Richard Muhal Abrams: "Afrisong"

“Nights at the Red Steinway": Alan's Choice, Part 1

My next book is going to be titled Nights at the Red Steinway, with the somewhat wordy subtitle, subject to change: Notes on Jazz Piano from the Wall Street Journal and Elsewhere.  It’s being published by Backbeat Books, hopefully in 2024.  Essentially, this will be a collection of what I’ve written about great jazz pianists over the last 35 years or so.  Although the emphasis is mostly on pianists who were active between the 1980s and now, there’s a lot of coverage about iconic players of earlier generations, too.  (Although I am not making the claim that this is a definitive history or even a comprehensive survey of the jazz piano.)  In pieces for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Sun, the Village Voice, and The New York Times, I believe I have written about nearly every major jazz keyboardist, particularly of the contemporary era. However, there were a few players I somehow missed, and I give major thanks to my buddy, the excellent photographer and music buff Alan Nahigian, for helping me to figure out who should be included.  Over the next few months, I’ll run some of these essays here on Substack, under the general heading: Alan’s Choice.  Thanks! 

One of the forgotten truths of early jazz - all the way up through the big band era, at least - is that in the Black community, the piano was the clearest path to bandleading.  This first occurred to me while I was writing the biography of Nat King Cole.  If we were to make a list of all the major Black bands, starting with Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Earl Fatha Hines, and Claude Hopkins, there would be at least as many piano-playing leaders as all the other instruments combined.  (Conversely, for whatever reason, there were virtually no major white piano-playing leaders until Claude Thornhill and Stan Kenton, relatively late in the game.)

There are at least two kinds of piano playing bandleaders; those who have to occasionally remind you that they were also great pianists, like Ellington and Basie, and those who never let you forget it, like Hines.  There were also those from whom you may not want to hear play long keyboard solos, like Henderson. 

Muhal Richard Abrams probably belongs to the first category; like Ellington, especially, he was a major composer, of works for a wide range of mostly jazz ensembles, and like the rest of these men, he was at the center of a group of remarkable individual soloists, including many of the greatest in all of American music.  More than the others, however, Abrams was also an educator, a musical theorist, and a performing artist who was always coming up with new ways to think about music.  Even more than a teacher, Abrams was a veritable pied piper, and played a central role in the thriving post-modern music scene of Chicago and later New York.

Most comments about Afrisong, Abrams’s 1975 solo piano album, were all about how important it was that Abrams remind us that he was first and foremost a pianist, in addition to everything else.  Nearly 50 years after it was first recorded, it remains a stunning if underappreciated achievement.

Afrisong places the Memphis-born, Chicago-raised Abrams in the category of Afro-centric pianists like the slightly older Brooklyner Randy Weston and the slightly younger Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) from CapeTown.  Unlike Weston, however, Afrisong is a unique project for Abrams - he wouldn’t devote his entire career to pursuing the Afrocentric ideal. 

The presence of African elements in Afrisong may be somewhat random: Abrams later told Alan Nahigian that an African girl happened to be at the session, and when she told him that she thought the first tune reminded her of Africa, that’s when he came up with the title.

It’s open to interpretation how much of the rest of the album, if any,  Abrams intended to sound African.  I personally hear a lot of the album as Abrams’ intention to capture the Afrocentric spirit at the keyboard, and while there are similarities with the pianoforte Africanus of Weston and Ibrahim, Abrams’s instrumental voice is always much stronger than that of his influences. 

The opening track, “Afrisong,” is perhaps the only one where Abrams telegraphs his intentions, but even under any other title, this would sound distinctly African.  He opens with a somewhat out of tempo intro that actually sounds like we’re traveling somewhere; in my mind’s eye, it’s through a thicket of bushes and trees and then into an open field.  All of a sudden, we are there; there’s a sprightly melody, apparently based on a traditional African air.  (One listener referred to it as “a two-chord folk song.”) Abrams spins variations and keeps the tune as a framework, even when he departs from it, he’s never gone long, and returns to this tune, recognizable, even danceable at several points, leading up to the end, where he slows and spirals down to a satisfying conclusion.

