End-of-week treats #7: 'You yet holding on?'
Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Robert Glasper, the Roots, Mahalia Jackson, Derrick Hodge, Meshell Ndegeocello–and why I love Chicago
For part two of my deep-dive into the ideas underpinning the Art Institute of Chicago’s forthcoming show, Project a Black Planet, I’m following a musical thread. It’s essentially a list of treats, because what a list of tracks! I’ve put the YouTube links right here, and added most of them to a Spotify playlist down below, if that’s more your jam. Happy listening dudes, it’s FRIDAY> > > > > > > >
Chicago* has birthed so much great music, I wouldn’t quite know where to begin were it not for the below band and the city sitting right there in its name: the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Thème de Yoyo, the track I left you with yesterday, really is the kind of tune to change your life. At least it did mine. I still feel the same thrill every time I listen to it as I did when a furious painter whose name I can’t remember and who kind of lived inside jazz as he worked, first played this at a party one night at art school in Marseille. Oof.
The Art Ensemble was founded by Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors Maghostut, Roscoe Mitchell, and Famoudou Don Moye in 1965. It emerged from the erstwhile Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) to become one of the most salient free jazz movements in a city already renowned for its jazz history.
The Art Ensemble’s slogan has long been “Great Black Music, Ancient To The Future” which, this excellent piece notes, functions both as a limitless, forward-thinking credo, a description for the group’s own work, a means to honour their cultural ancestors and a Pan-African conceptual framework.
When I interviewed British sculptor Dominique White in July, she told me she listens to music all the time. On her studio playlist, there's a little bit of Sun Ra, a little bit of Alice Coltrane, always Busta Rhymes, very specific techno.
White makes extraordinary sculptural works that defy gravity and explanation both. Her practice is deeply steeped in critical theory, but she’ll never insist on people engaging with that. She baulks at the idea of the art world as elitist, made for the few and not the many. “That's why I talk about music, because it's a very accessible way into Afrofuturism, or Afro pessimism, Black nihilism, celebrationism—there's always someone who, at some point has, basically engaged with that theory.”
To White’s mind, art should be a way for triggering conversation about our world and how to make it better—or at least to see it clearly. Dig into the depths beneath the sounds of African-American music, and that consciousness, that belief in a better world and that resistance to the deeply flawed one we have is right there.
The other week Emilia and I went to see Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Johan Grimonprez’s incredible documentary about the political machinations and cultural weaponisation behind the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. It is an extraordinary work, showing how jazz luminaries, including Louis Armstrong, were coopted into geopolitical wranglings over the Belgian crown’s stranglehold on Congo, at the dire expense of the Congolese people.
Alissa Wilkinson writes of the film that it “makes an explicit connection between what happened in Congo in 1960 and ongoing conflict today. These events occurred a while ago, but they’re not really history, Soundtrack argues. The past, one might say, is never dead. It’s not even past.”
It seems crazy, given the history of the genre, but when Robert Glasper started out in the early 2000s, he planned to do three jazz trio albums to first establish himself as a young black jazz pianist. That’s because, as he explained, the time that was rare, so thoroughly had the music been coopted by the wider musical establishment. He aimed to upend that trend.
Fast forward 20 years, and he’s done just that. Dan Charnas, in his incredible book, Dilla Time, says that in melding so many aspects of Black music with these jazz roots, Glasper has had a more radical impact on the genre than the master, Herbie Hancock, did with his 1983 gut punch, Future Shock. Meshell Ngedeocello started crying when she told me how important he is to her and the wider community: "He's our CEO,” she said. “He’s ushering in a new paradigm for Black music.”
That’s because music has always, for Glasper, been about community—about real lives, not art as abstracted from real life. Never just art for art’s sake.
While researching that piece I came across this review of his 2015 album, Covered (The Robert Glasper Trio recorded live at Capitol Studios) which describes how his tune Got Over came about. “The final two pieces feature spoken word over Glasper’s plaintive, gentle melodies and textures,” writes Alison Bentley. “In Got Over, Harry Belafonte tells his life story with a preacher’s cadences: ‘Let me tell you who I think I am…I’m one of the ones of colour who got over…I’m one of the ones your bullet missed.’” Glasper reportedly just told Belafonte to “say something that he thought people needed to hear.”
So I decided to travel down the family tree of the title of that track:
First, it’s also the title of my favourite Roots’ track from their eponymous 2010 studio album. Black Thought sings: "Out in the streets where I grew up / First thing they teach us, not to give a fuck / That type of thinking can't get you nowhere / Someone has to care".
When you read Black Thought AKA Tariq Trotter's recent memoir, The Upcycled Self, the unvarnished lived experience that birthed those words hits like a punch to the gut. Those are not lyrics chosen for dramatic effect. It’s all so real.
On Down in New Orleans, released in 2008, The Blind Boys of Alabama recorded a lilting meander of a version, featuring Marva Wright, sparsely featured with piano and gruff feeling. Gorgeous.
