The Artist as Institution Builder

The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field. In all of the obituaries published on the occasion of his passing a little over a week ago, I was surprised to not read more about his role as the founder of the Jazz Mobile Workshop, since that was how I came to know Dr. Taylor.

Much has justly been written about his founding of the Jazz Mobile touring music program in the early 1960s. He developed this program in order to take jazz music directly into the community by way of a mobile stage which was attached to a truck. In a different context it might have been used as a parade float. Here it was used as a vehicle to bring free music of the highest quality into those communities who might be least exposed to it (given the decline of jazz as a popular music) and least able to afford it (given that the music was now largely played in clubs). During the summer the roving stage is set up in conspicuously public locations such as parks, and name musicians perform. It was a brilliant idea and one that persists to this day. It exists because of Dr. Billy Taylor.

But oddly, little if anything has been written about the Jazz Mobile Workshop, the free music education program that Taylor founded in 1969 as one of the organization's programs to continue perpetuating jazz music. Located in Harlem in Intermediate School 201 on West 127th Street, just off of Park Avenue, the Workshop provided free instrumental instruction on Saturday afternoon for any and all. Taylor had appointed the bassist Paul West as executive director. I first heard about the Workshop from a trumpet playing friend in my Queens, NY neighborhood, Phil Clark. Queens at that time seemed populated by a wealth of musicians, young and old, the benefit some have said of having basements and backyards to practice in, given that we all lived in houses, not apartments. Phil was, like us, a young musicians and had taken to showing up at the band rehearsals we used to have in first my parents living room then their basement. I'm not sure if one of the other band member knew him or if he heard us playing from out on the sidewalk (the whole neighborhood apparently could hear us), but Phil took to hanging around. I suspect he wanted to be asked to join the band, but bands are formed around compatible personalities as much as shared musical interests and skills, so Phil became a perennial hanger on. Besides, we already had a strong trumpet player in our band. To his credit however Phil mentioned to me one day that he was taking classes with Lee Morgan, the well known trumpeter. He was taking these classes, he said, free of charge on Saturdays at the Jazz Mobile Workshop in Harlem, NY.

Taking Phil up on an invitation to accompany him to the Jazz Mobile one Saturday afternoon shortly after, I was pleasantly astounded at what I found. Peering into one classroom door in Harlem's I.S. 201 public school building I recognized bassist Richard Davis. In another classroom I spotted saxophonist Jimmy Heath. And in still another I spied guitarist Ted Dunbar. I was a serious enough young scholar of the music by that point that I had seen all of these guys in performance, and heard them on recordings, so I knew they were the masters in the field. Continuing on I located the classroom for drum set instruction and entered the room. The teacher there in the introductory/intermediate drumming class was none other than Albert "Tootie" Heath. After several months in Heath's class I was promoted to Freddie Wait's advanced class after impressing Heath with a particularly fluid interpretation of a passage he had us all perform. Wait's prodigious classroom demonstrations both inspired me while, at the same time, convincing me that I had a very long way to go indeed if I was to make music my life's work...which I ultimately chose not to do, though I continued to play professionally in a number of bands for a few years. Dr. Taylor himself would visit the Workshop periodically. I had my most memorable experience with him one afternoon in the Small Ensemble class. He gathered us drummers together and, with himself on piano and a young Howard "Locksmith" King on bass, told us we were going to practice "trading threes." We each looked at each other quizzically. Most jazz musicians when they solo play four, eight or maybe twelve bars, and often trading "fours," that is soloing for four bars apiece back and forth. As such most musicians develop a repertoire of phrases they often--unwittingly or otherwise--resort to, which playing for an irregular three bars completely disrupts. By having us "trade threes" (soloing for three bars each instead of four) Taylor reminded us that true creativity and improvisation does not rely on habit. It was a lesson I never forgot.

Other musicians assembled by Dr. Taylor to teach at the Workshop included such luminaries as Curtis Fuller, Sir Roland Hanna, Joe Newman, and Ernie Wilkins. All were following Taylor's lead and making their time and knowledge available to yet another generation. All of this asignificant history, occurring in the pre-internet age, seemed to have escaped the notice of the many writers paying tribute to Dr. Taylor upon his passing. I would have expected former drummer turned cultural critic and gadfly Stanley Crouch to have taken note, but in his obituary in the New York Daily News Crouch spent an inordinate amount of space once again bashing hip hop and "ignorant" baggy pants folks in general, while doing little to pass on this important and seemingly little known aspect of Dr. Taylor's life's work. But Dr. Billy Taylor was that rare individual, a consummate artist who had the vision and the institutional savvy to create something that would outlast him and benefit seceding generations. For that we can all be grateful.

