“Music is the healing force of the world.”
The O’Jays, I Love Music, 1975

“Everyone deserves music.”
Michael Franti & Spearhead, 2003

Everything, it seems, has a soundtrack.  A movie, a television program, even a commercial, is enhanced by the quality of music that accompanies the story.  A driver in a car is often soothed or energized by the music that plays on the radio or media player.  As we go about our daily lives, from the performance of routine tasks to the undertaking of some major adventure, we often hear music playing through loudspeakers, through headphones or within our own heads.

The nature of that soundtrack is determined by our sense of culture.  The culture of a person, or a group of people, is determined by historical events, but also by specific beliefs in the way people should live, treat each other, and interact with their home, the Planet Earth, and by the morals and customs that support those beliefs.  This culture is expressed in the everyday actions of the people, but also in the fashion, politics and artistic expression of the people.  At some point, a people must turn to their culture to nourish, energize and guide their behavior.

The special aspects of how a particular group of people live and see their place in history are shown in the people’s artistic expression of themselves through their culture: visual arts, poetry and spoken word, prose and storytelling, spirituality, philosophy, rituals, dance, music, and more.  Perhaps no one person or vehicle can adequately explore all the different aspects of a people’s culture.  Here, we explore one specific aspect of African and Afro-Diasporan culture: music.

On a group level, music can be seen as the soundtrack to the broader everyday existence of large groups of people, in neighborhoods, communities, towns, cities, states, regions of a country or an entire country or continent.  Cultural bonds help to maintain a sense of commonality, community and kinship, and these can be important attributes for a community when it needs to unite around issues of self-defense, social uplift and the need to protect and care for the weak or less fortunate.  Culture in general, and music in particular, often provide strong influences to the thinking of a person or a community.

It Began in Africa

“No matter how far the river flows, it never forgets its source.”
African Proverb

Black music follows its “river” back to the continent of our Ancestors, the continent of Africa.  This river began to flow in earnest during the 17th Century, when African people were captured from their ancestral home and taken away to the Americas.  In North America, unlike in South America, our ancestors were denied the use of the drum, one of the key instruments that were used to communicate, to share information, to warn each other of coming danger, to teach our Ancestors how to treat each other, to inspire them and to guide them spiritually.  The enslavers suspected the drum’s communicative power, and so it was taken from our Ancestors.  Thus, new means of communication were needed if they were to survive long enough to regain their freedom, as a people, with some of their culture and values intact.

Our Strength During Slavery: The Negro Spiritual as the Base

Deprived of our African culture, our Ancestors were in need of a source of strength during the hard times of slavery, as well as an effective means of communication that would be undetectable to their enslavers.  At first, there were the Drum and other forms of communication that were either passed down from African ancestors or directly brought to the “New World” by the enslaved Africans.  Then, as these were taken from our ancestors (mainly in the Southern United States; in the Caribbean and in South America, Africans were often permitted to maintain several aspects of their indigenous cultures), alternative forms of cultural expression, spiritual observance and communication were needed.  Since the missionaries and other standard-bearers of America’s professed Christian faith saw the “conversion” of Africans as a means to better control their actions under the guise of “saving their souls”, the church-oriented Spirituals became that cultural, spiritual and social connection.

A number of theories persist concerning the full meaning of the Negro Spiritual.  Some still believe that they were simply a Westernized version of ancestral African worship.  But others, specifically those who have studied the history of African and African-American culture, African resistance to oppression (including the Underground Railroad) and the Slave Revolts that rocked the South, are clear that the Spirituals had another purpose: a means of communicating with one another about when conditions were ripe for escapes or insurrections, a warning of impending actions by the plantation owners such as slave auctions and collective punishments, and a consistent exhortation to seek freedom not simply from the Christian concept of “sin”, but (also) from the tyranny of the slave masters, often “right under Massa’s nose”.

