(Left) Benjamin Barson. Photo by Shelly Woodson
(Right) Arturo O'Farrill. Photo by Joshua Bright for The New York Times
(Right) Arturo O'Farrill. Photo by Joshua Bright for The New York Times
On Friday, June 22nd, I sat down with Benjamin Barson, Production Manager at Ginny’s Supper Club Red Rooster Harlem, to discuss his most recent project, in collaboration with Arturo O’Farrill’s Grammy Award Winning Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and El Museo Del Barrio.
Katrina De Wees: Can you start with an introduction of yourself?
Benjamin Barson: Sure, my name is Benjamin Barson; I’m a baritone saxophonist, producer, activist and intellectual. I am currently employed by The Red Rooster in Harlem, where I’m the production manager of all of the music and live events, which is more of a liaising with the artists, and making sure their technical and hospitality needs are met. But I also have a role in shaping the curatorial element, what bands should be booked, and the message we are trying to communicate in our programming. And I share that responsibility with another individual named Andre Torres, who is the Editor-In-Chief of Wax Poetics, which is a really hot magazine. When I’m not at Red Rooster, I’m also participating in a number of events which I would describe as political. For instance, Salim Washington who is a Saxophonist and is the head of Jazz studies and Brooklyn College, and I, are playing for Colia Clark, an African-American, female, Green Party candidate tomorrow evening. We are also playing tonight for a benefit at The Maysles for a political prisoner Sekou Odinga. And before that, we also played with the same configuration at a benefit and a launch of an international campaign around a political prisoner named Russell Maroon Shoats, who is a former Black Panther party member who’s been in solitary for thirty years. So I’m trying to find the sort of fragile and fertile ground between activism and art, because especially in music it has a really rich tradition that has been somewhat obscured within Jazz recently, and that is something that I feel really strong about bringing back to the forefront of musical and political movements. And, on that note I also work with a collective of artists and activists, who call our meetings scientific soul sessions, and we put on these sorts of events that combine radical politics and avant-garde art.
KD: And who else is involved with the scientific soul?
BB: Scientific Soul is comprised of this gentleman I just mentioned: Salim Washington, Fred Ho, who’s an internationally renowned Baritone Saxophonist, and activist who among other things helped found the Asian-American Arts movement, but more specifically the Asian-American Jazz Movement which was really prominent in the 80’s. And he also was involved with the I Wor Kuen, which was sort of the Asian American Articulation of the Black Panther party. They organized Chinatown and fought successfully for a hospital there and then he sort of has the movement experience, and music experience. He’s also a Guggenheim recipient. Joel Kovel, who I believe is a MacArthur recipient, but more importantly he’s a long term anti-racist, anti-Zionist eco-socialist activist and intellectual who was actually dismissed from Bard [College] for writing a book that was critical of Israeli policies of Palestine. A woman named Day Star who’s a Native American activist and also an activist in the green party. My Friend Quincy Saul, an intellectual and clarinet player and also an activist around eco-socialism. So it’s a polyphony of different voices, but it’s a majority people of color, majority women and tries to confuse art and politics into a dynamic whole. So that’s really where the core of my political identity is.
KD: Awesome. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. So Ben, How did you get involved with Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra? How did it all come together?
BB: All these different spheres happened on their own, and then moved together in this really interesting way. So for instance, I met Arturo as a student, I was attending Hampshire College but I took a Jazz Improv and ensemble class at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. Arturo was the visiting professor of Jazz and he was such a great teacher, he was so alive and dynamic and really knew how to get to the heart of what made the music speak, and it wasn’t about… you know it’s interesting, I was just speaking to someone about music theory, and they were like: “Isn’t theory like cultural theory, and isn’t that what theory is? Understanding what is the relationship between oppression and politics and art, and how does modernity and capitalism shape art?” You know, these kind of larger historical questions, and their relationship to art. Where in music, music theory is a very European derived concept of the physics of sound, and what makes music, which is very narrow, and specific and came about a specific point of history of Europe, and so, in many ways, my experience of music theory was really alienated because I didn’t really feel like I fit into that paradigm, and really, really famous African-American musicians like Charlie Parker have been turned into a new theory as opposed to a living expression of a history of people, right!
