The last time I was in touch with the now departed Robert Farris Thompson, I told him about a joy-walk after the 2020 election:
Last night, post-Negroni(s), post-Georgia/PA/Arizona/Nevada — feeling good, I headed down to the Hudson where I bumped into a down-low bachata party at the 79th St. Boat Basin…Hung out for a while — doing mambo shines on the side. (Still can’t spin a mujer so machos had nothing to fear.) Ended up talking with one Abraham Lopez who organizes the party on Fridays/Saturdays (though I guess the cops shut it down sometimes now). The music isn’t loud, but it echoes like a dream in that stony surround — the dancers spread out — for social distancing or maybe since the scene is so sexy you want to get off on your own (even if you feel the presence of others)…—Candles give light (as it gets deep dark down there). I’m thinking the feel is closer to the Park Plaza than to those sunny mambo parties at Orchard Beach. OTOH, the agua is right there. And that river flows to your Black Atlantic. It was a trip to happen on the secret Afro-Latin city among us…
I went on to ask RFT if I could repost an interview about his friendship with Basquiat that had been on Sotheby’s website. He gave me permission but told me to get an ok from the auction house, which was selling paintings from his collection. In the wake of his recent death, I’ve chosen to post now (here) and ask Sotheby’s later.
RFT passed a few days before Greg Tate died. There was a poetic logic in their twinned exits. (Not that that would offer much solace to those gutted by news of Tate’s early death at 63.) RFT and Tate surely hung together in my head—a duo who seemed intrinsic to a pop epoch of discovery in the early eighties that felt like an extended springtime in New York. Especially for someone like me who was still a newbie in the city. Back then, Tate’s review of RFT’s Flash of the Spirit in the Village Voice, unlocked doors of perception during a planet-rocking moment. Thanks in part to Tate, Thompson’s scholarship spoke to many of us who began riding Afro-pop waves after Sunny Adé brought his juju to America (and the Talking Heads had gone from punk to poly-meters). RFT explored how sacred imperatives and 3/2 grooves shaped cultures on both sides of the Middle Passage. He went deep into what Herskovits had termed African survivals, reconstructing and repairing traditions as he upheld his idea of the Black Atlantic—a nexus of creativity that linked West African roots with aural and visual fruits all over the Americas. RFT helped novices like me pick up on continuities in (what another writer once termed) “the black music of two worlds” even as we were loving all that was fresh in new sounds crossing over from the Motherland and training in from the Bronx. Both RFT and Tate had an ear out for Afro-pop—Sunny Adé was the subject of one of Tate’s first Voice pieces—and hip hop (as well as an eye on Basquiat). I remember my first comradely conversation with Tate who seemed open and youthful, not careful as he came to be later. Some of our back-and-forth has escaped my mind. We probably touched on Flash and how the Birmingham Center’s subcultural theory might clarify hip hop’s local/oedipal origins. What I recall best is talking up “Watch the Closing Doors.” Forty years down the line, that innocent act of mimesis still sounds winning to me, but in the aftermath of Tate’s death I’m afraid the chorus now carries a metaphorical warning.
I met Tate through a kind ex—a comely Haitian woman named (aptly) Désir who was a Black Atlantic tripper too. (She taught me how to skank to reggae and her family had Black Jacobins in her bookcase long before I’d heard of C.L.R. James.) After graduating from Barnard, Ms. Désir worked with Tate at a gallery, Just Above Midtown (JAM), that was one of the Art-Worldly spots where bohemians mixed with b-boys. She was initially engaged by RFT’s meld of art history and anthropology since she hoped to establish herself as a curator, but his defense of diasporic religions ended up sparking a spiritual journey that led her to become a Vodou priestess. I’m flashing now on a Vodou ritual at her house in Harlem in the nineties. I may have been projecting but I sensed her young son might not have been all ease at the prospect of his mother being taken by Gods in the living room. I remember coming and going up the staircase where we sat, talking low about…anything but what was going on downstairs. (Not that I didn’t indulge in ritual sips of Barbancourt when a rum-bearer stepped to us.) I don’t think Tate was in the house but he’d’ve done better than me on the neo-avuncular front. He had a calm manner and I bet he was a natural with kids.
