SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2022
VOLUME ELEVEN NUMBER THREE
MARC CARY
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
REVOLUTIONARY ENSEMBLE
(June 11-17)
OLU DARA
(June 18-24)
WALTER SMITH III
(June 25-July 1)
BOBBY WATSON
(July 2-8)
JAMES MOODY
(July 9-15)
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON
(July 16-22)
LEYLA McCALLA
(July 23-29)
GREG LEWIS
(July 30-August 5)
RUSSELL MALONE
(August 6-12)
JOHN HANDY
(August 13-19)
STANLEY CLARKE
(August 20-26)
JASON HAINSWORTH
(August 27-September 2)
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/ronald-shannon-jackson
Ronald Shannon Jackson
I was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas in 1940. Both my parents were music lovers. My mother played piano and organ at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church, and worked as a schoolteacher. My father owned the only black-owned local record store and jukebox business. On one side of my family is Curtis Ousley (who became famous as King Curtis). On the other is David “Fathead” Newman. I started playing drums in elementary school under the clarinetist John Carter, and in high school under Mr. Baxter, the same teacher who taught Ornette Coleman, Curtis Ousley, Dewey Redman, John Carter, Julius Hemphill, Charles Moffett, and James Jordan. I began playing professionally in Dallas with members of the Ray Charles band, and worked in Fort Worth, Houston, New Haven, and Bridgeport before moving to New York City in 1966. I attended New York University along with alto saxophonist René McLean, trumpeter Charles Sullivan, and bassist Abdul Malik, who had worked with Thelonious Monk.
Since that time, I have performed with many legendary jazz musicians including Charles Mingus, Betty Carter, Jackie McLean, Joe Henderson, Kenny Dorham, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ray Bryant, Stanley Turrentine, Bennie Maupin, Shirley Scott and others.
I performed and recorded with three musical revolutionaries who virtually defined jazz in the 1970s: Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and Ornette Coleman. I am the only musician to perform and record with all three.
After my final performance with Ornette Coleman on Saturday Night Live in 1979, I created The Decoding Society, whose classic recordings, including “Eye on You,” “Mandance,” “Street Priest,” “Barbeque Dog,” and “When Colors Play” breathed new life into American music. On more than 15 albums and countless tours, I helped launch the careers of some of the most talented musicians in jazz, including Bill Frisell, Byard Lancaster, Billy Bang, James “Blood” Ulmer, Vernon Reid, Melvin Gibbs, Akbar Ali, Jef Lee Johnson, Robin Eubanks, Eric Person, and James Carter.
During the 1980s, I traveled on behalf of the Voice of America and the U.S. Information Service to 15 African countries, India, and eight East Asian countries with The Decoding Society. During a solo trip to Africa, I composed much of “When Colors Play.”
My string quartets and other composed music have been performed by the most noted orchestras in Europe and the United States, the Cologne Jazz Society, WDR (Köln) and on radio in France, Germany, England, and Poland. I have performed in classical concerts in Europe and the U.S. with Eliot Fisk, Ruggiero Ricci, Dennis Russell Davies, and Garrett List.
I have received numerous awards and honors worldwide, including an NEA Jazz Composer Grant; three Meet the Composer awards; Jazz Artist of the Year-Tokyo; the key to the city of Osaka, Japan; an Endowment from the Government of Malaysia; the Texas Music Association Jazz Musician Award; a Letter of Commendation from the U.S.I.S. for concerts given in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. My solo album “Puttin’ on Dog” was one of the most played albums on National Public Radio for three years.
As an educator, I have given seminars and performed at Sanders Hall at Harvard University, and at Cooper Union, University of Tampa, Pepperdine University, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Akron University, Brown University, Uppsala University in Sweden, Bryn Mawr College, Antioch College, University of Bridgeport, CalArts, Oberlin College, Grinnell College, the Cleveland Jazz Festival and in Indonesia, Taiwan and Malaysia. I was the only American representative at the 1993 World Drum Expo in South Korea, which was sponsored by KBS, Korean radio and television, and Korean airlines. I have performed live and for broadcast in France, Holland, Finland, England, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, and Austria. My endorsements include Sonor drums, Paiste cymbals and gongs, and Shure microphones.
Ronald Shannon Jackson
(1940-2013)
Biography by Scott Yanow
Drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, and his Decoding Society of the 1980s, learned from the example of Ornette Coleman's Prime Time and were a logical extension of the group. They featured colorful and noisy ensembles; were not afraid of the influence of rock; and their rhythms were funky, loud, and unpredictable. Jackson played professionally in Texas with James Clay when he was 15. He moved to New York in 1966, where he worked with Byard Lancaster, Charles Mingus, Betty Carter, Stanley Turrentine, Jackie McLean, McCoy Tyner, Kenny Dorham, and most significantly Albert Ayler (1966-1967), among others. He took time off of the scene and then joined Ornette Coleman's Prime Time (1975-1979). Jackson also worked with Cecil Taylor (1978-1979) and James "Blood" Ulmer (1979-1980). The Decoding Society (formed in 1979), through the years, featured many talented and advanced improvisers, with the best-known ones being Vernon Reid, Zane Massey, Billy Bang, and Byard Lancaster. Jackson also played with the explosive group Last Exit (starting in 1986), and in the early '90s with Power Tools. Ronald Shannon Jackson's music is not for easy-to-offend ears. The drummer died at his home in Fort Worth, Texas on October 19, 2013 after battling leukemia; he was 73 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Shannon_Jackson
Ronald Shannon Jackson (January 12, 1940 – October 19, 2013) was an American jazz drummer from Fort Worth, Texas.[1] A pioneer of avant-garde jazz, free funk, and jazz fusion, he appeared on over 50 albums as a bandleader, sideman, arranger, and producer. Jackson and bassist Sirone are the only musicians to have performed and recorded with the three prime shapers of free jazz: pianist Cecil Taylor, and saxophonists Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.[2]
Musician, Player and Listener magazine writers David Breskin and Rafi Zabor called him "the most stately free-jazz drummer in the history of the idiom, a regal and thundering presence."[3] Gary Giddins wrote "Jackson is an astounding drummer, as everyone agrees…he has emerged as a kind of all-purpose new-music connoisseur who brings a profound and unshakably individual approach to every playing situation."[4]
In 1979, he founded his own group, the Decoding Society,[1] playing what has been dubbed free funk: a blend of funk rhythm and free jazz improvisation.
Early life and career
Jackson was born in Fort Worth, Texas.[1] As a child, he was immersed in music. His father monopolized the local jukebox business and established the only African American-owned record store in the Fort Worth area. His mother played piano and organ at their local church. Between the ages of five and nine he took piano lessons.[5] In the third grade, he studied music with John Carter.[6]
Jackson graduated from I.M. Terrell High School,[7][8] where he played with the marching band and learned about symphonic percussion.[9][10] During lunch breaks, students would conduct jam sessions in the band room.[5]
Around the same time, Jackson's mother bought him his first drum set to encourage him to graduate from high school. By the age of 15, he was playing professionally. His first paid gig was with tenor saxophonist James Clay, who went on to join Ray Charles as a sideman.[5]
Jackson recalled that "we were playing four nights a week, with two gigs each on Saturday and Sunday, anything from Ray Charles to bebop. People were dancing, and when it was time to listen, they'd listen. But I was brainwashed into thinking you couldn't make a living playing music."[5]
After graduation, Jackson attended Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. He chose Lincoln because of its proximity to St. Louis and accessibility to great musicians touring the Midwest. His roommate was pianist John Hicks. As undergraduates, they "spent as much time performing together as studying."[11] The Lincoln University band included Jackson, Hicks, trumpeter Lester Bowie, and Julius Hemphill on saxophone.[12]
Jackson then transferred to Texas Southern University, and from there went to Prairie View A & M. He decided to study history and sociology at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. Jackson intended not to play music at all, but after exposure to various artists and styles, he concluded that "the beat is in your body" and "the music you play comes from your life."[13] By 1966, Jackson received a full music scholarship to New York University through trumpeter Kenny Dorham.[14]
New York and the Avant-Garde (1966–1978)
Once in New York, Jackson performed with many jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus, Betty Carter, Jackie McLean, Joe Henderson, Kenny Dorham, McCoy Tyner, Stanley Turrentine, and others.[15] Whenever he would ask Charles Mingus to consider him for his group, Mingus used to push him "rudely out of his way". After Jackson sat in with pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi, he heard loud clapping behind him. It was Mingus, who asked him to play with his band.[16]
In 1966 Jackson recorded drums for saxophonist Charles Tyler's release, Charles Tyler Ensemble. Between 1966 and 1967, he played with saxophonist Albert Ayler and is featured on At Slug's Saloon, Vol. 1 & 2. He is also on disks 3 and 4 of Ayler's Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962–70). Jackson said Ayler was "the first (leader) that really opened me up. He let me play the drums the way I did in Fort Worth when I wasn't playing for other people."[5] John Coltrane's death in July 1967 devastated Jackson. He spent the next few years addicted to heroin. He said, "I couldn't play drums then, spiritually.... I just didn't feel right."[5] From 1970–74, he did not perform, but continued to practice.[15]
In 1974, pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs introduced Jackson to Nichiren Buddhism and chanting. Although initially reluctant, Jackson decided to try it for three weeks. "Then three months had passed. It pulled me together and pulled me out and I was able to focus. I was a Buddhist and a vegetarian for 17 years."[5]
By 1975 he joined saxophonist Ornette Coleman's electric free funk band, Prime Time.[15] During his stint in Prime Time, Coleman taught Jackson composition and harmolodics. Jackson says that Coleman told him he was hearing music "in that piccolo range," and encouraged him to compose on the flute. Jackson went to Paris with Prime Time in 1976 to perform concerts and record Dancing in Your Head and Body Meta.[5]
In 1978, Jackson played on four albums with pianist Cecil Taylor: Cecil Taylor Unit, 3 Phasis, Live in the Black Forest, and One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye.[17]
The Decoding Society and Other Projects (1979–1999)
Jackson formed his band, The Decoding Society, in 1979, as a showcase for his blend of avant-garde jazz, rock, funk, and ethnic music.
The instrumentation and arrangements, along with Jackson's compositions and drum style, brought The Decoding Society critical acclaim.[18] Although considered to be part of the "new fusion" movement that emerged from Ornette Coleman's harmolodic concepts, Jackson was able to implement a voice of his own.[19]
The Decoding Society's music can be hot, savage, and danceable, or cool, gentle, and contemplative. American, Eastern, and African sounds are distilled under Jackson's guidance. Meters, feels, tempos, and stylistic references are heard throughout different compositions; many times within a single piece of music.[19]
Unlike many of Jackson's contemporaries, The Decoding Society incorporates pop music elements into its avant-garde approach. Guitarist Vernon Reid has said of Shannon that he "wasn't an ideological avant-gardist. He made the music he made from an outsider's view, but not to the exclusion of rock and pop – he wasn't mad at pop music for being popular the way some of his generation are. He synthesized blues shuffles with African syncopations through the lens of someone who gave vent to all manner of emotions…the collision of values in his music really represents American culture."[5]
Common characteristics among the incarnations of The Decoding Society include doubled instrumentation (basses, saxophones, or guitars). Polyphony often predominates harmony; compositions are not focused on one key. Polyphonic textures equalize harmony, rhythm, and melody, dispensing with traditional ideas of key and pitch. Each instrument can play a rhythmic, harmonic, or melodic role, or any combination of the three. The lines between solos, lead instruments, and accompaniment are blurred. Looseness in pitch and rhythm create heterophony within unison-based parts, which also adds to the tonal ambiguity.[19]
Melodies can alternate from busy, frenetic, multiple themes to simple, lazy, lyrical phrases. They often function as both heads and melodic material to accompany one or more soloist. Sometimes the melodies are diatonic, other times they are bluesy; occasionally they sound "Eastern". Although The Decoding Society is more of a composer's band rather than a vehicle for soloing or drumming, free-blowing solos abound, and Jackson's thunderous playing is heavily featured.[19]
Throughout the years, the Decoding Society has featured the performances of Akbar Ali, Bern Nix, Billy Bang, Byrad Lancaster, Cary Denigris, Charles Brackeen, David Fiuczynski, David Gordon, Tomchess, Dominic Richards, Eric Person, Henry Scott, Jef Lee Johnson, John Moody, Khan Jamal, Lee Rozie, Masujaa, Melvin Gibbs, Onaje Allan Gumbs, Reggie Washington, Reverend Bruce Johnson, Robin Eubanks, Vernon Reid, and Zane Massey.[20]
In addition to leading Decoding Society lineups, Jackson was involved in other projects. Guitarist and fellow Coleman alumnus James Blood Ulmer recruited Jackson for another group that intended to push harmolodics to a new level [18]
In 1986 Jackson, Sonny Sharrock, Peter Brötzmann, and Bill Laswell formed the free jazz supergroup, Last Exit, which performed and released five live albums and one studio album, before Sharrock's death in 1994 saw the end of the band.[21]
In the late 1980s, Jackson teamed up with Laswell on two other projects: SXL, with violinist L. Shankar, Senegalese drummer Aiyb Dieng, and Korean percussion group SamulNori,[22] and the free jazz trio, Mooko, with Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata.[23]
With the help of some grants, Jackson took a three-month trip to West Africa and visited nine countries.[5] The trip, both a personal and artistic milestone, inspired music for the Decoding Society's When Colors Play, recorded live at the Caravan of Dreams in September 1986.[19] Author Norman C. Weinstein detailed the excursion in a chapter of his book, A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz, titled "Ronald Shannon Jackson: Journey to Africa Without End."[24]
In 1987, Jackson formed an avant-garde power trio with bassist Melvin Gibbs and guitarist Bill Frisell called Power Tools. They released and toured behind an album titled Strange Meeting.[25] Writer Greg Tate referred to the project as "that awesome and under-sung Power Tools album…in my humble opinion, the most paradigm-shifting power trio record since Band of Gypsys."[26]
Later career (2000–2013)
His output slowed in the early 2000s due to nerve damage in his left arm. After consulting with a neurologist, Jackson declined surgery and was able to regain his strength through years of physical therapy. Physical limitations did not diminish his output as a composer, and he unveiled new material on YouTube in 2012.[27]
Jackson joined trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet with pianist Vijay Iyer and double-bassist John Lindberg in 2005. Their collaboration is documented on the Tabligh CD[28] and the Eclipse DVD.[29]
He played with the Punk Funk All Stars in 2006, which included Melvin Gibbs, Joseph Bowie, Vernon Reid, and James Blood Ulmer.[30] In 2008 Jackson and Jamaaladeen Tacuma toured Europe with The Last Poets; this collaboration was documented in the film "The Last Poets / Made in Amerikkka" directed by Claude Santiago.[31]
In 2011 Jackson, Vernon Reid and Melvin Gibbs formed a power trio called Encryption. During their trip to the Moers Festival in Germany, Jackson suffered a heart attack and underwent an angioplasty.[32] The next day, he checked himself out of the hospital to play with Reid and Gibbs at the festival. Afterwards, Jackson checked himself back in for medical observation.[33]
On July 7, 2012, Jackson performed at the Kessler Theater in Dallas with the latest version of the Decoding Society, which includes violinist Leonard Hayward, trumpeter John Weir, guitarist Gregg Prickett, and bassist Melvin Gibbs. The new compositions were described as being as strong as the best of his recorded work.[34] The performance was voted as one of the Ten Best Concerts of 2012 in the Dallas Observer.[35]
Death
Jackson died of leukemia on October 19, 2013, aged 73.[36]
Discography
As leader
- Eye on You (About Time, 1980)
- Nasty (Moers Music, 1981)
- Street Priest (Moers, 1981)
- Mandance (Antilles, 1982)
- Barbeque Dog (Antilles, 1983)
- Montreux Jazz Festival (Knit Classics, 1983)
- Pulse (Celluloid, 1984)
- Decode Yourself (Island, 1985)
- Taboo (Venture/Virgin, 1981–83)
- Earned Dream (Knit Classics, 1984)
- Live at Greenwich House (Knit Classics, 1986)
- Live at the Caravan of Dreams (Caravan of Dreams, 1986) AKA Beast in the Spider Bush
- When Colors Play (Caravan of Dreams, 1986)
- Texas (Caravan of Dreams, 1987)
- Red Warrior (Axiom, 1990)
- Raven Roc (DIW, 1992)
- Live in Warsaw (Knit Classics, 1994)
- What Spirit Say (DIW, 1994)
- Shannon's House (Koch, 1996)
(dates are recording, not release)
With Last Exit
- Last Exit (Enemy, 1986)
- The Noise of Trouble (Enemy, 1986) with guests Akira Sakata and Herbie Hancock
- Cassette Recordings '87 (Celluloid, 1987)
- Iron Path (Virgin, 1988)
- Köln (ITM, 1990)
- Headfirst into the Flames (Muworks, 1993)
As sideman
With Albert Ayler
- At Slug's Saloon, vols. 1&2 (ESP, 1966 [1982])
- Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962–70) (Revenant, 1962–70 [2004])
- La Cave Live, Cleveland 1966 Revisited (ezz-thetics, 1966 [2022])
With Ornette Coleman
- Dancing in Your Head (A&M, 1973, 1975)
- Body Meta (Artists House, 1975)
With Bertrand Gallaz
- Talk To You In A Minute (Plainisphare, 1993)
With Bill Laswell
- Baselines (Elektra Musician, 1982)
With Mooko
- Japan Concerts (Celluloid, 1988)
With Music Revelation Ensemble
- No Wave (Moers Music, 1980)
- Music Revelation Ensemble (DIW, 1988)
With Power Tools
- Strange Meeting (Antilles, 1987)
With SXL
- Live in Japan (Terrapin/Sony Japan, 1987)
- Into the Outlands (Celluloid, 1987)
With Wadada Leo Smith
- Tabligh (Cuneiform, 2008)
With Cecil Taylor
- Cecil Taylor Unit (New World, 1978)
- 3 Phasis (New World, 1978)
- One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye (hat Hut, 1978)
- Live in the Black Forest (MPS, 1978)
With Charles Tyler
- Charles Tyler Ensemble (ESP, 1966)
With James Blood Ulmer
- Are You Glad to Be in America? (Rough Trade, 1980)
- America – Do You Remember the Love? (Blue Note, 1986)
with John Zorn
- Spillane (Nonesuch, 1986–87)
http://davidbreskin.com/magazines/1-interviews/ronald-shannon-jackson/
Ronald Shannon Jackson
view pdf of the article
by Rafi Zabor and David Breskin
Note: David Breskin conducted this interview (from which all the questions have been excised, leaving Ronald Shannon Jackson to speak on his own, as he did so well) but then had to leave town on another assignment before the piece was ready for publication. The introductory and interstitial texts were subsequently authored by jazz drummer and frequent Musician contributor Rafi Zabor (who would go on to win the 1998 PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction for his first novel, The Bear Comes Home.) Within a few months of the publication of this interview, db was on the road with Ronald Shannon Jackson and The Decoding Society, doing live sound on a European tour, and immediately thereafter, co-producing the album, Mandance.
