A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, June 9, 2018
Billy Bang (1947-2011): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
Although he played an instrument more closely
identified with uptown concert halls than downtown jazz clubs, there was
no mistaking the primary source of Billy Bang's
musical inspiration. While his violin technique was extensive and his
familiarity with contemporary classical forms apparent, Bang's
rough-edged, sometimes almost guttural tone, old-fashioned sense of
swing, and lexicon of vocalic expressive devices defined him as a jazz
musician. Bang improvised lines that might have been lifted straight from a George Crumb
composition, yet he invested them with an emotionalism and spontaneity
unique to jazz. Whether in the abstract (as a solo violinist,
elaborating on skeletal melodic material) or as part of a greater whole
(with Sun Ra's Arkestra, for example), a Bang performance was always awash with surprise.
Bang
was born in Alabama as Billy Walker, but as an infant moved with his
mother to Harlem. He was a small youngster, so when he evinced an
interest in music as a junior-high student, he was given a violin. About
this time he began being called Billy Bang
after a cartoon character. Prompted by a fascination with Afro-Cuban
rhythms, he switched to percussion in the early '60s. As a hardship
student at a Massachusetts prep school, Bang played drums with his fellow student, the folksinger Arlo Guthrie. Bang
was drafted into the service and was sent to Vietnam. He became
radicalized upon returning to the U.S. and worked in the antiwar
movement. Bang began playing music again in the late '60s. Bang was inspired by the free jazz of the mid-'60s, especially the music of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.
The influence of germinal free jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins (and Coleman's violin work) led Bang back to his original instrument. Bang studied with Jenkins and involved himself with the burgeoning New York free jazz scene. He collaborated with saxophonists Sam Rivers and Frank Lowe and performed often in the downtown lofts that housed the avant-garde music of the day. Bang formed his own group, the Survival Ensemble, in the early '70s. In 1977, Bang co-founded (with bassist John Lindberg and guitarist James Emery) the String Trio of New York. It was for his work with the latter group that Bang became best known (he left the band in 1986). He also played with bassist Bill Laswell's Material and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, and led his own groups. In the mid-'80s, Bang played briefly with a funk band called Forbidden Planet. He also collaborated on various projects with pianist Marilyn Crispell, trumpeter Don Cherry, and guitarist James "Blood" Ulmer.
The violin is hardly the first instrument that comes to mind when you
think about jazz, but that's never daunted Billy Bang, one of the
instrument's most adventurous exponents. Over the past 26 years Bang's
hard-edged tone, soulful sense of traditional swing and evocatively
expressive style has enhanced over two dozen albums by top names in a
variety of genres, from the blistering funk of Bootsy Collins and the
harmolodic groove of Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society to the
intergalactic uproar of Sun Ra. With more than 15 albums under his own
leadership, nearly a dozen more in co-led endeavors, and five more with
the String Trio of New York (which he co-founded in 1977 with guitarist
James Emery and bassist John Lindberg), Billy Bang is one of the more
prolific and original members of the progressive scene. Born William
Vincent Walker in Mobile, Alabama in 1947, his family moved to New York
City's Harlem while he was still an infant. In junior high school he was
nicknamed Billy Bang after a cartoon character, and over his initial
protests, it stuck. Around the same time, his primary interest turned to
music, and he took up the violin, switching to percussion in the early
'60s when he became captivated by Afro-Cuban rhythms. While attending a
Massachusetts prep school under full scholarship, he met and began
playing with fellow-student, folk-singer Arlo Guthrie. Drafted into the
army following graduation, Bang was sent to Vietnam, an experience that
profoundly affected his life, often quite painfully. Returning home and
radicalized, Billy became active in the anti-war movement, and by the
late '60s had returned to music. Heavily inspired by the exploratory
fire of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and the liberating
energy of the free-jazz movement, Bang returned to the violin as his
principal means of expression. Attending New York's Queens College, and
studying privately with renowned violinist Leroy Jenkins, Bang became a
key member of the dynamic New York avant-garde scene of the '70s.
Forming his own group, The Survival Ensemble, and working with artists
like David Murray, Frank Lowe, William Parker and the legendary Sam
Rivers, Billy began to reach an international audience in 1977 with the
String Trio, remaining with the cooperative ensemble for nine years.
During these same years he continued to tour and record with his own
ensembles, as well as genre-busting ensembles like The Decoding Society
and Bill Laswell's Material (alongside guitar giant Sonny Sharrock). He
even briefly led his own funk-oriented band, Forbidden Planet, and in
1981 taught at the University of Nebraska. He continued to work and
collaborate with notables like Murray, Don Cherry and James 'Blood '
Ulmer, and in 1982 began a ten-year association with the incomparable
Sun Ra, concluding with a 1992 quartet recording for Soul Note, “A
Tribute to Stuff Smith,” dedicated to the father of the jazz violin. In
1990, Bang formed the Solomonic Quartet with trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah,
and continued to freelance and lead his own groups. Relocating to Berlin
in 1996 where he lived until 2000, Bang criss-crossed the Atlantic
frequently, performing all over Europe and doing five tours through the
South and Midwest with percussionist Abbey Rader, three of which
included tenorman Frank Lowe. He also began a regular working
relationship with percussionist Kahil El'Zabar in 1996, performing in
duet, and sometimes as a trio with esteemed Art Ensemble of Chicago
co-founder and bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut. Currently, Bang records
for Canada's Justin Time Records, for which he recorded “Bang On” in
1997 and “The Big Bang Theory” in 1999. His latest CD (released in
October 2001) entitled “Vietnam: The Aftermath” evokes and confronts the
memories of his Vietnam experiences and showcases the fine
compositional skills that have always marked his own recordings.
Returning to New York in 2000, Bang has continued his busy schedule,
touring Europe in the Fall of 2001 with David Murray, continuing a
musical interaction that has lasted over 25 years with a series of
concerts and a collaborative dance work in Birmingham, England. He also
tours Europe in November 2001 and the U.S. in January 2002 in duet with
El'Zabar; and performs in England with the fusion ensemble Sonicphonics,
with whom he's worked since 1998. A dazzling improviser, excellent
composer, and provocative leader, Billy Bang remains on the cutting-edge
of jazz expression.
"We were always going for individual voices and individual sound. That
is the only thing that almost made me stop. I didn't sound like anybody."--Billy Bang
Billy
Bang hasn't had an easy life, but neither is the music he plays. Bang's
improvisations require advanced citizenship. Concentration in an age
where the average attention span rivals the box office presence of Gigli
(Martin Brest/Bennifer film apparently seen by two people, who told two
other people). But to his credit, through difficult times, he outlines
below, Bang has continued on. Continued playing his unique brand of jazz
and we're all better for it, even if we don't have dedication to
realize it now. Like all good things, I'm sure the appreciation for Bang
(unedited and in his own words) will come in due time. FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning. BILLY BANG:
I was born in Mobile, Alabama, but I never grew up there. I grew up in
Harlem, New York. As I lived in Harlem in the early Fifties as a kid, I
heard music all around me from the jazz clubs and from the candy stores.
They had speakers outside the candy stores that they would play music,
music like Eddie Harris and once in a while, Brubeck's "Take Five." So I
started hearing jazz very, very early, and when you lived in Harlem in
those days, it was in the blood. It was in the people. It was in the
clothing. It was prevalent. As a young man, I bought a pair of bongos
and two of my friends and I used to play the bongos on the New York City
subway system. We would take turns dancing and playing the bongos and
earn some money. That was my professional debut in the music. I was in
special classes in elementary school. There was a brand new music school
opening up in East Harlem and that was an extension of an older music
school. They were relocating to a brand new music school and they were
going around to all the elementary schools up in Harlem, trying to pick
out kids that they thought would fit the music department there. They
chose me and so when I went to the school, I was handpicked for the
orchestra. I was a little bit upset because I wanted to play the drums
or the saxophone or something that I was more familiar with and hearing,
not the violin. I was put in the orchestra and then they measured the
guys up. The tallest guys got the bass and the next size guys got the
cello and guys my size got the viola or the violin. They put me on the
violin.
This is something that I am not creating, my parents
aren't creating, but it is the system. I was in this orchestra. It was
classical for two full years. I don't remember doing math or English,
but I remember this violin orchestra music. In my ninth year, I should
have been in this orchestra class and gone on to Juilliard or some other
school of music. But I received a scholarship to go to a school with no
music department, so I was very, very happy. It was purely academic. I
was rubbing shoulders with all the wealthy people's children in America
such as Jackie Robinson's son. I went there two years and then I became
frustrated to basically my naivete to American racism. I didn't quite
understand the things that were affecting me, but they were horrible at
that school. This was more on a personal side. At the same time, it was a
boarding school, so I lived up there. I was coming home on Christmas,
Thanksgiving, and the summer, back into the ghetto, back into my
neighborhood. So I became an extremely confused human being, not knowing
which side of the tracks I was on. I wasn't black enough to be with the
black kids and not white enough to be with the white kids. I was a
total mess. I think that was the beginning of my schizophrenia. After I
left the prep school, I had to choose a school in the Bronx. I lived in
the Bronx. It was just by random that I chose a school and went to it
for two years trying to graduate, which I didn't. I had to go to summer
school, which I couldn't stay in there because it was too beautiful a
summer. The next thing I know, I received draft papers in the mail. I
had a choice, either go back to school or get drafted. I got so fed up
with school that I allowed myself to get drafted. FJ: And how soon did you begin your tour in Vietnam? BB:
Six months later. You do six months of basic training. AIT, they called
it, which is advanced infantry training, and then I had an extra two
weeks in what they call assimilated Vietnam camp, where they teach you
more specific things about jungle warfare and guerilla warfare. Then I
was shipped to Vietnam after coming home for a few weeks. After that, I
boarded a plane that went to California and then Alaska and then the
next thing we knew, we were all in Vietnam. FJ: You received minimal training that was geared specifically for the region, when you were in country, did any of it help? BB:
I would like to think it did because the people that didn't get it and
they were still sent to Vietnam, maybe they could have used some of it. I
don't know. Every situation varies and it was different, but they must
have known that my orders were 11 Bravo and 11 Charlie, and that is
infantry. So I think they sent me through all the regiments of Vietnam
as an infantry soldier. In other words, they didn't give me training on
typewriters when they knew I would be shooting. FJ: The vast majority of musicians I have spoken with served in the military, but most were in the band. BB:
Yeah, a lot of guys were in the band and a lot of guys were in what
they called special forces, not the fighting kind, but doing different
things. Frank Lowe, my good buddy, was an MP. Butch Morris was a medic.
The guys had different jobs. I think I am one of the few guys that
actually humped the boonies and lived in the jungle. FJ: How many tours did you do? BB:
I did one. One too many. I did one year, the required time. Most people
have ideas about Vietnam from watching these silly movies and things,
but basically, it was a very lonely time. Although I was involved with
the unit, it seemed like you were always thinking to yourself. I was
with a great bunch of guys, guys that were just as down as me. That is
important because when you hump and anybody panics or freaks out, it can
be detrimental to your safety. I was fortunate to be with some strong
willed guys, guys that wanted to fight and come back home. We weren't
really fighting for any nationalistic cause. We were fighting to get the
hell out of there, at least I was. FJ: When you are in the midst of a war, how far away was music? BB:
Oh, music wasn't even near me. The only thing I heard of music was once
in a while, I heard a Vietnamese song in the background. I just heard
the music of automatic weapon fire and the syncopation of mortars being
hit and things like that. FJ: Upon your return from Nam, how did your perspective on this country and the world change? BB:
Well, I was extremely disappointed with myself and with civilization. I
didn't think I could cope and I didn't feel like I fit in anymore.
There was so much anti-Vietnam fervor around that I didn't talk much
about it, except to close people that knew me. And although I am a
gregarious type person and like to speak, I was fairly quiet for a few
years. I was withdrawn and just maybe scared in not knowing how to deal
with life. I went back to my job and my original job was not there. They
told me to come back in a few weeks and I never went back.
