Interlocking History #1: Herbie Mann

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​[14] The February 1, 1963 SNCC concert was not the only benefit concert Herbie Mann played at; he also donated his music to several civil rights causes, mostly performing Afro-Cuban jazz. He had experimented with the style rather early in his career and made an appearance on Art Blakey’s famous 1957 album, Orgy in Rhythm. But his career in Afro-Cuban jazz took off in late 1958 when Mario Bauzá – the longtime musical director for the Afro-Cuban orchestra fronted by Francisco “Machito” Grillo – hired him to write songs for a new album he was preparing to record for Roulette Records. The album, a live album recorded at Birdland titled Machito with Flute to Boot, featured Machito’s Afro Cubans Big Band alongside guest soloists Mann, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, and trombonist Curtis Fuller. After his stint at Birdland with Machito, Mann assembled his own Latin group that debuted in June 1959 at Basin Street East. There, he recorded another live album, Flautista!, which featured percussionists from the Machito band: two Puerto Rican cousins, Santo Miranda and José Luis Mangual, as well as the famous Cuban conguero, Carlos “Patato” Valdes. Sometime in 1963, Mann reunited with Machito and his Afro Cubans to offer their support to the civil rights movement. They contributed “Carabunta,” a song they originally recorded on Machito with Flute to Boot, to the Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) double-album, A Jazz Salute to Freedom. The benefit album would go on to sell around 17,000 copies and raise $50,000 for CORE.

 

[15] While Mann’s Afro-Cuban aesthetic obviously appealed to CORE’s executive director James Farmer, Mann also pursued another aesthetic stream that resonated with benefit concert organizers: “African” jazz. In November 1958, amid his successful experiments with Afro-Cuban jazz, Mann began to think more broadly about African music and its contribution to American jazz. More specifically, he wanted to go on a teaching mission to Africa and, in his words, “show the Africans how much our American jazz music owes to its African heritage.” To put his plan into action he solicited the help of Marshall Stearns, a noted jazz historian who also worked for President Eisenhower’s International Exchange Program: the same program that sent Charlie Byrd, Keter Betts, and Buddy Deppenschmidt to Brazil in 1961. Stearns set up an audition at New York’s Village Gate where Mann and his group debuted a piece he had been working on, a multi-movement composition dedicated to African influence and heritage titled “African Suite.” Stearns and Mann also hired former Flautista! musicians “Patato” Valdes, José Luis Mangual, and vibraphonist Johnny Rae in order to record an album of the “African Suite.” Stearns and the band wanted to send their recording to the American National Theatre and Academy as well as to seventeen American consuls in Africa. Their goal was to get the State Department to assess whether they wanted Mann to tour under the auspices of the federal government. Unfortunately for Mann, not enough consuls enjoyed his recording. The advisory committee concluded that his music on “African Suite” was “too primitive” and suggested he add horns to his percussion-heavy instrumentation because it would make his band versatile enough to play dixieland, swing, Afro-Cuban, and bebop. Mann accepted their stipulations and in late 1959 the State Department approved a band comprised of Valdes, Mangual, Rae, bassist Don Payne, drummer Rudy Collins, as well as the requisite horn players, trumpeter Doc Cheatham and trombonist Willie Dennis. Between December 31, 1959, and April 5, 1960, Mann’s group visited Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Tanganyika, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Morocco, and Tunisia.

 

[16] Despite his interest in the music of Africa, Mann’s comments about – and behavior during – his State Department tour suggests he may not have been entirely sympathetic with the tenets of the American civil rights movement. As Robin D.G. Kelley writes, Mann began his tour condescendingly and told the New York Times critic John S. Wilson that “I’ve heard that a professor at an African college has said that the youth of Africa want to forget about their culture, that the new music of Africa is jazz . . . So maybe they’ll resent my music. On the other hand, I might be able to show them that their music is not something to be ashamed of.” A public affairs officer who accompanied Mann on tour noted his “cavalier, condescending attitude” which he reserved mostly for the Sudanese, whom Mann described as “uncultured” and “unsophisticated” because they “preferred dixieland to modern jazz.” When he returned to the United States, he told the Chicago Defender about his “jazz safari” to Africa and spoke more about the photographs and films he took than the music he made or listened to.

 

[17] But whether they were aware of his comments made about Africa or not, the Africa Defense and Aid Fund certainly felt Mann was sympathetic enough to their cause to hire him a year later to perform at their “Africa Freedom Day” benefit concert on April 17, 1961. And whether Mann thought his condescension towards Africans did not preclude him from expressing his interest in civil rights for African Americans (the most likely explanation), or whether he had amended his views and now believed Africans – even if they liked dixieland – were modern, cultured people (maybe), or whether he did not believe in civil rights at all and was just playing a gig (the least likely explanation), he nevertheless accepted their invitation. Organized by several African nationalists, the “Africa Freedom Day” benefit featured talks by Kenneth Kuanda, president of the United National Independence Party of Northern Rhodesia, author James Baldwin, senator Hubert Humphrey, and James Farmer, CORE’s executive director who would later reach out to Mann to provide music for the organization’s benefit album. In addition to Mann, performers included Dizzy Gillespie and Miriam Makeba, one of South Africa’s most celebrated singers and activists. In large part thanks to Mann’s interest in African music and his experience abroad, he must have felt somewhat comfortable at the “Africa Freedom Day” concert. Either his “African Suite” that he had recorded a few years prior, or the more general Afro-Cuban jazz in which he had been specializing, would have fit right into the program. Whatever he played, he surely made an impression; after all, James Farmer, who shared the stage with Mann that day, did, two years later, include his music on CORE’s A Jazz Salute to Freedom record.

 

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[18] By performing African-jazz, and Afro-Cuban jazz at benefit concerts such as the “Africa Freedom Day,” Mann made a decision that several of his colleagues were also making. As cultural historian Josh Kun points out, “many of the Afro-Cuban jazz experiments … were embedded in larger pan-Africanist projects and were part of a widespread jazz trend in the late 1950s and early 1960s to celebrate recent developments in African postcolonialism and political liberation from European rule.” Songs like McCoy Tyner’s “The Man from Tanganyika,” Horace Parlan’s “Home Is Africa,” John Coltrane’s “Africa,” Jackie McClean’s tribute to Ghanaian independence, “Appointment in Ghana,” Lee Morgan’s tribute to Kenyan independence, “Mr. Kenyatta,” and Art Blakey’s album, The African Beat “were all intended to generate African American pride in the struggles and achievements of postcolonial Africa.” Mann may have made contradictory comments towards Africa, but his music unequivocally placed him alongside artists like Tyner, Coltrane, and Blakely.

 

[19] While Mann’s embrace of Afro-Cuban and African jazz was not unique, at SNCC’s “Salute to Southern Students” concert on February 1, 1963, Mann included a style of music that his peers so far had not: bossa nova. In 1959, Mann saw Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus’ famous film about carnival in Rio de Janeiro that won the Grand Prize at Cannes and an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1960. More accurately, in 1959 Mann heard the soundtrack to Black Orpheus, which featured the music of Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim, the sounds of the Brazilian bateria, and what would soon become bossa nova standards like “Manhã de carnaval,” “O nosso amor,” and “A felicidade.” After seeing the film, Mann approached record producer and manager Monte Kay, who was collaborating with Alex Valdes to organize a tour of Brazil that featured musicians Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Jo Jones, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Chris Connor, and several others. Mann wanted to attend and explained why: “I really am getting bored,” he told Kay. “The drummers are the leaders of my band and I’m a sideman. I need something more. I have to go [to Brazil].” Since Kay retorted that nobody in Brazil would recognize Mann’s name, Mann offered to go “for nothing.” He pleaded: “I have to go to Brazil … I’m going to commit musical suicide if I don’t go … I will go insane.” Kay acquiesced and included Mann and some additional personnel – bassists Ahmed Abdul Malik and Ben Tucker, percussionist Ray Mantilla, and drummer Dave Bailey – on a multi-day, multi-city tour of South America. What Kay called the “American Jazz Festival” debuted in São Paulo at the Ritz Theater on July 12, 1961, where it played for four nights before heading to Rio de Janeiro for the 16th, 17th, and 18th. The musicians then traveled to other cities across South America. Kay was not exactly telling the truth when he told Mann that nobody in Brazil would recognize his name, although the Brazilian press seemed most excited to hear vocalist Chris Connor. However, Mann surely felt insecure appearing alongside such big names, some of whom – like Roy Eldridge – had played to Brazilian audiences before. He nevertheless bolstered his image one night by incorporating as much local music as he could into his sets. According to local journalist José Domingos Raffaelli, one night Mann played “Asa Branca,” a 1947 composition by Luiz Gonzaga and Humberto Teixara whose lyrics describe the Brazil’s Northeastern sertão (hinterland) region. According to accounts Mann relayed to his biographer Cary Ginell, “the whole audience stood up and started applauding.” Mann recalled further, “I could have been elected president of Brazil that night.” He was so moved by the Brazilian musicians he heard that he returned to Brazil in October 1962 to record Do the Bossa Nova with Herbie Mann for Atlantic. A few months later, he appeared at SNCC’s “Salute to Southern Students” concert playing bossa nova as well.

 

[20] Unsurprisingly, Mann’s early bossa nova recordings often feature the same instrumentation and musical characteristics that he used in his African and Afro-Cuban jazz recordings. Songs on Right Now such as “Desafinado” and “Meditação” featured “Patato” Valdes on congas. Brazil, Bossa Nova & Blues took a similar approach, with Valdes supplementing drummer Willie Bobo’s bossa nova patterns with a traditional tumbao pattern on most of the songs. Some of the album alluded to the harmonic form of African American music, notably the inclusion of a twelve-bar blues in “B.N. Blues.” Other songs on the album allude to the sounds of the Afro-Brazilian samba. On “Me faz recorar,” percussionist José Paulo offers his expertise on the pandeiro, approaching the pandeiro with the same rhythms and technique as those playing in samba contexts, such as in Linda Batista’s “Coitado do Edgar.” He gripped the pandeiro in one hand and used the thumb, forefingers, and palm of his other to create bass, treble, slap tones. Whether due to instrumentation or harmonic decisions, Herbie Mann, with the help of percussionists like Valdes and Paulo, recorded bossa nova that was not entirely too dissimilar to the African- and Afro-Cuban jazz for which Mann was known.

