Instrumental In Environments
By GABRIEL JERMAINE VANLANDINGHAM-DUNN
in Fall 2017
Sedrick Miles, "Black Band," 2017
Birth
I’m fortunate to have experienced many different aspects of Black America’s history throughout my life. My maternal grandparents were from Gastonia, a small town in North Carolina. Like many other Black Americans, they traveled as part of the Great Migration, searching for better opportunities, safety, education, housing, and employment. Shortly after settling in Baltimore, Maryland, they started their family; my mother Janice being the eldest daughter. Janice raised me with an expansive understanding of the arts, primarily music and visual art. An avid reader herself, she tried to instill the cerebral exercise into all three of her sons, yet the bug didn’t hit me for some time. However, there were many things about my environment, and our African roots, that my mother couldn’t explain to me, mainly because she had been shielded from aspects of cultural history herself. One day it hit me that music was the African history teacher that I had been looking for. I started collecting records at a very young age, and the music of the time, Hip-Hop, was filled with messages and samples that not only celebrated African history, but also taught me about my own (then) surroundings. Absorbing Black Music of the past and present, I was afforded the opportunity to learn about the experiences that detailed Africana history, which shaped my worldview during the 1980s-1990s.
Elders/ Gospel
The Negro, now, becomes more definitely Negroes. For the first time, after and during these mass flights to the North, Negroes spread out throughout the country. The South was no longer the only place where there were Negroes in great numbers. Chicago, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Philadelphia, all received in very short periods of time relatively large Negro populations.[1]
Like most of our folk at the time, my grandparents and their children were very active in the church. The deacon and deaconess raised their kids on the same traditions that they had been taught in the Carolinas. My mother and her siblings all sang in the church, making a lifelong connection with the institution.
When black people began pouring into the nation’s cities during the second decade of the twentieth century, they took their joyful spirituals with them, but found the rural-born music to be unsatisfactory in urban settings and unresponsive to their needs.[2]
Church related traditions didn’t appeal to my brothers and I (we felt no real connection to church and often refused to go peacefully). Yet, there was one aspect that has stuck with me all of my life. Almost every church had a band, or at least an organ, and a choir. The choir is where my mother spent long Sundays, learning songs that had been sung from the period of enslavement until now. The musical accompaniment is important to understanding, not only the versatility of Black American spirituality, but also American music as a whole. Africans brought the gift of improvisation to the “new” world while forced to maintain fields full of profitable crops (of which not even a penny we’ve seen while other marginalized communities have received reparations).[3] My folk created songs to emancipate themselves from that hideous state of bondage (e.g. tributes to God, keeping sanity, passing along secret messages related to liberation). Hearing these songs in the church, young Black folk are exposed to not only one of the earliest forms of American music, but also their ancestors' tradition of overcoming adversity and unifying their voices in attempts to stay sane through one of the most brutal periods in the world’s history. Accessing this music, little did I know at that point, introduced me to the environments my elders and ancestors came from; for that I’ll always be grateful.
Growth/ Hip-Hop
The United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War (1955-1975) also coincided with the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. During this period, more drugs were pushed into urban settings, mothers were forced to find work due to drafted and incarcerated fathers (mainly due to what we now call the Prison Industrial Complex)[4], street gangs were formed, and arts programs were cut from education budgets across the country in Black and Latino neighborhoods. These budget cuts and other forms of disenfranchisement led kids in areas like New York to create new forms of expression to have their voices heard, primarily through what would be later called Hip-Hop. Black and Latino folk in that region slowly created a dominating culture over the span of several years. Hip-Hop's roots could also be traced back to Malcolm X’s death in 1965. The slain Civil Rights hero was very important to the birth and development of Hip-Hop as some of his speeches were recorded then pressed to vinyl. These records, purchased by followers, were in the same collections that early DJs dug through looking for tools and sounds that would eventually become the backbone of Hip-Hop. His fiery spirit for human rights underlies the reasoning and foundation of the musical movement. When referring to X’s last attempt at developing a strategy to end suffering to his people, Frank Kofsky writes:
It was this global rebellion which convinced Malcolm that the only realistic approach for the Afro-American liberation movement to adopt was to merge with like-minded anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a joint campaign against their common enemy. [5]
Part music, part visual art, part dancing based on the influential routines of James Brown, full of messages, the Hip-Hop culture that I was born into was vibrant, diverse in sound, and an education into what I would face every day when I left the house. For many, Hip-Hop told the tales of the streets, which eventually attracted throngs of white listeners by the end of the 1980s. However, for Black and Brown kids most Hip-Hop was about the communication of our experiences. Those experiences would take center stage before the mass commodification of the culture in the early 1990s. This is what emcee Ras Kass calls “the nigga news.”[6] Rappers would give shout outs to their hoods, and eventually this created a map that was understood by Africana descendants across the Diaspora. For example, in their 1982 hit, “The Message,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five drop knowledge about the state of Black and Brown Americans that could be easily understood, Melle Mel raps:
Broken glass everywhere
People pissin' on the stairs, you know they just don't care
I can't take the smell, can't take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat
I tried to get away but I couldn't get far
'Cause a man with a tow truck repossessed my car
(From “The Message”)
Having access to these types of tunes saved my life. They gave me knowledge of how to stay out of harm's way, but they also gave me valuable lessons on how to excel at school if I stayed on course and not let negative things lead me astray. Considered by many to be one of the greatest Hip-Hop albums of all time, Main Source’s Breaking Atoms was released in 1991 by Wild Pitch Records. Conceptualized by William Paul Mitchell, better known as Large Professor, the record focuses on uplifting messages through “code of the streets” language that many members of the Black and Brown community could relate to. Their tracks “Friendly Game of Baseball” and “Watch Roger Do His Thing” are widely considered within Hip-Hop circles to be ahead of their time and socially conscious.
