Horace Tapscott - 2020 - Ancestral Echoes

Horace Tapscott & Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra

2020

Ancestral Echoes

01. Ancestral Echoes 18:58

02. Sketches Of Drunken Mary 10:06

03. Jo Annette 13:51

04. Eternal Egypt Suite 27:31

Alto Saxophone – Gary Bias, Michael Session

Baritone Saxophone – Amos Delone

Bass – David Bryant, Marcus McLaurine

Piano – Horace Tapscott

Congas – Moises Obligacion

Drums – Ishmael Balaka, Ricky Simmons

Flute – Adele Sebastian, Aubrey Hart

French Horn – Wendell C. Williams

Alto Clarinet – Herbert Callies

Alto Saxophone – Dadisi Komolafe

French Horn – Robert Watt

Piano – Linda Hill

Soprano Saxophone – Jesse Sharps

Tenor Saxophone – Charles Chandler, James Andrews 

Tenor Saxophone, Bass Clarinet – Fuasi Abdul-Khaliq

Trombone – Lester Robertson

Trumpet – Steven Smith

Tuba – Red Callender

Vocals [Poet] – Kamau Daáood

Recorded in January 1976

When pianist/composer/conductor Horace Tapscott founded the Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra (PAPA) in 1961, it was by design a support collective for all arts, bringing pride to the black community, specifically that of South-Central Los Angeles. PAPA signified social activism, teaching empowerment, and advocating Tapscott's belief that channeling African ancestral roots was a key to succeeding. Tapscott, who died in 1999, had forsaken wider recognition to bring music and teaching to his community, but his catalog has seen a revived interest with four recent reissues. Ancestral Echoes—The Covina Sessions, 1976, the latest from the Dark Tree label was something of an open-house jam session that likely included some Watts neighborhood musicians not documented for the credits.

PAPA worked as a rotation of musicians that often changed considerably from one project to another. Of the twenty-four known participants on Ancestral Echoes, only flutists Adele Sebastian and Aubrey Hart, and poet/percussionist Kamau Daéood, were part of the live 1972-1981 compilation Live at I.C.U.U. (Soul Jazz Records, 2019).

Daéood, at Tapscott's request, had written the verse that accompanies the pianist's nineteen-minute "Ancestral Echoes," a composition that appeared in a much shorter version on Daéood's Leimert Park (Mama Records, 1996). That album included Tapscott and his regular bassist Roberto Miranda. Daéood's recitation gives way to an extended Tapscott solo after two minutes, morphing into an orchestrated masterwork with electrifying solos from trumpeter Steven Smith and soprano saxophonist Jesse Sharps. Tapscott's quartet of Andrew Cyrille, Cecil McBee, and John Carter recorded "Sketches of Drunken Mary" on the seminal recording Dark Tree (HatOLOGY, 1989), over twenty years after this version. Flutist Hart and alto saxophonist Michael Session create a whirling back-and-forth dialog bookended by Tapscott's expansive solos. At nearly a half-hour, the closing track "Eternal Egypt Suite" features an ethereal Sebastian flute in its opening segment, shifting to an Afro-Cuban theme, free improvisation from tenor saxophonist Fuasi Abdul-Khaliq, and finally, a lush, orchestral finish.

Tapscott's music, particularly with the Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra, is traditional in a way we rarely think of as tradition. The pianist/composer created and fostered multiple generations of Watts musicians through the nurturing of a sweeping philosophy of autonomous and organic creation with origins in Africa and South- Central LA. The reality Tapscott presents on Ancestral Echoes, plays out at the crossroad of music and values.

By Stuart Broomer

The Los Angeles-based composer/ pianist/ bandleader Horace Tapscott (1934-1999) has long been overlooked, whether because of his Los Angeles base or his commitment to community-based music. Most of the few commercial recordings he made as a leader that were released during his lifetime (Dark Tree, Aiee! The Phantom and Thoughts of Dar Es Salaam) were recorded during his last decade and presented him with celebrated support, including clarinetist John Carter, bassists Cecil McBee and Reggie Workman and drummer Andrew Cyrille, suggesting to some extent an elitist, internationalized image of jazz. But Tapscott was very much a visionary community bandleader, his affinities more with Sun Ra than the music business, his relatively obscure orchestral recordings appearing on his own label or Nimbus West between 1978 and 1979.

