Tag Archives: black America

harry whitaker, 1942-2010

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Last night I went to a memorial service for Harry Whitaker, jazz and soul pianist, teacher, and all around New York music legend. Roberta Flack sang a song for him, remembering their days playing the world together. In her clear voice, she described how, as her musical director for fabulous records like Killing Me Softly, he transformed a song Stevie Wonder had written for her into something like “an Egyptian chant,” free and open, meditative and forward-thinking, like Harry himself. “Harry was the scene,” said Eric McPherson who, along with saxophonist, Abraham Burton, also played for him last night.


I remember Harry where I met him, in his berth behind the piano at Arturo’s, the pizzeria-restaurant-bar, on Houston Street. A non-musician, I can only appreciate the steadiness of his time, his soulfulness. Also there was that pile of books, filled with markers and notes that sat on the piano, evidence of his voracious appetite for books. Histories, biographies, philosophy–Harry read a lot. Musicians appreciated his flights of mind, the way he took them high, and kept them there. “Everytime he played, the music was fresh, new. He never played the same old shit. I can’t say that about too many people,” says Itai Kriss, who played frequently with the great pianist. Harry was a real teacher, what Jacques Ranciere might call an ignorant school teacher: one who shares his knowledge openly, without imposing relationships of inequality on his students. He taught without his students knowing he was teaching. He taught them how to be free, by being emancipated himself. Most important, Harry was a sharp wit:

“I’m having fun, this is the best time of my life. I love music and I’m passionate about it. It took me a long time to realize this is what I want to do, I just need to keep working on it. Money is no problem, it’s about how do you want to make the money.” Whitaker laughs, warming to his subject. “I’m a runaway slave. I ain’t in the kitchen, I ain’t in the fields picking cotton, I ran away and they have to come and get me! I’m doing what I want to do.”

–Harry Whitaker

for more about Harry’s life and work, visit waxpoetics.

hold on, hold on

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In every generation, we must get free. Let everyone of us work, let none of us shirk our duty.

I do not think that there is anything that is functionally–by its very nature–absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice… The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them… I think that it can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom.

–Michel Foucault.

 

the DJ still runs this house

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For a long time the word “house” referred not to a particular style of music so much as to an attitude. If a song was “house” it was music from a cool club, it was underground, it was something you’d never hear on the radio. In Chicago the right club would be “house,” and if you went there, you’d be house and so would your friends. Walking down Michigan Avenue, you would be able to tell who was house and who wasn’t by what they were wearing. If their tape player was rocking The Gap Band, they were definitely not house, but if it was playing Loleatta Holloway or (surprisingly enough) the Eurythmics, they were and you would probably go over and talk to them.


One day soon, Chicago [black, gay] kids would invent a stark new kind of dance music, and because of where this came from [The Warehouse], and because of where it was played, it would steal the name for itself. But for several years, house was a feeling, a rebellious musical taste, a way of declaring yourself in the know. Certainly the word house was used long before people started making what we would now call house music.

–Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, (1999)

But, where does house music begin?

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Adrian Piper’s funk lessons

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Consider the history and style of funk dancing, as a form of expression in urban black America, and then as a popular American dance form. Consider how this form has disappeared, in a sense, from our everyday physical vernacular. How are popular dances, ways of moving and self expression, archival practices?

Notes on Funk I (excerpt)
by Adrian Piper
1985

From 1982 to 1984, I staged collaborative performances with large or small groups of people, entitled Funk Lessons. The first word in the title refers to a certain branch of black popular music and dance known as “funk” (in contrast, for example, to “punk,” “rap,” or “rock”). Its recent ancestor is called “rhythm and blues” or “soul,” and it has been developing as a distinctive cultural idiom within black culture since the early 1970s. Funk constitutes a language of interpersonal communication and collective self-expression that has its origins in African tribal music and dance and is the result of the increasing interest of contemporary black musicians and the populace in those sources elicited by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s (African tribal drumming by slaves was banned in the United States during the nineteenth century, so it makes sense to describe this increasing interest as a “rediscovery”).

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