I knew about Charlie Keil somewhat before I met him and long before we began collaborating on various projects. In 1966 he published Urban Blues, which was a study of such singers as Bobby Blue Bland and B.B. King, blues musicians who wore sharp suits and performed in urban venues with electrified instruments. The book received wide acclaim, both in intellectual circles and in, of all places, the rock and roll press. And why not? After all, much of rock and roll was based on the blues. This lively and erudite book, published by an prestigious university press, University of Chicago, gave legitimacy to the work of critics publishing in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and Crawdaddy.
I don’t know just when of how I came to read it, but it electrified me. For not only did Keil write about the music, he wrote about the musicians and the communities in which they lived and performed. After all Keil was an ethnomusicologist, and it probably said so somewhere on or in the book. If so, it didn’t register with me. And, like many who read the book, I assumed that Keil was black. I mean, how could a white man know so much about black life and write so sympathetically about it? No, this Charlie Keil fellow had to be black.
While I might has bought the book soon after it was published, I don’t actually know that. But I’m sure I bought it sometime before the fall of 1973, when I went off to graduate school, because I remember talking with my Baltimore friends about the book, who were as taken with it as I was.
When I shuffled off to Buffalo – yeah, the Devil made me do it – I didn’t know that Charlie Keil was on the faculty there. I went off to the English Department at UB (State University of New York at Buffalo) while he was in American Studies. But I also hung out in the improvisation workshop run by Frank Foster in the music department. Though I never verified this, I had the impression that some of the people in the workshop were music students at Buffalo, while others were young local musicians who showed up to learn from a man who’d played with Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Elvin Jones and who knows whom else. Frank was one of the masters, and we were there to learn from him.
One of the people who was there was a young guitarist named Simon Salz. I believe he was one of the locals, but he may also have been registered as a student. It doesn’t matter. We hit it off and formed a quintet that played a few gigs here and there in Buffalo. One day, likely in the spring of 1978, my last semester there, he told me about a party where there’d be a big jam session.
“Charlie Keil will be there,” he told me.
“The Charlie Keil. The guy who wrote Urban Blues?”
“Yes. He teaches in American Studies.”
I couldn’t believe it. One of my intellectual heroes had been here at UB all along and I didn’t even know it.
So of course I went to the jam session. There he was, thumping along on bass. Very tall. And white. Like me, and Simon, and a jillion other people as well. For whatever reason I didn’t introduce myself. Why not? Mostly, I’d guess, because I’m shy. Besides, what’s the point, I was leaving UB in a couple of months.
So I left UB for a faculty position at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY, not far from the state capital, Albany. I did this that and the other, failed to get tenure, hung around Troy doing this that and the other and somewhere along toward the end of the century began corresponding with Charlie through email. I forget just how that came about, perhaps through a family friend, Jon Barlow, who knew of him, and whom I contacted while researching my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. However it got started we kept it going sporadically while he left the university and moved to Lakeville, Connecticut, and I left Troy and moved to Jersey City, NJ, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
As I’ve lost our correspondence during that period when I had to move my life’s work, a big chunk of it, from one user-friendly Macintosh to more recent user-friendly Mac, I don’t have a good record of what we corresponded about, but it must have been music. That’s likely when he hipped me to his 1966 article, “Motion and Feeling Through Music,” in which he fired a couple of shots across the bow of the musicological establishment which was, naturally enough, built around the practices of high-art music in the Western tradition, so-called classical music. Where Charlie thought of music as fundamentally grounded in human performance, classically oriented musicologists were bewitched by the idea of compositions which, for all practical purposes, resided in a Platonic realm of ideals. And they analyzed those compositions by examining melody and, above all, harmony and harmonic progression. Charlie focused on rhythm, and properly so, for without rhythm little else matters. It’s rhythm that binds us.
The point is that Charlie influenced my thinking about music, and that in turn influenced Beethoven’s Anvil. We kept up our correspondence after the book came out. And then history intervened. The United States was gearing up for war with Iraq. Charlie and I were opposed to the war – we’re both conscientious objectors – and decided to meet up at the anti-war march scheduled for March 22, 2003, in Manhattan. Not only that, we decided to bring our instruments, me with my trumpet, Charlie with his cornet.
I got off the PATH train in mid-town Manhattan at about 12:30. Five minutes later I was in Harold Square, home of Macy’s, checking out the demo. I’d agreed to hook up with Charlie between 1 and 1:30, so I had a few minutes to get a feel for the flow.
People filled Broadway from side-to-side for block after block. Here and there I heard drums and bells and a horn player or two, but no organized music. I noticed a trombonist standing on the sidewalk. Just as I was about to invite him to come with Charlie and me he headed out into the crowd. I let him go his way as I went mine.