There are many sources of information on the Negro Spiritual available on the Internet for those who wish to delve further into the research:

• The “Negro Spiritual” Scholarship Foundation, http://www.negrospiritual.org/

• “African American Spirituals”, http://www.authentichistory.com/1600-1859/3-spirituals/index.html

• “Sweet Chariot: The Story of the Spirituals”, http://ctl.du.edu/spirituals/

• “The Negro Spiritual, Inc.”, http://thenegrospiritualinc.com/

• An extensive list of Negro Spirituals, including “Ain’t Gon’ Let Nobody Turn Me Roun”, Babylon’s Falling”, “Every Time I Feel The Spirit”, Go Down Moses”, “Jubilee”, Nobody Knows the Trouble” and of course, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”, “Wade In the Water”, “We Shall Overcome” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” can be found and listened to on the website http://www.negrospirituals.com/news-song/index.htm

• “Slave Songs of the United States”, by William Francis Allen (1830-1889), Charles Pickard Ware (1840-1921) and Lucy McKim Garrison (1842-1877); published  by the Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.  http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/allen/allen.html

It should come as no surprise to learn that so many of the superstar recording artists of the 20th Century found their voices in the church choir, just as it should shock no one that many of the most celebrated leaders for Civil Rights and the struggle against oppression from Rev. Nat Turner to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., were Men of the Cloth.  In truth, the connection for African-Americans between spirituality, human rights and the struggle against tyranny has long been maintained through culture, specifically music.

Black Expression in “The Blues”

When times have been at their hardest, we have often sought refuge in the commiseration and, finally, the hope that music could bring us.  One of the earliest forms of musical expression to establish itself in the United States was “the Blues”.  This is how Wikipedia explains the likely origin and essence of the Blues:

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the “Deep South” of the United States around the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues chord progression is the most common. …

The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines, and instruments. Blues can be subdivided into several subgenres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Best known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump, and Chicago blues styles. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues-rock evolved.

The term “the blues” refers to the “blue devils”, meaning melancholy and sadness; an early use of the term in this sense is found in George Colman’s one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912, when Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.

“The blues takes many forms… It is variously a feeling, a mood, a nameless threat, a person, a lover, a boss man, a mob, and, of course, the Devil himself. It is often experienced as both cause and effect, action and reaction, and it can be used as both hex and counterhex, poison and antidote, pain and relief. Most importantly, the blues is both the cause of [the] song, and [the] song itself…” (Edward Comentale, p. 49. Sweet Air: American Popular Song, 2013, University of Illinois Press, ISBN 978-0-252-07892-7)

The lines are often sung following a pattern closer to a rhythmic talk than to a melody. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative. The singer voiced his or her “personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, [and] hard times.” This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook to life when they were enslaved.

The lyrics often relate troubles experienced within African American society. For instance Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Rising High Water Blues” (1927) tells about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927:

“Backwater rising, Southern peoples can’t make no time
I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can’t make no time
And I can’t get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine.”

The origin of the term of was most likely derived from mysticism involving blue indigo, which was used by many West African cultures in death and mourning ceremonies where all the mourner’s garments would have been dyed blue to indicate suffering. This mystical association towards the indigo plant, grown in many southern US slave plantations, combined with the West African slaves who sang of their suffering as they worked on the cotton that the indigo dyed eventually resulted in these expressed songs being known as “the Blues.”

The social and economic reasons for the appearance of the blues are not fully known. The first appearance of the blues is often dated after the Emancipation Act of 1863, between 1870 and 1900, a period that coincides with Emancipation and, later, the development of juke joints as places where Blacks went to listen to music, dance, or gamble after a hard day’s work. This period corresponds to the transition from slavery to sharecropping, small-scale agricultural production, and the expansion of railroads in the southern United States. Several scholars characterize the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized style. They argue that the development of the blues is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the enslaved people.

The musical forms and styles that are now considered the “blues” as well as modern “country music” arose in the same regions during the 19th century in the southern United States. Recorded blues and country can be found from as far back as the 1920s, when the popular record industry developed and created marketing categories called “race music” and “hillbilly music” to sell music by blacks for blacks and by whites for whites, respectively. At the time, there was no clear musical division between “blues” and “country,” except for the ethnicity of the performer, and even that was sometimes documented incorrectly by record companies.

Though musicologists can now attempt to define “the blues” narrowly in terms of certain chord structures and lyric strategies thought to have originated in West Africa, audiences originally heard the music in a far more general way: it was simply the music of the rural south, notably the Mississippi Delta. Black and white musicians shared the same repertoire and thought of themselves as “songsters” rather than “blues musicians.” The notion of blues as a separate genre arose during the black migration from the countryside to urban areas in the 1920s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry. “Blues” became a code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners.

