When Curtis Mayfield recorded his last album in 1996, he did it lying on his back, singing a line at a time. He had no choice-- he'd been paralyzed since a 1990 lighting rig accident. He was near the end of a life and career that saw him become one of the most influential songwriters and performers of his generation. He was a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, producer and thinker who had his hands in a lot of amazing music, and was among the first black pop artists to inject the ideas and hopes of the Civil Rights movement into his work, doing it subtly at first with the Impressions with "Amen" and "Keep on Pushing" and then much more directly later on.
Jazz, of course, got to openly supporting Civil Rights and expressing black pride before pop music did. Max Roach's 1960 Freedom Now Suite is a good example. Charles Mingus' 1959 classic "Fables of Faubus" was a sly and sarcastic takedown of Arkansas governor Orval Faubus after the Little Rock Nine incident-- the list is pretty long. Part of the reason jazz got there before Mayfield is that Mayfield was working within the constraints of pop radio, which is where all his record labels were aiming. In 1960, he couldn't have done what Max Roach was doing for the simple fact that no one would have given him the chance.
Jazz bassist William Parker was getting his start in the early 70s just as Mayfield went solo with a series of albums that very directly addressed issues of race, equality, and black pride. These themes have run through Parker's work as well for decades, so a tribute to Mayfield seems natural and fitting. Parker isn't simply interpreting or covering Mayfield's songs on I Plan to Stay a Believer, though. He's extending them, treating them as living documents, and adding new content that dovetails with Mayfield's political thoughts. Parker's notes on the recording explain his belief that every song has an "inside song" waiting to be reborn, and he implies that these are the songs he heard inside Mayfield's music.
Parker and his collaborators began work on this project nearly 10 years ago, and this final document is a live compilation of sorts, bringing together performances from 2001, 2002, 2007 and 2008 into a basically seamless whole that presents a panoramic exploration of both Mayfield's music and modern black identity over two discs. Actually, the recording dates are interesting, because three of these tracks were recorded in Italy just days before the election of Barack Obama, and there is a sort of old-school Civil Rights thrust to the additional poetry contributed by Amiri Baraka-- post-racial this is not, and it's sort of a pre-acknowledgement that having a black president won't automatically erase all of the nation's tormented racial history.
Looking across the two-disc track list is a little intimidating-- eight of the eleven tracks are over ten minutes long, with "If There's a Hell Below" topping out at 21:23, so you know up front that this won't be a casual listen. These songs twist and turn, invariably opening with musical motifs from Mayfield's originals-- the creeping bass line of "Hell Below", the funky riff of "Freddie's Dead", the ebullient horn fanfare of "Move on Up", here slowed, rounded off and made significantly darker-- and from there, it's anyone's guess where the energy of the performance will take the band. Gospel, bop, soul, funk, post-bop and free music are all part of this mix, and the band spends a lot of time between them as well. For instance, the 10-minute version of "This Is My Country (New York)" on disc two takes on the feel of an out-of-control revival, ultimately flying off the rails into an ecstatic muddle of squealing sax, shouting, and tumbling drums.
It has the feel of the type of project Charles Mingus might have taken on had he lived to see this century, ambitious and quasi-historical, but still swinging and loaded with content that takes many listens to unpack. The band is amazing. Several tracks feature choirs (including a choir of 90 children on two of those tracks), but they blend right in, adding to the dual vocal attack of Baraka and singer Leena Conquest, a long-time Parker collaborator who dances through these tangled arrangements and the heavy subject matter with tremendous grace. Asim Barnes plays guitar on only three tracks, but I could spend a whole paragraph breaking down why what he does is thrilling, and drummer Hamid Drake is strictly next-level on every song. The way he switches between a slow, swinging beat and a double-time stomp on "Move on Up" is breathtaking and helps transform the song into a living, pulsing beast-- Conquest riffs on "Keep on Pushing" as the song begins to break down and head off into freer territory, and if you've spent any amount of time digging Mayfield in the past, you will love the way she does it.
I wish I could've seen some of these performances in person, because the amount of energy the band packs into them surely must have flowed right into the crowd. Even here, pressed onto little plastic discs, the band practically explodes toward you. I have no idea what Mayfield would think of these versions of his songs, but it's hard to imagine him being anything but flattered by the immense thought and planning that clearly went into these arrangements. To pull and stretch these songs so much and still preserve their essential identity is a true feat of art.