Passing the Torch Yet Again

Thinking about Dr. Billy Taylor and Jazz Mobile put me in mind of other artists who have taken on the hard task of institution building. The recently announced impending retirement of Judith Jamison, former principal dancer turned artistic director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, made me recall the formative history of that company and institution. Performing for the first time in 1958 with a company under his own name, Ailey went on to build a company with an almost unparalleled reputation, securing his first permanent home in 1979 after sharing a renovated church with choreographer Pearl Lang beginning in 1971. I was fortunate to see Judith Jamison dance "Cry" shortly after Ailey choreographed the dance--which he created as a birthday gift to his mother--for her in 1971. I saw (and photographed) Jamison dancing this piece and others a number of times, falling in love with her over and over again as she commanded the stage in this amazingly powerful piece de resistance of movement. Not too long afterward I did a portrait of her in the company's studio, and from that moment on swore that I would have followed her anywhere.

Upon Ailey's untimely death at 58 years of age in 1989, Jamison took over as Artistic Director of the company as Ailey had requested, putting to rest her own newly formed company The Jamison Project. She has grown the institution steadily since then, weathering the economic storms of keeping a both the main and junior companies active, while moving into its second new home, which is no small feat in these times of dwindling support for the arts. At one time in New York there were a wealth of black dance companies: Fred Benjamin Dance Company, Dianne McIntyre's Sounds in Motion, Otis Sallid Dance Company, Rod Rodgers Dance Company, Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theater of Harlem and others could be seen on stage with some regularity. I seldom missed a performance by either of these companies while living in New York. They were an important part of my creative sustenance. But slowly, over the years, they all but disappeared or disbanded, victims of the difficult task of keeping a large or medium sized company together. Some, like Sallid, found early success in the commercial entertainment arena, choreographing for television and motion pictures, and others were fortunate to find work in the academy. That the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater has been able to survive and thrive while hewing to its original artistic vision is a testament to its founder and its soon to be retired Artistic Director, Judith Jamison. Their lives and hard work should be an example to us all.

(Note: Hopefully in a future post I will write about Wynton Marsalis, who is yet another artist/musician who has done a significant and impressive job as an institution builder in bringing Jazz at Lincoln Center into being. This institution appears to be the first long term major home for the performing and ongoing preservation of one of America's original art forms, with an in-house repertory band and multiple performing venues contained within its home, located at Columbus Circle in New York City.)

Photographs (from top): Dr. Billy Taylor and youthful admirers; Freddie Waits (photograph © Tom Marcello); Alvin Ailey and Judith Jamison

Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

James Baldwin
New Orleans, 1963

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts. As was his wont, my dad didn't talk much about that evening when they came home--I only remember him saying he did not entirely agree with Baldwin, whom he said struck him as being too strident and "arrogant"--but he did make it a point to leave the book sitting out where I could "find" it. Entitled The Movement: Documentary of A Struggle for Equality, it was a collection of photographs depicting the Civil Rights Movement at a moment when the movement was indeed still a vivid and very present reality. Containing photographs by a number of photographers, including Danny Lyons, Charles Moore, and others, its text had been authored by the African American playwright and writer Lorraine Hansberry. The book was published by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SNCC), and contained Hansberry's short but evocative texts alongside the photographs. The photographs themselves ranged from scenes of demonstrations, sit-ins, along with photographs of everyday black life in America at that moment..which is to say that some of the pictures were quite gruesome.

16th Street Baptist Church on the
morning of the bombing

Along with photographs of menacing white racists taunting civil rights marchers there were other pictures that more starkly visualized the often horrific results of the ongoing attempts of America's black citizens to lift themselves out of a state of enforced apartheid, as well as the violence that befell them and their non-black sympathizers who dared to resist. The pictures came at me in a rush. While I had indeed begun to experience the sting of racism as a black student bussed into previously white schools as part of the first wave of Northern school integration, I had never experienced anything like the raw, naked racist violence that these pictures described. Fire hoses, dog, and tear gas set loose on black citizens, those same citizens publicly stalked and beaten with baseball bats, and set upon by white mobs for daring to sit at a lunch counter or ride a Greyhound bus. Pictures made at lynchings, in which the white participants posed as if at a family picnic while a black body swung from a tree, or smoldered in the embers after being burnt to death.

