What I've Learned From Melvin Gibbs

Some thoughts on How Black Music Took Over The World

Harriet Tubman (L-R: Brandon Ross, JT Lewis, Melvin Gibbs)

New Albums Available For Pre-Order Now! We’re releasing two CDs on Burning Ambulance Music on May 22.

Ava Mendoza’s Alive Alone, Alive Together is a live album which features legendary jazz drummer Hamid Drake on four of its eight tracks. It rips; you’re gonna want to play it loud. Pre-order your copy here. (We’re also offering a special deal — you get Alive Alone, Alive Together and Ava’s last album, Mama Killa, which features violinist gabby fluke-mogul and drummer Carolina Pérez, for just $25 plus shipping. But we’ve got fewer than 100 copies of Mama Killa left, so that’s a limited, while-supplies-last offer.)

Pianist Joel Futterman and bassist William Parker’s Transcendent Universe is an epic free jazz monster jam, an hour of unfettered improvisation from two masters. RIYL Cecil Taylor, Don Pullen, Dave Burrell… this is a heavy record, but beautiful. Rapturous, even. Pre-order your copy here.

CDs are at the manufacturer now. As always, they come in heavy-duty gatefold mini-LP style sleeves, printed on textured paper. They look beautiful on your shelf, and feel amazing in your hand… and we’ve only made 500 copies of each. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, so order now!

---

I would never presume to call Melvin Gibbs my friend, but we know each other a little, and have traveled in overlapping circles for many years. I’ve written about his music for BA and Stereogum and The Wire; I’ve interviewed him; I’ve seen Harriet Tubman live twice; I’ve asked him non-musical questions via email, and gotten thoughtful answers; we exchange ideas on social media occasionally; he donated a track to a compilation I put out when Burning Ambulance Music launched; I introduced him to several of the members of Khanate at a Supersilent/Matana Roberts show at Le Poisson Rouge one night; and I’ve released a record by Tubman guitarist Brandon Ross’s band Breath Of Air. And I’ve been listening to his music for somewhere around 30 years.

I think I first became aware of him in the early ’90s, but I’m not sure in exactly what context. I definitely knew his name before he became the bassist for the Rollins Band.

I’d been a fan of the Rollins Band since 1989 or 1990; I bought their first album, Life Time, and the follow-up, Hard Volume, and listened to them a lot in high school and the years immediately afterward. I saw them play at CBGB in March 1990, at City Gardens in Trenton, NJ sometime after that, and one more time in August 1991, when they opened the Lollapalooza tour and the whole “alternative” world discovered them. I never saw them with Gibbs in the band, though. I did listen to the albums he played on, 1994’s Weight and 1997’s Come In And Burn. There were some great songs on those records, particularly “Starve” from Come In And Burn.

Around the turn of the century, the Knitting Factory label released a slew of albums by Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society. I was particularly fascinated by the archival live recordings Montreux Jazz Festival and Earned Dreams, which featured Gibbs and guitarist Vernon Reid. The band’s manic but airtight post-harmolodic jazz-funk was like a bolt of lightning going up my spine, and Gibbs and second bassist Bruce Johnson were more like train drivers than anchors. They didn’t keep the music in line; they spurred it onward.

About 15 years ago, I discovered Gibbs’ main current band, Harriet Tubman (with Ross and drummer JT Lewis), when their third album, Ascension — a live recording from 2000 that sat on a shelf for more than a decade — was released. They followed that in 2017 with Araminta, a collaboration with Wadada Leo Smith, and The Terror End Of Beauty a year later. This year, they’ve released Electrical Field Of Love, featuring vocalist Georgia Anne Muldrow. Their music is amazing, a fluid and dreamlike combination of dub, funk, and psychedelic rock, with dashes of jazz here and there. (I once saw them expand to an octet with trumpeter Jaimie Branch, alto saxophonist Darius Jones, tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Warren Trae Crudup III, performing a version of Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” at Winter Jazzfest 2018.)

Gibbs has just published a book called How Black Music Took Over The World, and I’m very impressed by it. I feel like it’s the kind of book one doesn’t just read once and file, but returns to again and again as a reference and source of instruction.

I’ve seen some jackasses — OK, one jackass — complaining that despite its title, the book isn’t a complete history of African-American music from the 19th century to the present. Specifically, it doesn’t talk about Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington (or Bert Williams, a blackface vaudeville comedian well known in his time but forgotten today). But when one reflects on what the book does talk about, this seems like one of the most bizarre cases of missing the point I’ve ever come across.

What Gibbs offers is a mixture of autobiography; professional memoir; technical discussion of musical practice, and the specific characteristics of African and Caribbean musical forms which manifest in American music; physics, theoretical and otherwise; and cultural history. It bounces around a lot, taking you from almost textbook-style studies of musical patterns (including diagrams of Gibbs’ own design, to help readers like me who love music but can’t perform it to save our lives) to tales from the road to family lore and back around again.

One theme he returns to again and again is learning from elders. As a teenager, he borrowed records from a neighbor, and got advice on purchases at a local record store from the proprietor. Later, he studied percussion, before picking up the bass. When he was getting started as a bass player, he worked with musicians older and more experienced than himself, and when they said, “You should hook up with So-and-so,” he took their advice. Even as an experienced musician, he would find himself in situations where his accumulated skills were not yielding the desired results, and someone older needed to step in and guide him. As Gibbs tells it, becoming a musician is both easy — there’s no barrier to entry beyond the will to do it — and a lifelong journey, a never-ending learning process.

