Black music through the decades

The Soundtrack of Malcolm X
Various artists
Qwest/Reprise through Warner Music
Available on cassette and CD
RCA: The 1st Note in Black Music
Various artists
BMG Music
Available on CD
Reviewed by Norm Dixon

"What we wanted to do", film maker Spike Lee said recently of the soundtrack for his black consciousness bio-epic Malcolm X, "was tell the history of black music. Let the songs define eras and particular decades."

Lee devised the Malcolm X soundtrack, like the motion picture, to be educational and consciousness-raising for a radicalising African American youth.

Through the broad spectrum of African American music on this album, the message comes across as a clear as a cymbal crash: modern American — modern Western — popular music owes much to the often unattributed, and more often unrewarded, efforts of a galaxy of black artists.

The African American community has created, innovated and popularised virtually every modern style of US music only for it to be usurped, tamed and homogenised by white recording and broadcasting corporations.

The history of the music was rewritten to minimise its black heritage. White imitators were, and continue to be, promoted at the expense of popular music's black creators. Just as African Americans have been disenfranchised politically, so they have culturally.

Paradoxically, this lack of cultural and political power has been an incentive for the African American community's seemingly inexhaustible creativity and innovation in music. As quickly as their music is coopted and debased by the music industry, black musicians and listeners find new forms and sounds that — for a time — are their own alone.

Lee's Malcolm X soundtrack allows African American youth to rediscover, be proud of, and realise the depth of, this heritage. The opening track by Arrested Development alone will ensure the album is in the collections of millions.

"Malcolm loved to dance, and to be around the music. We have attempted to recreate that music, that sound of the African American experience ... what it means to live, breathe, die and love as the descendants of slaves", Lee explains in the liner notes.

"Revolution" by southern hip hoppers Arrested Development is a stirring call to black youth to get active in the struggle against racism and poverty, to follow in the footsteps of fallen African American liberation fighters.

The album closes with a superlative gospel version of Donny Hathaway's m "Someday We'll All Be Free", specially recorded for the soundtrack, by Aretha Franklin.

In between, some of the giants of black music show just how deep the well of African American music is. From riotous jive and r & b numbers by Joe Turner and the incomparable Louis Jordan, the exquisite phrasings of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to the wonderful vocal schmaltz of the Inkspots. Lionel Hampton's big band number "Flying Home" is as spectacular on record as it is on the screen during the monster jitterbug dance hall scene.

But towering above all the tracks on the album are those by John Coltrane and Duke Ellington. Saxophonist Coltrane's haunting "Alabama", played over images of the vicious police repression, was written after reading a speech by Martin Luther King eulogising four black children blown up in a racist attack on a Birmingham church in 1963.

Ellington's "Arabesque Cookie" is a majestic orchestral mix of North African/Middle Eastern melody and swinging Harlem blues. It accompanies the film's scenes of Malcolm's pilgrimage to Mecca.

The only disappointment is that the album does not contain more. Excluded is Sam Cooke's much-covered yet unsurpassed "A Change is Gonna Come" and Ella Fitzgerald's "Drop Me off in Harlem". There seems to be no excuse, as the album's running time of a shade above 50 minutes is well below the length of most CDs these days.

RCA's 1st Note in Black Music is an ambitious three-CD compilation worth checking out if you want to explore African American music further. A very detailed and informative booklet acknowledges that "practically all modern American music is based" on black music.

Disc one, which concentrates on the blues and gospel, and disc two, which highlights jazz, are excellent. The 42 tracks are a who's who of black music. There are classic tracks from Fats Waller, Blind Willie McTell, Leadbelly, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey. However, the third disc, entitled "Pop, Rock, Soul and Beyond", is a dud.