I arrived at 36th and 6th – our meeting point a block away from the demo route – at about 1. Charlie arrived about five minutes later, with two German house guests. We were to meet with other musicians and then join the demo, providing some street music for the occasion. None of the other musicians had arrived by 1:45, so we waded into the crowd searching for the drummers we could hear so well – one of our musicians arrived about ten minutes later and managed to find us in the demo. We made our way to the drummers and starting riffing along with them, Charlie on cornet and me on trumpet. I could see one guy playing bass drum, another on snare, a djembe player or two, and various people playing bells, a small cooking pot, plastic paint cans. Then I heard some wild horn playing off to the left. I looked and saw the one-armed cornetist I’d seen playing in Union Square in the days after 9/11. Charlie and I made our way toward him and joined up. Then I noticed two trumpeters and a trombonist a few yards behind us.
So there we were, a half dozen horns, perhaps a dozen percussion, all within a 20-yard radius. We’d come to the demo in ones, twos and threes, managed to home-in on one another’s sounds, and stayed in floating proximity for the two or three mile walk down Broadway to Washington Square. Sometimes we were closer, within a 5 or 6-yard radius, and sometimes we sprawled over 50 yards. The music was like that too, sometimes close, sometimes sprawled.
When the march slowed to a stop, one of the djembe players would urge the percussionists to form a circle. The horn players executed punctuating riffs as one person after another moved into the circle’s center to dance their steps. These young women clearly had taken African dance classes. When the demo started to move, the dancers dispersed into the crowd, the circle dissolved, and we starting moving forward.
Sometimes the music made magic. The drummers would lock on a rhythm, then a horn player – we took turns doing this – would set a riff, with the four or five others joining in on harmony parts or unison with the lead. At the same time the crowd would chant “peace now” between the riffs while raising their hands in the air, in synch. All of a sudden – it only took two or three seconds for this to happen – a thirty-yard swath of people became one. Horn players traded off on solos, the others kept the riffs flowing, percussionists were locked, and the crowd embraced us all. You walked with spring and purpose. Even as the crowd chanted “peace” I was feeling “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in my mind and in my step.
Things got jammed up as we got to Waverly Place – the street that runs just north of Washington Square, the demo’s end. One of the cornet players looked off to the side. I followed his gaze and saw the trombonist I’d passed when I’d first reconnoitered the demo in Harold Square. His horn was pointed to the sky, slide pumping away, as he worked his way toward us. He settled into “All You Need Is Love” and the other horns joined him in sweet, crude, rough harmony. I was hearing John Lennon in my mind’s ear, along with the sardonic horn riffs answering the treacly refrain.
I heard, and played, more music in that demonstration than I’d heard in any of the demonstrations I’d been in back in the 1960s. Oh, there was protest music back then, in coffee houses and clubs, on the radio, on records (remember those? they’re coming back), and movies. But it didn’t happen at demonstrations, not like it had that day in Manhattan. What had changed in the intervening decades, how, and why? I don’t know.
Charlie decided to get organized. In his years at Buffalo, Charlie had developed the concept of a versatile band for street music. He called it the 12/8 Path. “What,” you might ask, “is the 12/8 Path?” By 12/8 Charlie means a framework for making grooves. Technically speaking, it’s a time signature in the Western tradition. “What’s a time signature?” It’s a way of organizing musical time by specifying a hierarchical structure of beats and measures. In 12/8 time a measure consists of 12 beats, where each beat is an eighth note. “And, what, pray tell…” An eighth note is half as long as a quarter note, which is, in turn, half as long as a half note, which is half as long as, guess what? That’s right, a whole note. The important thing about 12/8 is that 12 is four times three. It’s the interlinking of the three and the four that gives 12/8 time a slinky, slithery, flexible, and deeply danceable feel.
Here’s how Charlie characterizes the idea of a 12/8 path band:
If I understood the last year or so of his life correctly, Malcolm was trying to develop both a political organization and a religious organization on the theory that it would take two orientations/organizations reinforcing and complementing each other to make the radical social changes required by the crisis. In Malcolm’s time “the crisis” was a self-determination of peoples crisis, and, while this crisis is deeper today than it was then […] a bigger species integrity and diversity crisis has emerged that threatens all vertebrate life on the planet. A 12/8 path band, at least as I envision it, simply puts musicking at the very center of Malcolm’s strategy for social change, just when a comprehensive strategy for a deeper crisis is urgent.
Thinking about how easy it is to get a few musicians together and make a start on it, how much fun it is to make music, what joy there is in beating drums and blowing horns in the carnival styles of different cultures (Brazil, Cuba, New Orleans), how satisfying it is to “stroll” and not be plugged in or sitting down or stuck in one place, the money there is to be made by being mobile, different, flexible, ready to play gigs that other bands can’t play.
