Mary Schmidt Campbell on Educating the Next Generation of Black Artists frieze.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from frieze.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Cisco Bradley
12 February 2021
Bassist, composer, and scene-maker William Parker has a colossal figure in creative music since the 1970s, particularly as a musician who has defined the sound of New York beyond the mainstream. His range is astonishing, but so is his focus. His recorded output is vast, particularly lately.
Shying away from dealing with it all is understandable. Parker’s recordings as a leader exceed 100 albums, with sideman work particularly with Cecil Taylor, Charles Gayle, David S. Ware, and Matthew Shipp easily tripling that figure. How can we begin to grasp it all, particularly when the music ranges from modern jazz to free improvisation, from string quartet to vocal art songs?
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Bob Dylan and Tom Wilson in the studio. Source: Wikipedia.
Black History Month special: Tonight Sing Out salutes
TOM WILSON, the first African-American producer at a major record company (Columbia Records). The Harvard grad’s role in the recording studio in the 1960s changed all of our lives and pushed musicians to change the sound of music itself, from producing the first Sun Ra album in 1957 (on Wilson’s short-lived label Transition), the only collaboration between Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, electrifying Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence,” helping Bob Dylan go electric with “Like a Rolling Stone,” and that was just the start. Wilson produced the debut albums by Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, Velvet Underground, Soft Machine, solo Nico, many of the Animals’ albums, as well as Dion, Pete Seeger, Country Joe & the Fish, the Blues Project and dozens more.
Photos by Jill Steinberg
Iranian-American saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh has spent decades straddling two traditions, finding the commonalities, and using them to create something entirely new. Born in Durham, North Carolina to an Iranian father and an Irish/Russian mother, he came to jazz as a teenager, enraptured by Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, and Lester Young. âIt wasnât until I had to consciously consider who I was in this society and as a musician,â he says, that he was drawn to Persian music, despite having heard his father sing and play the
tombak (a type of drum) at home. Living in the Bay Area, he began studying with a traditional Persian musician, Mahmoud Zoufonoun, and soon perceived similarities between the two approaches to making music.