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ooks | By Jon RoSS
Weston’s Cross-
Cultural Life
In 2001, Randy Weston stepped into a
club in Kyoto, Japan, and felt the presence
of Africa. Weston, an ethnomusicological
hobbyist, had spent his entire
life learning about African music and
integrating it into his esthetic, but he
never expected to identify with the Japanese
audience on a spiritual level. The
pianist’s oeuvre has explored his African
ancestry; that evening, he learned that
the same sacred principles can resonate
across different nations.
african rhythms: the autobiography
of randy Weston (Duke university
Press) is a tour of African spirituality. The
book details the Brooklyn-born Weston’s
early connection with African culture and
his quest to infuse his compositions with
a sense of place and history. Weston,
now in his 80s, writes music wedded to
both the American jazz tradition and his
ancestors’ musical vernacular.
While Weston is credited as the composer
of african rhythms, Willard Jenkins is listed
as the arranger, stringing together hours upon
hours of interviews into a structurally sound
and engaging narrative. Anecdotes from major
figures in the pianist’s life along with letters
by admirers enhance these interviews, but
most of the book’s 300 pages are led by the
good-natured Weston’s conversations. This
story-by-transcript model takes a bit of getting
used to, but makes the work ultimately
more personal.
The interviews have been edited and
smoothed out to achieve a novelistic flow.
According to Jenkins, Weston added detail
to the material and clarification in some parts,
but he also edited candid remarks out of the
manuscript. The result is a book rich in detail
about the professional aspects of Weston’s
life, but glosses over points that may be embarrassing
or uncomfortable.
Weston spends most of the book revisiting
details over which followers of his music
would salivate. He thoroughly explores his artistic
relationship with the arranger Melba Liston,
devotes an entire chapter to the personalities
of his current band and explicates his
discography, focusing on 1960’s uhuru africa,
1972’s Blue moses and other African-influenced
material. But while african rhythms is
a musician’s autobiography and famous historical
figures leap out of the page—including
cameos by a benevolent Charlie Parker and a
garrulous Muhammad Ali—the book is much
more about the pianist’s quest to find physical
and spiritual tranquility.
From an early age, Weston’s taskmaster
father, who was of Caribbean descent, in-
stilled in him a cultural pride. He spent weekends
with his churchgoing mother, who was
raised in the South. Church and cultural pride
soon mixed with jazz. Many prominent musicians
lived in his neighborhood, and Weston
spent his youth hanging out at the houses of
Max Roach, Ray Abrams and Duke Jordan.
Musicians were heroes to him, not only for
their talents, he writes, but because “their
music was something for which we could
claim ownership.”
Once the professional floodgates opened
and Weston achieved prominence as a musician,
he parlayed that notoriety into tours of
Africa sponsored by the state department. He
fell in love with the continent and moved to
Morocco in the late 1960s, eventually settling
in Tangier. A disdain of more contemporary
jazz fueled the relocation as much as his desire
to be in Africa. Weston disliked the avant
garde and cool jazz movements, both of
which he deemed a rejection of black culture.
“There’s a certain romance, a certain love in
our music, a certain emotion despite all the
adversity we’ve faced,” he writes. “That’s
what I wasn’t hearing in the music anymore.”
As he grew older, Weston’s frank attitude,
and his wearing traditional garb, alienated
critics and listeners and may have even
opened him up to overt racism. But Weston
didn’t let these issues sway him from his goal.
Weston has dedicated his life to spreading African
music throughout the world and forging
a bond with his identity as an African American
musician. african rhythms ably recounts
his sometimes arduous journey to becoming
a true cross-cultural ambassador. DB
ordering info: dukeupress.edu
NOVEMBER 2010 DOWNBEAT 69