Sarah Collins in the hospital
after the bombing
Photograph by Frank Dandridge

By the time The Movement had appeared in print, blacks in the south had been living through an orgy of violence directed against them for two centuries. Blacks in Birmingham, AL had their homes so frequently dynamited by racists who resented their presence and home ownership, that the city had become known as Bombingham. On September 15, 1963 this dynamiting of black lives reached a crescendo with the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. The week before, Alabama governor George Wallace had stated that in order to stop integration Alabama needed, "a few first-class funerals." Four young girls were killed that Sunday morning. A bomb having been placed there earlier by Robert "Bomber Bob" Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas Blanton--Ku Klux Klan members all--exploded at 10:22 AM, taking the lives of Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14) who were attending Sunday school and preparing for church service. The bomb exploded with such force that one of the girls was immediately beheaded. Twelve year old Sarah Collins [now Sarah Collins Rudolph], sister of Addie Mae, was blinded when flying glass pierced her eyes. She later lost one eye. It was a picture of a young Sarah Collins, lying in a hospital bed, her eyes covered with huge patches of cotton gauze, that was among the images in The Movement that grabbed my attention and permanently seared itself into my brain.

Odessa Woolfolk
Courtesy The Birmingham News

I was eleven years old when I saw that image of the immobilized little black girl laid out, helplessly scarred and traumatized, and that image has stayed with me all of these years. I realize now that I was at the time the same age as the youngest girl killed in that attack, Denise McNair. Deciding some seven years ago that I wanted to somehow work with this experience, to use it somehow, to confront it by putting myself in Birmingham, I contacted the curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art to see if I might shape a project, working with them on what would become a residency project that would honor the memory of those killed that day while also engaging the contemporary Birmingham community. During that initial visit I was able to attend a service at 16th Street Baptist Church and to have lunch with Odessa Woolfolk, the President and a founding board member of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which had opened in 1992. I had lunch with Ms. Woolfolk, who began to give me a deeper sense of the history as well as the various ways in which that history was still playing out in the Birmingham community. When I told her that I would be visiting the 16th Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning, she asked me with a knowing look, "Let me know what happens." I am pretty sure she knew what would happen, but she likely thought it best that I have the experience myself.

From top left (clockwise)
Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair,
and Addie Mae Collins

16th Street Baptist Church

My initial visit to 16th Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning began to give me a sense of the complexity of the situation I was actually entering into. I had approached Birmingham full of the known history. But history as it is lived is usually messier and certainly more nuanced than the mythic history afforded by historical hindsight. Mythos and reality may be, in some ways, related but they are generally never quite the same. This first occurred to me when, entering the church to attend the service, I noticed unsettlingly that they church was filled to only perhaps a quarter of its capacity...at best. I had expected a full and rousing congregation, but was met instead by an almost empty building that was in a sad and obvious state of disrepair. Greeting the minister and several of the deacons after service, I introduced myself and briefly described the work I hoped to do. As soon as I mentioned September 15, 1963 the minister stopped me in mid-sentence. His words echo in memory still. "Stop right there," he admonished me. "Here at 16th Street we're not about all of that business; we're about the business of Jesus Christ. If you're interested in that, we'd love to help you." Stunned though I was, I did my best to keep a straight and polite face. Who was I, after all, to tell them what their "business" should or should not be. Of course "all of that business" was basically all that I knew of 16th Street. Recalling her knowing look, I realized then that this response would not have surprised Odessa Woolfolk at all. I realized then that I had much to learn indeed about the place where I hoped to make my work. I left Birmingham after that first visit more perplexed than when I came. [Note: 16th Street Baptist Church was designated a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior in 2006, after my initial visit, and has since undergone a $3 million restoration of the building, reversing years of neglect, including water damage, and damage to the facade masonry.]

