Randy Weston Traces History of ‘Blues’

Pianist Randy Weston explores similar terrain on “Volcano Blues,” a jazz album that begins with the unexpected sound of Texas bluesman Johnny Copeland wailing the old Jessie Mae Robinson tune “Blue Mood” in a keening tenor voice backed by acoustic guitar. From this simple opening, “Volcano Blues” traces the bloodlines of the blues from Africa to the Caribbean, the Mississippi Delta, the Kansas City big bands of Count Basie and on to New York, harnessing such players as veteran West Coast saxophonist Teddy Edwards, percussionist Obo Addy and the young trumpeter Wallace Roney.

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“We just tried to do a global trip on the blues,” chuckles Weston, 67, the reigning Afrocentric eminence of jazz. With his kufi caps, horn-rim spectacles, steel gray hair and 6-foot-8 frame draped in daishiki robes, Weston cuts a pretty unforgettable figure and he appears to be on a roll--”Volcano Blues” is his fifth album in three years and was just voted the third-best jazz album of 1993 in a survey of American jazz critics conducted by the Village Voice.

Weston’s latest record is a spiritual heir of sorts to his major 1992 work “The Spirits of Our Ancestors,” a two-CD set that traced the roots of jazz back to Africa. On “Volcano Blues,” he approaches the blues with a wide vision: One selection, “The Nafs,” takes its title from a Muslim word for negative forces and features African talking drum, while “Chalabati Blues” is based on a Moroccan rhythm that was rearranged for a nine-piece ensemble by Weston’s masterful collaborator, Melba Liston.

“ ‘Chalabati Blues’ is my concept of a song that was sung by the Gnaoua people,” says Weston, who lived in Morocco for many years. “They sang this song when they were going through a period of slavery, calling upon God Almighty to help them. So it’s like I am calling on the spirit of Louis Armstrong and King Oliver to help me on the song.

“The blues is pure Africa,” adds Weston. “You go anywhere on the continent and you hear it . . . it’s the greatest method of communication you can use to get your story across, whether it’s the story of your family, your problems or whatever. It reminds me of ancient music because it enables people to communicate directly and simply.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1926, Weston was just feeling his way into the New York jazz scene when the postwar be-bop revolution hit. Thelonious Monk’s angular, percussive attack remains his single biggest influence as a piano player, a stylistic debt he honored with “Portraits of Thelonious Monk,” one of three tribute albums he released in 1990. Weston’s 1950s Riverside recordings are relatively straight-ahead trio dates tackling standards and originals, but by the early 1960s he was traveling to Africa and absorbing the continent’s traditional music.

“My father put that idea in my head when I was 6 years old,” he recalls. “He had many books on African culture and civilizations and kingdoms.” Weston eventually moved to Morocco in the late 1960s, partly to escape the economic doldrums of the American jazz scene at that time, and he has since traveled extensively throughout Africa.

Weston lives in Brooklyn these days, yet, like Cassandra Wilson, his career has often elicited more enthusiasm overseas than at home. Until she signed to Blue Note, Wilson dealt primarily with European and Japanese labels, and, although she tours Europe regularly, she has yet to play on the West Coast. Weston’s acclaimed recent recordings for the Verve label were done under the auspices of that label’s offices in Europe, where Weston gets most of his work.

“It’s sad, you know,” he says, in particular citing the neglect suffered by Melba Liston, the arranger who shares top billing and cover photograph with him on “Volcano Blues.” An innovative trombonist and arranger since the late 1950s, Liston continues to create masterful arrangements for large jazz ensembles despite having suffered a stroke in the mid-1980s that paralyzed her right side.

“Melba Liston lives in Los Angeles--she should be honored by Los Angeles, this woman,” says Weston. “Something should be done, because I don’t think she has ever had a concert of her big-band arrangements presented in Los Angeles.”

Cassandra Wilson, meanwhile, recently discovered a curious fact about her father, the jazz-loving Herman B. Fowlkes. Shortly before he died last April, just as she was finishing the recording of “Blue Light ‘Til Dawn,” Wilson learned from a blues archivist that her father, who seemed uninterested in the blues, had once played on a recording session with Chicago singer and harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson. The recording was never released and her father had never mentioned it--a blues skeleton in the family’s closet.