Theoretically, my job was guaranteed through the army, but I didn't make
a stink. I just left it alone. As a matter of fact, I thought they did
me a favor just to walk away. I was kind of a misfit. Also, the two
years I was away, it seemed like things had changed. FJ: How so? BB:
Well, physically, they definitely changed up in the Bronx. When I left
the Bronx, the Bronx was a livable, community-oriented place. When I
came back, it was the war zone. There were a lot of burnt out buildings,
a lot of my friends had turned into junkies, cats I played basketball
with a couple of years ago. In two years, it seemed like there was a
radical change up in the Bronx. I didn't recognize it. I thought it was
very strange how things had changed. For the most part, I thought I was
in a very safe place in Vietnam because a lot of my friends that did not
go to Vietnam, they seemed to be worse off then I was with the drugs. FJ: When did you interest in the music begin to return? BB:
That came soon after I got out of the army because I felt like I
couldn't do anything else. I felt like a lost person. I will try to make
this as clear as I can without incriminating myself. When I came home, I
was recruited by some underground group in the Bronx, an
insurrectionist kind of group, not the Black Panthers, but something
equivalent to that. There were a lot of people picking up arms and
feeling the nationalistic fervor during that period. So they came to me
and these were people that I knew and people that knew me from growing
up. They asked me if I could help them purchase weapons for them.
Generally, this was a run down South. We would get in the car and drive
at least to Maryland and Virginia, where it was easier to just buy a
weapon, handguns out of a pawnshop with very little ID, if any at all.
They wanted me to look at them and kind of inspect them because I knew
about weapons. I was a weapons expert so to speak from Vietnam. One of
these pawnshops that I went to, I walked to the back of it and there
were these violins hanging up in the back. I honestly, to this day think
I heard them calling me. So I ended up back there and saw one hanging
and asked the guy in the store how much it was and he said some price
like twenty or twenty-five dollars, which I had in my pocket. I gave it
to him and brought it home. Meanwhile, the guys I am with are looking at
me very strangely thinking that Vietnam really got to me. I would take
the violin out to the park where we played basketball and I would start
scratching on it, sounding like shit. These guys would make jokes, but
they would respectfully make them because they knew me. I met a sweet,
young girl, she was a girlfriend and I told her that I wanted to move
down to the East Village because that is where all the musicians were,
Andrew Hill, Cecil Taylor, a lot of musicians, and I needed to go where
the music was. She said that she moved with me and she did and that is
when I really started seriously undertaking my challenge in music. I
think I was twenty-one then, which is pretty old to start, but I was
very determined. Being determined about playing music helped counteract a
lot of the post-traumatic stress disorder that I had from Vietnam. It
offset it that I was focused on doing something that I devoted all my
time to it and unable to dwell in the negative aspects of Vietnam. I
couldn't stop it from my dreams, but I could do something in real life. FJ: What was the inspiration for your creative outlet? BB:
I could be very, very honest with you, Fred. At the time, I was
attending Queens College under the GI bill. One of those semester, I was
offered an exchange program. I was a pre-law student. They allowed me
to work at a legal office. I was a paralegal. I did that during the day
time for credits. When I saw all the under the table, underhanded things
that happened in the justice system, that really ran me out of society
completely. I felt badly enough because I thought what I did in Vietnam
was wrong that I didn't want to join forces with anything else that
represented that same unfairness, which was the justice system here in
America. I don't care what they say, it is basically how much money you
have. They are right, justice is blind. So I didn't want to join up
again with something that I knew would be harmful to others, so that
propelled me and threw me totally in the music. I left school after that
and stayed in this basement from sun up to sun down working on the
violin. I started getting my fingers limber and getting dexterity and
trying to find my own notes. Basically, I was relearning the violin and
teaching myself with the help of others.
FJ: Why free jazz? BB:
I did hear violins all my life. I bought the Delmark records and heard
Leroy Jenkins. Then I started hearing all the Joseph Jarman and Roscoe
Mitchell. I loved the AACM. I loved Delmark for putting them out, Muhal
Richard Abrams. This music really turned me on. It seemed very
political, very conscious for me at the time and also very free, but
with structure. So when Leroy Jenkins came to New York, I tracked him
down and I did a little study with him for about six months. It was
enough to reshape my direction. I already had a direction, but it really
straightened it. From that point on, I just kept trying to go for it.
Nobody would hire me, but that didn't stop me. I would hire myself and
hire a band and we would play at places like lofts in New York.
Eventually, loft jazz became very, very big in New York and that
catapulted my name and my career. During that period, I did all sorts of
things, sitting in with Sam Rivers at The Five Spot. I sat in with
Jackie McLean. I just had to be around the music and the cats that I
loved and respected. I was disappointed that John Coltrane passed away
because I think I would have followed him day after day after day to try
and get in his band. FJ: You spoke of the loft scene, which to the music was a pivotal, but unrecognized period in the music. BB:
It was a very big thing. I think that catapulted my name
internationally along with the David Murrays, the Henry Threadgills, the
Frank Lowes, the Lester Bowies, the Joe Bowies. A lot of us wrote our
own compositions. We weren't playing standards. The bebop guys had to
play standards to be legitimate. We were able to create our own music,
direction, and compositions that also helped to lend a more directional
input into the music. The loft jazz's impact of it came when the Newport
Jazz Festival came to New York that year and they didn't hire any of
us, so we had our own loft jazz festival. There were meetings and I
remember Archie Shepp was talking and Rashied Ali was talking. I was
very, very happy to be in New York at that time and to be around such a
powerful movement with powerful names in it, Braxton, a lot of cats, all
the cats that I love. We started setting up concerts all over, all the
places. Sam Rivers had Rivbea and Rashied Ali had Ali Alley, which is
where I played most of the time. When I played there with my Survival
group, Werner Uehlinger came from hatHUT and he signed me to do a solo
record. We were very adamant and strong about what we were doing. We
were committed in belief. The World Saxophone Quartet started. The
String Trio of New York started. Air was here. There was a lot of power
going on simultaneously. There was a movement going on. We actually saw
it in the making. I find it extremely important. The only reason why it
does not have as much importance as I see it is because a lot of the
writers didn't pick up on it. Francis Davis from Philadelphia, he did
and Stanley Crouch to some degree. There were people that picked up on
it, but it wasn't enough of a movement. The next year, George Wein hired
some of the loft guys to play at the jazz festival. I was even offered a
gig there with the String Trio. I didn't make it because I like to hold
out. I will be very honest, Fred. After I did my tour in Vietnam, I
felt above a lot of the everyday activities in this world. I faced death
and I think I had died more than once, so after that, I was sort of an
untouchable. Me with my music, I didn't feel the threatening situation
that others felt. I didn't feel obligated to have to compromise or the
necessity to have to kiss anybody's ass. I was determined to be focused
in a Billy Bang direction until today, I am the same way. I think that
strength is what kept me going, that commitment of strength, that
conviction. They didn't like the things that I did in the beginning. In
fact, I didn't like a lot of it, but I was committed enough to keep
trying and not be shot down by critics, writers, peers, whomever. FJ: These days, that kind of self-determination and integrity become liabilities. BB:
That is true. I don't see it anymore. Cats are trying to be technical.
You can exercise all your technical prowess and you sound like what's
been out already. I hear more guys sound like Clifford Brown or Freddie
Hubbard then I heard them do. That was not the thing. We were always
going for individual voices and individual sound. That is the only thing
that almost made me stop. I didn't sound like anybody. I thought I
sounded so horrible that one particular day, I was ready to smash up my
violin and I remember James Jackson from the Sun Ra band came in and
tried to recruit me and he had a long talk with me. He told me that I
had my own sound and that I had a Billy Bang sound. I took that to heart
and started working from that perspective and saying that I needed to
keep working at it and developing my sound. FJ: Judging my solely your Soul Note discography, different ensembles, various setting, you are always searching. BB:
Yes, that is true. I actually tried to outdo the last one too and
trying to see what else is there. I was just trying to supercede what I
did last and trying to tighten it up and really find exactly what I am
trying to say musically. Yes, you are right, you can follow the trail of
the albums or the CDs and see the development of Bang. FJ: You had a close association with the late Dennis Charles. BB:
Oh, God. I couldn't hardly play without Dennis during some periods.
This man knew. He could anticipate what I was about to do and he just
fit so well. We were like two peas in a pod. First of all, Fred, he
played melodic. He was a very supportive drummer. He didn't try to
outstage you or outdistance you. He was always trying to do his part to
make the music better. He was just a wonderful drummer and an
extraordinary human being. On the road, Dennis had super drug problems.
We all had some, but Dennis was a lot heavier. Just to watch him go
through Europe with me and he was sick and ill, but he did it for the
love of the music. He had been around. He had been around the Art
Blakeys and the Steve Lacys and the different cats. It was not new for
him, but a lot of it was fairly new for me. He was a secret tutor on
some levels and then he just followed me in a direction of the music
that I believed. FJ: And Frank Lowe? BB:
I first worked with Frank on his record called Lowe and Behold. That
was a real different kind of record for me to be involved with because
he was bringing people from two different camps at the same time. There
was one camp that was John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne and others and the
other camp was Joe Bowie, Phillip Wilson, Butch Morris, and myself.
What Frank Lowe did was bring everybody together on the same LP. I
thought it was really amazing that he could see that far in advance.
This was before Bill Laswell. This was way before. So that is when we
first began collaborating. He saw me really moving because Frank was my
hero and he later saw me as an equal. We talked together and did
projects together. FJ: You returned to playing solo on Commandment, not the easiest of tasks. BB:
It isn't, particularly in this music and trying to keep the interest of
yourself and the audience, but I was ready for it at that time on the
second one, as I am for a third one. I have so many projects right now
on the table, I can only do so much. My next big project is doing the
follow up to Vietnam: The Aftermath. I am slowly writing for
it, but the big push will be in August, September. On this CD, I will
include some Vietnamese musicians. FJ:Vietnam: The Aftermath is you making peace with your demons on record. BB: This was from a CD I did called Big Bang Theory
and that was Jean-Pierre's first assignment with me. During breaks and
intermissions and things, we had talked. Somehow he was interested in my
Vietnam career and I told him that I don't really talk about it, but
with him I did. I told him I thought about doing some music about it,
but never could pull myself together to approach it. Upon moving back to
America from Berlin, I came back with maybe a penny in my pocket,
literally. Thank God for my daughter because her and her husband allowed
me to stay at their house in Queens to get myself back together. I also
have to thank Kali Fasteau for hiring me during this time and giving me
some gigs. But it wasn't what I wanted to do at the time. I needed to
really regroup because it was like starting again. I was at Kali's
house, rehearsing for a gig with her and I called Justin Time up and I
was on the phone over-enthusiastically asking for a record date because I
needed the money to get myself together. This is all practical stuff I
am dealing with now. So when I talked to Jean-Pierre, he was very kind
and asked me to write about my experience in Vietnam. I wasn't in the
mood for that, but I thought about it and called him back and I agreed
to doing it. I needed an advance because I was so broke and needed to
eat and pay rent somewhere. That was such an ordeal for me, writing this
music because I had to relive Vietnam. I had to conjure up experiences
that I have been trying to runaway from since I came home. I had to face
it again and didn't know how I would react and respond. Fortunately,
for me, it made me a very mature person at that time and the music came
out honest and well. I got a lot of extra baggage off of my shoulder by
doing that record. Shit I have been carrying around, horrible thoughts
and bad flashbacks, things I have been avoiding. If I saw something like
that, I would go get drunk or use heroine or whatever. I am glad I got a
lot of that off of me. FJ: Are those demons behind you now? BB:
I think I put quite a few of them back. Not all of them, because it
will never end, but enough to function on a better level now, Fred.
Violinist
Billy Bang's new album, Vietnam the Aftermath, may be the only jazz
recording ever that lists not only the musicians' names and instruments
but also their rank and serial number.
Bang, four other players in
the eight-piece band and conductor Butch Morris are Vietnam veterans.
Bang was a combat infantryman in the First Division ("the Big Red One"),
Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, in 1967 and 1968. The
record they've made is a kind of Vietnam suite - evocative, moving and
eminently danceable in "Saigon Phunk," the last of the eight pieces on
the CD. No other extended jazz work seems to have explored the
experience of the Vietnam War, certainly not as intensely, nor does any
other art music - if that's not a killer phrase. Little or no classical
music has been written about Vietnam, either. Vietnam was a rock 'n'
roll, rhythm and blues, country and western war.