I was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas and I stayed there until I went off to college. My mother plays piano and organ, and my father always wanted to play the saxophone. He was the local juke-box man. He owned juke-boxes and record stores. He had the record store in the black neighborhood, and we sold gospel and race music and Red Foxx stuff, which was basically under the counter and illegal — for parties and all. We always had to put the most sellable blues on the jukes, because we didn’t have that much money and so my father had to make the right choices; it would boil down to choosing Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters and B.B. King and Bobby Bland and Guitar Slim and Gatemouth Brown. So I grew up listening to them, because that’s what he put on the boxes — all that intermixed with Horace Silver, who was hitting at the time with that Blue Note scene. This was mid-50s. I used to spend my summers out in the country, place called Aola, Texas, way out there in east Texas. Place just has a barber shop and a little grocery store. Train didn’t even stop. Local man just put the mail up on a post, trainman would snag it on the way through. That was the environment I grew up in.
I was about four years old when I saw a set of drums in a church basement in Houston, and I knew I was going to be doin’ that. I didn’t know what they were, but I knew they had something to do with me. I used to keep time on pots and pans and everything I could find to keep time on. When I was in 3rd grade was the first time I had actual access to a set. Fellow named John Carter, who now teaches at the University of Southern California, was my first music teacher. In the 3rd grade they asked everybody who had training on instruments, they write your name down an’ all, then they send you to the band room. They gave me a clarinet, but I moved to the drums in the back of the room — which I knew I wanted to do. I just happened to have a natural talent for it. So we had to learn the Sousa’s, other marches by English composers. By the time I got to junior high, we were playing Wagner. At high school, it was marching music during the football season and classical music during the rest of the year. Now for our own enjoyment, we used to jam during lunch hour. The band director let us have the band room. We had access to all the instruments, every day during lunch. He would just lock us in. We didn’t go to lunch in those days. We weren’t playing blues, we were playing jazz. Charlie Parker had been through town and there was a local contingent of guys who could really play. Dallas was bigger than Fort Worth, but Fort Worth always had the cats who were on the money in terms of the music. It had a lot to do with our music teacher there, Mr. Baxter. He played all the instruments. He loved to perfect a band. He put his whole life into music — to the point it would drive him mad, so dedicated, totally dedicated. A lot of people come through this man: he was Ornette Coleman’s teacher, he was Dewey Redman’s teacher, he was Julius Hemphill’s teacher, Charles Moffett’s teacher and John Carter’s and mine. King Curtis, my father’s cousin, also came from there. Billy Toman and I used to take our instruments home over the weekends, he was a saxophone player, used to play with Mingus. We couldn’t get into the clubs much. I’d sneak in a lotta places ’cause my father had the juke-boxes, just long enough to catch a few sounds until someone got wise and realized I wasn’t there dealing with the juke-boxes. Then we started goin’ to Dallas. Saw a group called James Clay and the Red Tops, and I loved what everybody was doing and I wanted to sit in but I just wouldn’t. Fellow named Leroy Cooper, a baritone player who played with Ray Charles, was the one that got me up there. Billy had told him I played drums. I was 15 then.
I’d been so indoctrinated to the fact that the life of a musician is so hard. I’d seen a lot of musicians, and I thought I could do better in terms of living. But the music was something I just did. In church, I sang in the choir. In school, I sang in the choir. And the bands. And I played some gospel music, some spiritual music. It took a long time to actually make up my mind that this was what I was gonna do.
I went off to school, to Lincoln University in Missouri, to study music. But when I got there I realized it wasn’t the kind of music I wanted. It wasn’t jazz, which was the music I most liked to play. I’d been gigging in Dallas with James Clay and playing in Fort Worth. Ornette, of course, was long gone by that time, and Hemphill was four, five years ahead of me. So we didn’t have a chance to play together until I got to college. In the marching band and symphony orchestra at Lincoln was Oliver Nelson, Lester Bowie, John Hicks, Julius Hemphill, a bass and tuba player, Bill Davis, and myself. There we all were in Jefferson City, Missouri. I had chosen Lincoln over other schools because Lincoln was right between St. Louis and Kansas City and I knew I’d get the chance to catch all the players that came through there. With the background I had, I was afraid to come to New York, absolutely frightened to death.
At Lincoln, I learned how to play — uh, I had to play — hillbilly music, which paid for my food. Pure Ozark music. Also, some Boots Randolph-type music, screamin’ saxophone sorta thing. Just drums and sax in these back hills clubs up in the Ozarks. It was what they call, real redneck music. Redneck Honky-tonk music, it had nothin’ to do with the blues. And there were like no black people in the club except me and the sax player. And they would call out the weirdest songs and we’d have to play ’em and make those people dance. Just me and the saxist: that’s how I got a foundation in being able to play without a bass player or anything else. Actually, it was like a life and death situation. The saxophone player grew up in that area and all the white people knew him — he was their local idol, they always gave him work. And so he could play any song that they would ever want; it might be outa tune, in the wrong key, whatever, but he could play it. He had a good ear and he could scream.
We’d have to play “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and then go to “Polkadots and Moonbeams” then “Honky-tonk” then maybe “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window.” People came down to get drunk and we couldn’t jive ’em, we really had to be playing. They’d throw all kinds of things at us. Look: we were black so we were in trouble anyway. So we’d better not do nothin’ wrong, or else; you know, just play it boy. I guess we usually came through the front door but we had to come through it pretty early in the night, which was pretty much the same thing as coming in the back. And we’d play roller skating rinks, which were much better than the bars. No organ. Just me and the saxophone. In the Ozarks I had to learn how to fill in for other instruments, like the organ at the rink, I’d hear in my head where those other instruments were supposed to be and I’d know how to fill in — and still swing.
See, the whole gist of what I’m doing now is to play music that swings — swings just as madly, just as profoundly as any music has ever swung — but without having to play it in the context of keeping time. In other words, I play rhythms and let the rhythms create the time itself. So having to do those type of things early on — playing with no bass or no piano for instance — helped me think about the drums in a different way. And I had to play for everything and anything: bar mitzvahs, weddings too, and Mass, and honky-tonks, and everything else. I bought my first telephone in New York with money from a strip-tease gig. Me and a saxophone player from Philly, C. Sharpe, had that gig. Bump an’ grind, boom ba-ba-boom ba-ba-boom and all that. Most of it was on the toms and the bass drum, geared to your basic hip-shaking and then the undressing ceremony. Uh-huh, I’ve played everything.
I was at Lincoln a few weeks less than a year, ’cause I took off to see John Coltrane and Dizzy in St. Louis. Coming from Texas you could only hear all these people on record. I played in Dallas that summer and after that enrolled at Texas Southern University in Houston. I started working an evening gig, then an evening gig and an after-hours gig. I was working so much, I quit school again. My father became very ill and I went back home to run his business. It was then I decided to take school very seriously, in terms of trying to learn something other than music.
I had dissipated an awful lot as a young person. I was always with people much older and so I was always doin’ what they were doin’. In order to prove myself I was always doin’ it to the extreme. So when I went home to take care of business it was a breather for me; I got away from the life I’d been living. I’d been playing a regular singer-type gig with bass and drums from 8-to-12, and then a be-bop and blues gig from ’bout one till 6 or 7 in the morning in these gambling joints. Gambling’s illegal down there and these joints stayed open all night long. We used to get raided all the time. Shot at and everything else. They’d be so bombed out all the time they just didn’t care. The raids wouldn’t be the sort of thing that they’d cart the black folk to jail, because where I grew up if black people killed each other it was: “Oh well, another nigger dead.” No big deal. What the cops wanted was to catch up all the piles of money before the cats could grab it away. Now Texas allowed everybody to carry a gun, so everybody had one.
So from there I decided I had to go to school and study. And I went and studied ancient philosophy and business and tried to work from that end. As a music major, they’d been teaching me out of the same books as in high school and I’d been playing the same Sousa and Wagner and the other European classics. And technically, the teachers couldn’t teach me nothing new. Meanwhile, I was looking for people to teach me jazz. I had this concept that people actually taught jazz; I’d been playing be-bop in night clubs and had the notion that someone was teaching this somewhere.
I wasn’t aware at the time that the music you play comes from your life, not teaching. I was living that type of life and that’s where the music was comin’ from. But some of the cats I’d run into on gigs would tell me a few things about the drums and I picked up on that. I wanted to go to New York but I was too scared, so I found myself a school near there — University of Bridgeport up in Connecticut — that would be close enough so I could come down to the city. I started comin’ in and go my first gig with a foot-stompin’ piano player over at the Inner Circle on Sutton Place. Just piano and drums. I played a lot of duos.
At the University of Bridgeport I was truly and sincerely trying to become an American businessman. My parents wanted that. I had fucked up so royally from all the nightlife that it was time to put this other thing together. But then I found that wherever I’d be, I’d be playing music. Or if I had some time alone I’d be drawing drum sets, designing them the way I wanted them to be. I was working at United Aircraft as a market researcher. I was only there to do calculations, so I’d take off with other reports down to New York, and down there I started putting together the kind of drum set I wanted. So, needless to say, I was back playing the drums.
I gigged around in Connecticut and then moved to the city for good early in ’67. I moved into Bennie Maupin’s place between Avenues C and D on 10th Street. Cecil McBee was living right up the street. Another bass payer’s apartment became vacant and I moved in there. One night at Slug’s, Grachan Moncur told me about there were scholarships open for jazz musicians if you could qualify and take the tests and so on. The biggest requirement was to be able to play. I got a scholarship to N.Y.U. College of Music. My life was split between the strip-tease gig, playing at Slug’s or The Five Spot or on Staten Island or New Jersey or that morning playing for high school kids. This was the situation.
Then I began working for Albert Ayler. Charles Moffett took me to a recording session he was supposed to do. He didn’t want to do it because he was working with Ornette, so he asked me to do it. Charles Tyler was the leader. I met him for the first time in the studio. He told me what his kind of music was. We sat down and made the record. All first takes, no second takes. That was my very first record. Never got paid. But one of the people in the studio was Albert Ayler. Now I don’t know if I’d even heard of Albert Ayler; if I had, I didn’t remember him. Albert comes up to me and said he liked the way I played, would I join his band. He’d just come back from Europe and was looking for a drummer. I said: O.K. it didn’t bother me, didn’t faze me one way or another ’cause not only didn’t I know who he was, but I didn’t even think he was serious.
He called me. We started playing gigs down at the Lafayette Theatre. I’d been playing by myself a lot, and I’d played with duos and trios and orchestras and choirs, but never with someone who told me to play everything I could possibly play. It blew my mind. I could try anything. All four mediums — both feet, both hands — used to the maximum, with total concentration in each one. You know, the whole set-up was so massive: the total spiritual self, which can be a million different things at one time, but trying to make it concise and particular at a given moment. It was like somebody taking the plug out of a dam. So I was playing that, but one night I went over to the Five Spot where Mingus was trying to play “Stormy Weather.” That was one of the songs I used to practice by myself all the time; my father used to love to hear Lena Horne sing “Stormy Weather,” so it was in my psych. I used to practice it all the time, I could always play phrases on the drums from “Stormy Weather,” Now Dannie Richmond was the drummer, but I had the key for the music Mingus wanted to play. But he said NO. Allright, during their break Toshiko Akioshi comes out to play some solo piano. Herb Bushier comes up and starts playing bass. So I figure, why not. When we got through playing, some tune like “I Remember April,” the audience started applauding like mad. I remember a guy, right behind me, clapping LOUD. And then the guy says, “O.K. come in tomorrow.” I turn around and it’s Mingus Crazy. I enjoyed it, I played with the group as the second drummer for a few weeks. He liked what I was doing and wanted to rent some tympani for me, ’cause Dannie was his regular drummer and he knew I could play them, and he was working on some pieces and all. But Albert Ayler had gotten more work and there was a conflict. I couldn’t do both. I’d already been bitten by this Albert Ayler bug — he had such presence, he could play just two notes in a club and everyone would have to stop to listen — so I went to work for Albert. Which went along fine, until Albert wasn’t working for awhile.
Then I started up with Betty Carter. Working with her was one of the highlights of my life. The way she sings — rhythmically, her be-bop phrasing — really allowed me to extend the playing of my left hand tremendously. She would play with the rhythm section. It was a beautiful thing, but unfortunately I was going through a lot of degrading things in my personal life and I dropped out of the scene for awhile. This is at the end of the 60s, marches, riots and all that. I moved to Queens. Worked on a lot of social jobs: high school gigs during the week, small bars at night, every Saturday morning a bar mitzvah or an Irish wedding, which paid me more money than I made all week on all my other jobs. At this time I made a recording with Weldon Irvine. I met him when I worked with the Joe Henderson/Kenny Dorham big band. Then I did a record with Teruo Nakamura. And then I started chanting.
I was driving to a gig with a young pianist Onaje Alan Gumbs. I was a real speed demon, so I was driving very fast. So he starts chanting. I’m speeding down the highway, double-clutching, and he’s scared to death. He’s chanting: Nam Myoho Renge Kyo and I say: what in the hell are you saying? He said he’d tell me about it after the gig. He did, and I picked up from there. My life changed. I realized all the things I’d been seeking were right there in the rhythm of chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. In other words, all the discipline I needed in my life — the thing that was gonna put the pieces together for me — was the chanting. I moved back to Manhattan. I chanted. I wanted to live off music, not have to do anything else. That happened. I continued chanting; I wanted to put it to the test in terms of my life.
Up until this time I was playing totally from natural talent. But this made me think of music in a different way. I’d been very egotistical: I could go anywhere and just play, literally, in any musical context. And I did it all the time, sitting in all over New York: Latin, blues, rock, jazz, whatever, gospel music. But when I started chanting in ’74, this changed. I began practicing. I went to a religious convention in Hawaii, played out there in a trio with Buster Williams and Onaje. Herbie (Hancock) sat in. I came back and kept chanting. Had a steady gig in a cabaret, made a lot of money: I’d make $150.00 for 15 minutes at a press party for Elizabeth Taylor, things like that, and I’d never made money like that. You would not believe some of the places in New York: money, money, money these people had. I knew this was all happening for a reason . . .
I said my Buddhist prayers and practiced. Pray and practice. Then one Sunday morning I went down to the Pink Tea Cup, a soul food joint in the Village, and Ornette walks in. Now I had met him every once in a while over the years, Julius Hemphill had introduced me to him. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was looking for a drummer. I gave him my number. At the time I was makin’ more money than I had conceived was possible just playing the drums, so I wasn’t even thinking about it: I had a nice place, a telephone with an answering service, I could close up when I wanted to and come out when I wanted to. And he called a day later. Bern Nix was there at the rehearsal, and he’d been chanting also. Ornette had a gig with the Symphony Orchestra in Paris and he wanted to go over and spend a month. So we rehearsed for a month: Ornette; Jamaladeen Tacuma on bass, Bern Nix and Charles Ellerbee on guitars, a Chilean percussion player and myself. We rehearsed all day, every day. They’d already moved into his loft on Prince Street. And we left for Paris. This was the first time I’d been abroad and we were like travelling gypsies. We did everything ourselves. Got our own gigs. A fellow gave us the keys to his studio; all the equipment had been stolen out of it and we could use it for as long as we liked to rehearse. We ended up staying from October to March, this is ’76, ’77. We go out to Italy or wherever and play for awhile. We came back from one trip round Christmas, went into the studio and recorded Dancing In Your Head. We’d already done the pieces with the Orchestra.
Ornette had begun to show me different things: how I was playing according to the rules about playing behind someone and all, and encouraged me to do some writing, and work on my ideas. There was the same freedom to play as with Albert, but in this context you’d know everything you could or would play before you got up to the bandstand. Still improvisational, but ordered — no more guessing games. Already the chanting had allowed me to put my finger on what I wanted to do. I see music all around me. Everything is raining sixteenth and eighth notes all the time. I was becoming aware of all this and finally disciplining myself to sit down and write it out and perfect it. Since I had the keys to the studio, I’d get up early and go down there and work by myself, then the band would come by around 3:00, and we’d work till 9:00, sometimes till midnight. One night the police broke in; we were playing so late, the neighbors had complained. We played everyday, and the people ’round there weren’t used to this sort of thing. And I played all day. Any day I wasn’t there I’d be off to some museum of African art or history or maybe the Louvre, or the Museum of Man out at the Eiffel Tower ’cause that really had the stuff. I learned about the world, about life, and at the same time I was writing out all sorts of rhythms. The experience changed my life, changed what I wanted to play. We came back and played that Avery Fisher concert and then the spot on the “Saturday Night Live” show, which was the last thing I did with that group.
After that I had no place to live in the city, I had to move around again. I chanted and chanted so I could get a place to work on my ideas. And I ran into a saxophone player who was getting ready to leave his studio down on 13th street, which had a full apartment in back. All I had to do was move in, and I did. I wrote music and wrote music and wrote music and learned how to play the flute. I had no responsibilities: from the opening of my eyes to the closing of my eyes it was just music. I’d go out and work a press review or something for a few hundred dollars, but that would be it. I wasn’t working any gigs, didn’t have to. Other than rent, all I needed was 10, 15 dollars a week; I’d become a vegetarian, only eat one meal a day.
I had a loft bed, from which I’d write drum rhythms all over the ceiling. My conscious state was completely dominated by music. I’d never worked that hard, ’cause I could do all the things I’d hear being done by other drummers. But I was going for something else. I’d also been exposed to the Joujouka drummers of Morocco by Ornette. My playing was Ornette’s harmolodic concept from a rhythmic point of view. Ornette is a master saxophonist, melody-writer, magician, teacher. The whole time in Paris was like being in Coleman University. We were totally under his influence. He just paid us so we’d have money to eat and expenses. He was paying the hotel bills and everything. All we had to do was rehearse. We only played concerts when they’d pay him enough money that he thought it was worth it. My concept started there, but it didn’t begin to jell for me until I was alone down on 13th Street.