 

[21] Although he may have been the first musician (if not, then the most notable) to combine bossa nova with the sounds of African jazz, Mann was not alone in his endeavor; bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik approached his bossa nova recordings from a similar outlook. Like Mann, Abdul-Malik dedicated most of his career to fusing African music with jazz. But Abdul-Malik’s conception of “Africa” revolved mostly around North Africa and the Middle East. Born in Brooklyn to Caribbean parents (although he claimed his father was from Sudan), Abdul-Malik converted to Ahmadiyya Islam, a popular sect amongst African Americans because, in Robin D.G. Kelley’s words, it “redefined so-called Negroes from a national minority to a world majority” and “bestowed upon black American culture a sense of dignity and nobility.” In conjunction with his faith, Abdul-Malik also expressed interest in the music of Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, and other parts of the Muslim world. Arabic music was already a popular fad in the late 1950s because it captured American audiences’ longstanding interest in exotic sounds. However, Abdul-Malik brought a spiritual element to his music that combined jazz with a serious interest in Middle Eastern harmony, melody, and timbre. He played the oud (a Middle Eastern lute), explored quarter tones, and used Arabic scales while accompanying fellow Brooklyn-native Randy Weston during jam sessions. Together, they would record several albums in the mid-1950s. Weston ultimately developed a storied career as a pianist who incorporated African elements into his music, exemplified by albums Uhuru Africa and Music from the New African Nations. Abdul-Malik would pursue a similar path and adopt similar interests. In October 1958, he recorded and later released his debut album as a bandleader, Jazz Sahara, which would coincidentally be the first Arab-jazz fusion release. In 1961 he joined Herbie Mann’s band to tour Latin America for Monte Kay’s American Jazz Festival. On July 16, 1961, they stopped at Rio de Janeiro’s Teatro Municipal. There, according to journalist José Domingos Raffaelli, Abdul-Malik “tried bossa nova, leaving the audience amazed at [his] immediate adaptation to our Brazilian rhythm.” It was probably this experience that motivated him to record “African Bossa Nova” for his 1962 album, Sounds of Africa, upon his return to the United States.

 

[22] Interestingly, Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s “African Bossa Nova” shows how musicians could on the one hand, perform incredibly popular music such as bossa nova, yet on the other hand, similarly be cognizant of the political and social power of performing Afro-diasporic music. Like José Paulo did with Mann, percussionists Chief Bey and Montego Joe helped spotlight the Afro-Brazilian roots of bossa nova. Both percussionists had already dedicated most of their careers to fusing African music with jazz. Montego Joe accompanied Babatunde Olatunji on his provocative and commercially successful 1959 album, Drums of Passion, while both percussionists – in addition to Ahmed Abdul-Malik – played on Art Blakey’s The African Beat in January 1962. Abdul-Malik must have enjoyed the Blakey recording session, because he hired both percussionists to accompany drummer Rudy Collins on his Sounds of Africa session. The album’s liner notes credit Chief Bey on “African drums” and Montego Joe on “congas and bongos,” but more specifically they recorded “African Bossa Nova” with a shaker of some sort and a simple repetitive pattern on the agogo bells – an instrument comprised usually of multiple bells of different pitches. Robin D.G. Kelley, who documents Abdul-Malik’s career in his monograph, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times, believes Abdul-Malik’s music “music was in many ways a foil against the Middle Eastern craze and a celebration of the dignity and power Islam represented for the black world.” However, Kelley specifically ridicules “African Bossa Nova” and calls it a “jaunty little twelve-bar blues that not only worked as dance music but exploited the burgeoning bossa nova fad.” How come “African Bossa Nova” only “exploits a fad” while an album like Jazz Sahara is “a foil against the Middle Eastern craze?” Such characterization dismisses the seriousness – the tasty bebop licks and the African diaspora-inspired instrumentation and conception – of even this “jaunty dance tune.” In his conclusion to his study of Abdul-Malik, Kelley writes that the bassist “tirelessly pursued his dream of understanding the music of his ancestors ­– real or imagined ­­– and continuing their tradition of making a joyful noise for God. In the process he made astonishingly modern music using ancient materials, ushering in a new world on the wings of very old and established beliefs.” That statement applies equally well to “African Bossa Nova” as it does any other track Abdul-Malik recorded.