RFT’s spirit-ism might’ve deepened Tate’s assurance about his own way of being. Thompson provided a rich moral/anthropological back story for African American cool. Thompson’s royal angles could seem too far gone from damage done to black ways of being in the New World, too distant from truths evoked by Gwendolyn Brooks (“We real cool…We jazz June…We die soon…”) or The Cool World.[1] Yet his affirmation of West Africa’s legacy of cool made a compelling case for self-mastery not only on the dance floor but in the dance of life: “The highest value is reconciliation and generosity, to be at ease, to settle quarrels. Tranquility of mind. To be cool, wet, and silent. When you hear ‘chill,’ you’re in the black aesthetic of the cool.”
RFT’s implicit advisory might have been too perfect a fit for Tate who proved to be a recessive guy. While my own uncool self may have brought out the chill in him, it wasn’t just me and my wearing enthusiasms. When Tate went to conferences or held forth on panels (and even when he started playing guitar in the midst of his large Black Rock Coalition bands)[2], he often seemed to be covering up in public. One of his biggest boosters, Voice editor Robert Christgau, has linked Tate’s style with that of rock critic Lester Bangs who often dared to be emotionally unguarded in life and on the page. Tate, by contrast, tended to keep his felt life under wraps. (Bangs once wrote that young Elvis gave him “an erection of the heart”; it sometimes seemed like Tate kept a condom on his.)
He had reasons to be self-protective. He was a pro in a bohemia run by white hipsters. I’m recalling just now how a pale editor called out to Tate when we were going over a music review I’d written for the Voice. The editor hadn’t heard of Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots,” which I’d invoked to convey the bop of another pop song. Tate confirmed there were plenty of urban listeners who’d get my reference. In the class/race-bound downtown realm where Tate thrived (for a while), he had knowledge regulators needed. Lucky for me he was there at that instant.
Tate graced white pop lifers with more than his cultural competency. He often went over the top when it came to hipsters’ favorite artists. I recall thinking he gave grunge’s founder a little too much:
More people can make meaningful statements about art than can make their feelings come alive for others (Billie Holiday, Brando, Robert Johnson, Kurt Cobain).
But he was just warming up. In the same piece he touted a semi-popular, blue-eyed post-soul man:
To appreciate the brilliance of [Chris Whitley] you have to imagine the impossibility of a 30 year old singer-arranger popping up today who seems more a peer of Ellington, Henderson, and Basie, than a disciple, who never seems lost in nostalgia or memory (in other words David Murray).
This was extreme even for Tate, but his avowals of musicians overvalued by white hipsters began to seem a little suspect. Was I wrong to read his parenthetical bow above to David Murray, a fine and eclectic black jazzman, as a CYA afterthought since Whitley was the primary hype-object?
I don’t want to leave the impression Tate slighted contemporary black jazz musicians. Master drummer J.T. Lewis surely felt seen and heard by Tate. (Tate used to call him “Father Time.”) Tate’s eulogists often cited his touchstone Miles Davis, but they also underscored his loving feeling for Wayne Shorter’s works and days. Tate’s faith in what came after be-bop testified to the formative influence of Amiri Baraka’s Black Music, which Tate cited as the book that got him going as a writer. It was a foundational thing he shared with critic Stanley Crouch, though their tastes diverged sharply as Crouch slammed late Miles records and trashed hip hop.
