![\"Weston](\"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Weston-Zep-Tepi.jpg\")
<\/a>With Zep Tepi Randy Weston demonstrates why he continues to be one of the elite musicians of the international stage. He has seen every change in the jazz world from the end of the swing and big band era, right through the be-bop period and the periods of free music. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, exposed as a child in his family\u2019s home to the likes of Count Basie and Duke Ellington. The rhythms of the Caribbean were the sounds of his community. His early compositions were often in waltz time, frequently written for children, and widely recorded by people like Cannonball Adderley.\u00a0He moved to North Africa in the late 1960\u2019s and in 1969 opened the African Rhythms Club in Tangiers. His time in Africa put him in direct contact with the deep roots of history that his father Frank Edward Weston educated him in, the cream of African musicians, and the spiritual Ganawa people. He has conducted his own deeply personal study of the history of African music and its influence on the rest of the world.<\/p>\nOnly two prominent Afro-American musicians have fully explored the deep roots of the song and rhythm patterns of ancient African music with the compositional, melodic, harmonic, and instrumental innovations of American jazz, and then consciously and fully integrated them into their own music. One of them, clarinetist and composer John Carter died relatively young. Carter\u2019s five CD series that explores the story of jazz from its African origins to its urban and free stages (Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music), is sadly out of print and badly needs re-mastering and re-issuing.<\/p>\n
The other musician-composer is Randy Weston. His three-CD series of Self-Portraits, Portraits of Duke Ellington and Portraits of Thelonious Monk from the late 1980\u2019s contains definitive interpretations of the two masters and once again demonstrated Weston\u2019s superior compositional abilities. His 1991 double CD The Spirits of Our Ancestors put African rhythm combined with the avante-guard expressionism of Dewey Redman and Pharaoh Saunders back into the foreground. It also contains one of the last sessions in which John Birks (Dizzy) Gillespie recorded. His collaborations with Melba Liston dated from his 1958 recording \u201cLittle Niles\u201d and even after she was semi-incapacitated by a stroke, Randy Weston asked her to arrange his stunning \u201cKhephera\u201d and \u201cVolcano Blues\u201d CDs .<\/p>\n
Weston is now performing as much or more than in any period of his 80 year life. Concert listeners can testify that he is playing with an intensity and excitement that has not slowed down with age. Yet the name Randy Weston is absent from headlines these last few years, not because of any particular desire of his own, but because of the economics and vagaries of the music business. The \u201cPortraits\u201d series and The Spirits of Our Ancestors are out of print but fortunately the Mosaic label has re-issued some of his earlier records, including \u201cUhuru Afrika.\u201d There is also another issue for Randy Weston\u2019s subdued presence: he speaks persistently about the African roots of the music, a topic which is not very popular in these decades. How could Africa be seen as a source of musical culture and profound spiritual knowledge when it has been poverty-stricken and war struck for so many hundreds of years? Yet when I spent time in the poorest of the poor areas, the Sahel, in 2011, I found the most amazingly literate people who revered the ancestral musicians who played as if the desert winds spread ancient wisdom that emanated from the desert sands.<\/p>\n
\u201cZep Tepi\u201d is Weston\u2019s first trio recording in decades to enhance his presence. Zep Tepi reprises in a trio context the history of Randy Weston\u2019s music including \u201cHigh Fly\u201d, \u201cBerkshire Blues\u201d, \u201cBlue Moses\u201d, and \u201cPortrait of Frank Edward Weston.\u201d Weston frequently uses African words to name his recordings, and Zep Tepi translates as \u201cFirst Time,” the name of the ancient Egyptian creation story. The co-musicians are long-time African Rhythms collaborators Alex Blake (acoustic bass) and Neil Clarke (percussion). This is a key point, for African Rhythms is a touring band. That means the three musicians have lived inside the compositions over a long period of time, constantly evolving their color and emotional depth.<\/p>\n
Randy Weston\u2019s piano style harkens back to the day when musicians did not have microphones to throw their sound. In those years, people like Earl Hines developed harmonic approaches that allowed them to be heard from the front to the back of concert halls and cut through the decibel levels of the brass. Weston chauffeured Thelonious Monk\u2019s for several years and was able to observe at close hand in the New York clubs how Monk made the piano radiate with over- and under-tones.<\/p>\n
