The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles

by Steven L Isoardi

Overview

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists—passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478025283
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2023
Edition description:	Revised and Updated ed.
Pages:	456
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.92(d)

About the Author

Steven L. Isoardi is an independent scholar; editor of Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott, also published by Duke UniversityPress, and Jazz Generations: A Life in American Music and Society; and coeditor of Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Music Finds a Way: A PAPA/UGMAA Oral History of Growing Up in Postwar South Central Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
1. Ancestral Echoes: Roots of the African American Community Artist  1
2. Ballad for Samuel: The Legacy of Central Avenue and the 1950s Avant-Garde in Los Angeles  19
3. Lino’s Pad: African American Los Angeles and the Formation of the Underground Musicians Association (UGMA)  43
4. The Giant is Awakened: The Watts Uprising and Cultural Resurgence  69
5. Warriors All: UGMA in the Middle of It  117
6. The Mothership: From UGMA/UGMAA to the Pan Afrikan Peoples Akrestra and UGMAA  141
7. To the Great House: The Arkestra in the 1970s  179
8. Thoughts of Dar es Salaam: The Institutionalization of UGMAA  215
9. At the Crossroads: The Ark and UGMAA in the 1980s  259
10. The Hero’s Last Dance: The ’90s Resurgence  285
11. Aiee! The Phantom: Horace Tapscott  311
12. The Black Apostles: The Arkestra/UGMAA Ethos/Aesthetic: Music, Artists, Community  341
Epilogue: The Post-Horace Pan African Peoples Arkestra  363
Appendix: A View from the Bottom: The Music of Horace Tapscott and The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, by Roberto Miranda  369
Notes  379
Bibliography  407
Index  425

Editorial Reviews

"Though Horace passed away in 1999, his Arkestra continues to play with three generations of players while moving forward with playing international festivals. This book is essential to understanding their ethos of paying the music forward."
 

L.A. Taco - Mike Sonksen

"An impressively constructed tapestry of voices, it includes memories and opinions from myriad people while maintaining a strong narrative thread through lsoardi's authoritative voice. . . . lsoardi's interviews with dozens of members—not one of whom declined to participate—recover a wealth of information crucial to the history of Los Angeles jazz. In the process, he has made The Dark Tree a truly collaborative project that itself shares in the communal spirit of the UGMAA."
 

The Wire - Matthew Blackwell

The Dark Tree is just wonderful. One cannot understand the history of Black arts on the West Coast without a thorough assessment of this movement; Isoardi knows this history so well and tells a much bigger story. The book does a fantastic job of capturing the nitty-gritty nature of the music scene and resurrecting local figures in the Arkestra who have never gotten any press for their astounding musicianship. This is a remarkable book.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original - Robin D. G. Kelley

In these pages, Horace Tapscott says to the audience, ‘This is one more you wrote through us.’ And this is what Isoardi has done here: given voice to the nearly lost history of a revolutionary community movement through its key players. Epic in scope, dazzling in detail, and sensual as any Coltrane solo, this rare book—informative, intimate, lyrical, scholarly, nuanced, and essential—reads like no history book you’ve read before.

Chris Abani

This is a revelatory document, virtuosically combining scholarship and oral history to connect the dots of African American music on the West Coast. Far more than a mere historical ‘overdub’ of an underdocumented scene, this book disrupts the mythic notions of jazz history, showing instead how music and community unfold as one. Both a celebratory and a cautionary tale, it also delivers some of the most frank and eye-opening musicians’ accounts since Arthur Taylor’s Notes and Tones.

Vijay Iyer

"Though Horace passed away in 1999, his Arkestra continues to play with three generations of players while moving forward with playing international festivals. This book is essential to understanding their ethos of paying the music forward."
--Mike Sonksen "L.A. Taco" (12/22/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"An impressively constructed tapestry of voices, it includes memories and opinions from myriad people while maintaining a strong narrative thread through lsoardi's authoritative voice. . . . lsoardi's interviews with dozens of members--not one of whom declined to participate--recover a wealth of information crucial to the history of Los Angeles jazz. In the process, he has made The Dark Tree a truly collaborative project that itself shares in the communal spirit of the UGMAA."
--Matthew Blackwell "The Wire" (10/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"The Dark Tree is just wonderful. One cannot understand the history of Black arts on the West Coast without a thorough assessment of this movement; Isoardi knows this history so well and tells a much bigger story. The book does a fantastic job of capturing the nitty-gritty nature of the music scene and resurrecting local figures in the Arkestra who have never gotten any press for their astounding musicianship. This is a remarkable book."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of "Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original"

"In these pages, Horace Tapscott says to the audience, 'This is one more you wrote through us.' And this is what Isoardi has done here: given voice to the nearly lost history of a revolutionary community movement through its key players. Epic in scope, dazzling in detail, and sensual as any Coltrane solo, this rare book--informative, intimate, lyrical, scholarly, nuanced, and essential--reads like no history book you've read before."--Chris Abani, author of GraceLand

"This is a revelatory document, virtuosically combining scholarship and oral history to connect the dots of African American music on the West Coast. Far more than a mere historical 'overdub' of an underdocumented scene, this book disrupts the mythic notions of jazz history, showing instead how music and community unfold as one. Both a celebratory and a cautionary tale, it also delivers some of the most frank and eye-opening musicians' accounts since Arthur Taylor's Notes and Tones."--Vijay Iyer, musician and composer

From the Publisher