V.A. Soul Of A Nation: Jazz Is The Teacher, Funk Is The Preacher - Afro-Centric Jazz, Street Funk And The Roots Of Rap In The Black Power Era 1969-75

Soul Jazz Records’ new release ‘Soul of A Nation: Jazz is the Teacher, Funk is the Preacher’ is a powerful collection of radical jazz, street funk and proto-rap made in the era of Black Power (1969-75).
This is the second ‘Soul of A Nation’ album released by Soul Jazz Records and coincides with the exhibition ‘Soul of a Nation – Art in the Age of Black Power’ currently at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and which moves to Los Angeles at The Broad in spring 2019. The international exhibition was critically received when it was launched last year at the Tate Modern in London (as was the accompanying first album ‘Soul of A Nation – Afro-Centric Visions in the Age of Black Power 1968-79’).
This new album features a number of important and ground-breaking African-American artists – The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry, Funkadelic, Gil Scott-Heron and more – alongside a host of lesser-known artists all of whom in the early 1970s were exploring new Afro-Centric poly-rhythmical styles of music – radical jazz, street funk and proto-rap – while at the same time exploring the Black Power and civil-rights inspired notions of self-definition, self-respect and self-empowerment in their own lives.
During this era African-American jazz musicians ripped up traditional definitions – rejecting the term ‘entertainer’ to redefine themselves instead as ‘artists’. They worked outside of the mainstream music industry perceiving this artistic relationship to be fundamentally exploitative and politically flawed. Artists instead formed their own pan-arts community-centric collectives, set up their own record labels, ran concerts in alternative performance spaces – art galleries, parks, lofts, community centres – all as a way of taking control of their own creative destinies.
At the start of 1960s jazz musicians had embarked on an intense period of musical experimentation as artists John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry sought to dismantle the traditional definitions of jazz by creating new music that broke free from its establishment shackles.
By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, forward-thinking African-American jazz musicians had absorbed the ideas of this radical and avant-garde path but also began to introduce many new elements – not just civil rights concepts of freedom but also black power ideas of self-respect, righteousness and anger. Their music developed into a radical and intense Afro-Centric mix of jazz, funk, soul, and street poetry all in search of a new musical language that could better represent artistic African-American cultural expression.
All of the featured artists here were involved in this search in different ways; a shared sense of Afro-centric collectivism joined the dots between the deep avant-garde experimentalism of The Art Ensemble of Chicago (here featuring soul singer Fontella Bass singing the powerful ‘Theme de Yoyo’) to the hyper-funk psychedelia of George Clinton’s Funkadelic. The poetry of Gil Scott-Heron and Sarah Webster Fabio is performed with a backdrop of street funk and heavyweight percussion – in the process laying down the template for the birth of rap. The Har-You Percussion Group, which grew of a government-sponsored community project in Harlem in the 1960s, connect latin, jazz and funk rhythms; Byron Morris and Unity offer an intense and rhythmical journey. James Mason, Gary Bartz and The Oneness of Juju offer spirituality and cosmology in equal measures. Chicago’s The Pharaohs and Detroit’s collective Tribe add deep jazz and street funk in equal measures. And more besides!
The front cover features a painting by Barkley Hendricks, a central artist in the exhibition ‘Soul of A Nation – Art in the Age of Black Power’.