The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The origins of spirituals go back much further than the blues, usually dating back to the middle of the 18th century, when the slaves were Christianized and began to sing and play Christian hymns, in particular those of Isaac Watts, which were very popular. Before the blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, it was defined as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. It was the low-down music played by the rural Blacks.

Big Band and Swing

From that time, African-American culture has evolved as our circumstances in the Americas have evolved.  As Black communities gradually began to achieve better status in the larger society, our musical tastes gradually became more hopeful, and Black musicians became prominent in big band swing, popular (“pop” or “Top 40”) music and in Rhythm-and-Blues, or “R&B”.

While Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Guy Lombardo and the recognized “King of Big Band”, Benny Goodman, held sway in the 1930s and 1940s, Cab Calloway, Billy Eckstine, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Lionel Hampton, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington (pictured) made serious inroads in the music and became the faces of Big Band for Black, and many White, audiences.  A modern descendant of the Big Band Era would arguably be Quincy Jones, whose extensive discography includes a number of
movie and television soundtracks (for example, “Ironside” from the 1970s) as well as the entire soundtrack from the television miniseries Roots, which not only awakened the sense of cultural pride of African-Americans across the country and of African descendants around the world, but also helped usher in the era of the miniseries in television.  The Big Band influence could even be seen in Africa, where Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti used an ensemble that resembles a Big Band to create an unmatched library of African music classics.

Jazz and the Art of Improvisation

Many people could not understand the freewheeling, liberated sound that emanated from such places as New Orleans and New York City.  It was undisciplined, they said.  It lacked structure and melody, they said.  It would never last, they said.  From Ragtime to New Orleans Jazz to Bebop to Avant-Garde to Afro-Cuban to Latin Jazz to “Smooth” or “Fusion” or “Cool” Jazz, the many ways in which African culture has influenced American popular music have made this multi-faceted style the envy of the nations of the world.  It is often regarded as North America’s one truly indigenous art form.

Wikipedia‘s history of Jazz gives the following explanation of the art of improvisation and its centrality to jazz:

While jazz is considered difficult to define, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements. The centrality of improvisation in jazz is attributed to its presence in influential earlier forms of music: the early blues, a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of the African-American workers on plantations. These were commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also highly improvisational. Although European classical music has been said to be a composer’s medium in which the performer is sometimes granted discretion over interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment, the performer’s primary goal is to play a composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized as the product of group creativity, interaction, and collaboration, that places varying degrees of value on the contributions of composer (if there is one) and performers. Summarizing the difference, pianist Earl Hines remarked in a 1975 film that

“… when I was playing classical music I wouldn’t dare get away from what I was reading. If you’ve noticed, all of the symphonic musicians, they have played some of those classical tunes for years but they wouldn’t vary from one note — and every time they play they have to have the music. So that’s why for some classical musicians, it’s very difficult for them to try to learn how to play jazz.”

In jazz, therefore, the skilled performer will interpret a tune in very individual ways, never playing the same composition exactly the same way twice. Depending upon the performer’s mood and personal experience, interactions with other musicians, or even members of the audience, a jazz musician may alter melodies, harmonies or time signature at will. The importance of improvisation has led some critics to suggest that even Duke Ellington’s music was not jazz, because it was arranged and orchestrated. On the other hand, the solo piano “transformative versions” of Ellington compositions by Earl Hines were described by Ben Ratliff, the New York Times jazz critic, as being “as good an example of the jazz process as anything out there”.

From this basic improvisational concept came various attempts by musicians to interpret it and put their personal stamp on it.  Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, Jelly Roll  Morton, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Max Roach, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, John Coltrane (pictured), Jackie McLean, Archie Shepp and Dexter Gordon did much to set the standards by which traditionalists assess what is “true jazz” and what is considered a commercialized adulteration of the original music.  Artists such as Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie and Sun Ra helped expand our perspectives and exerted tremendous influence on how we see and listen to jazz music today.  The Modern Jazz Quartet, The Headhunters, Return To Forever and The Crusaders, among others, brought distinctive flavor to the music.  Davis and Herbie Hancock showed us that it was possible to straddle the more traditional acoustic jazz and the more electric “progressive” jazz of the 1970s and 1980s.  Stanley Turrentine, Jimmy McGriff, Hubert Laws and Ronnie Laws helped bring jazz to a wider audience as they infused elements of funk into the music.  Mongo Santamaria, Joao Gilberto, Tito Puente, Airto Moriera and Antonio Carlos Jobim brought South American flavor to jazz.  And “young lions” such as Terence Blanchard, Morris Chestnut, Wynton and Branford Marsalis began to “bridge the gap” from “fusion” jazz back to the more traditional forms, thus helping bring us all back “home” again.  Still, there were many traditionalists who believed music was for instruments only, and acoustic instruments at that.  Many of these listeners would have difficulty adjusting to the addition of electric amplification and vocals to music.

