LA EVENTS: One Night In Miami

February 25, 1964 was supposed to be a great day for boxing fans. It was the day a loudmouth, 22-year-old fighter named Cassius Clay was finally supposed to have his bragging stopped by fearsome heavyweight champ Sonny Liston. That was not to be, and after the young Clay’s shocking victory, there was no celebration planned, since no one thought he would actually win. No one except his three friends, activist Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and football player Jim Brown. The foursome threw together a party in Malcolm’s tiny hotel room in Overtown, the city’s downtrodden black ghetto. The next morning, Cassius would make an announcement that would shock the world yet again. One Night in Miami… imagines what might have transpired on that very real, very fateful night in Malcolm’s motel room in 1964. The civil rights struggle was ready to boil over. And in less than a year, two of these friends would be dead. But on this night, the possibilities seemed endless.

The World Premiere of

One Night in Miami…

by Kemp Powers

Directed by Carl Cofield

Featuring Kevin Daniels, Jason Delane, Matt Jones, Ty Jones, Jason E. Kelley, Burl Moseley, Giovanni Adams, and Jah Shams

Scenic Design by Stephanie Kerley Schwartz

Lighting Design by Leigh Allen

Sound Design by Christopher Moscatiello

Costume Design by Naila Aladdin Sanders

Prop Design by Katherine Hunt

Stage Manager: Daniel Coronel

Buy your tickets NOW!

The Fall of Black Music – Part 2

Black Americans have contributed to the advancement of American society in an endless number of ways. Intellectually, technologically, politically, militarily, and of course by the captivity of our labor our affect on the shaping of the United States of America can hardly be denied. But it might not be wrong to say that our greatest collective legacy in this country has lied in the cultural sphere, particularly through our art and our music. There’s an easy reason for this. In literature, academics and other areas where some measure of organized education has been necessary to gain a mastery of the field, such education was prohibited to the African-American, first by slavery, and then for all intents and purposes by discrimination and segregation. Such barriers to education have declined precipitously across the course of one-hundred and forty-five years, but we are still enduring the ills of a long history of educational disenfranchisement, one that to some extent persists to this day. But in the area of music (and certainly dance and culinary arts) we didn’t need any training. We brought our music over from Africa, and although the precise forms and languages of our former arts were lost to us, our innate, human urge to sing, to dance, and to express ourselves in song was not lost. Music was one of the few consolations for our circumstances the slave master, whether by whip, dog, or separation, could not take away from us. The deeper our pain, the more powerful our music; the purer our songs,the more resonant our expression of the longings of the human soul. Even a cultural critic as narrow minded as Joseph Goebbels, the virulently racist propaganda minister of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi empire, commented that the most distinctive music product of American culture historically was the spirituals of the negro. That the Nazi’s could recognize the power of such music is simply a testament to the depth of its quality.

With the Blues and later Rhythm and Blues came expressions of an evolving but similar pain. Not all music of the forties and fifties dealt directly with the ills of societal injustice and the pain of our persecution, but when you listen to Billie Holiday conjure the deathly imagery of blacks lynched, swinging from trees in the song Strange Fruit, or the soaring somberness of Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come, it is easy to hear in that the same mourning that colors Old Man River and other dark, somber songs of sadness and lament that arose from the pain of our bondage. That pain has morphed in recent times, but has never disappeared. It lives on, expressed with increasing complexity concurrent with the sprawling urbanization and societal inequity overwhelming the faith and the worldview of our ghetto youth. Our humble mourning of ages gone by has become profane, militant and directionless anger in the noise of many rappers, but if you listen past the cursing and the anger of a song like Tupac Shakur’s They Don’t Give a F–k about Us, or if you bother to pay attention to the words of Momma’s Just a Little Girl, it is not hard to tell that the last agony grows from the same roots as the first. Inasmuch as our music has had a particular power in the heart of America and over the imagination of the world it starts in this, that so much of it grows directly from our experience, that we sing and we play what we know from life.

Of course, not all black music is sorrowful. In the very same way the joy of our music, it’s love and romance, has contributed a warmth and a genuineness to American music that too comes from the hardness of our circumstance. What’s true of black music is also true of Jewish music and surely other peoples who have known oppression, and that is that the happiest and the loving-est music comes from those who are well acquainted with sadness. In the case of black music you can’t talk about the music of Sam Cooke (think You Send Me) or Jackie Wilson (think To Be Loved) or Solomon Burke or Donny Hathaway or Ray Charles without calling to mind a body of romantic music to equal a treatise on love for all time (to say nothing of the great musicians and composers that permeate the history of black music, from Louis Armstrong, to Duke Ellington to Miles Davis). Whereas the politics of race and civil rights divided Americans black and white in so many ways, the universality of American music put crack after crack in the color barrier, and brought blacks and whites together in at least this one thing over time. This tradition continued with the great groups of the Motown era, including of course the Temptations, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, not to mention the many greats outside of Motown like Aretha Franklin, The Platters and near countless others.