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[23] Given the musical characteristics of his bossa nova recordings, Mann – to say nothing of his colleagues like Abdul-Malik – did not feel like he took a leap from specializing in African- or Afro-Cuban jazz to specializing in bossa nova; nor did he feel like playing bossa nova would be inappropriate for a benefit concert. Mann believed that bossa nova – just like his performances of Afro-Cuban jazz with Machito on CORE’s A Jazz Salute to Freedom or his “African Suite” that he may have performed at “Africa Freedom Day” – generated Josh Kun’s aforementioned “African American pride in the struggles and achievements of postcolonial Africa.” The back cover to Mann’s 1965 album, Latin Mann, articulated his beliefs succinctly. On the cover, Atlantic Records included “A Latin Jazz Family Tree.” They labeled the base of the tree “Spain, Africa, and Portugal.” Each trunk then expanded, branching out into different genres: from Spain came Chano Pozo; from Africa, the blues; and from Portugal, Brazil, then samba, and then bossa nova. Yet the diagram also showed the branches of the tree interrelate, so while Atlantic labeled “bossa nova” on the far right of the tree, you could follow its branches to see what Leonard Feather (who wrote the liner notes) called “cross-pollination.” By following a branch that started from “bossa nova” and passed through “Jive Samba,” then “Horace Silver,” then Mann’s song, “Let’s Boom, Chitty Boom,” listeners could end up on the other “far side” of the tree, next to Tito Puente and Machito. Or you could take another route (root!), through Ray Charles (no, not the other one), jazz, and the blues, and end back to “Africa.” Bossa nova comprised just another genre in an interrelated web of Latin-based African diasporic music.

 

Interlocking History #2: Anthropology and African Retentions in Brazil

 

[24] Mann was not alone in recognizing the interrelatedness between bossa nova and the African diaspora; ever since the 1930s, anthropologists had been debating the extent to which Afro-Brazil maintained any links to Africa. On one side stood Guy B. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier who argued that descendants of Africa in North and South America did not retain any African traits of their ancestors. Johnson looked at Gullah – an African-derived English creole spoken in the Georgia Sea Islands – to make his case. In his 1930 book, Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, he argued that slavery was so devastating that enslaved former Africans and their descendants lost all aspects of their forbears’ African culture. Gullah, according to Johnson was “predominately a dialect of English, with only minor traces of African patterns.” Americans researching Afro-Brazil came to a similar conclusion. On November 8, 1940, E. Franklin Frazier and Lorenzo Dow Turner arrived in Brazil where they conducted field work on the family structure of Black families living in Bahia, Salvador. In August 1942, Frazier published his findings in American Sociological Review. “Whatever influence African traditions might have exerted upon the family organization of their African forebears in the New World,” he argued, “had evidently been lost through racial mixture and the mobility of these families.” Frazier and Johnson essentially predated the argument Stanley Elkins would more forcefully make in his famous and provocative 1959 book, Slavery: A Problem in American and Institutional and Intellectual Life. The conditions of slavery had traumatized enslaved Africans in the New World to such an extent that they became, in the summation of historian John Thornton, “cultural receptacles rather than donors.” For those that just witnessed the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, Elkins’ argument – alongside Johnson and Frazier – testified to the utter destruction that chattel slavery causes.

 

[25] While Guy B. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier felt that Afro-Brazilians and Africans shared very little in common, Lorenzo Dow Turner (who accompanied Frazier on his trip to Brazil in 1940) and Melville J. Herskovits argued that descendants of Africa in North and South America were not “receptacles” but instead did retain African traits of their ancestors. Turner, a linguist, began to study the speech of ex-slaves in 1929 and immersed himself in Gullah culture. He found that their grammatical constructions and words had nothing to do with English, hypothesized that they instead stemmed from African languages, and enrolled himself at London’s School of Oriental Studies in 1936. After studying Ewe, Efik, Gã, Twi, and Yoruba, he finally published his response to Johnson’s work on the Gullah in 1949. His magnum opus, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, showed around 4,000 West African words survived in Gullah speech. While Turner offered an alternative to Johnson’s interpretation, Melville J. Herskovits acted as a foil to E. Franklin Frazier. In August 1941, Herskovits arrived in Brazil to also conduct field work on the Black family in Bahia and similarly published his findings in American Sociological Review. In his article, “The Negro in Bahia, Brazil: A Problem in Method,” he took issue with Frazier’s conclusions and responded by noting “the social organization of the Yoruban and Dahomean peoples of West Africa … have played the most important role in shaping Afro-Bahian culture.” Maybe descendants of slavery living in the Western Hemisphere retained some elements of African culture after all.

 

[26] African “Americans” (i.e., from the United States and Brazil) looking for tools for liberation had good reason to ignore Herskovits and Turner’s theories. E. Franklin Frazier – and later Martiniquais psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon – were not at all convinced that the past of peoples of color was a potential ally for black liberation. Fanon would most vocally critique the arguments presented by Herskovits, specifically attacking fellow Martiniquais poet and politician Aimé Césaire’s concept of negritude by stating “in no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself a man of any past. I do not want to sing the past at the expense of my present and my future.” Instead of looking to the past, both Frazier and Fanon were more interested in the future and the place of negritude within modernity. More recently, ethnomusicologist David F. García has written about the damage done when scholars, musicians, artists, and intellects in the mid-twentieth century endorsed the idea that an African past had been retained in the New World. Although he recognizes that scholars and artists like Melville Herskovits and Dizzy Gillespie deeply committed themselves to the anti-racist movement, their scholarship and interaction with other musicians like Chano Pozo (from Cuba) relied on them going “back in time” to find Africanisms in the African diasporic music. Their actions engaged in a type of ideological violence because they relied on a belief that Africans were living in the past – in a space and time apart from the modern man.