FOR
THE RECORD - An article in yesterday's Today section about the album
Vietnam the Aftermath gave the wrong date for a performance by musician
Sonny Fortune. He will appear at 4 p.m. Aug. 11 at the New Haven Lounge,
1552 Havenwood Road.
Bang,
55, and his sometime mentor Leroy Jenkins are perhaps the finest jazz
violinists since Ray Nance played with Duke Ellington. Bang was a
mainstay of avant-garde New York loft jazz in the 1970s and played
frequently with Sun Ra and his Arkestra until Ra's death in 1992. Bang
has led his own groups off and on for 25 years, and he's a prolific
composer. Times of war In Vietnam, he says, "I was
straight-up infantry. The guys who do the pounding in the boonies,
search-and-destroy missions, sweeps, take-out ambushes, pull point. I
did everything you can do in the infantry. "I did my full year, and I rotated," he says. In
the picture on the cover of Vietnam the Aftermath, his eyes look very
wary. He's stripped to the waist, he's smoking a big cigar, and he's
toting an M-60 machine gun. "That was a long time ago," he says. "I was 19 years old." As
soon as he arrived in country, as they used to say, he was dumped into
Operation Junction City, one of the biggest of the war. He was on the
Cambodian border, and he says: "I didn't know what the hell was going
on." He learned fast. "I think I was an excellent soldier,"
he says. "My ship was real ... tight. That's part of it. But the other
part is I think I was just lucky. I thought I was so good. I honestly
thought I knew more than the officers. I knew more about what was going
on in the country than they did. They were too green." And
although he was in a combat outfit, he wasn't fighting every day.
"Whenever combat appeared in my unit, we had to deal with it," he says.
"It was sufficient. It was enough to make you nervous, to make your hair
stand up on end." Before Aftermath, Bang had written only one
piece based on his Vietnam experience, "Bien Hoa Blues." His battalion's
base camp was at Bien Hoa, a city about 20 miles northeast of Saigon, a
place he rarely saw. "I was mostly in the field, the jungle," he says. He had been reluctant to confront Vietnam in his music. "I
had this idea some time ago," he says. "But I always put it off. I
think I never really, truly wanted to open that Pandora's Box. But it
was always an idea. So maybe all I needed was someone to introduce it to
me again." That turned out to be Jean Pierre Leduc, his producer
at Justin Time Records, his recording company in Montreal. Justin Time
released his last CD, Big Bang Theory. Bang had just returned from
a four-year stint in Germany, playing, teaching and holding workshops.
He was ready to get to work on a new recording. Leduc suggested a record
about his Vietnam experience. "I said whoa, whoa, man. I don't see too much art in that area of music. I don't even want to think about it. "You
know, I've sort of been afraid. I've been trying to repress those
thoughts and dreams I had since Vietnam, since I've come home. I don't
want to think about that stuff every day. It haunts you from time to
time, so I don't like to keep it in the forefront of my mind."
But he thought maybe it was the time to move ahead. He agreed to write the music. "I
had to conjure up all these dark thoughts I had been hiding away from
myself and deal directly with it, or at least contemplate and think
about it," he says. "This time, maybe it took this many years, it wasn't
as painful as I thought it would be, and also I think it sort of cured
me in a strange kind of way." He incorporated "Bien Hoa Blues" into Aftermath and wrote seven pieces in about three months. "I
do think of it as a body of work that's related and interconnected," he
says. "There is a theme running through the songs, and that's Vietnam.
It was pretty intense. In each individual song, I really applied myself
and my thoughts to it. I didn't want to cheat anybody. Including
myself." He tried to find a balance between African-American and Asian music. The
very first note of the opening song "Yo! Ho Chi Minh is in the House"
is a deep-throated bellow from Frank Lowe's sax that sounds like the
grunt of a horn in a Buddhist temple.
And
his "Moments for the KIAMIA" is an extraordinarily moving jazz elegy
for the dead and missing, not unworthy of being compared to Django, the Modern Jazz Quartet's lament for Django Reinhardt, or Lennie Tristano's Requiem for Charlie Parker. "It was moving
for us," Bang says. "For me in particular and for the band in general.
We all, individually, thought of someone we knew who either was killed
or missing in action. In playing the music we all sensed that, I guess.
It brought some of us to tears." Veteran musicians He wanted
to have all Vietnam veterans playing his music, but that proved to be
impossible. Still, he got five: Frank Lowe, the tenor sax player; Ted
Daniel, trumpet; Ron Brown, percussion; Michael Carvin, drums; and Butch
Morris, conductor.
John
Hicks, piano; Sonny Fortune, flute; and Curtis Lundy, bass, are not
Vietnam veterans. (Fortune, incidentally, plays Sunday at the New Haven
Lounge, in Northwood Shopping Center.) Not all the vets saw
combat. Lowe was a military policeman in Saigon, for example. But as
Bang says, "Just being `in country' made you nervous." Aftermath
has been widely acclaimed. Gary Giddins, jazz critic, biographer of
Louis Armstrong and adviser to the Ken Burns documentary Jazz, called it
an album of rare power, an "original and masterly achievement." A counselor in Albuquerque, N.M., told Bang he played it for his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder group. "They liked the record."
Billy
Bang, shown shown here in a 1999 performance at the Vision Festival in
New York, played multiple times in D.C. Courtesy Michael
Wilderman. jazzvisionsphotos.com
by Marc Minsker
Capitalbop
Jazz violinist Billy Bang passed away earlier this
month at the age of 63, a victim of lung cancer. Bang led a life full of
intensity – both on the stage and off.
The first time I presented this masterful musician in concert in
D.C., I gained some insight into his complex character. A man who’d
battled personal demons as well as the Vietcong, Billy Bang was quite
possibly the greatest jazz violinist of his generation. More frenetic
than Leroy Jenkins but equally skilled in his
improvisational sense, he had an amazing stage presence and brilliant
charisma that had to be seen to be believed. Offstage, he had an
irascible streak to him that many friends traced back to a torturous
tour of duty in Vietnam.
I’d had the opportunity to see Bang perform several times during the
late ’90s at the Vision Festival in New York City. Then in 2001, after
an arrangement was made with Arts for Art in New York, musicians from
the Vision Festival were transported down to D.C., where they performed
over the course of three nights at what was then known as Gallery 505 on
7th Street (now it’s the Red Velvet Cupcakery). Two years in a row, the
“mini” Vision Fest was held in Washington, and both years the lineup
was outstanding. All told, the two festivals included the Billy Bang Trio, Vattel Cherry, the Joseph Jarman & Sabu Toyozumi Duo, the William Parker & Hamid Drake Duo, the Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre Group, the Ellen Christi & William Parker Duo, Noumenal Lingam and Auto Looming.
At that time, the Billy Bang Trio included Joe Fonda on bass and Abbey Rader
on drums. I’ll never forget when they rolled into town and pulled up on
the afternoon of May 22, 2001. Billy was the first out of the minivan.
“Gotta pee, man!” he shouted as he ran through the door of Gallery 505
to the john. Abbey and Joe strolled in quietly, subdued and laidback. As
I inquired about their ride down from New York, Joe told me that Billy
was “bursting at the seams” to reach D.C.
PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED TRACK: Billy Bang Trio, [Unknown title] (live at D.C.’s Gallery 505; May 22, 2001) Anyone who knew Billy can attest to his anxious mannerisms and
his seemingly nervous energy. As Abbey and Joe loaded in their
equipment, Billy paced back and forth, smoking a cigarette and inquiring
about accommodations for the two nights he’d be in town. “You’ll be
staying at one of our patrons’ houses: a beautiful five bedroom house
that sits on Rock Creek Park,” I said. Billy pulled on his cigarette and
raised an eyebrow. “Wait a second,” he said. “Whose house?” I explained
how all of the touring musicians stayed at her house, that she was
divorced and lived alone, and that the accommodations were more than
adequate. “Alright Minsker,” he said, “but if it’s a bum deal you’re
getting me a hotel room.”
Bang’s skepticism and questioning eye seemed right in line with the
personal background of this gifted musician and sometimes tormented
soul. After dropping out of high school in the Bronx in 1965, Bang was
drafted by the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam, where he saw his fair
share of combat and devastation. According to friends who knew him prior
to his Vietnam experience, the war “inexplicably changed him.” Upon
returning to the United States, it was through music that he tried to
forget the experience. Just a few weeks before he arrived in D.C. for
the Gallery 505 show, Bang had recorded a collection of eight original pieces with five other Vietnam vets. The resultant album, Vietnam: The Aftermath,
fuses jazz with southeast Asian music, and its recording served as a
type of healing process for the musicians. Many consider it a
masterpiece.
The D.C. performance on the night of May 22 was well received, the
venue packed to the gills. Billy was working the room with sweeping
smiles to match his sweeping bow and swinging melodies. Joe and Abbey
are talented players who provided a strong platform on which Billy could
perform his musical gymnastics. As Abbey remembers, “Billy had endless
power on the stage. I’m guilty of creating bigger and bigger circles and
more and more intensity, but Billy always climbed up another notch over
that … It seems we were boundless.”
After their performance, we were back stage and I went to settle up
with Billy. We were standing next to his bandmates when I handed over a
wad of cash: “$1500 was the take tonight,” I told him. Billy grabbed my
arm and said, “Come with me.” He pulled me into the small bathroom in
the back of Gallery 505 (one sink, one toilet), shut the door and
explained that he’d learned early on “never to take any money that you
haven’t counted out personally.” After he’d finished counting the money,
we both emerged from the bathroom, me feeling a little awkward but
Billy smiling from the successful gig.
After a late dinner and some drinks (Abbey always kept an eye on
Billy’s intake), we returned to the host’s house. Everyone went in to
drop off their bags and get settled; I chatted with Billy outside while
he smoked a cigarette. We spoke about his time at the Stockbridge School
– a progressive boarding school in Western Massachusetts, where Bang
attended for two years along with the likes of Arlo Gutherie and Chevy
Chase. He had mixed feelings about the school, known for its early
integration, racially mixed classes and unique curriculum. “They tried
to be this United Nations school,” he recalled, “but they were so far
removed from an urban environment, they really didn’t know much about
Black people.” He dropped out after two years to return to the Bronx.
I thanked him for a great performance and told him that I’d be
heading home. No sooner had I started my car than he came running back
out of the house. He bolted up to the car window and seemed more anxious
than before: “C’mon man, you gotta be kidding me, right? The lady’s got
no TV! Not a single one in that big house.” I offered him a place at my
apartment, but he preferred to stay with the band. With reluctance, he
walked slowly back into the house, giving me a sour look as he shut the
door.
The next morning, I showed up around 10 a.m. Joe and Abbey were up,
having tea with their host. When I asked her what had become of Billy,
she said, “Still sleeping. He was up all night listening to the radio.”
An hour or so later, Bang emerged from one of the guest rooms with a
smile on his face, and after the host gave him some tea and Muesilix, we
all headed out for a car tour of D.C. After we left the house, Billy
piped up: “Last night was fine, but tonight, you’re getting me a hotel
room, Minsker.”
The rest of the band’s D.C. stay was uneventful, and Billy was cheery
and talkative through the day, holding forth on everything from the
shadow government being run by reptiles to the plight of Mike Tyson.
That night, when I dropped him off at a rather low-down motel just south
of Reagan National Airport, he was almost ecstatic as I handed him the
key. “Now you’re cooking with grease!” Before I left, he asked, “What
time is checkout?” I told him noon, and he clarified: “So if you’re
paying for the room up till then, don’t pick me up till 12.”
***
A little over a year later, Billy Bang returned to D.C. to perform in a Transparent Production gig with Kahil El’Zabar at
Sangha in Takoma Park. This was in November 2001, just weeks after the
release of what some have called his magnum opus, the haunting album Vietnam: The Aftermath.
In addition to the Transparent show, I was able to arrange a gig for
the following day: a free daytime performance on the National Mall.
After going through the Parks system, we got a permit to set up a
makeshift performance space on the lower steps of the Lincoln Memorial,
with a power cord supplied for Billy’s amplifier. The event was called
“An Offering of Peace: For Those Who Lost Their Lives.” Little did we
know our event would coincide with the ending of that year’s U.S. World
Peace Walk, in which some 50 or so participants had walked from New York
City to Washington, D.C.
Although there were certainly fans who came out for Billy and Kahil,
there were also quite a number of peaceniks from the Peace Walk hanging
around. After a powerful performance, including Kahil’s spoken-word
improvisations and call-and-response with Billy’s violin, the two
musicians hung around and talked with fans and other pedestrians on the
Mall, including several Vietnam vets clad in motorcycle gear. At one
point, Billy was smoking a cigarette with a young hippie who was part of
the Peace Walk. I overheard Billy saying to the kid, who couldn’t have
been more than 20 years old, “Man, that’s terrible … walking all that
way.” The peacenik explained the concept and the significance of the
walk and Billy perked up, “Oh, that’s cool then.” He immediately offered
the stranger a ride back to New York, as he and Kahil were leaving that
afternoon.
