September 12, 2019

Horace Tapscott/Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra/Great Voice of UGMAA

Why Don’t You Listen?
Dark Tree DT (RS) 11

Simon Nabatov

Readings Gileya Revisited

Leo CD LR 856

Big Tent

I Am Waiting

NotTwo MW 989-2

Pneuma

Who Has Seen the Wind?

Songlines SGL 1629-2

Ben Goldberg

Good Day for Cloud Fishing

Pyroclastic PRO 5

Something in the Air: Adapting Poetry to Jazz and Vice Versa

By Ken Waxman

Although the sentiment conjured up by the phrase Poetry and Jazz is of scruffy beatniks intoning verse to the accompaniment of a stoned bongo player, the intersection of poetry and improvised music has a longer history. As far back as the 1920s poets like Langston Hughes integrated jazz energy into their work and subsequent interaction involved whole groups of literary and musical types, with notable instances in San Francisco, Liverpool and Vancouver up until the present day. Some of the discs here extend the idea of sounds complementing words, while others work on the more difficult task of integrating both elements. MORE

November 21, 2006

The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles

By Steven L. Isoardi
University of California Press

By Ken Waxman

Pianist Horace Tapscott’s 30-year stewardship of Los Angeles’ Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra from the early 1960s until his death in 1999 wasn’t tied to any attempt at fame or self-aggrandizement.

Instead, as Steven Isoardi points out in The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles, Tapscott organized the band and its ancillary offshoots to fit snugly within the largely impoverished and blue collar African American community that was his home from the time he arrived in LA as a child, following his 1934 birth, until his death. “(His) relationship to his community was organic”, writes Isoardi, adding that “the community was an extension of his family”. MORE