23/11/2024
Phil Freeman has an interesting write-up about the Black Artist Group (BAG) on the Shuffle app.
Shuffle seems to have been set up by music critics and fans. It provides quick descriptions of musical genres, scenes and artists and provides links to recommended albums. You can quickly find yourself falling down one rabbit hole after another.
Freeman’s bio of BAG is brief but informative. BAG was a multi-disciplinary arts organization in St. Louis that was born in the late sixties; it burned brightly for just a few years but spawned jazz artists that would help define avant-garde jazz in the coming years. Julius Hemphill (whose classic album Dogon A.D. came out of this scene), Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiet would bring in David Murray to form the World Saxophone Ensemble. Baikida Carroll, Floyd LeFlore, JD Parran and Charles Bobo Shaw became stalwarts of the ensuing free jazz scene, and Joseph Bowie would lead Defunkt (to this day). Joseph’s brother Lester left for Chicago to play an integral role in the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and became the trumpet player and economic strategist behind the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Crucially, Freeman provides socio-political context for BAG, explaining that the organization was able to secure some federal Model City program funds to rehab and inhabit a warehouse and keep the arts projects afloat for a few years. Although the Model Cities program had a checkered history, as historian Mindi Isaacs Jackson explains, the program played a role in galvanizing organizing efforts: “Its importance is often overlooked because it lies in the rarely-told stories of resistance and neighborhood organizing against its implementation on the ground — from community groups who sought not to dismantle it, but to take it over and assert their grassroots model.”
In Rochester, Reverend Franklin Florence met the Model Cities planning process with savvy organizing. FIGHT fought for representation on the planning boards, creating a development corporation in order to capitalize on the opportunity.
The Clarissa Uprooted exhibit in Rundell library, however, provides an opportunity to see how other less enlightened federal programs (“urban renewal” and highway planning) had a disastrous impact on Rochester’s third ward. In this scenario, the federal programs crippled the local jazz scene. Public policy matters.
Read Phil Freeman on Black Artists Group