 

[27] Nevertheless, in the 1950s and 1960s, Turner’s and Herskovits’ arguments that certain Brazilians and Americans had retained some culture from Africa obviously appealed to descendants of slaves living in the mid-twentieth century. Journalist Herb Frazier offers a compelling reason why. He recalls that growing up in Charleston, South Carolina during the 1950s and 1960s “we did not know about our strong connection with the Mother Continent. Schools and the media did not promote black history in those days. Moreover, outsiders had ridiculed our speech, our diet, and our traditional ways of life for generations.” As he learned more about Gullah language, the research done by Lorenzo Dow Turner, and the several scholars who followed in Turner’s footsteps, Herb Frazier realized he now possessed a narrative for countering insults hurled towards him about his speech (“funny talking”) and culinary diet (“rice with fish heads”). Consequently, in 1972, as a reporter for Charleston’s News and Courier, he wrote a story about the links between the coiled sweetgrass baskets and the similar baskets made in West Africa, citing specifically Turner’s theories. But the theories of Herskovits and Turner did not just appeal to the Gullah people of Georgia and Carolina. A Pittsburgh Courier column from 1942 helps demonstrate why these theories were so attractive. “You owe a debt of gratitude to the Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University, Dr. Melville Herskovits, for his recent illuminating book, The Myth of the Negro Past,” the column begins. “Your detractors and apologists have propagandized the world into believing that you came to this land an ignorant, benighted, uncivilized being without significant history and that since you have been here you have lost all memory of the little culture you have.” For those who were constantly harassed, insulted, and degraded over their alleged uncivilized behavior, the theory of the “Negro past” offered a compelling retort.

 

[28] Although the intellectual community continued to debate the issue of Africanisms in the New World, historian August Meier remarks that Lawrence W. Levine’s publication of Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom in 1977 essentially signaled the “triumph” of Melville Herskovits’ theories; looking at discourse in the African American press between 1940s and 1960s helps show many musicians rallied behind the theories presented by Herskovits and Turner and talk about the African influence of several types of Brazilian music. Originally, samba featured heavily in the coverage of the 1940s. In 1941, the Baltimore Afro-American interviewed Trinidadian-born calypso singer Sir Lancelot, who put into words what Atlantic Records, Herbie Mann, and Leonard Feather conveyed on the back cover of Latin Mann some twenty-four years later. Lancelot argued that “there is a definite kinship between the infectious rhythm of the calypsos of Trinidad, the tango of the Argentine, the rhumba of Cuba, the samba and conga of Brazil, and jazz of the United States … They all have an identical background in the tom-tom rhythms of Africa.” That same year, the newspaper noted “many colored Americans may not realize it, but the exotic rhythms of our Latin American neighbors are as African in base as this nation’s own blues, spirituals, and hot jazz. The samba, rumba [sic], tango, conga, etc., stem directly from the Dark Continent where fundamentally the same intricate rhythms are played today.” Lorenzo Dow Turner even commented on Brazilian samba’s African foundation. Although he accompanied Frazier to Brazil, his conclusions differed from his colleague’s. Turner extended his arguments about Africanisms in Gullah culture to his understanding of Brazilian music and other music of the New World. “[Turner’s] research also shows that such dances as samba, rhumba, Charleston, black bottom, and tango, have originated in Africa,” reported the Pittsburgh Courier in 1956. The Courier had apparently gotten an inside scoop on Turner’s research: Turner would officially publish his findings two years later in a chapter titled “African Survivals in the New World with Special Emphasis on the Arts.”

 

[29] Musicians and members of the African American press similarly described bossa nova as a type of Afro-diasporic music with roots in Afro-Brazilian samba as early as the fall of 1962. “Samba jazz [i.e., bossa nova] is a merger of Negro North American jazz with an equally potent blend of Afro-Brazilian origin,” wrote Bob Hunter for the Chicago Defender. Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete, who had begun to establish a career in the United States, remarked for the same newspaper that bossa nova “is a new rhythm in which Brazilian samba has been transformed into a jazz rhythm.” Dizzy Gillespie likewise argued that “the average cat cutting the tune doesn’t know what he’s doing … they don’t know how to play the samba, and that’s all the bossa nova is.” There was little confusion amongst black musicians and members of the African American press: bossa nova was African-derived music.

