Audubon Ballroon (he/him)Randolph Edward "Randy" Weston (April 6, 1926 – September 1, 2018)
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#blackmen #blackpeople #blackamerican #blackjazzpianists #blackcomposers #blackmastodon #blackhistory #blackleaders
was [a Black] American jazz pianist and composer whose creativity was inspired by his ancestral African connection...
Described as "[US]'s African Musical Ambassador", Weston once said:
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"What I do I do because it's about teaching and informing everyone about our most natural cultural phenomenon. It's really about Africa and her music."
Biography
Early life
...his father was of Jamaican-Panamanian descent, a staunch Garveyite,
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who passed self-reliant values to his son.
...Among Weston's piano heroes were Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, and his cousin Wynton Kelly, but it was Thelonious Monk who made the biggest impact, as Weston described in a 2003 interview:
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"When I first heard Monk, I heard Monk with Coleman Hawkins. When I heard Monk play, his sound, his direction, I just fell in love with it. I spent about three years just hanging out with Monk. I would pick him up in the car and bring him to Brooklyn and he was a great master
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because, for me, he put the magic back into the music."
Early career: 1940s–'50s
...In 1951, retreating from the atmosphere of drug use common on the New York jazz scene, Weston moved to Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. There at the Music Inn, a venue where
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jazz historian Marshall Stearns taught, Weston first learned about the African roots of jazz. He would return in subsequent summers to perform at the Music Inn, where he wrote his composition "Berkshire Blues", interacting with artists and intellectuals such as Geoffrey Holder,
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Babatunde Olatunji, Langston Hughes and Willis James, about which experience Weston said: "I got a lot of my inspiration for African music by being at Music Inn.... They were all explaining the African-American experience in a global perspective, which was unusual at the time."
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1960s–70s
...In the 1960s, Weston's music prominently incorporated African elements, as shown on the large-scale suite Uhuru Afrika (1960, with the participation of poet Langston Hughes) and Highlife (full title: Music from the New African Nations featuring the Highlife),
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the latter recorded in 1963, two years after Weston traveled for the first time to Africa, as part of a U.S. cultural exchange programme to Lagos, Nigeria (the contingent also including Langston Hughes, musicians Lionel Hampton and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and singers Nina Simone and
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Brock Peters). On both these albums he teamed up with the arranger Melba Liston. Uhuru Afrika, or Freedom Africa, is considered a historic landmark album that celebrates several new African countries obtaining their Independence.
...In 1967, Weston traveled throughout Africa
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with a U.S. cultural delegation. The last stop of the tour was Morocco, where he decided to settle, running his African Rhythms Club in Tangier for five years, from 1967 to 1972. He said in a 2015 interview: "We had everything in there from Chicago blues singers to singers from
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the Congo.... The whole idea was to trace African people wherever we are and what we do with music."
...In the summer of 1975, he played at the Festival of Tabarka in Tunisia, North Africa... accompanied by his son Azzedin Weston on
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percussion, with other notable acts including Dizzy Gillespie.
In 1977, Weston participated in FESTAC, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos, Nigeria; other artists appearing there included Osibisa, Miriam Makeba, Bembeya Jazz,
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Louis Moholo, Dudu Pukwana, Donald Byrd, Stevie Wonder and Sun Ra.
Later career
For a long stretch Weston recorded infrequently on smaller record labels. He also made a two-CD recording The Spirits of Our Ancestors (recorded 1991, released 1992), which featured arrangements by
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his long-time collaborator Melba Liston. The album contained new, expanded versions of many of his well-known pieces and featured an ensemble including some African musicians, with guests such as Dizzy Gillespie and Pharoah Sanders also contributing.
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The music director was saxophonist Talib Kibwe... who subsequently continued in that role. The Spirits of Our Ancestors has been described as "one of the most imaginative explorations of 'world jazz' ever recorded."
...A five-night celebration of
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Weston's music took place at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1995, featuring gnawa musicians and a duet with saxophonist David Murray.
...An African Nubian Suite (2017) is a recording of a concert at the Institute of African American Affairs of New York University on
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April 8, 2012, Easter Sunday, with Cecil Bridgewater, Robert Trowers, Howard Johnson, T. K. Blue, Billy Harper, Alex Blake, Lewis Nash, Candido, Ayodele Maakheru, Lhoussine Bouhamidy, Saliou Souso, Martin Kwaku Obeng, Min Xiao-Fen, Tanpani Demda Cissoko, Neil Clarke and
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Ayanda Clarke, and the poet Jayne Cortez. Describing it as an "epic work", the Black Grooves reviewer wrote that The African Nubian Suite "traces the history of the human race through music, with a narration by inspirational speaker Wayne B. Chandler, and introductions and
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stories by Weston in his role as griot.... Stressing the unity of humankind, Weston incorporates music that 'stretches across millennia'—from the Nubian region along the Nile Delta, to the holy city of Touba in Senegal, to China's Shang dynasty, as well as African folk music and
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