Yesterday was the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X and I think it fit to share with you an album that I picked up over winter break. It is a "The Malcolm X Memorial (A Tribute in Music)" (1968) by Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble. This is a really cool album that was recorded live at the Affro-Arts Theater in Chicago on Feb. 25 1968, just about three years after the death of Malcolm X. Philip Cohran is a Chicago trumpet player that is probably most well known for his time with Sun Ra and the Arkestra and his involvement in the founding of the AACM (association for the advancement of creative musicians, I will probably talk more about this group in later posts). Those of you from New York most likely know or can associate Cohran as the polygamist father of all seven of the brass players from the Hypnotic Brass Band aka that really great horn band in Union Square. This album is really cool and serves as a sort of time capsule that allows us to listen to the sounds of Black Power, three years after the assassination of its most respected leader. So in this way the album can be seen as a kind of retrospective, but overall I think it is more representative of a time when jazz and urban black culture were undergoing a serious social movement affecting the consciousness of a people. Black power in its essence was not a violent movement it was the embracing of "blackness" in rejection engendered white ideals to allow for the creation a black identity with power and self respect so as to oppose the effects of the uneven balance of power. The music takes elements from jazz, african, middle eastern, soul, and the avante garde and blends them all into something that is undeniably relevant to the time. My favorite track is the last one (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz), not really because of the five minute drum solo but because of the epic vocals at that it builds to at the end... epic.
"The story of Brother Malcolm's life is one of the most widely known episodes in modern history. This tribute is based on Malcolm's life subdivided into four distinct parts and these four parts are a model of the four stages of the American Blacks elevation to a higher life."
-from the liner notes
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