Brief Reflections on Practice in View of Race and Spirit Through Music

As someone who studies the interplay of “spiritual” and “musical” experience, as a musician, and as a fan, I spend a fair amount of time in studios, in concert halls, and at music festivals. Whether I’m performing or just enjoying, my academic side that wants to “study” what’s happening is never far away. That was the case again this weekend as I’ve been attending the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, an annual rite of music discovery for me, and also a time to let through new ideas for my research relating to practical theology.
This year, four events I attended seemed connected in a way that mattered for the kind of research that I do. First, a panel discussion about the life and legacy of the legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius, a figure as musically and spiritually significant for many musicians and fans as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. That panel surfaced the influence of Afro-Cuban conga drumming and African-American electric bass heritage (through Jerry Jermott and James Jamerson) on Pastorius, who was white. Second, the debut of the documentary “Jaco,” which through interviews and archival footage documents the complicated life, heroic musicianship, and tragic decline and death of Pastorius. In that documentary, you hear from African-American musicians who played with Pastorius, including the equally-legendary Wayne Shorter (NYT: “greatest living improviser”), who feelingly narrate the musical-spiritual mystery in Jaco’s life. There is a story to be told here of how musical experience, musicianship, race, and spirit are overlaid and intertwined. Third, a panel discussion on the 30th anniversary of the Black Rock Coalition, founded under the creative auspices of rock guitar icon Vernon Reid of Living Colour. This panel assessed the progress over the last three decades in supporting African-American rock musicians, reclaiming the black roots of rock music, resisting racism in the industry, and continually teaching white musicians like me that all rock and roll not only deeply shares the heritage of black history, but also finds musically, culturally, and politically important present expressions in African-American rock artists today. Finally, a vibrant performance by Malian rock band Songhoy Blues. To experience their triumphant set at a packed, largely white, rock club on the main drag at SXSW was to see rock music renewed, made familiar and strange all at once in a way that drew from and re-wove rock’s complicated racial-spiritual history in the USA. The new wave of rock music from Africa and its positive reception in the West — a positive point raised at the BRC panel — raises many important matters about how it relates to this complicated history.
Although I could probably turn this into a 10-part series, I’ll just make a brief point about how these four events related for me: they all got me thinking about how “popular/secular” musical practice communicates “spiritually” in a way that is also racially laden. This fits in with and stimulates my current work in practical theology: Jaco Pastorius had the bass speaking a “black” language, the BRC has to continually interpret the African-American dimension and heritage of “white” rock while showing (indirectly, usually!) that hip-hop is not the only transformative black popular music today. And Songhoy Blues gives an opportunity to re-open these questions for a new generation: what does the new African rock do to the racist and racialized history of popular music in the United States, a history communicated in and through performing, producing, and listening practices?
Tom Beaudoin, Austin, Texas