Hisham Aidi in The Ideas Letter:
The pianist Randy Weston—who was born one hundred years ago—arrived in Tangier, Morocco, in April 1967, fresh from a tour sponsored by the US State Department of fourteen African countries and Lebanon. A sense of Weston’s ancestral heritage was woven into his upbringing. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he had been, as he put it in his autobiography African Rhythms, “thoroughly conditioned” toward Africa and the Pan-African ideas of Marcus Garvey by his father, Frank, who ran a Bed-Stuy luncheonette, the Panama Café, that had walls lined with portraits of African kings and tables frequented by musicians and educators. Frank taught his son to think of himself as “an African born in America,” and, as Weston recalled, set out the history of African civilization as an antidote to the Tarzan movies of his childhood: “Between the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Ethiopians, the great university of Fes, the Moors in Spain… we civilized them!” Street-corner teachers such as John Henrik Clarke and Yosef Ben-Jochannan, also known as Dr. Ben, helped deepen that Afrocentrism—as did Weston’s burgeoning engagement with jazz. As a young pianist, Weston was captivated by Duke Ellington’s evocations of Africa, especially in his Liberian Suite (1948). In the early 1950s, at the Music Inn, a cultural center in the Berkshires, Weston accompanied Marshall Stearns on piano and watched the jazz historian as he deployed a mixture of lecture and performance to map the music’s roots in the Caribbean and in West African musical traditions—polyrhythm, call and response, improvisation—challenging what Weston called the clichéd “up the river from New Orleans” narrative.
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