So Arturo brought it back to that living thing. Even if he
didn’t really articulate it like that, you really could feel that. He was like,
man, I’m playing a minor chord, look,
I’m playing a major third on it, you know, which you can’t do, but he was doing
it in this crazy line, that was really rhythmic and intense and really
beautiful, and it was really hot. And it was cool. It didn’t mean don’t listen,
and throw all your sensitivity out the window; but it means, you don’t have to
imprison yourself to this concept of aesthetic perfection, which is a really
European concept, which isn’t so much routed in the actual people that actually
created what we call Jazz. So, Arturo was great, and you know, we didn’t really
know each other that well, but I expressed an interest in working with him, and
actually coincidently, he played frequently near my really good friends house
Julian Litwack, in Park Slope [Brooklyn]. He played at this club called Puppets,
which was really intimate and is now closed, it was a really cool hang. It was
him [Arturo O’Farrill], every week, with this trio. You would get to see this
amazing pianist, blending classical, and jazz, and rumba and all these Latin
traditions in this really postmodern synthesis, but not pretentiously
postmodern. Like very much, matter of factly, really cool. And, you know, it
took some time before I was able to approach him as a college graduate, and I
expressed interest, in helping out with his nonprofit, the Afro Latin Jazz
Alliance.
So, essentially what Arturo did was he took his Grammy-winning,
esteemed Latin Jazz ensemble called the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, which plays
the sort of repertory of the music and also expands it, he took that and he
turned the whole thing into a non-profit organization; which not only does
performances, but also does cultural exchange with Cuba, and advocates for the
end of the blockade, and teaches lower income students of color in the Bronx
and Manhattan and hopefully soon Brooklyn, the legacy of this music, and
instrumental music more generally, since music programs in New York City public
schools are basically non-existent, and certainly don’t afford instruments;
which is another reason why this music is increasingly played by children of
the middle class, and mostly white. And so he’s trying to reverse that trend, I
think it’s a really noble thing. So I reached out to him. I said, I’m really
interested in what you do, and we sort of built a relationship out of that, and
we sort of progressed. Is that sufficient? I mean, I could keep going…
KD: That’s definitely sufficient. Thank you. In your introduction, you spoke a bit about the work you do at Red Rooster, but how did you get involved specifically with Ginny’s Supper Club?
BB: Well, I was speaking about Fred Ho, previously, and Fred
has really been this north star for me, in terms of how to have this
politically engaged artistic life, and how to have an artistically engaged
political life, and one of the artist’s he’s really interested in as a
historical figure and as an influence in his music is Cal Massey. Cal Massey
was a 1960’s jazz composer and political activist and radical who wore his
militant politics on his sleeve. And even though he was hanging out with
Coltrane and even though Charlie Parker recorded a lot of his music, and actually
Charlie Parker’s first Latin tune, Fiesta,
was a Cal Massey composition, and even though Coltrane’s first Album had a Cal
Massey composition named Bakai, even
though he taught Lee Morgan, and gave McCoy Tyner his first professional gig at
17, and all these greats that really went on to make history, he’s nowhere in
the history books, or the Jazz anthologies. He’s nowhere in the Ken Burns
documentary on Jazz, he’s just not even mentioned as a footnote. And, the
reason is instead of being recorded by Blue Note [Records], he was being
commissioned by Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther party to write works such
as the Black Liberation Movement Suite, which was a nine movement suite that
paid homage to, in addition to Eldridge, (which maybe was just a reflection of
his commissioning of the suite), Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey,
etc.
And Cal Massey actually also played at the original Red
Rooster, which the contemporary Red Rooster is sort of a historical imaginative
recreation. So I brought this to the attention of Marcus Samuelsson, who is the
Chef and Owner, and is really interested in bringing back this history and music
and culture to the community through the vehicle of a restaurant, which has a
certain prominence in contemporary life.
