Artist - Tune - Album
Eddie Palmieri & Harlem River Drive - Harlem River Drive - Harlem River Drive
Marquis Hill - Black Harvest - Modern Flows EP, Vol. 1
Erykah Badu - Turn Me Away - New Amerykah, Pt. 2
Cinematic Orchestra - Reel Life (Evolution II) - Man With A Movie
Tony Williams - Tony - The Joy Of Flying
Dinah Washington - It Isn’t Fair - This Is My Story, Vol. Two
Steely Dan - Aja - Aja
The Headhunters - Descending Azzizziuh - Straight From The Gate
Eddie Jefferson - Sister Sadie - Golden Essentials
Sy Smith - Perspective - Sometimes A Rose Will Grow In Concrete
Joe Jackson - Jumpin’ With Symphony Sid - Jumpin’ Jive
Gladys Knight - Daddy Could Swear - Gladys Knight and the Pips Anthology
Grant Green - Brazil - Right Now
Jay Hoggard - Startin The Blues En Clave - The Right Place
Leszek Możdżer, Lars Danielsson, Zohar Fresco - Karma Party - Polska
Freddie Hubbard - Space Track - The Black Angel
The ode to musical styles past and present that introduces Jazz Gumbo is “Music Evolution” by Branford Marsalis and Buckshot LeFonque.
Playlists for all past Sets of Jazz Gumbo will be found at jazzgumbo.blogspot.ca
During my early teens, I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which was a very diverse community. My junior high school’s population was about a third Black, a third White and a third Puerto Rican. Aside from having lots of Puerto Ricans as school mates, I can’t say that I absorbed a great deal of that culture. Except, that is, for the Music! In the streets, the playgrounds, the shops and apartment buildings, the strains of Puerto Rican music were as prevalent as any other.
Unfortunately, I was a product of that bias-blinded time. Back then, the mainstream cultural media covered all things White, and little else. My Black friends and I listened to the Black radio stations. And I guess my Puerto Rican friends had their own stations to listen to. Though our environment brought us all together, and we shared in many ways, there were barriers of behavior and preference and taste that we observed without being consciously aware of them. I remember that there was one Puerto Rican boy who was dating a White girl. I don’t think there was any substantial, negative social reaction to that, but just the fact that I remember it tells me how rare that sort of mixing was.
Similarly, though I remember watching the live premiere of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” one evening, along with just about everyone else, I don’t think I’d ever have spent my money to buy the record. It would’ve seemed disloyal, to all the Black artists – like James Brown – whose talent was hardly acknowledged by the status quo. And on the flip side, though I knew the names of Tito Puente, Willie Colon and Eddie Palmieri, and was drawn to the Puerto Rican music I heard, and even recognized that Puerto Ricans shared a lot with Black Americans as dis-advantaged and disparaged people, it never occurred to me, until decades later, to delve a bit more into this music, these people, their culture.
Eddie Palmieri did something about this cultural divide when he formed Harlem River Drive in 1971. The actual expressway for which the band is named, and which the song speaks to, was a way for suburbanites travelling to and from lower Manhattan to by-pass the Black ghetto or Harlem and the Puerto Rican ghetto that was East Harlem. Palmieri’s band brought together the musical styles of these two communities in this music. Their theme song opens up this Set of Jazz Gumbo, and their album cover is this week’s feature.
Thrive!
Kirby