I realized that to get to the point that I wanted I would have to sacrifice for it. My father had always told me that. You’ve got to sacrifice. I’d been reading a lot of books, and learning how man can attain what he wants if he places himself in a desired state and works to stay there long enough. No one in my neighborhood cared when I played, so I played regardless of time. I’d get up at 3:00 or 5:00 in the morning and start playing the drums. Didn’t bother no one. I’d play into the afternoon, go make myself a cheese sandwich or egg sandwich, go to sleep for a few more hours, wake up and start playing again. After I’d been working on my ideas for over two years, I felt I needed actual group playing to further develop them. So I kept chanting and chanting — I’d told myself that I’d never miss my morning or evening practice — and I hadn’t so I knew if I set a goal for myself I could achieve it. I could send out the vibrations and basically get into the situation I desired.
So one night I’m walking up 7th Avenue, have a dollar in my pocket, figure I’ll go get myself a falafel sandwich. Then something in my mind said: no, don’t get something to eat now, go on up to the Vanguard. I never liked to go the Vanguard ’cause the fellah at the door and I didn’t get along, and I didn’t like havin’ to go to places where I had to pay to get in. On this night a young lady was on the door and I just walked in and went into the kitchen and there was Cecil Taylor drinking champagne out of a bottle. We started talking. He asked me what I do, I say I play drums. He ask me how good are you? And I told him I was the best person on this planet at doing what I do. I told him I play drums the way I play them better than anybody else because nobody plays ’em the way I do: playing drums from rhythm instead of from time, but still swinging. He didn’t know I had played with Ornette or anything: what impressed him was that I told him I was the baddest motherfucker that did what I did. Nobody could play drums like I could. So he said: (in a skeptical tone of voice) O.K., gimme your number, I did. The next day he calls and says come over — with your drums. I go over and he had five flights of stairs to walk up. Whew! We just started playing together and immediately hit it off. From the shit I was working on it was a great situation: I could modulate, I could play rhythms, I could play the numerical sequences I hear and construct myself — and still make it fit within the frame of what he’s doing. I could enhance his thing and still keep the drums and the rhythms as melodic as possible. Making the beat, without the time; like African rhythms, which talk about events and appearances in life, not time.
This is when I realized that the stuff I’d been working on down at the 13th street basement — ’cause I’d been down there two whole years, right? — could really happen. And Cecil liked what I was doing. So we rehearsed every day, from about 2 till 7, just the two of us. I knew he liked what I was doing ’cause friends used to call at certain times of the day. Cecil had a clock on his piano and if it was a particular time he knew someone regularly called at he’d pick up the phone, otherwise he’d let it ring and it might be from upstate or California or something, and Cecil would say “Listen to this” and go around taking all the phones in the apartment off the hook so that the whole space would be like a music chamber. Then he and I would play — maybe for 20 or 30 minutes — for these long distance calls and Cecil would pick up the phone again and say, “Did you hear that?” We had a ball. I have a whole library of cassette tapes of duos with Cecil. I’ve got alternate takes of things that are better than some of the stuff that’s been put out. I’d only heard Cecil play once before I met him, very briefly at the Five Spot. And I hadn’t heard Ornette either when I started playing with him, though we were supposed to be comrades, being from the same home town and all. I hadn’t become conscious of their music until I played with them. And I don’t think I could have handled that if I hadn’t been chanting.
Everyone sees themselves as what they are potentially capable of doing. But I think society blocks all that. There are so many obstacles. People settle for whatever they’re doing, instead of accomplishing whatever they want to do. The practice of chanting allows a person to look at and reflect on what they are and what they may become. By doing it every day, it reinforces this reflection. Since the practice requires action — it’s action because it’s vocal and rhythmical, which are actions themselves — you begin to accumulate more and more of your potential, whatever it is. Maybe you might want to be the best cab driver? Then you focus on all the things that would make people want to ride in your cab. But more than that, it makes you see that each person is an individual jewel . . . if they can take what they have and develop it. I’ve seen a lot of people fall by the wayside, who never got to where I am now ’cause they never stopped to change what they were doing. I realized the environment I was in wasn’t gonna get me to the place I want to go. I’d worked with Ayler and Mingus and Betty Carter but I’d gone back to working bar mitzvahs and parties. I heard many things, but I didn’t have the discipline to make them a reality. I was seeking, but I didn’t know who I was as a person. And that’s what chanting gave me. It broke down all the other characters and gave me me. I could sit in with anybody, anybody, ’cause I could play any kind of way — but not Shannon Jackson’s way. When I was seven years old I told my mother that I was gonna become rich by the time I was 35 but before that time I figured I might as well do everything; and David, I did everything, Believe me. About 99% of the things humans do, I did. And it’s funny, the year before my deadline I began chanting, and became rich by another standard . . .
Once Jackson put it together, he was unmistakable, one of the handful of drummers whose rhythmic identity is so strong that he changes every musician with whom he plays and the way you hear them. More than that, his inventions run so deep that you find yourself rethinking the American rhythmic tradition the way you had to, for example, when Elvin Jones came along.
One afternoon up at Soundscape, the New York City music loft where he practices, Jackson showed me how some of his rhythmic figures were put together, the right hand, left hand and right foot playing three different configurations of the same phrase while the left foot chopped out a steady series of eighth-notes on the high-hat. The result was a fairly funky, unusually spacious second-line beat that reminded me of some of the things Zig Modeliste had done with the Meters, but when Jackson began developing his three lines independently of one another he moved beyond the strictures of a 4/4 bar line into a rhythmic field in which any combination of polyrhythms was possible without any loss of beat.
A number of jazz-rock drummers since Tony Williams have worked out similar coordinations, and studio aces like Steve Gadd have evolved their own specialities; the big difference is the way Jackson has made it feel. It’s not just that he’s made the free-jazz connection or brought a lot of his playing down from the cymbals and back onto the set or even that (like two other Coleman graduates, Eddie Blackwell and Charles Moffett) he is an enthusiastic player of marches. The Jackson effect has more to do with musical essences than with new stylistic wrinkles or technical nuance; like Coleman before him, he has reconnected himself to traditions that modern jazz has either ignored or put to its own more urban uses. If music is a hidden river every artist has to find within himself, Jackson’s findings have led him back from the cluttered island of modernity to the fruitful and murderous fields of America — its folk continuum, trembling wooden churches and football fields, its festivals in Congo Square and, ultimately, Africa. So we are talking about a larger landscape than the city allows and a shared, communal music in which there is no extraneous compulsion to be clever, nor any fear of the simplicity of things as they are. Jackson’s technique may be extraordinary, he may dominate the bands in which he appears, but he does not communicate egocentricity. No matter how astonishing he gets, there is an implicit modesty in his work and a devotion to the music and what might come out of it. He communicates not “look what I can do” but “this is some of the power implicit in rhythm.”
The Jackson discography is small for the moment but impressive. Dancing in Your Head, nice start, is one of the (ahem) great recordings in the history of jazz, and the followup, Body Meta, still available on Artists House, bless ’em, comes in a notch or two lower on the pole but still sets the spirit dancing. The four recordings with Cecil Taylor reveal Jackson as the most stately free-jazz drummer in the history of the idiom, a regal and thundering presence. The two New World issues, Cecil Taylor and 3 Phasis, are colossal enough; the three-record One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodby on hat Hut is positively Wagnerian (also has the most obliquely feelthy title of the decade so far). Live in the Black Forest, on PAUSA, does not feature elves but does boast another shuffle and shorter, more easily assimilable pieces. Five stars to them all, or am I in the wrong magazine? Of the two albums with “James” Blood Ulmer, rock fans tends to prefer the Rough Trade import Are You Glad to be in America? (good God yes, especially now) for its raw, funk-punk spunk, but No Wave on Moers Music is my favorite for its unbridled energy and the way Jackson overpowers the already strong band of Ulmer, David Murray and Amin Ali with wave upon wave of rhythm (notice especially the stunning onslaught that opens the album).
Clearly this was one drummer who would wind up leading a band. What’s interesting about the Decoding Society’s debut disc, Eye On You, on About Time records, is not that it threatens to be the Next Big Thing (a designation apparently destined for Ulmer, who has been signed by Columbia for more money than you thought they spent on jazz) but that it looks like the beginning of a real oeuvre. Jackson did all the writing for the date — eleven tunes, since the cuts are kept short — and has effectively extended his penchant for polyrhythm into the sphere of composition. Most of the tunes are written in more than one tempo, often with haunted, Ornettish melodies suspended above faster, more driving rhythms, the orchestration thickly layered, almost sculptural in use of the two saxophone, one violin, two-guitar front line. Jackson is onto something, certainly a portion of Ornette’s harmolodic vision of the divine simultaneity, but also something all Jackson’s own just beginning to find its voice. I know where the rhythms come from, but why should the melodies and textures keep reminding me of China, Southeast Asia, Java, Chad . . . Of course, when you begin to crack the code there’s no telling what connections may turn up and what barriers may come down. The artist with a thousand faces has always enjoyed chatting with himself whenever he can get his instruments working right. Jackson resumes:
Cecil and Ornette are like suns. Not planets, but light for other planets. From Cecil I learned construction, how to really structure my ideas in terms of melody. All that time I’d been working on the rhythms and I had to sit up and block the cliches. I had to de-program all of that and say: BLOOM, you don’t have to go there no more, put in your own things. You don’t have to eat hamburgers every night. BLOOM! BLOOM! You can have shrimp and garlic sauce tonight, you can have lobster — you don’t have to play the same breaks and the same runs no more. You don’t have to play it from time, you can play it from rhythm. And from the basic rhythm you can create a million patterns from that, and keep the whole thing flowing. To me, making Cecil’s music swing means putting a beat there without actually playing it. I want the listener to feel the beat without the beat having to be there physically. The beat is in your body.
As far as be-bop time, I love the way Kenny Clarke and Max Roach and all those cats set it up. But they played it when Charlie Parker was around and this is no longer the Charlie Parker era. It’s been done. So I’m doing something different, playing time by just playing rhythms. If you ever saw the gatherings down South where people would start to dance and you’d see a person start to go in a circle ’cause the spirit hit them, and the moment it hit them might not have been on one, two, three or four. It might happen on five or six, or in between the two. Or the way the hearts beat: da-duh, da duh, da-duh — that kind of pulse can be used in different tempos. I can set up a time, using sixteenth or eighth notes on the sock cymbal, but the pulse don’t have to be with that. The pulse can just come directly from life, or from the music that’s being played. I place different rhythms, different numerical sequences together. And these rhythms aren’t corporal — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight; the rhythms of your heartbeat; a march rhythm — but rather they’re spiritual, which can vary in their numerical sequence. That variation indicates a different pulse movement. The foundation might be the type of beat you hear in a ritual ceremony in an African village.
I go there in spirit all the time. I’ve been going there, as a matter of fact, quite frequently since 1975. I can very easily go to a dance or a celebration. I often find myself there if I begin to read something and get off in my solitude and — BLOOM — I’m there, and it will take something startling to bring me back.
The Decoding Society is an organization for decoding musical and spiritual messages. Melody itself, like poetry, comes from the spiritual world, and we serve as a medium for it. When I began to write melodies I wondered where they came from, they’d become locked in my head and I couldn’t do anything about them until I wrote them down. That happens when I walk around certain parts of the city and it happens when I play the drums. In the middle of practicing the drums I naturally hear melodies. My whole life force now is directed towards presenting what I hear.
Our society has gone as far as it can possibly go in the direction we’ve been programmed to go in. We’re becoming conscious of the problem. I think people have begun to go into themselves, much more so than even three years ago, to find some spiritual solutions. I feel I’ve been blessed with an opportunity and I’m gonna do all that’s within my power to carry it out. Perhaps it’s just that certain people are given certain keys to carry out certain plans that already exist on a metaphysical plane. Beethoven worked on his ideas, but also on spiritual ideas. I’m trying to structure my life the same way. Sometimes now I wish I had more classical training, because with it, I feel a whole other feeling could be brought to music. I’d like to be able to present my music in totally orchestrated form. Not traditionally, but the way I hear it. I’ve had glimpses of it since my youth: to be able to present the music with such joy and warmth and giving that it will carry over into the person’s regular life. In ten years I’d like to take a group, a small group, to anywhere in the world and play, perhaps supplemented by an orchestra on certain pieces.
Rhythm is the pulse of life, and when you use those rhythms in the right way, in the positive way, it can carry your life into a sphere you might not experience unless you are deep into yoga or are charged with electro-telepathic impulses like a clairvoyant. There are melodies that come directly from the drums that I’d like to play that I don’t get a chance to play: I’ve had to create in terms of producing the concert, getting the musicians together and rehearsing, putting out the flyers, helping organize, advertise, carry the whole thing through . . . All of which doesn’t allow for the leisure of just going and doin’ it. Many times I hit on an idea but I don’t have the resources to carry it out. I found myself the other day taking money I had allocated for food and the telephone bill, and buying music books with it, just so I could keep writing music. I have a lot of music I’m working on right now, but since I don’t have a contract at the moment, I can’t very well ask people to rehearse it all the time. Last year, About Time gave me enough money and a month to do it the way I wanted to do it. David Baker did a fantastic job recording the instruments. This type of music would be fantastic in Digital. You don’t need Digital for disco or be-bop, but it came along at the right time for this music. I was told at CBS there wasn’t enough money for it. But if they want to — “they” being the people who market it or rather create the market for it — they could sell this music. Hell, they can create a market for whatever they want to. They can go down the beach and pick up some rocks and sell ’em on television. “Get Your Pebbles, Get Your Pebbles!!” — put it on TV commercials and you’ll have a run on rocks. That’s the irony of them saying there’s not enough money for something. They can sell anything if they want to.
For a lot of people, my music is music they hear also. I know I’m not the only one hearing this music. If I’m hearing it, there are millions and millions of others hearing it in their own minds. And for those people my work would be a verification that they’re not alone. I want my music to be a joy for people. The problem with it — since it’s called “art” music — is that it doesn’t get the same airplay as “commercial” music. And it’s also not SupClub music, mine is not music to eat dinner to. It’s more of a ritual. It’s not “finger-popping-at work” music, and it’s certainly not “I-love-you-baby” music. But I don’t ever want to be limited, ’cause my responsibility is not limited. Just because I’ve been associated with jazz, doesn’t mean I’m limited to doing this or that. Hell, the first tune on my new record, Sortie, blends an Eastern-Africa feel with an overlay of a march, the kind of spiritual movement at a football game. As a young kid I used to sit behind the band at the football games, and they used to spread such joy when there was a touchdown or someone caught a pass. I go there, to that feeling, when I play. My father used to take me to games when I was very, very small. And I would freeze, my feet would be frozen, almost frostbit by the time the game was over. But I was so into the music: they used to have some phrases everybody would sing, and the drummers, of course, would always be playing. That was where it was.
The second piece on the album, “Nightwhistlers,” is a blues, but it’s like a person walking between buildings in New York and whistling and hearing the reflection of that sound bouncing off the buildings and singing the blues all at the same time. He’s humming the blues and whistling. In other words, coming out of the country and whistling in the kind of echo-chamber we have here in a big city creates that kind of thing. So I wrote it all down, and played it the way people feel in an environment I used to be a part of — where people worked all week picking cotton and corn, and worked in wheat fields and watermelon patches — when they’d get together, starting Saturday afternoon puttin’ all the ice on the beer, and then after the sun went down they’d get together and start dancin’. And I used the kind of beat they’d dance to, it would be goin’ up and down at the same time, it would be like a volleyball beat. In “Apache Love Cry” I interlocked two melodies; one is the result of being at a West Indian Festival over in Brooklyn, the other comes out of a Bowery bar where I used to stop and get a beer after everything closed. One guitar player plays the one —which is lively, happy, full of carnival gaiety — while the other guitarist plays the depths of despair. And “Apache” as a symbol for what this country is all about. They represent the true spirit of what this country was and still is; no matter how many bulldozers and buildings we put up you can still get the spirit of this country if you go check them out. “Shaman” is a tribute to Max Roach, who’s a shaman. The first part, which has an African influence — and by that I mean a Southern Blues beat played in 6/5 — gives way to a drum solo and then a waltz-type thing. “Eastern Voices, Western Dreams” came through chanting. While I was chanting an Oriental voice would speak to me and this is what the voice said. I just got up and wrote down specifically what the voice said. But I come from the West. I live in a western society. I think the two of them are beautiful and will come together in this country, which of course would only bring it back to where it was at first — the American Indians already had that kind of spirit.
I do a lot of writing now from the piano ’cause I have one at my disposal, but everything on the record was written on the flute, or from the drums. For instance, “Dancers of Joy” was written on the drums. When I ride the bus and the subways I see a lot of people coming from dance classes. My thinking and feeling about that is, well, people want to dance the way they feel, not the way they’re programmed to dance. If someone comes to you and says, “Here David, here’s 50 $1000 bills, no stigmas attached.” You might not jump up and down right then, but when you get out the door and get by yourself, you start dancin’ for joy. Pure delight. Gurdjieff tried to use — in fact, did use —dance in his teachings, right? When people dance another element comes in, the thing that has to do with pulse, because when you really dance and let the mind-body-spirit be itself then one’s mental-logic-reasoning system is cut off and one goes into what the ritual of the dance can bring into a person, another dimension of the self. Whirling dervishes, right? I took the title from a Buddhist phrase, which talked about dancers of joy 3,000 years ago.
“Theme For A Prince” has two melodies. I wrote it in Europe and America. The first I wrote on top of a hill in the middle of a cemetery in France. It was after midnight, I didn’t have no money, and some Algerian dude hipped me to this place. Some famous French painter, Monet or somebody, painted up there. On top of the hill there’s a bar with money from all over the world, every country that has paper money has a bill pasted to the top of the ceiling. And these people were in there enjoying themselves. Really enjoying themselves. It was like: to hell with the world, the world didn’t even matter. The title was for the person I wanted to play it, that’s all.
Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Drums
I have a standard set, a set that was self-designed. I use Sonor drums and Paiste cymbals. The cymbals are the new dark sound cymbals, New Creations. Very much like the old K. Zildjians, which were handpressed in Turkey. I use two 15″ hi-hats, an 18″ Chinese splash, a 21″ flat ride, an 18″ dark ride (as a crash), and a 16″ crash — 2000 series, and also 10″ 2000 series interchangeably with a small gong-like cymbal which was Tchaikovsky’s which his son gave me. The drums are Sonor. Basically what I wanted was a heavier sound from the mounted tom-toms, a deeper, richer, lower sound from my left hand. One of the things I had in mind was piano design, where you come from the lower registers on up. I play more drums than cymbals, because I’m more interested in getting into the depths of drums in music — since to me, a lot of melody itself comes from rhythm.
I use two different size sticks because the two hands are different. The two hands and the two feet are not evenly matched, though I’ve used a: matched-grip for the past 7 or 8 years. So in the right hand, I use a stick with some kind of round beater, to get the proper effect on both drum and cymbal, but of a lighter weight than the one for my left, since my right hand will always be a little stronger.
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Record Review
Eye on You: Ronald Shannon Jackson And The Decoding Society.
About Time Records. 1981.
Reviewed by Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Vol. 1, Number 1, Fall 1981
© 1981
Ronald Shannon Jackson is the only individual to play and record with both Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, two of the major innovators in the history of black creative music. For many people this fact alone would be sufficient information about this artist. However, it is important to note that Jackson has emerged as a highly creative musician and composer in his own right. He is also a man with a clear vision of his aesthetic identity. It is this clarity of purpose and visionary perspective that distinguishes his music and marks his ensemble as a major contemporary force in world music today.
For over 20 years now many black musicians have been involved in developing a functional unity of the essential elements of the Blues, Rhythm and Blues, Funk and various stylistic forms of improvisational music. There has also been considerable interest in, and use of, traditional folk musics around the world. It is this “tradition” that continues in the multi-directional music(s) of Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society.
Jackson, originally from Forth Worth, Texas, (a city that has spawned such outstanding musicians as King Curtis, Julius Hemphill, John Carter and Ornette Coleman), has been playing and recording in New York since 1966. Born in 1940, Jackson has performed or recorded with everyone from Albert Ayler and James “Blood” Ulmer to Betty Carter and Stanley Turrentine. This wide spectrum of musical experience has had a profound impact on Jackson’s aesthetic philosophy.
In Eye On You, Jackson’s first album as a leader, he presents an intricate and emotionally compelling series of miniature sound portraits. It appears that Jackson, as a drummer and composer, has mastered the musical system of harmolodics created and taught by Ornette Coleman. This system allows all instruments in the band the structural freedom to create their own concept of the melody.
In Jackson’s music, all melodic and rhythmic structures are seen as dynamic interactions between notated and improvised material. The ensemble emphasis is on collective improvisation and communication. This method insures constant textural and tempo changes and a broad expressive palette of instrumental colors. The result is not a mindless hodge podge of musical styles and aesthetic idioms, but a dynamic synthesis and extension of the philosophical and spiritual values in contemporary music.
Lest the reader get the mistaken idea that Jackson’s music is purely cerebral in content, it would be wise to guess again.
This band “swings” like mad! The ensemble sound is kinetic and explosive, warm and majestic. The music roars, caresses, teases and burns fiercely. Fiery and passionate, it is dance music for the soul. It is also this time zone’s interface of New Orleans martial cadences (dig the pronounced two-beat booty licks), Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix rock riffs, hardcore African delta blues, stomp-down R&B, enchanting Indian/Chinese ballads and a fascinating crossbreeding of the stylistic innovations of Coleman, Dolphy, Ayler, Taylor and Coltrane.
The outstanding quality of this music destroys the facile and parochial categories of critics. This music’s references and sources are at once Western and non-Western, urban and rural, blues based and spatial, traditional and postmodern, notated and improvised. Jackson defines the Decoding Society as “an organization that interprets and translates the musical and spiritual messages of the New World.” To paraphrase the name of the small independent label that Jackson records for, it’s About Time.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4_8sOFQs-8
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Ronald Shannon Jackson:
''Rhythm Is Life Itself"
Interview: April 10, 1982
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON
Interviewed by Kofi Natambu
Eclipse Jazz Concert
The Power Center
Ann Arbor, Michigan
This interview appears in Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Vol. 2, Number 2-3, Winter/Spring 1984
Kofi Natambu (editor)
Solid Ground: We're sitting with Mr. Ronald Shannon Jackson, drummer-composer and leader of the Decoding Society, an outstanding black creative music ensemble. Last night they appeared in concert at the University of Michigan as part of the Eclipse Jazz Series. We're going to be talking with Mr. Jackson about his philosophy of music and its relationship to what he·s been involved in over the past decade or so in this part of the world. I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome you Mr. Jackson.
Ronald: Thank you very much Kofi. The music I play, and the group I represent, is the beginning, the seed. the nucleus of the turning point of our music throughout the land as it has moved before in waves, as our people assimilated the western instruments in New Orleans and created this music in terms of furthering our development as a people in this music. By that I mean we are simply carrying on a tradition that was set in New Orleans and many other places. A tradition that was brought to a very high peak of perfection by Charlie Parker. Dizzy Gillespie. Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, etc. who built on the foundation of Fletcher Henderson, and other great musicians in the "Swing Era" on up to Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Now we're at the point where we have electricity influencing not only music, but life. And since life is music and music is life, it's just the next step in the music. Our group. the Decoding Society, has the good fortune of being a leader in this, so the young musicians in Detroit. and throughout the United States, will be able to really harness their own musical spirit and energy and bring forth what they have to give. It would be a sad thing if we didn't allow our youth to have the necessary philosophy. or understanding the history of oursefves as a people. We have the responsibility of carrying that on. I think that what we're doing will give them that impetus.
As you know the media has flooded our homes and our people's mind (and especially our younger peoples minds) with a music that is for dancing and only allowed for dancing or made so that everyone can dance to it. Where you go and you can dance the same way every night. When as a people we oome from a background where you had dances for each occasion. Not just one steady rock or disco beat. Now we already have that influence in our homes and in our youngsters. But we can use that same electrical pulse to bring forth our true creativity, which is what we're striving to do. It's just about finding itself, its own roots, and really manifesting itself totally, throughout the whole world. As our art form "jazz" has done.
We're given the dilemma of having the fortune and misfortune at the same time. We are originators and creators of this music. but we're not the benefactors of this fruit. In other words we plow the field, we plant the seeds, we do the nurturing, we even pick the crops. But we don't get to eat the fruit. Unfortunately, that's going to continue. But we as a people have to continue also. We have to realizethat we are given a responsibility to carry on the aspect of creativity in music and man throughout the Universe at this particular time. Nothing is born from the silver spoon. It has to come from the depths of our lives and the suffering that we're going through. And that suffering is not eliminted by finncial stability. To us, that's only a pathway to bring forth more of the deep, unfathomable crealivee force we do possess.
S.G.:
Throughout the ages, music has been used as a philosophical and
spiritual way of acquiring a broader consciousness of one self in
relation to the environment. In the context of the Decoding Society, how
would you describe what the purpose or the function ol the Decoding
Society is in terms of that particular point of view?
Ronald: Like I stated before, civilization keeps ooming to certain mountain peaks. Every seven years Man changes, every several decades or centuries or so, civilization changes. In this country, at this time, the winds of change are very present. And that wind blows, and those of us who are given the responsibility of carrying on the tradition of our music have to realize this and make it manifast so that when we come to the point of understanding not only our own personal relationship with the environment and society, but our relationship with the Universe as a whole then we will feel that. The Decoding Society is a verification of that.
In other words, the Decoding Society is saying that joy, that warmth, that inner enlightenment that one sees is a glimpse of the infinite that is there in all our lives. This is present all over. In the same way that a flower can be used to show a horn owl some of the laws of nature, the Decoding Society is a group that shows that this manifestation has appeared now. And it's just the beginning of it. It's the beginning of bringing together spiritual forces. Sure, music has been used in a spiritual, philosophical vein throughout the ages because it is the highest of the art forms. That's because it's sound vibrations. Sound. Music is Sound, and sound creates the whole Universe. We're sending out sound signals now into the infinite or not so much infinite but distance. Into the distant planets and we're listening for echoes and the return of those sound waves to our planet.
It's
the same thing with Man. We send out signals, you and I. We all have
fibers that emanate from our center and although we can't see that, it's
the same as we can't see our eyebrows, it is still there. It emanates
from me to you, and emanates from you to other people. Which is saying
we're all connected and when we send our the wrong type of vibes from
those fibers, then we see the bad, or wrong type of effect. When we send
out the right type of vibes from these fibers that are emanating from
us, then we see that beautiful effect and it's embodying a law of cause
and effect. Music is the highest cause.
Personally I practice Buddhism. At one time Buddhism used music to teach people about the awareness in themselves. Because music has, or is the element that will make one look into themselves, as opposed to outside ourselves. So the Decoding Society is a vessel of the manifest realistic entity embodying the forces of music to show that unity exists in Humankind on a spiritual level.
S.G.: When I listen to the music of the Decoding Society, I get very distinct feelings. Very distinct impressions ... I can actually feel the unity between melody and what people call rhythm. To the extent that you've been involved as a composer of music and as a "drummer," how does the element of rhythm play a part in the music in terms of its energy?
Ronald: Rhythm is—as you know—life itself. Rhythm is Life and Life is Rhythm. Everything we do is rhythm. Our heartbeat ls rhythm. Our ancesters used rhythm as a way of communicating since they all didn't exist at that time. Our International Telegraph and Telephone or whatever, and we still use it. Some of our relatives still use rhythm to talk with.
Now in the Decoding Society, I use rhythm and melody to speak the way we've normally been speaking throughout the ages. You see when people said "Jazz has died, Jazz is dead" they were saying something that is not so. You know people at one time were saying that "Jazz is dying." Well we all know that is not true. What happened is that Jazz is such a universal and international force that ways were devised to exploit it and make it more "palatable" to people in terms of putting it behind TV and using it as background music throughout the world. In order to make it so it wouldn't affect you, they took the rhythm out. And that's what you're talking about. You know, that is my personal goal: To see to it that Rhythm is put back in our Music. We can talk, we communicate, we dance from rhythms and we don't, too. We are not just a disco dancing people. All of us who listen or will read what I'm saying will understand that we dance inside in millions of ways. We jump for joy, we have movements for sadness, we have dances for weddings, we have dances for births. We have dances for the celebration of just our pure being and it's not a disco beat. It is the rhythm of our life. That's what I'm doing. I'm using rhythm itself.
Rhythm is the element that we all have, and if you listen to a dog barking and the dog barks in an angry rhythm, you immediately understand it. Same way as you can listen to the flutter of the wings of a bird and feel the melodiousness behind the rhythmic activity. We all have this in us. As a kid I remember being in the kitchen and my grandmother would be humming some hymn. You know our older women were modest in those days. They had on these long dresses and long aprons. They'd grab the apron and pull it up. Not real high or anything sexually provocative, but they would pull it up so they could get their legs moving and really get in the rhythm of what they were doing. And that's there. I know that's in all of us, our people, and that's what I want people to really understand. We're not alone, you know. It's in all of us. That is the rhythmic aspect.
Melody
comes out of rhythm. You can be playing a rhythm, and once you play it
to a certain state, it begins to manifest its own melody. Life appears.
It's not something that's mystic or mysterious, it's just there and
rhythm unlocks it. Rhythm is the key that says: "Yeah, check this out."
It's the same as the air we're breathing and the atoms that surround us,
you know. We don't see it but it's there. Rhythm is there the same way.
A heartbeat. If your heartbeat misses a rhythm, you know that ... ask
anyone who had a heart attack.
S.G.:
That's crystal clear. You've obviously been playing a long time. In the
development of your own life, how did you begin to formulate some of
the ideas that you've expressed in terms of your playing? Could you
describe that process?
Ronald:
Well, actually Kofi it's a process that began before I was born this
time. I say that because I knew that I was going to be playing drums by
the time I was four years old. And I'd never played any. When I first
saw a drumset I was in the basement of a church in Houston, Texas. My
mother had taken me to Houston, and it was some kind of kiddie
program-the kids were there and I was walking through in a line and this
drum set was sitting there on this podium and I just stopped. I let
everyone else go. I was just mesmerized at that point. Although there
was nobody on the bandstand I could see all the joy in music with the
cats playing. I could see this, so I knew that that's what I was
supposed to be doing.
But what I was seeing was not a cat just sitting behind the drums. So the natural forces steered me toward what I was supposed to do. The same as if allof us were allowed to carry out what we see in our minds. Those things we know we're supposed to do in this lifetime. Then we would all be happier people for sure. We could carry out what we're supposed to do. I knew that I was supposed to be playing music and I grew up in a musical environment. My mother was a piano player and played organ. She played on the first and third Sundays in the Methodist Church. On the second and fourth Sunday she played the organ in the Baptist Church, and my father, although he had always wanted to play saxophone, he could never afford one. But when he was young enough to be able to play. But he always carried the melodies he wanted to play.
I
told my people when I was about four years old. I mean they saw me
playing. I'd always been playing on stuff, you know. Since I was a very
young kid. Imagine this: my little boy now is two years old. He hasn't
been around any drums because my drums are in another place, but he goes
into the drawer and gets a knife and a spoon or something to play on
all the time. So I was the same way.
Like I said before, we had a piano in our home. So even as a kid crawling around they always kept the bottom off the bass. It was one of those old Stanley uprights, and you could pull your fingers cross the strings at the bottom of it. And from there I could hear all the harmonics. On top of that there was a Holiness Church across the street from where I grew up and they used to get down every day, and all day Sunday (gentle laughter), and then when I got older, say when I got to the third grade, a fellow named John Carter who's a very fine clarinet player out in California, who was my third grade music teacher in school, he started me. Since I played piano he wanted me to play clarinet because he knew I knew how to read music at that point. So it was in the third grade that I first began to really play. After about three or four weeks I wound up on drums. Which was what I told them I wanted to play. They wanted me to play clarinet and I wanted to play drums.
So eventually I gave them back the clarinet and was playing the drums. From there it just kept developing. I sang in the choir and my father became the local jukebox operator in my hometown. From having the jukebox he opened up a record store and we sold 45s and 78s at that time. Gospel and rhythm and blues and jazz, which only later became distinct terms.
In the community I grew up in there wasn't any difference. You were just playing music, you know. You get on the bandstand and you went the whole spectrum. It wasn't just one element of it. That came about when people decided they had to have categories to identify what was going on. But we didn't have to have that identification because we grew up with that, you know? Me and a fellow named John Theodore (who lives in Ottawa, Canada now), we started playing what's called "jazz" together a little before we went to high school. Around ninth grade. From the seventh grade to the ninth grade we were allowed to take the instruments home. I was allowed to take the drums home. So I already had cooperation from my family. My aunt would come pick me up, pick me up from school on the weekends and I would take the drums home. Since my uncle was a carpenter we had what's called a "little house" on the back of our house, and on weekends I could set up the drums in there and me and this fellow named John Theodore, we'd just play all day Saturday and Sunday. And we'd take the stuff back to school and proceed on the normal course of going to school.
By the time we got to high school I was playing timpani and snare and bass drums and we had talent shows. Our high school teacher was named Mr. Baxter. Now Mr. Baxter was definitely a special person. King Curtis, you know King Curtis who arranged and played all the first parts of the music of Aretha Franklin, he was my distant cousin. He was my father's sister's nephew, and he came out of that high school. John Carter came out of there. Ornette Coleman came out of that high school. Julius Hemphill came out of that high school. Charles Moffett came out of that high school and Dewey Redman came out of that high school and myself ...
S.G.: That's no coincidence, that's phenomenal!
Ronald:
We all came out of that same place. The city recognized his [Baxter]
talents and gave the high school all the instruments we needed. And the
band uniforms and stuff. We had a whole string ensemble in terms of
contrabass, viola, cello, violin. We had all the brass—E flat horn,
tuba, baritone horn, French horns. We had all the drums from the snare
drum and the bass drum to the tympani. We had all the musical
instruments, in other words, at our disposal. And what Mr. Baxter would
do is make us practice. We never went to lunch. We played music in the
regular band, then he'd lock us in the band room during lunch period. In
the course of buying all this equipment he also bought all the
equipment we needed to play dance music. In other words, the same bass
drum we used to march on the field with we had foot pedals we could hook
up and play jazz on. The same cymbals we used for class we could take
the middle part out and he brought the cymbal stands so we could play
them. And then we had the sock cymbals. And could use the same
instruments. We other words, Mr. Baxter just locked us in the band room
and we played music for an hour, while everybod else ate lunch.
(laughter)
That's how we were allowed the access to develop our music. Whether our parents had the money to buy an instrument or not. He taught us music, he [Baxter) was a very disciplined cat. You had to be able to play. He was a beautiful cat man. From there I just went on. When I was about 14 I started playing in bars, and in the local juke joints, you know. Blues. I'd see cats like Jimmy Reed and Lightnin' Hopkins, T. Bone Walker, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles, Sonny Stitt. All these cats were coming through there, man. Jay McShann. It was such a variety and mix of music. I'd see Clara Ward. It was so much music happening. And then we'd go and play this music, you know. Count Basie and the Duke, and the town I grew up in was like a stockyard town. It had a lot of money because of all the cows. They brought all the cows from Texas into this area. It was like the cow depot. It was like the train junction also, so you had the porters on the trains and so forth, cats working the stockyards, so they made a little money, you know, these guys were off on Mondays. The hotels were poppin because of the business element, so there were a lot of places to play, and we began to play gigs.
Then
after I graduated from high school I went to Lincoln University in
Jefferson City, Missouri. And that was another strange mioho situation,
and by mioho I mean the mystic law. My roommate was a fellow named John
Hicks, a piano player. I mean my freshman year. Another fellow who was
there was Oliver Nelson and he was one of our teachers. He had come back
to college, you know. He wanted to graduate so he was teaching also. A
fellow named Bill Davis was playing bass and tuba. He plays with Frank
Foster now. Julius Hemphill was there. Lester Bowie was there in the
band. So again I was in one of these situations where we were just there
playing music. I quit going to school because Coltrane was supposed to
be playing in St. Louis during the time of the final exam. So Coltrane
and the Dizzy Gillespie group were in St. Louis. But the reason I went
to that school was because it was close to St. Louis and Kansas City,
and I could dig more music live so I just had to tell the school they
had to wait until I check this other stuff out (laughter).
