In our Rock Town Hall Basement Bunker Edition, Townsman dbuskirk passed along the following find. I think it’s worth bringing to The Main Stage, as I think is the case with just about all of db’s ruminations. (Hint, hint…) A couple of songs by these artists, including a Fela tune featuring Bowie, follow. Dig.
While surfing around on that thing they call “the internets” I came across this pretty amusing short interview about Lester Bowie‘s experience with Fela Kuti.
This picks up where Bowie flies to Lagos, knowing no one and looking to meet area musicians. A guy tells him to go see Fela.
“Who?” “Well just get in a taxi cab and say, ‘Take me to Fela.’ Everybody knows where Fela is.”
…Fela was asleep. So he took me to a room and said, ‘We’ll get Fela up.’ Fela got up and we talked for a minute. He said, “Ah Lester Bowie, you’re from the Chicago Art Ensemble.” I say, “Yeah that’s right.” And then he tells this guy to bring in a record player. And he tells this other guy, “Bring me my horn.” The record was one that just had a rhythm section, so he figured we’d play along with that. So I just blew. I didn’t know anybody in the town, I was playing my heart out there! So after I play about two [verses], Fela says, ‘”STOP! Stop. Go get his bags. He’s moving in!” [laughter] And I stayed there I think for about six months.
I stayed as an honored guest, so I was treated with the same respect as Fela was treated with. He said, “I’ll show you how to be an African man. You want to be an African bandleader? I’ll show you what it’s about.” And he showed me what it was about! They’d bring us food. Nobody else could eat until we finished. Which I wasn’t used to, but I just played it off like, you know, ‘Cool with me too!’ [laughter] He showed me about all the wives. He had eight wives at that time. At that same time, I was believing I should have more than one wife. At the time I was getting divorced, I was between marriages. I thought the best thing for me to do was have a couple of wives. But after I stayed with Fela for that time, I saw that one was better! [laughs] And I told him, “Fela, you’ve got too many women. You don’t have time to put into practice. You want to get into jazz, it takes time, you know. You’ve got to practice. You can’t just be mediating arguments about who get the clothes or who get to drive this or do that…
Art Ensemble of Chicago, “Hippparippp”
That “No Agreement” song is *awesome*. I’m sure e.pluribusgergley would agree!
That whole interview is worth reading, traveling and playing with Fela sounds like the sort of experience that can give a special seasoning to one’s talent.
The Mod picked some pretty abstract example of the Art Ensemble and Bowie’s playing, among his bag of tricks there are some really funky tunes that show where Fela and Bowie’s music met.
Bowie right about polyamorous relationships, having taken up with a second girlfriend before (oh, youth…) made me realize how time-consuming relationships are. How Fela got anything done is beyond me, especially considering Bowie’s closing quote:
Interviewer: Ginger [Baker] said Fela was a truly humorous man.
Bowie: Oh yeah, he was.
Interviewer: Always in his underwear.
Bowie: In his underwear, smoking those big ol’ joints… [laughter]
That interview was great, and Bowie’s solo on No Agreement really raises the bar for Afrobeat. With Fela’s music I always love the rhythm arrangements, and the horn charts are great, and I love the way he composes long pieces with the whole ensemble in mind. I just don’t hold his solo sax/organ chops in as high regard as he did.
I especially liked where Bowie said: “So most of the time, we talked about the music. Music and its ramifications. What it implied. What is it. What can it be used for. It’s about… Basically, I always believed art is functional. It’s not just something you put in museums, it’s better for it to be used for something functional: educational usage, therapeutic usage. But it should be USED. Music should be used, not just as entertainment. I’m not saying it’s NOT entertainment. It’s EVERYTHING. It’s entertainment, it’s religion, it’s a lot of things. “
Some times you’ve just gotta love the crazy ones. I saw Fela at the Troc in the early nineties. I have and enjoy lots of his records, but live he was really something. The Troc Stage was chock full of bandmembers and women in african garb doing dancing like something out of a National Geographic special. I know where BigSteve is coming from with his dismissal of Fela’s keyboard and sax. His solos are generally some doodling on top of the monumental groove of his band, but they serve as a reasonable excuse to let that groove roll on forever. His stage presence was mesmerizing. I think he did a lot of casual smoking but the band was more attuned to him than I’ve ever seen, including a good James Brown show. He had this great move where he would bend his knee and let his leg hang in the air for a moment and when he dropped it…BOOM…the thirty folks on stage just dropped a bomb into whatever was going on. It was thoroughly cool.