Tate’s relative openness to rap (and black pop, in general) didn’t mean he was a sure guide to what was most vital in that form of musical theater. A passage like the following one suggests he wanted to stay in the struggle for a conscious hip hop after the rise of gangsta rap:
In 94 you’re going to hear the hip hop of my dreams. A pro-woman, pro-love, pro-abstract, pro-struggle hip hop. A polytonal, polyrhythmic, polymorphous, symphonic Coltranean, Ellingtonian hip hop, cutting the air with ginzu slices of vision, vulnerability and the mortal consequences of domestic violence.[3]
Yet he tended to undercut such projections with cliquish name-checks…
In 94 you’ll be checking for Freestyle Fellowship’s Aceyalone and Micah 9 on the solo flex. Forget what you heard: the real marriage of jazz and hip hop begins here. Ninety-four will herald the reign of a freestyle sorcerer named Supernatural and his cyberteric brother Muhammad. You’ll catch the updraft of a whirling dervish named Sha-Key and a headnaddin’ aesthetic known as the BOOM poetic. Green Card Writers Samantha Coerbell, Sonja Son, Everton Sylvester, and David Allen will be in the house. Jsiri, Dasez Tempo, BlueBlack, and Djindi Brown will slam the wall flowers. Priest and the Vibe Chameleons will provide scatological atmosphere, there’ll be a gaseous cloud named Beans floating above the fray and a deep space voyager whose mama named her Nine.
Nice for Nine et al. but such shout-outs didn’t do much for the rest of us. (In case you weren’t around or paying attention in ‘94, nobody on that list ended up coming through to anyone outside Tate’s circle.) Tate’s sensibility seemed to narrow down as he got older. I got a hint he was losing his groove for Afro-pop one night in the early nineties.[4]
Autumn was in the air that evening, but Benin’s Angelique Kidjo and her band brought summer back at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater.[5] As they heated up, a cheap date changed into a real free show. Diggers left their seats for good to rock around the stage. My crew, which included the girlfriend of my thirty-something years, along with sisters from both our families joined with other strangers moved by Kidjo’s world-beats. My girlfriend found her groove quickly, swinging with African elegance and American abandon. (Someone associated with a dance crew set to perform at Kidjo’s other gigs in the States, asked after the show if she might want to join them, though she wasn’t interested in dancing just like a black girl should. Even a whiff of “bubbling brown sugar” turned her off.) I tried not to cramp her style, dancing in the round with her siblings and my younger sister. As I looked up at the night sky and around the Delacorte, I recognized Tate sitting stiffly with a companion high up in the stands. He was dressed in a flak jacket, scrunched down, collar up. The breeze was brisk that night, especially if you were too cool to dance. The sight of him brought home the space that had opened up between us. Thinking again about that late summer night in ’92 and then further back to the early 80s when I dove with Tate and a bunch of RFT’s children into the Black Atlantic, it occurs to me my Afro-pop changes took for good.
That girlfriend of my thirties, though, took off for Italy where she’d marry up and have Afropean kids. My gone dancing queen (well, she was little older than seventeen) got to Africa before me. She called to kibitz about her vacation amidst untraumatized Senegalese who made her doubt she’d ever go back to America, though she missed her husband when she followed protocol and ate with women. My own first trip to the Motherland was a solo one. I’d been doing clerk-work at a Catholic medical aid organization and they needed somebody to pinch-hit for their Africa rep at a weekend conference in Ouagadougou–the capital of Burkina Faso. I arrived on an evening with a full moon, which seemed like a supermoon due to the absence of “light pollution” even in the capital. The odor of the place got all up in me right away. I asked someone, “What the hell is that smell?” A knowing expat answered: “It is Africa.” Turns out there’s a flower in Burkina that opens at night and perfumes the air—like lilacs but stronger. It melds with whiffs from cooking fires and, no doubt, a touch of sweet old urine-smell. A Cameroonian told me the flower was called Queen of the Night. La Reign de la Nuit for the francophone Burkinabe.