I
was going to learn more in checking these cats out than I was going to
learn in 50 years listening to that shit they were talking about! (we
both crack up) I was finally convinced after the year had gone that
maybe I should go back to school. So I went down to Houston. I got in
there and I started playing again. I had been playing all the time, so
when I got there I went and started sitting in. The local cats gave me
all these gigs so I was working in the evening. I worked from 8 to 12
for like a cocktail gig, and from about 1:30 or 2 in the morning to
about 6 in the morning I was playing afterhours gambling joints. So I
really wasn't any good during the day for going to classes anyway. So
that didn't work out, so I just played music there. Then my father got
sick and I went home. Then I started playing in Dallas a lot. But around
this time they put up Sputnik [space capsule], and I decided there was
some information on this planet that I didn't know about. At that time I
didn't know what made an airplane fly. Since they were going over my
head all the time, I figured Man has some information I need to know
something about, other than music, so that I'd also know something about
Life.
So I decided to go back to school. So I borrowed money. I realized I wasn't going to learn what I wanted to know. So I just buried myself in the library. Then I went to school and decided I needed to go up North. I was afraid to go to New York. From what I heard about New York I was really in love with it, but I was horrified of going there.
So I went to the University of Connecticut. And that way I figured I could go down to New York and check it out and come back. It's only 45 minutes away. I went, and I was studying at the University of Bridgeport, and I was reading a Downbeat (magazine). Art Blakey and his group were playing, and the newspaper said that the piano player was John Hicks, my old roommate. So you know I started going down to the club and sitting in. By this time what I was reading was obsolete information. But I did finally catch up with him, and Betty Carter needed a drummer at that time so John hooked me up with her. So in the meantime I ran into Kenny Dorham and he said they were looking for musicians to give scholarships to at NYU. Since I was going to school at Bridgeport, I said, well, let me go in and apply. I got a scholarship. What happened was the scholarship gave me the money not only to go to school, but they gave me a stipend. So I had money to live and eat off of in New York. So I said, "I've gotto go to New York now. I'm up here in Bridgeport going to school but I'm working part time, so I gotta go." So I went on ...
S.G.: This is the early '60s?
Ronald:
No, this is the late '60s. I actually moved there in 1966. I was
working with Betty Carter, and I ran into Albert Ayler and I worked with
him for a long period.
S.G.: What was that like?
Ronald:
A revelation. Albert was a very heavy spiritual cat. Very, very heavy
spiritual guy. Albert was a cat who, when he played, you know he'd come
into a bar and people would be making noise, music is playing loud,
normal shit in a bar right? But once he put his horn in his mouth
everything stopped. The cash register stopped ringing, waiters stopped
picking up glasses. People stopped talking; you knew something profound
was going down. And the only thing you could do was listen. A lot of
people would be crying. Because Albert could touch that part which is in
each of us that's so true, yet we deny it so much. We camouflage it. We
put cigarettes, alcohol and drugs on top of it. We put family and
social problems before it, we pile things up on it to try to make it go
away. Because society doesn't want to accept us that way. It's easier to
make distinctions in terms of race, class, all these other ways to
break down things—to make it functional for those who are in control.
But the element itself is very true and very pure, and Albert had a
direct connection to that. Music connects us to that. That's what makes
it so universal. Albert was close to this force. When I met Albert I was
recording for another group. He said, "Just play, man." He happened to
be in the studio and he said, "I want you to play in my group, man." And
he said, "Just play everything you hear." On top of that he just played
his soul. It's a pity none of it [our work together] was ever
recorded.
Also, by that time I'd gotten into a financial bind. I had quit working. I'd quit going to school, so that was cut off. Because I had started going on the road. I had a family, then I started working with Charles Mingus. It was paying me a lot of money, and Albert wasn't getting any work that was paying any money. At that time I hadn't moved my family yet from Connecticut. So I brought them down. And it appeared I worked with a lot of "bebop" players, the cats, the musicians as far as I'm concerned. I worked in the Kenny Dorham—Joe Henderson Big Band. Jackie McLean, a few times with Charles Lloyd. As I said, I worked with Mingus, and that was another revelation. I worked with Betty Carter, with John Hicks and Walter Booker. Than I worked with the Ray Bryant Trio. I traveled a lot with the Ray Bryant Trio. Stanley Turrentine—I just worked with a lot of people. The McCoy Tyner Trio. It was a very heavy period in my life. I met a lot of cats and worked with them. By this time I'd lost my fear of New York.
I met a lot of Detroit cats with Mingus. I'd met Charles McPherson and Lonnie Hillyer directly, immediately—Boom!—that's how it is when you're messing with Detroit cats (laughter). I met Barry Harris during that period. I'd worked with Barry and Charles McPherson had a group at that time. I met Ray McKinney and his group, too. Roy Brooks was there doing his thing, he was really in the mainstream of it. So it was a hell of a period. But then I realized after that period as things moved on that I still hadn't completed or gotten to what I was destined to come to New York to do. And that was to play the music I used to walk around hearing in my head in Texas.
And I used to hear the rhythms of our people with the melodies of this land. I made a lot of mistakes in searching and seeking for it, as you would do with anything you really have to try. You really have to go and seek what is really there for you. It's the hardest thing to unearth. I came upon the fact that what I wanted to do, I was just knocking my head up against a brick wall. Instead of finding the element that I was hearing, I began to get more gigs and cabarets and weddings and bar mitzvahs. Things that were only supplying me with the income, but not the spiritual revelation of the music that I wanted to get to.
So I was playing a gig with a musician called Onaje Allen Gumbs, a piano player, and he told me about the Nichuren Shoshu Buddhist chant. and I went to a meeting at Buster Williams' house and the rhythm there put me in contact with something that I knew had existed in other lifetimes of mine. And I just glimpsed something that I had only glimpsed in moments of pure music. There are times when you are playing and it's no longer you playing, you're Just One with the forces of the Universe.
And
when I went to the Buddhist Temple and I heard these people chanting,
the fear had been knocked out of my life in terms of accepting other
elements that had been considered foreign to us as a people. Because I
realized we had only been taught in the Western concept, when we're in a
land that's as open as the whole world itself. So when I heard the
people chanting, it didn't scare me, it didn't frighten me. It just
allowed me to stop and realize that here was something that was a part
of me also. And the discipline and the practice allowed me to begin to
see that I didn't have to be locked into what was socially acceptable.
That I had to develop myself. And that meant I had to break away from
the norms and go my own separate way. And it just put me in a total
financial bind. Because I wasn't able to make a living. But I could see
every day through chanting that I was growing into what there was for me
to grow into in terms of being a musician, in terms of developing my
art and myself. And I just kept doing it. Like a scientist in a
laboratory. Every day I wrote out my rhythms and I worked on it. I
worked on the patterns I worked on the ideas. Every day I got up, I
would chant every morning and I would work on the flute. Because I knew
that I needed a melodic instrument to bring forth what I was hearing in
the rhythms I was practicing. And it wasn't coming from the piano. It
was, it would have to be the same as our brothers in Kenya and in Ghana
and in Chad who play, and as you know it's no written form. But there's a
musical and social unity that's in music where they play. It's not
coming to the end of a cadenza or coda. It's the life of the people. So
that when they come to the end of a statement—SMACK!—everybody stops.
Together.
He called me the next day and I got that gig. But things I'd been working on came out in "Dancing In Your Head" [1976 recording by Ornette Coleman]. Also in an album called Body Meta (1978). Then I went back and after I worked with him for awhile and he quit working, I didn't want to work-I just wanted to work on my ideas. Because I realized I was just beginning what I was doing. And I realized through chanting that I couldn't let my Ego take me out in terms of that. I'd been working with Ornette and I had received all this beauty. It's like going to Coleman University, working with him and studying with him. But through chanting I realized I couldn't let my Ego just take me out there. I had to keep going. So I went back and starved even more because I wasn't working at all. And after a two-year period, I had come to a point in what I was working on in ideas. and I didn't have any money, but I went to a Buddhist meeting and after the meeting I got a ride downtown with Buster Williams. And I went and heard Buster play a set up and I was on my way home and my mind just kept telling me to go to the [Village) Vanguard. And I never went out, I never go out hardly now, because I just work on what I have to do. And I hate to see the brothers just there—locked into something that they're not growing In.
But my mind kept telling me, "Go to the Vanguard." So I went and I walked In and I couldn't see what I was supposed to be there for because the group that was there wasn't really nothing I wanted to hear. So I went in the kitchen and there was Cecil [Taylor) back there drinking champagne and I started talking to him, and he asked me what it was I did. I told him I play drums. And he said, "Can you play?" And I said I'm the best on this earth playing what I play. Cecil said, "OK, give me your number" and I gave my number and for about a month we played together. Just he and I. I only played with him six months. But four records were recorded in that time. And that was a statement A documentation of his art.
But
through chanting I realized couldn't let my Ego take me out there
either. You know because it's about all people and ALL of life. So I
went back to work some more. I got a flute wherever I go, I can alway
carry it with me. So all the places I'd go to and all the people I'd
meet I'd write about them. All of us have this warmth, this glow about
us. If we allow it to exist, it's there. And when I see it and I feel it
in myself, then 1 reinterpret it. You know—to give it back.
So
being with Cecil allowed me to see the structure in music. How to
structure my music. So I'd kept working on it and I went to work with
Ornette again. And this time Charlie Ellerbee, who was still in Prime
Time (Omette's group), but couldn't make the tour because he was working
with the Trampps who had a big hit out at that time. So [James] Blood
went with that group (Prime Time). And so after I stopped playing with
that group I started working with Blood's group, you know. But playing
the ideas I had been working on still again. And that brought about his
Music Revelation Ensemble. But then I still realized there was something
else I had to do. I had to go Otlt with these things I was hearing and
writing and working on, and develop it among our younger musicians So
that they can develop among those to come. So that as a people we can
all continue to grow and give. By this time in our 300-400 years in
America it sounds like a bad word to give any more. But we're going to
have to keep on doing it (rueful laughter). It's just there. It's ours
to give. So we have to give it. If we don't we'll all be blown off this
planet.
We just have to realize we can't be selfish. Even though we understand and realize how much we are persecuted and were made to suffer and humiliated and made to feel that we were supposed to be less when we know what our true worth really is. So we just have to keep on giving it. Developing and giving our young people that which is theirs to inherit. To keep and continue on with. (End of Part I)
Ronald Shannon Jackson, Composer and Avant-Garde Drummer, Dies at 73
October 22, 2013
New York Times
Ronald Shannon Jackson, an avant-garde drummer and composer who led an influential electric band and performed with many of the greatest names in jazz, died on Saturday at his home in Fort Worth. He was 73.
His death, from leukemia, was confirmed by his son Talkeye.
Mr. Jackson, whose distinctive look included long hair that he once braided with rivets and subway tokens, had a muscular style that set him apart from his fellow avant-garde jazz drummers, providing for a thunderous yet economical rumble infused with funk, marching-band patterns and African styles. His band, the Decoding Society, showed his knack for writing rigorous yet approachable music.
He performed over the years with Charles Mingus, Betty Carter, Jackie McLean and Joe Henderson. But his name was most closely linked with three free-jazz pioneers: the saxophonist Albert Ayler, the pianist Cecil Taylor and, foremost, the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who also hailed from Fort Worth.
After his brief but important stint with Mr. Coleman’s groundbreaking electric band, Prime Time, Mr. Jackson forged ahead with the Decoding Society in 1979. The group extended and streamlined the kinetic, boldly polyphonic style that Mr. Coleman had introduced while incorporating rhythms derived from ethnic styles.
“We’re coming from a world music as opposed to one kind of beat,” Mr. Jackson told The New York Times in 1982.
“Everything we do has a foundation,” he continued in that article. “I think the African phrases are very obvious. I think the funk phrases are very obvious. I think the Oriental phrases are obvious. I think the Bulgarian rhythms are there — I hear all of it.”
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the band was a proving ground for veteran instrumentalists like the saxophonist Charles Brackeen and the violinist Billy Bang, as well as promising newcomers. Two of Mr. Jackson’s protégés, the guitarist Vernon Reid (later of the rock band Living Colour) and the bassist Melvin Gibbs (who went on to play with the punk-rock vocalist Henry Rollins), performed with him sporadically through his final years.
Mr. Jackson was born in Fort Worth on Jan. 12, 1940. His mother, Ella Mae, played piano and organ at a Methodist church and his father, William, was the proprietor of Fort Worth’s only black-owned record store and jukebox supplier. The saxophonists King Curtis and David (Fathead) Newman were relatives; among the musicians who preceded him at I. M. Terrell High School were Mr. Coleman and the saxophonists Dewey Redman and Julius Hemphill. Mr. Jackson played his first public engagement, with the saxophonist James Clay, at age 15, then worked with Ray Charles’s band in Dallas. In 1966 he went to New York, where he enrolled at New York University. That year he made his first recording, with the Charles Tyler Ensemble, and joined Ayler’s band. His work with Ayler is documented on two roughly recorded but urgently played volumes of “Live at Slug’s Saloon.”
By 1967 Mr. Jackson’s career was derailed by drugs, he said in an interview published by Fort Worth Weekly in 2003. Introduced to Buddhism by the bassist Buster Williams in 1974, Mr. Jackson regained his health. A passing encounter with Mr. Coleman led to a four-year run with the newly formed Prime Time, which recorded the watershed album “Dancing in Your Head” and its successor, “Body Meta.” He joined Mr. Taylor’s band in 1978 and stayed for six months, appearing on four albums.
Mr. Jackson formed the Decoding Society in 1979, and it would occupy him for the rest of his career. Not just a showcase for his drumming, flute and schalmei (an archaic horn), the band also showed his increasing confidence as a composer. Albums like “Mandance” (1982), “Barbeque Dog” (1983) and “Decode Yourself” (1985) reaped critical acclaim. He seemed poised for a breakthrough.
He still found time for side projects. In 1986 he joined Last Exit, a blustering jazz-metal quartet with the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, the guitarist Sonny Sharrock and the bassist Bill Laswell. Another venture with Mr. Laswell, SXL, brought the two together with the Indian violinist L. Shankar, the Senegalese percussionist Aiyb Dieng and the South Korean percussion troupe Samulnori. In 1987 Mr. Jackson joined Mr. Gibbs and the guitarist Bill Frisell in a trio, Power Tools, which made one album, “Strange Meeting.”
Commercial success eluded Mr. Jackson. But Decoding Society albums like “Red Warrior” (1990), a fiery guitar-oriented session, and “What Spirit Say” (1994), featuring the saxophonist James Carter, showed that he had never stopped evolving as a composer. “Shannon’s House,” his final studio recording as a leader, was issued in 1996.
In 2000 Mr. Jackson’s playing was curtailed by nerve injury in his left arm. By 2005 he had recovered sufficiently to play in the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet. Mr. Jackson played his final public concert with a new Decoding in July 2012 in Dallas, video clips of which were posted on YouTube.
Besides his son Talkeye, Mr. Jackson is survived by his wife, Natalie; two other sons, Gregory and Clifford; a daughter, Sunday; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society - Live at the North Sea Jazz Festival 1983 (The Decoding Society, 2021) ****½
One
of the pros, and cons, of digital releases is how quickly some recently
discovered sessions, outtakes, or bootlegs can be converted for a
proper release. Requisite caveats aside (fidelity, length, detailed
credits, and so on), it would be extremely difficult to turn down a gift
like the continuing reissue and live recordings project The Decoding
Society, dedicated to the music of Ronald Shannon Jackson.
The
latest release, an hour-long set from the 1983 North Sea Festival
features Jackson’s Decoding Society right in the pocket of its, no pun
intended, prime time. Jackson was on an epic run, beginning with Eye On You, Street Priest, and Nasty,
his group at the time had just released Mandance and was touring for
the legendary Barbeque Dog. Although the credits list a different
lineup, it’s actually the same from that album and tour: Jackson on
drums and flute, Henry Scott on trumpet, Zane Massey on saxophones,
Vernon Reid on guitar and banjo, and Melvin Gibbs and Reverend Bruce
Johnson on electric basses. As with his mentors Cecil Taylor and Ornette
Coleman, Jackson directs each bass player to fill a different, specific
role. And there are jaw-dropping moments, from Masset and Scott’s
fiery, synchronized melodic runs, to the opening riffs of “Mother’s Day,” where Johnson and Gibbs play mightily off Jackson, always a metaphorically eight-limbed player.
Many highlights abound, including a high-octane “Iola” leading to “Mystery At Dawn,”
where Jackson switches to flute for the melody, and Reid swaps guitar
for banjo. There’s a searching quality to the playing, less
contemplative more like a beacon lighting a path. The music is
meditatively transcendent, like most of Jackson’s playing: the rhythm
and melody achieve a kind of harmonic equilibrium, underlining the
application of harmolodics as a framework, more than merely one man’s
methodology.
Writing in The Washington Post in 1983, Geoffrey Himes remarked, “There has always been an underlying order in the seeming anarchy of Ornette Coleman's melodic jazz. That order, though, has rarely been as evident or as compelling as it was in the show by Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society at the 9:30 club Saturday night.” This was in January, and the sextet grew remarkably stronger over the course of that year’s shows. Closing on a lengthy version of “Alice In the Congo,” the opening track off Mandance, the sextet does not hold back. Gibbs, Johnson, and Reid perform an incredible tripartite improvisation, with Jackson smashing cymbals and rolling through epic drum fills.
There
is free jazz, and then there is the kind of jazz that demonstrates
freeness. Decoding Society always seemed to deliver on the latter.
Jackson was a brilliant writer of funky, addictive, and multi-threaded
compositions, and the promise of more tapes like these is a wonderful
gift.
Listen and download from Bandcamp.
Also available, a subscription to
Jazzhttps://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/03/ronald-shannon-jackson
Ronald Shannon Jackson obituary
For any jazz fan raised on 1950s caricatures about drummers – that jazz players were cool, Italian-suited and swung with no more effort than if they were dealing cards, while rock drummers were loud, theatrical and obvious – the arrival of Ronald Shannon Jackson was a rude shock. Jackson, who has died from leukaemia aged 73, was a dramatically exciting drummer and one of the most uncompromisingly fearsome exponents of the post-1960s fusion sometimes called "punk jazz" or "no wave", a loose amalgam of free-jazz, world-music rhythmic inspirations and rock. The antithesis of the tastefully discreet accompanist, he was a force of nature at the kit.