From Rock-N-Roll to R&B

Chuck Berry (pictured, left) revolutionized Rock-N-Roll long before Elvis Pressley’s coronation as “The  King”, just as Jimi Hendrix would turn rock and electric music on its ear years later.  Even into the 1970s, audiences would thrill to the virtuosity of Ernie Isley on the electric guitar and the skills of George and Louis Johnson on the guitar and bass.  This went hand-in-hand with Black artists’ rise in the R&B world as vocalists, from supergroups such as The Shirelles, The Platters, The Coasters, The Supremes, The Temptations, the Four Tops and The Chi-Lites, to individual headliners such as Clarence Clemons, Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross, and full-fledged entertainers such as the incomparable Little Richard and the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, James Brown.

With each perceived backlash against the African-American struggle for freedom, justice and equality, our cultural expression became more overtly socially conscious.  As the Civil Rights and Environmental Movements reached their peak, we heard the concerns of the people expressed in the music, such as Marvin Gaye‘s (pictured, right) lament to the impending destruction of the environment, “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)” and his commentary on man’s inhumanity to man, “What’s Goin’ On”:

“picket lines and picket signs
don’t punish me with brutality
talk to me, so you can see
what’s goin’ on”

In the face of continuing oppression, music began to be more assertive, even defiant.  In August 1968, just months after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Brown (pictured, left) released “Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud”.  It held the number one position in the Billboard R&B chart for six weeks and made it to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

“We demand a chance to do things for ourself
we’re tired of beating our head against the wall
and workin’ for someone else”.

This came as the Civil Rights Movement was giving way to the Black Power Movement, and African-Americans were beginning to assert their determination not only to fight for those rights that were owed, but denied, by the United States, but also to take matters into our own hands and to begin to exercise the “self-help” philosophies that had been espoused by the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party, among others.

From Disco to House

During the backlash against disco that occurred in the 1980s, the R&B-influenced dance music was denigrated as “plastic” and “superficial”, perhaps because of the use of lengthy percussion and bassline intros to the songs and the insistence on an energetic, danceable beat.  Certainly, the almost rabid popularity of the music, which inspired large numbers of musicians and “just regular people” to become DJs (including this writer) as well as the proliferation of nightclubs featuring powerful sound systems, mirror balls and flashing lights around the world, would inspire massive blowback, as do all things that are regarded as trends or fads in today’s society.  But one thing that seems to have been missed is the inherently positive message that one could pick up in almost all “disco” music: one of tolerance, brotherhood, empowerment and community.  To be sure, there were bits of social commentary involved, such as Donna Summer‘s (pictured, above right) expose of the streetwalker’s life in “Bad Girls”, but most of the themes were about universal concepts of love (just about anything by Barry White), fun (music by groups from Chic to Parliament-Funkadelic, which was more funk than disco but was prevalent during the Disco Era), self-realization (Patrick Hernandez’s “Born To Be Alive”), determination (McFadden and Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”) and togetherness (such as Sister Sledge’s iconic disco anthem “We Are Family”, which was used as a theme song for the Pittsburgh Pirates’ World Series run in 1979).  Some artists, though, were so timeless that they were able to bridge musical eras and ride the disco wave past the point of disco’s alleged demise, such as Kool & The Gang and Earth, Wind & Fire.  While mostly-White audiences often participated in the joyous rejection of the rhythms and fashions of the Disco Era, however, most Black partygoers and listeners were transitioning from disco through R&B to a new musical form that shared many of disco’s structural and philosophical characteristics, and House Music soon became the rage.

