On the Open Sky website as well as in the pages of DownBeat and JazzTimes magazines your correspondent has contributed dispatches from one of the more distinctive word music festivals, Festival Gnaoua, held each June in the beautiful seaside town of Essaouira, Morocco.  At last year’s festival as Suzan and I stood along the big Scene Moulay Hassan stage overlooking the fishing port we had an epiphany relating to one of the cultural revelations of our year in New Orleans.  How cool would it be to have some Mardi Gras Indians performing on this festival? 

                       Jaleel Shaw with the Gnawa at Festival Gnaoua ’08

At that moment the fine young alto saxophonist Jaleel Shaw, who currently holds down that chair in NEA Jazz Master Roy Haynes’ Fountain of Youth band, was onstage joyously jamming with Gnawa (Gnaoua) Maalem (master) Mahmoud Guinea and Malian ngoni master Bassekou Kouyate.  Since Festival Gnaoua has since its inception invited improvising soloists to interact with Gnawa musicians, the question of which Mardi Gras Indians might conceivably be most appropos for the festival was a no-brainer: Donald Harrison’s Congo Nation.  Why that’s the case, the whys & wherefores of Festival Gnaoua, and how a case was built for a subsequent grant from USArtists International proved successful is the subject of this piece.  Our journey to Essaouira will be June 25-29…

DONALD HARRISON, saxophonist-composer, is a New Orleans native, son of the late, great Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr. of the Guardians of the Flame and several other tribes, a keeper of the inimitable African American New Orleans-centered culture known as the Mardi Gras Indians.  An accomplished saxophonist, Donald Harrison is unique among jazz musicians in general and New Orleans jazz musicians in particular in that he too is a keeper of the Mardi Gras Indian flame as Big Chief of his

tribe and leader of the Congo Nation performing ensemble.  Donald, who is conservatory-trained and has traveled the world as a saxophonist and bandleader and made numerous recordings as both sideman and leader, is arguably the most accomplished trained musician of all the various Mardi Gras Indian tribes. 

“I was a Mardi Gras Indian first and then I became a professional musician,” he once told interviewer Ned Sublette.  Donald Harrison has been “masking” as the Mardi Gras Indian costuming tradition is known in New Orleans, since he was two years old under the tutelage of his late father.  He formed his Congo Nation performing ensemble in 1999.  Donald has toured the globe extensively as both soloist and leader of several bands.  Congo Nation has performed at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, as well as festivals in locales ranging from the Belleayre Music Festival in New York State, to festivals in Bahia, Brazil and Ticino, Switzerland.  As saxophonist, singer & dancer in that tradition Donald also meticulously sews his own Mardi Gras costumes, unique works of art in their striking beauty and fierce in their pride of culture.

          Big Chief Donald Harrison

The tradition known as the Mardi Gras Indians dates back to slavery in the U.S. when escaped slaves of African descent were often offered refuge on Native American reservations in Louisiana.  The tradition of these “masking” Black Indians dates back to the 1700s.  History reports that tribes such as the Choctaw, Seminoles, and Chickasaws of Louisiana freed some blacks from slavery.  Native American and African respect for their ancestral spirits and use of ritual costuming are shared characteristics.  For the Black Indians of New Orleans who “masked” in creative and intricate costuming that included decorative feathers and plumes and other accouterments, including elaborate beaded scenic depictions, parading, chanting and singing traditional songs in full regalia and challenging other “tribes” from different neighborhoods (particularly Uptown vs. Downtown Indians) became a Mardi Gras day custom and became the prime time to see them in public; thus they became known as the Mardi Gras Indians.  Since this tradition arose there are now two other times when these “Indians” choose to “mask” or costume, typically on what is known as Super Sunday in late winter and at nightfall on St. Joseph’s Day. Typically these tribes practice and assemble their costumes for these rare occasions year-round.  At the core of these celebrations the Mardi Gras Indians are honoring the Native Americans that assisted their ancestors to freedom.

Donald Harrison learned these traditions from his late father and became Big Chief of his own

tribe, out of which his Congo Nation is the performing ensemble.  Congo Nation brings a rich mélange of jazz, blues and traditional Mardi Gras Indian chants and songs into the modern era, all keyed by Donald’s alto saxophone mastery.  The call and response chants and voicings, and percussion-driven traditional songs of the Mardi Gras Indians lend themselves well to interpretations from jazz and blues perspectives.  Donald Harrison has pledged to uphold these traditions which he grew up witnessing from his late father Donald Harrison Sr.’s leadership, while at the same time updating them and bringing his unique improviser’s perspective to the music.