Over the past decade, I saw Billy several more times, in concert in
Baltimore and New York. Although he was no more than an acquaintance, he
was always warm and friendly, recounting details from his times in
Washington. When I gave him a CD of the Billy Bang Trio set from Gallery
505, he was overly appreciative and told me, “As long as you aren’t
making money off of it, why don’t you release it?”
Unfortunately, we never did release the 70-plus minutes of music from
that night. But above you can find the first publicly available track
from this performance by a modern American master in the nation’s
capital. It is a city whose leaders sent Billy Bang into a war that
would stir him to create high art – at a very high price.
On April 10, 2011, the music world lost one of the foremost innovators
of the violin, Billy Bang. In addition to boldly pushing the
instrument's boundaries, he is one of the rare jazz players who left an
indelible mark on it. The Finnish TUM label posthumously released Bang's
swan song, recorded a mere two months before his untimely death from
lung cancer. Da Bang! is a sublime album of rich
harmonies, multifaceted emotions, and tight, intellectually stimulating
spontaneity. The lone original, "Daydreams," is also its centerpiece,
opening with pianist Andrew Bemkey's
wistful and nocturnesque sonata that shimmers in muted colors. Bang's
eloquent and longing strings unfold with intense expressiveness and
nostalgic flair. Bassist Hilliard Greene's
deeply lyrical and pensive reverberations enhance the edgy and subtle
melancholy. Out of this somber atmosphere, Bang's exhilarating, free
flowing violin emerges with an energetic virtuosity that imbues its
delightful atonality with exuberance tinged with a touch of sorrow. Saxophonist Sonny Rollins'
classic "St Thomas" closes the CD on a festive note, Bang's playful
violin leading the band in a series of bright and effervescent sonic
pirouettes. Trombonist Dick Griffin's
ardent and rough hewn sound adds a sun-drenched warmth to the piece
while Greene handles the bass with the facility of a large guitar as he
pours forth remarkably intricate and tuneful pizzicato tones. Drummer Newman Taylor Baker's marching and swinging beats conclude the cut with extroverted acrobatics full of joie de vivre. Bang's melodic and African-tinged muscular violin opens trumpeter Don Cherry's
"Guinea." As he builds raw and haunting poetry with his slapping and
bowing, elements of 20th century western classical music enter his
intricate solo. He leads the group in a hypnotic and lilting refrain
that expands on the intriguing musical ideas that form the tune's core.
Griffin's bluesy growl adds an earthiness to the melody, while Taylor-
Baker's visceral polyrhythms bring a primal timelessness to it. The track contrasts nicely with altoist Ornette Coleman
penned "Law Years." This darker and more elegiac composition features
Bemkey's intelligent and heady pianism, which flows mystically over the
bass-and-drum duo's raggedy and organic beats. Bang's own improvisation
is perhaps the most intriguingly aspect of the record. His passionate
pyrotechniques are tempered by a contemplative solemnity, combining
maturity and an intrepid spirit. This landmark release comes with
liner notes full of informative and though-provoking essays by the
likes of poet Amiri Baraka and writer Quincy Troupe, as well as session
photos and musician profiles. The blues-inspired abstract cover art fits
the music perfectly, and the disc itself is both a memorial for Bang
and a reminder that his creative legacy is very much alive.
Track Listing: Da Bang; Guinea; Daydreams; Law Years; All Blues; St Thomas. Personnel: Billy Bang: violin; Dick Griffin: trombone; Andrew Bemkey: piano;
Hilliard Greene: bass;
Newman Taylor-Baker: drums.
With his previous record, Vietnam: The Aftermath, violinist,
veteran, and anti-war activist Billy Bang exorcized some of the demons
that continued to haunt him for thirty years following his return from a
tour of duty in Vietnam in the '60s. With Vietnam: Reflections,
an album that blends traditional Vietnamese folk melodies with modal
grooves and tender ballads, he moves further towards reconciliation. It
doesn't exactly shake any musical foundations, but that's not the point
of this deeply personal project that finds Bang surrounded by a number
of other Vietnam veterans—trumpeter Ted Daniels, drummer Michael Carvin,
percussionist Ron Brown, and conductor Butch Morris in addition to
pianist John Hicks, saxophonist/flautist James Spaulding,
multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill (this time heard solely on
flute), and bassist Curtis Lundy. The inclusion of singer Co Boi
Nguyen and Nhan Thanh Ngo on dan tranh, a sixteen-string zither, finds
Bang moving towards a point that, despite experiences that have
inexorably altered the lives of Americans and Vietnamese alike, also
looks to moving on and finding nexus points between two very different
cultures. Bang's own compositions are informed with a significant shade
of blue and fashion their melodies after Oriental pentatonics in the
same way that Coltrane integrated Indian harmonies in his music. And by
interspersing them with traditional Vietnamese songs, Bang creates a
moving work that, even with its sometimes melancholic nature, is
ultimately filled with hope and healing.
Even the structure of the album is pointed towards resolution and a
joining of cultures. "Reflections starts with a modal vamp that gets
moving in a relaxed way, with Bang's oriental-informed theme not
entering until nearly the two-minute mark. This piece, like the third
track, the equally groove-based and modal "Lock & Load, is more
about creating a simple, open-ended context for the soloists, rather
than any developed compositional concerns. But the interspersing of the
traditional pieces "Ru Con and "Ly Ngua O —performed by Nguyen, Ngo, and
Bang—after "Reflections and "Lock & Load, respectively, paints a
picture of cultural division, at least at first. But then the
haunting ballad "Doi Moi paves the way for the first of two takes on
"Reconciliation 1, where the American and Vietnamese musicians finally
join together and, for the rest of the nearly seventy-minute record,
even when the musicians go their own separate ways—as they do on the
beautiful "Waltz of the Water Puppets and the traditional "Trong Com
—the precedent has been set, so that by the time of the album's closer, a
more upbeat reading of "Reconciliation 2, the mood has become
considerably brighter. While Bang first got his credentials in
more avant-garde and free jazz settings, his most recent work has moved
closer to the centre, sounding more mainstream and certainly more
approachable. Still, despite the more straight-ahead direction of Vietnam: Reflections,
there's no sense of pandering. Instead it's all about finding common
ground and the potential for beauty in the simplest of contexts.
Track Listing: Reflections; Ru Con; Lock & Load; Ly Ngua O;
Doi Moi; Reconciliation 1; Waltz of the Water Puppets; Trong Com;
Reconciliation 2
Personnel: Billy Bang (violin); James Spaulding (alto sax, flute);
Henry Threadgill (flute); Ted Daniel (trumpet); Butch Morris
(conductor); John Hicks (piano); Curtis Lundy (bass); Michael Carvin
(drums); Ron Brown (percussion); Co Boi Nguyen (vocalist); Nhan Thanh
Ngo (dan tranh)
Title: Vietnam: Reflections
| Year Released: 2005
| Record Label: Justin Time Records
Music
- Soundboard - Billy Bang - Who else: AbbeyRader also is on the bill. -
When: 8 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Rogers Room, Keene Hall, Rollins
College, Winter Park. - What it costs: $8.
November 6, 1998 by Parry Gettleman Orlando Sentinel
Billy Bang is one of the foremost violinists in jazz, internationally recognized for a unique style that combines intellectual and technical rigor with the fierce emotion and melodic beauty of blues and gospel. But as a little kid growing up in Harlem, Bang hated the violin. `Hated it. Hated it,'' Bang repeated, speaking from his present home
base in Berlin, Germany. (Bang's first-ever tour of the Southeast
brings him to Rollins College Saturday with formidable
drummer-percussionist Abbey Rader.)
Bang had wanted to join the school band but, as a gifted child, was assigned to the orchestra and issued a violin. ``My
friends were coming out with drumsticks, mouthpieces and stuff, and all
I wanted was something rhythmic, something black,'' Bang said. ``I had
to carry this [thing) down 117th Street in Harlem, and they called me a
sissy. They were trying to feel my [behind) and stuff! I hated that. But
it taught me to become a good boxer.
ADVERTISEMENT
I probably could've become one of
the bestboxers in the world, thanks to the violin! ... The violin
brought me a lot of trouble - and a lot of life. In this monstrous
world, the violin really saved me.''As a young man, Bang tried to abandon the violin. Then he was sent off to Vietnam. ``I
came home out of the Army, and I was so angry at my government, at our
government, that all I wanted to do was do insurrection, at all costs.
Because I was willing to give my life up for some ideological
misunderstanding, something I had no concept of, I should be willing to
give it up for my people, for my blackness, for my stature or
nationhood,'' Bang explained. He joined a radical group but turned
into a different kind of radical after he was sent down to Baltimore
with some other men to buy guns. ``We went into a pawn shop - and I saw violins in the corner,'' Bang remembered, a note of awe lingering in his voice. He bought a violin instead of a gun. ``The
guys in the car were very [ticked) off at me,'' Bang said with a laugh.
``We were supposed to do a bank thing, but I picked the violin up and
didn't go do the bank thing. And one of them got killed, and another was
shot in the arm. I didn't do it. The violin saved my life.'' Still,
Bang didn't decide to devote himself completely to the violin until he
had a run-in with the legal system - while interning as a paralegal in
preparation for law school. He was representing an elderly woman before
the housing
court in an eviction case and lost because the landlord's daughter and
her fiance testified that they would need the apartment after their
imminent marriage. Bang said he was terribly despondent. Nevertheless,
when he saw the young woman in the corridor, he told her he hoped she
would enjoy her honeymoon. ``She said, `What honeymoon?''' Bang
recalled. Then he learned the ``fiance'' was a stranger paid to
participate in a legal charade. Disillusioned with the system, Bang decided to stay as far away from ``hierarchies and stratifications'' as possible.
``I
said, `OK, I give this up; I'm going to go to the Geige,'' Bang said,
using the German word for the violin. ``Until I realized I couldn't play
it, and then I tried to break it!'' Fortunately, a member of Sun
Ra's Arkestra, the late James Jacson, would not allow Bang to break his
instrument, saying Bang did ``something very original'' with the violin. Others
soon came to appreciate Bang's innovative style. He not only played
with the Arkestra on and off for seven years but also became an
important figure on New York's avant-garde scene in the '70s, working
with the likes of Leroy Jenkins and Sam Rivers and helping found the
String Trio of New York. As a leader, Bang has recorded many
well-regarded albums, featuring bandmates such as Andrew Cyrille, Roy
Campbell, William Parker, Michele Rosewoman, Wilber Morris, Denis
Charles, Butch Morris and Frank Lowe. Bang's extraordinarily diverse
catalog ranges from A Tribute to Stuff Smith, a celebration of the jazz
violin pioneer, to the free solo explorations of last year's Commandment
to the funky hip-hop jazz of another 1997 release, Forbidden Planet. Coming
next from Bang are an album he recorded with Rader and an album to be
produced by the enigmatic Kip Hanrahan. Bang is also much in demand as a
performer in Europe and finds the career he adopted out of youthful
idealism now earns him a comfortable living. It may also bring him a
film role - he's scheduled to do a screen test in Paris for a movie that
includes characters based on Bang, David Murray and Kahil El Zabar. ``I'm
very lucky right now,'' Bang said. ``For some reason, once you hit this
age, 50, either it goes all downhill or starts moving somewhere else,
and at the moment I'm moving somewhere else in a very positive
direction.''