While many pop-music-oriented nightclubs were closing down in the aftermath of the demise of disco, in predominantly-African-American nightclubs (as well as many gay nightclubs), the party was still going.  Groups such The O’Jays,  Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool & The Gang and Parliament-Funkadelic had allowed Black partygoers to keep the beat.  New York DJs from Larry Levan and Shep Pettibone to “Little” Louie Vega helped keep these clubs going with a prolific series of 12-inch (album-sized) singles of popular songs, remixed by them and a host of others, which were readily available in record stores across the country, and R&B-Dance music took over in the 1980s.  All this was happening as the smooth basslines and uplifting lyrics of House Music migrated from the creative minds of people such as Frankie Knuckles in Chicago and Kevin Saunderson in Detriot to take dance music by storm, at least in the urban centers.  At the same time, House’s cousin, a Detroit-bred electronic sound called Techno (the genesis of which many credit to Saunderson), began to exert its influence as well.  Techno would soon be picked up by European DJs and producers who found new ways to use the technology to create more variety (some called it “space music”) with Trance and other Techno-based styles, until that style of music barely resembled its Detroit roots.  Meanwhile, both House and Techno wielded their influence on the dance music scene through the 1990’s and into the 21st Century.

The Rise of Hip Hop and Rap Music

One could argue that James Brown was the real father of Hip Hop, as many would say that he did not so much sing his songs as he rapped them.  Still, most people trace the origins of what would first be called Rap Music, then Hip Hop, to the Bronx’s DJ Kool Herc, who in 1972 helped pioneer various DJ mixing techniques, and others began rapping, or rhyming, over breaks and popular songs.  DJ Hollywood and Lovebug Starski are often credited with coining the term Hip Hop to describe the style.  Specific mixing techniques, such as scratching (quickly moving a record back and forth under a turntable needle) and flanging or “phasing” (in which two records of the same song are played, almost exactly in phase with each other, to create a tight echo effect akin to listening through an air hose) were introduced by a variety of DJs in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  The Sugarhill Gang (above, left) released “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, which officially announced that Rap had Arrived (though it was not the first dong to use rapping instead of sung vocals).  When the 80’s arrived, there was a virtual (by those standards) explosion of talent on the scene: Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash, Whodini, Run-DMC (above, right), LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa, and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (Will Smith), among others.  Some describe that period as the Golden Age of Hip Hop, as the music, and the images of many of the music’s performers, would soon undergo a major change.

After the Beastie Boys converted from Punk to Rap, there was a pronounced increase in the aggressiveness of the lyrics of the music, as well as incidents involving many of the new Hip Hop artists.  Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” had marked a switch from simple party-rap and bragging about one’s lyrical prowess to the area of social commentary, laying bare the harsh life of the inner city for all to see.  While spoken-word performers and musicians such as Gil Scott-Heron had been doing this for some time, other Hip Hop artists took this positive move a step further, taking on the character of the drug dealer, the thug, the gang-banger.  Lyrics began to describe acts of criminality such as assault, murder, rape and general mayhem in great detail, often combining them with the braggadocio from Hip Hop’s early days, to the point of appearing to outwardly brag about such exploits.  Suddenly, the musical landscape was practically saturated with small record labels, often subsidiaries of larger corporate record companies, and a slew of “gangsta” rappers, some of whom had experienced mild success as R&B artists or “mainstream” rappers, but most of whom appeared on the scene just long enough to release one or two expletive-laden songs that received massive airplay on car stereos (with their heavily-bleeped versions obtaining radio play on pop-R&B stations) but were never heard from again.  Most of these songs were notable for their repeated use of not only angry and raunchy swear words, but also for their habitual reference to “niggas”, “bitches” and “hos”.  During this period, several artists were able to rise to prominence by bridging the gap from “gangsta” to mainstream music and entertainment, such as Dr. Dre (from NWA to a recording industry producer and mogul), Ice-T and Ice Cube (now actors) and Snoop Dogg (now an entertainer-activist and known for a while as Snoop Lion).  Other prominent artists, however, met tragic and violent ends, such as legendary rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious BIG, both of whom were gunned down, gangland-style, in the 1990’s.  Still other artists fought to maintain Hip Hop’s socio-political conscience, as did Public Enemy (pictured below) and, often, Tupac, with songs that emphasized either the humanity of those trapped in the ghetto, or the inhumanity of a political and economic system that tries to trap them there.

