The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble

[Kahil El’Zabar, Corey Wilkes, Alex Harding. Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble
Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
Urbana, Illinois
February 9, 2017

Kahil El’Zabar: cajón, drumkit, footbells, mbira, voice
Alex Harding: baritone saxophone
Corey Wilkes: trumpet

Kahil El’Zabar last visited the Krannert Center in 2008, with the Ritual Trio and guest musician Hamiet Bluiett. Last week El’Zabar returned with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, founded in 1973. The Ensemble’s continuing premise: two horns and percussion (originally, saxophonists Edward Wilkerson and Ernest Khabeer Dawkins and El’Zabar). In a pre-performance talk, El’Zabar told the story of bringing his father on an Ensemble tour in 1986. Would people really turn out to hear nothing more than two horns and percussion? Indeed, they did, and still do.

“Nothing more than”: in other words, what a listener won’t find is the familiar rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums, or just bass and drums. But there’s nothing missing in the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble’s sound, which is full of color and texture. Much of that is due to El’Zabar, who provides a constant commentary as he plays: singing, scatting, humming, grunting, stomping, and shouting encouragement. (“Go to Texas!” he told Alex Harding at one point.) Harding’s baritone adds another layer of commentary, one that looks back to the earliest jazz traditions, in which the tuba (or sometimes bass saxophone) assumed the role later taken over by the string bass.

Here is one example of the ensemble in action: in “All Blues,” El’Zabar set a groove for the deepest sort of slow blues with nothing more than footbells, stomps, and mbira. Harding’s baritone added an element of R&B to the tune’s familiar vamp, and the vamp resurfaced behind Wilkes’s solo and in Harding’s own solo. Like El’Zabar, Harding and Wilkes are master musicians: Harding’s huge tone and rhythmic drive suggest both Harry Carney and Hamiet Bluiett; Wilkes’s playing ranges from boppish complexities to Miles-isms to shakes, wails, and, at one point, a 180-degree blast of plain air.

Some especially bright moments: El’Zabar soloing on mbira, sounding something like, say, John Lee Hooker worrying a handful of notes; El’Zabar stepping down from the bandstand to scat and dance; Harding interpolating “Lester Leaps In” when soloing in “The Eternal Triangle,” an invitation taken up by the other musicians; Wilkes’s baby daughter responding to the sound of her father’s Harmon mute. And one more: El’Zabar preaching during “Pharoah Sanders”: “We can never win with pessimism. Even in dark times, we need optimism.”

The tunes: “All Blues” (Miles Davis), “The Eternal Triangle” (Sonny Stitt), “Little Sunflower” (Freddie Hubbard), “Pharoah Sanders” (El’Zabar), “Freedom Jazz Dance” (Eddie Harris).

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Ethnic Heritage Ensemble : Kahil El’Zabar : Alex Harding : Corey Wilkes

Dante, Beatrice, and Nancy

[Gustave Doré and Ernie Bushmiller, with help from the alpha tool and me. Click for a larger view.]

Not exactly a beatific vision, but as close as I can get.

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Publius Sluggo

[Nancy, November 20, 1946. From Random Acts of Nancy.]

Leave it to Sluggo to try to keep Nancy from attaining the beatific vision. Troublemaker. But who would be taking over as guide here? Fritzi Ritz? Aw, that ain’t no fun.

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[The Nancy dash is often but not always made of “some hyphens.”]

Domestic comedy

“She’s some kind of a star.”

“That must be why we’ve never heard of her.”

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Dictionaries rising

Jesse Sheidlower, lexicographer: “Right now there are a lot of questions about what is true. We want clear statements about what things are, and dictionaries provide that.” And: “In times of stress, people will go to things that will provide answers. The Bible, the dictionary, or alcohol.”

From the Fashion and Style pages of The New York Times, a report on increased interest in dictionaries.

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Ties, misspellings, typos

Richard Thompson Ford wonders:

Mr. Trump’s tie symbolizes one of the central questions of his candidacy, and now his presidency. Is his seeming ineptness genuine? Or is it part of a contrived performance, designed to deploy the symbols of power while rejecting the conventions of civility that have traditionally defined and constrained them?

I’ve wondered in the same way about the seeming ineptness in all those misspellings and typos. Are they genuine mistakes, or are they calculated distractions meant to incite mockery and thus make Trump’s supporters feel that they too are being mocked? I can imagine what someone might say: “You know what? I don’t spell so great either.” Snooty elites!

But I’m probably overthinking. When I read about aides who cannot figure out how to turn on the lights, I tend to think that the evidence of ineptness is genuine — and sad. Dunning K. Trump: sad!

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“Not even the President”

Bob Ferguson, Washington Attorney General, commenting on the decision of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals not to reinstate the president’s travel ban: “No one is above the law, not even the President.”

Just three weeks, and it already feels like Nixon days.

[I heard these words on All Things Considered last night, as a comment on yesterday’s decision. They also appear in a tweet from February 3. I embedded the tweet before realizing that the date was too early.]

Do Androids dream of Perry Mason?

A new use for an old phone. Thanks to Ian Bagger for the link.

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Gaslighting, moonlighting

It looks like our president is moonlighting. A genuine Lifehacker headline:

“When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism”

George Prochnik, writing in The New Yorker about Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and “When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism”:

The excruciating power of Zweig’s memoir lies in the pain of looking back and seeing that there was a small window in which it was possible to act, and then discovering how suddenly and irrevocably that window can be slammed shut.

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