Billy Bang first came to
prominence in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s, as one of the few jazz
musicians playing the violin. He co-founded the acclaimed String Trio of
New York, then went on to make a number of records under his own name,
always a vital member of New York’s downtown improvisational scene. His
career gained new attention in 2001, when he released the first of two
albums that dealt with an aspect of his life that until then had not
been touched in his music: his time in the Vietnam War. Born William Vincent Walker in 1947, Billy’s family
moved to the Bronx when he was an infant. As a child, he was first able
to play music at a school he attended in Harlem. Students there were
assigned instruments according to their size; so being of slight build,
Billy received a violin rather than his preference, the saxophone or
drums. He later earned a scholarship to a prep school in Massachusetts,
where he not only gave up playing the violin, but also encountered
racism and class disparities with his privileged classmates. He returned
to the Bronx, and at the age of 18, received his draft notice. Billy
served in the infantry, including in the Tet Offensive, attaining the
rank of sergeant during the course of a tour of duty. After being
mustered out, he dealt with a number of war-related psychological
problems that the Veterans’ Administration of that time was seemingly
ill-equipped to address. He briefly studied law at Queens College,
before becoming involved with a mysterious revolutionary group who
called upon his military expertise to help them buy guns. On one such
buying trip to Baltimore, he instead bought violins from the pawnshop he
was visiting—and thus his life in music was reborn. In his subsequent twenty-five years as a musician,
Billy has made two Vietnam-themed albums, both on Canada’s Justin Time
label: 2001’s Vietnam: the Aftermath (on which he played with musicians
who were mostly fellow veterans) and 2004’s Vietnam: Reflections, which
included contributions from Vietnamese musicians. Pulse: I’m going to start off with sort of an abstract
question, but that’ll get us rolling, anyway. How would you characterize
the relationship between music and traumatic events, whether personal
or political? In your view, what is music’s role in healing? Billy Bang: Speaking from a very personal point of
view, since I have been playing music, it seems to have helped my
personal traumatic event, my time in the war, in Vietnam. I believe it
culminated to more of a formidable help for me when I started writing
about the experience through music. In other words, I had to think more
about it, and bring it to the forefront of my mind. I’d been avoiding
it, not wanting to face that part of my life, and it’d been stewing in
me like a cancer. But once I was obligated, in 2000, to deal with it
directly, that’s when I saw a big change in my own personal healing. You address this in the liner notes to Vietnam: the Aftermath
when you write: “This project has been in my mind for at least thirty
years. My inability to confront my personal demons, my experiences in
Vietnam, has been a continuous struggle.” And a little later, you say
that because of this: “At night I would experience severe nightmares of
death and destruction, and during the day, I lived a kind of undefined
ambiguous daydream.” I was wondering if you could talk a little more
about that, about the ways that not confronting this, of not expressing
it, affected your life during that time. Well, I think it really hurt a lot of my life between the time I came
home and the time I wrote Vietnam: the Aftermath. The years seemed to
just go by like a fog. When people were speaking with me, or to me, I
didn’t know if I was really speaking to them, or hearing them. I was
trying to avoid a lot of things. I didn’t want to face the reality of
the problem I had. I tried to seek help, though. I went to see different
psychologists, through the Veterans’ Administration, the hospital, but
for some reason I didn’t seem to relate to the psychologists themselves.
I couldn’t understand how they [could] wear my shoes during that time
and understand what I [was] dealing with. They had all the books in the
world to help them understand me, but I just could not relate to them,
not living like I had lived, coming up in the ghetto, coming up with a
single mom, and onto Vietnam. So I dismissed what they said, I just
dismissed it. I never stayed long enough to get any real help. Maybe I
never gave people the proper chance or opportunity. I think a lot of it was my fault. I did well, bringing up a family,
but I think I could have done a lot better. It’s difficult to
differentiate the problems; I don’t always know if I’m having a personal
problem with a person, or if Vietnam is haunting me at that moment.
Honestly, it wasn’t until 2000 that I felt that I was reborn to the
innocence that I remember when I was 17 years old. As though I lived
through 30 years of my life—and anything in between was a big fog for
me. You say also in those liner notes that the project finally
happened only when it was suggested by Jean-Pierre Leduc of your record
label, Justin Time. Do you think you would have eventually done an album
like this anyway, or did it take an outside catalyst like that to make
it happen? I’ve always wanted to do this. But I didn’t have the finances or the
courage to try. “Bien Hoa Blues,” which is on the CD, was written 20
years earlier. That had always been in my mind. But I was under the gun
when he offered it to me. I had just moved back from Berlin, back to
America. I was at my daughter’s house, and I’m sure her and her husband
were getting sick of me. I needed finances badly. But even when they
suggested that project, I didn’t take it; I told them I would get back
to them. To me, it was too personal to put in public. I never wanted to
talk about it; most veterans don’t talk about Vietnam. Most veterans
from any war don’t talk about it. That’s true. Both of my grandfathers were in the Second World
War, and they would tell stories about their military service, but
about the actual fighting, they would never say anything. Right. When you have these horrible incidents and nightmares, you’re
not proud of them, you don’t even want to talk about them, you know? I
never wanted to publicly think about it. I was under the gun though, as I
said, I needed the money badly. So I tried to reverse it on them and
make some demands, ask them for X amount of dollars up front. I told
them it would allow me to concentrate on the music and not have to make
me hustle and work for rent and food; I could just focus on this
project, and get it done in a reasonable time. They agreed, so the ball
was back in my court. You mentioned a minute ago the other vets and others who have
gone through this experience, and I saw in one interview that you said,
“We weren’t really fighting for any nationalistic cause. We were
fighting to get the hell out of there, at least I was.“
Right. And get back home in one piece. Hopefully.
Was that attitude widespread? No it was not widespread. Maybe [among] a lot of the minority cats.
But no, there was a lotta guys over there from the John Wayne syndrome,
people who were fighting for America. It’s really hard for a black
American to think of oneself as an American. We’d just started voting –
we were still seeing dogs and water-hoses being put on us—this was right
during the Civil Rights movement. It seems that over the years most of the media images of the
Vietnam War centered on the experiences of white soldiers. What was it
like being a black soldier during this time? I don’t know why it was centered on white soldiers;
although we make up 20% of the population, I think we probably made up
40% of that war. But statistics are not my thing. We were drafted. And
it was that, or go to jail for five years. It was just pretty much the
lesser of the two evils. It was not like, “Wow, let me go join this
conflict because, whoa, we gotta save our country.” There are some
people who might’ve believed that. “Let’s go fight communism,” or
something. It was only after I came out of the war that I found out it
was basically being fought for multiple conglomerates with capitalistic
concepts. I didn’t know these things before I went into the war. The
Pentagon Papers coming out really spelled that out for everybody. Yeah,
but you see, I went in the service in ’66; a lot of people became a bit
more educated in the early seventies. Even I did. In the late sixties, I
was in a neighborhood where the elderly black folk were still under the
concept of people such as W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP. Their concept
was to go into the army – it’s only good for a person – rather than
being out in the streets, doing nothing. That was the general concept. But if I would have looked further into DuBois… he went back on his
own word about “closed ranks.” In 1917 he wrote this article, about
Blacks should join the army for World War I… And the year that they came
home after the war, 1919, was called the red summer; that was the time
of the most lynchings this country has ever seen. If I had been
knowledgeable of these things, then I would have had a way to make an
opinion based on factual things, based on the yin and the yang of
education, or balance. I had just the one, straight ahead, narrow minded
type concept that I was getting from everybody. Everybody except my
mother, I have to tell you that. She’s the one who made me sit in front
of the t.v. so I could watch Malcolm X; she’s the one who showed me this
black person being handcuffed because he resisted the war. She was the
one who was trying to turn me to [avoiding the war by going to]
Montreal. She was the only person that would point me in that direction.
And I regret it to this day that I didn’t listen to her. You spoke a minute ago about coming into that situation from
the Civil Rights movement. Many people see this time as also having a
profound influence on the music being made. One example is how jazz had
become freer and more exploratory during the ‘60’s, a time when black
people were fighting for their freedom in the Civil Rights movement. It was all under the banner of liberation. Liberation in the
struggle, liberation through the music. It’s probably why I went to that
style of music, because it was radical and it was against the system,
it was something very new in our heads. Even then, the elder black folks
in the neighborhood did not like John Coltrane: couldn’t stand him. And
they didn’t like the later recordings of Miles Davis; he was also
considered an enemy. We were going to our local candy store and we had a
Coltrane tape up loud—not super loud, like the way kids have today—but
where you could hear it. And the guy said, “Turn that off. Get that
outta my store. Don’t ever come back in here again with that awful blah,
blah, blah.” He was into, maybe, Charlie Parker, or something like
that. But even those guys were radical for their time. So everyone has
their different points, but once you get settled and satisfied in your
area, it’s hard to move on to newer things. And that’s true for
everybody; that’s beyond ethnicity and religion and things. Once you
become comfortable in your area, it’s hard to move on. I never became
comfortable, I was always looking, searching. Do I have it right that you didn’t play any music during the war? No, not at all. God, no. Not one note. The only music I played was
the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire. Music was the furthest thing from
my mind. So you didn’t get to hear any of the Vietnamese music either, then? Not that I remember. I remember hearing it only in
Saigon, which I very rarely went to, because it was off limits for us,
but we had to pass through there to go to R&R. It was only after the
war that I made a conscious effort to try to seek it out because I felt
very guilty about trying to hurt people who never did anything to hurt
me. I tried to learn more about the people who I was badly misinformed
about, tried to share, or learn from them so I can share, in the future,
and understand. Because it’s misunderstanding and ignorance that brings
us to war and to hate. I thought the more I could learn and understand,
the less ignorance I would have and the less hatred I would have,
especially [concerning] the people I was forced to fight. Can you give us any insight on what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on what you went through? I see the same problem today as we did then. I think
it’s worse today, though, to be honest. Because it’s beyond
nationalism, it’s a religious situation now. It’s jihad for them, for
the Afghans and the Iraqis. They feel people tramping on their religion,
on their life, on their whole being. So they’re fighting with every
tooth and nail to counteract that. And I think even the Vietnamese
didn’t have that much counteraction in them. And also the style of war
is different. We didn’t have that many explosives on the road, ,
I.E.D.’s. There were a lot of booby traps that were meant to kill, but
these folks are dealing with so many explosives; there’s so much maiming
going on. So it’s a more horrific type war, I think. And for those who
are not being hit, just watching this and experiencing this, I think
their nightmares are much more traumatic. All wars are bad, but I
somehow think the one today is even worse. Cause I can fight a guy about
money, but I wouldn’t want to fight a guy about his religion. I’ve read that you first started playing the
violin by chance, since in your school’s orchestra you were each
assigned instruments based on your size. But you’ve stuck with it over
the decades, even relearning it after not playing for years. When I came out of Vietnam, I really wanted to play
music. I thought that was the safest and the purest thing I could do
without hurting another person in life. Maybe there’s something I can do
to bring some happiness and some joy. I tried the flute, but I just
couldn’t get it under my grasp; the only instrument I truly know
something about is the violin. I know it’s not jazz; but I believe you
can take any instrument and get your inner thoughts and your inner
feelings to come out through that instrument. It’s a vehicle. So I went
back to the violin. I just dedicated my life to trying to play music. I
left the materialistic world. I didn’t have to drive a big, bright red
Cadillac around the streets of Harlem, and have nice, shiny alligator
shoes and a silk suit. I didn’t care about those things anymore. I just
wanted to try to bring some peace and harmony into the world, because it
would redeem my own soul. I don’t really know how much this has been
made public knowledge yet, so I ask on behalf of our readers who don’t
know, but I know from having been talking to you that you’ve recently
been diagnosed with cancer, and are going through some pretty intensive
treatments for it. How are you doing? Not so great. I’m just hoping I can get through this
and hopefully I can lick it and it won’t come back, but I’m not quite
sure. Because it is a process. It’s actually lung cancer I’m dealing
with. That doesn’t seem so positive to me, but… I do all I can out here.
But maybe I’ve done all I could for the world. There’s not much I can
say about it; it’s just God’s way, you know. And this cancer is due to exposure to Agent Orange—am I right about that? Well, I also smoked cigarettes for all this time,
but I started in Vietnam. So that’s part of it. And the other part, too,
is that they believe it was because I was exposed to the Agent Orange
in Vietnam. So your time in Vietnam is still profoundly affecting you, in life-changing ways, even after all these years? Sure, that’s true. Yes, that’s really true. I gave
up on trying to fight it, and now I just have to accept that it’s going
to be this way.
Billy Bang, a Vietnam war veteran, used music to express his harrowing
experiences of prejudice, violence and isolation. Photograph: TUM
Records
As the instrument often taken to represent the soul of western
classical music, the violin has seemed untouchable to many jazz artists.