A number of Hip Hop pioneers and “purists” considered the “gangsta” trend to represent the adulteration of Hip Hop, as did Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels on August 5, 2013, calling today’s Hip Hop “immature and disrespectful”.  While Mr. McDaniels is saying something that needed to be said long ago, we must remember that when Hip Hop first entered the scene, it was an authentic, organic creation of young people, in this particular case young Black people, in the urban centers, who were looking for a creative way to express themselves and what they felt in their hearts, just as was the case for the pioneers of the Blues, Swing, Jazz, R&B, Disco and House before it.  As long as the emphasis was on the artistic expression of the people who created it, the music was, on the average, wholesome and positive, even if it often became rebellious.  But once the corporate interests realized that a steady stream of “wannabe” artists could be introduced, used up and discarded regardless of talent, and that those things that shock us will usually cause us to look at them before turning away (such as misogynistic or violent imagery in music), the feeding frenzy was on and Hip Hop was pulled from its proud beginnings into a state of disrepute among a considerable percentage of the general public.  But there are those who are fighting to restore Hip Hop to its proud beginnings.  Many of them are young, independent artists who skillfully blend spoken-word poetry and HipHop-style rapping to deliver messages of social justice, community uplift, self-empowerment and Black pride based on our historic legacy, and they are delivering this important message to those who need it most, the children.  Groups like Dead Prez and artists like David Banner, Jasiri X and Mos Def have been bringing a strong, pro-Black message of defiance and resistance to oppression, while Michael Franti & Spearhead have broadcast a consistent message of (if somewhat folksy) global tolerance.  Europeans have picked up on this truth-and-justice vibe as well, where the United Kingdom’s Jamiroquai has combined occasional rapping with sung lyrics and driving rhythms to push a message of resistance and human rights.  Perhaps the strongest example of this where I live in Maryland was Precise Science (pictured below), a local group that delivered a strong message featuring ancient African history and its relevance to our struggle today. Sadly, one of its members, Reggie “Ruffmic” Logan, succumbed to cancer in 2017, but the music he made with Heru Ptah MeriTef lives on in recordings and needs to be heard by a populace desperate for knowledge and inspiration.  In groups and artists such as these, Hip Hop has the chance to reclaim its place on the leading edge of social and human advancement.

Thus does Black Music continue the struggle upon which it set out the moment African people were captured centuries ago and taken from their home half a world away to the so-called New World.  This way of sharing information, of warning us of coming danger, of teaching us how to treat each other, of inspiring us to achieve great things and of guiding us toward spiritual oneness, righteousness and completeness, has never stopped pushing us toward our rightful destiny, despite the efforts of some to adulterate it, despite our occasional refusals to heed its critical message.  Contemporary artists such as the early 2000’s group Fertile Ground, spoken word artists such as Ilu Butterfly and Soul-Fusion vocalists such as Kim Poole (pictured, below) have worked to spread this critical message across the United States and around the world, Ms. Poole in particular through her Teaching Artist Institute (TAI) and its message of using Art for Social Transformation which she has taken to Afrika several times since 2015. The history of our musical and cultural journey has shown us that when we have allowed the spirit in the music to move our artistic expression, we have achieved great things.  When we have allowed self-interest and greed to corrupt it, we have gone astray and threatened the very fabric that protects us and keeps us strong.  As the O’Jays said, Music is the healing force of the world, but this is true only if we allow it to be.  And for the sake of the memory of our Ancestors, for the sake of those currently looking for hope and inspiration, for the sake of our children and those yet unborn, as Michael Franti says, Everyone deserves music. 

At KUUMBAMusic and WorldHouse Music & Sound, we are dedicated to bringing this healing force of the world to all of us. We are available for small-to-medium parties, lectures, presentations and cultural events.  We can accommodate ballrooms for up to 1000 attendees or multiple rooms of up to several hundred.  We can provide inputs for small-scale live shows for up to ten performers, including microphones for lecturers, presenters, emcees and vocalists.  We can include projectors for images in lectures and presentations.

We emphasize music from Africa and the African Diaspora, “Exploring the Spectrum of Black Music from Africa, the United States and the World.”  We specialize in Jazz, Rhythm-and-Blues, Conscious Hip Hop and House from the United States, as well as a variety of musical styles from Africa and the Caribbean, including Afrobeat, Calypso, Highlife, Jive, Juju, Makossa, Reggae, Samba, Soca, Soukous and Zouk. For information on availability and rates, email us at cliff@kuumbaevents.com.