Jackson's often thunderous directness appealed to such pioneering leaders as Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, the vocalist Betty Carter, and the pianists Cecil Taylor and McCoy Tyner. From 1979, he took to running his own groundbreaking groups (including the long-running Decoding Society) and performing with European radicals including Peter Brötzmann and Albert Mangelsdorff, as well as such uncategorisable American originals as John Zorn and Bill Frisell. His style was his own and it gave every band he played in an exuberant, dishevelled and liberating drive.
Jackson was born in Fort Worth, Texas. His mother, Ella Mae, was a church organist, and his father, William, sold records and jukeboxes from Fort Worth's only black-owned record shop. Jackson learned drums from childhood, went to the same school as the Coleman saxophonist Dewey Redman and by his mid-teens was playing with the saxophonist James Clay – a key figure in the Texas jazz scene of the 1950s and an early influence on Coleman.
In 1966, Jackson moved to New York, becoming a university student as well as a sideman with Mingus, Carter and Jackie McLean. For much of that year, Jackson worked with the soulful and sublimely intense saxophonist Ayler, participating in the famous May Day 1966 session at Slug's Saloon.
Drug problems led Jackson to withdraw from playing from 1970 to 1975, but he regained his health, discovered Buddhism and returned as part of the engine-room of Coleman's Prime Time. This controversial band was Coleman's typically distinctive take on jazz-rock fusion, which frequently sustained long, high-energy, multilayered rhythmic trances (Jackson often played drums in tandem with Coleman's son Denardo) rather than offering conventional themes and variations. Ornette Coleman favoured an approach to group improvisation he dubbed "harmolodics" – in which rhythm, melody and harmony could all be varied on the fly by players sufficiently attuned to the method; this influenced Jackson's own work.
During his Prime Time period, Jackson worked briefly with the harmolodic guitarist James "Blood" Ulmer before forming his first Decoding Society. Though the band was often described only in terms of the volume it put out, Jackson's range and depth were always evident – from street-march grooves to blues, bebop, rock and funk. His ability to sustain multiple and ostensibly contradictory rhythms simultaneously could be breathtaking, and he also took to playing the flute and the German double-reed schalmei horn with the group.
In 1983 Jackson brought a version of the band to Camden Jazz Week (the forerunner of the London Jazz festival), an event memorable for the slamming percussion effects he played on a massive sculpture-like structure festooned with cymbals and tom-toms; a rumbling underpinning furnished by two bassists who virtually morphed into a second drummer; and grippingly sleazy, street-corner melodic ideas which sounded like themes from some distant-galaxy cop show.
Jackson summed up the inclusiveness of his approach in a New York Times interview in 1982: "I think the African phrases are very obvious. I think the funk phrases are very obvious. I think the oriental phrases are obvious. I think the Bulgarian rhythms are there – I hear all of it." The improvising violinist Billy Bang, the saxophonist Charles Brackeen and the guitarist Vernon Reid were among the many Decoding Society members with powerful musical identities of their own and the ensemble made several acclaimed albums, including Mandance (1982) and Decode Yourself (1985).
Jackson worked with the German free-jazz firebrand Brötzmann, the noise-guitarist Sonny Sharrock and the producer/bassist Bill Laswell in the fierce thrash-metal improv group Last Exit (1986-94); with the world-jazz SXL ensemble featuring Laswell, the Indian violinist L Shankar and percussionists from Africa and South Korea; and, in 1987, with the bass guitarist Melvin Gibbs and Frisell in the co-operative fusion trio Power Tools. With a variety of guitarists and saxophonists – including, on What Spirit Say (1994), the stylistically flexible Detroit sax star James Carter – Jackson continued to steer Decoding Society's development.
Nerve injury to his left arm halted his playing from 2000 to 2005, but Jackson returned to work, with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and the pianist Vijay Iyer, in Golden Quartet, and played publicly with his last Decoding Society in Dallas in July 2012.
An active educator and an inspiration to free-thinking musicians from many perspectives, he combined the raw excitement of rock, the articulate freedoms of jazz and the communality of many of the world's traditional musics with a passionate energy that transformed every band he led or joined, and stretched received wisdoms about the equality and intimacy of melody, harmony and rhythm in the process.
Jackson is survived by his wife, Natalie; his sons, Talkeye, Gregory and Clifford, and his daughter, Sunday; three grandchildren and a great-grandson.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. Jazz drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson died last October at age 73. In the 1970s, he played in saxophonist Ornette Coleman's electric band "Prime Time." Then Jackson founded his own band the Decoding Society. Two of that group's early releases are now available again as downloads. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says he's been waiting for their return.
(SOUNDBITE OF DECODING SOCIETY SONG, "MAN DANCE")
KEVIN WHITEHEAD: Drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society with the title track from "Man Dance." It's one of two fine albums the band made in the early '80s now available as downloads from Verve after being out of print for ages. "Man Dance" and its sequel "Barbecue Dog" are prime examples of the '80s' so-called free-funk movement. The spiky Afro-pop guitar, two grumbling electric basses and melodies played in several keys at once are all out of Ornette Coleman's band Prime Time. But the Decoding Society had a lazier lope and wasn't quite so eager to fill all the available space. Compared to Prime Time, it is a pop band - playing short or shortish numbers that spotlight the melody.
(SOUNDBITE OF DECODING SOCIETY SONG, "BARBEQUE DOG")
WHITEHEAD: Ronald Shannon Jackson's "Barbecue Dog" with Vernon Reid on guitar, before he found greater fame with the black rock band "Living Color." Reid is part of the core crew in this six or seven piece outfit, alongside saxophonist Zane Massey and bass guitarist Melvin Gibbs and Bruce Johnson. Shannon Jackson, like other '80s composers, abstracted looping structures from West Africa's intersecting rhythm cycles. His tune "Iola" is built in layers, the bassist play different lines - one twice as long as the other as a horn melody moves in slow-motion over the top. Vernon Reid plays banjo, an African-American instrument rarely heard in creative music because of un-cool associations with minstrelsy and Dixieland. But it's thin, percussive snap cuts through and helps keep the texture transparent.
(SOUNDBITE OF DECODING SOCIETY SONG, "IOLA")
WHITEHEAD: There's a hint of a New Orleans march in Shannon Jackson's drum beat on "Iola." A few modern jazz composers dearly love their marches, including the drummer's old boss, Albert Ayler. Jackson came from Fort Worth and his interest stems from a venerable Texas tradition - playing halftime music at school football games.
(SOUNDBITE OF UNIDENTIFIED DECODING SOCIETY SONG)
WHITEHEAD: The Decoding Society's music mostly wears very well, though "Barbecued Dog" has a couple of quasi-East Asian numbers that flirt with Hollywood stereotypes. Even so, I like how trumpet and soprano sax mimic Chinese double reeds on "Yugo Boy" with an assist from Vernon Reid's guitar synthesizer. That tune also shows how Jackson's free funk upended a typical jazz bands hierarchy. The rhythm players improvise it well - romping on the groove, while the horns stick to the melody and support.
(SOUNDBITE OF DECODING SOCIETY SONG, "YUGO BOY")
WHITEHEAD: With his Decoding Society, Ronald Shannon Jackson made some kind of universal music - Amero-Afro-Asian-Avant-Pop-March- and Dance music. The albums "Barbecue Dog" and especially "Man Dance" really nail this concept. Later editions of the band didn't always meet that high standard but hitting the jackpot even once in a while is plenty good enough.
(SOUNDBITE OF UNIDENTIFIED DECODING SOCIETY SONG)
GROSS: Kevin Whitehead writes for "Point of Departure" and "Wondering Sound" and is the author of "Why Jazz?" He reviewed Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society's reissues available as downloads.
Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
FIRESIDE CHAT WITH:
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON
I am not certain about many things outside of politics, having worked for various Congressman through my short lifetime. But I am certain that Ronald Shannon Jackson should be all over the place, playing, recording, and doing what it is that Shannon does to his heart’s content. There would be justice in the world then, but that is a pipe dream and the reality is that if it were not for devoted producers like Jim Eigo and Knit (for reissuing the stuff), Shannon would be but a fond memory and a new generation of eager listeners would not get an opportunity to hear the music of Shannon (outside of the DIW imports). Shannon attributes his lack of time in today’s sun to his opinion that he is being blackballed by the industry. That may not be too far out when you consider that he has skills a plenty and should be all over the place. We could and do do much, much worse. I am honored to present, Mr. Ronald Shannon Jackson, in all his splendor, unedited and in his own words.
FRED JUNG: Let’s start from the beginning.
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: I been knowing that I was going to play drums since I was four years old. I saw some in a church when I was passing through. My father was the local jukebox operator here. From five years old, I used to go with him every Saturday and I would wipe the jukeboxes off, count the change, and put the 45s on. He had a monopoly on the jukebox business here, so in order to run that business, he opened a record store here at Fort Worth, Texas. I was always around music. My father’s sister was King Curtis, who was the musical director for Aretha Franklin, my father’s sister was his mother. I grew up in a town that is a very musical town, producing the likes of Ornette Coleman, whose mother actually passed a block away from where I am at now, Julius Hemphill, Dewey Redman. My first music teacher was John Carter, the clarinetist, who had graduated from Lincoln University in Missouri at nineteen years of age. My mother played piano and organ in the church. I was around music all the time and I was always strumming the strings on the bottom of the piano because we had an upright Steinway in my home. That is the environment I grew up in. At twelve and thirteen, you could actually go around and see Jimmy Reed because he used to play here all the time. All the blues players used to stop through and I knew most of their music through the records we had to put on.
FJ: With your mother playing the piano and organ, conventional wisdom would be to play a keyboard instrument.
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: Well, they made me take piano lessons when I asked for drums when I was about five. They made me take piano lessons up until I was nine. I received my first drum set because that was the only way that they could get me to finish high school. It was such a money making town that I didn’t really have to go to school and so, of course, I got out seven times the last year. So rather than have me come back, they put me a grade up to go into the army and my mother agreed that if I would do that then she would buy me a drum set. So my graduation present was my first drum set.
FJ: You have made the most of that investment.
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: (Laughing) Yeah, right.
FJ: People go where the money is. You were where the money was. Why did you leave?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: I left here to go to college at Lincoln University. When I left here, I had a full scholarship to Westlake College of Jazz, out there on the outskirts of Los Angeles, which is defunct at this time. I didn’t go there. I went to Lincoln University because Julius Hemphill, who already attended school there, explained to me that it was located in the middle of Missouri, between Kansas City and St. Louis, so if we missed someone and didn’t have the money to go the weekend the person was at St. Louis, we could catch them the next weekend in Kansas City. It worked out to my advantage very much so. So I went to Lincoln University and my first roommate was this fellow who was studying agriculture and he wanted to get up early, so I asked this other kid to move in my room and he switched rooms and this other kid who moved into my room was named John Hicks.
FJ: The piano player?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: Yes, he was my roommate for that year. Of course, I had quite a bit of money and so I went out and bought a stereo and all the latest jazz records and so my room was the hangout for all the musicians, which included Oliver Lake, Oliver Nelson, who had just come back to school that year, Julius Hemphill, Lester Bowie, we were all there at the same time. We used to play music all night long. We used to always get stoned and just play music all night. Every time I left home, I always made money playing drums. Right near the school was the Missouri Mining and Engineering School, which is where they opened up the first McDonalds and so I used to buy bags of hamburgers and malts and lots of fries. Every night I would come home from work and we would all eat because we were all spending our money staying stoned and playing music. After that, I went to Connecticut to the University of Bridgeport and from there, I got a full scholarship to NYU through Kenny Dorham. So that is how I moved to New York City from Connecticut.
FJ: What is the key to playing drums?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: The bass drum is the key to playing drums. I know how to play the bass drum. Hicks was the musical director with Art Blakey and they had come back from Japan and they were playing at Slugs, and so I drove down to see him and as soon as he saw me, the first thing he said was, “Man, you have got to move here. You can work.” And I was shocked because I was always afraid of New York. People in this area go to California, not to New York.
FJ: And drummers you respect?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: Art Blakey played the drums. Tony Williams played the drums. Philly Joe Jones played the drums. Papa Jo Jones played the drums. Chick Webb played the drums. Ed Blackwell played the drums. Basically, Fred, I play the bass drum. I play the drums. And all the people who play drums, all the people who I admired play the drums and all the great leaders allowed the drummer to play the drums, including Albert Ayler.
FJ: Let’s touch on your association with Albert Ayler.
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: Ornette Coleman was having a squabble with ESP Records at the time and he didn’t want Charles Moffett to make any records with ESP. This fella, Charles Tyler had been brought to town to make a record at ESP. Charles Moffett asked me if I wanted to make the record date and I agreed. We played the song with one take and after the record date, I cried because I was so torn about my feelings about what had happened. In the meantime, when I came back to pack up my drums, this fellow who had been standing around in the studio, who had a beard with a gray spot in it, it looked kind of unique, and he asked me if I would play with his group. I said, “Yeah.” I asked John Hicks who the fella was that had just asked me to play with him and he said it was Albert Ayler. Of course, I had never heard of him. So I started working with Albert Ayler.
FJ: How was Albert Ayler unique?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: He taught me to play the drums the way I play the drums at home when no one else was around, to play the drums the way I enjoyed playing the drums. That is what made him unique. He was not afraid to allow me to drums.
FJ: What are other leaders afraid of?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: The problem you have, Fred, and it has even got extremely worse now, it is an ego problem mainly. The drums are an instrument of excitement in the first place. In Africa, they are used to talk long distance. So it is easier for a drummer to be the center of attention in any group, but what is not understood is that it is necessary for the drummer to be open in order to make a group work. This is what Miles and Coltrane understood and also what Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, all these people understood that. Chick Webb is the only black musician who has ever received a doctorate from Yale University in 1939. If the drums is working and the bandleader don’t have an ego, then they can make music happen. We have come to a time period where the leader has to be the saxophone player or the guitar player and the drummer has to be squashed down in the background, but that is not happening. That is one of the reasons why you don’t have anything new happening. The other reason is that there is a concerted effort to take the music back to what Charlie Parker and them was playing, which Charlie Parker, if he was living, wouldn’t be playing right now. What you are really asking, Fred, is what made that music work the way it worked? One thing is that most music critics, I was going to wait to put this in a book, but from the middle of America, not on the East Coast and not on the West Coast, but coming straight out, down from Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and that area, were a lot of Masonic temples and since it was the era of segregation, you had the white Masonic lodge and the black Masonic lodge. And the black Masonic lodge always had these musical instruments and these marching bands. Here you have a situation in the black community where you have these instruments in the schools, but you also have these Masonic temples, where they had all the major dances. That music we played and the kids were taught at these Masonic temples was the kind of music that Albert was coming out from. So when people were saying that Albert’s music sounds like march music, it wasn’t that as much as it was an open 4/4 music with the improvisation and the sound that you would hear in the Masonic temples, which wasn’t heard in the general population. That has never been spoken about because most of the critics, who write about jazz, don’t know the key words to open, like in an interview, a person can only tell you what you trigger them to say and since most people who do interviews are so arrogant in the first place, most of the time, I read things where people don’t even call me. All they have to do is pick up the phone and call me and I would have told them the right dates and things. It is no probl That has never been spoken about because most of the critics, who write about jazz, don’t know the key words to open, like in an interview, a person can only tell you what you trigger them to say and since most people who do interviews are so arrogant in the first place, most of the time, I read things where people don’t even call me. All they have to do is pick up the phone and call me and I would have told them the right dates and things. It is no problem. You want it out there correctly. But people can be so arrogant and they have so much power, they just write what they want to write. As you know, Fred, whatever people see first is what they believe. You put a rebuttal and that is three months or four months later and a lot of people don’t even see that.
FJ: And your work with Cecil Taylor?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: I worked with Cecil Taylor exactly six months. And out of that six months, six records were recorded. What it was was three of the records were just live radio broadcasts. One night, I was out wandering around. I had a dollar in my pocket and I was hungry because those were starving days and I went down into the Village Vanguard and I went down into the kitchen, which is the dressing room and Cecil was playing there at that time. We started talking and he asked me what I do and I told him that I played drums. He asked me if I could play and I told him that what I play, I played better than anyone else because I was already playing this mantra. I gave him my number and he called me. A couple of days later, he asked me to talk a cab with my drums over to his loft. We started playing and Cecil had about four or five telephones in this loft he had and I noticed that he went around and took all the phones off the hook and we just played and played for a few hours, just totally improvised and that is how I got that gig.
FJ: Let’s touch on your association with Ornette Coleman.
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: From Mingus (Charles Mingus), I got a gig playing with Betty Carter, through Joe Chambers, who was working at the Five Spot with Freddie Hubbard. Betty didn’t have a drummer and she got mad at Joe and Joe turned her onto me. And then, I have never told anybody in early interviews, but I got strung out and I was out of the scene for a long time. When the spirit came back to me, I started back playing. I have to stop and put an interlude here because I stopped playing when they put up Sputnik in Texas.
FJ: The Russian satellite.
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: I was driving home from my father’s store and I was driving across this bridge, smoking a joint and when they announced that they had put up Sputnik, I realized that I didn’t know what made airplanes fly and so I came home and told my mother I wanted to go back to school and that is why I went back to school. So I played with Betty Carter and after Betty Carter, I was out of it for a long time and then when I came back on the scene, I played with Ray Bryant. I don’t even remember if we had a week off because we would go out on the chitlin circuit. In those days, you would play a week in each town. We stopped on one trip and stopped and made a song called “Ode to Billy Joe,” which was popular at that time on 45. On the B-side of the 45, we recorded “Ramblin’,” which was Ornette Coleman’s song, which is how I really got to know Ornette Coleman. We were born and raised in Texas, but he is ten years older, so I didn’t really know him. I saw him one time when he came back, but we were over in the bushes looking at him and Don Cherry when they were going into the joint. They were big stars and we were country boys down here. I met him one day crossing the street of 2nd Avenue and I told him that we had just recorded this song and he said that he would like a copy and so I brought him a copy and that started a relationship with him. Then I faded off the scene and then when I came back on the scene, I had kicked my problem and I was working downtown on the East Side. I met Ornette Coleman when I had taken a girl to this restaurant and he said he was looking for a drummer and I gave him my number. The next day, he called me and that is how I got the gig with him. He asked me to make a commitment with him for four years because his son, Denardo, was studying business at city college and he was going into his first year. When I met Ornette that Sunday, he had already tried out seventeen drummers. The problem he was having was that he had this nineteen-year-old kid from Philadelphia playing electric bass. He was wanting to go electric. I had been practicing Buddhism and my attitude had changed a hell of a lot. I was trying to make everything positive and not dwell in the negative. What happened with the other drummers, because he told me, was after they got through playing, they all enjoyed playing with Ornette, but they would tell him that he needed to get an upright bass player and so he would never call them back. And when I went around there, he left us in the loft, Bern Nix, Jamaaladeen, and myself. He left us for about four hours and he came back and asked Jamaaladeen and Bern how it was and they said it was beautiful and so that is how I got the gig.
