Just imagine, if you can, the American musical landscape minus the blues. Unfathomable, you’ll agree. Now keep snipping away: From that expansive map, take away jazz, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, soul, hip-hop, and all of their myriad tributaries. Not much left, is there?
Each of these cornerstone genres of American music arose from the African American experience. From a time when slaves sang in the fields to a time when an African American can rise to the highest elected office in the land, the patchwork quilt that is black music has been one of our nation’s most cherished gifts to the world. Set foot on even the most remote spot on the globe, and you can be sure that names such as Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Ella Fitzgerald, and Stevie Wonder will bring a knowing smile to the locals.
All of those American icons have graced the Carnegie stage. So too have Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Leontyne Price, and Beyoncé. Booker T. Washington spoke at the Hall, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed New Yorkers at the venue as well.
The history of Carnegie Hall is one of colorblindness. Since opening in the late 19th century, Carnegie Hall has embraced an open-door policy toward bookings, acknowledging the value of the African American musical contribution. The venerable venue was only a year old in 1892 when it showcased its first African American performer, the soprano Sissieretta Jones. Blues pioneer W. C. Handy, pianist Fats Waller and legendary singers Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson all performed at Carnegie in the 1920s, and the Jazz Age acquired a new validity in 1938 when a pair of interracial concerts featuring such giants as Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Joe Turner, Sidney Bechet, Big Bill Broonzy, and others wowed New York City audiences.
In the ensuing decades, virtually every black jazz giant has played Carnegie Hall, including Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Sonny Rollins, and Ornette Coleman. The blues has not been a stranger either: Memphis Slim, Son House, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Big Mama Thornton are only a few of the blues artists who’ve performed in Carnegie’s hallowed rooms.
Folk (Lead Belly, Odetta, Harry Belafonte), gospel (Mahalia Jackson, the Winans), rock ’n’ roll (Chuck Berry, Fats Domino) and R&B (Ike and Tina Turner, LaBelle, Mary J. Blige, Whitney Houston) have all found representation at Carnegie Hall. So too have baseball groundbreaker Jackie Robinson, poet Langston Hughes, and actor Sidney Poitier at various events.
Indeed the Hall’s bookings have always mirrored the evolution of the music. It is with that in mind that Carnegie Hall, from March 4–23, presents the ambitious, wide-ranging festival
Honor! A Celebration of the African American Cultural Legacy. Curated by legendary soprano Jessye Norman,
Honor! pays tribute to the numerous genres and sub-genres of African American-originated music, and to the great artists who’ve made that music a permanent part of our collective cultural life.
For the opening night of the festival—which includes more than 20 different concerts, panel discussions, and educational events both at Carnegie Hall itself and at other prestigious venues in New York City—Miss Norman and the Carnegie team have invited an all-star cast of contemporary musicians to honor the great African American artists of the past.
Honor: Blues, Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, and Beyond features pianist Geri Allen; trumpeter Terence Blanchard; bassist Ron Carter; saxophonist James Carter; guitarists/vocalists James “Blood” Ulmer, Vernon Reid, and Toshi Reagon; R&B singers Freddie Jackson, Leela James, Kem, and Ryan Shaw; and others whose names are being kept under wraps until showtime.
All of these artists share a deep understanding of the path that this music has taken—how the raw emotions expressed by blues pioneers Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Bessie Smith, and Muddy Waters spoke to earlier generations just as soul, funk, and hip-hop have spoken to their children and grandchildren. These contemporary musicians have absorbed the rhythms and the thought processes at the core of jazz, the ingenious inventions of Duke, Count, Bird, Trane, Ella, Billie, Monk, and Satchmo—each so vital to our cultural makeup that they are recognizable by a single name.
Music, of course, never sits still very long. It builds from where we’ve been and who we were and points us to where we are going. Out of the blues came swing and bebop and modern jazz—more uni-monikered giants like Dizzy and Miles. Then, in the post-war ’40s and ’50s, the more pronounced, deliberate, dance-happy beats of rhythm and blues, and the rock ’n’ roll and soul era: Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, the Motown monolith. Those sounds provided a soundtrack for the journey from Jim Crow to Civil Rights, from oppression to pride. As the ’60s heated up, the outrageousness of Jimi Hendrix, the raw power of Aretha Franklin, the genius of Stevie Wonder, the sensuality of Marvin Gaye, the sizzling funk of James Brown—these were just some of the voices that told us where we stood. We look back at them now with a sense of awe—how, we ponder, did such a relatively brief span of time produce so much lasting, influential greatness?
Honor: Blues, Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, and Beyond has been conceived with these larger-than-life icons in mind. The show’s musical director, Ray Chew, whose recent credits include directing the music at one of January’s inaugural balls in Washington, DC, describes the program as “an arching overview of American music through the black experience.” Throughout the course of the evening, he says, “We’ll be going back through some of the jazz journeys and the transitions—for example how they took the swinging jazz beat, made it a little heavier, and it then became a rock beat.”
Chew and his musical partner Danny Melnick were brought into the project by the Carnegie staff, and together with Miss Norman they came up with what Chew calls “a gigantic wish list” of potential artists who are versatile and talented enough to understand the scope of the concert and do it justice. “The list got smaller and smaller,” Chew says, until “it wound up being the people that Jessye really wanted anyway. She has great awareness of the musical community.”
For Miss Norman, the idea of paying tribute to the entire spectrum of African American music is one that had been brewing within for some time. Once the idea began coming to fruition, then followed the difficult part: taming it. How exactly does one honor the immensity of the African American musical experience in one two-hour performance?
Needless to say, there’s no way even to offer small samplings of everything. Ultimately the task of crafting a single performance that both lives up to the title of
Blues, Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, and Beyond and makes for a coherent entertainment package fell to the producers. “We had to make sure that we had one running stream of thought [through] the whole thing,” Chew says. “It’s not just everyone doing whatever song they feel like playing. It’s a rehearsed program with a theme to it.”
What everyone involved understands innately is that an event of this magnitude could only happen in one place: Carnegie Hall. “Everybody has an appreciation for the history of Carnegie Hall and what the building itself means,” Chew says. “In order for us to be able to put on a program that is so diverse, everyone is checking their musical egos at the door to be a part of one program.”
And, he adds, everyone is keeping close to heart and mind the word that is so central to the success of the series: honor. “We should certainly embrace the fact that this is something worth our respect and our attention, and we should pause for a moment and pay homage to it.”
—Jeff Tamarkin
Jeff Tamarkin is the Associate Editor of
JazzTimes magazine.