Almost from its birth, Tribe was much more than simply a jazz group. It was a living example of the ways that community and cultural capital could evolve together during the American century’s final third, in a city that helped define the era’s musical and civic spirit: Detroit, Michigan. Tribe began as a collective around four musicians—reed player Wendell Harrison, trombonist Phil Ranellin, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and pianist Harold McKinney—who embodied the late 1960s’ spirit of black self-determination. It ended up a local institution, tutoring program, and one of the unmistakable through lines in the city’s musical history. The contributions of Tribe members stretch directly from Ray Charles and Motown to Geri Allen and Detroit techno. If Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014, a wonderful compilation of mostly unreleased recordings from the latter chapters of Tribe’s history, doesn’t quite scale early-career musical heights, it makes clear that judging lifelong endeavors through a narrow lens of a single period of time—even one that contemporary perspective deems “classic”—is a fool’s errand.
There is no denying the value of Tribe’s revolutionary early sounds. Recorded mostly under the names of individual players and only occasionally as a group, their fluid mixture of soulful post-bop swing, free avant-garde playing, hard in-the-pocket jazz-funk, and almighty music of the spirit continues to spill gracefully off comps like Soul Jazz’s Message From the Tribe: An Anthology of Tribe Records 1972-76 or P-Vine’s Vibes From the Tribe Vol. I and Vol. II; it’s likely to appeal to any admirer of improvisational rapture or a fat-ass groove. But the myriad activities around these recordings, the ones that helped build and sustain both Detroit’s mythical creative streak and its literal artistic community, expose Tribe’s deeper virtues.
This is where neighborhood capital, and Tribe’s contribution to it, come into play. The self-sustaining ethos of Tribe Records, Harrison’s Wenha Records, and Harrison and McKiney’s Rebirth Records helped carry on Motown’s ideal of homegrown, artist-run labels, one that continues in the city’s dance music to this day. Tribe magazine—published from 1972 until 1977 and edited by journalist Herb Boyd, author of Hometown’s liner notes and the great 2017 book Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination—was deeply involved in local politics, galvanizing votes for the city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young. (According to Mark Stryker’s fine new book Jazz From Detroit, the publication was also successful enough to fund Tribe Records.) And both Marcus Belgrave’s Jazz Development Workshop and Harrison and McKinney’s educational and event-production organization Rebirth Inc. were responsible for fine-tuning an endless list of Detroit’s musical talent.
That’s one reason Hometown is stocked with performers you may recognize from classic John Coltrane albums (bassist Reggie Workman) or Theo Parrish 12"s (trumpeter John Douglas), along with lesser-known giants (trumpeter Jimmy Owens, trombonist Kiani Zawadi). Despite consisting of three separate sessions recorded over 24 years, and featuring two dozen players, the collection feels like a unified work. Eschewing the outer territories Tribe members once wandered, Hometown conveys a more comforting musical tradition (though with plenty of details that trail outward like breadcrumbs, for those paying attention). Its sound is, to quote the title of the McKinney piece that opens the set, “Wide and Blue.” Recorded live in 1995, at the SereNgeti Ballroom, a great turn-of-the-century Detroit jazz space, the song cuts a relaxed and confident stride: McKinney and Workman’s extended conversation and Harrison’s compact tenor solo are bookended by a theme stated on four horns—Harrison, Belgrave, Owens, and Zawadi. It’s a harmonic statement that wouldn’t seem out of place in the classic Blue Note songbook—that is, until the diminuendo, when horns unlock into a frenzied blowing burst that’s part Frenchmen Street, part Saturn.
Hometown collects many such knowing touches as it showcases the depth of an oft-ignored creative community and its cultural staying power. The experience and mastry is there for all to hear, whether in the lesser-known compositions (each of the 10 songs is an original that features its author) or in exceptional playing, which is beguilingly concise.
The songs are alone worth the price. Ranelin’s “Freddie’s Groove” is a dance number honoring Freddie Hubbard, precisely capturing the legendary trumpeter’s funky Red Clay/Straight Life period (cue: Ralphe Armstrong’s uncut bassline, Harrison quoting cartoon themes like Sonny Rollins, and guitarist John Arnold in rocked-up George Benson mode). The Pamela Wise composition that gives the compilation its name beautifully mixes the propulsion of a squad of percussionists with the intertwined melancholy of Douglas’ trumpet and Harrison’s tenor, supported by Wise’s modal keys. Zawadi’s “Libra Ahora,” the set’s single moment of stretching out, brings the clave and the drummers (including a star turn by percussionist Frencesco Mora), plus an extended interplay between the four horns. And then there’s McKinney’s “Juba,” which opens with the pianist’s wife and twin daughters in a rendition of an antebellum handclap-and-voice holler, followed by a horn party that McKinney amends by banging out wonderfully dissonant clusters.
Such social history has always been central to Tribe’s musical expression, and Hometown features a trio of direct lyrical engagements with the past that also speak to the present. Wise’s “Ode to Black Mothers” and “Marcus Garvey,” featuring words by poet/pastor Mbiyu Chui, are familiar ceremonial acclamations in which a lone teacher rises on a bed of drums to bear a valuable lesson. But McKinney’s closing “Slave Ship Enterprise” is something else entirely: a two-decades-old, solo piano-and-voice reading whose prescience would be remarkable if you didn’t know that black America has been preaching its message for a century. It is an inversion of the chords of “America the Beautiful,” rewritten as an operatically delivered tone poem, with McKinney unfurling a broad “comment on the American phenomenon”—at times ambient, at others direct. “Seems so near and dear, yet so far/Near as our ideals, yet far from the way we are,” reads his indictment of the “land of the free,” a ship “of state… where captain and captive must share a common fate.”
The fact that “Slave Ship Enterprise” ends on an almost undeserved image of hope—“U.S. spells ‘us’”—says a lot about where the faith of both Tribe and McKinney, who passed away in 2001, lay. (Belgrave died in 2015.) Like much of the collective’s work, musical and otherwise, it was rooted in the strength of the community and its culture. There was (and remains) an inherent understanding that the vitality of any hometown is expressed not only in how brightly its light shines, but in how long the people keep it on.