If “Afrisong'' feels like traveling across a field, “"The Infinite Flow" suggests a river; the constant melodic motion gives a feeling of floating downstream, while the pianist’s phrasing, his dynamics, and his uses of rests and pauses, suggest bobbing up and down slowly on the waves.  The journey gets more intense as it goes on; the flow continues as we navigate around rocks, as Abrams interrupts the infinite flow with heavily pounded, percussive chords.  After six minutes, we reach the end of the river and the stream becomes a trickle.

"Peace On You" is slow and contemplative, and still African-sounding, at least, to me; he plays a heavier chord in his left hand, then spins out notes around it in his left.  The melody occasionally reminds me of the show tune and jazz standard, “Lazy Afternoon.”  Unlike the first two pieces, the melody occasionally slows down and speeds back up, giving it less of a traveling feel; the metaphor would be more like an internal journey, like the thought process, rather than an external one. 

“Hymn to the East” makes me think about how the piano, more than most western instruments, can create instrumental sounds meant to evoke different ethnicities and cultures.  Think about silent movies; if you’re watching a western, the  pianist would play a specific phrase that would let the audience know there are native Americans approaching; in Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, there’s a scene when the hero enters a den of Chinese gangsters; both of those ethnic groups would be represented with a specific sound, a set of specifically-voiced chords and harmonies.  True, they were not even remotely authentic to the actual groups they purport to represent, and those sounds are a kind of stereotyping in and of themselves; I cite this mainly to underscore the power of the piano.  “Hymn to the East” uses some of that distinctly Asian phrasing, but unlike most times when you hear that particular sonic effect, it doesn’t sound like a cliche.

“Roots” has a steady beat, and is a kind of series of phrases that is meandering and yet urgent, going somewhere, but perhaps not by the most direct route. Each phrase sounds somewhat incomplete, like it’s not exactly there yet, but rather leading somewhere else.  

The two final pieces, “Blues for M.” and “The New People,” seem to be the least explicitly African, except in the vaguest sense, as in the philosophy of Randy Weston and others, that all jazz and blues essentially come from Africa.  “Blues for M.” is the piece where Abrams shows that he can not only play the very old-fashioned blues, but stride as well.  Abrams was a dominant figure in what we loosely call the jazz avant-garde, but this piece shows that to move into the future, you don’t have to discard the past.  Abrams probably never had the intention of including this piece merely to show off what he could in terms of stride and the blues, but rather, deemed that those forms were the best suited to the melody he heard in his head and the story that he wanted to tell. For me, at least, this is the most easily enjoyable track - the one most firmly in my own personal comfort zone - and regrettably it’s also the shortest on the album.

At ten minutes, the final track, “The New People,” is by far the most overtly avant-garde or free-form of the seven compositions here.  First there’s a brief flurry of notes, then a plink, followed by a surprisingly long rest.  The pattern repeats and varies; there’s a flurry, a silence, then a cascade of a few notes, then another silence.  It kind of goes on like that: a burst of what seems like random adjacent notes, then a silence.  There are alternating patterns of sound and silence, and sometimes one goes on longer; six minutes in, there’s a two-note, one-two phrase that gets repeated up and down the keyboard.  This expands and evolves into another ongoing melodic line of sorts, and calms down almost to a complete halt near the end, about 9:30.  

I confess that as I play and replay the album, I tend to linger more on “Blues for M.” and pay less attention to “New People,” but just the same, it’s a glorious ride from start to finish.  It’s become a cliche in the 21st century to characterize a musical performance as a “journey,” but I can’t think of any other word to describe a work like Afrisong, which starts with you in one place, transports you to some other place, and then leaves you at someplace else entirely.

Here’s the playlist for the full album (on youtube).

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Special thanks to ELIZABETH ZIMMER for proofreading this essay and scanning for those pesky typos, of which I characteristically have zillions!

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