxophones, and percussion instruments, scattered about the stage. But the silver painted faces that appear behind the instruments set the environmental mood for exploring human emotion. The listener is immediately grabbed up into the arms of griot galaxy and sped off into other worlds of innovation. Some call it jazz, some call it avant garde. some even (ambiguously) call it new wave... Space Music, and even garbage (which is how I feel some mornings) to describe this unit's expertise...

"l call it the logical extension of Urban folk music," says Faruq. Faruq explains, "While I'm not particularly carried away by designations, the term 'urban folk music' closely approximates what we're trying to do and has even more profound implications for the future. What has been termed 'new wave' may turn out to be a tired old ripple. Cornpositionally, we're more concerned with the essential thrust of influences of a tradition, rather than the concrete realization of 'the tradition', which is to say, you dig, that the note-for-note rendition of classical pop tunes (which is a contradiction in terms) is closer to the European classical tradition."

Q: Which leads to improvisation?

A: Yes. After all, it should be fairly obvious that a musical form whose primary energy is derived from improvisation would tend to resist the limitations of form which are, upon closer investigation, found to be basically whimsical anyway.

Q: How can a musical form resist the limitation of form?

A: I'm trying to quote Carl Jung who said, "Anything that's universally true, tends to give the appearance of paradoxy."

Q: Is improvisation a paradox?

A: Actually, yes. In order to improvise properly, one must bear in mind the original theme, as well as whatever new data one is trying to bring to the form. "Any note can follow another note" (Vincent Pesichetti).

Q: Do you think the term "music" needs to be redefined?

A: What do you mean, "music"?

Q: Should mathematics include music in its definition or should music include, etc., etc.?

A: First of all, all the old cultures never differentiated between music and mathematics. What we (Griot Galaxy) are trying to accomplish is a recognition of spiritual technology as well as physical.

Q: Who is your major, influence in terms of composing?

A: Seriously, the universe at large.

Q: Whose mathematical approach have you encountered that inspire your writings?

A: Spiritually, Coltrane, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Roscoe Mitchell. Physically, Schillinger, Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud.

Q: What do you like about these composers?
A: In a word. ..audacity.

Q: Do you jog?

A:"...?..."

Q: Where do you buy your sunglasses?

A: Yes, I jog.

Q: Are you compelled to 18 hour music or do you party and eat hamburgers like everybody else?

A: Yeah. Well, of course, I party... like a (#%&#Zx'&) but a real musical craftsman, or any other so-called artist lives his art, The ideal is to live the poem... or whatever.

Q. Is improvisation based on impulse and is it purely intuitive?

A: Obviously it's impulsive. Equally as obvious is the fact that it is predicated on one's total experience. Of course, intuition plays a great part, in that intuition is the facility that synthesizes apriori knowledge with the unknown.

Q: Are you trying to say it's a spiritual experience?

A: Definitely.

Q: What kind of rewards do you hope to gain with your work?

A: Do it and die.

Q: How old are you?

A: On this plane, I'm 38, but...I honestly believe in pre-existence.

Q: What else do you... do?

A: I'm into sailing, Grand Prix international auto racing and science fiction.

Q: Do you have a mathmusical system?

A: Yeah....

Q: Well....

A: It has to do with the tension that exists between tonal intervals. This includes both linear (melodic) and concurrent (harmonic) relationships. What I have encountered to do is establish a constant numerical value system that indicates the tension relationship that exists between tonal, intervals. In this way I hope to be able to "engineer" a composition in such a way as to have more precise control over the emotional state of the audience

Q: How do you measure audience control?

A: In the short term it's irrelevant. In the long term by response.

Q: What do you mean by response?

A: I mean their total response, which is to say how they come to live or whether they buy our records!

The present personnel of Griot Galaxy is Tani Tabbal, Drums and percussion, Anthony Holland, Reeds, Jaribu Shahid, Bass, and Faruq Z. Bey, Reeds. For the maximum experience in musical science fiction and an alternative to visiting your analyst, it may be expedient to give a listen to these musicians...

Sadiq Mohammed (interviewer) Faruq Z. Bey (interviewee)



Griot Galaxy 1984 Left to right: Tani Tabball, Faruq Z. Bey, David McMurray, & Jaribu Shahid Photograph by; Leni Sinclair


Griot Galaxy Discography


Phil Ranelin - 'Vibes From The Tribe'
contains 1 track w/ Griot members
1976 Tribe Records
TRCD 4008


Griot Galaxy - 'Kins'
1981 Black and White
B&W 001


Griot Galaxy-Live at the D.I.A.

