Jim Pepper Native Arts Festival steering committee re-forming for 2013

“It’s good where we’re goin’ and where we’ve been

Hey yeah Hi yi Hi yi Hi yi Hi yi”

--Jim Pepper, Comin’ and Goin’, 1985

  

Jim Pepper Native Arts Festival Steering Committee re-forming

  

Greetings:

After a two-year hiatus, we are re-forming the Jim Pepper Native Arts Festival Steering Committee.

From the beginning, our number one priority has been to establish a home closely allied to an educational institution, where proceeds from Pepper-related events would be dedicated in support of Native American students, and music and arts programs.

Our earlier efforts were focused on building a partnership with Portland State University, in largest part due to this language in SJR 31, the 2005 senate resolution honoring the life and achievements of Jim Pepper, but also because Jim’s mother Floy Pepper retired there after a career spanning some 60+ years as an educator:

(3) The members of the Seventy-third Legislative Assembly direct that a copy of this resolution be delivered to the Leroy Vinnegar Jazz Institute at Portland State University for inclusion in its permanent collection and encourage the creation and endowment of a Jim Pepper (hUnga-che-eda “Flying Eagle”) Chair at the university to further the study of Native American music and its relationship to jazz.

But the University is a very crowded and busy place, its Leroy Vinnegar Jazz Institute faded away several years ago and, practically speaking, the increased costs of parking and public transportation to that part of the city make accessibility an issue and a hindrance for many.

Now, we are exploring a partnership with Jim’s alma mater, the Parkrose School District in outer NE Portland, where as a student in 1955 Jim first made his mark in Oregon music history as a member of the Young Oregonians, which was also the beginning of his lifelong friendship and musical relationship with Glen Moore, co-founder of the band Oregon. Oregon continues to carry Jim’s music to the far reaches of the globe to this day.

Then there is the wind and the water to consider, and the views of the mountains that Parkrose offers, close to the Columbia Gorge and the Big River. Also from the Resolution:

Whereas Floy Pepper said during her acceptance of her son's First Americans in the Arts award in 1999, “Jim Pepper was a member of the Kaw Indian Nation known as ‘The Wind People’ from his father. From me, his mother, he was a member of the Creek Indian Nation known as ‘The People of the Waters.’ It's no wonder his music was so strong and powerful--with the wind to carry his music to the four directions of the Earth. And as long as the grass shall grow and the waters flow--which is forever--may his spirit remain alive for time immemorial”; now, therefore,

Parkrose also offers wide open spaces and abundant free parking. There is a much different pace here than in downtown, and the Parkrose School District offers a different set of charitable purposes. These are likely to have a broader reach, and to make a difference in more students’ lives, and in their families’ lives as well, supporting music and the arts “from the ground up.”

Our earlier planning had two charitable purposes: to fund scholarships for Native students to PSU, and to support the endowment of the Jim Pepper Chair as described in the Resolution.

Among its first orders of business, our Steering Committee should develop a charter that contains language directing proceeds of Jim Pepper-related events to be used to support music and arts-related programs throughout the Parkrose School District, including college scholarships in Jim’s name, and to provide pathways for Native students wherever they are, to wherever they are goin’.

And, we must identify some sources of funding to move organizing forward.

About the music of Jim Pepper

It is not enough to describe Jim Pepper as a jazz musician. His first album, Pepper’s Powwow, for example, recorded in 1970, featured traditional Native American songs and chants, Jim’s original compositions, rock, blues, bebop, free jazz and two songs by Peter LaFarge that had been famously sung by Johnny Cash. Wow!

Jazz trombonist Marty Cook, who recorded with Pepper in Munich, Nuremberg and New York City in the 1980s, described Jim's world wide musical range in these liner notes:

"Jim Pepper is hard to categorize. He is an eclectic player. Known best as a jazz player for his work with Don Cherry, Paul Motian and Charlie Hayden, his playing and writing embrace the traditions of African, Caribbean, South American and his own Native American cultures, as well as the traditional standards, and pop and rhythm and blues repertoire."

And Bill Siegel’s excellent biograph, posted on his Jim Pepper Lives! website, has this to say:

But at the base of it all, there was always Pepper’s commitment to the power of music and to its healing message. “The emotion most prevalent in his music,” says mother Floy Pepper, “is intense spirituality.” World-renowned saxophonist Joe Lovano has said that he still thinks of Pepper and that he will sometimes ask himself, “What would Jim do now?” before launching into one of his own solos.

Pepper spent most of his final years living and performing in Austria, where he was wildly popular. According to Hoch, “they loved him in Austria… loved him. He never got that kind of recognition here. It’s too bad… more people should know about him, they should know his music.” Thorne remembers that Pepper

“complained bitterly about America’s lack of support for jazz. That’s why he went to Europe. It’s a typical story – they’ve made movies about it, written books about it, how jazz musicians had to leave America.” His mother has said that “he did not find respect and acceptance of his music in America – but he did find it in Europe, where he was respected as a person and as a jazz musician. There he found peace.“

Jim Pepper was posthumously granted the Lifetime Musical Achievement Award by First Americans in the Arts (FAITA) in 1999, and in 2000 he was inducted into the Native American Music Awards Hall of Fame at the 7th Annual NAMMY Awards ceremony. In 2005, the Leroy Vinnegar Jazz Institute and the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission named Pepper Jazz Musician of the Year at the Portland Jazz Festival. In April 2007, his legendary silver Selmer saxophone, beaded baseball cap, leather horn cases, early LPs, and original sheet music were donated by the Pepper family to the Smithsonian Institution for the National Museum of the American Indian‘s permanent collection. In October 2007, he was inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. And in 2008, the Paul Winter Consort  recorded the CD, “Crestone“, which includes two versions of “Witchi Tai To” sung by John-Carlos Perea and which won a GRAMMY Award in the Best New Age Music category.           

                      --- http://jimpepperlives.wordpress.com/

The Steering Committee will hold its first meeting in November in Parkrose at a date TBD. We will organize ourselves and begin planning a series of small concert events that will start in the Spring and lead to a major festival down the road.

Please contact me if you are interested in joining the Steering Committee, participating in any other way, or being kept in the loop via email.

Best wishes,

Sean

Sean Aaron Cruz

Executive Director

1000 Nations

Public policy research and consulting

Editorial services

www.1000nations.wordpress.com

seancruz@comcast.net

[]Jim Pepper “Ya na ho” with Nana Vasconcellos at Collin Walcott tribute 1985, NYC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41HuypiWxaI&feature=relmfu

[] Jim Pepper, Grand Finale Witchi Tai To at Collin Walcott tribute 1985, NYC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o85aQXg2A0E&feature=relmfu

Trilok Gurtu, Don Cherry, Jim Pepper, Glen Moore, Steve Horn, Dave Holland, Marty Ehrlich, Paul McCandless, John Abercrombie, David Darling. Jack DeJohnette

Jazz at the Native American Music Awards? Join the discussion!

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

My friend Marc Bowlegs Anderson, a jazz guitarist of Oklahoma Seminole descent, has instigated a spirited discussion regarding the absence of separate categories for jazz and classical recordings at the Native American Music Awards, now in its 12th year.

The Nammys currently place all jazz and classical nominees in a catch-all category labeled “instrumental,” although there are probably as many jazz and classical recordings with vocals as there are without.

The Nammys require a minimum of six nominations in each of the 28 categories that they currently recognize. They haven’t received the minimum six, they say, six this year, six last year and six next year to create the category.

Marc wrote to the Nammys: “The NAMMYS should take a proactive approach…and foster participation in jazz and classical music by offering these awards without regard to the number of entries in any year. This can only enhance the diversity and visibility of the NAMMYS and will certainly serve Native Classical and Jazz musicians well, thereby benefiting the entire Native American music community.”

