The world’s most interesting man doesn’t care about the brand of beer you drink. Kahil El’Zabar wants to realign your molecules through the incantatory power of rhythm.
From Broadway to the runway to jazz’s exploratory frontiers, El’Zabar has shaped the culture of America and — far beyond — while wearing fashion-forward outfits of his own design. Knighted with the Chevalier Medal of Letters by the Counsel General of France, he’s the guy who created headdresses for Nina Simone at the same time he held down the drum and percussion chair in her band.
Back in the Bay Area next week as part of an extensive tour celebrating the 50th year of his protean Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, El’Zabar performs Tuesday at the Back Room in Berkeley and Wednesday at Bird & Beckett Books and Records in Glen Park (Monday’s show at The Chapel was cancelled).
Over the decades, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble has featured some of jazz’s most expressive improvisers, which include El’Zabar on percussion, drum kit, kalimba and vocals. The current lineup, which is featured on the upcoming EHE album “Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit,” is similarly formidable, with trumpeter Corey Wilkes, a 20-year Ethnic Heritage Ensemble veteran, and baritone saxophonist Alex Harding, who joined the ranks seven years ago.
“They’re two extraordinary musicians, masters of their instruments,” said El’Zabar, 70. “The kind of complexity we’ve evolved can seem very simple, but when we get to the motifs, we can go in a lot of directions. The three of us are very cross-genre; flexibility that flows from a collective mind.”
Through his work as a bandleader and composer, El’Zabar has been a leading force in bringing African percussion to the foreground in American culture, most impressively with Julie Taymor on her Afrocentric, Tony Award-winning production of “The Lion King” (the third-longest-running production in Broadway history). As longtime friends, he and Taymor had collaborated on a number of projects but, in reimagining the animated film’s look and sound for the stage, they brought a West African aesthetic into an increasingly risk-adverse Great White Way.
When it comes to creative projects he believes in, El’Zabar has never shied away from taking a chance. A second-generation member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) — the Chicago Black arts collective founded in the mid-1960s that included pivotal figures as pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill, multi-wind player Anthony Braxton, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago — El’Zabar transformed the largely textural role of hand percussion in jazz into a structural, compositional component.
Even amidst adventurous and experimental-minded AACM artists, he faced doubt and puzzlement as he pursued the EHE’s unorthodox instrumentation. “The idea of percussion and two horns was far more challenging than a lot of bands in the AACM,” he said. “I tried to share the concept with my parents, and they were very skeptical. ‘How will you make a living?’ You start hearing that your idea may have some challenges, but when you’re feeling something strongly, you’ve got to see where it goes.”
For El’Zabar and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, the path led through West Africa, where he took on a new way of thinking about bringing musicians together in common cause. During the time he spent in Ghana, he realized that a full ensemble might consist of a shaker, a hand drum, a bell, and a string instrument.
“The communities of musicians always found a way to facilitate a full sound,” he said. “So could I do that in a Western sense, using certain African practices? How can I take music from an ethnic context and translate that into an urban language of contemporary music? One thing that was key was understanding that melody is not superior to rhythm. In the West, advanced harmony is considered king, though everything is based on frequency, on vibration. People fail to understand the possibility of rhythm as a catalyst to advanced music.”
El’Zabar, born Clifton Blackburn, first went on the road at 16, as a drummer with Chicago tenor sax great Gene Ammons, and he credits his parents with providing the skills that enabled him to support himself. They owned Chicago’s preeminent formalwear business serving the Black community, Ask Gwen, and El’Zabar and his sibling were expected to help out. She taught him to sow at nine years old, “and when I came home from school we had to work,” he recalled. “At 14, my mom sent me to Italy to study formal gown-making, and I learned the fine piping technique used in gowns.”
While eager to leave home and get away from the piece work, he found out that making a living as a gigging jazz musician was tough going, “and this thing I hated became my income-generating vehicle,” he said. He made his own outfits, and his colleagues started to take note of his sartorial splendor. Before long, his bespoke garments gave Chicago’s avant-garde its own take on the Afrocentric aesthetic that swept through the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.
“Everyone in the AACM wore my dashikis,” he said. “The little vest that Henry Threadgill [wore], I made that. Even before I played in Pharoah Sanders’ band, he wore my clothes. I made that sunflower dress that became a trademark for Freda Payne.”
When the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble lit out for Europe in the mid-1970s, he befriended the rising generation of fashions designers, including Jean Paul Gaultier, Claude Montana, and John Galliano. “All those designers liked jazz, as everyone in Europe did then,” he said. “We were stars of the avant-garde in Europe, and I had that background. I understood their craft.”
During his tenure with Nina Simone in the mid-‘70s, she took note of his wardrobe. “She asked, ‘Where’d you get those pants?’ ‘I made them.’ I started making her those headdresses and big, flowery tops she wore. My last major thing was for the hip-hop group Arrested Development. They were looking for a look, like the big African pants, and commissioned me to do a piece for them.”
Between his work as an educator, composer, bandleader, and consultant — he worked with the Eastside Cultural Center in Oakland to launch the annual Malcolm X Jazz Festival — El’Zabar has his hands full. And then there’s keeping up his chops on his various instruments, a regimen to which he devotes six to seven hours a day.
“I’ll still get up at midnight and put on music, and be up to until 3 or 4 o’clock, designing clothing and painting,” he said. “Those are my outlets for relaxation.”
Mixing it up with two volatile duos at The Lab
The Lab presents a pair of volatile duos Saturday, with an opening set by Gliss Glass Gong (percussionist Karen Stackpole and instrument builder Krys Bobrowski), followed by Oakland saxophonist Phillip Greenlief and Scott Amendola on drums and live electronics. They’ve been performing together intermittently for three decades, a partnership that earned considerable notoriety with their 1995 album “Collect My Thoughts.” The Berkeley-based Amendola has specialized in stripped-down contexts over the years, performing widely in duos with organist Wil Blades and guitarist Charlie Hunter (including March 27 at Novato’s Hopmonk Tavern, and March 28 at The Ivy Room in Albany). Renewing their venturesome music-making in conjunction with a new project, “Stay With It” on Clean Feed Records, he and Greenlief, an essential creative catalyst on the Bay Area improvised-music scene since 1993, have both covered a lot of ground since they worked together regularly. There’s no telling where the music might go.
The coronation of Dillon Vado
Dave King is best known as the drummer for The Bad Plus but, over the past decade or so, he’s established a vibrant identity outside of that long-running band, particularly via his work with guitarist Julian Lage (with whom he played several nights at the SFJAZZ Center last month). He’s back in town for two shows this week, performing with the Dillon Vado Vibes Trio at Keys Jazz Bistro Thursday, Feb. 22, and The Art Boutiki in San Jose Saturday, Feb. 23.
Raised in San Jose and now living in Oakland, Vado is a gifted drummer and composer. The opportunity to work with one of his major influences makes these gigs something of a milestone, as does the presence of Monterey-raised Kanoa Mendenhall, one of New York’s top young bassists.