Taylor Branch
Parting The Waters

Some time after that initial visit to Birmingham, I began working on a brief residency project in Baltimore with the Walters Museum. An invitation to dinner from one of the senior museum staff took a wonderful and surprising turn one evening when I found out that the friends who would be joining us, Christy and Taylor, were none other than Christina Macy and her husband the renowned writer and chronicler of the civil rights movement Taylor Branch, whose epic chronicle of the civil rights era had garnered him a Pulitzer Prize. Taylor (who was born in Atlanta, GA) and I had much to talk about, as I knew he had spent considerable time in Alabama, and Birmingham in particular over many years, researching what is now a trilogy of important books. When I told him I had ventured to 16th Street Baptist Church one morning, he raised his eyebrows and asked me knowingly just what had happened. He was not at all surprised, and indeed had I given his book another read before venturing to Birmingham, I might have been better prepared, as he writes at length about the complicated relationship of 16th Street to the history of the Movement. Though the church was the site of many of the mass meetings that Dr. King, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and other movement leaders called to organize their various marches and actions, the congregation of 16th Street Baptist Church was notably absent from those meetings. Those attending the mass meeting came largely from Bethel Baptist Church, 6th Avenue Baptist Church, and the smaller black churches throughout Birmingham.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Birmingham, AL 1963

When King visited 16th Street Baptist Church on one occasion in 1963 to ask for volunteers to join in a planned demonstration, not a single adult stood to volunteer, much to King's frustration. Instead the young people began to stand. The adults, many of whom worked for whites, simply could not afford the risk of such action. Doing so would likely have resulted in their being fired, their homes foreclosed on or bombed, or worse. Thus many of the black adults took a publicly disengaged and accommodationist stance. So it was the youth of Birmingham who eventually brought the city to its knees. 16th Street Baptist was the staging ground and meeting point for what became known as The Children's March, with even teachers turning their backs as students staged mass class walkouts in order to feign ignorance--and thus avoid complicity--for what was taking place. The bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church took place four months after these successful demonstrations in an attempt to stop the progress that was then being made. Four months after the adults of 16th Street Baptist Church had specifically not participated in public social protest, their church was dynamited and four of their girls were killed.

Virgil Ware 13 years old

On subsequent visits to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute I learned that on that same September day two boys, 13 year old Virgil Ware and 16 year old Johnny Robinson has also been killed in acts of racist violence. Virgil Ware was killed while riding on the handlebar of his brother James' bike, shot by two white teenagers coming from a white citizen's rally. The Ware brothers were unaware of the church bombing that had taken place that morning, and crossed paths with two white teenagers coming from a white citizen's rally. Johnny Robinson was shot and killed by a police officer who claimed he had been throwing rocks at passing cars in the disturbances that began to happen in the aftermath of the bombing that day. I decided immediately that these two young African American boys would also be the memorialized focus of my project. I would make portraits of African American girls, ages 11 and 14, and photographs of African American boys ages 13 and 16. Additionally, as a way of suggesting the lives that were cut short and never allowed to unfold, I would make portraits of adult men and women who were the ages that these young people would have been had they been allowed to live out their lives. Thus the portraits would both document black Birmingham's present while memorializing those lost in its past. These photographs would form the centerpiece of my project.

Filming in Birmingham, AL
Photograph by Truman Grayson

I also wanted to continue the work I had begun in video with my earlier Four Stories (2003) that examined the lives of four diverse Detriot teenagers, and decided to create a two channel video piece that would be an evocative meditation on that September morning. I wanted the piece to unfold in extreme slow motion, and invoke the journey that each of the four girls took the church on that "bright blue fall morning" as I seen it described in my readings about that day. Wanting the production values to be as high as I could make them, I began interviewing video and film makers in Birmingham, and decided to work with Six Foot Five, a crew of young filmmakers and editors. After several weeks of pre-production location scouting, most of the principle photography for the video is done, with one more day of filming and audio recording to be scheduled before going to post production editing. The video takes place in four different social spaces, a barbershop, a beauty salon, a classroom, and a lunch counter. Each of these locations have a particular, and in some cases very loaded, place in the social history of the city, with the barber shop and beauty parlor being more intimate and closed social spaces and the classroom and the lunch counter being scenes of highly public social interaction and potential racial conflict and segregation. The other channel of the video describes the languorous and peaceful ride to the church as the car (and the girls) move slowly towards the horrific moment that we know is coming.

