Sunday Music_Pan-Afrikan People's Arkestra, Los Angeles and the Value of Local Culture Media

TV Documentary: LA public television program 'Artbound' spends an hour with "The New West Coast Sound," showcasing the importance of great community music and community storytelling

Every great story needs a passionate storyteller to tell it, and a passionate editor/producer to make sure it gets done right. There was a time around 2014-16 that whenever I’d speak to writers about potential stories and then-current cultural narratives that needed telling—more precisely, ones I wished somebody would pitch me—I found myself talking about the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Leimert Park and the musicians merging various communities of sound in LA. Of course, being in New York, I was inevitably getting some of it wrong—just how “various” were these communities?—but even from afar you could tell that the overlaps and contours of the city’s contemporary Black music were not only interacting and evolving in remarkable ways, but referencing the roots of Black Los Angeles culture. 

After I wrote the “new London jazz” piece for Rolling Stone in early 2018, a few industry folks asked if I would consider doing one on LA next. The subject definitely appealed to me—and the music only kept getting better. Yet a large regret remained from writing the London piece, one that made me dismiss even entertaining doing another like it: the feeling that I was a carpetbagger, a cultural tourist describing and deconstructing a scene from an ocean away. Enough LDN locals and artists assured me this wasn’t the case, and so the guilt lifted. Yet it was not something I wanted to repeat, especially knowing the people in LA who were far more knowledgeable at drawing the picture that showed how Kendrick/TDE, Kamasi/Terrace/West Coast Get Down, FlyLo/Thundercat/Brainfeeder, Miguel-Atwood Ferguson/Carlos Nino/Dublab, the Sa-Ra crew, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Low End Theory, World Cafe, Leimert and Echo Park, were all moving parts of one of the most potent musical communities in the U.S. And still are.

So it was thrilling a couple of weeks back to find out that one variation of this story has now been brilliantly told, as an October episode of KCET’s excellent Artbound. The episode’s title, “The New West Coast Sound,” is probably its biggest misstep, not simply because the community music Artbound describes—played predominantly by Black musicians with Leimert Park roots, centered on original compositions and improvisation, a tradition sometimes referred to as “jazz” but encompassing a lot of sound that follows this lineage—has been mutating around LA since the Great Migration. But also because the ensemble the story follows, Pan-Afrikan People’s Arkestra (the Ark, for short), was founded all the way back in 1961 by Horace Tapscott, one of the city’s great musical elders. Calling this “sound” “new,” and framing it as a tale of “discovery,” plays into white-gaze Culture Marketing 101. Because actually, this story's beauty is far more interesting than mere novelty or long-awaited recognition would lead you to believe. Longevity is not its core strength either—or, not directly. It’s more like regeneration, taking a set of important information from the past—notes, tunes, attitudes, a way of looking at life—and injecting it with youthful energy, modernity, new tools. It’s a short story about community building and history tracking, how to manifest thriving, meaningful local culture outside of normative commercial constraints. 

The narrator and main character of “The New West Coast Sound” is twenty-something drummer Makela Session, current musical director of the Ark, which in itself is some kind of ant-ageist achievement. Makela quite literally grew up in the Ark (his father Michael Session, a saxophonist, has been a multi-decade member, former musical director and was a close friend and confidant of Tapsott’s, before the Ark’s founder passed away in 1999), so he’s a great window into understanding the band’s purpose as an institution of community memory and how that role moves forward in the contemporary world. And because Makela is a member of that Leimert Park and greater LA scene, the doc has a broader, intergenerational musical perspective of what moving a culture forward might look and sound like. 

So you don’t just get to see a parade the Ark’s elders (including, holy sh*t, Tribe’s Phil Ranelin—he lives in LA now?) rub shoulders with some of the city’s extraordinary younger talents (spotted: pianist Jamael Dean, singer/composer/choir-leader Jimetta Rose, singer/pianist Qu’ran Shaheed); or watch Session trade beats with experimental hip-hop and electronic musicians (Def Sound, Busdriver). You also get a sense of how the ideas that guide the Ark inform its younger members, while continuing to bypass mainstream thinking, even as Tapscott’s legacy gains academic and hipster prominence, the Ark’s rare recordings become more sought after, and jazz in general gets more institutionalized and commodified. (An exchange in the film between Makela and an engineer while digitizing newly discovered Tapscott interviews, speaks on what are all-too-rarely expressed truths in cultural reports where racism is a character in the room—and echoes Gio Russonello’s recent notes about jazz’s role in contemporary society.)

Nothing in the doc exemplifies the Ark’s contemporary community ideals, and the non-linearity of its musical timeliness like “I Met a Mountain,” a song Rose wrote in memory of Ras G. (The doc shows the big-band spiritual in snippets of rehearsals, and a live performance from a New Year’s Eve 2019-20 show performed at Grant Park; PBS filmed that entire concert, which you could see in full on KCET’s Southland Sessions.) A lot of the meaning comes from understanding the importance of Ras G to the LA community. Born Gregory Shorter, and passed of natural causes in summer of 2019, he was a seminal local figure, producer/DJ, record store smartie and creative connector; though maybe, most crucially, as somebody who was a philosophical engine, thinker, archivist, teacher, and empath, the kind of cat who made sense of sound and history, and of sound as history. To traditional musical ears raised on “genre,” much of Ras G’s Afrofuturist mix of techno, hip-hop and oddball electronics, was maybe a solar system away from the Ark’s spiritual jazz. But genre is often at direct contradiction with traditions and purposes of sound, especially when commercial interests refine music for consumer and easy-to-market-to palettes. You can easily hear Ras G’s tracks as spiritual offspring of “jazz,” simply replacing a trap-kit with drum machines, and acoustic or brass instruments, with synths and sequencers; and when Rose honors him as a “mountain,” it’s less about Shorter’s physical stature than the elemental role he played in connecting old and new stories.  

To watch an almost year-old video of Rose conducting the Voices of Creation during the Grant Park performance of “I Met a Mountain” is to behold a performance of exceptional emotion and power. On the verge of a new year which has ended up seeing so much loss and attempted redefinitions of social values—by people who, if we’re frank, quite often don’t have any—it is the kind of gut-punch that art and culture regularly offer, especially, if you have all the contexts. (Though it’s incredible without them too.) And if you watch “The New West Coast Sound,” far more of those contexts come into view than you’d usually expect from a mainstream television program. And for that Artbound, KCET and the folks who worked on it, deserves great credit. It was either a case of them knowing the Ark and Leimert Park story, and letting it be told with little interruption; or of allowing the writer-producers heads who brought it to KCET to do their thing, blocking the institution from getting in the way. Whichever was the case, the successful result shows the importance of high-level local storytelling, something that could become the cornerstone of an equitable archive, rather than some bullshit feather in a diversity cap. 

Yesterday, I was speaking to one of the founders of the local Los Angeles magazine theLAnd, and it struck me that their endeavor also had some of the same DNA of Artbound. It’s an understanding of local cultural histories and their intricacies, but also a recognition that the future of the world is at least partially dependent on these intricacies not to be smoothed over, but celebrated in their complexity. There’s great value in trusting audiences to understand those complexities — or to give them an opportunity to ask follow-up questions.