As Donald told interviewer Ned Sublette: “When I was a younger person I thought of playing jazz as one part of my life, and the music of the Mardi Gras Indians as another.

And I came home in my late 20s to participate with my father on Mardi Gras day as a Mardi Gras Indian.  I was listening to the drums and all of a sudden I heard a merging of what I was doing in New York with the jazz music and the Mardi Gras Indian music.  So that has led me to so many revelations in music, the fact that I was in two different things and I heard them mix together.  That has helped me to be able to find new songs in a natural way.” 

Performing at Festival Gnaoua will be a further revelation for the saxophonist who chooses to honor the ancient New Orleans tradition of African expression in

through the name and music of Congo Nation.  

Festival Gnaoua and World Music (Essaouira Gnawa and World Music Festival); scope & history of the event.

The Atlantic coastal Moroccan town of Essaouira is one of the most unique in the North African country and has long been a haven of fascination for visitors from the west, including such notables as Orson Welles (who filmed his Othello partly in Essaouira), Jimi Hendrix (who legend has it wrote his song “Castles Made of Sand” about a structure you can still view to this day off the shores of Essaouira), Mick Jagger, Maria Callas and many others.  Part of this fascination with Essaouira undoubtedly stems from the significant number of Gnaoua (or Gnawa) who reside in Essaouira. 

The Gnawa are one of several Moroccan spirit music brotherhoods whose music is used as a means of celebrating Allah and the spirits of their ancestors.  There is a unique ancestral kinship between the Gnawa and African Americans who were enslaved from the same regions of West Africa.  While African American ancestors made the journey in bondage across the Atlantic known as the Middle Passage, Gnawa ancestors from the same tribes and families were trekked across the Sahara Desert and up the Nile to North Africa in bondage, thus becoming the core of Morocco’s black populace. 

Gnawa music consists primarily of the use of a 3-stringed, camel-skin lute known variously as a guimbre or hajhouj, which is pitched in the cello to bass range and played by a lead musician known as the Maalem (master) who generally issues the call or lead voice, drums known as tbel, and ensembles of responding singer-chanters who employ the hypnotic large metal castanets known variously as qaraqabs or qarqabates.  Numerous jazz musicians, including Randy Weston, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and the Cuban pianist Omar Sosa, have found much musical kinship between their music and that of the Gnawa.  Weston has often remarked that when he first heard Gnawa music as a recent Moroccan settler in the late 60s-early 70s he heard echoes of the great jazz bassist Jimmy Blanton in the playing of the Gnawa Maalems; he heard blues roots in Gnawa (or Gnaoua) music.  The music of the Gnawa is a healing music that is based on a meticulous color chart and generally performed at their spiritual ceremonies known as Lila.

In 1998 the Essaouira Gnawa and World Music Festival (Festival Gnaoua and World Music) was launched as a means of celebrating Gnawa music and culture.  The festival is entirely free of charge and held at several large outdoor venues with simultaneous performances on its four nights in late June.  The festival has grown into a mega-event which now draws upwards of a half-million festival goers including over 10,000 foreign visitors to the town whose usual population is upwards of 70,000.  The heart of the festival is Gnawa music performed by ensembles from across Morocco.  Each year the festival also invites musicians and ensembles from other parts of Africa and from the west, including U.S. musicians, from jazz, pop, rock and contemporary world music.  These visiting musicians are invited to interact with Gnawa ensembles as well as perform their own unique music.  This sense of musical interaction or world fusion often produces performances of startling brilliance and has led to lasting collaborations.

One of the more notable aspects of the Gnaoua and World Music Festival is that it is produced by A3 an all-women communications and production company based in Casablanca, Morocco.  This is truly remarkable for an Islamic country and is representative of the progressive nature of Morocco.

Gnaoua and World Music Festival past participants

Past participants in the Essaouira Gnawa and World Music Festival (or Gnaoua and World Music Festival) have included:  Youssou N’Dour, Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Toumani Diabate, Orchestre National de Barbes, Troupe Samulnori Molgae, Cheikh Tidiane Seck, Omar Sosa, Ali Farka Toure, Pat Metheny Trio, Ba Cissoko, Corey Harris, Steffano Di Battista, Hmadcha brotherhood, DJ Click, Le Trio Joubran, Oumou Sangare, Hamid Drake, The Wailers, Adam Rudolph, Hassan Hakmoun, and hundreds of Gnawa musicians from across Morocco and even Tunisia.

