It was 1982 or ‘83, perhaps ‘81 or ‘84, I don’t remember exactly. I had gone to Daisey Baker’s, a restaurant in downtown Troy, New York, with Margaret, my best friend’s girlfriend. She knew Don Dworkin, leader of Doc Scanlan Rhythm Boys, a local swing era jazz group. She introduced me to him and he invited me to sit in on a tune, “Sunny Side of the Street.” As I was taking my solo I noticed a group of RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) administrators sitting at a front-row table. I recognized the VP for Student Affairs, whose name I forget, one or three others, and most especially Eddie Knowles, Assistant Dean for Minority Affairs.
Eddie had toured with Gil Scott-Heron for a number of years as a percussionist. After my solo I went over to their table and introduced myself. He seemed a bit surprised that I recognized him. It’s not as though having played with Scott-Heron was a secret identity, but I suppose he wasn’t used to people thinking of him in that context. Now he was a university administrator. Anyhow, he introduced me to his fiancé, Druis Beasley; we chatted a bit, and I returned to Margaret, which, BTW, is what she called herself. Not “Peggy.”
Dance Class
Anyhow, as they were leaving, Ade came over to me and said that he was playing drums for a class in African dance that Druis was teaching. Would I like to join him? Yes.
At least that’s how I think it went. But maybe he and Druis made the invitation while I was chatting with them at their table. I don’t really remember. What I actually remember is: me and my trumpet, Margaret, Daisy Baker’s, “Sunny Side of the Street,” Eddie with RPI administrators at a table, introduction, chatting, invite. I’m just trying to turn that into a plausible sequence of events.
A couple of days, a week, later I showed up at the class. There was Druis, in a leotard? a half-dozen to a dozen dancers, and Eddie. He had a conga drum, a djembe, some cowbells, perhaps claves, and perhaps a shekere (a West African instrument made from a large hollowed-out gourd covered with beads in a loosely strung netting). That is to say, that is likely what he had. Congas and djembes for sure, the rest is highly plausible conjecture. I had my trumpet and flugelhorn.
Druis would tell Eddie what she had in mind, he would play a rhythm on either the conga or the djembe, Druis would lead the students in some dance move, and I would play my trumpet or flugelhorn, whichever seemed appropriate for the rhythm. No one told me what to play. They assumed that I’d know what to do. Which I did. Not that I’d ever done this particular thing. I hadn’t, but I’d played a lot of music, and listened to a lot; I was an experienced improvisor. I could handle it.
Surprisingly well, considering. Yes, Ade played African and Afro-Cuban rhythms, and I played jazz, which has African roots. But the rhythm is not the same. The basic pulse, the groove, is different. The patterns you play over it are different. I couldn’t just take my jazz chops and lay them on those African rhythms.
African rhythm is polyrhythmic, based on multiple interlocking rhythmic phrases. Afro-Cuban rhythm is based on a rhythm called the clave, which consists of five beats in a fixed pattern, but they’re not equally spaced. Depending on the particular dance – for these are fundamentally dance rhythms – various other interlocking phrases will be repeated over the clave. In contrast, Western rhythm is monometric, based on a single regularly recurring pulse, generally in groups of four (e.g. marches) or three (e.g. the waltz). More complex patterns are created through either adding beats together or dividing them in two or four, and sometimes three. Jazz rhythms reflect a negotiation between the two systems. I was trained in “legit” music and in jazz. Afro-Cuban rhythm was new to me.
But by no means completely new. I had some Latin (e.g. Afro-Cuban, Salsa) records which I listened and enjoyed a great deal. And I’d play along with them. I’m thinking particularly of Eddie Palmieri’s Lacumi, Macumba, Voodoo, with the legendary Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros on trumpet. I hear it now, “Colombia Te Canto,” the drums, Palmieri’s percussive piano figures, and Chocolate floating over the time. I had to be Chocolate with Eddie, Druis, and her students. We worked well together. I particularly remember playing flugelhorn over a samba rhythm. Liquid.