After I did my conference duties, I had a day to myself. My hotel was on the edge of town and so I walked to the city center. I got the feel of the place as I passed by market people selling everything (but body-and-soul)—spare parts, bread, nescafe, strawberries, bananas (which I missed a chance to taste though I later learned in Ghana how finger-sized African bananas are packed with a candied sweetness that has only the vaguest relation to the taste of the fruit we eat in the States). I found a spot I’d heard had local Afro-pop cassettes, bought a couple and then got turned around. My sense of direction sucks. I got more discombobulated when a group of kids suddenly gathered around me, looking for a beggars’ score. But a vendor by the side of the road, called me over and that got me out of my little mess. He sold African sculptures and other art-pieces. We got to talking—an easy parley despite my Jr. High School French and his dicey English. After a while he went into his storage shed and came back with a business card. He asked me if I knew the name on it. A query that brought to mind a story told by an Israeli American acquaintance who walked all over Africa in the 70s. He once ran into a villager in the Congo who wondered where he came from. The traveler kept it simple, and said he was from America. The villager considered that and then asked him: “Do you know Joe?” My native questioner proved to have better instincts. I didn’t know the name on the card but I was struck by the address. The card-holder was from my hometown—he was a professor at UMass/Amherst. It is written? Maybe not, but the upshot was surely narratively apt and it convinced this white man in Ouagadougou that I was meant to be there. I loved my fate even more the first time I played one of those tapes I’d bought by a singer named Georges Ouedraogo who was big in Burkina in the 70s. His sound was close to deep Southern soul, with hints of Ethiopian-ish organ in the mix and a full African chorus backing up his Jamesian screams. I felt like a true song-catcher when I heard Munefica et al.
I go for classic Afro-pop but I also listen out for new sounds from the Black Atlantic diaspora. Last spring my kid steered me to Aya Nakamura’s mellow Afropean flow and this season we’re both locked on Bomba Estereo’s electro-cumbia cum soukous. (Pace Jon Pareles—the Times’ longtime pop critic—who had Bomba Estereo’s Deja as his CD of the year. I like Deja lots but a back-to-back on B.E.’s Elegancia Tropicale, “El Alma y el Cuerpo” and “Sintiendo,” got my weekendorphins firing.)
I’m pretty sure RFT would agree Aya’s music and persona deserve an ooh la la. (Try Djadja.) After all, she’s an incarnation all on her own of a view from above that RFT cultivated. He’d often urge his students to imagine a space alien wowed by the blackness of the earth’s airwaves: “You hear drumming in Africa, you hear hip-hop in Chicago, you hear jazz in New Orleans, samba in Brazil, and mambo—everywhere.” Bamako-born Aya is the traveling kind who’s brought her blackness to Paris. Per a bemused youtube commenter (who could be a human cousin of RFT’s alien): “So she’s an African with a Japanese name who sings in French?” Not a question that would’ve thrown RFT. Nor would he have been flummoxed by Bomba Estereo’s blackish Columbian blends. After all, it was an Afro-Latin music—mambo—that changed his life in the late 40s.[6]
He honored mambo’s three originators—Orestes Lopez, Arsenio Rodriguez, and Damaso Perez Prado—in “The Medicine in the Imagining: Notes on Mambo,” an article in the very first issue of First of the Month. (I remember calling RFT to nail the edit of that piece on my lunchbreak at my temp job after my home-phone got cut off since I couldn’t afford to pay the bill. I kept a look-out for bosses over my shoulder as I went over the piece with RFT who must’ve sensed he was dealing with a rookie editor. I tried to ignore the pressure and live up to his canons of the cool.)
RFT’s cultural history highlighted mambo’s message to and from the grassroots:
“We have a choice and the choice is to remain African in America. We have a choice and the choice is to protect our religion and our philosophy even as we dance and play. We have a choice and the choice is to master and blend with other traditions when we find they complement our beauty—jazz, ballet, mime, the music of the Moors. We will stay the way we want. We will change the way we want.”
RFT’s passion for mambo and its Afro-and-proud messaging ensured he’d hit it off with my wife who grew up dancing Latin in Senegal, where bands put their own spin on Cuban music throughout her youth. When we went to an RFT lecture around the Millennium, his self-presentation appealed as well. To my Mbayang, RFT was one of the rare souls who seemed to be at once respectable and romantic. That last term (a double-play from languages she’d acquired after her more homey Senegalese lingos) was her favorite praise-word. It had a supremely positive valence as well as a je ne sais quois quality that might have stumped even a master-translator of diasporic meanings like RFT. Still, I think he’d’ve sussed it was a high accolade.