Tapscott moved from Texas to Los Angeles as a child and played as a teenager with contemporaries like Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry and Billy Higgins. Remaining in Los Angeles, he suffered from the largely racially defined economics of West Coast jazz: on one hand a bland and airy school of moonlighting studio musicians playing music of smug prosperity versus the hard-edged Watts-centered radicalism embodied in the work of Ornette Coleman, Cherry and Dolphy, music that shocked New York hard boppers when it escaped East.

Tapscott’s great community project has come increasingly into view in recent years. The French Dark Tree label, founded by Bertrand Gastaut, is named for Tapscott’s composition and the eponymous Hat Hut recording, and it’s also the title of a book that includes Tapscott’s work, Steve Isoardi’s 2006 study Dark Tree: Jazz and The Community Arts In Los Angeles (University of California Press).

Gastaut’s Tapscott project began last year with Horace Tapscott with the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Great Voice of UGMAA: Why Don't You Listen?, Live at LACMA, 1998 , an intense union of orchestral and choral energies from the last year of Tapscott’s life. But Tapscott launched the band in 1961, almost three decades before that concert. Ancestral Echoes presents the band near the middle of that long run, in 1976.

There are four pieces, ranging from 10 to 27 minutes. Details of who plays on which track, apart from soloists, are unavailable, but there are 21 musicians in the list with three others added as possible participants. The band is called an Arkestra, and that’s no idle imitation: it’s a declaration of solidarity and identity, music played with an intensity that suggests it’s a way of surviving. The music sometimes suggests roots in Ellington, but more particularly Sun Ra, Coltrane and, especially, Randy Weston. It’s strong on polyrhythms and ostinatos with an abundance of bassists and reed and flute players. Many of the musicians’ names will likely be unfamiliar. The only ones that jumped out at me immediately were Red Callender, who gave Charles Mingus bass lessons, here playing tuba, and trombonist Lester Robertson, who played regularly with Gerald Wilson’s big band and may be most frequently referenced as the inspiration for Dolphy’s “Les.”

That lack of celebrity sidemen testifies only to the degree to which jazz is, in some dimensions, an almost anonymous art, a creative force outside celebrity that is, at many of its higher harmonics, a transformative, extra-personal force, an archetypal expression. The poet Kamau Daáood intones a poem at the opening of Tapscott’s “Ancestral Echoes” that invokes “the shoulders that have carried us here,” accompanied by Tapscott’s piano strings. When the words end, Tapscott plays a powerful solo that will reference folk songs and also suggest affinities and allegiances with his generation of pianist/composers, among them Muhal Richard Abrams and Andrew Hill, before settling on the complex ostinato that will bring the orchestra to the fore. The orchestra, a complex pulsing force, keeps pressing the soloists ‒ trumpeter Steven Smith and soprano saxophonist Jesse Sharps ‒ to reach individual peaks.

Tapscott’s “Sketches of Drunken Mary” is more richly orchestral, an Ellington throwback with wobbling rhythms and dissonant harmonies that drift toward Mingus. Alto saxophonist Michael Session plays with an emotionally rich blues flavor intermediate between Parker and Dolphy, while Aubrey Hart flutters forward on flute. “Jo Annette,” composed by alto saxophonist Guido Sinclair, an Arkestra member who doesn’t appear here, is closer to advanced hardbop than Tapscott’s own pieces, but it provides a strong bedrock for the rushing tenor saxophone extrapolations of Charles Chandler who stretches tumbling, Coltrane-like lines towards multiphonics, a kind of transparency that flows naturally to Wendell C. Williams’ burbling French horn.”

The final track is also the longest and most complex, “Eternal Egypt Suite,” composed by tenor saxophonist Fuasi Abdul- Khaliq. Moving through long solo passages by flutist Adele Sebastian (luminous) and Tapscott (pensive) it eventually collects its orchestral energies around a lock-step repeating figure in the third movement to launch trumpeter Smith. Then comes the fourth movement, Abdul-Khaliq’s own gathering firestorm a torrent of expressionist energy, first swarming and roiling against Tapscott’s insisting, ascending punctuations, then against the orchestra, then relaxing with Tapscott’s piano, only to build to a final paroxysm at once lyrical and manic, focussed and diffuse, before the ensemble encapsulation.

The liner booklet includes informative and moving reflections from several members and associates of the band, and a quote from Tapscott appears as epigram: “Our Music is contributive, rather than competitive.” It would have been nice if this music had appeared when it was made 44 years ago, but it’s just as significant that it appear now, with all its energy, meanings and relevance still intact.