But also as a person of Ethiopian descent who was raised in Sweden and
has now immigrated to Harlem, saw in Fred a really brave and imaginative
intervention in Black culture and history since Fred is Chinese-American. So we
put this work together, and with a lot of gracious support from Red Rooster, and
what would become Ginny’s (at that time it was called the Red Rooster downstairs),
we premiered this work with a 16 piece big band, and I was playing baritone
saxophone for it, but I was also producing it, I also did a lot of the
publicity for it, I brought a lot of different communities out, people from the
movement, people from the political prisoner movement, and people from the art
world; people that were just Red Rooster customers, who had a lot of
interesting experiences on their own, and tried to create this really lush,
continuum of people and life through that music. That was great, because it
showed that we can do this really important work, and it can still be popular
and can still bring revenue to the restaurant which is ultimately how it
survives. And so it’s not a dichotomy between supporting important art that has
a progressive message and history and is also progressive in terms of its own
aesthetic, and the intelligence created behind it, and also creating buzz and
revenue. So that’s the beginning of Ginny’s.
Since then, they’ve gone on, and they’ve had Roberta Flack
there, and other acts of this nature. But the next piece that I helped produce
was this work with Arturo O’Farrill, and he produced and composed a new suite
called The Offense of the Drum which
we just premiered at Red Rooster Ginny’s.
KD: On
Tuesday [June 19th, 2012]
BB: Yes.
KD: Can you explain, in brief, the ideas behind The Offense of the Drum, and your experience inside the work?
BB: Arturo came to the Cal Massey show, and really liked
what he saw, and we spoke on the phone and had a relationship, I’ve taught for
his non-profit, I’ve done fundraising, I’ve done media outreach on his behalf,
and we are very close, and he was telling me about how he’s been thinking about
similar themes, partly as a result of Occupy Wall Street, and partly as a
result of the stop and frisk activities, partly on the part of the actions of
the police and partly on the campaign around it, and he’s become more
interested in politics. He’s always been interested in politics, but now it’s
becoming more integrated into his artistic life, and he said:
“I’m thinking about
writing this suite. I’m thinking about drumming, and how drumming was used in Zuccotti
Park. All the libraries and all the health care stuff is on the east
side, but on the west side there were a lot of anarchists and a lot of drumming.
And I was thinking about [Mayor] Giuliani cracking down on the
drumming circle, and I was thinking about the drumming there, and I was
thinking about the drums 400 years ago, used amongst the slaves to communicate
resistance, and create a common culture and common language, and that’s where
this music comes from.”
And I was so moved to hear he not only was working in the
direction, but he wanted to bring that to Ginny’s Red Rooster and have me be a
part of it. So I set it up, Marcus and Andy Chapman, the other owner of Red Rooster,
and Arturo and Arturo’s manager Eric Oberstein and I sat down and started
discussing different ways we could work this into the Supper Club environment;
and maybe specifically have a Cuban menu and cocktails to evoke that
experience, but also, could we collaborate with a visual arts institution that
was doing similar work. And immediately what came to my mind was El Museo Del
Barrio, since they are the representatives, culturally speaking of East Harlem,
and the Puerto Rican Diaspora, and Latin Americans more generally in the United
States. And coincidentally enough, they were doing this exhibit with The Studio
Museum in Harlem and the Queens Museum of Art called Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, which was exploring a lot of
these same themes.
The Caribbean was a site of struggle and resistance with
Maroon communities that actually survived for hundreds of years, and became
independent as a site of drumming. And drumming as a site of really rich
evocative experience, but also had something that was social and historical.
So, for instance, in the English colonies, drumming was banned. Because, In
1739, in South Carolina there was an event called The Stono Rebellion when 20
slaves overpowered their master of the plantation and escaped and got their
drums and weapons, and went to a hilltop outside Charleston, and started
drumming, and they summoned dozens, and their ranks raised to more than one
hundred. And that’s really intense, because they all heard this drum, and we
might all be from West Africa, and we might all have these different cultures
and histories that don’t necessarily overlap, but we all know what that
[drumming] means. Obviously the revolt/revolution
[Stono Rebellion] didn’t succeed otherwise we would have had a different
history, but what it spoke to was not only the drum as a weapon, but the fact
why the English actually banned the drum, under the American colonialist. They
clearly saw a threat, whereas in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, like
Brazil and Cuba, they weren’t as adamant about banning this music, and that’s
why in Cuba and all these music’s you have all these rich polyrhythmic
expressions. Robin [D. G.] Kelley and other people have written about this,
about [how] polyrhythm represents a unity in the diaspora. So you have all
these different identities that are being articulated within these overlapping
rhythms because really that speaks to a differentiated and split concept of
self which… but not one that is antagonistic, but one that is fusing all these
rhythms together into a beautiful song. And that’s really what it means to be a
modern human being. More so than being a European sovereign identity, but being
this split subject with multiple histories and multiple experiences. And that’s
what Caribbean: Crossroads really
spoke to, that difference, that unity, the experience of racism and imperialism
and colonialism, and how that was overcome, and how that was internalized in
the subject. And to me music represents all those things and the drum
specifically. And so The Offense of the
Drum, is looking at the drum now as a political tool in Zuccotti Park, it’s
looking at the drum historically as a metaphor and an actuality of African
diasporic culture and history, and how it brought all these different people
together. And so, I was so excited to bring this work to Ginny’s because I
thought that this is really what the community of Harlem needs, this is what
the music community needs, and this is what we need to be talking about right
now in 2012.
