Bush Country By Ellis Marsalis The black community to the best of my knowledge which included some HBCUs (Historical Black Colleges and Universities) were never a big supporter of jazz music. Theres a lot of reasons for that. This may or may not be the format to discuss this in its entirety. There were exceptions, people like Alvin Batiste, who I met in elementary school, became a great clarinetist and university professor at Southern University @ Baton Rouge which is about 80 or 90 miles outside of New Orleans. Harold Batiste was a mentor to me being about 3 years ahead of me in the collage at Dillard. The faculty at Dillard University was not supportive of jazz music. Our cross town catholic school was not supportive of jazz music. So people that I met up with who attended other HBCUs it was that case all around. Jazz was not supported within the framework of black communities. I think theres a lot of sociological and historical reasons for that. When it came done to it we had to nurture each other. We played whenever we could. The first group that sort of came out of that nurturing process was Ed Blackwell who was a fantastic drummer and recorded on the BayFO Local label of Harold Battiste before he left and went to New York. Mostly Black people are Protestants, now I lived in a city where there was a size able number of Catholics. Xavier University was not friendly towards jazz music and the students who went there making their music had to tread very lightly. An important ingredient came from what is referred to as the black church. What needs to be recognized there is that one umbrella called the Pentecostal. At one time Pentecostal were the holy rollers, the sanctified church and maybe one or two other kinds of sects if you will. I remember going to a sanctified church in Mississippi with some of my cousins when I was very young. The religious expression included a minister with a guitar, singing, people with tambourines and members of the congregation would get up and dance as a form of religious expression. Which in some ways is probably as close to what one would get to what happens in the bush country in Africa. Where there are dances that coincided with some spiritual aspects of what was taking place as well as some secular. These are American terms. You go back to the Bush Country in Africa and they wouldnt even know what your talking about.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 05:34:05 +0000
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