“When I was in third grade,” Melvin Gibbs begins, “my dad took a job as a super in a building in Flatbush. When we moved there we were the second black family on our block. It was essentially an all-black neighborhood 3 years later. Because of this a lot of times I was the first black person people in certain parts of New York had any serious interaction with. Conversely, I was one of those rare New York black kids of that time who had serious, consistent interaction with white people. My parents’ best friends lived in the projects in Fort Greene so we spent a lot of time there. My grandma and one of my aunts lived in the South Bronx. In fact in high school I lived with my grandma in the South Bronx for a minute. My other aunts lived in Harlem. So I had a lot of cultural crosscurrents to deal with growing up.”
It was the start of a trend that would follow the man Time Out New York has referred to as the ‘best bassist in the world’, into adulthood. This lead Melvin Gibbs to become a confluence for the cultural crosscurrents of the Atlantic African Diaspora, all the while maintaining a home base in The Planet: Brooklyn, New York. ”Until recently Brooklyn was the place with the largest population of African-Americans in the U.S. We had Black people from the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Haiti etc. as well as from the U.S. Brooklyn was and is a real Pan-African melting pot.”
“People were wild back then. Remember, that was before people discovered sex could kill you. Downtown, drug use was the norm. People like me and Vernon (Reid) who didn’t do drugs were unique. The Brooklyn style of dress circa 1979-81 was clean, very similar to the current ‘tight clothing’ urban style. We’d put our jeans in the cleaners so they’d be pressed for the club on the weekend. Every week we’d buy a pair of cheap white sneakers called skips which were worn ONCE, then threw them away. The other style was London influenced rudeboy. For Jamaican and punk parties I’d wear my Dad’s clothes. Knits, sharkskin suits, hats.
“The Black kids who went to upscale private schools who could claim some connection to hood culture became famous. Most of the real innovators who came up in the hood and created hip-hop and graffiti culture have stayed obscure. Meanwhile the jazz guys who were doing for self, making there own gigs and creating their own circuits were blowing up on what we would call the indie level now.”
With the musical playing field laid out as such, deciding a path for Gibbs was about not becoming limited. ”For me the issue was always that I wanted to do a lot of different things musically. Back in the day people expected a musician to stay in a lane. If you did music you did one kind of music. R&B people got mad if you did rock. Rock people got mad if you made jazz. I solved that by working with other people who were doing the kind of things I wanted to do instead of trying to do it all myself.”
In this way Gibbs was able to go between genres, from jazz to no wave to rock, through scenes often labeled avant-garde, though he’d be hesitant to proclaim the avant-garde as his trajectory. ”I’m not big into the idea of avant-garde as a tactic. I think the connection should come first. People like Sun Ra, Art Ensemble, P-Funk, Pharoah Sanders, these people made the connection FIRST. Otherwise you’re preaching to the choir. We do that anyway but the idea is for the choir bigger or at least more educated over time.
“It’s also a generational thing. The message that the avant-garde carries changes. The medium has an effect as well. What jazz musicians used to say in their music is said out loud by conscious rappers now. What would Charlie Parker be doing if he were alive today? Playing saxophone? I don’t think so. He might not even think music was the best way get across his message in 2009. It’s a question of cultural meaning.”
What big question that is, particularly in this age, where cultural meaning has been defined by market analysts in boardrooms. ”People are making music to accomplish a purpose. The purpose is constrained by the culture. People make hip-hop now to make money. Jazz at Lincoln Center is serious music. Even though the creative and the cultural are two different impulses, people in practice usually meld them, which means the cultural creates the definition. Avant-garde is a cultural category not a musical one. Music is music.”
Still, it isn’t uncommon for Gibbs to be named among avant-garde musicians, particularly for his work during the no wave era. However, through his work after no wave, he strove to go beyond the values which it laid out. ”I wrote an essay when I put the Punk-Funk All-Stars together, the basic point of which was, we all got that musical point by striving for excellence musically. It was diametrically opposed to the modern primitivist ethic that powered no wave. No wave was tabula rasa but our thing was about the whole history of Black Music.
“In the seventies and eighties those guys were trying to do what Ayler, Sonny Sharrock, Pete Cosey, all the people of the Black avant scene were ALREADY doing but they (no wave) didn’t have the language. So they made a new one, which is cool, but now a Pidgin is taking precedence over a fully formed language because it’s easier to learn and disseminate. Some great things were done by the no wave guys. No disrespect, but I feel at this point it’s becoming the ONLY story in the same way hip-hop became the ONLY story about what was happening in the African American community in the late seventies early eighties. People are shocked to hear the band Death, just like they are shocked by the Gees Bend quilters.
“There have always been abstract Negroidism. You can do it on guitars, you can do it with cloth, with a saxophone, with a video camera. It goes beyond punk, no wave, avant-garde. Now it’s being narrowed down to a canon and that canon is amplifying itself. Again the creative becomes the cultural.