After I learned of RFT’s death, it was an odd sensation—not freakish but Vico-ish—to realize Greg Tate had been with me (and mine) in spirit all over again. Right before he died, Tate paid tribute to RFT: “A giant of African cultural scholarship no longer walks among us but along what Sun Ra called The Celestial Road.” Let’s circle back to Thompson’s own 3/2 path. His piece in that first First ended with a sequence on Anibal Vasquez, one of the great Latin dancers of the 20 C. Thompson limned how Vasquez Afro-Cubanized flamenco stamping patterns and evoked Vasquez’s richest suite of moves: “a dancing to the cardinal points, north, east, south, and west, a revolving figure he named the perfecta.” Vasquez’s hands, “with crisply pointing fingers, webbed a la Gower Champion,” chopped out a 6/8 beat above the 4/4 of his footwork and liquid hips, instantiating “one of the primary organizing principles of Afro-Atlantic dance and music, multiple meter…
He made visible the flash of the three over two. But, more deeply, in dancing to the cardinal points, he had spiritually returned to the cosmogram of Kongo, the circle written on the ground when the original mambos sounded in the palo shrines of Cuba. He had danced into being a sign of certainty and confidence, the sign of the four moments of the sun. It is a sign that says in prayer, May the circle of your life remain complete. And it is also a sign that says in celebration that death is not the end.
He was really saying something.
Notes
1 Not that RFT was removed from the reality of struggle. Try his tribute to James Brown (which became the lead piece in the first First of the Year volume):
“Sweat pouring down his face and neck, head tilted back at the ecstatic angle, eyes closed in distant meditation, lips contorted in rage and majesty, James Brown goes on forever. Like his spiritual brother, Damaso Perez Prado, he was a master of non-verbal action. His grunts and screams detoxified a nation. I remember ten years back when I was asked to talk about him for the BBC, I gave them a typology of James Brown’s screams. It was not what they expected. But boy was I honored to talk about Brown’s sonic landscape. Once I saw a video in Brussels on the life and art of soul brother number one. They showed him singing for a Democratic candidate. Brown screamed. Brown got down. The white candidate stood still without a smile. I thought: damn, if he can’t react to James Brown, he’s gonna lose. He did. There ain’t no past tense big enough to hold James Brown. The cat, as I said, goes on forever. Locked in his screams, pain purified to pleasure, is a message from Kongo to all of us: mu diavwezwa mweti mean diansitusu!—from humiliation stems grandeur.”
2 Tate began conducting his ensembles, but that also allowed him to turn his back to the audience. More Miles?
3 “Pro-abstract” signified something violative about Tate’s aesthetic. He got in the habit of treating music as a vector for theses.
4 His mentor at the Voice, Robert Christgau, became the newspaper’s main guide to Afro-pop.
5 Kidjo may be Benin’s greatest musical ambassador, but the band from Benin is Orchestre Poly-rythmo who played a memorable show in NYC a few years ago. Back then, John Chernoff, author of (among other books) the classic ethnography, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, sent a bunch of Poly-rythno songs to my dropbox along with a quick and dirty assessment of their sound:
Poly-rythmo may be one of the two greatest bands ever to play music. (The other was Rail Band, whom I saw through harmattan dust at L’Hotel de la Gare de Bamako one night early in 1970.) Really, it is hard to imagine a better band. I had no idea they are still functioning. Talk about diversity of rhythms and chords! No way they could cross over…When I was trying to represent all the African musicians to record companies in the 1970s, I didn’t even try to go to Cotonou to contact them. Nobody was buying into Fela or Sunny Ade, so you can well imagine that Poly-rythmo was too far removed from a funk-happy US of A. Anyway, these should keep you happy. I just don’t think they have ever invented speakers that can play the music as loud as it should be played. Headphones may help.
6 One more trippy bit from RFT’s scholarship:
“Funky is derived from the Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, meaning ‘positive sweat’ of the sort you get from dancing or having sex, but not working. One’s mojo, which has to be ‘working’ to attract a lover, is Ki-Kongo for ‘soul.’ Boogie comes from mbugi, meaning ‘devilishly Good.’ And both jazz and jism likely derive from dinza, the Ki-Kongo word for ‘to ejaculate.'”