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
Henry, We Hardly Knew Ye
It would be folly to try and string together a cohesive narrative of the career of musician, artist, mathematician, philosopher and North Carolina native, Henry Flynt. His life has played out much like one of his madcap art stunts. In 1989, Flynt traveled to an as yet unopened art galley in Italy to scout the space and negotiate a showing of his own art. He photographed the rooms in the gallery, returned home, and then sent the photos he had taken of the empty walls of the gallery to the gallery owners announcing that his “show” was already over, before it had taken place. And the photos proved that the show had in fact occurred, unbeknownst to those who had been in attendance–namely Flynt and the gallery owners. Then Flynt made posters announcing the “show,” but told patrons not to bother about attending because it had already happened.
All of Flynt’s accomplishments occurred as though in a virtual vacuum, but have been documented with photos and recordings that seemingly prove that it did all happen in the real world. He could just as likely have made all this stuff up a few years ago: that he left Harvard in 1961 before obtaining a degree; that he moved to New York, hung out in the Yoko Ono loft scene arguing the finer points of musical pretension with John Cage; was squeezed out of the Velvet Underground for playing his fiddle too hillbilly; recorded several albums of his own compositions with various incarnations of bands during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s; started a movement to rid the world of formal art; produced several installations of his own art work; and wrote extensively on philosophical problems. He could have made it all up because there seems to be almost no one who was aware of Flynt while he was doing all those things.
Even if it is all an elaborate fabrication, his records are pretty damn good.
Imagine that Warren Ellis (of Dirty Three and Bad Seeds fame) and the Rev. Horton Heat had grown up attending a one-room schoolhouse together where Ornette Coleman was the only teacher, and they formed a band with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson; they might well have sounded like Henry Flynt.
For all the yammering Flynt does about jazz, Hindustani, and classical (there’s a three hour interview from a 2004 radio broadcast, during which you can hear several of Flynt’s recordings)–and despite the fact that he has subjected himself to extensive instruction in music theory and performance (he plays at least violin and guitar, plus he tosses around technical terms like triads and fifths and interval modulations and peppers his lengthy orations with artsy, pseudo-intellectual jargon, such as referring to particular gigs as “sound environments” rather than concerts)–his music rocks. It is a very unlikely yet highly infectious mélange of jazz, Appalachia, and rock, with infusions of Eastern experimentation.
One of the more transfixing of Flynt’s recordings is the forty-four minute long “You Are My Everlovin’ ” (Recorded Records, 2001), something Flynt called New American Ethnic Music. It is comprised of semi-sophisticated, old-timey style fiddle, sawing over the top of a deep tambura drone. If you surrender your body aural to its wilting beauty, it could deliver you unto a deep woods trance state, meditated into a reincarnation of an immense anthropomorphized oak tree, like the Ents in Return of the King-before they freaked out and stormed Isengard, of course.
The recordings that Flynt produced with his fully-staffed bands, The Insurrections and Nova’Billy, are informed by many of the same influences as were say, James Blood Ulmer or Danny Gatton, or even Led Zeppelin, but managed to sidestep the trappings of a producer’s meddlesome ambition or a record label’s marketability mandate.
A single volume of Flynt’s collected writings, Blueprint for a Higher Civilization, was published in Italy in 1975 and is of course long since out of print. You can still find lengthy sections of his musings available at a fan-maintained website, www.henryflynt.org
His musical recordings had collected, in some cases, nearly forty years of dust before a barrage of Flynt sides was released, mostly by Locust Records and Recorded Records, between 2001 and 2005. Having never found an audience or even a record label during his more productive years, Flynt, after some mysterious mishap on the way to a gig in Berlin in 1984, finally lost his ambition for public performance. He has not performed in public, nor, he claims, has he played, or otherwise composed or produced any music since.
Discography:
The first two titles were recorded in the early 1960s. The other titles show the year the music was recorded, followed by the year it was released:
Back Porch Hillbilly Blues Volume 1 (Locust Music, 2002)
Back Porch Hillbilly Blues Volume 2 (Locust Music, 2002)
C Tune (Locust Music, 1980, 2001)
Raga Electric (Locust Music, 1963/71, 2002)
I Don’t Wanna (Locust Music, 1966, 2004)
Purified by the Fire (Locust Music, 1981, 2005)
Graduation And Other New Country & Blues Music (Ampersand, 1975/79, 2001)
You Are My Everlovin’/Celestial Power (Recorded, 1980/81, 2001)
Spindizzy (Recorded, 1968/83, 2002)
Hillbilly Tape Music (Recorded, 1971/78, 2002)