JULY 2006/INTERVIEW/STEVE REID/PART II

This month the second exclusive instalment of Black Athena’s interview with the legendary jazz drummer Steve Reid is online. Steve talked to Black Athena about his insights on his time in Africa, working with the prodigious Sun Ra and spirituality in Jazz. Essential!


You hooked up with Fela Kuti during your time in Africa – what kind of impression did that leave you with?

Yeah I met Fela Kuti but I also met a brilliant Master Drummer, Guy Warren and he was very instrumental for me. He was really a pure African drummer and really well known over here, probably the premium African Drummer. His son is playing now. He’s a Guinean drummer - you have to check him out. I stayed at his house, then I joined his band over there, Leone Stars, and we travelled all over the continent playing, in Liberia, all over Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, that was a really good time, I was young and I was just trying drum all over.

It sounds like a massive learning experience?

It was, and it was good. It was a good chance to reverse the process too, if you’ve ever seen that story Roots on television, the story of the slavery on the boat, so I reversed it!!


…Like the Black Star Liner Marcus Garvey
Exactly

Did you feel that connection when you were there?

Oh yeah I felt welcome I knew where I came from. It’s important to know where you’re coming from cause people can be displaced from anywhere due to circumstances. It’s important sometimes that you find out a little bit about your roots, about your people you know what I mean?

I’m going back next year, I’m making a little trip to Dakar Senegal and Soul Jazz want to come along and record whatever we do. I just want to do something with the local musicians 40 years after I was there the first time, it should be exciting man.

Your time in Africa coincided with the Vietnam War so you were classed as a conscientious objector, was that something you felt very strongly about?

I was not gonna fight for no other army except mine! This is one thing that makes me happy now because at least we are one of the few countries in the world now where we don’t have a draft because of that. Over 60,00 people were locked up and they never told the world that but that’s one big reason why we don’t have it, so that’s one aspect I feel really good about.

Would you say your political views informed your artistic development at the time?

Oh yeah, I was a Black Panther man and I did a lot of stuff that I can’t mention on International Telephone cos they’re listening to everything (laughs). So that was always like a focal point and in that time we didn’t have the civil rights act so basically black people or anybody that wasn’t a white American was getting treated like a piece of sh*t. It’s still happening to some extent, but not like it was then when you couldn’t eat where you wanted to eat, or you couldn’t sleep where you wanted to sleep. Fortunately that’s changed at least and that was the same reason people had to go into the system. That time was a very exciting renaissance time - the time of Woodstock and free love and money wasn’t the number one thing then. Now money is number one so people go for that, nothing is free now, not even ideas so everybody wants to make money, they say if you think this way or write this way or play this way you’ll make money and if you don’t then you won’t.

And people sell anything.
Oh man you can sell a rock. You can sell water. You’ll be selling air soon, in a canister (laughs). This is what’s wrong you cannot associate popularity with quality. The say “oh but it’s not really popular, so it can’t be all that”.. but this is the whole point – not everything’s meant for mass consumption.

A lot of Jazz musicians from that era turned to Islam – what do you think the inspiration for that was?

That had happened years ago, in the 40’s Art Blakey was one of the early people to turn to Islam. His name was Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, and there’s one album where they call it Buhaina's Delight and when he made that album he was a Muslim. So that was happening and Yusef Lateef and a lot of older guys that got into it so it wasn’t like a strange thing it was pre Bin Laden (laughs). McCoy Tyner is a Muslim, Ahmad Jammal, so there were a lot of guys into it at that time Shahib Shihab. It wasn’t anything strange at that moment, it wasn’t political it was just personal. Just like Herbie Hancock being a Buddhist.
Musicians have always taken a personal spiritual path. You need spiritual support cause it’s a job of long suffering. You have to plant your seed before you can have a harvest and the whole thing is about surviving while the seed is generating (laughs) and that’s really the tricky part, but I feel really happy to have been blessed in my life. I’ve had a few rough spots man but I met some great people along the way and played some great music and that’s the most important thing – I’ve had some great audiences, and that’s the way I like to look at it. Somehow I’m always taken care of in the scheme of things, that’s why this thing we’re carrying doesn’t surprise me. It’s something that’s meant to be. Maybe we can open up another way so that people can hear things a little differently and feel good about it. That’s what I want to generate through the music and people have got to be happy and feel good. Music and art have a lot of power - if a person feels good they’re gonna treat somebody else good and then another good thing is going to happen, that’s the way the planet has got to be working. If it wasn’t for the music and the art, the planet would have been blown up by these madmen!
Do you know that Max Roach record “We Insist” that’s a classic from that period that’s the only Max Roach record I have, I really like that one, it represents that certain period there that we were just speaking about.


So after Africa you started to work with Sun Ra is that right?

Yeah I did, on and off for many years. I worked with him on and off and I would come back ten years later and then just disappear again.

He was notoriously strict with his musicians did you find his methods unusual?

Well if you have a big band you have to have some type of discipline, so he had his ways just like I have my ways. And especially when you’re dealing with 11-16 guys you have to have something worked out. Otherwise it would just be chaos.

Which it was sometimes anyway I suppose?

Yeah but it was always purposeful. It’s like if you heard the band many times they could play old Fletcher Henderson compositions and then the next time they would play Space Is The Place. So it wasn’t really like people think it is and it’s still not. I just saw them the other night at the triptych festival and it made me feel kind of sad to see how old they were. Before they played we were talking and they were with the costumes and then you see them go up there. And once the music started it was cool but was kind of sad. There’s really no more bands left now it’s kind of sad, only pop bands, pop or rock bands, there’s no other kind of proper music bands going on. Isn’t that crazy?

When you see footage of Sun Ra you get the impression that something else was going on with him and his musicians beyond simple musical terms.

Of course, it’s the unseen, which is where the music comes from - that’s where all music comes from, that’s where everything comes from. It comes from the unseen and then it is seen which is the final stage and which is like the death. So the music has always been cosmic in nature even Miles and Trane, that sh*t was cosmic in nature, Jimmy Hendrix was cosmic where there’s something else in there besides the regular notes. It’s just the invisible thing, just like when I play that’s happening. There’s something else in there and I’m just transmitting it. It’s just flowing through me it’s not mine. Guys have to take their ego out of this sh*t it doesn’t belong to anybody. Once you approach it that way, it’s not a self-thing it’s a we thing.

So you had to be a part of his culture to understand the whole concept?

That’s the way. That’s why black people are so good at the music cause that’s all we had. Through the religion and the stuff we had, in my estimation the creator put us in charge of the world’s music. To keep it up and pumping and basically that’s what the guys have been doing. The music was invented by black people but can be played by anyone - that’s how I view it - look at Miroslav Vitus or Boris Netsatatayev, the young Russian guy in my band, he’s fantastic. I’m very fortunate to have him for all these years. He’s got another gateway - he writes music for German television so he gets a lot of money for that I’m happy he doesn’t have to depend on me to pay his rent!


Tell us a little about your label Mustevich Sound.

Well the name is the word music with the word Steve in the middle. Most people thought it was a foreign record company, which was really good for me at the time (laughs). I ended up licensing the recordings out to Soul Jazz records a couple of years ago, and I think I’m gonna put out one more this year with Charles Tyler and Arthur Blythe called ‘Odyssey of the Oblong Square’. It’s a live radio recording made in New York in ‘76 it’s really heavy stuff man. You should try to find that before they put it out. I’m trying to record another record with my ensemble. Personally I don’t believe in doing too many recordings in a short time because what you’re doing is not letting each record go as far as it can go. So that’s more of a pop thing, I like to do a good record and let it sink in for 18 months or something then think about it and go back, so each one is completely different. That’s what the people like, they like to see that you’re still searching.

I’m creating a new thing every night. A record is just a moment in that period and that’s the way I look at it otherwise it’s just commercial if you have to play the same thing the same way, every night which is what the audience wants. It’s not fun. I did a lot of that kind of work but it was not commercial it was fresh and real at the time, with Fats Domino and Peggy Lee.

You know, we need a book written about what happened with the music after Coltrane left. We only really have two books Valerie Wilmer’s “As Serious As Your Life” and other one is Frank Kofsky’s “Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music” but I think it’s called now “John Coltrane And The Jazz Revolution Of The 1960s” those are the only two books. But none of them deals with what happened after and it would be an interesting story. About what happened to the music after Trane left, when Hendrix left, something happened. I reckon that the system came in, it’s like when people have a leader, Trane was a leader of a certain movement in the music and when he left there was no guy that we could point to and say now he’s successful and he is playin this kind of sh*t so the system like moved in and stomped it out, that’s what happens. It’s like when they take away your hero and we didn’t have that young hero at that time to run up and replace him.

Do you think the system wanted to control what was happening in jazz and music generally because it was getting too powerful?

Music leads to free thinking and once people change their thinking all types of things can happen positive and negative. Change your mind and you change your life so the system has always tried to control what the public hears and tried to keep them on a hypnotic diet or something where they can ‘t think but just feel it, it’s just like during the world wars jazz was played even in places like Nazi Germany, underground in people’s cellars, so it has always been a struggle but the music and politics are not in any way hooked up together, it’s two separate entities. Politics is a game, it’s unreal you have to be a liar to be in it, into manipulation, whereas music comes from somewhere pure. The politics is the sh*t of this world. I get mine regardless of me stepping on your head.


Was Mustevic Sound an experiment in artistic freedom?

Well we wanted to record for Bluenote, for Impulse, for Columbia, Atlantic, whatever.
But this gave us artistic freedom. That same group on Nova the Master Brotherhood used to tour with Alice Coltrane’s group and she was always telling Impulse ‘oh you should sign these guys they’re playing something a little different’. And they finally approached us but didn’t really want to pay any money. That’s the type of vibe that was around; Trane was gone so you couldn’t have anybody demanding.
In your live performance it was really obvious that you were channelling the music and that it was a complete physical and mental experience for you.

Yeah, I want people to feel it too that’s the whole thing that, there’s some happiness and it’s not all serious. This one now, this one is to make you feel good for the evening or something and to me that’s important right now. Some happiness were you can see somebody having fun and then they start having fun and before you know it everybody says: “oh man I feel better”. It’s like being the exorcist or something cos I can feel at the end everybody is very happy. We did a tour with Gilles Peterson in the UK and there was a gangster rap act that came behind us and they were telling people “ah man what’s going on, you’re full of sh*t “ and the crowd started booing them because we had been preaching the other thing. The love thing. We did the drum story in there. It just goes to show you how the system works and that’s why they keep certain things like that.