We Form a Band
So we did that a couple, three, four, half-dozen times, I don’t know exactly, and we decide to form a group, Eddie, Druis, and me. We called ourselves the Afro-Eurasian Connection (AEC). Eddie on drums, bells, and other percussion; Druis on vocals, bells, and other percussion; me on trumpet, flugelhorn, occasionally bells and other percussion. We were the core. Sometimes Druis’s sister Fonda would come up from New York City and join Druis on vocals, and bells and other percussion. Also Eddie’s old compatriot Kehinde Donaldson on dundun, and other percussion.
From left to right: Fonda Beasley (holding a shekere), me, Eddie Knowles (congas), Druis Beasley (balafon)
We had to create a repertoire. Percussion, vocals, and trumpet is not a standard musical format. There is no standard repertoire for it. We adapted songs: Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro-Blue,” Druis sang the lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr.) in a rich, full alto (and I played high harmony on flugelhorn, Eddie on percussion; “Signifying Monkey” (Oscar Brown’s version), with Druis on vocal, me on balafone, and Eddie on Percussion; “Wade in the Water” (traditional), Druis on vocal, Eddie on slit drum, me on muted trumpet. And so forth. And of course we created our own stuff.
We played various local and regional gigs: a cultural fair in downtown Troy, some pep rally at RPI, a student union gig at Alfred University in Western New York. I had to drive the van because the others were worried about being pulled over for DWB (driving while black; it happens). We played a party that RPI put together to showcase local (RPI) talent on the side. As we played one tune the hall went stone cold silent. A local arts center asked us to put on a program. Gave us a month. Eddie was busy at work, so Druis and I had to put it together.
By that time we’d changed the name to the New African Music Collective (NAMC). Same music, with perhaps a bit more Africa in the vibe (though we didn’t talk of vibe back then). Somewhere in our relationship, I don’t recall just when, but it’s convenient to locate it in this timeframe, I learned that among friends and family Eddie had adopted the name “Adenola,” which is of Yoruba derivation, meaning “the crown of wealth” or “royalty is wealth/honor.”
Back to the program.
Druis took an undergraduate term paper Ade had written at Lincoln, about John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and broke it into sections, which she read, interspersing them with singing. “Go Down Moses,” was one tune; made the hair on the back of my head stand on end. She called it a recitation. We put some instrumental pieces before the recitation, and some after. The ones after were based on some musical figures I was playing around with. We were tight. And well received.
Druis got us a grant from NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) to do a residency in some Schenectady middle schools. That was the first time I was in a classroom where the portraits on the walls we all of famous black people. I forget whether or not I actually saw a portrait of Beethoven as a black man, but Samual Coleridge-Taylor began advancing that idea in 1907. I do know that few or none of the students had ever heard of Louis Armstrong, which didn’t surprise me at all.
I believe that it was in the summer of 1984 that we opened an outdoor concert for Dizzy Gillespie. A group in Albany had gotten together to sponsor some outdoor concerts in a park in Albany. They asked NAMC join them. We called the series Come Sunday (after the song by Duke Ellington). Dizzy Gillespie was the first concert in the series, and NAMC would open for him.
Dizzy Gillespie was one of the great musicians of the century: trumpeter, bebop innovator, band leader, jokester. He was a childhood hero of mine. He also played a major role in introducing Cuban music to the jazz world. He’d brought Chano Pozo, a drummer and composer and a devotee of Santería to New York to play with his band.
We brought in Fonda and Kehinde for the gig and added a bass player, whose name I forget. My parents drove in from Pennsylvania for the concert. It was the first time they’d heard me play the trumpet since high school.
Perhaps we opened with I tune I wrote, “We Arise.” Maybe we then featured Druis on “Afro-Blue.” But maybe that was third. We probably did three other tunes, and that was our half-hour set. It went well, very well.
In that kind of a situation you have less than a minute to grab the crowd. We grabbed them and held them. Beyond that, what can I say, it was 40 years ago. Was it a big deal? Yes. But, after all, someone had to open for Dizzy. Why not NAMC? Which is to say, it was a gig like every gig. No one in the audience was giving us points for opening for Dizzy Gillispie. Like the other audiences we’d played for, they wanted us to play. We did.