 

[30] Interestingly, these discussions about bossa nova’s African roots were emerging while African Americans were beginning to endorse the argument that Brazil was not the racial democracy they once thought it was. Although Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 – some twenty-five years after the United States – many African Americans nevertheless viewed Brazil as a racial paradise. African American newspapers like the Western Appeal, Indianapolis Freeman, and Chicago Defender all wrote articles during the first three decades of the twentieth century which described a situation where European, African, and those of indigenous ancestry freely mixed and married in Brazil. Additionally (or consequently), Brazil lacked formalized segregation or anti-miscegenation laws prevalent in the United States. The country’s positive reputation in the press even led black nationalists in the United States, such as Cyril Briggs and those associated with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, to attempt to emigrate to Brazil during the 1920s. But African Americans began to change their outlook beginning in the 1940s. W.E.B. DuBois – who had previously endorsed Brazil’s approach to race-relations during the 1910s and 1920s – changed his opinion. DuBois found that dark-skinned Brazilians continued to experience social and economic barriers into the 1940s while racial amalgamation had contributed neither to “social uplift” nor greater power and prestige for mulattoes and mestizos in Latin America. Governmental policies encouraging European immigration as well as a history of branqueomento lead DuBois to think that “darker people” were beginning to “think white.” In the early 1940s, DuBois was warning that Afro-Brazilians were losing awareness of their cultural patterns “in a scramble on their part to become white.” This criticism of Brazil’s policies of racial amalgamation and miscegenation peaked during the late 1960s as younger and more nationalistic black Americans criticized the non-violent and integrationist philosophies of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil rights movement. Amalgamation did not work in the United States, newspapers like Negro Digest concluded in the late 1960s, so why could it possibly have worked in Brazil? If anything, it instilled a pathological behavior in Afro-Brazilians, who constantly tried to ignore their African heritage.

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[31] Nevertheless, Afro-Brazil remained prominent in the imagination of African Americans as several television programs solidified the links between bossa nova and the African diaspora through the content of their programming. The New York Amsterdam News instructed its viewers that the February 3, 1963 airing of the Ed Sullivan Show would feature live performances of both Babatunde Olatunji and Os Bossa Tres, for instance. The same newspaper also promoted WCBS-TV’s special, “The Distant Sounds,” which aired December 23, 1967. The program followed hosts Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff “on a musical journey from Harlem to Brazil to enhance their own understanding of the Afro-American roots of the music they interpret.” After their first stop in Bahia, Salvador, the show and its hosts move on to Rio de Janeiro where “they meet Luis [sic] Bonfá, an innovator of the bossa nova sound, who joins Ruff in an impromptu music session.” The African American press also solidified the relationship between bossa nova and music of the African diaspora by promoting television performances of bossa nova alongside other television programs that dealt with topics on African diasporic history and culture. In their “What’s On TV?” column for the week of May 26, 1969, the New York Amsterdam News reported that WNET was airing a special titled “The World of Bossa Nova.” Other shows that the newspaper thought their readers might want to watch included WOR’s two-part series on West Africa and CBS’s “Black Heritage – A History of Afro-Americans.” Even if these programs did not achieve a political goal, bossa nova certainly played a role in how African Americans imagined themselves within the rest of the diaspora.

 

Interlocking History #3: Bossa Nova and Black Power

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[32] Unsurprisingly, given bossa nova’s reputation as Afro-diasporic music, several musicians associated with Black Power also performed bossa nova; noted avant-garde saxophonist Archie Shepp offers one notable example. On February 16, 1965, he went to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey to record his version of “A garota de Ipanema,” a song written by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes in 1962. By the time Shepp had recorded his version, the song was already a hit. In March 1963, Jobim, vocalist Astrud Gilberto, guitarist João Gilberto (Astrud’s spouse), saxophonist Stan Getz, and several Brazilian rhythm-section musicians walked into A&R Studios to record a famous, soft, and seductive version of the song. Their recording, featuring English vocals by Astrud, became incredibly successful and won a GRAMMY for “Record of the Year” in 1965. Shepp’s version does not sound soft and seductive. Instead, it begins with bassist Reggie Johnson and trombonist Joseph Orange playing a minor arpeggio together. They’re later joined by the rest of the band, who play a series of short pre-composed melodies. Nothing for the first thirty seconds sounds like “A Garota de Ipanema” as Jobim and Gilberto performed it. Then, 34 seconds in, trumpeter Ted Curson begins to play the recognizable melody. Drummer Joe Chambers plays a bossa nova pattern alongside Johnson’s bass ostinato. If it weren’t for the harmony supplied by Shepp and alto saxophonist Marion Brown, the trio of drums, bass, and trumpet would sound rather unassuming. But Shepp and Brown gave the opening four measures of the song a disconcerting quality. Brown plays a second below Curson and Shepp typically harmonizes a major or minor second below Brown. They’re seemingly doing their best Krzysztof Penderecki impression. In his 1960 composition, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Penderecki writes for 52 string instruments playing quarter-tone clusters. Shepp did not have that many instruments at his disposable. But the use of tone clusters in his “A Garota de Ipanema” does create a similar unsettling affect to the one Penderecki achieves.

