The powerful oratory and evolving political views of civil rights leader Malcolm X deeply influenced jazz musicians in the 1960’s, including John Coltrane, who saw parallels between his own search for liberation and Malcolm X’s message. 

 As a young man, Malcolm was famously passionate about music. In his autobiography, he boasts of how, as a shoeshine boy in Boston’s Roseland State Ballroom, he shined the shoes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, and other greats. As a young man in Harlem, Malcolm danced and played drums at jazz bars, under the stage name Jack Carlton. But when he joined the Nation of Islam, his views began to change. In 1950, while in prison, Malcolm penned a letter to a fellow Muslim, describing his love of jazz and its “comforting effects.” “My ace girl was Dinah Washington,” he wrote, “She’s still the greatest.” But the music also reminded him of his “sinful past”, and he vowed to indulge only in jazz performed by Muslim artists.

For the rest of his life, Malcolm X would try to balance his love of music with his political and religious commitments. In a 1964 speech, he underscored the importance of music to black liberation, stating that music was “the only area on the American scene where the black man has been free to create. And he has mastered it.” 

Malcolm’s personal papers are sprinkled with references to music, containing mentions of Thelonious Monk and his “Muslim Band,” the vocalist Dakota Staton, and a newspaper clipping of Duke Ellington’s State Department tour in Syria and Iran. 

While traveling in Africa, Malcolm immersed himself in the musical life of the newly independent states, visiting social clubs and dance centers, heartened by how they were trying to revive indigenous musical forms as part of their decolonization. At the Ghana Press Club, he took in a heady performance of highlife music, and—in Maya Angelou’s telling—tapped his fingers on his lap, but refused to dance. In Cairo, he hung out with African American jazz aficionados who were trying to create a “progressive” Afro-Asian genre to counter what was being broadcast by the State Department.

In a society where inequality, bigotry and injustice were the norm for African Americans, Malcolm said, “No wonder we do some of the things we do … no wonder we drink, dope and all sorts of things to soothe our soul … no wonder we so continuously have sought the lures of night life to create some sort of peace within ourselves … no wonder we have so longingly turned so often to music for its comforting effects.”

Music:  “The Opening” from Terence Blanchard’s “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite.”

Podcast (soundtrack): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

The 1950’s was a hopeful decade. People like Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. each successfully battled against segregation. Philadelphia’s bebop scene was blossoming. Cal Massey’s touring days were over, and he had started his own band with Albert Heath on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass, “C” Clarence Sharpe on alto sax and a seventeen–year–old pianist named McCoy Tyner. 

Still life as a musician was hard; there was never a steady income. Not one to give up easily, he began to produce his own concerts, giving them at his own house and organizing benefit concerts at the St. Gregory’s Church right across the street. Concerts that featured names as Rashaan Roland Kirk, Thelonious Monk, Elvin Jones and of course his close friend, John Coltrane. 

Then things got worse. On July 17, 1967 John Coltrane died from liver cancer at the age of 40. Then, on April 4th, 1968, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee.

Cal Massey had gotten involved with musicians that had a more radical attitude towards black liberation, including the Black Panthers, and during the Pan African Festival in Algiers he paid a visit to one of their early leaders, Eldridge Cleaver, who lived there in exile. Cleaver asked Cal Massey to write the Black Liberation Movement Suite dedicated to black leaders. Cal compiled this suite of some of his best work and wrote pieces dedicated to Malcolm X, Cleaver himself, Dr. Marten Luther King, Huey P. Newton and John Coltrane.

Back in Brooklyn Massey organized a series of historic benefit concerts to help the Black Panthers party of which 21 members were on trial. The first benefit concert premiered Massey’s Black Liberation Movement Suite. 

The Black Liberation Movement Suite is an unsung masterwork worthy of joining Mingus‘ “The Black Saint and the Sinner“, Oliver Nelson’s “The Afro–American Suite“, and Ellington’s Sacred Concerts. But while it is jazz on a scale of considerable musical and artistic grandeur, the BLM Suite is also a work of considerable socio–political significance, commissioned by The Black Panther Party and musically and ideologically expressing the revolutionary upsurge of the Black Liberation Struggle in the America of the mid to late 1960s. 

Music: From 1969, “Part 1: Prayer” from Cal Massey’s “Black Liberation Suite.“

Podcast (soundtrack): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

The Real Ambassadors was a vibrant mix of humor, social commentary and swinging music. And it couldn’t have existed if Dave Brubeck hadn’t taken over the world with Time Out, his epochal 1959 record with alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, bassist Eugene Wright and drummer Joe Morello — because The Real Ambassadors was a passion project and almost certainly a money loser.

The Real Ambassadors is a jazz musical developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Dave and Iola Brubeck, in collaboration with Louis Armstrong and his band. It addressed the Civil Rights Movement, the music business, America’s place in the world during the Cold War, the nature of God, and a number of other themes. It was set in a fictional African nation called Talgalla, and its central character was based on Armstrong and his time as a jazz ambassador.

In writing this work, the Brubecks drew upon experiences that they, and their friends and colleagues, had touring various parts of the world on behalf of the US State Department. The Brubecks and Armstrong (among many other musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington) were part of a campaign by the State Department to spread American culture and music around the world during the Cold War, especially into countries whose allegiances were not well defined or that were perceived as being at risk of aligning with the Soviet Union. 

Among the events referenced, directly or indirectly, were the 1956 student riots in Greece in which stones were thrown at the US Embassy, which dissipated following performances by Dizzy Gillespie; Louis Armstrong’s 1956 visit to Ghana as the guest of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah; and Armstrong’s dispute with the Eisenhower Administration and President Eisenhower personally over the handling of the 1957 Central High School Crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957, Armstrong canceled his state-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union after President Eisenhower refused to enforce court-ordered desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. “President Eisenhower should take these little children by the hand and lead them into that school” he erupted. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.” After Eisenhower eventually acquiesced, Armstrong participated in the program.

The Real Ambassadors was able to capture the often complicated, and sometimes contradictory, politics of the State Departments tours during the Cold War Era. Addressing African and Asian nation building in addition to the US civil rights struggle, it satirically portrayed the international politics of the tour. The musical also addressed the prevailing racial issues of the day, but did so within the context of satire.

Despite Iola Brubeck’s intention for some of her lyrics to be light and humorous in presentation, believing that some of the messages would be better received if presented in a satirical manner, Armstrong saw this performance as an opportunity for him to address many of the racial issues that he had struggled with for his entire career, and he made a request to sing the songs straight. In one 2009 interview, Dave Brubeck remarked: “Now, we wanted the audience to chuckle about the ridiculous segregation, but Louis was cryin’… and every time we wanted Louis to loosen up, he’d sing ‘I’m really free. Thank God Almighty, I’m really free’. After years of demeaning roles in his public performances, The Real Ambassadors offered Armstrong material that was closer to his own sensibility and outlook. 

Music: From a performance at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival, Louis Armstrong sings “They Say I Look Like God.”

Podcast (soundtrack): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS