Regional talent pockets are mystifying phenomena. For techno heads it must be quite vexing to contemplate that three of the genre’s pioneers, Derrick May, Kevin Sanderson and Juan Atkins, all hail from rural Michigan’s Belleville High School. Fans of free jazz are likely even more titillated by the list of the vanguard pantheistic fixtures who came through I. M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth, Texas–a school named in honor of the prominent African American Texas educator. It was originally a secondary school set aside for the town’s black students who had enough latitude to pursue that level of education in 1882 and is now an elementary school.
In the early ’50s the Terrell school graduated saxophonist and 2000 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee King Curtis. Curtis was a mainstay session player and producer of soul and R&B records for Aretha Franklin, The Coasters, Sam Moore, and many others throughout the ’50s and ’60s up until his very early demise in 1971.
Taking nothing away from Curtis’ impressive and prodigious list of accomplishments, especially considering he died at the tragically young age of 37, I. M. Terrell’s less congruent but more compelling alumni constitute a veritable Who’s Who of what became the avant-garde (and often controversial) genre of free jazz.
Between 1948 and 1958 Terrell saw pass through its halls–and more particularly through the musical instruction of band teacher G. A. Baxter–saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman (pictured below), and Julius Hemphill (pictured above), as well as drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson.
I would run down that list again, but you can just go back and read it yourselves.
Contemplating the expansive global influence of those four musicians as well as perusing a list of the people they played with is what you might call a real mind fuck.
Ornette Coleman, albeit on the immediate heels of John Coltrane’s stunning and irreversible inversion of bee bop, essentially invented or at least defined “free” jazz. There was not a post-punker worth their salt, from Thurston Moore, to Henry Rollins to the Laughing Hyenas’ guitarist Larissa Strickland, who didn’t cite Coleman as an influence.
To further tighten the knot between these jazz deities and the reach of their influences, Shannon Jackson, after doing several records with the pianist every jazz purist loved to hate, Cecil Taylor, as well as swatting the skins on at least three Albert Ayler records, formed a trio that could only be neatly categorized as fusion–and to try and define the extent of the elements they fused would be light years out of my league. Nevertheless, the other two players in this project, The Decoding Society, were a pre-Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid and a pre-Rollins Band bass player Melvin Gibbs.
Jackson played with so many avant-garders, including his old townie, Coleman, it would take another website worth of server space to cover them all. Jackson was not only a drummer but became an accomplished horn player and composed music for 23 albums of one or another of his projects, not to mention being the song starter for the legendary, and oft name-dropped influence on every conscious NYC post punk band, the totally improvisational Last Exit, with bassist Bill Laswell, sax man Peter Brötzmann and one of the most distinctive guitar stylists there ever was, Sonny Sharrock.
Julius Hemphill was, of course, the founding force behind the fabulous World Saxophone Quartet. And Dewey Redman, father of present-day jazz star Joshua, was considered among the most skilled sax players of his day and an important innovator of the free jazz form.
G. A. Baxter taught them all.
I interviewed Shannon Jackson for a personal video project a few years back and could not quite get him to agree that the Fort Worth free jazz phenomenon was anything but coincidence. The way he thought of it was comparable to one day when he ran into two friends from different countries and different walks of life at an airport ticket counter. Jackson did, however, admit that Mr. G. A. Baxter, who Jackson described only as a short man of “black German” heritage, was a steadfast disciplinarian but with a pragmatic lenience. According to Jackson, Baxter’s imperative was to every year win the statewide, black high school band competitions, held annually at Prairie View A & M University, a traditionally black institution of higher education in Prairie View, Texas. This is where Baxter’s disciplinarian traits were applied. On the other hand, Baxter would open the band room at Terrell High for Jackson and his fellow classical composition class and school band mates everyday during school lunch hours and allow them to play unsupervised.
When I asked Jackson to consider what I perceived to be his involvement in projects (i.e., Ayler, Coleman, Last Exit) that had great influence on rock musicians, and asked him if he liked rock music, or if he was ever going for a rock sound, he flatly replied, “no.” He ended up playing in electric bands like Decoding Society, Power Tools and Last Exit because it allowed him to express his physical approach to the drums unfettered by the restraint necessarily dictated by circumstances where acoustic pianos and horns were the feature instruments.
All the Fort Worth guys started in what was then a small town in a racially miserable setting in a state where open debate on race is so taboo that discussion of it is still stifled to a muffled murmur. They all played blues, R&B, even country in the case of Jackson. Jackson’s family home, where he lives today, was firebombed and nearly destroyed by rednecks when he was a youngster
Ornette Coleman once said, in an interview the late 1990s–this is paraphrased–that of all the places he has been, Texas is the one place he had no idea about. Fort Worth has hosted a jazz festival for several years, the administrators of which had trouble finally agreeing to terms acceptable enough to Jackson for him to play the festival even once.
Having lived in three different cities in Texas I noticed how aggressively the Texas community tries to erase its own history before it even becomes identifiable. They will have to go to great lengths to erase the legacy of G. A. Baxter and the kids out of I. M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth