Last Century Expanded

Listening to “Jack Johnson” today.  I’ve long enjoyed “Bitches Brew” and “On the Corner” but this hinge between the two was something I’d somehow overlooked.   Apparently the first tune was simply John McLaughlin on guitar, and Billy Cobham on drums and Michael Henderson on bass.  They were bored and started jamming in B flat.   Miles dug what he heard and ran out of the control room and picked up his horn to join by middle of the second minute.  Must have been nice affirmation.  Herbie Hancock was apparently in the studio on other business and they wired him up to a cheap organ so he could join the session as well not long after. 

Long been a fan of Steve Grossman.  He’s on the set.  Long been a fan of Sonny Sharrock and he’s on there as well.  What I hadn’t known much about was the boxer whom the album was dedicated to.  When I first had a look at the original cover I hadn’t understood why there was a 1920s sports car on the cover.  That’s the problem with thumbnail images as opposed you album covers.  You can’t see anything.  I just blew it up and it is Jack Johnson himself at the wheel.

I probably shouldn’t have, but I got pulled into a documentary on the man.  I’m glad Miles brought him to my attention.  I’m surprised I had never really confronted this person, a boxer, as sportsman who seemingly crossed the color line, triumphantly, long before Jackie Robinson or Joe Louis. 

The title fight against Jeff Jeffries in Reno on July 4, 1910 had the heavy weight champ come out of retirement to defend the crown against a black man.  Jefferies who must have been the original great-white-hope was shown the mat in the fifteenth round.  John Sullivan, Jack London and most everyone who viewed the effort agreed that Johnson had simply outclassed Jeffries.  Jeffries himself said he stood no chance against Johnson.  Then, twenty-five cities in the country rioted ending in twenty dead, hundreds injured and boxing films banned for the next twenty-five years. 

 I don’t think anything so broadly combustible on matters of race happens again till MLK is assassinated.  And one would have imagined that Johnson might have wanted to lay-low but it appears that was not his style.  And probably why Miles and Muhammad Ali and others were such fans.  He taunted people in the ring with a big smile.  He dated whomever he wanted, partied as he chose, and eventually became a fugitive from trumped up charges related to the Mann Act.  Later, after a long stay on the run and the loss of his heavyweight crown, he turned himself in, though he was allowed to drive himself to prison, per his request.

Recorded music and film leave an imprint that suggests when a certain period of history begins.  I think of the jazz age in the 1920s.  Before this I assumed there was simply nothing to hope for as an African American.  Watching these films from 1910 and considering this star with his own railroad car, long before Bessie Smith and a man marrying a white woman when that must have been a very dangerous thing to flaunt, I sense a piece of my understanding of the early part of last century expanded backwards a few years.  This was the an early, maybe the earliest, role of a black superstar, a man of great influence to everyone who followed, whom I had never known.

Sunday, 2/5/16