What that means, practically, is that you need musicians who can move. You’re not going to have pianos, upright basses, or any instrument that needs to be plugged into a socket. We’re talking about percussion – various kinds of drums, bells, shakers, claves, etc. – and horns – tubas, trombones, trumpets, and saxophones. Sure, you could have fiddles and banjos and acoustic guitars as well, but for whatever reason that hasn’t happened with the bands I’ve seen. The interesting thing is that the form accommodates musicians of all different skill levels. As long as they can keep a beat, they can participate. Everyone gets to play.
At some point Charlie rented a rehearsal studio somewhere on 14th Street in Manhattan and got a bunch of musicians together so we could work on some tunes. Nothing elaborate, just simple tunes and grooves that we could play on the street. The idea was to have a stable of musicians to call on for demonstrations in Manhattan. We marched on, I don’t know, a half dozen or so times, an anti-nuclear demonstration in May of 2010 where the Japanese and Korean protestors seemed to out-number white folks. In 2009 Charlie got a bunch of us into a recording studio and we recorded eight tunes. We all knew “Amazing Grace” (below). Steve Swell arranged “Johnny Comes Marching Home” (above) to feature the late trombonist, Roswell Rudd (who was also Charlie’s cousin). As for the other half-dozen tunes, we’d made them up at one time or another (like “Peace Now,” even further above).
After that Charlie and I started other things. Charlie had the idea of promoting a Truth and Traditions party, so I set up a blog of that name in the summer of 2010. I managed to keep that going for a while, but, let’s say I had my hands full with other things. In 2015 and 2015 we worked on a small collection of materials built around a Benjamin Rush published in 1793, “A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States.” With the addition of materials by Mary Liebman, Frederick L. Schuman, Charlie, and me, we had the first volume in a series of pamphlets on the theme of local paths of peace today: Need a Department of Peace: Everybody’s Business, Nobody’s Job. A couple of years later I put together a collection of essays by the economist Thomas Naylor, Thomas Naylor’s Paths to Peace: Small is Necessary, in which he argued that nations and corporations have grown too big for effective governance. The most recent addition to the series is a collection of essays on music, Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature.
The last time I checked, Charlie was busy finishing a couple of book projects, one about the polka, and another about music for children, perhaps his major passion these days. We all start life as infants and children, and kids love music, a theme from an earlier 3QD column, Born to Groove: Up from Mud and Back to Our Roots.
Consider young Gavriil, who is a bit over two years old in this video:
He’s quite deliberate in what his exploration. After a bit of this and that he catches on to something at 0:37, where he plays a repeated note in the left hand, adds a note with the right (0:43), and then opens it up, adding more notes with both hands (0:48).
Pause.
Repeat the sequence (0:56), starting with a higher note.
Repeat (1:24), quickly.
Repeat (1:33), moving higher, with some variations thrown in (1:36).
Repeat (1:47), moving higher (notice how he shifts position on the bench, 1:49) – follow his eyes.
Repeat (2:03), notice how he lays into that first note (even dropping his right arm to the side), adding the right, filling it out, increasing the volume. The repetition slows, becomes more insistent…
Pause, both hands raised (2:37),
Repeat (2:38), really laying it on with the left, adding the right (2:43)
He’s thinking (2:51), and now begins developing some new material.
That’s the really significant thing, he introduces some new material after having worked through one basic idea seven times (by my count). I leave it as an exercise to the reader to attend to how he deals with this new material, which seems a bit more concerned with what the two hands are doing at the same time.
After a bit be pauses and thinks a bit at 3:35, and is figuring out whether or not he’s done (3:45). Ah, not quite. Last note at about 4:00. But he keeps working his arms and hands without sounding notes, moving them back from the keyboard at 4:10, down to his lap (4:15), then back up. 4:24, hearing his mother (I assume), he’s done, and moves away.
Young Gavriil is probably exceptionally talented. But I can’t help but wondering what would happen if all children were encouraged the way he is. This talented four-year old is operating in a different musical tradition:
I know from other videos that she lives in a musical household. But why aren’t all households musical households?
There is an answer to that question: That’s just not how our culture is organized. Historically, I suppose that answer makes sense. But, with artificial intelligence looming large in our future, I fear that we’re running out of history.
We’re going to have to reinvent ourselves. That’s not easily done, not in a day, a week, a year, a decade, not even in a generation. It will take several generations. In my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil), the project that got me corresponding with Charlie Keil in the late 1990s, I argue that music was the vehicle through which groups of clever apes transformed themselves into human beings (Humo ludens collaborans as Charlie likes to put it). Perhaps we should use music as the foundation for the reboot, make the 12/8 path the path to the future.