June Reflections

I have been listening to some great music, King Sunny Ade—what a treat. He was in town Friday, June 19 and I had an opportunity to talk to him for an hour while he was on the road on my birthday, June 20. Look for the broadcast later this month. Pharoah Sanders’ Quartet with special guest Zakir Hussain was here last week in San Francisco also. The group which features, Hussain on tabla, William Henderson on piano, Nat Reed on bass and Joe Farnsworth on drums was so phenomenal Sanders started dancing. He went all the way to the floor twice, no three times and started blowing into the bell of his golden tenor sax. Closing night, Coltrane wasn’t on the bill, but quite a few standards were, like “My Favorite Things.” I saw Victor Little’s super band Monday night. His stage was so full when someone wasn’t playing they had to wait in the wings. The bassist had two drummers, two keyboardists—Mike Aaberg one of them, and at different times during the extended set, he’d have besides himself on bass, at least one other bassists plus two, three and sometimes four guitarists on stage. He had this really cool Palestinian vocalist Sukhawit Ali Khan, I mean DRAMATIC Palestinian singer, who sang in Arabic—I could catch a word here and there. I wondered how Little knew such varied artists. He brought Haroun Serang on with Ali Khan for an encore and literally took the music up another notch, if that were possible. Little was clearly at home as he said hi to friends on the audience, many whom he was touched to see in the house for his release party. He spoke of being from Chicago and meeting Sandy Perez there. The congero was awesome. I think he’s married to a friend of mine, Laila. Anyway, the group which also featured a percussionist, Roberto Quintana and a drummer who could sing. Little even pulled a friend from the audience to sing something. It was dedicated to Michael Jackson. I don’t know how he’ll be able to pull this off when the band goes on the road…but Little has a winner here, so you missed this date, visit www.victorlittlemusic.com

My favorite musical experience though last month had to be while I was in Austin and Big Chief Victor Armstrong took the audience to New Orleans Carnival or Mardi Gras. You won’t believe this, but I still have never been to Mardi Gras…. It was a hot week, when I arrived the temperature peaked at 104ish and this was the hottest day of the year. The temperature hung out there in the low 100s until I left, but Friday night after a reception for East Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed, whose The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. I was like too excited to meet a sister who’d won this coveted prize. The event which was a kick-off for the annual African American Book Festival in Austin, East Austin, the historic black part of town, at the Carver Museum, was lovely. I met a judge, the first African American woman appointed to a regular judgeship in Texas in 1973. She was a judge for the City of Austin Municipal Court for 20 years and during that time she became the presiding judge. She is also the only African American woman to serve as a democratic presidential elector from the state of Texas. See http://www.utexas.edu/law/news/2005/080805_murphy.html At the Carver Museum is a permanent exhibit of Juneteenth and narratives of African Americans who’d been children June 19, 1865. The current exhibit profiled Texans who’d experienced Hurricane Katrina and relocated to Houston. This exhibit was both an oral history project and a photography exhibit. It was strange walking through the exhibit (18 profiles) listening to the stories of loss and triumph, despair and hope. I’d just read Pearl Clege’s latest book, “Seen It All, Done the Rest,” which has a character who has relocated to Georgia from New Orleans, post-Katrina, and these stories reminded me of his and of Robert King’s who was with me at the museum. All of the writers featured at the annual book festival were women and many of them hailed from East Texas like Gordon-Reed or Texas. It was fitting that Gordon Reed share her latest work at the Carver, as Hemingses’ descendants lived in Austin, one Dr. John Q. Taylor King, his daughter Marjon Alicia (King) Christopher, and son, Stuart Hines King, who introduced the author the next day. Dr. Taylor King was president of Huston-Tillotson College from 1965 to 1988 and an alumnus of Anderson High School which was celebrating its 100th anniversary in a 4-day event beginning July 2 at the Sheraton Austin Hotel. Over 1000 former students are expected to attend. For information call (512) 989-0912 or tljmadison@aol.com. A court mandate to desegregate the public schools in Austin closed the school in 1971.