A concise summary of Weston\u2019s command of the instrument can be heard on \u201cThe Healer.\u201d The composition is taken lentissimo with a few contrasting tempo shifts. It starts with a trinkle-tinkle quickly followed by a huge bass chord that he lets reverberate to complete decay while repeating the opening notes. He then returns exclusively to the treble for a short floating swing improvisation, establishing a mood of peace and tranquility, as if the mind is being settled for the healing process. Weston\u2019s hands are enormous and his reach allows him to span the nine-foot breadth of the B\u00f6sendorfer keyboard with ease. This is not just a technical issue, for Weston has long had the imagination to use the extremes of the piano\u2019s treble and the bass to create evocative moods.<\/p>\n
\u201cBlue Moses\u201d encapsulates the burning concert pulse of Weston\u2019s African Rhythms workout style. The composition opens as relatively formless piano explorations and deep-note glissading chords from the bass, precursors of the themes to come. The pace up to the fourth minute is taken with a slow, lilting bounce. The musicians then pause, as if taking a deep breath in preparation for the high-velocity ride across open ground that is to come. The velocity is taken about a third faster than version on The Spirits of Our Ancestors, a pace is akin to riding a bare-back camel in full-sprint across the desert. It takes strong thighs indeed for a rider to avoid being thrown by this beast.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Alex Blake holds a sustained bass pattern with tremendous control and strength. He uses two\u00a0 striking devices: the way he glissades the notes, giving them a resonating plasticity, and the way he percussively clicks the strings on the fret board. Blake is not particularly well-known to the public, but based on his aesthetics and chops, he certainly ranks in the 99.9th<\/sup> percentile of contemporary bass masters.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cBlue Moses\u201d is thirteen-minutes long and filled with complex ringing piano tones, sometimes expressed as smashing chords, sometimes as quick successive strikes on individual keys (perhaps even one finger on two keys at the same time). Weston\u2019s rhythmic senses leave the listener in two distinct time zones: one in which time is elastic, and one in which time is concise. The tangible oscillations within extremes is one of the characteristics that creates the complexity of emotion one feels while listening to Weston\u2019s music.<\/p>\n Zep Tepi is wonderfully recorded. The miking of the piano puts the listener\u2019s ears right on top of the strings with the ability to cinematically feel Weston\u2019s of playing the bass, treble, and mid-ranges of the instrument. The vibrancy of the recording also extends to the Blake\u2019s bass and Clarke\u2019s kit. Clarke has an affinity for using wood blocks the way some jazz drummers might cast sound through the cymbals. Listen carefully to that approach on\u00a0 \u201cTamashi\u201d (the word \u2018soul\u2018 in Japanese). I found a special treat to hear the musicians sounding their vocal chords during the workout moments of the CD, even in hearing breath after the last notes of \u201cBlue Moses\u201d and \u201cThe Healer\u201d have died away.<\/p>\n Zep Tepi is a\u00a0 living testament of the African sources of jazz music. But it is not fair to Weston to configure his work within the confines of jazz. While his music originates from what Ellington called \u201cthe music of my people,\u201d Weston, like Ellington, transcends categories. Call Randy Weston\u2019s music \u201cuniversal.\u201d<\/p>\n Note: Originally written in in 2006, updated in 2013.<\/p>\n CD: www.randomchancerecords.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a9Laurence Svirchev<\/p>\n With Zep Tepi Randy Weston demonstrates why he continues to be one of the elite musicians of the international stage. He has seen every change in the jazz world from the end of the swing and big band era, right through the be-bop period and the periods of free . . . → Read More: “ZEP TEPI” Randy Weston and His African Rhythms Trio (2006): CD Review and Commentary:<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","category-reviews","odd"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Weston-Zep-Tepi.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1378"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1531,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions\/1531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}