Importance of the invitation and this project

The idea of bringing together the Mardi Gras Indian tradition with the Gnawa music is rich in its implication of bridging two cultures which resulted from shared ancestry and are both triumphs over the historic tragedy of slavery.  The Gnawa who perform at the Essaouira Gnawa and World Music Festival are vividly festooned in costuming of a vast color pallet representing an incomparable visual spectacle.  This opportunity to bring together the vivid colors of the Gnawa with exquisitely costumed Mardi Gras Indians will further enhance this unprecedented opportunity to bridge Gnawa music and songs with songs and chants from a New Orleans tradition that also dates back centuries.  There is additionally the interesting perspective of bringing together two music cultures that have also been informed by French and Spanish culture.  And since the opening of the festival includes a colorful processional of Gnawa (Gnaoua) through town, it is anticipated that the processional will be joined by the Mardi Gras Indians who themselves come from a rich marching tradition.  Donald Harrison has never performed at the Gnawa festival nor have any others representative of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition.  This will be a historic first collaboration.  

 Distinguished composer John Duffy

This is the first in a series of return engagements for interviews I’ve had the privelege of conducting with artists and others in the music down through the years.

Back in the early 1990s when I was director of the National Jazz Service Organization (NJSO) one of the board members who always had something useful, intelligent and erudite to say, at least in part because he was not someone readily identified with the jazz community — though a passionate supporter of the music nonetheless, was the distinguished composer John Duffy.  He’s the founder of Meet the Composer, a funding and service organization for composers which always considered jazz composers on par with European classical composers.  One conversation with John Duffy would quickly reveal that MTC outlook as a top-down philosophy because though his work as a composer was in the notated area more closely identified with European classical music and chamber music, John always had an open ear for the art of the improvisers and championed their cause.  The following interview was conducted in 1991 for an issue of the NJSO quarterly.

I think about John Duffy every time I’m reminded of the continued evolution of jazz music in the concert arena, particularly on those venerable stages that for most of their 20th century existence were the almost exclusive province of orchestra, opera and chamber music.  Thoughts of John’s views also come to mind whenever I hear music written and performed by artists more identified with jazz expression who endeavor towards a meeting of jazz and European classical forms, a musical coupling that one of our previous interviewees, pianist Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus, has pondered in their blog Do The Math.  And that’s actually the juncture where this conversation with John Duffy began.  Where exactly are we with this still nascent partnership or adversarial relationship circa 2009?  Read what John was saying towards the end of the 20th century; you be the judge, and your comments on the relationship of jazz and European classical music in today’s world are welcome below.

Where do you see jazz and classical music forms meeting?

John Duffy: I think now that jazz is the center, rather than the symphonic world, and jazz composers are bringing all of these currents — these cultural and ethnic currents, and the whole area of improvised and notated music to symphonic work, music theater work, dance work, work for big band… In other words the alignment has turned around and the exciting work that is coming is not being so much generated or initiated by the orchestras, but by jazz composers and people who work in various forms, whether its dance music, symphonic, chamber… [they] are in fact imbuing symphonic music and symphonic forms with the particular characteristic of jazz.  Number 1: improvisation; No. 2: notation, which is often quite different from the traditional notation for symphonic music or chamber music; No. 3: with this incredible vitality, spirit, and imagination [of jazz].

What would you say have been some truly memorable and meaningful meetings between the two forms?

JD: I think Julius Hemphill, both in his music theater, in his work for the Richmond Symphony, in his work for his own Septet; his work really stands out.  Ornette Coleman stands out ["Skies of America"]; Gerry Mulligan, the works that he wrote for symphony orchestra and himself as baritone saxophone soloist; Hannibal Peterson’s "African Portraits" [and "Diary of An African American"]; David Baker in his work; Don Byron in his work for dance; Billy Taylor in his work for the Julliard String Quartet working together with his group; George Russell in his big band and chamber works; and then the members of the World Saxophone Quartet: Bluiett, Murray, and Lake; [Marty] Ehrlich is also a person who has brought that kind of sensibility and that kind of cross-cultural spirit and extensions of these different forms, as has Leroy Jenkins.

One musician who you would probably include in that list, but who kind of denies that he is a jazz musician, would be Anthony Davis.

JD: Yeah, I agree…  This issue has overtones that come out of the long history of intolerance and racial discrimination in this country, where jazz and the music of black people — whether its hollers, blues, gospel music — which has influenced music throughout the world, has not been held in the regard that it should have been.  There’s a political overtone: there are some people who find the word jazz offensive — Max Roach does, and probably Anthony Davis, though I don’t want to speak for him.  What they want is the same kind of recognition that is afforded Isaac Stern, Copland, Bernstein, etc. and which is often not forthcoming.  Certainly Anthony Davis, when you listen to his operas, although the vocal lines very often sound like some that you would hear in Benjamin Britten’s operas, the accompaniments have most inventive blues and improvised characteristics to them, and they have rhythmic vitality and association that comes out of a jazz base.