KD: Thank
you so much for breaking that down so eloquently.
BB: I’m just seeing if I can find that…
KD: The [Édouard
Glissant] quote?
BB: Yes.
KD: So, were you saying, [just before our interview began that] Édouard Glissant, an actual quote of his was a work of art on view, or was there a work that was referencing that quote?
BB: No, well, one of the works [at El Museo Del Barrio] that
was in a glass box was his book, but it was illustrated by a great artist (that
I don’t know the name of), but I thought it was so cool that his work was
featured…
KD: I don’t know if you know, but Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich curated a show [Be Black Baby, June 16th 2011] that took place last summer, at a small gallery called Recess, and it was kind of looking at Haiti, [and the larger Caribbean], and she invited a few scholars to speak specifically about Glissant’s work, and that was how I was first introduced to him, and after that I was reading some of his stuff. He was an incredible theorist that I think is certainly under discussed.
BB: Yea, well, because the Caribbean is not acknowledged,
which is why it’s so cool you guys [Studio Museum, El Museo and Queens Museum]
did this work, because it’s not really seen as a site of historical importance,
or cultural production, and the cool thing about Glissant is he’s not really
writing theory, which is why he can kind of get away from saying really cool
things, but he’s writing poetry. And that’s his whole thing; I’m not saying
it’s not theoretical... I’m actually really close to it [the quote]…
Okay, here we go: this is so deep. I love this, you know, music
and drumming were so important to the enslaved experience, because they had
prohibited language and writing. You know, and so within the kind of European
enlightenment Hegelian framework, poetry is the highest form of knowledge, and
art, and music is only sensuous, it’s not anything rational, it doesn’t appeal
to that deeper sense of ‘whatever’ art, and the unity of reason and non-reason,
but for the slaves, music was truth. Music was the social experience embodied.
It was a historical document, and, for hundreds of millions of the people who
labored to construct the modern world, and died, meaningful but quick deaths,
this was their Charles Dickens, this was their Shakespeare, and it was a
collective book, it wasn’t like a book written by a single person. And Glissant
writes about this site at the plantation, and he writes about it so
provocatively:
“It is understandable that in this universe
every cry was an event. Night in the cabins gave birth to this other enormous
silence from which music, inescapable, a murmur at first, finally burst out
into this long shout—a music of reserved spirituality through which the body
suddenly expresses itself. Monotonous chants, syncopated, broken by
prohibitions, set free by the entire thrust of bodies, produced their language from
one end of this world to the other. These musical expressions born of silence:
Negro spirituals and blues, persisting in towns and growing cities; jazz,
biguines, and calypsos, bursting into barrios and shantytowns, salsas and
reggaes, assembled everything blunt and direct, painfully stifled, and
patiently differed into this varied speech. This was the cry of the Plantation,
transfigured into the speech of the world.
For three centuries of constraint
had borne down so hard that, when this speech took root, it sprouted in the
very midst of the field of modernity; that is, it grew for everyone. This is
the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the
deepest voice cries out."
– Édouard Glissant. Poetics of Relation
pp. 73-74
KD: Thank you for sharing that quote. You answered many of my questions; I did not even need to ask them out loud. Thank you for taking the time to read them in advance!
BB: Yes, and thank you for letting me drift into this
sort-of Meta thing.
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