Griot Songs and Imagined Independence
This Week: Bill Banfield’s Griot Songs. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
“I Am A Griot”
Bill Banfield makes his students recite that mantra as a way of teaching them about the history and varieties of music. Griots were traveling musicians, poets and storytellers in West Africa, and Banfield is himself a modern version of one— as a composer and performer of a jazz, classical and symphonic music and opera; as an historian of the bandleader Sun Ra and his Arkestra; as a writer with a novel soon to come out about a musical dreamer growing up, as he did, in Detroit, in the Motown era; and as the chair of Africana Studies at the Berklee School in Boston.
We went out to see Bill’s Imagine Orchestra a few months ago, a collection of fantastic young (and some not so young) musicians. It evokes the big band sound of the 1930s and ’40s, but you can also hear hip hop riffs and sounds that draw on the church and the street. The music is orchestrated but makes room for improvisation, too. Imagine that and imagine a neighborhood jazz joint where you could hear it!
Here’s a partial rundown of the music used in this program:
Marvin Gaye — “Heard it Through the Grapevine”
Michael Jackson — “Man in the Mirror
Geri Allen — “Flying Toward the Sound”
Marcus Belgrave — “Space Odyssey”
We also wanted to give a special shout-out to the jazz violin virtuoso Regina Carter who joined our program to discuss her lifelong friendship with Bill and their shared musical education in Detroit. For a taste of the Carter style, check her take on Coltrane’s “Impressions”, recorded with the all-female, Detroit-based quartet Straight Ahead:
Chris also revived his own podcast interview with the Ghanaian griot and Highlife musician Koo Nimo. You can check out the full interview here and find more highlights from 15 years of podcasting history over at our Patreon page. We just reposted Chris’s interview with the late Gore Vidal as well as his old sparring partner, Norman Mailer.
Read: Frederick Douglass
Mary’s digging into an advance copy of David Blight’s new doorstopper biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. The new bio also reminded us to revisit Douglass’s “Fourth of the July to the Slave?” over the break this week. You can find the full essay on The Nation’s website, with a short introduction from the magazine’s sports reporter, Dave Zirin:
“What to the Slave is the Fourth July?” by Frederick Douglass is not only a brilliant work of oratory. It speaks to our every frustration spurred by the gap between the ideals of the United States and the reality we witness every day; between the Bill of Rights and our decaying civil liberties; between the USA’s international declarations of human rights and the ordered drone attacks backed by presidential “kill lists”; between the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and a nation that leads the world in jailing its own citizens; between our highest ideals and our darkest realities. Here’s hoping people take the time to read the entirety of Douglass’s brilliant speech; even though his were words that spoke directly to his moment in history, they still ring with an unsettling power. As Douglass says: “Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
The introduction, written in 2002, seems even more resonant today for Zirin’s own work—which has focused recently on black athletes rebelling against symbols of (white) nationalism and militarism in their respective games. “What is the national anthem to the black quarterback,” Kaepernick might ask today. Douglass’s response: “To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”
If you have other thoughts on echoes of Douglass today, send us your notes: info@radioopensource.org
Watch: Leave No Trace
Daughter-Dad films are big on the indie circuit this year (see Hearts Beat Loud, Eighth Grade, etc.), but Leave No Trace might be the best and least sentimental of the bunch. It’s less strictly about family and more about the burdens of a sick nation and unevenly distributed societal pressures in Pacific Northwest. It’s also beautifully shot and will make you want to escape into whatever wooded world is nearest to you.
Wherever you go this summer though, make sure you bring your radio: we’ll be back next week with another show.
Til next time,
The Open Source Independents