Who from the classical side in recent times has expressed a sincere interest in working with jazz, jazz composers, jazz forms?

JD: In the past, of course Milton Babbit did — he has a background in music theatre and jazz; he wrote that work for jazz at Brandeis which commussions George Russell’s "All About Rosie".  Charles Wuorinen… more out of African drumming, but it has certain overtones from jazz; Ollie Wilson; Hale Smith…  I think that Morton Gould over the years, and certainly [Leonard] Bernstein over the years.  But what that music may miss is the spontaneity that improvised music can bring, and also the firm basis of life in jazz.  I think it makes a difference if you have a life in jazz, if you come out of that… 

To give you an example, and this may be far-fetched, it would be like Michael Jordan, fabulous basketball player, dazzling… he also loves baseball and he was dipping into baseball.  Now I don’t know how good he was [in baseball] but he certainly made a decision that he would move back to where his roots are.  I think also that its interesting when you hear Stravinsky’s jazz, from the work he wrote for Woody Herman… he wrote some jazz works.  He was dipping into that as was Copland, as was Milhaud.  They weren’t rooted in [jazz].  It’s like when you grow up in a certain neighborhood, you come from a certain background, no one has to tell you what the story is, you’ve got it right in your bones, in your muscles, it’s part of  your cultural life.

What do you think of some of the younger people from the classical community who have made inroads into jazz to some degree, people like Marin Alsop?

JD: I can’t comment on that too much, all I know is that she’s a fabulous musician and that she works from the heart and the guts.  I think that one of the things that does come through in this is that it’s also time that we start just referring to music as Music, just as we should start thinking in a more global way.

Do you think we’re too conditioned to labeling to turn back now?

JD: No, we’re not.  I think if you introduce Max Roach, he is a sublime musician; he is on the same level as Itzhak Perlman; [Max] is in fact more inventive in a certain sense, he can improvise, he writes music, and he doesn’t need to be introduced as Max Roach, the Black American jazz artist.

What examples of bringing these forms together have received support from Meet The Composer?

JD: Billy Taylor’s works for the Julliard String Quartet; a number of works by Muhal Abrams, almost all of the recent work of Hemphill; Geri Allen’s new music theater work for the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia; Hannibal Peterson’s "African Portraits"; [David] Baker; Jane Ira Bloom; Don Byron’s work for a dance company; Leroy Jenkins; Fred Ho; Max Roach…

One of the more troubling aspects of these masterworks has been the one-shot nature of their performance; beyond their concert premier there usually is no afterlife, particularly in the case of recording opportunities.

JD: No, I think that composers who don’t write works like that also face the same problem — whether they’re from African, Asian, European, Latin American ancestry… in terms of just the tolerance and political background; in terms of stylistically… whether it’s twelve-tone, jazz-influenced, minimalist, neo-romantic… The composers face the same kind of problems: #1: symphony orchestras, opera companies, chamber groups are flooded with works.  They’re trying to market works and they tend to lean towards the works that an audience is familiar with.  They have generally, especially symphony orchestras and opera companies, limited rehearsal, and instead of having leaders who commit themselves to the performances of new works, they look at their budgets and say ‘look, it’s gonna take us extra rehearsal to do a new work and it’s not going to match up with the box office, so there are economic questions… whether or not this is all true is doubtful.  I think it’s just that the audiences, or more, that the orchestras very often are run with a view that has to do with marketing and certain kinds of almost pathological habits of thinking.  And the other thing is that music directors are not around to provide leadership, they’re traveling all over the world.

Now in terms of the recording, it’s so expensive to record, especially symphonic work that even if you do a CD the expense… even with an arrangement with an orchestra whereby the orchestra will rehearse the work and perform it several times so that it’s still going to cost you [big dollars] to record, and very often those records don’t sell.  And it’s not only new works; if the New York Philharmonic were to record Haydn’s symphonies they’d probably be lucky if they sold 5,000 copies, so it’s an economic thing.  On the other hand you do have situations where you have Reich and Glass, who have a wide audience, who sell well.  But their work is not symphonic, it’s usually for their small ensembles.  If we can all start thinking of people just as composers, conductors, performers and begin to think in some kind of evolved state of mind so we think beyond these categories, beyond the labels and get a mind set that looks at the globe…

Next time: An archival conversation with the longtime genre fence-straddling flutist James Newton on this subject.