Photographing in the Birmingham Museum of Art
Photograph by Truman Grayson

I've also began photographing, making portraits of the first group of subjects, women, girls, and boys of the appropriate ages. I've yet to photograph any men unfortunately, and will need to redouble outreach efforts to locate them and gain their participation. The project has been one of relationship building as much as it has been about making the actual photographs and video work. It's been a process of relationship building for me of course, since while one side of my family is from the south--West Point, Mississippi--I am distinctly an outsider to the Birmingham, AL community. It has provided as well an opportunity for the Birmingham Museum of Art to deepen and extend its relationship with its African American community through a project that is very much about that community and its collective history. As such, the project continues my interest in institutional culture and re-shaping the relationships that museums have and can have with their respective communities.

Photographing in original Bethel Baptist Church Sanctuary
Photograph by Truman Grayson

I have begun the photographic work by turning one of the museum galleries into my temporary studio, using the museum--as I have in the past--as a space for making work as well a space for later exhibiting that work. It also provides yet another way for the people I am photographing to consider just what a museum is and to claim a more active place within that institutional space. It has been heart rending when photographing the people who come to my museum studio to think about them in relationship to the six people whose lives inform this work. To think of someone striking such a young life down with impunity is a renewed horror each time a young person sits in front of my camera. To see the older women, having lived rich full lives, reminds me constantly of the tragically abbreviated lives of those six young people.

I'm going back to Birmingham to continue work for another two weeks in December, and to continue working on the video 9.15.63. I'll be photographing in Bethel Baptist Church as well. The exhibition will open September 2013, the 50th anniversary of the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church. I'll be posting periodically--in this blog and on Facebook--and invite you to come south to Birmingham next year to the completed work. The Birmingham Museum of Art will commence a series of performances and programming as the 50th year begins. Participating artists will include Theaster Gates, Jefferson Pinder, and others. I'm hoping to curate a small selection of related films as well. Watch for it.

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Tom MarcelloMarch 25, 2011 at 8:16 PM
Thanks for you memories of your experience with Jazzmobile.
I always looked forward to the Jazzmobile coming to my hometown of Rochester each Summer.
I'm glad you could use my photo of the great Freddie Waits.
Best,
Tom Marcello
Manager / Joe Locke
sewa mobilMay 14, 2011 at 9:49 AM
Very nice article, thanks.

Kim RNovember 29, 2012 at 5:47 PM
Thank you for sharing your personal story! It adds another dimension to this very important project and has motivated me to go back and re-examine the events of the bombing. Just last week, there was an article in the Birmingham News about the surviving sister, Sarah Collins Rudolph, whose picture you feature here (http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/11/fifth_little_girl_still_relati.html). She still lives here in Birmingham and went before the Mayor and City Council to raise awareness about her story and the struggles she continues to face as a result of her injuries that day. Until last week, many people (including myself) were not aware of her story. I'm sure as the commemoration date approaches, we'll hear even more stories that we have not heard before. As a result, I anxiously await your exhibit in which my mother and daughter are both participating. Imani (my daughter) was the first to be photographed, and I was pleasantly surprised to see my mother's photo featured in your blog (black clothing with gold necklace). She'll be honored to know that her picture is included here. I welcome you again to Birmingham as you complete your work and will make every effort to recruit some men to participate in the project. Thank you!
Dawoud BeyDecember 3, 2012 at 9:39 PM
Thank you Kim. I do hope to meet Sarah Collins Rudolph while I am in Birmingham. The tragedy of that Sunday morning traumatized those left behind like Sarah who lived, but suffered physical and psychic wounds. Thank you so much for both your interest AND active participation.
Cedric 80'sMarch 2, 2014 at 2:15 PM
Hey Dawoud, My comments are a little late in regard to your exhibition about the very tragic coverage and work on the 16th st church bombings which I do remember being in the news in my youth and wish I could have seen your exhibit at the Birmingham museum, that being said your blog describing your work process has shed a lot of light for an old painter on how to shoot and create in video and photography in fact I get a good feel for you as teacher and instructor(lol) ,You know we could have crossed paths many years ago at Just above Midtown Gallery in Tribeca, anyway I'm going to send a friend request on FB I think I might learn something Prof.

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WHAT'S GOING ON? - DAWOUD BEY'S BLOG

November 21st, 2012

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