| 1970, Dakar, Senegal ( songs 1-7) 1957,Johannesburg (songs 8,9) |
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| Music of the World CD 12536 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| REVIEW | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
COVER LINER NOTES
by Tony Scott
MAYIBUE AFRIKA! UHUURU! LONG
LIVE AFRIKA! FREEDOM!
I visited AFRICA for the first time in 1957, at the invitation of two South African students, white Jews, who I had met in Paris, and I played in a number of South African towns. I held five concerts for whites only, five concerts for blacks only, and five for whites, blacks and Indians together; it was the first time this had happened. It was an enormous step forward in the fight few integration in Africa and for my direct experience of the real meaning of apartheid and of the most extreme forms of racism. It was an unrepeatable experience and it was very satisfying. Many white musicians had played for just whiles and had returned home rich: I returned to New York with a debt of $1.000 - the price of a Paris-South Africa-America ticket. Drum Magazine wrote: " Tony Scott, the man who refused to play few whites only ". I returned to America badly depressed. Bobby Hackett, the trumpet player, gave me work to help me get back on my feet emotionally and economically. In 1958 I played with my Jazz group at Carnegie Hall with Langston Hughes, famous Afro-American poet and novelist to collect money for Tom Miboya, at that time vice-president of Kenya, to support of he Mau-Mau to free Kenya of white and Indian power and put in President Kenyatta. In Johannesburg, in 1957, I recorded backed by four penny whistles, bass, guitar drums and a chorus of women who shouted in unison The Penny Whistle Song and The Zulu Walk.
One after another, from 1954 to 1959, my great Jazz friends died - Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Sid Catlett, Lester Young, Billie Holiday. I lost the will to continue my successful career; the world was no longer the same place. I had to get away from New York! I changed my life completely. My other dream was to visit Japan, the Far East, where I lived and worked from 1960 for five years and recorded my disk "Zen. Meditation".
I returned in Africa in 1969, searching for the root of Afro-American Jazz and the melodies, the feeling and above all the pulse and rhythms of Africa - an integral part of the birth, the life and the death of every being - and fundamental indispensable in the creation of Jazz. I stayed in Africa two years, working and searching in Egypt, Kenya,Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda and Liberia: I stayed four month at Dakar, in Senegal; and a year and a half in Marrakech, in Morocco. I could listen to and absorb music and tribal rhythms, and the nature, sounds, smells and life of the African peoples. While living in New York I had met such great African percussionists as Olatuji and Guy Warren (from Africa), Candido, Patato, Umberto Morales. Ray Barreto (all from Porto Rico), and the great Chano Pozo, Cuban conga player with Dizzy Gillespie.
In Africa I met musicians and percussionists capable of playing the material I had collected, and with them I recorded for four months - from 1.00 a.m. to 7 p.m. - at the American Embassy in Dakar, with two Ampex recorders belonging to the Embassy. The two fantastic Tam Tam players were each just seventeen years old; Emmanuel, on bells and singing, was thirty and came from the Cameroon, the land of Voodoo; Papa Akaye, from Ghana, played the trumpet, flute, bells and also sang. I played clarinet, drum solos and sang, also arranging and leading the group.
I dedicate this disk to all the black Africans who fought against European and Arab oppression and slavery for hundreds of years.
I extended my best wishes to NELSON MANDELA and the AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS party for having made South Africa a democracy that is not only an example to Africa, but to the whole world.
In memory of all those who gave their lives in the difficult
but indispensable path to freedom and justice
MAYIBUE AFRIKA! UHUURU! LONG LIVE AFRIKA! FREEDOM!
©Tony Scott
, Rome, Italy, 199
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