Our music isn’t primarily about love anymore; nor does it find so much time to soulfully reflect upon the smaller and simpler things and battles of life that music helps to illuminate. As the years passed and television and the multimedia era enveloped the years, songs like Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, a song about a woman who spends her life putting her own dreams on hold first for an irresponsible father, than an unreliable lover, and finally for their children as a single mother, did not come along much anymore. On occasion there is an India Arie, who sings about things that are real. On occasion an Anthony Hamilton can rise to the task. But the overflow of materialism, of gratuitousness and even violence that persists in our music today was never there before. As image transcended substance love was replaced by lust in our music, to great degree, and inasmuch as this is true our music is not as inspiring as it once was. What is troubling is that black people as a whole have little inkling as to how much weaker this has made us as a people.

The Fall of Black Music – Part I

You probably already have an idea as to where this article is going, so let me get one thing out of the way before I get to the point: I don’t hate all RAP and all Hip-Hop. The positive side of the music of Tupac Shakur has left an indelible impression on me, likewise the music of  Saul Williams, and much of what artists Talib Kweli, Common and some others have to offer. I remember being a young teenager and floating away from my adolescent angst to the reflective notes of Lauryn’ Hill’s “To Zion,” then dancing in my mirror to the rhythm of “Doo Wop,” also off the “Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” CD. I used to scan the radio to hear Aaliyah and Timbaland’s “Are You That Somebody,” (kept it on repeat when I finally got the CD–remember when it was still about buying the disc?) and I’ll be quick to admit that I was a pretty big TLC fan as well. I went through a definite Outkast phase, and have listened to my share of Jay-Z, Dr. Dre and so forth. I certainly know what it’s like to like and love RAP and Hip-Hop, and I don’t want to sound like those who revile it without ever understanding the appeal of the music. I was a kid of the ’90’s, a teen of the 2000’s, and it’s hardly difficult for me to remember how attached me and my peers were to the sounds of our generation.

Having said all this, I was listening day in and day out to Sam Cooke long before I ever remember hearing Ginuwine. And as much as I may have liked The Roots, it’s hard to remember them while you’re blaring Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. In terms of vocal talent, it’s hard to compare singers like Beyonce and Mary J. Blige to the likes of Nancy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday (anybody want to put Rihanna and Nicki Minaj up against Aretha Franklin and Patti Labelle?). Obviously people are still aware of the great Motown era groups and artists like The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Smokie Robinson, and of course I could mention  the soulfulness of Al Green and the burning sounds of James Brown. If you dig deeper and go back further of course, you return to the days of song masters like Johnny Mathis, the pioneers of Rock and Roll such as Little Richard, and artists such as Sarah Vaughn and the  unforgettable Nat King Cole, for both of whom competence on the piano was a natural part of their musical arsenal (Nat King Cole was a great Jazz pianist well before he was widely known as a vocalist).

The list of great black singers and musicians from times gone by goes on forever, of course, but it get’s thinner as we come to our modern age of American music, until finally we arrive now at the point where real musicianship starts to look like a lost art. A big part of the reason for that is technological, and that in a couple different respects. On the one hand, with the advent of multitrack recording and drum machines in the ’70’s and 80’s, (along with all manner of synthesizers and artificial musical effects) it became increasingly possible to make music without the hassle of including musicians. So then comes disco, techno, and ultimately House, Hip-Hop and modern Pop. With the advent of these musical forms came the decline of, yes, musicianship generally with respect to popular music, but also a near elimination of the element of live recording in music. You may never have thought about it before, but consider the fact that in the entire history of recorded music all the way through the late seventies, everything you bought on a record or heard on the radio was a live recording of a live performance. There was no other way to make music. Consequently, musicians had to be very good. The tornado that was Jackie Wilson didn’t fake a note of “Say You Will,” didn’t redo a single phrase of the recording. He had to know how to breathe, how to sing the whole song flawlessly. The musicians in the James Brown band didn’t have the luxury of coming to the studio one at a time, recording their tracks by themselves so an engineer could paste them together later. They needed to be fluent in the art of playing together. But in my time an artist like Ashanti can be a plausible singing star because the burden of making quality recordings was not on her.

Of course there is another aspect of the technology dynamic that renders musicianship an optional quality, and that is the nature of our modern media and the importance of image. To be attractive has always been an asset for performing artists, but in the grand old days of American (and Afro-American) music it was not a necessity. Nancy Wilson was beautiful, of course, but that was coincidental…most people who heard her music didn’t know what she looked like. There were no music videos, certainly no Youtube, and unless an artist found his or her way to the Ed Sullivan show or later on to Soul Train or some such venue like that, people either knew their faces from their album covers or not at all. Nowadays attractiveness is almost prerequisite to fame and with female singers particularly. Beyonce is a legitimately talented dancer, and capable of giving a halfway decent vocal performance, but her body is every bit as important to her success. Likewise Ciara and the afore mentioned Rihanna and Nicki Minaj, whose public images are emblematic of the degree to which the “music” industry has been so overtly sexualized…and just how little any of it has to do with music as an art unto its own. I readily admit this is a problem with American music in general. But it is one that hurts the black community even more given the fact that music has long been the most powerful export of black culture…