LISTEN TO ONE: Afrika (Africa)
This album marked the finishing touch to A. K. Salim's career, though he lived to be 80 years old and died in 2003. But it was a distinguished career indeed, even if much of it was behind the scenes, and he's little remembered today, Most of his work was as an arranger and composer -- he had been forced to give up playing the alto saxophone due to a jaw injury.
Salim was born Albert Atkinson in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1922, but grew up in Chicago, where he attended DuSable High School, a fertile breeding ground for musicians -- his classmates included Bennie Green, Dorothy Donegan and Gene Ammons. When he embraced the Muslim faith and changed his name is unclear, but it must have been quite early -- his arrangements for a 1947 Gene Ammons session are credited to A. K. Salim.
His early work included arranements for Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Lunceford, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie as well as Ammons. He left music for the real estate business in 1949, but returned in 1956 to arrange a couple of the most important albums of that decade. Drummer Bobby Sanabria, in an interview with Marc Myers of Jazzwax, talks about those recordings:
Tito Puente had recorded Puente Goes Jazz in 1956 and Night Beat in 1957 for RCA. Both recordings featured the arrangements of A.K. Salim. Morris Levy, the head of Roulette Records, wanted to copy some of the success RCA had with these Latin-jazz albums. Since Levy used to book Machito and Tito in his club, Birdland, he asked Mario Bauza and Machito to record a Latin-jazz album using A.K. Salim to write some original tunes and arrangements.
Building on the success of those Latin jazz recordings, Salim made a series albums for Prestige under his name, as arranger/musical director. Flute Suite (1957) featured Herbie Mann and Frank Wess. Stable Mates (1957) had Salim's arrangements on one side, Yusef Lateef's on the other. Salim's side had an eight piece band featuring Johnny Griffin, Johnny Coles and Kenny Burrell. Pretty for the People, also in 1957, had another eight piece band with Griffin, Kenny Dorham, Pepper Adams and an all-star rhythm section of Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Max Roach and, returning to the Latin influence, Chino Pozo. Finally, in 1958, Blues Suite utilized ten pieces, including Nat Adderley and Phil Woods. All of these fall into the general heading of straight-ahead jazz, and all are very, very good.
Afro Soul / Drum Orgy, recorded six years later, was markedly -- in fact, totally -- different. According to the liner notes by Robert Levin,
The idea for it came from A&R man Ozzie Cadena...to build the framework of the album out of African rhythms and for the music to be completely spontaneous -- no charts were used, and there were no rehearsals. All that was predetermined was the African context.
"The musicians came to the date cold," Salim says. "All the composing was done right on the date--we just talked over what we were going to do and did it--and with the exception of 'Salute to a Zulu' which was done in two takes, all the numbers were completed on the first take. The basic inspiration for the horns was drawn from whatever the drums were doing. Willie Bobo's assistance in getting us the drummers was most invaluable. For the most part I just told the drummers to get it started. Julio Callazo knew some African rhythms and helped to set patterns for the drummers. The horns were playing for sounds rather than the traditional or conventional jazz lines--their impressions of what Africa sounds like, inspired by the drums. They were really having a conversation, not just playing in a traditional jazz way.
My first thought here--you could get away with anything in the Sixties. But sometimes this top-of-the-head, Sixties-happening approach can work, and don't forget that the musical director here is A. K. Salim, veteran of the 1940s, a guy who knew a whole lot about music and a whole lot about bringing a band together. This isn't the sort of album a mainstream jazz lover is likely to return to again and again, the way Salim's Savoy albums are, but it's very interesting, it's worth a listen. As the horn soloists start to find their footing and open up to a different kind of improvisation on "Afrika (Africa)," the first tracj from the session and the first track on the album, you realize that this was an experiment very much worth undertaking.
Yusef Lateef was the perfect choice for this session, with his deep love of Middle Eastern music and hos familiarity with unusual ethnic instruments. Johnny Coles had worked with Salim before, on Stable Mates. This would be his only apprearance on Prestige, but hed a solid background in the jazz business, including work with Charles Mingus, a good grounding for work on the experimental edges of jazz. And if you wanted credentials for a genre-extending, open-improvisatory session, you could hardly do better than a decade with the Sun Ra Arkestra, which was Pat Patrick's background.
Julio "Julito" Callazo, who brought the knowledge of African rhythms to the percussion section, was a Cuban-born musician who came to the US to work Katherine Dunham's dance troupe; and later performed with with Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Mongo SantamarÃa, Dizzy Gillespie and Machito. Cuban Marcelino Valdes was from a musical family. Three of his brothers, including singer-composer Vicentico Valdez, were professional musicians, as is his son Marcelino, a popular bolero singer. Osvado "Chihuahua" Martinez played with a number of Latin groups, including Ray Barretto, and around the time of this session, released a couple of highly regarded albums of Afro-Cuban jazz under his own name. Juan Cadaviejo doesn't seem to have recorded beyond this session.
Philemon Hou was an actor as well as a musician. A Zulu tribesman, he was the only African in the ensemble. He had come to New York in the cast of a short-lived Broadway play, Sponono, and according to Robert Levin, "Salute to a Zulu" was based on a melody he was improvising on the African xylophone. Hou would become much better known for another melody, a few years later, when trumpeter Hugh Masakela, a fellow South African, was doing a recording session in Hollywood for his debut album. They needed one more tune to fill out the album, and Masakela had a rhythmic idea, but no melody. While the band was laying down the rhythm track, Hou, who happened to be in the studio at the time, composed a melody on the spot. "Grazing in the Grass" became Masakela's biggest hit, and his signature song.
Willie Bobo, enthralled with music from a young age, became a band boy for Machito's orchestra in 1947 at age 12, and shortly thereafter began to draw attention as a dancer. He played with Mary Lou Williams, Tito Puente and George Shearing in the early 1950s, then with Cal Tjader and Mongo Santamaria, with whom he had formed a deep friendship early on. Later, as a session musician, he worked with Carlos Santana, who would record his song "Evil Ways." He had a long and successful career as a salsa bandleader, and appeared on two other Prestige sessions, with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davi and Dave Pike.