Naturally, as a fan, I was drawn to the stories about bands I loved, and records I’d heard. Of his time in the Decoding Society, he writes:

“Shannon’s drums were more correctly called a drum choir than a drum set. He was a very melodic player who had a very specific tuning system. I had to figure out what notes would properly harmonize with both his drums and his melodies. And he played loud, which meant that I also had to figure out which of the notes that worked would both cut through and add to what was going on compositionally. Once I figured out how to play around what he was doing, I was able to take it up a level and actually play inside what he was doing.”

Similarly, he talks about finding his way inside the Rollins Band after being invited to replace their founding bassist, Andrew Weiss:

“Creating Rollins Band music was an iterative process. Chris [Haskett, guitar], Sim [Cain, drums], and I would jam. Theo Van Rock, the band’s soundperson, who was a full-fledged member of the band, would give both supportive, positive feedback and candid and unstinting critique. Henry would listen to what we were doing and, when what we were working on was well enough formed, write to it. He’d jam on top of our jams, working through his ideas until he got them where he wanted them. The two riffs I’d brought in to play at our first session together survived and thrived. The first riff became the backbone of the song ‘Civilized.’ Chris, who’d long been one of the band’s sonic architects, brought in great riffs of his own. Sim gave those riffs shape and body. Henry picked the cream of the crop and turned them into songs. Theo monitored our work and kept it moving in the right direction.”

I also found his dissection of rhythm patterns fascinating and educational. In Chapter 6, “Can’t Stop,” Gibbs uses simple diagrams depicting 8- or 12- or 16-event cycles as points on a circle to break down rhythms heard in Brazilian music, in the music of Fela Kuti, in the music of James Brown, and eventually shows how the beat from “Funky Drummer,” emulated by programming a drum machine, shows up on “Miss The Rage,” a song by Trippie Redd and Playboi Carti. (I’ve taken these diagrams as a kind of homework assignment and begun programming them in Logic, listening to the beat loop and seeing where it takes me.)

There’s a lot of musical instruction in How Black Music Took Over The World. Gibbs attempts to explain it all as clearly as possible, with a minimum of hand-waving and mysticism; when he discusses the differences between Western tuning and African tuning and how that influences the blues, I can follow. But when he gets into oscillations in the harmonic series, and fundamentals and natural thirds and whatever, my eyes glaze over and my brain shuts down. I don’t get it, and it’s not him, it’s me. But if that kind of thing is of interest to you, there is a lot to learn and absorb here.

He goes on to discuss how expressive instrumental technique migrates between seemingly disparate genres, writing:

“Slap bass is an example of what musicians call an extended technique. Hacking musical instruments and technology used for sound recording and reproduction to give them additional expressive capabilities is a signature aspect of Black music making… the wailing coming from Jimi Hendrix’s guitar while he played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock, the preacher-like cries coming out of Pharoah Sanders’s saxophone on his ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan,’ and the ugly beauty of Sonny Sharrock’s guitar playing during ‘Hold On, I’m Coming’ on Herbie Mann’s Memphis Underground are all examples of this. The use of extended techniques by musicians in New York’s loft jazz [scene] was a model for musicians in the parallel No Wave scene. No Wave musicians studied with, other times borrowed from, and at yet other times played and collaborated with loft jazz musicians. James Brown’s song ‘Super Bad,’ the song where he yells ‘Blow me some Trane’ (as in John Coltrane) before saxophonist Robert McCullough plays perhaps the most avant-garde solo ever heard on a Top 15 pop song while the band’s rhythms pump underneath him, was an example of both.”

Gibbs was and is a living bridge between loft jazz and No Wave, having performed for years with ex-DNA guitarist Arto Lindsay in Ambitious Lovers and, alongside several other jazz players, most affiliated with the Black Artist Group of St. Louis, as a member of James Chance’s band the Contortions. (Before long, the Chance backing band started doing their own thing, becoming Defunkt, led by trombonist Joseph Bowie, brother of Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter Lester Bowie.) As he writes, “People took to calling what we were doing ‘punk funk,’ perhaps in part because Rick James, who was the biggest Black artist as the movement emerged, started calling his music that. I respect the fact that the term stuck as a designation for what we were doing back then, and I’ve used it myself. But I’m more drawn to the term free funk. I feel it’s a more accurate description of what Defunkt and the other bands I mentioned, as well as Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time and the other funk bands that loft jazz musicians put together in the wake of Defunkt’s success, were trying to accomplish.”

(Gibbs and I have argued over the merits of free funk. I love some of it; Of Human Feelings is one of my favorite Ornette Coleman albums, and Arthur Blythe’s Illusions and Lenox Avenue Breakdown are incredible records. But I’ve never really vibed with James “Blood” Ulmer’s work as a leader, even though he plays on both those Blythe records and several other albums I love, like Larry Young’s Lawrence Of Newark and Big John Patton’s Accent On The Blues. And I find many of the sonic trademarks of the free-funk/post-loft era, like the sharp ringing snares and the metallic bass lines and the clanging guitars and shrill horns, unappealing.)

Is How Black Music Took Over The World the ideal title for this book? I don’t know. It’s provocative, which is good from a publishing industry standpoint, but it might more accurately be called My Journey Through The World Of Black Music, or something like that. But like I say, this is not a book you read once. I’m going to file it next to the other books that have genuinely made me think about music in new ways, like Greg Tate’s Flyboy In The Buttermilk and Joe Carducci’s Rock And The Pop Narcotic and Michael Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae and Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip Into Another World, and I suspect I’m going to come back to it again and again, even if it’s just to look at Gibbs’ rhythmic diagrams and program them on my drum machine until they make sense.