However, a few have sidestepped its symbolic status to put this
dazzling sound-source to their own improvisatory uses. The swing
musicians Joe Venuti, Stuff Smith and Stéphane Grappelli were
jazz-violin pioneers in the 1930s and 40s; Jean-Luc Ponty and Didier
Lockwood introduced a rock-influenced fusion in the 1970s; and others
took the violin into the sometimes abrasively uncompromising world
of free improvisation: Billy Bang, who has died of lung cancer aged 63,
was one of the most respected, skilful and influential. Bang's playing sometimes erupted with a jackhammering, snaredrum-like
percussiveness, his solos jostling with undertones, unexpectedly
baroque flourishes and implied harmonies that darted like shoals of fish
around and under the dominant melodic line. But as well as a "sheets of
sound" approach that could suggest the saxophone soliloquies of John
Coltrane, Bang could also exhibit a wheedling, mischievous quality,
reminiscent of the soprano sax lines of Steve Lacy. Bang was a genuine
original, whose radicalism of method was always balanced by a powerful
lyrical sense, a driving inner beat and the earthiness of the blues. He
was born William Vincent Walker in Mobile, Alabama, and in early
childhood moved to Harlem, New York, with his mother. He learned the
violin at the prep school he attended on a scholarship. There, he gained
his nickname (from a cartoon character), played with the folk singer
Arlo Guthrie and taught himself drums and flute. Frontline military
service in Vietnam had a seismic effect on Bang; being small in stature,
his job was to confront North Vietnamese soldiers in boobytrapped
tunnels with just a flashlight and a .45 pistol.
Drugs, alcohol and mental distress dogged Bang on his return
to the US. While living in the Bronx, New York, he became involved with a
revolutionary political group. On a trip to a pawnshop to buy guns, he
ended up choosing a $25 violin instead. An older violinist, Leroy
Jenkins (an early free-jazz exponent who became his teacher), inspired
him to believe that through music he could express his harrowing
experiences of racism, violence and isolation.
With Jenkins's encouragement, Bang became a key figure in New York's
informal "loft jazz" scene of the 1970s – though at the outset he knew
comparatively little of the jazz tradition and was yet to embrace the
work of Coltrane or Ornette Coleman, the saxophonists who were to become
powerful influences. In a 2005 interview with Jazz
Times, Bang recalled his epiphany as being a simple realisation: "I'm
determined to become a musician now. Not a violinist, but a jazz
musician who happens to play that instrument." In 1977, following sessions at the experimental La MaMa theatre,
Bang co-founded the String Trio of New York, with the guitarist James
Emery and the bassist John Lindberg. This was to become a seminal group
operating on the borders of classical chamber music and free
improvisation. It passed through several incarnations after Bang left in
1986, with the jazz-violin star Regina Carter becoming one of its most
celebrated later members. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Bang performed in America and Europe,
often with senior figures from the first wave of free jazz (including
the trumpeter Don Cherry, the saxophonists Frank Lowe and Sam Rivers,
and the drummer Dennis Charles). He also played in the avant-funk
drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson's group Decoding Society in the late 70s,
and alongside the fierce, Hendrix-like guitarist Sonny Sharrock in Bill
Laswell's fearsome punk-jazz ensemble Material in 1981. Bang formed several genre-crossing jazz and improv co-operatives,
such as the free-bop group the Jazz Doctors (with Lowe) and the
rap-influenced Forbidden Planet. He was popular in Europe, having
regularly toured the continent from 1977 onwards. The Italian label Soul
Note released much of his best work, including the mercurial Rainbow
Gladiator in 1981 (with the saxophonist Charles Tyler and the pianist
Michele Rosewoman) and Tribute to Stuff Smith (1992), which featured the
free-jazz bandleader Sun Ra, another experimenter with deep traditional
roots, in a rare sideman's role. Bang had performed with the Sun Ra
Arkestra in the 1980s. He relocated to Berlin in 1996, and also shifted to the Canadian
label Justin Time – a move that brought the violinist closer to a
lyrical standard-song style than at any time in his career. At Justin
Time, the producer Jean-Pierre Leduc encouraged Bang to make the
Asian-influenced album Vietnam: The Aftermath (2001), for which he
enlisted a gifted band including Lowe and the trumpeter Ted Daniel,
another Vietnam veteran. Leduc recently observed that the players were
often overcome by emotion during that session, although the leader was
at pains to balance music that was reflective of Vietnamese life with
representations of the traumas of combat. The tracks Tunnel Rat and Tet
Offensive reflected the latter. The follow-up album, Vietnam: Reflections (2005), included the
composer and saxist Henry Threadgill, four American Vietnam war veterans
and two Vietnamese musicians. The violinist went back to Vietnam for a
documentary film, Redemption Song (2008), which introduced him to a
new audience. Bang continued to tour Europe and the US regularly, sometimes working
with the Art Ensemble of Chicago's bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut,
the saxophonist David Murray, the fusion ensemble Sonicphonics, and his
long-term collaborator Lowe, until the latter's death in 2003. Their
last concert together was issued – as Lowe's dying wish – on the CD
Above and Beyond: An Evening in Grand Rapids (2007). Bang is survived by his partner, Maria; his daughters, Hoshi and Chanyez; his sons, Jay and Ghazal; and a granddaughter.
• Billy Bang (William Vincent Walker), musician, born 20 September 1947; died 11 April 2011
Fuse Jazz CD Review: Violinist Billy Bang’s Superb Final Recording — “Da Bang!”
When I saw him, he was rarely still on stage: a Billy Bang performance was something like a dance.
Da Bang!, Billy
Bang, violin, Dick Griffin, trombone, Andrew Bemkey, piano, Hilliard
Greene double bass, Newman Taylor-Baker, drums. TUM Records.
by Michael Ullman
The late jazz violinist Billy Bang — he didn’t so much perform as dance.
Born William Walker, violinist Billy Bang, who was nicknamed after a
now obscure cartoon character, died of cancer soon after this disc was
recorded in 2011. He had a rocky life. Born in Alabama in 1947, he was
raised in the Bronx and sent to school in Harlem where as a small child
he was given a violin: he said he would have preferred a saxophone.
Eventually he was sent as a scholarship student to an elite prep school
in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. (Arlo Guthrie was a classmate.) The upper
class educational experience confused him, and he dropped out.
Bang was drafted into the army and soon found himself in Vietnam
where, still a teenager, he took unwilling part in combat. He came back,
it would seem, permanently shaken. Bang said he tried to find peace
through drugs, drink, and revolutionary activity: “My inability to
bravely confront my personal demons, my experiences in Vietnam, has been
a continuous struggle . . . At night, I would experience severe
nightmares of death destruction, and during the day, I lived a kind of
undefined ambiguous daydream.” Eventually, he returned to the violin: he
made the reunion sound like it was only a matter of chance. He saw
three violins in a pawnshop and bought one. He developed a wild technique, or perhaps manner. When I saw him, he
was rarely still on stage: a Billy Bang performance was something like a
dance. He started recording in the mid 70s with a cadre of avant-garde
players. (Over his career he recorded almost 30 albums as a leader,
another dozen or so with various co-operative groups and many more as a
sideman.) Performing with the Sun Ra Arkestra probably taught him the
value of combining music and theatricality—many of his early
performances, free or structured, included interludes of poetry and
other kinds of recitations. Through music, he found a sense of mental
balance: with one of his most successful groups, the String Trio of New
York, Bang played a tune called “Catharsis in Real Time.” Still, there
was a breakthrough about his Vietnam experience to come: in 2001 he made
the raw Vietnam: The Aftermath, a recording that featured
other musicians who also served in the war. The compositions included
“Tet Offensive.” The late Butch Morris conducted, and he spoke to me
movingly of the tears and courage of those sessions.
Cover art for Da Bang!
Da Bang!, the violinist’s last recording, doesn’t proffer
that level of intensity or distress. With tunes such as Don Cherry’s
“Guinea,” Ornette Coleman’s “Law Years,” Miles Davis’s “All Blues,” and
Sonny Rollins’s joyous “St. Thomas,” the album comes off as a glowing
tribute to Bang’s musical influences and heroes. The horn on the date is
trombonist Dick Griffin, who early in his career played and recorded
with Rahsaan Roland Kirk. (On LPs such as The Eighth Wonder of the World,
Griffin demonstrated his ability to play several notes at the same
time. Through the use of multiphonics he could simultaneously play all
three parts of Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” convincingly.) Griffin
provides a grumbling, amusingly vocal solo on the opening number, Barry
Altschul’s “Da Bang,” which is built over Hilliard Greene’s appealing
bass line. Bang’s virtuoso solo comes in his unaccompanied introduction to Don Cherry’s “Guinea,” a piece that, on the recording Old and New Dreams,
opened with a kind of trumpet fanfare. Bang brings a tremulous flurry
of energy to Cherry’s folksy melody. Then he worries some double stops,
aggressively attacking with his bow. Eventually he introduces pizzicato
effects that dominate the rest of his opening statement. What is
remarkable is the engaging musicality, even the genial lyricism, of this
agitated introduction to a piece that retains a kind of innocence even
after the band enters over Newman Taylor-Baker’s solid drumming. Bang’s composition on the album is “Daydream,” which is introduced
gently by pianist Andrew Bemkey. It’s as sweet as a composition by
Satie. Still, Bang’s statement of the lovely theme exudes his
distinctive urgency: a startling force that comes from the pressure of
his bow and from his decisive attacks on the strings. Bang played in
formidable avant-garde groups, but there is nothing forbidding about his
music or his exciting approach to improvisation. His was not what you
would call a classical technique: but it was uniquely his, though, and
it will be missed.
Bang during a recording session for Vietnam: The Aftermath. Justin Time Records
Billy Bang's experience was not unusual for urban teens in the
1960s. He was drafted after high school and sent to Vietnam. What Bang
has made of that experience, however, is perhaps one of the most
remarkable albums in recent years, says Howard Mandel in a report for Weekend Edition Saturday. Bang
has spent the last 30 years establishing himself as one of the most
respected violinists playing jazz today. Like many vets, he brought the
war home with him — and avoided confronting his wartime experiences. With his new album, Vietnam: The Aftermath,
he's no longer trying to forget. In pieces such as "TET Offensive" and
"Mystery of the Mekong," he tries to bring back the sounds and
sensations of the Southeast Asian conflict. Mandel reports that the
recording is helping to heal the veterans who played on it and those who
hear it. A portion of the proceeds from the CD benefits
the nonprofit veterans' aid organization, Veteran's Quality of Life
Access Network.
Da Bang! is a special release for
many reasons, the most obvious being that it documents the final studio
work recorded by jazz violinist Billy Bang. Recorded only two months
before his cancer-related death in April 2011, the album is a fitting
tribute to this singular artist, who added his own voice to a rarified
club boasting members such as Stéphane Grappelli, Stuff Smith, Jean-Luc
Ponty, Jerry Goodman, Michal Urbaniak, Joe Venuti, and Leroy Jenkins.
The line-up Bang assembled for the session includes legendary trombonist
Dick Griffin as well as musicians who regularly accompanied him during
his final period, namely pianist Andrew Bemkey, double bassist Hilliard
Greene, and drummer Newman Taylor-Baker.
To say Bang led a fascinating and full life is
a gross understatement: he recorded five albums with the String Trio of
New York (which he co-founded in 1977 with guitarist James Emery and
bassist John Lindberg), five with the FAB Trio (featuring bassist Joe
Fonda and drummer Barry Altschul), and two with Tri-Factor (Bang joined
by multi-instrumentalist Kahil El'Zabar and baritone saxophonist Hamiet
Bluiett), and was as comfortable playing in a traditional jazz ensemble
context as with Bill Laswell's Material (Memory Serves, 1981) and Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society (Eye On You,
1980). Bang's post-high school Vietnam stint had an especially profound
impact on his life: in addition to becoming active in the anti-war
movement upon his return, he revisited the experience on two later
recordings, 2001's Vietnam: The Aftermath and 2005's Vietnam: Reflections (in fact, Bang believed that the cancer he contracted was caused by exposure to Agent Orange during his time in Vietnam).
While Da Bang! itself is less
adventurous on conceptual grounds compared to some albums in his
discography (thirty as a leader and another dozen or so in other
contexts), it's a thoroughly satisfying affair and argues strongly in
favour of Bang's gifts. Highlights are plentiful and the selections
themselves are an interesting lot, with a single original (“Daydreams”)
accompanied by covers of pieces by Barry Altschul, Don Cherry, Ornette
Coleman, Miles Davis, and Sonny Rollins. As such, one could regard the
album as Bang paying homage to favourite musicians and some of his
greatest influences. Admittedly, it might have been more interesting to
hear Bang tackle a less familiar Davis-associated tune like, say,
“Nefertiti” (even if it is a Wayne Shorter composition) than a warhorse
like “All Blues,” but that's a minor complaint, all things considered.