The Magic of the Bell
And like every group that ever got over, we rehearsed, once a week whether we had a gig or not. At one of those rehearsals magic happened. There were four of us (Fonda had joined us), as I recall, at this particular session. Each of us had a bell with two or more heads on it. Ade assigned three of us simple interlocking rhythms to play. Ade then improvised over the interlocking parts.
Once we were rolling melodies would emerge which no one was playing. Rather, the melody strung together tones, first from one bell, then another, and another, and so on. No one person was playing the melody; it arose from the “cohesions” which appeared in the shifting pattern of tones played by the ensemble. Depending on the patterns he played, Ade could “direct” the melody, but the tones he played weren’t necessarily the melody tones. Rather, they served to direct the melodic cohesions from place to place.
Since three of us were playing the same thing over and over again, the relationships which obtained between our tones stayed the same from cycle to cycle. However, Ade’s patterns were improvised and thus were not the same from cycle to cycle. Nor did the tones he played simply “float on top” of the tones the rest of us were playing. But they existed in the same tonal space, and, because of this, they affected the moment to moment gestalt of tones in that space.
Something even more remarkable would occasionally happen. When, and only when, we were really locked together in animated playing, we could hear relatively high-pitched tones which no one was playing. No one. None of us. Spirit tones? Each bell had a pitch tendency (these bells were not precisely tuned), but these high tones did not match the pitch tendency of any of the bells. They were distinct tones, but not directly attributable to any of the bells.
This only happened when we were in the state of relaxation conducive to intense playing, deep in the groove. Without the relaxation, no emergent tones and melodies. According to Ade, that’s how it always is with the “magic of the bell.” Ade spoke that phrase with a familiarity indicating has experienced it before.
This incident was so striking that I used it open the second chapter of my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil.
Coda: Among Friends
Early in our musical association, I became friends with Ade and Druis. This is not necessarily the case among band members. In college I’d played in a rock and roll band, The Saint Matthew Passion, that was started by three friends. The rest of us were friendly enough, but we were just bandmates. We didn’t hang out together outside of the band. The same with The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band, the other band I played in while I was in upstate New York. Some of the guys had been friends before the band. But the rest of us were just bandmates.
Just why I bonded with Ade and Druis, I don’t know. Why not? But we did. Of course it was the music, but also, to some extent, I suspect that it was because we were, in different was, outsiders at RPI. RPI was an overwhelmingly white institution and Ade was brought there – remember, this was the late 1970s and early ‘80s – to help bring in and retain black students. As for me, let us just say that, while I may have been trained as an academic, my style was more that of an explorer I a world of academics who functioned more like real estate developers. They were in the business of developing settled intellectual territory. I was in the business of looking for new lands.
We’d rehearse at Ade’s place. Sometimes we’d hang out afterward. During the summer of our first year Ade invited me to his annual Juneteenth party. Friends and family from all over, but mostly, I believe, New York City and the Northeast, would gather at Ade’s place to eat barbecue, drink Piña Coladas, play bid whist and talk trash, play the drums – there were always a half-dozen or more drummers there, and just generally hang out.
I don’t know just when NAMC played our last gig, probably sometime in 1985 or ’86. But we’d still hang our occasionally. In the late 1990s I started travelling on consulting gigs and I left New York in 1999 to join a company in Hoboken, New Jersey, where I now live. But I did make one last trip back to Troy. I believe it was for another Juneteenth party. Ade had moved to a larger house. It was on a couple of acres of wooded land a couple of miles outside of Troy and set back from the road.
As I got out of my car I saw a longsword driven into the ground. Ade had become a priest of Shango, the Yoruba orisha (divine spirit) of thunder, lightning, and drumming. He’d gone up the ladder at RPI from Assistant Dean for Minority Affairs, to Dean of Students, and finally to Vice President for Student Life. He’d now retired from that position and taught percussion in the Music Department. Remember how I’d written about the magic of the bell in my book on music? Ade would distribute that section to his percussion students.
Ache!
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