The Nammys replied to Marc: “In our earlier years, we actually had a combined jazz/blues category. Over time, the jazz recording submissions vanished and were non-existent and thus gave way to a complete Blues category, as evidenced today. We are still attempting to hold on to the classical field through our Instrumental category.

"However, we continue to honor jazz and classical musicians with special awards as we have in the past with artists as Frederick Whiteface with a Lifetime Achievement Award, Jim Pepper - Hall of Fame, etc. and allow all jazz and classical artists to submit their recordings in whatever category they feel they are qualified to enter.

"We did not ask the Grammys to "break their rules", when we submitted the Native American music category proposal and sought their approval. In fact, we had to prove a marketplace existed five years prior and five years ahead showing hundreds of recordings each year in both the traditional and contemporary fields just to create ONE category for our genre. The same obviously does not apply to suggesting new categories in the Nammys, but to maintain our credibility among the mainstream music industry and media and keep the fairness among all competing categories - we require a minimum number of entries of six recordings for that year and continuous years just like any other national music awards show."

It’s a complicated subject. I intend to return to it several times over the coming months, any number of times going forward.

The argument is only in part about which should come first, the chicken or the egg, six entries each year for the foreseeable future or the category.

Music is often not easy to categorize or label, and that fact points to a separate but related issue, the arbitrariness of the nomenclature itself.

Coming off the stage after his set at the Isle of Wight music festival, Miles Davis was asked the name of whatever it was that his band had just performed. Miles said, “Call it anything,” and that’s how its labeled on the album.

There’s art, and then there are labels and categories.

Then there is the much larger issue of how Native American music and musicians are perceived and categorized by the recording industry and recognized by the Grammys, its annual self-promotional showcase. The Grammys bestows awards, prestige and other support to artists in 109 categories.

In each of the past 12 years the Nammys have demonstrated the broad diversity of Native American music, while in an entirely separate process the Grammys distills all of Native American music down to one performer per year, regardless of genre.

This discussion reaches to how Native American music is categorized and marketed in record store bins, often clustered with “World Music”, irony noted….

The six-entry rule bars recognition of a lot of Indian talent. Robbie Robertson is an easy example. Among his accomplishments are movie scores for “The Departed” and “Gangs of New York”. The music itself was not “Native”, but regardless, the Nammys are not likely to get six Best Score or Best Song Soundtrack for Motion Picture or Television any time soon. The only option was to award Robbie a Lifetime Achievement Nammy, which he earned for his time with The Band and Bob Dylan alone.

There should be a way to recognize the accomplishment for the accomplishment.

It’s not like there isn’t any Native American jazz or classical music close at hand….

Gabriel Ayala, the Yaqui guitarist, won the 2010 Best World Music Nammy with a recording of Spanish classical guitar music. Most record stores consider World music to be synonymous with indigenous music, not the Spanish classical canon.

On awards night, Gabriel performed a medley of Concierto de Aranjuez (as popularized by Miles Davis) and Chick Corea’s Spain, and that was jazz played on a classical guitar. Gabriel Ayala plays classical and jazz guitar on the same instrument, in the same performance.

His Nammy performance included this duet with Skylar Wolf. Feel free to put a label on it, to place it in a single category. Is it Indian music? Sure, but then what…?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g6Bd3codYA&feature=related




Here are some thoughts going forward:

Muskokee Creek poet and musician Joy Harjo, last year’s Female Artist of the Year at the Nammys, has a new multimedia show titled “We were there when jazz was invented,” featuring her band, three Oklahoma stomp dancers and video.

The Nammies could make a powerful statement about Native Americans in jazz by featuring Joy Harjo’s program at the 2011 Nammys, I’m just saying….

And while we’re at it, let’s nominate Choctaw brother the late Don Cherry for the Native American Music Awards Hall of Fame, to join his soul mate Jim Pepper there….

And then there’s the late Don Pullen, whose “Sacred Common Ground” with the Chief Cliff Singers (Kootenai) is just as astonishing a concept today as it was when recorded shortly before his death….

I’m just saying….