The album certainly holds up as a wonderful portrait of his working
band's sound.
The hard-grooving bop of Altschul's “Da Bang”
immediately establishes the recording's loose and swinging vibe with
Bang and Griffin voicing the head and setting the stage for individual
soloing. No one would think the end would be so near for Bang given the
way he tears into his solo, a move that in turn cues the others to dig
into their own spotlights with equal conviction. Cherry's “Guinea” is
memorable for being such a powerful showcase for the leader, especially
when the piece's opening finds Bang exploring a broad range of
techniques in an unaccompanied solo that lasts three minutes before the
band kicks in with its own soulful reading of the trumpeter's
Eastern-tinged vamp. Bemkey introduces “Daydreams” with a suitably
dreamy solo, the pianist's elegant touch paving the way for a sweetly
lyrical turn by Bang wherein echoes of Stuff Smith emerge. With Griffin
and Taylor-Baker sitting out, Greene solos at length before Bang returns
to reiterate the tune's melodies before unleashing a bravura solo of
free-wheeling sawing.
Bang's affection for Coleman's music was made clear on Untitled Gift,
which the violinist recorded in 1982 with Don Cherry, and is
re-affirmed by the inclusion of “Law Years,” which the band tackles with
gusto. “All Blues” is given a faithful rendering, the key difference
being the front-line of Bang and Griffin in place of Davis and
saxophonists Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. Familiar it
might be, but there's no denying the joyous swagger of “St. Thomas,” and
the group does Rollins proud by investing its performance with the same
kind of exuberance the saxophonist is renowned for bringing to his own.
A final word of praise must be extended to TUM for honouring Bang with
such a deluxe presentation, the CD accompanied by a full-colour booklet
featuring photos, bios, commentaries, and poems, the latter of which (by
Amira Baraka, Amina Baraka, Quincy Troupe, Steve Dalachinsky, and
Sebastian “SibaGiba” Bardin-Greenberg) were recited by their authors at a
memorial event for Bang in New York City on September 19, 2011, a day
before what would have been his sixty-fourth birthday. The release is a
fitting tribute to an innovative and deserving artist.
The defining crisis of the 1960s was Vietnam. Martin Scorsese’s recent documentary on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home,
brought back that era, and while his film is about a young folk singer
and a counterculture, the war is always there. The movie vividly recalls
two corollaries of Vietnam: how completely it polarized our society and how completely we have moved on.
If Vietnam makes the news anymore, it is in minor stories like when its
Prime Minister, Phan Van Khai, met with George Bush at the White House
last June to discuss the World Trade Organization.
But for those who fought there, moving on is not so easy.’
“I lived in Vietnam, totally, all the time,” violinist Billy Bang says
of the 30 years that followed his Vietnam experience. “I couldn’t get on
with my life. I couldn’t even handle the Fourth of July.”
For most of those years, Bang was a busy player on the left-of-center
jazz scene, recognized not only for his ability but also for his unusual
choice of instrument. Almost no one, including musicians close to him,
knew his story.
At 18, after dropping out of high school in the Bronx, he had been
drafted into the army, was given six months of infantry training and was
sent to Vietnam where, after only three days in-country, he was dropped
by helicopter into a firefight near the Cambodian border. Bang was
quickly promoted to squad leader, then sergeant. He took out ambushes,
“humped the boonies” and became an expert marksman. “When you’re in a
squad you move up to the next position when someone above you rotates
out or gets hit,” Bang says. “Right after I got there, my squad leader,
Fontenot, from Louisiana, got hit. I remember him falling back into the
bunker.”
Bang did a two-year hitch, with one year in Vietnam. He got a G.E.D. in
the army and after discharge attended Queens College on the G.I. Bill,
studying pre-law. But while working in a paralegal internship program,
he observed firsthand what he describes as the “legal injustices” of
American jurisprudence. “I made one big mistake in my life–fighting
against the Vietnamese, a people who had done absolutely nothing to me,”
Bang says. “I went all the way to their land to fight them, for no
reason. I felt very badly about that. Then when I worked in our legal
system and saw that guilt or innocence was really about how much money
you had, I decided, ‘I don’t want to be part of this. I don’t want to
feel guilty again.'”
He dropped out of Queens College and threw himself into music. It was
late to start, but he had received musical education in his youth, when
he had played violin in the orchestra of an innovative music school in
East Harlem. “The violin was the only instrument I knew, and I wanted to
play music. I didn’t know about Leroy Jenkins or Ornette Coleman at
that time–or Stuff Smith or Ray Nance or anybody. But I said, ‘I’m
determined to become a musician now. Not a violinist, but a jazz
musician who happens to play that instrument.'” Bang says that the
decision “was almost like joining a priesthood. I knew I would never be
rich. It was like accepting a nonmaterialistic approach to life.”
He moved to the East Village, “practiced 24/7, sounding like shit,” in a
basement on East Sixth Street, and started hanging out with other
people in various early stages of learning, like William Parker and
Henry Warner. Older players like Wilbur Ware and “C” Sharpe dropped by
and shared knowledge. “We were teaching each other,” Bang says, “kind of
like the AACM, but without a name.” Bang began to find his voice, and
he believes that his breakthrough came in the loft-jazz movement of the
mid-’70s, when players on the level of David Murray, John Zorn and
Hamiet Bluiett accepted him. In the ’80s and ’90s he collaborated with
most of the prime movers in avant-garde jazz (Sam Rivers, Sun Ra, Don
Cherry), led or co-led several respected ensembles and made over 30
recordings.
But his nights were filled with very bad dreams. There is a clinical
term for the problem: post-traumatic stress disorder. Bang sought relief
in drugs and alcohol rather than treatment. He spent the late ’90s in
Berlin, and when he returned to New York in 2000 he says, “I was
financially strapped and called Jean-Pierre Leduc at my record label,
Justin Time, and told him I needed a record date. He suggested I do an
album about my Vietnam experience. I said, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t talk
about that.'”
Bang was frightened of the project, but he also felt a call that had
been buried in him for years. He stayed in his apartment for several
weeks and wrote the music. “That’s when I started reliving it and crying
again and going through the nightmares,” he says. “Everything came back
to me.” Vietnam: The Aftermath was released on Justin Time in 2001. The
opening track, “Yo! Ho Chi Minh Is in the House,” establishes the
atmosphere of menace and tension (which is sometimes explosively
released) that pervades the album. The tune is a wildly careening vamp,
Bang’s violin sawing and whining, Michael Carvin’s gong crashing. The
Southeast Asian inflections and tonalities suggest an exotic, alien
environment, perilous for intruders.
Bang has said that his original intention was to have every instrument
played by a Vietnam veteran. As it turned out, six of the nine musicians
who appear on the recording, including conductor Butch Morris, were in
Vietnam. It is affecting to see their ranks and serial numbers under
their names in the liner notes. Butch Morris does not play an instrument
but, in Bang’s words, “plays the musicians.” His “conduction,” a
patented system (literally) of hand and baton signals, brings players in
and out and cues trills, sustained notes and crescendos. In this
environment of unleashed emotional extremity, Morris keeps the players
together.
“I had been carrying around a lot of baggage,” Bang says. “It was only
in the writing and performing of this music that I had to remember
things I had absolutely been trying to forget. To write this music
honestly, I had to face what I’d been through. Then I finally started
feeling lighter. I started to deal with my drug and alcohol issues. It
was like coming out of a coma.” Vietnam: The Aftermath is an extraordinary personal and
historical document that stands on its own as art. Pieces like “Tet
Offensive” and “Saigon Phunk” are visceral depictions of the madness and
panic of combat that achieve in music what works like Apocalypse Now
and The Red Badge of Courage achieve in film and literature. The music
is not as “outside” as much of Bang’s previous work, because he creates
objective correlatives for the war experience in keening, stark,
pulsating compositional forms. But within Bang’s structures the players,
individually and collectively, give passionate witness. Ted Daniel on
trumpet, the late Frank Lowe on tenor saxophone (who both served in
Vietnam), Sonny Fortune on flute and John Hicks on piano (who did not)
play with burning, focused inspiration.
But for many, the revelation of Vietnam: The Aftermath will be
the unique expressive capacity of Bang’s atypical jazz instrument. In
his hands, the violin can shriek like demons of the night. But it can
also, sublimely, sing. Bang’s subject matter is broader than nightmare.
“Mystery of the Mekong” is a rapt meditation with a slow, fervent flute
outpouring from Fortune and Bang’s plucked and bowed violin. “I did find
some peacefulness once [while I was a soldier] when I saw the Mekong
River with the sun setting on it,” Bang says. “It was a moment when I
realized, ‘God, if there was no war here, it would be such a beautiful
place.'”
“Moments for the KIAMIA,” a lament for the fallen, with Bang’s violin
alone over the rhythm section, is wrenching. “People ask for this piece a
lot,” Bang says. “When I play it now, I still become emotional with it.
It tears me up every time.” His violin weeps, but in an austere,
dignified melody that creates the distancing of genuine tragedy.
With an album as potent and thorough as Vietnam: The Aftermath, it seemed that Bang had at last told his story. In fact, the story had just begun. Vietnam: Reflections
appeared in mid-2005, also on Justin Time. The strong personnel from
the first album is retained except for the reeds: Henry Threadgill (an
infantryman in Vietnam) and James Spaulding replace Fortune and Lowe. Reflections is not a sequel, but another step on Bang’s journey to healing and acceptance.
While The Aftermath insinuated tonal and harmonic elements of Southeast Asian music to evoke strains and sonorities new to jazz, Reflections
goes further. Bang brings in Vietnamese musicians (Co Boi Nguyen on
vocals and Nhan Thanh Ngo on dan tranh, a traditional finger-plucked
dulcimer). In three adaptations of Vietnamese folk songs and five new
compositions, a cross-cultural synthesis of musical traditions embodies
the reconciliation that is Bang’s quest.
If The Aftermath is about existential immediacy, Reflections
benefits from a perspective provided by the passage of time. Thirty
years have brought enormous changes for the nations and individuals once
in conflict. Threadgill and Spaulding play brilliantly (if sparingly),
but, as with the first album, the most moving performance places Bang
alone with the rhythm section. “Doi Moi” possesses a poignant grace that
is hard to imagine coming from any instrument other than jazz violin.
“I haven’t been back to Vietnam,” Bang says, “but ‘Doi Moi’ is my
imagining of what Vietnam might be like today.”
Bang does intend to return to the country in order to finish what he now
considers his Vietnam trilogy. The final chapter will be a documentary,
which Bang hopes to begin filming by fall of 2006. “I want to go to
Vietnam and assemble an orchestra of musicians who play traditional
Vietnamese instruments,” Bang says. “Hopefully there will be some who
fought in the war. That will be part of the film: meeting them, meeting
their families, meeting their kids and grandkids and just having some
rice wine together. Like, the opposite of war. Another part is a musical
part. I want these musicians to learn Butch Morris’ system of signals,
and I want Butch to conduct the orchestra while my American band plays
with them and improvises. It could be an incredible sound and incredible
footage, to see that come together. Another part is me returning back
to places where I fought, in the jungles.”
One of Ernest Hemingway’s most famous sentences, “I had made a separate peace,” comes from A Farewell to Arms.
It is a work of fiction, but Hemingway had been to war and he knew that
a soldier’s separate peace is not easily won. Billy Bang’s, surely, has
not been.
Perhaps one reason that his Vietnam recordings contain such powerful
spiritual resonance is that our society has not moved on as completely
as we would like to think. Bang is not alone in carrying baggage from
the Vietnam War. Its appalling imagery of agony–all of it in vain–was
once inescapable for every American with a television set. That imagery
is somewhere in our national repressed memory still. What we finally
achieved on April 30, 1975, when the last Chinook helicopter took off
from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon (with those desperate
Vietnamese civilians scrambling, futilely, to climb aboard), was escape,
not closure.
If Bang’s documentary film does get made, and he shares rice wine and
makes music with his former enemies, he will have found a most fitting
way to close the circle–and not only for himself. Listening Pleasures:
50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Interscope)
“I purposely don’t listen to a lot of jazz,” Bang says. “Maybe since the
’80s, when Wynton came along, I stopped listening to the music. I
didn’t hear anything anymore. I do listen to WKCR sometimes, but
classical. They might put on Arnold Schoenberg from 1927 and I’ll say,
‘Damn, that sounds like it was two weeks ago.'”
