This first post is dedicated to the song from which I got the idea for this username, which will inevitably change, as all things must. Writing this post then, will be a little exercise in institutional memory because the only art we must forget is the art of forgetting :)
The Robert Glasper Experiment - Afro Blue (Feat. Erykah Badu)
I’d heard this song many times before. But it was only recently that I found myself in a place and time where both the lyrical content and sonic baseline of this composition called on something deep inside of me. I didn’t and still don’t know exactly where it is calling me. Following it, I learned all about the magical origins of this song and the peoples who have given it both a literal and figurative breath of life in its various stages of existence.
A version my generation can easily recall is Robert Glasper’s musical rendition alongside Erykah Badu’s soulful vocals. But the first person to map the song’s music in a music sheet that only existed in his head was Mongo Santamaria. The roots of his beat have roots that reach long and deep into Africa. I’ll start with Mongo.
Many consider Mongo Santamaria the best conga drummer of the 20th century. Santamaria was an Afro Cubano born on the island in 1917 and not too long after learned rumba as a kid in the streets of Havana’s Jesús María barrio. He reminisced: “In the neighborhood where I came from we had all kinds of music, mostly from Africa. We did not leave it alone; we changed it our way. The music we made dealt with religion and conversation. The drum was our tool and we used it for everything". Gerard, a composer, saxophonist and Santamaria fan points out: “Santamaría, like other drummers of his generation, learned music in the streets by observing different drummers. When he started playing professionally, he learned on the job. His approach was utilitarian, not theoretical”.
Santamaria, like so many of, engaged an activity out of necessity. A necessity to feed the hunger pains in his gut. But I know that from a different place in his gut, the human need and will to create also called his hands to the congas.
It was in 1959 that Santamaría recorded "Afro Blue," the first jazz standard built upon a typical African 3:2 cross-rhythm, or hemiola. A cross-rythm, or hemiola, is a staple African soundscape which can also be referred to as a “perfect fifth”. A hemiola means that the upper note makes three vibrations in the same amount of time that the lower note makes two.
A perfect fifth is a dialogical harmony between notes. It’s elegance is sonic, and it is theoretical, and it is attitudinal. A hemiola is a two-dimensional attitude to rhythm where two beats are in constant conversation-no one beat dominates. Two beats exist in one song. Because of this, the song exists in, and only exists because of, constant contradiction. Is it one song, then? Or is it two? Only the Western analytical mind would insist on division in the name of analysis.
Victor Kofi Agawu, a music scholar from the Volta Region of Ghana succinctly states: "The resultant 3:2 rhythm holds the key to understanding . . . there is no independence here, because 2 and 3 belong to a single gestalt”. A gestalt is an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.
David Penalosa is devoted to the study of Afro-Cuban and related music genres. He argues that from the philosophical perspective of the African musician, cross-beats can symbolize the challenging moments or emotional stress we all encounter. Playing cross-beats while fully grounded in the main beats, prepares one for maintaining a life-purpose while dealing with life’s challenges. Many sub-Saharan languages do not have a word for rhythm, or even music. From the African viewpoint, the rhythms represent the very fabric of life itself; they are an embodiment of the people, symbolizing interdependence in human relationships. Said another way, Santamaria says: “When I play, I don’t know how I do it, or what I do ... I just play”. For him, there is no distinction between playing and being. Mongo’s sensibilities found a way into the lyrics of the song, too.
In 1960, lyrics were added by prolific songwriter Oscar Brown. The words to the song describe a “beautiful girl”, an “elegant boy”, who together dance for joy in an elegant swirl with varying shades of delight- cocoa hues, rich Afro blues. Whispering trees echo their sights, and passionate pleas are met with tender replies. The singer’s “slumbering fantasy assumes reality...the two are you and me”. The lyrical content of the song is another dimension of cross beat harmony. These beautiful lyrics are later be interpreted by Dianne Reeves, and American grammy-winning jazz singer, and Erykah Badu, the high priestess of what most people refer to as “neo-soul”.
In 1963 John Coltrane recorded his cathartic version of "Afro Blue" with the great jazz drummer Elvin Jones. Their warping rendition testifies to the song’s elastic capabilities, or perhaps it testifies to music’s demand that every generation questions the basis of the beat. Perhaps these are one and the same.
Jones inverted the metric hierarchy of Santamaria's composition, performing it instead as duple cross-beats over a 3/4 "jazz waltz" (2:3). This 2:3 in a swung 3/4 is perhaps the most common example of overt cross-rhythm in jazz. Almost 40 years later, the song would experience another (r)evolution.
In 2012, American jazz pianist and hip/hop producer Robert Glasper recorded his fifth studio album, Black Radio. The album won the category Best R&B Album at the 55th Grammy Awards. Glasper enlisted the soulful vocals of Erykah Badu, and together they gave life to the latest popular incarnation of the song. In doing so, they carry on with the right and responsibility of all artists- the creative endeavor of remaking, remixing, and re-cognizing the physical and metaphysical materials of their artistic projects. The presence of the perfect fifth, however, lives on.
4 we beat the perfect 5th
Santamaría once said “You can’t learn to play things like guaguancó here.... You have to have been where it came from.... You can’t listen to records and get those feelings”. How are those of us who have not yet or will ever be called to play, but already hear the calls to listen to these soundscapes implicated in all of this? Of course, I am not exactly sure. But I do know is that If we listen 4 the beat inside our chest with an open mind on a quiet day, we may hear the perfect 5th beating from within. The soundscape of the pumping organ inside our chest is calling upon us, demanding that we mirror the intangible essence of the hemiola in our words and in our actions; the beat demands that we lend it our arms and eyes and legs and make it real in the flesh.