FJ: How were you able to relate to Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Bern Nix, when seventeen other drummers could not?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: It didn’t matter what instrument the person was playing, it was what their spirit was doing. That is the way it has always been with me. To give you an example, Fred, when I was with Ray Bryant and we were on the highway coming back to New York, after about a six or eight week chitlin circuit thing, on the Hudson Expressway, coming back to New York, when they announced that Coltrane had died. Something seemed like it just left, right at this little hole at the top of your head, this little indention. It seemed like something just hit me and I knew I wasn’t going to play no more and I didn’t for a long time. The same with when they put up Sputnik. The spirit just left and after I quit doing the heroin thing, actually, I was still doing it. It came back on me and I started humming all the time and whenever I start humming all the time, I know it is time to play. Just like now, I am sitting out here. Theoretically, I am supposed to be blackballed. I play when it is time for me to play. Whether it is for three thousand dollars or for charity, it is up to me. It is more with me about the spirit.
FJ: Society these days is very hard on a man of spirit and principles.
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: Fred, business and companies cannot create music. They can create disasters like they got going on now because you don’t have anything fresh or new coming out.
FJ: Why do you feel as though you have been blackballed?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: I can play music. I know and this is a talent and a responsibility that I have been given. I knew this and understood it. People who do the things like I do, we have a different kind of sensibility. When I was a kid, I always had lots of problems with my ears. They took me in to see the doctor every three months to get my ears cleaned out. If I got into a car and the windows were down, I would have the worst headaches. Once I grew out of that, I had this ability to hear things. I can sit in a place and hear things. That allowed me to listen. There is a big difference between listening and hearing. In order to write music, you have to be listening. That is what I do. I listen to the surroundings that I am in and I listen to people. When I meet people with good spirits, I write songs. I write melodies, which is what Ornette told me. Ornette told me to go buy a flute because I wasn’t playing drum solos. I was playing melodic solos on the drums. My spirit has always been one to play the melody, the same as the first time I heard Elvin Jones. I was very arrogant in those days, but to me, it was like here was somebody who sounded like he was trying to play like me. I was still in Texas. I had never left Texas then (laughing). People come together in music because of music, not because of some business people. I wish there was a situation where Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich and other great white drummers because then I wouldn’t be persecuted so much. I should be playing all the time. All you have to do, Fred, is think like this. If I was white, what would I have? I would have everything at my feet, but because I play drums and when I was growing up, the drummer was looked at like a linemen in football. He is nothing but a dummy with meat on him and muscles. I play drums. I write all my melodies and through Buddhism, I became a leader of a band because I never had no intentions of being a leader of a band. I just wanted to be one of the greatest drummers living and to make people happy. I used to write poems about that in school. They don’t want me out there playing. My CDs are being taken out of the stores, not because it wasn’t selling, because if you look on the internet, you are going to find about eight whole pages of people selling my CDs. If you go to the record store, my CD sells more than everybody else’s.
FJ: Why have you not recorded more?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: They have studios that are sitting up there with nobody using them. They would rather for them to be barren and nobody is playing than to open them up to get music. I don’t understand the craziness that is going on. I’m a person born a baby boomer. Music is vital to people’s well being. If you know history and you can see what they did in Nazi Germany with music, why don’t they allow music to happen here. There is a concerted effort to make everything the way certain people want it. Why not let it happen the way it used to happen? All the bands that I have been with, people used to ask me how I got this band together. I didn’t go out seeking to put a band together. I was sitting here the other day when on TV, they announced the making of a band on TV. How you going to make a band on TV? It is easier to have a survival show than to make a band. A band comes together out of the spirit. We all should honor the spirit. People deal with religion and not with their spirit. If they dealt with the spirit, we would have a much different country. They just past a law here in Texas, giving people permission to carry their guns to the football games and to church. Now, what is the need to carry a gun to a church?
FJ: How high is the crime rate in Texas that one needs to carry a loaded firearm to a football game?
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: Or anywhere? I’m saying that these studios are just sitting there. Why not let people go in there and make music? If you go to Spain, in the lower part of Spain, these people get together every night. They smoke hash and drink Johnnie Walker black and they play some of the most beautiful music that you would ever want to hear. I played guitar and I haven’t ever tried to play guitar in my life. People play music all the time and it was through my travels that I see that three-fourths of the world doesn’t teach music because it is not necessary to teach music, anymore than it was necessary for me to be taught music. I taught myself how to write music. In this society, because of business, because of greed and capitalism, you have to go to school four years to learn something you already know. I was reading this article about Phish the other day, who was on the cover of Down Beat last month, and the drummer was saying something that I had been saying a long time ago when I used to do interviews, the first thing I tell people when they come into my band is to go back when you asked your mother to buy you an instrument and when you first got your instrument and didn’t know the technicalities of the instrument, you could play your ass off. It was only that you started learning changes and other stuff, that the problems came in. The rest of the world don’t know nothing about 4/4, 6/8, or ¾, or the keys or what else. We in this western world, because England couldn’t hear B and most black people hear in B flat, English people hear C, so we have got middle C as a criteria. If it is a note that I can’t hear in my head, I immediately know that that is C. Once you travel the world, you see that they improvise and they harmonize together. Now, why can’t we do that here?
FJ: Decode Yourself has yet to be released in CD format.
RONALD SHANNON JACKSON: Not only that, Fred, but they squashed it. They never put it out. It would have made me again, the popularity that they don’t want a drummer, especially a black drummer to have. The people that they have designated to talk about drums and about drummers, here you have people that weigh damn near two hundred and fifty, three hundred pounds talking about they’re drummers and these are the people that they choose to write articles on drummers. They are already jealous because how are you going to play drums and your ankles are bigger than your thighs. Even though you might have talent, having talent is one thing. If you want to do what the spirit requires you to do, you have to do twice the amount of work and I’m not a person that works eight hours or twelve hours or sixteen hours. This is a twenty-four hour job because you hear melodies at the time they come, not when you want them to come. A person like myself is not allowed to work and I have been blackballed throughout the system. People have told me, people who have access to that information from the computer.
FJ: Yet another reason for me to bury my head in the sand.
Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society: Mandance (Antilles)
by Richard Cook
2 October 1982
New Musical Express
LOOKING FOR CLUES
THE PECULIARITY of the new electric jazz is its pull towards two times, the past and the future. It has almost forgotten the present. Mandance looks through the failure and achievement of the past and rockets the whole angry melee into the future, missing any current dimension. Rightly, it is over-ambitious, wrongly, it has no stabilising balance of ideas. Maybe the problem is insoluble, the perspective impossible.
Jackson is a drummer, already in receipt of generous applause from the more wakeful of American commentators for his live appearances, and he wrote and arranged all nine tunes here. As a performer he has a speed and gradation of touch so immaculate it lifts the group without smacking heads into stifling regulation — the understanding of polyrhythm, minute judgements of emphasis, glimpses of unfettered power and almost impressionistic cymbal colourings are a constant, true-hearted pleasure. Jackson sounds like one of the few drummers who could create a listenable solo set.
The members of his Decoding Society (reference: the deciphering of daily intake into personal programmes) require a similar proficiency, because this is brutally difficult music to play. Quite apart from the velocity of 'Catman' or 'Belly Button' wrinkles of expression have to humanise the machine. Jackson loves to tie up melodies in a knotted maze of bends and drops, cliff-hanger spills coming out of the shadows and shocking switches of direction arriving like an unsignalled express. But it's planned through (on a record cut live) like a big-league heist and nobody slips overboard.
At the same time, the wriggling contours and deliberately restless gait finally undermine their intent. A lot of exceptional ideas are summoned and spent leaving only a fleeting impact; fragments like 'Spanking' and 'The Art Of Levitation' emerge as disruptive, unfinished sparks. 'Alice In The Congo' goes through so many changes in its six minutes including some admittedly beautiful textures, its surface flash loses out to irritation.
The music benefits from a brilliant production by Jackson and David Breskin, where everything sounds big and clear, and the Society's bassists Melvin Gibbs and Bruce Johnson are superlative players — a whole generation of great bassmen is growing up with this music. Their upsurge and resonance sustain the superstructure of horns and electric guitar in a way that celebrates a central dictum of the music: that melody springs from rhythm.
The differences between this and Ornette Coleman's Of Human Feelings — superficially from the same corner — are endless. Where Prime Time turn round and round in a tight box, extracting the most spellbinding variations from a simple scale, the Decoding Society run on and on along splayed-out rails until they're breathless. In 'Iola', 'Mandance' and the sombre facets of 'When Souls Speak', where music is hinted at. Despite my reservations, there's more than a germ of real greatness inside.
© Richard Cook, 1982
Cook, R. (1982) "Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society: Mandance (Antilles)". New Musical Express.
Ronald Shannon Jackson.
Retrieved July 16, 2022, from http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ronald-shannon-jackson--the-decoding-society-imandancei-antilles
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Ronald Shannon Jackson's
Decoding Society: Roundhouse, London
by Richard Williams
18 March 1983
The Times
AS THE ONLY drummer to have appeared on record with Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, three of the grand masters of the jazz avant-garde, Ronald Shannon Jackson certainly deserves a priori consideration.
Sporting dreadlocks and uptown leathers, half-hidden behind a drum kit of Cobhamesque proportions, he leads a New York-based sextet called the Decoding Society, whose name suggests its ambition: to present a simplification of the abstruse principles of harmolody, invented by Coleman and picked up by those who work at the fashionable interstice of free jazz and new-wave rock.
On the basis of the group's appearance at the Camden Jazz Week on Wednesday night, Jackson cannot be said to have succeeded. The music's loud, garish swagger may have been superficially attractive to those of a certain temperament, but much of it was depressingly simple-minded, its lesser aspects characterized by Melvin Gibbs' sloppy bass guitar solo and by a drum improvisation which, in musical terms, was not worth the skin it was played on.
By contrast with Coleman's Prime Time and James Blood Ulmer's bands (of which Jackson has also been a member), the rhythms cooked up beneath the themes contained no spring or mystery. This was the drummer's fault; the second bass guitarist, Bruce Johnson, sounded as if he had better ideas, but was overwhelmed.
Only once did the mood change, when Jackson forsook his kit for a bass flute and, with the trumpeter Henry Scott and the saxophonist Zane Massey, performed a gentle, wandering, hymn-like tune as the background to an interestingly eccentric banjo solo by Vernon Reid. The piece gradually sucked the listener into its strange, primordial atmosphere, making the remainder of the evening seem even more frustrating.
© Richard Williams, 1983
Williams, R. (1983) "Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society: Roundhouse, London". The Times. Ronald Shannon Jackson.
Retrieved July 16, 2022, from http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ronald-shannon-jacksons-decoding-society-roundhouse-london
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Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society
by Don Snowden
11 November 1983
L.A. Weekly
If you've tapped into the East Coast/international jazz press recently, you've no doubt seen Ronald Shannon Jackson touted as "the future of jazz drumming" and his band, the Decoding Society, sometimes called the most important working band in jazz today. Jackson, a 43-year-old native of Texas, was the percussive force behind Ornette Coleman and James Blood Ulmer's early electric albums and played with pianist Cecil Taylor before laying the foundation for the Decoding Society five years ago.
Impeccable experimental jazz credentials, to be sure, but the RSJ resume also includes absorbing gospel and "race" records as a kid; duo gigs with a sax player in Ozark hillbilly honky-tonks; playing tympani in classical orchestras at college; marching bands; cabaret and Bar Mitzvah dates; and stints with bebop vocalist Betty Carter, Charles Mingus and Albert Ayler. But it took the active encouragement of Coleman ten years ago and a conversion to Buddhism that Jackson credits with giving him personal discipline before he started writing his own music.
Jackson went through several versions of the Decoding Society before selecting the current line-up of musicians, all in their mid-twenties: Henry Scott (trumpet), Zane Massey (saxes), Vernon Reid (guitar/guitar synthesizer/banjo), the Reverend Bruce Johnson and Melvin Gibbs (electric basses). The five Decoding Society LPs have maintained a consistently high degree of general inventiveness marked by wailing horn harmonies, powerhouse rhythms that don't unduly dominate the sound, and varied ensemble arrangements and textures that sidestep the sameness that plagues many electric jazz offerings.
Challenging stuff, certainly. But is it inaccessible to anyone who hasn't devoted considerable time to investigating the more esoteric end of the jazz spectrum? I think not. It doesn't take much effort to summon the melodies to 'Small World' and 'Mandance' from the memory banks, and 'Gossip' popped into my head one sunny afternoon after all of two listens to the new Antilles LP, Barbecue Dog.
Barbecue Dog is a healthy refinement of the group's lyrical, melodic side at the expense of the energetic strut 'n' swagger of their last album, Mandance. Despite a tight, focused performance at Club Lingerie recently, I still find the Decoding Society equation works better on vinyl than in person. Young Turks will be young Turks, and live the result is a confused welter of high speed improvisations that masks subtlety more than it attains the 'Trane-like state of spiritual catharsis Jackson seems to be gunning for.
I spoke to Jackson, who had just returned from a six-week State Department sponsored tour of Asia, two days before the band's Lingerie date.
Was there a specific point when music first really hit you?
I was about four years old. My mother had taken me to an American Woman meeting in Houston, and we were being marched through the basement of a church. There was a set of drums up there, and I just stopped. I got out of the line. I knew it had something to do with me.
It's like, my hands always looked as old as they look now. Kids used to tease me when I was in school. It was only in France that some people pointed out — they showed me a book — that drummers' hands all look like that. That was like being ashamed of something that turned out to be part of what you're about.
Is there a particular Texas flavor to music or the rhythm trip that goes on down there?
Sure. It's very spacious, very wide. It's a full drum sound, as opposed to a drum-cymbal sound, bringing the essence of what one's playing from the drum, the rhythm itself. Up north, you get more of a swing from the ride cymbal, where I swing from the drums as an African drummer would be playing.
Could the Decoding Society's music be all acoustic, or is there something that requires electric instruments?
Playing rhythm doesn't really allow you to play with acoustic bass players. I could not play rhythms like I play — with the total freedom of being able to project the rhythms with clear, thought-out patterns — and improvise on that. It's not a thing where you pitty-patty around. It has a certain force and power behind it. Either you play it or you don't play it.
The new album strikes me as more lyrical.
I want every album to reflect the total spectrum of what the Decoding Society actually means — deciphering the universal music that we hear, presenting it and decoding it so that not only we enjoy it but the people who are listening enjoy it. I need people listening and all that goes with that as much as I need playing the music. I didn't want to get hung up in the artist syndrome: "I'm an artist." To me, that's bull.
Barbecue Dog, especially the second side, represents another spectrum of what I hear. The first and last compositions on the second side ('Gossip' and 'Harlem Opera') are the direction I'd really like to go into, but I think that's in the years coming as opposed to right now.
Does the drummer in you sometimes get in the way of the composer or vice versa?
I think they really enhance each other. What I try to do in the improvised section is lay a foundation that will give people freedom to improvise. Each player becomes his own composer within the piece, which allows them to challenge themselves within a creative framework.
Is that one of the things you picked up from working with Ornette of something that had been in you all along?
Both. I learned from Ornette and Cecil, and I learned a lot from playing with Albert Ayler. Albert was the one that made me play with total freedom totally abandoning the time elements and just playing for the rhythm. Working with Ornette was like going to Coleman University, because it was always a learning situation.
Cecil also enhanced it, because here is a person who is very well-ordered in the way he structured his ideas and compositions — although a person listening to him for the first time would think otherwise. It's not something that's haphazardly done at all, but that's the problem with the nature of his music. People have always characterized it as free jazz or avant-garde, when it's some of the most well-trained and logically thought-out music existing on this planet.
When I compose, I write the melody, I work on the rhythmic structure, and then I have to hear what the bass lines are going to do because I'm using two bass players. The creativity comes in after the melody is played. The musicians go to their space where they hear it, and then you have the melody as the foundation. This is the root. It's like you've got a blank piece of paper. If there's nothing on the paper, you can go anywhere; but if you've got a dot somewhere, you have someplace to return to. That's how it's done.
The leading jazz DJ in Hong Kong, who is really into traditional jazz, asked me in a very cynical way, "With all the good melodies that are out there, why are you playing what you're playing?" I said, "Ellington was playing Ellington, Monk was playing Monk, 'Trane was playing 'Trane. Miles was playing Miles. All these melodies you asked me about, what if they hadn't played those? What if they just stayed in the tradition of Jimmie Lunceford or Louis Armstrong or King Oliver?"
What about the music of today? We as the Decoding Society are doing the same thing, but in the '80s. We're not deviating from jazz, not at all. We're playing the way jazz started, where the cats got off the gig and went uptown and just played. If Charlie Parker and them were born now, they would use electricity, too, because it's the thing of our time.
It's not a supper club music. It's not a music to sit down and eat
steak unless you got a lot of Alka Seltzer wit' ya. No, we're just
carrying on the tradition, but we're actually carrying on the tradition
as opposed to trying to relive the tradition, to really move it so that
whoever picks it up from there will go on.
© Don Snowden, 1983
Snowden, D. (1983) "Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society". L.A. Weekly.
Ronald Shannon Jackson. Retrieved July 16, 2022, from
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ronald-shannon-jackson-and-the-decoding-society
Post Aesthetic Black Music From the Occident and the Orient
by Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Volume 2 Number 2-3 Winter-Spring, 1984
© 1984
Street Priest
Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society
Moers, 1983
Barbecue Dog
Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society
Antilles, 1983
"See, it's swing. Swing is the thing, but how do you swing without playing bebop? Instead of making time swing, I'm making rhythm swing ... I don't know what you should call this music. It's not free jazz, it's not fusion music—really it's just Texas blues."1
—Ronald Shannon Jackson
"Electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West. The contained, the distinct, the separate-our Western legacy-are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused."
—Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage" 1967
One of the singularly creative ensembles in American music today is led by an extraordinary 44-year-old composer/drummer named Ronald Shannon Jackson. Of course, not one in a million people in this country has even heard of Jackson or his innovative six-piece ensemble called The Decoding Society, but that only lets you know that the ancient tradition of black creative musicians who-have-astounding-genius-but-remain -almost -totally- obscure is not only intact, but is flourishing in the state-directed catatonia of American culture, 1984. After all. in this society how many "music lovers" had even heard of say Charlie Parker in 1948 or John Coltrane in 1960? Or for that matter James Brown in 1965?
So what is astonishing about Jackson and the Decoding Society is not so much the almost total media whiteout of their prodigious artistic efforts (and we might add that of their estimable colleagues like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, the World Saxophone Quartet, James "Blood" Ulmer, Roscoe Mitchell, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, etc.) but that their music effortlessly communicates what every major so-called "jazz," "rock," "pop" and "classical" critic says is missing from 99.9 percent of all music in the U.S. today: a contemporary, independent and creative vision of a truly synergetic world music with authentic New World roots. This is a monumental task that artists as disparate in taste and sensibility as Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Steve Reich, Albert Ayler and the various emulators (idolators?) of Karlheinz Stockhausen in Ameirca have consciously tried to project and develop.
Without suggesting whether I think these and other previous composers and instrumentalists have succeeded in this endeavor (and there is considerable evidence that many individuals have made major contributions to this quest In the 20th century) none, in my opinion, has done it with more "structural," emotional, intellectual or artistic force and integrity than Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society.
I
play from a melodic/rhythmic concept, but most of the compositions
arrive from endeavors to perfect certain numerical rhythmic modulations.
Respective playing of certain rhythmic sequences is the cause whose
effect is the yield of melodic messages. 2
What gives RSJ and the Decoding Society its fundamental power is its profound knowledge, and creative use of, the multidimentional aspects of African-American musics. That is, its complete command of the total black music tradition as it has been expressed since Africans first graced these New World shores eons ago (and, no, I'm not just talking about the period of American slavery). This tradition encompasses an extremely wide spectrum of sounds and musical philosophies from spirituals, worksongs, field hollers and various blues to martial lyrics and cadences, folk songs, and ritual/ceremonial forms. The unifying force that links all of these expressions is, of course, the highly sophisticated and complex concept of spontaneous creativity—the organizational and spiritual principle of improvisation.
In the music of RSJ and the DS this guiding element is merged with the theory of harmelodics created and taught by one of Jacksons musical mentors, the lengendary multi-instrumentalist and composer Ornette Coleman. The role of Coleman's functional methodology for group ensemble playing is to free the individual musician from the traditional formalistic constraints of Western harmony and conventional tonality (diatonicism) by the assertion of the primacy of melody and rhythm. As expressed in the context of contemporary black music, harmelodics relies on the unity of tempo, rhythm and melodic intervals. Essentially, this means that there is a constant modulation of tonalities and rhythms. Literally everyone is free to explore their own concept of the melody. This method not only insures that there is timbral and textural variety, but a broad expressive palette of instrumental colors to work from. The entire ensemble "paints" the aural portrait that reflects how every painter "saw" the canvas.
With Jackson and the ensemble his working idea of music as a continuous conversation between equal participants is given a broader meaning than its implication of collective improvisation. What happens in all of Jackson's composition is a synergy of the aesthetic elements of the blues, R&B, funk and various stylistic forms of creative music. Thematic material is not self-contained units of melodic line, rhythmic and harmonic duration, but rather is used as a springboard for the creative exploration of tonality, rhythm and sound textures. Just as the late scientist and visionary R. Buckminister Fuller explained synergistics as the "behavior of wholes which are not predicted or indicated by the activity of their various parts," the integral components of Jackson's music work in an ongoing dynamic co-operative tension whereby seemingly disparate or even contradictory modes complement each other through the principle of co-existence.
Thus, ideas and procedures gleaned from traditional and modernist frameworks (be they from the Americas or from Africa, Asia and Europe) are used to both support and comment on each other without any artificial attempts at a synthesis of these varying conceptual and spiritual values. There is concomitantly no simple reliance on patische for structural identity or formal content. The resulting effect is of a holistic music that encompasses and extends the many musics it makes use of. In this way function is wedded to expression, which we should never forget is a fundamental philosophical value in black music. The peculiar genius of RSJ and the DS is that this complex aesthetic is expressed with such emotional simplicity and directness in their playing. This quality is what gives the ensemble its utterly distinct innovative ability: its presence puts everyone on notice that the present categories that are used to "define" various musical genres are false and arbitrary. Like Ornette Coleman says: "It should be clear to everyone by now that jazz, rock, pop and classical are all yesterday's titles."3
My approach is basically that the oldest physical instrument is the center, the same as the sun is the solar center of our galaxy. And that exactly as the planets move around the sun, melodies-and those of the Decoding Society where there are as many melodies as there are instruments-concur in the multiple chanting of world cultural rhythms. In other words, at any given point I might begin to play a rhythm pattern that is closest to the vibe or human call, related to what that other person is doing. One sax player, the guitar, or the bass player might be playing a blues figure that carries its own rhythm. Consequently, I might be playing Bulgarian, Hungarian, or African beat-or simply a John Philip Sousa punctuation.4—Ronald Shannon Jackson
A Digression on the Music (For the Adjective Freaks Out There)
"So
yeah Kofi we know that the cats is smart and shit, but will the music
itself send me and my loved ones into hypnotic states of turquoise
ecstasy at the drop of an accent ... in other words, to use an old '60s
expression: how do it FREE us?"
Well, all I can say is that Jackson is a master composer and percussionist whose melodies are haunting, angular streams of light that either waft gently above or deftly cut through the dense rhythmic forest of sound. This sound is made up of an oscillating spectrum of polyrhythmic chants, raging vamps, blistering stop-time arabesques, quicksilver interlocking, seductive lyricism, furious call-and-response, and enchanting folk musings. The music in both these recordings are unabashed statements of the coalescence of occidental ("western") and oriental ("eastern") references transmuted through the cultural experience and ideologies of Black America. What emerges from this interface of traditions is a new conception of the link between art and community; an active and evaluative break with the critical and social standards established by the obsessed defenders of the Myth of Western Hegemony. In short, Jackson's music portends that the age of specialization and academic codification in the arts and sciences is over. We have returned to the artist-as-extension-of-community. No longer can the world's musics be reduced to nationalist boundaries imposed by cultural politicians who wish to rule the world through a bureaucratic denial of self-determining art forms communicating imaginative solutions to historical dilemmas (like all forms of ethnocentrism and racism).
What
Jackson's music ultimately addresses is the global reality of artists
in the post-aesthetic age who use whatever is available to make their
art, and whose identity is not tied to any hierarchial system or belief
that would denigrate or feel a need to deny other cultures in order to
realize its own value. In Jackson's music themes come and go, rhythms
state themselves emphatically only to dissolve and immediately reappear
in new guises buttressed by the energies that come from environmental
media. This is the media through which the Decoding Society deciphers
and translates the music and spiritual messages of the New World. It is a
"technique" and feeling, but as they come from Life—not from theory
alone. This life comes from the entire world, not from isolated zones of
ethnic experience. We end this digression with Jackson's words:
We in the Decoding Society. are the inheritors of a musical tradition that is as rich as the topsoil of this land. We are forebearers whose roots are African, whose language is English, whose customs are French and German whose rowdiness is Irish, whose visions are universal. We are steeped in Eastern and Oriental influences planted by the Eastern sages eons ago. These are the spices in the pot, which are boiling with the rich water of suffrage, played with the wisdom acquired between life and death, stirred with old age and sickness, and served with the hand of death. This is the mission of the Decoding Society in music—the blown caps of many mountains.5
Notes
1. From Downbeat magazine (Chicago: August, 1982) Interview.
2. Ibid.
3. Liner notes from recording "Dancing In Your Head," Horizon, 1976.
4. Downbeat magazine, August 1982, (Interview).
5. Ibid.
Ronald Shannon Jackson
Selected Discography:
With the Decoding Society
Barbeque Dog, Antilles (1983)
Street Priest, Moers (1983)
Man Dance, Antilles (1982)
Nasty, Moers (1981)
Eye On You, About Time (1981)
With Music Revelation Ensemble
No Wave, Moers (1980)
With James Blood Ulmer
Are You Glad To Be In America? Artists House (1981)
With Ornette Coleman
Body Meta, Artists House (1978)
Dancing In Your Head, Horizon (1976)
With Cecil Taylor
One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye, Hat Hut (1980)
Live In The Black Forest, Pausa (1979)
Unit, New World (1978)
3 Phasis, New World (1978)
With Charles Tyler
Charles Tyler, ESP (1967)
http://www.cruiseshipdrummer.com/2012/03/1984-md-interview-ronald-shannon.html
1984 MD interview:
Ronald Shannon Jackson
THE BASS DRUM
"It's a funny thing," Jackson explains, "because the way I got to jazz was through records; you couldn't see any of those people live where I grew up. Recording technology wasn't nearly as advanced as what we've got today, so when you listened to those records you never heard the bass drum. Consequently, me and a lot of cats grew up thinking that the bass drum wasn't being played. But when I finally got to New York and heard cats like Art Blakey, Max Roach, Philly Joe and Elvin Jones, I realized that the bass drum was definitely played.
"Luckily, I had the good fortune to grow up in a dance band environment, so I was always in control of the bass drum, and I simply had to transfer that to the bebop and jazz bands I encountered in New York. I grew up playing traps in an environment where the bass drum was most important, as opposed to bebop or swing where you're playing a lot of snare, and doing a lot of accenting between the cymbals and snare, and keeping time with the cymbal. Whereas in dance music the bass drum is keeping the time. In blues music, the bass drum pulse is the soul of the music.
"See, the most important thing is that foot- the master drum. It's the
control drum. It's the center. It's the heartbeat, the relaxed pulse,
the more musical tonal center as opposed to the more direct speaking
tone- that's what settles the music.
"Now you know that it can be really hard to hook up with the bass
player. They'll hear some tone in your bass drum and right away they
think something's wrong," Shannon laughs. "Or else they'll get on your
case and tell you that you're rushing- all drummers know about that.
I've found that a lot of bass players rush tempos, and don't understand
why. If you think about it, as string players modulate upwards on their
instruments, everything gets faster. That's just basic physics- the
actual vibrations of the high notes are faster. Now if you're playing
with masters like Ron Carter or Buster Williams, none of that matters,
because they have a solid sense of their own tonal center. But less
experienced players get thrown off by all that bass drum timbre because
it falls in the same tonal range as their sound. They will start to play
higher so they can hear better. That's when they start to rush and get
on your case. That's why, even though it's more pleasurable to have some
tone in your bass drum, it's better to tune for a flatter 'thud,' so
that in acoustic music, they can hear better, and in electric music, you
can hear better. The drum cuts through and lets you control the flow of
energy."
"In any ethnic group that employs the drum, you're going to find the
large drums, like this Trinidadian drum I have- the long drum; the deep
drum. That bottom is where music comes from in most folk cultures. In
drums themselves, there have always been master drums- especially in
African tribal drumming where there's always that pulse, that center to
any social or spiritual event. You can take out the speaking rhythms or
the communication on top- that which is portraying the event itself; the
master drummer can keep everything going. The pulse, the intention, is
still there on the bottom, so you can play the same pulse and change the
rhythms on top of it. You can do the same thing on the drumset, when
you start with that pulse from the heart- BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. Now
everything on top is good; those rhythms are the enhancers- what we
emotionally want to say. But if the heartbeat isn't there, things are
unstable.
"Life is rhythm: the rotation of the earth; the blooming of flowers; the
way we talk; the way we walk. So as long as a drummer knows where the
one is, and can project that feeling, everything is cool. One of the
problems we had in the avantgarde era during the '60s was that no one
ever established where one was, or locked and settled anything. I mean,
all of life goes from positive to negative, good and bad, hot and cold,
black and white- that's rhythm, too, like saying 'boom-chick,' back and
forth. So because no one locked things in, it always gave the people
anxiety, as opposed to tension/release. And no one went for it, which
was just logical human nature. You don't necessarily have to talk to
people to communicate with them- just give them a heartbeat. [...]
"And that's why even when I'm not playing the bass drum, I'm playing the
bass drum. Even though the other musicians and listeners may not hear
it, they can always feel it, so they know where that space is. I always
play my bass drum. What I'm actually doing is locking my big toe and the
adjacent toe, so that the beater is locked in place against the bass
drum head. I'm holding it there with my toes, and then the heel itself
is actually keeping time," he says, stomping down the back of the pedal
with his heel to make the point, "so that you can feel the vibration
passing through the bass drum. Sometimes the beater will come up off the
head, and that will serve to enhance what I'm doing, too. But that
pulse is the thing that lets you be creative and still be together. Not
beat, not rhythm- pulse."
CYMBALS
"It was while I was with Blood [Ulmer] that I began getting concepts for
my ideal drumkit, and I began to come down off of the cymbals onto the
drums for the rhythms, which is something really hard for drummers to
do.
"See, it's hard for drummers to get off the cymbals and onto the drums
because cymbals are like a mini-orchestra. We could play cymbals all day
long and be satisfied, because there are so many melodies and textures
you can derive from the overtone series and because each cymbal has so
much color within it. I remember how turned on I was by the K. Zildjian
sound to begin with. Then when I heard Art Blakey and the Jazz
Messengers, that was really it. I've played A. Zildjians. My mother
bought me a set of Slingerlands when I got out of high school. That set
came with a 22" medium ride and a pair of 14" hi-hats, so I've played
A.'s all along. But when I was coming up, all the hip guys used K.'s and
Gretsch. Every month in down beat there'd be these ads, and everyone
looked so clean and sharp in their suits and ties: Max, Philly, Blakey,
Art Taylor, Elvin and all of them.
"Basically I find the differences between A.'s and K.'s to be a matter
of taste. A.'s aren't bad. I just prefer the warmth of a K., but a K.
can be a lot worse if you don't get the right one. I'm talking about the
old cymbals, now. I used to be able to go across the bridge to the
Gretsch factory when they were in Brooklyn. They'd warehouse all the
K.'s, but man, after Elvin and Tony and those guys had picked their way
through, there wasn't much left. I couldn't believe how many bad cymbals
there were, but I figured somebody's got to be buying them. In fact,
some of those warped, funny belled cymbals really work for cats. I've
got a 22" K. I bought from Frank Ippolito for $70, from his last
shipment of Turkish K.'s. Nobody wanted it because it was messed up with
a bad dip in the cup, but you can get some beautiful sounds out of
it... sometimes. To me, the tones of a K. allow for a variety of
inflections, whereas an A. doesn't change that much. You can get a great
sound, but it's always going to have that distinctive A. sound: bright,
high pitched; with that big cutting bell sound.
"But see, there are all kinds of K.'s. Some of them were so metallic
that by the third set of a gig you'd be tired of listening to it. That's
why you have to find the right one. That's how me and Tony Scott fell
out. We were playing a gig at a club in the Village, and I had two K.'s:
a crash and a ride. Right in the middle of a tune, Tony Scott came
over, took my cymbals off the stands and reversed them, putting my crash
where my ride was and my ride on the crash stand. He was basically
right, because that ride was just too hard, especially for clarinet. But
it was the principle of the thing. So Steve McCall was there, and I
asked him if he wanted a gig. I packed up and he finished the job."
Upon inspection of Jackson's cymbals, I noticed a groove cut into the
cup. "That has to do with the way a cymbal sets," he explained. "Any
cymbal you put on a stand will tell you where it wants to set. You can
turn it around any which way you like, but after you've been beating on
it, it will turn around. I use a little round file to cut a small
channel in the bell, so that cymbal will set right on the stand once I
know where I'm going to be playing it. I've been doing that for a long
time."
Currently, Shannon's extensive cymbal arsenal is stocked with Paistes, in an everchanging setup drawn from the Sound Creation, 2002 and Rude series. "The first person who turned me on to Paistes was Bruno Carr, who's not only a beautiful drummer, but a beautiful man. He got me back into the jazz scene after basically no one would touch me anymore, because I was messing up as a person. Anyway, he gave me a 16" 602 China, and that was a really nice cymbal- it just fit right in with my K.'s. After that I was playing with a singer named Juanita Fleming. I bought a 20" 602 flat ride, because I discovered you could swing your ass off without overriding the vocalist."
Shannon's latest setups have varied greatly due to the demands of room acoustics and tempermental P.A.'s, but one theme remains the same: his preference for faster, quicker cymbals to complement his hard, funky, crisscrossing leaps in register.
"That's because I'm playing mostly drums... and I couldn't have made that statement 20 years ago. The cymbals aren't for duration; they're mostly for punctuation and beat. Also, when the cymbals are smaller, you can go back and forth between them so much faster and sharper, playing double shots and rebounds without extended overtones. For a sock cymbal sound, I prefer them on the heavier side so I can get a nice solid 'chick-chick' with just the foot. I could never really use that splashy 'shook-shook' sound; it isn't solid
enough.
"For crashes, Paiste's Rudes are really something else; they'll cut through anything, although sometimes they'll cut through so rudely that that can be a problem. But for really loud electric situations, they're excellent. I suspected the 2002s might not cut as well, which was confirmed when I saw the Police at Shea. I couldn't always make out a lot of Stewart Copeland's cymbals, but he had this little 14" Rude crash. I realized during one song that it was projecting like crazy, and it wasn't the sound system cutting through— it was that cymbal."
PLAYING AS A LEADER
"...lately I've been working much more consciously on the older cats like Chick Webb and Sonny Greer. I hope I'm able to project that through the music, because a lot of times, as a drummer, I want to take a solo, but as a composer/bandleader, I have a responsibility to structure the music so it comes out right. Often I'm not even thinking in terms of being a drummer. I'm thinking about orchestration, flow and the organic concept that has to be completed. Sonny Greer was a master of that. He hardly ever soloed, but it's like Ellington said: 'He made everything sound bigger and prettier.' He played music on the drums; he was the conductor."