Question: Roger's life seems complete, right?
That's what an education can and might do
It may sound corny but it's true
Roger does his thing and so can you
So get your head out the sling
And watch Roger do his thing, hit it
(From “Watch Roger Do His Thing”)
Large Professor’s words came right on time for me in the early 1990s, growing up in Baltimore’s Park Heights area, and having lost many friends and family to the dangers of the streets. The conscious lyrics combined with the raw jazz-laced backdrop of this music helped me through the maturation process and set the stage for the next wave of audio discoveries to come.
Adulthood/ Jazz
When the listener grows, often their taste widens and expands as well. Around 1996 something changed drastically in Hip-Hop. The cultural direction of the music had begun to splinter into a separate pop/mainstream and underground/raw arenas. There was also a large influx of white rappers, which took a lot away from the roots of Hip-Hop, which were to empower young, voiceless Black and Brown kids. I also changed, and my listening experience grew as I did. Because I made Hip-Hop beats from older LPs, I had always owned Jazz records. Yet, I didn’t always listen to the work I was sampling. Eventually, I started connecting songs from my collection with the struggles I was experiencing as a young Black man growing; the pains that my people experience. I soon began memorizing tunes and musicians. I’d pick up on solos and instrumentation that I connected with and would search out the similar and/or completely foreign things. I began to pay little attention to the commercialized Hip-Hop and made Jazz my primary source.
What took place through my late-teens and early twenties was nothing short of a transformation. As I bought more Jazz, I was hipped to Black writers from the 1940s-1980s. I started tracking down their books and eventually was again sitting at the feet of my elders. Jazz has not only given me the greatest music ever created, it has also brought me to a point of understanding my people’s history and the many environments they have survived and excelled in. Through this music I have learned further about geography, American history and politics, literature, and African cultural norms. Through John Coltrane I learned that spirituality comes in many forms. Within the compositions of Charles Mingus, I learned that several different forms of African musical traditions can be combined to create complex and amazing suites. Most importantly, I found my own path as an ethnomusicologist, focusing on my people’s history and the climates/environments that gave birth to all these beautiful forms of music. Saxophonist, composer, and playwright Archie Shepp stated:
Culturally, America is a backward country: Americans are backward. But jazz is American reality-total reality…. Some white seem to think they have a right to jazz. Perhaps that’s true, but they should feel thankful to jazz. It has been a gift that the Negro has given, but [whites] can’t accept that-there are too many problems involved with the social and historical relationship of the two peoples. It makes it difficult for them to accept jazz and the Negro as its true innovator.[7]
Music is not a hobby or a passion to me. From my ancestors' work songs to their gospel shouts to N.W.A.’s music celebrated in film, music is a connection to my origins. It is my lifeline. It is the reason I can face life on my worst days. It transports me back to the best and worst moments in my life and reminds me to be thankful regardless of my personal downfalls. I am thankful to have the opportunity to share these sounds and this knowledge with other people. My writing and DJing uses not just my knowledge, but the blood of my ancestors to pass on traditions that would’ve long been forgotten had it not been for records.
References
[1] Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: W. Morrow, 1963), 96-97.
[2] Eileen Southern,The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 402.
[3] For more information regarding the disproportionate economic challenges facing marginalized communities in the US, readers should review the work of scholars such as William “Sandy” Darity. In the essay "Umbrellas Don’t Make it Rain: Why Studying and Working Hard Isn’t Enough for Black Americans" (2015) he and his team dig into the research related to the hardships that face Black Americans and how economic stability has eluded many for so long.
[4] See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
[5] Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 261.
[6]Rhyme & Reason, directed by Peter Spirer (United States: Miramax Films, 1997), VHS. Los Angeles rapper Ras Kass mentions this in a small segment outlining the importance of Black communities across the country sharing information.
[7] Kofksy, Black Nationalism, 9.
Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn is a writer, ethnomusicologist, and a Temple University graduate from the Park Heights neighborhood in West Baltimore, Maryland. An avid Jazz historian, he has written for www.musicismysanctuary.com and most recently musiqology.com, focusing on music of the Western Hemisphere (post Atlantic Slave Trade) and mental/ emotional health of Black American men. He can be reached at pachwerk@gmail.com.