“There’s an essay where Brian Eno talks about Miles. Basically he says Miles’ genius ISN’T his music but his THING. I don’t agree with that but this is what everybody was and is dealing with. Your cultural stance determines what kind of success and what level of access you have. But cutting edge African American creativity is always about a dialog. That’s the part that we held when we got pushed off the boat. It’s not ‘pure’ creativity in the aesthetic sense. That’s why I don’t like the term avant-garde. It implies a lack of dialog to me.”
Fortunately, throughout his career Gibbs has been able to work with a number of artists who are all about that dialog. ”Hooking up with Ornette Coleman through Alphonia Tims showed me that there is a system. Ornette has been doing what he’s doing a LONG time. He got accepted as an innovator in the larger American culture when it was rare for African Americans to get that acceptance. I saw that the method to that only partially dealt with music. It was structural, culture-wise and presentation wise.”
It was a foundation that Gibbs would carry with him as he went on to work with artists such as Shannon Jackson, Joe Bowie, Greg Tate, Vernon Reid and Henry Rollins. ”People often wonder how I ended up in the Rollins Band. Maybe it makes sense now. That band was direct. Avant-garde without being avant-garde. It went a lot of places musically.”
He’s also frequently worked with longtime friend Arto Lindsay. ”I met Arto at the Squat Theatre,” he recalls, “which was one of the main venues of the no wave scene. I was playing there every week at one point, either with various James Chance projects (the Contortions, James White and the Blacks, etc.) or Defunkt. I went there to pick up some clothes on a day when DNA happened to be rehearsing. I got really taken with the band and introduced myself.”
Gibbs’ peer group, however extends beyond just music evident by his relationship with cinematographer and artist Arthur Jafa. ”I kick it with guys like Arto and AJ to make sure that what I see can stand up to scrutiny. They have different angles of attack and I respect their viewpoints. Everyone I’ve had an opportunity to work with has added something to the mix.
“Actually a big musical influence for me is Swami Nityananda, the once head of Siddha Yoga who got kicked out and is now a major spiritual figure in India. He plays tabla. At the ashram he used to play for devotional purposes. He was a pretty good player, but the energy he was able to create… the kind of thing you read about in books.” Speaking on energies here, Gibbs clearly means forces of the spirit.
“All the so called ‘avant-garde’ artists had to operate in the service of and for the benefit of the community. The energies they brought in were ‘healing.’ It couldn’t be ‘pure’ aesthetics and it couldn’t be in the service of forces that would harm it’s supporters. Culturally and musically I strive to extend that way of thinking about so-called ‘avant-garde’ expression.”
In recent years Gibbs has made the transition from performer to production, taking the helm for projects with Arto and DJ Logic among others. ”Having or being in a band is about exploring in my opinion. You always need to feel like there is something you haven’t done yet musically. Production, on the other hand, is about finishing things, about making a sort of definitive statement. When it comes to making music on one level the producer is the decider, as Dubya would say, in a way that even the bandleader is not. After dealing with the provisional nature of bands for so long I wanted to be involved in a process of making definitive decisions.
“I knew a lot of the basic science of sonic perception and how to manipulate that perception. In addition now I understand the process of illusion making that happens when you take the sound of a band, singer or piece of music and attempt to create an experience of that sound in a home stereo system or headphones. I’d say this knowledge has made me think about ‘translation’ issues between live music and recorded music and how to avoid them in a way I didn’t before.”
Combining the technical with a firm cultural structure upon which to place his music, Gibbs embarked upon his latest project Melvin Gibbs’ Elevated Entity “Ancient Speaks” to create a body of work that builds an energetic dialog, drawing lines of connection throughout the African Atlantic experience.
“On the musical level, unlike the inter-personal level, you don’t have to restore connections. They are inherent. You just have to notice and overstand. According to musicologist Kofi Agawu the melodic and rhythmic elements that came from the Motherland map first onto the voice, then the body, then onto musical instruments. If you invert the muscle memory learning process and re-map back to the basis, to the voice, you’ll see that there is a common set of elements that are ‘pan-African’ or rather Pan-African-Diasporic. These elements get mapped and memorized differently because different muscle memory systems (dance and playing techniques) can be used for the same vocal elements. Once you see how the pieces mapped originally you can re-map them using the African elements from their vocal basis. This method is how I generated the drum programs for the album. The drums programs on ‘Sometimes’ and ‘Represent do Rio’ actually come from the same map. But the execution addresses different muscle memory systems.
“From an African philosophical standpoint the Elevated Entity is the Self, the higher part of our individual being. This part of us vibrates and its vibration creates harmonies with other entities. To communicate with that part of your being you have to ‘tune in’ to it at the proper frequency. Music is commonly used as part of the process of tuning in. In fact tuning in musically is often used as a method of tuning in and of itself. The Ancients speak our names and thereby create us. Our names then interact with our circumstances, creating our fate.”?
“Not THE culmination, otherwise I can quit, no? But it’s definitely a touchstone if you’re talking about how I see the formal elements of the different musical expressions I’m interested in fitting together.” The touchstone, indeed. The Ancients have spoken the name of Melvin Gibbs, launching forth his Elevated Entity.
Melvin Gibbs’ Elevated Entity “Ancients Speak” is available now on Livewired Music