 

[33] Interestingly, Shepp’s avant-garde rendition of “A garota de Ipanema,” released on the album Fire Music, appears just one track after a song dedicated to Malcolm X titled “Malcolm, Malcolm – Malcolm Semper.” Much of the song revolves around a poem that Shepp wrote. A song is not what it seems,” Shepp begins in a hushed tone. “A tune perhaps. Bird whistled while even America listened. We play. But we aren’t always dumb,” his poem continues. Although it appears on the same album as “A garota de Ipanema,” Shepp recorded this song on March 9, 1965. Malcolm X had just been murdered a few weeks before, on February 21, in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Shepp was recording a poem in commemoration. “We are murdered in amphitheaters,” Shepp’s recitation continues. “On the podium of the Audubon.” Engineer Rudy Van Gelder placed a large amount of reverb on Shepp’s voice. It sounds like the saxophonist recited his poem in the Audubon itself. “Philadelphia 1945. Malcolm, my people. Dear God. Malcolm.” The poem ends. Bassist David Izenzon accompanies Shepp’s recitation, adding a mixture of bowed and plucked notes. He also sounds like he is doing his best impression of Penderecki’s Threnody: tremolos, microtones, angst, and terror abound. Except, instead of piece about the nuclear bomb, Shepp and his band are playing a threnody to Malcolm X. When Shepp finishes his poem, he grabs his tenor saxophone. Drummer J.C. Moses joins in. They improvise freely for several minutes, creating a haunting recording. 

 

[34] Given bossa nova’s presence at several benefit concerts and alongside other political events, it should come as no surprise that a song like “A garota de Ipanema” appeared alongside a eulogy for Malcolm X performed by a leading avant-garde jazz musician; however, critic Rex Reed frequently argued that bossa nova and avant-garde jazz had nothing to do with each other. In a review of Harold Vick’s album, Straight Up, Reed argues that “Vick does not use his music to make violent statements about his troubled world.” Reed also contrasts Vick with the fiery music of Archie Shepp, noting that Vick “is not likely to make any claim to the reserved-for-controversy column space already occupied by the Archie Shepps and the John Coltranes and the Albert Aylers. He isn’t revolutionizing the jazz business by tempering his sermons with anguish, anger, and hate. But he is just as emotional.” To argue that Vick’s music was not angry, hateful, or full of anguish, he cited, among other songs Vick’s original bossa nova, “A Rose for Wray.” In his review, Reed suggested that bossa nova shared little in common with some of the more politically outspoken music of the late 1960s.

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[35] ​Rex Reed was even more forceful and declarative in his review of John Handy’s album, New View!. On June 28, 1967, alto saxophonist John Handy played a benefit concert at New York City’s Village Gate which was recorded by Columbia Records. A year later, Reed reviewed the album and had little positive to say about the recording. “John Handy may be the performer to take the place of the late John Coltrane [and] I do not mean that as a compliment,” Reed began. “Handy never fit into this [avant-garde] jazz movement before, but apparently he has now heard about the race riots and Selma and James Meredith and it has all gone to his head, because the new John Handy Quintet is full of protest, and in my humble opinion it has all but wrecked his style.” His review continued to chastise: “the group tells it like it is on side two, with a twenty-four-minute exercise in cluttered, cacophonous tedium called ‘Tears of Ole Miss (Anatomy of a Riot)’ based on James Meredith’s attempt to enter the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962.” Reed even made comments about the music specifically: “sections of minstrel songs and old Southern Negro chants are thrown in for humor, but none of it is very amusing.” In a devastating final sentence, Reed remarks that “protest jazz, the hardcore buffs tell me, is here to stay. They still haven’t explained what it has to do with real music.” Yet, while Reed launched his tirade against Handy’s music, he praised the presence of bossa nova on the album. The song “A Little Quiet,” the reviewer noted, is performed with a “gently swinging bossa nova flavor” which persuaded Reed “to not give up entirely on John Handy.” The song appears somewhat out of place on the album since “Tears of Ole Miss” sounds like Handy is doing his best Archie Shepp impression: extended techniques, squeaks, and overblowing abound. Yet, “A Little Quiet” is relatively unassuming. Little wonder that Reed picked it out as an exception of the saxophonist’s style, not necessarily the rule. However, Reed failed to see the irony that lied at the heart of his review of New View!: some of the most politically overt avant-garde jazz musicians saw little contradiction in incorporating bossa nova music alongside their music that advocated for civil rights. And why should they?

 

