Public Culture and Visual Sounds: An Exposé Every generation needs a griot in music and art. Black American writers feel this all well!! Ellison understood that as he reflected on Duke in his days. Baraka recognized it when he hung in the Village chasing Trane during the Beatnik era. Baldwin, too sensed this in Monk and Miles. I, too sense it in my peers, all of them, but one in particular is Stacy Dillard. These American griots are heroic figures in a certain sense: daring and witty as he overcomes the chaos of city life to lead us into the Promised Land. One whose storytelling embodies the complicated nature of sadness and joy. When the American cities blew up in racial flames, it was our Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Bird, Cannonball and John Coltrane who took those forces of nature--improvisation, swing, and the blues---and made them speak to the conditions of our culture with such sophisticated genius and pure beauty. And still today our world is hampered by black lives matter and economic inequality. But the artists takes us pass all of this to put us in touch with our deeper selves. He plays against the dichotomies of music and culture: love and hate, war and peace, with the intent to resolve it or not. But this is the hypocrisy of the blues! Two warring ideas, fleeing and fighting, contending against the dark realities of our modern civilization. On many nights at Smalls, a jazz club in the Village, tenor saxophonist Stacy Dillard digs deep inside his warm spirit to show us a brighter path. His playing captures the body and soul of real music. He comprehends the musical notes of loneliness, fear, and the hypocrisy of joy in the face of death. There is an ole soul that lives in his playing: the marvelous timeless gestures of Hank Mobley or Harold Land. But then in the wee hours of a weekend night when most patrons have left for the night, something deep within his playing rises to the surface. Frightening and yet real, large, looming over our heads, it embraces us all like the spirit of the ancestors coming to take her children home. He is our griot, our soothsayer of some kind who not only pushes against the cultural conflict we all feel, but steady begs us all to come deeper still into that rhythm of life. Wont you come? Stacy Dillard
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 21:52:52 +0000
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