Being in the south and meeting relatives of Sarah Hemings (“Sally”) put an entirely different spin on the notice of commemorating our formerly enslaved ancestors and the pale this American legacy casts on the day to day workings of both personal and civic lives, livelihood and governance. Gordon-Reed shows in her book how what happened in Sally’s life and President Jefferson’s life was not anomaly rather it was par and parcel of the lesser known stories of enslaved Africans and their keepers whose lives were not as high profile. She takes the glamour and nostalgia often associated with the Hemingses story and tells it like the horrific tragedy that it is. There is nothing pretty or noble about slavery. There is nothing to brag on being assigned to the house or to the field, both mean one is not free. Those of us on the outside of the system, tend to pass judgment on the choices made or not made by the enslaved as if we can put ourselves in their shoes and do a better job of surviving and ensuring our children’s survival. Gordon-Reed makes her audience work, this book not difficult to read but it fills one’s head with so many thoughts as she ties the past to the present, asks questions one wants to answer, but cannot. She is co-author with Vernon Jordon of “Vernon Can Read: A Memoir” and author of a precursor to this latest book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.” An attorney and law professor at Rugers University (how appropriate right? Paul Robeson’s alma mater). She is also editor of Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History. She lives with her husband and two children in Manhattan. I got a chance to catch up with Eddie Abrams and his lovely wife Rose this weekend also. Baba Abrams had camera in hand filming the author events and capturing impressions on film for the archives. His sister-in-law and granddaughter were there at the African American Book Festival too.

James Farmer, founder of CORE was born in Austin and raised on the East Side. His house is now a national landmark. One could stay in East Austin and never run out of black history treasures. It’s too bad the black folks are selling and moving away. It reminds me of West Oakland, close to downtown, the capital, the University of Austin, shopping museums.

Earlier last week we rode over to the Austin Museum of Art to see “The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art. The exhibit up through August 9, explores the ways we remember individually and collectively. It makes one question as in the case of three friends who all share an experience, yet recall different aspects of it more vividly than others, when they are brought together on a German television show, Kerry Tribe’s “Episode.” How much of what we remember is a result of social reinforcement—do we remember more vividly what society tells us to, these experiences a part of the collective consciousness? In one installation, American Desert, dedicated to Chuck Jones, creator of the Road Runner cartoon character and his nemesis, Wile E. Coyote, are absent yet for those familiar with the story we can place the characters in the scenes. The installation I liked the most was the series of sculptures based the artist’s forgotten memories of her first, fifth, and sixth-year birthday parties. The memories are on video and at the center of the models. Scientifically I can’t tell you what was going on, what the lines meant, but if memory had a look and it looked like the models, that would be pretty cool.

As a person with amnesia, I wish I could rebuild my memory…collect the details from those who were present and then see how it feels in my mind to let that fill the space where nothing exists. I wonder, if memory is tangible, how I could reconstruct 500 years of loss? How could I fill in the empty spaces with tangible stuff like language and history, experiences I never had, but should have? I guess I am moving into vicarious existence, voyeurism. Is it best to leave the empty spaces empty or is it better to fill them even if the new memory is not a primary one? Does memory have a shelf life and after so long does one need to get rid of it?

Another exhibit, my third favorite is Emma Kay’s Shakespeare from Memory. The artist wrote summaries of all the plays by Shakespeare she could recall. Some are more detailed than others, and in some, the artist’s memory didn’t match mine.

From Vietnam to Hollywood is really cool. The artist, Dinh Q.Lê, takes stripes of photos and weaves the paper together creating a 3-D effect on the surface which maintains its figurative intent. Cody Trepte’s photo album, one the other hand, is abstract. His photos made me think about my digital images which have never been printed. My photo albums look just like his. They are filled with zeroes and ones— binary code, which means, if I hadn’t read the description, I might not have known what the bound pages filled with numbers meant. It certainly move me any closer to knowing who his family is. Photos represent memories. If we don’t print the photos out, then that memory is potentially lost if the reason for the recording is to assist in recall. I need to print my photos out so I can enjoy them. I also didn’t realize that some flash memory cards only have a life span of five years. The artist wonders if “this new phenomena will impact our ability to trace our past in the future.” Visit www.amoa.org