1983 Entropy Stereo
Recordings
ESR 001


Montreux Detroit Collection Vol. 3
contains 2 tracks w/ Griot members
1983 Montreux Detroit
MDR 843


Griot Galaxy - 'Opus Krampus'
LP and CD release, CD has 2 bonus tracks
1984 Sound Aspects
SAS 004


Item 601080
Faruq Z. Bey w/ Northwoods Improvisers-
Primal Waters

SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL
Volume 1 Number 3/4
Winter/Spring 1983 
Page 64



UNTITLED #1
By Faruq Z. Bey

yo for big life
the parrafin faces
cop postures of sanguinity
dzyo for big life
Leroi lies buried
under tomes & dust
diatribic & besides
whats a neruda anyway
dzyo for big life
in my tyme lye conferred
wid frayed dames miztresses
of the Arcane
the themes of Ma hence the ma-thematics ergo the ma-at equations dzyo digit ergo sum

(phase theme)
I've seen the violences
the slathering the vicious maw
the palsied frenzy of bitches
Wagner in the Cotton fields
Nietzsche in the dives
I've seen the violences
cogito ergo dizzy


"Ripe for a Vision" - Faruq Z. Bey/Northwoods/Dennis Gonzalez. Composition by Faruq Z. Bey
 
Dennis Gonzalez - Trumpet
Faruq Z. Bey - Tenor
Skeeter Shelton - Soprano
Carl Smith - Alto
Mike Gilmore - Vibes
Mike Johnston - Bass
Aaron Gonzalez - Bass
Nick Ashton - Drums
Stefen Gonzalez - Drums
Videography - Todd Treece

For information about ordering CD's, please contact: info@entropystereo.com
Nostalgia For The Present: An Anthology of Writings (From Detroit)
1985
Pages 37; 40

“MY MAN FRIDAY”
BY FARUQ Z. BEY

Funny, but haven’t we had
this conversation befo?
you’re obviously irked
a strangely graceful harlequin
with well-honed myths
a riffian of Azure knowns
the stuff of your eyes.
men
thick-set & black-skinned
warlords, driver-men of
galactic feudalism
plot minor intrigues/beneath
Akhnatons awning
we are not essential
to the casual drift of history
we are pivotal tho anxious fares
our past seeks us out
devours us & shits
like any other healthy animal
I, only want you to entertain
that past as a ravenous
but slightly well-meaning beast
whose bind & halter
are epiphanies of the absurd
funny . . how we deem outselves
sate from our own judgements
funny, how we seem to have had
this convesation befo
I turn to squash a roach
a star was built as soulkeep
causal disfracturetude
a phallic icon of daring
we turn on the corroded/axis
of meaning
words the mishappen/shell
of being
hard work this end
less feeding of stars
this dude is loved/by his following
he is their sensor
he is their Interpretor
who is no longer comfortable
under their eyes
who no longer breaths
like soft russet husks
who has lost the ghost
of his grandmother to Kansas
who loves tales of hollowed
bones the beseeching stared
of statues rhapsodic
as bat gwano
like the soft-bodied scuttlers
that live in the corpses of trees
e , whose eye carelessly violates
mendacity funny, but
are you near yourself?
are you on speaking terms wid
the miasmic spirits that habit
‘ your head?
e •3 have you chosen them?
ie do they love you?
ie Is your arrogance a crafted
armor, a juju, a medicine
for the witches of this dark
town ... do you care?
could you be singer
burnisher of slightly
dingy choons
who should you aspire to?
except yoseif
who should aspire to you?
xcept
“If they saw the primacy of rhythm, they wouldn’s need a dictionary”
UNTITLED
by Faruq Z. Bey

sho he was a homemade
holy man
sho he be self
described
das why they shrunk away
in revulsion sometimes
at his handicraft
das why dey grunt
in uncommitted apathy
the curious snarls & kinks
arabesques of his half seen
schemes
cause dey was duh
designed ones
lectrons with a certain destiny
even Eshu would have
no part of this
so sometimes he spirit
wept for loneliness & I guess
he pizened hisself by
slow degrees &
his world was blinding bright
& deep space black
by shocking sudden turns
and you know he gon be unstable
so what else he gon be
but kinda rough around the edges
& all his acts & artifacts
was a kind of spastic code
a searching for his tribe-mates
& soundings for his home
sho he was a homemade wholly man
& the others were designed
am no comfort In it
nowhere


His Name Is Alive w/ Faruq Z. Bey - Zrii


"Zrii" is the opening song on Silver Dragon (2010).
Recorded at the UFO Factory, New Detroit 2009.Dion Fischer - moog synthesizer
Noah Eikhoff - bass
J Rowe - percussion, gong
Steve Nistor - drums
Warren Defever - guitar, keyboards
Faruq Z. Bey - soprano saxophone, bells
 


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THE MUSIC OF FARUQ Z. BEY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH FARUQ Z. BEY:


Griot Galaxy - Dragons



Griot Galaxy - Faruq Z. Bey 1978



Faruq Z. Bey (1941/42 - June 1, 2012)

 



Faruq Z. Bey With Northwoods Improvisers 

 

 

Faruq Z. Bey With Northwoods Improvisers - Ethiopia 

 


Faruq Z Bey With Northwoods Improvisers - Oncala


Faruq Z. Bey With Northwoods Improvisers – Rwanda

 


Faruq Z. Bey - Currents.wmv

 



FARUQ Z. BEY vs WARREN DEFEVER 

 


After Death - Faruq Z. Bey w/Dennis Gonzalez & Northwoods 

 


Mystery of Love - Faruq Z. Bey & the Northwoods Improvisers 



Vines - Faruq Z. Bey and the Northwoods Improvisers 

 


Griot Galaxy at The Concert of Colors



Published on July 15, 2017:
David McMurray, Anthony Holland, Cassius Richmond - saxophones, Jaribu Shahid - bass, Tani Tabbal - drums. Recorded 14 July 2017 at Detroit's Concert of Colors festival.  