Gearbox:
Violin: “I have a new violin with a lot of inlaid colors. I think it’s
from Canada, handmade. I bought it used at Alex Musical Instruments on
48th [in New York City]. Before that I had a Barcus-Berry.”
Pickup: “I used to have a Barcus-Berry 1320, with the pickup built into
the bridge. My man Carlos [Martinez] at Alex just fixed me up with a
Barcus-Berry 3100, which goes outside the bridge. It’s stronger.”
Shoulder rest: Wolf Forte Secondo.
Strings: Super-Sensitive Red Label. “They’re cheap but I like them. They sound jazzy.”
Rosin: Super-Sensitive black.
The didgeridoo doesn’t possess a very expansive melodic range,
but when it comes to setting the mood with a rich drone, it does the job
perfectly. The late Billy Bang’s violin joins Bill Cole’s expansive
droning in this album’s opening improvisation, and they create a
hypnotic sound, with long, bending tones and some vocalizations coming
from Cole through his pedal point. These six tracks, divided evenly between improvisations and
compositions, come from a 2009 performance in Charlottesville, Va. An
expert on Asian double-reed instruments, Cole plays different ones for
the rest of the set, and, since none of the instruments are confined to
strict Western pitches, each complements Bang’s expansive bowing. In
“Shades of Kia Mia,” Cole’s nadaswaram sounds like a human voice
singing in a haunting scale. The natural echo of the University of
Virginia’s chapel makes the duo feel even larger. Bang sounds like two
violins at one point during “Shades,” and almost like a variation on a
trumpet during one of the improvisations. In some ways, the combination can be a little unsettling in its
dissonance, especially when both men kick up the energy. But when Bang
quotes “Take the ‘A’ Train” and Sun Ra’s “Space Is the Place” in “Jupiter’s Future,” he proves that a jazz mindset still underscores this music.
Billy Bang, Jazz Violinist Inspired by Vietnam Experience, Dies at 63
Billy Bang,
a violinist whose gritty, expressive and spirited playing earned
admiration in contemporary jazz circles, died on Monday at his home in
Harlem. He was 63.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, said Jean-Pierre Leduc, his friend and agent.
Prominent
as a bandleader and a sideman throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Bang
achieved his most substantial success with the 2001 album “Vietnam: The Aftermath,”
which featured music inspired by his time serving in the Army during
the Vietnam War, played with peers who had also served. The album — and a
2005 sequel, “Vietnam: Reflections,” which included Vietnamese
musicians — in turn inspired “Redemption Song,” a 2008 documentary film
about him.
Born
William Vincent Walker in Mobile, Ala., on Sept. 20, 1947, Mr. Bang
moved with his mother to Harlem as an infant. He studied violin in
school and took up drums and flute independently. He briefly attended
the exclusive Stockbridge prep school in Massachusetts with no music
curriculum, then dropped out, moved to the Bronx and was drafted into
the Army and sent to Vietnam.
After
a struggle with alcohol and drugs on his return to America in the late
1960s, which he recounted in his liner notes for “Vietnam: The
Aftermath,” Mr. Bang identified the free-jazz scene created by players
like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman as a means for addressing issues
of race and social justice. Taking up the violin again, he studied with
the prominent avant-garde jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins, became immersed
in the 1970s downtown loft-jazz ferment, and went on to collaborate with
idiosyncratic musical auteurs like Kip Hanrahan and Bill Laswell.
In
1977, with the guitarist James Emery and the bassist John Lindberg, Mr.
Bang founded the String Trio of New York, a durable group that wedded
chamber-music intimacy and rigor to free-jazz gusto in a manner few
other bands had achieved. Over time he honed a signature sound: grainy
and penetrating, but more lyrical than strident.
Billy Bang performing in 2008.Credit
Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
Even
at his most exploratory, Mr. Bang pledged allegiance to swing-era
violin forebears like Stuff Smith and Ray Nance. In a 1985 review for
The New York Times, Jon Pareles described him as “one of the pre-eminent
young jazz violinists — he can swing and he plays in tune, two
qualities rarely found in the same musician.”
During
the 1980s Mr. Bang made a series of well-regarded albums for the
Italian label Soul Note, and in 1986 he left the String Trio of New York
to concentrate on his own projects. He also played in Sun Ra’s Arkestra
throughout the 1980s and ’90s.
A collaboration with the pianist D. D. Jackson in 1996 brought Mr. Bang to the attention of the Canadian label Justin Time,
where Mr. Leduc was a consulting producer. After Mr. Bang made two
albums for the label, Mr. Leduc offered to finance a project inspired by
Mr. Bang’s Vietnam experience.
Long
haunted by his memories, Mr. Bang overcame initial reluctance and
embraced the project, for which he enlisted as collaborators fellow
veterans like the saxophonist Frank Lowe, the trumpeter Ted Daniel and
the drummer Michael Carvin.
“Here
we had all these grown men in a macho idiom like jazz, in the studio,
‘Let’s hit it,’ ” Mr. Leduc said in an interview Tuesday. “They would do
a take, and then people would have to go out of the studio between
takes to cry, because it was so powerful. And it was so cathartic for
everybody.” The music was swaggering, agitated and elegiac by turns, Mr.
Bang’s playing brash, folksy and reminiscent at times of Vietnamese
string sounds.
“Vietnam:
The Aftermath” changed Mr. Bang’s life, Mr. Leduc said, leading not
only to the sequel album and the documentary but also to extensive media
coverage and large, enthusiastic audiences touched by his story.
Mr.
Bang is survived by his companion, Maria Arias; two daughters, Hoshi
Walker and Chanyez Chamberlain; two sons, Jay Walker and Ghazal Walker; a
granddaughter and his wife, I Ting, from whom he was separated.
Correction: May 2, 2011
An obituary on April 17 about the violinist Billy Bang
omitted the name of a survivor. In addition to two daughters, two sons, a
granddaughter and his companion, Maria Arias, Mr. Bang is survived by
his wife, I Ting, from whom he was separated.
A version of this article appears in print on April 17, 2011, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Billy Bang, 63, Violinist Moved by Vietnam War, Dies. Order Reprints|Today's Paper
Co-founder of String Trio of New York and collaborator with Don Cherry, David Murray and other creative music notables was 63
Alan Nahigian
Billy Bang
Violinist Billy Bang, noted for forging his own way on his
instrument, died on April 11. According to an associate, he had been
suffering from lung cancer. Bang was 63.
Born in Mobile, Alabama, as William Vincent Walker, Bang was raised in
the Bronx and began playing the violin at a very young age. He was
given the nickname Billy Bang in homage to a cartoon character.
Although he won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding prep school in
New England, Bang ended up dropping out and returning to the Bronx.
Alienated from formal education, Bang gave up the violin. He was drafted
into the Army at the age of 18 and served in Vietnam until his
discharge a few years later. Many years later he would put the
harrowing experience into his music with a set of albums-Vietnam: The Aftermath (2001) and Vietnam: Reflections (2005), the latter even including contributions from Vietnamese musicians.
Bang told JT’s Thomas Conrad in 2005
that his experience in Vietnam haunted him. “I lived in Vietnam,
totally, all the time,” the violinist Billy Bang told Conrad. “I
couldn’t get on with my life. I couldn’t even handle the Fourth of
July.” Although he got his G.E.D. in the Army and studied pre-law and
even went to law school for a short time, Bang bounced around at various
jobs after his release from the military and eventually picked up the
violin again. He dedicated himself to relearning the instrument and
became part of the downtown loft-jazz scene of the 70s.
He told Conrad: “The violin was the only instrument I knew, and I wanted
to play music. I didn’t know about Leroy Jenkins or Ornette Coleman at
that time-or Stuff Smith or Ray Nance or anybody. But I said, ‘I’m
determined to become a musician now. Not a violinist, but a jazz
musician who happens to play that instrument.'” Bang said that the
decision “was almost like joining a priesthood. I knew I would never be
rich. It was like accepting a nonmaterialistic approach to life.”
Bang played briefly with the Sun Ra Arkestra. In 1977, inspired by the
approach of the World Saxophone Quartet, he formed the New York String
Trio with John Lindberg and James Emery, with whom he would play
regularly for many years. Bang also developed his own career as a solo
artist and bandleader. Over the next 20-30 years, Bang would
collaborate with many of the greats of the improvising jazz scene,
including William Parker, Hamiet Bluiett, Don Cherry, David Murray and
many others. He recorded over 30 albums, including many for the
Canadian Justin Time label.
Jean-Pierre Leduc, who worked with Bang at Justin Time, said: “Billy
was not only an innovative violinist but also an inspiring one. For too
long pegged by many as an ‘out’ or avant-garde player, the last decade
saw him deservedly playing much larger venues and instantly gaining new
fans. Composing, rehearsing and then recording the two ‘Vietnam’
recordings not only renewed interest in Billy’s music, but it also
helped bring peace and order to his life. Playing even a small part in
this healing was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
“At the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2008 Billy brought the house down at
the Salle Wilfred Pelletier – a 2,000-seat venue. Very few in the
audience had known his name; now they were standing and cheering. I’ll
never forget the look on his face when he came offstage: sheer joy.”
THE MUSIC OF BILLY BANG: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWSWITH BILLY BANG:
Billy Bang (September 20, 1947 – April 11, 2011), born William Vincent Walker, was an American free jazz violinist and composer.
Biography
Bang's family moved to New York City's Bronx neighborhood while he was still an infant, and as a child he attended a special school for musicians in nearby Harlem.[1]
At that school, students were assigned instruments based on their
physical size. Bang was fairly small, so he received a violin instead of
either of his first choices, the saxophone or the drums.[1] It was around this time that he acquired the nickname of "Billy Bang", derived from a popular cartoon character.[2] Bang studied the violin until he earned a hardship scholarship to the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts,[3] at which point he abandoned the instrument because the school did not have a music program.[4]
He had difficulty adjusting to life at the school, where he encountered
racism and developed confusion about his identity, which he later
blamed for his onset of schizophrenia.[4]
Bang felt that he had little in common with the largely privileged
children at the school, who included Jackie Robinson, Jr. (son of
baseball star Jackie Robinson)[4] and Arlo Guthrie,[2]
and he struggled to reconcile the disparity between the wealth of the
school and the poverty of his home in New York. He left the school after
two years and attended a school in the Bronx. He did not graduate,
decided not to return to school after receiving his draft papers,[4] and at the age of 18, he was drafted into the United States Army.[5] Bang spent six months in basic training and another two weeks learning jungle warfare,[4] arriving in Vietnam just in time for the Tet Offensive.[5] Starting out as an infantryman, he did one tour of combat duty,[4] rising to the rank of sergeant before he mustered out.[1] After Bang returned from the war, his life lacked direction. The job he had held before the army had been filled in his absence.[4]
He pursued and then abandoned a law degree, before becoming politically
active and falling in with an underground group of revolutionaries.[1]
The group recognized Bang's knowledge of weapons from his time in the
Army, and they used him to procure firearms for the group during trips
to Maryland and Virginia, buying from pawnshops and other small operators who did not conduct extensive background checks.[4] During one of these trips, Bang spotted three violins hanging at the back of a pawnshop, and he impulsively purchased one.[4] He later joined Sun Ra's band. In 1977, Bang co-founded the String Trio of New York (with guitarist James Emery and double bassist John Lindberg). Billy Bang explored his experience in Vietnam in two albums: Vietnam: The Aftermath (2001) and Vietnam: Reflections
(2005), recorded with a band which included several other veterans of
that war. The latter album also features two Vietnamese musicians based
in the United States (voice and đàn tranh zither). Bang died on April 11, 2011.[3] According to an associate, Bang had suffered from lung cancer.[3] He had been scheduled to perform on the opening day of the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival on June 10, 2011.[6] He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Billy Bang 
http://www.capitalbop.com/special-feature-remembering-a-moment-in-d-c-with-the-late-billy-bang-a-fiery-jazz-violin-master/ 
Courtesy Billy Bang, Michael Carvin
Billy Bang's experience was not unusual for urban teens in the
1960s. He was drafted after high school and sent to Vietnam. What Bang
has made of that experience, however, is perhaps one of the most
remarkable albums in recent years, says Howard Mandel in a report for Weekend Edition Saturday.