Jewish Gospel singer Joshua Nelson has sung this song for decades, crediting Mahalia Jackson (see below)…
He makes an appearance on Live at Azusa 3. Back in the 1990s, Bishop Carlton Pearson put on the legendary Azusa conferences at the Mabee Center in Tulsa, becoming one of the first first Black mega church pastors and propulsing Black Christian music to the fore. Pearson passed away in November 2023. I love this tidbit from Rolling Stone’s obit:
Pearson’s album The Best of Azusa…Yet Holdin’ On is a staple in the Black community. On the 14-track album, featuring songs from his Azusa conference days, he has an oratory track called Mother Sherman Story, in which he recounts a question an elderly mother from his home church would ask him, even as dementia began to set in: “You yet holding on?” —The album’s title.
‘That meant many things,” explains [Destiny’s Child member Michelle] Williams. “It meant keep holding on to your faith and also meant keep holding on to your morals and your standards.’
Before that, Aretha Franklin brought her verve and power to an altogether more furious take on How I Got Over, on her 1972 album, Amazing Grace. You kind have to stand up to listen to it, which obviously makes it sound like a live version …
… until you listen to an actual live version and oh the KEYS on this:
The song was recorded in the same choral arrangement (singer uncredited) for an otherwise wordless church scene in Sydney Poitier’s 1974 film, Uptown Saturday Night (also featuring Belafonte).
And so we get to Mahalia Jackson in the early 1960s. This was her signature song…
…which she most famously performing, during Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963, in front of hundreds of thousands of people:
But although so many of course reference Jackson when doing their own version, the song was actually first recorded by Clara Ward and the Ward Singers, in 1950.
Ward’s recording on the Gotham label was entered into the Library of Congress’s register in 2017. In his accompanying essay, music historian Don Cusic writes that “the Civil Rights movement was driven by songs from the black churches, that soothed, ignited and inspired African-Americans to ‘move on up a little higher’ and told audiences how they ‘got over’. The spirit moved in mighty ways as the singers sang and the pews emptied as churchgoers shouted their hallelujahs.”
Ward founded a publishing company in 1953 and published her songs. Though initially listed as the writer of How I Got Over, on the first copyright, in subsequent listings, the song is ascribed to W. Herbert Brewster, a preacher at the East Trigg Avenue Baptist Church in Memphis in the 1930s. Ward reportedly first heard it on a record by Queen C. Anderson.
So from Glasper and Belafonte in 2015 all the way back to Clara ward five years after the end of world war two.
On the one, that’s just musical history, people reprising tunes passed down from generation to generation and appropriating them for themselves. But it’s also over half a century of the same sentiment being voiced out loud in music because so much is yet to change.
I love how no matter how much this music dwells on a painful present and, unavoidably unpacks an unbearable past, it is constantly, firmly, deliberately, envigoratingly, furiously, magnificently forward facing. It’s about tomorrow. Talking about any of this is like planting a garden. It’s a way, always, of finding hope.
In December 2013, Glasper and Hodge were on tour with Maxwell, in South Africa, on the day Nelson Mandela died. "Just being in Johannesburg, talking to people from there, was a crazy feeling,” he told me. “It really stuck with me." They worked Hodge's track below, Message of Hope, into a tribute during their big concert, two days later. Some of Mandela's family came.
On Code Derivation, one of the albums Glasper has released since Christmas 2023 in a four-record deal with Apple, he has finally been able to record Madiba, the track he wrote in response to that formative experience.
World of echo
Notes
*Chicago is one of those places where, when I finally got there, I felt like I was flying. Before I went to art school, I studied history of art and archeology in Aix-en-Provence, taking in a lot of urbanism, architecture and aesthetics too. I loved every minute of it.
One of the courses that totally gripped me was the history of the skyscraper, which began with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the resulting terrain vague of a city centre, just waiting to be rebuilt—an inconceivable thing, really. All those towers that followed came with exceptional public art and sculptures, not to mention the Art Institute of Chicago itself, which opened in 1879 and has an extraordinary collection and temporary exhibitions programme.
My first ever visit to the US started with a few days by myself in Wheaton. I took the train into Chicago every day and walked around looking up up up up up. Each corner I rounded, there’d be another building I knew by book and it was like I was meeting a old friend. Oh you’re here too? I was squealing on the inside.
But that’s not where it ends. Every mention of the Windy City since has brought that same sense of excitement and possibility, of struggle and radical change and rebirth.
This is the city that has given us not just the Art Ensemble of Chicago but Common (“Little Chicago Boy”), Jim O’Rourke, the Sea and Cake, Sam Prekop (who, it turns out, was actually born in London? but grew up in Chicago, my love for whom I know I’ve mentioned before), the entire Thrill Jockey back catalogue, The West Wing’s Leo McGarry (at one point Bartlet gets irked: “What is it with people from Chicago that they're so happy to have been born there?” he asks Leo. “I meet so many people who can't wait to tell me they're from Chicago and when I meet them, they're living anywhere but Chicago.” “You wouldn't understand,” comes Leo’s reply.), The Good Wife, The Bear, the Bears, the Bulls, the Obamas, and the only instance I know of of a museum having a mathematician-in-residence (Eugenia Cheng, at the Art Institute).
And! And! And it’s now where my godson Arthur and his one brother Tobias live. Skyscrapers, saxophonists and my two favourite bell ringers <3. No city can hold that much goodness. Ofc I realise that for anyone that’s a pretty random and certainly incomplete list of reasons to herald the place, so if you have more, hit me up: