For several years, the Makanda Project has performed four free concerts per year in the auditorium of the Dudley Branch of the Boston Public Library, located in Dudley Square, Roxbury. This has become our “home base.” The audience has grown steadily, and we can pretty much expect that the room will be filled when we perform there.  These concerts are meaningful in a number of ways, beyond the fact that they have helped keep the band working.

It’s important that the concerts are in Roxbury.  Roxbury is the heart of Boston’s African American community, and it is also where Makanda Ken McIntyre grew up.  In the 1950s, as Makanda was learning his craft, the community was a vibrant source of jazz activity.  There were many clubs where the music was performed, and the music permeated community life in ways beyond that.  Daoud Haroon (aka John Mancebo Lewis), trombonist who played on Makanda’s first album “Stone Blues,” told me a story which seemed to symbolize how the music was interwoven into daily activities and relationships: he was practicing a certain exercise every day in his apartment, and one day the mailman (also a saxophonist, and the father of the great drummer Tony Williams) knocked on the door and offered a tip based on what he had been hearing each day.  Now, though, the jazz clubs are gone.  (Connolly’s, the last one standing from the heyday, was torn down by the city in the mid 90s supposedly to make way for a retail development that would be good for the neighborhood.  The lot remains vacant today.)  The opportunities for jazz musicians to perform that do exist are in other parts of Greater Boston.  Roxbury residents are not well represented in the audience at those venues.  Similar phenomena have occurred in other cities across the U.S.

Many conclude from the above that there is no real jazz audience, or support for the music, in Roxbury or communities like it.  Our premise when we started the concerts was that this is not true; it is simply a matter of making the music accessible in an effective way.  Our experience has proven us correct.  I was reading a book about one of our heroes, pianist, composer, and bandleader Horace Tapscott: The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles by Steven L. Isoardi.  I came a passage in the Preface where the author comments on ” . . . the inability of much of the jazz and mainstream media to see beyond commercial venues and into the areas that birthed this art form.  Much of the African American audience is where it has always been, in their communities and not in higher priced clubs, halls, and festivals far removed from those neighborhoods and their working-class populations.  While most of jazz journalism, history, and commerce have focused primarily on these typical venues, they have become increasingly removed from African American communities and the music emerging there over the last fifty years . . . .  Performances at parks, schools, social centers, and cultural festivals continue to attract substantial audiences.”  To this last list we could add libraries.

The concerts attract people from places an hour or more away – jazz fans who know, for instance, that these concerts are the only opportunity in the region to hear some of the guest artists who perform with us such as Oliver Lake, Craig Harris, or Odean Pope.  As such, the concerts have a welcoming multicultural flavor.  At the same time, the majority of the audience is from the neighborhood, and the feeling of the concerts is that of a community event.  I think it’s important that the audience includes not just the hard core jazz fans (from Roxbury as well as elsewhere), but also neighborhood folks who may not have a great deal of experience listening to jazz but who come because it’s an event in their community.  When we talk about making the music part of community life, it’s important that the “community” in question is not just the relatively narrow group of music insiders (i.e., the “jazz community”).  It’s also gratifying to observe that the relatively uninitiated jazz listeners do not seem to be scared off by the complexities of Makanda’s compositions.

Of special note, in terms of the audience composition, is that the library is a family friendly environment where children are welcome and do attend.

I hear from time to time of suburban residents who will not come to the concerts because it is “too dangerous” in Roxbury.  No amount of evidence will convince them otherwise.  This is too bad.  But this thought did occur to me: usually it’s the targets of stereotypes who end up missing out on things, rather than the holders of the stereotypes.  If it must be one way or the other, it’s probably more fair that this be reversed.

There are more things to write about concerning the Dudley Library concerts, but those will be in separate posts.

• John Kordalewski