Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Southern California Fires Hit the Jazz Community
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
“Our planet is crying, and we have to wake up, and we have to do more,” says T.K. Blue.
(Photo: Adam Z./Art Photo)On pianist Abdullah Ibrahim’s landmark 1977 album The Journey (Chiaroscuro), a then-unknown alto saxophonist and oboist is listed in the credits under the name “Talib Rhynie.” Forty-five years later, that gentleman is explaining how his life and career — and his monikers — have progressed over that time.
“You have a whole evolution of names,” says the man born Eugene Rhynie in the Bronx in 1953 to Jamaican and Trinidadian parents. “And it wasn’t my doing ... it just happened.”
He had been given the name “Talib” (meaning “student” in Arabic) as a young man from a spiritual elder; Ibrahim eventually gave him another, as they toured Africa in the late 1970s: Abdul Qadir, which represents “the night of power when the revelation of the holy Koran was revealed to the holy prophet,” the saxophonist said. “Kadir” became Kibwe (“blessed” in the Nigerian Yoruba dialect) in the early 1980s when he returned to Africa, this time with another pianist, Randy Weston, with whom he would work for 28 years as musical director.
When he signed with Arkadia Records in 1999, label president Bob Karcy suggested to Talib Kibwe that he adopt a stage name, asking if he had a nickname growing up. “I said, ‘Sure, Blue,’ because I love the color blue,” he explains. “I always used to wear blue jeans to school every day.” In that moment, T.K. Blue happened upon the name he has kept ever since.
Blue is speaking from Guadeloupe, an island in the Lesser Antilles chain of the French Caribbean, where he was performing a tribute concert to his late mentor, Dr. Weston. He’s heading back to New York soon, but he’s not ready to leave the balmy tropical climate and the cerulean ooshan of his heritage. Nor is he ready to see those things vanish from this earth. “My wife and I scuba dive,” Blue says, “and we’re always concerned when we read about the tremendous pollution in the waters, and [how] the coral is dying at incredible rates.” He notes that the decay of the world’s environmental health coincides with what he calls the “juncture of the most disharmonic mode on the planet,” rife with social, racial and geopolitical dissension. He envisions an alternate world, “a place devoid of war, famine, systemic racism, gender discrimination and religious intolerance.” He calls that world Planet Bluu, the title of his latest release.
Blue’s Planet Bluu (Jaja Records) leans on the concept of music as a healing force, espoused by the Gnawa people in Morocco. He was recently there again, with Herbie Hancock’s entourage in Tangier for International Jazz Day, paying tribute to Gnawa master musician Abdellah El Gourd, whom Blue first met in 1985 when he first visited Morocco with Weston. “[The Gnawans] heal people with music,” he says. “They believe that every human being has a particular color — it could be red, blue, green ... when you get ill, it’s because you get out of sync with your color, so they will first find your color, then they will play music to bring that color back to your spirit, and it heals you.” T.K. Blue’s color is, of course, blue — the same spirit color of our ailing planet.
“That was another reason for the utilization of the African hand piano,” says Blue of his new record, “to represent the healing qualities of music.” Many of the songs on Planet Bluu were conceived of and start with either kalimba, sanza, lukembi, mbira or bongo, each with unique tunings Blue affixed to each instrument he himself hand-crafted. He recalls, “I knew what I wanted melodically and harmonically, but I wasn’t fixed in stone about the rhythm, so I went to Orion’s house.”
Orion Turre was Blue’s neighbor in Jersey City, New Jersey, for a time, and he is also the son of trombonist Steve Turre, a long-time friend and collaborator. “[Orion] and I kind of fleshed out these rhythms, and he did a marvelous job.” Blue’s ancient timbres mix with Turre’s modern drumming to produce a variety of infectious, Afrobeat-inspired grooves that give the album its otherworldly, world-music vibe, at once primordial and futuristic.
Turre is not the only direct descendant from a notable jazz figure in Blue’s band. Pianist Davis Whitfield is the son of guitarist Mark Whitfield. Bassist Dishan Harper’s parents are accomplished Atlanta-area musicians, while his uncles Winard and Phillip are New York jazz veterans who have recorded together as the Harper Brothers. Blue had just happened to play a gig with those three younger musicians (at a barbecue restaurant owned by the grandchildren of Weston). “The gig felt so good,” he remembers, “and then I was thinking about this record. I said, ‘Shoot, why not?’ And then it gave me an opportunity to play with Wally Jr., who I had never played with before.”
Wally Jr. is the son of the late trumpeter Wallace Roney and the late pianist Geri Allen. Roney Jr.’s father was only 18 when Blue introduced him to Ibrahim at their show. Ibrahim had that young man sit in that same evening, and then promptly hired him to go on tour to Europe, with Blue. On Planet Bluu, Wallace Roney Jr. follows in his father’s footsteps alongside Blue, complementing the saxophonist’s warm tones with robust fire and fluidity.
The pairing of the elder statesman with these younger lions reaffirms a time-honored paradigm in jazz and in human history: the transference of knowledge and wisdom to the next generation. In Blue’s case, this was a happy accident, but he understands and reveres that tradition. “In Africa, these [hand pianos] are played predominantly by the jalis. These are the oral historians of their particular region or society. … They can tell you who your great, great, great grandfather was, where he traveled, when he passed away ... and then they pass it down to their progeny, to their children, and they absorb it, and then maybe they play the same instrument.” Blue easily could be referring to his band.
Mentors and students, fathers and sons. Student Talib Kadir was playing with Ibrahim, his mentor, at Ornette Coleman’s loft space, called The Artist’s House, when his soon-to-be new mentor Randy Weston appeared with his manger and his father in tow. “That really impressed me,” Blue says, “his love of family, because he had his father with him.” He later asked Weston if he could play with him, thus beginning a lifetime of shared musicianship and friendship. Blue has included tributes to Weston, who passed in 2018, on his recent recordings. On Planet Bluu he and his band of young brothers, along with Steve Turre, engage in a spirited rendition of Weston’s composition “Chessman’s Delight.”
He includes a second homage to another mentor, the composer Hale Smith, whom Blue first met when Weston tapped Hale to conduct their band with an orchestra in Grenoble, France, in the 1980s. A few years later they would coincidentally become neighbors as well. Hale’s serene composition “When It’s Time To Say Goodbye” is played beautifully by Blue and yet another neighbor and collaborator, pianist Dave Kikoski.
At 71, Blue has already had to say goodbye to many of his friends, neighbors and mentors (though Ibrahim is still going strong at age 90). Yet he refuses to bid farewell to his vision of a better world. “Our planet is crying, and we have to wake up, and we have to do more,” he states. The avid scuba diver refers to one of his new compositions, “Chrystal Lake Bluu,” about a body of clear water in which “you can see for miles and miles. Aquatic life is plentiful. There’s no pollution.”
It’s one sound portrait among many in the mind of Talib Kinwe, first known as Eugene Rhynie, who became Blue before he learned to play the blues, affirming his own color as a healing force for the world that gave him so much, and for the spirit world in his dreams of what could be. DB
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