Respect to the founder, Faruq Z. Bey (4 February 1942 – 1 June 2012).


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faruq_Z._Bey

Faruq Z. Bey


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Jesse Davis
Born February 4, 1942
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Died June 1, 2012 (aged 70)
Detroit, Michigan
Genres Free jazz
Occupation(s) Musician, poet
Instruments Saxophone
Associated acts Griot Galaxy


Faruq Z. Bey (born Jesse Davis, February 4, 1942 – June 1, 2012)[1] was an American jazz saxophonist and composer from Detroit, Michigan. Bey was known for his work with Griot Galaxy, which played distinct compositions, often by Bey. Odd meters and polyrhythms were a frequent feature of the group's tunes, which would give way to free sections. Originally started in 1972, Griot Galaxy settled into its most stable line-up around 1980, when Bey was joined by saxophonists David McMurray and Anthony Holland, as well as bassist Jaribu Shahid and drummer Tani Tabbal. Griot Galaxy played at the 1983 Detroit Montreux Jazz Festival (now the Detroit Jazz Festival), and toured Europe in the mid-1980s.

In the mid-1980s Bey was in a serious motorcycle accident that left him in a coma.[2] Almost a decade passed before he returned to performing. He re-emerged with an all woodwind ensemble called The Conspiracy Winds Ensemble. He began to play in Speaking in Tongues and Hakim Jami's Street Band. He joined forces with The Northwoods Improvisers, who devoted several releases to Bey's music. His frequent collaborators, saxophonists Michael Carey and Skeeter Shelton, joined him on most of the Northwoods Improviser's recordings. He also played in Kindred, a quartet with Kennith Green, Kevin Callaway and Joel Peterson, and in Odu Afrobeat Orchestra. Among Bey's last ensembles was The Absolute Tonalist Society with Carey, Peterson and drummer Kurt Prisbe.
Some of his most noted releases are Kins, Opus Krampus and Live at the DIA with Griot Galaxy, and Auzar and Ashirai Pattern with The Northwoods Improvisers. Bey published two books of poetry, Year of the Iron Sheep and Etudes in Wanton Nesses, in addition to a theoretical/aesthetic manifesto Toward a "Ratio"nal Aesthetic (1989). Bey died on June 1, 2012.[3] He had experienced long-term health issues including emphysema.[3]

Discography

With Griot Galaxy

  • Kins (Black & White, 1982)
  • Live at the D.I.A. (Entropy Stereo, 1983)
  • The Montreux/Detroit Collection- Volume Three: Motor City Modernists (1983)
  • Opus Krampus (Sound Aspects, 1985)
With Northwoods Improvisers

  • 19 Moons (Entropy Stereo, 2001)
  • Ashirai Pattern (Entropy Stereo, 2002)
  • Auzar (Entropy Stereo, 2004)
  • Journey Into The Valley (Entropy Stereo, 2004)
  • Hymn for Tomasz Stanko (Qbico, 2005)
  • Rwanda (Qbico, 2005)
  • Infa'a (Qbico, 2006)
  • Emerging Field (Entropy Stereo, 2009)
  • Primal Waters (Sagittarius A-Star, 2011)
With His Name Is Alive

  • Detrola (Track 8 Only) (Silver Mountain, 2006)
  • Silver Dragon (Silver Mountain, 2010)
With Synchron

  • Synchron (Sagittarius A-Star, 2012)
With Faruq Z. Bey 4et

  • Live at the Detroit Art Space (Sagittarius A-Star, 2012)
Faruq's Poetry

  • Hymn Book of the Anciency (Entropy/Codex, 2006)
With Phil Ranelin

  • Vibes From The Tribe (Tribe, 1975)
With Leroy Jenkins

  • Beneath Detroit: The Creative Arts Collective Concerts at The Detroit Institute Of Arts 1979-92 (Geodesic)
With M.L. Liebler

  • The Kurl of the Butterfly's Tongue (Detroit Radio Company, 2008)
  • Gasoline: The Detroit Legacy Sessions (Detroit Radio Company, 2009)
With K.A.S. Serenity

  • Return to Rainbow Bridge (POPP, 1996)

References




























  • Nastos, Michael G. Faruq Z. Bey at AllMusic

  • Heron, W. Kim (June 25, 2003). "Musician interrupted: The story of Griot Galaxy & a renaissance for Faruq Z. Bey". Metro Times. Retrieved August 11, 2010.


    1. Heron, W. Kim (June 2, 2012). "Detroit jazz and avant scenes lose icon in passing of Faruq Z. Bey". Metro Times. Archived from the original on June 6, 2012. Retrieved June 3, 2012.

    External links

     
    at