[36] Bossa nova did not just appeal to civil rights organizers or avant-garde jazz musicians; it also appealed to black Catholics, like those led by Father Peter Scholtes, who incorporated it in their broader attempts to define themselves as “authentically black and truly Catholic.” In 1966, Reverend Peter Scholtes wrote a bossa nova mass, “Missa Bossa Nova,” for the 20-voice choir that comprised the St. Brendan’s Parish for Young People, a parish located in Chicago’s South Side. Surprisingly, this was not the only mass to incorporate bossa nova. In May 1966, pianist Eddie Bonnemere debuted his “Missa Hodierna” at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Harlem. And although Bonnemere’s “Missa Hodierna” received a couple of repeat performances at other churches around New York, Scholtes’ “Missa Bossa Nova” was far more successful. It helped that the head pastor at St. Brendan’s was very receptive to Scholtes’ arrangement: “all I know,” he told the Chicago Defender, “is that when we started the Parish for Young People using the ‘Bossa Nova Mass,’ we saw teen-agers at church whom we hadn’t seen since they left grammar school. How can anyone argue with that kind of success?” In 1966 alone, the Young People Choir recorded their “Missa Bossa Nova” for Flair Records and began a successful tour of performing for television, religious functions, community get-togethers, concerts at nearby parishes, recording a second album, and even raising money to perform at the National Liturgical Convention in Washington, D.C. One of their more overt civil rights performances occurred on March 19, 1967, when they performed the “Missa Bossa Nova” at a benefit concert at the Chicago Sheraton Hotel for the city’s branch of the Urban League. On October 29, 1967, the group performed for another activist-oriented convention, this time sponsored by the Lutheran Reformation Festival held at the Rockefeller Memorial Church. At this event, speakers gave talks about their participation in the National Draft Resistance demonstrations while Pastor Griffin from a parish in North Kenwood gave a talk on the “Black Power advocate in a Christian context.” As this eclectic programming suggests, black Catholics’ embrace of bossa nova arose in conjunction with the rise of Black Power politics during the late 1960s.

 

[37] In many instances, black Catholic parishes in Chicago lent their support to local Black Power organizations. In 1968, the Panthers called on George Clements, a priest who would become the first black pastor of Holy Angels Catholic Church in 1969, to mediate an internal dispute. Shortly after becoming pastor at Holy Angels, notable Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was gunned down by the police. Clements – who had grown close to the Panthers – knew that Bobby Rush, the second-in-command of the local Panthers branch, was also in danger. Clements recalled that he artfully introduced Rush to “a little-known thing in the Middle Ages called the ‘right of sanctuary’” and encouraged Rush to hide at Holy Angels.

 

[38] ​While Peter Scholtes composed “Missa Bossa Nova” at a time when several black Catholics were lending their support to the Black Power movement, he was also performing in the aftermath of recommendations issued by the Second Vatican Council. In 1962, Pope John XXIII convened a rare (once every 125 years or so) ecumenical council of the Catholic Church to achieve what he called aggiornamento (“bringing the church up to date,” “adaptation,” and “modernization”). The council issued decrees that allowed for Catholics to pray with other Christian denominations, encouraged friendship with other non-Christian faiths, and opened the door for languages besides Latin to be used during Mass. Their recommendations to encourage vernacular languages and expand the liturgical style beyond Gregorian chant specifically impacted black Catholic worship. By the late 1960s, black Catholics did not only engage in Black Power politics by lending their political support to organizations such as the Black Panther Party but also by changing their style of worship. While the Catholic Church attracted many African Americans between the 1930s and 1950s due to its claims of “universality” – best exemplified by giving its mass in Latin – by the late 1960s, many parishes adopted a much more culturally specific approach to worshiping. On December 1, 1968, The Knickerbocker Hotel hosted Chicago’s first “African Mass” which featured “a black man stripped to the waist” who “processed to the altar with the chalice” and performed “an interpretative dance ‘to the beat of jungle music’ along the way.” Musicians dressed in “African robes” provided music and relied heavily on drums, which led some critics to call this the “Drum Mass.” Father George Clements – who would later give a eulogy at Fred Hampton’s funeral – did not find this exoticism disturbing, but rather embraced it. After witnessing the “African Mass,” he even suggested to the press that “African masses with jungle music” would soon be offered in black parishes throughout Chicago. And he was correct, although “jungle music” does not accurately describe the amount of rock and roll and black protestant gospel choirs that sounded inside churches like St. Dorothy’s throughout the late 1960s. Nor does “jungle music” accurately describe the sound of Peter Scholtes’ “Missa Bossa Nova.” The pastor’s combination of folk-acoustic guitar, bossa nova rhythms, and a large liturgical choir appears hilariously divorced from the aesthetics of something like James Brown’s Black Power anthem, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Instead, it sounds like Scholtes was doing his best Peter, Paul, and Mary impression. Yet, “Missa Bossa Nova” – and its repeated performances by the St. Brendan’s Young People Choir – nevertheless relayed a similar message.

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[39] Throughout the 1960s, bossa nova music found itself in all sorts of political contexts. Activists at the end of the decade conceived of it alongside other types of African-derived music, so much so that television programs included it alongside general histories of African American roots music and Black Power activists associated with the Catholic church included it alongside broader “African”-themed masses and types of worship. Avant-garde jazz musicians did not find bossa nova irreconcilable with the rest of their music, either. Musicians like Archie Shepp recorded jarring and dissonant versions of “A garota de Ipanema” that they released alongside eulogies to Malcolm X, while John Handy released much mellower versions of bossa nova alongside a turbulent commentary on school desegregation. Then of course, there were the benefit concerts where bossa showed up – hosted by the Urban League, by the CCRM, and in early 1963, by the one organization that arguably first married bossa nova music with activism.

 

[40] February 1, 1963. “A Salute to Southern Students” concert at Carnegie Hall. It was here that the civil rights movement made its mark on bossa nova; or rather, bossa nova made its mark on the civil rights movement.