Billy Bang, Jazz Violinist And Vietnam Veteran, Dies At 63 : A Blog Supreme : NPR

Billy Bang, Jazz Violinist And Vietnam Veteran, Dies At 63 : A Blog Supreme : NPR

Billy Bang, a violinist known for intense performances and a wide-ranging sensibility, died Monday night, his agent Jean-Pierre Leduc confirmed. Bang, who had been suffering from lung cancer, was 63.

Born William Walker in 1947, Bang was an important figure on the experimental jazz scene that blossomed in New York in the 1970s. But he gained wider recognition in the last decade for a series of recordings which drew on his military service during the Vietnam War.

His experiences in combat scarred him mentally, and he generally avoided speaking about them until Leduc encouraged him to create what would become 2001's Vietnam: The Aftermath. The album — and its successor, Vietnam: Reflections — received critical acclaim and proved cathartic for Bang.

"There used to be a time where I used to have dreams about it a lot and it's not as often now," he told Howard Mandel for NPR in 2004. "But for a very long time, I suffered a lot in my sleep. But to be honest, I think after I faced the ordeals of what I've gone through — after completing that music, and after rehearsing it, particularly after recording it — I've felt a lot lighter."

Bang grew up in New York City's South Bronx, and actually studied the violin as a teenager. He didn't like it.

"I didn't know what was going on," he told Tom Vitale for NPR in 1993. "I couldn't carry it back on my block. I lived on 117th Street. Can you imagine a little guy carrying a violin, and you talk about guys picking on you, man. I mean, they really did. I had to put the violin down, throw a couple of punches, get thrown at me, go upstairs. I hated to practice it. It sounded terrible."

Despite being offered a scholarship to a boarding preparatory school in New England, Bang never finished high school. He was drafted into the service and, as he told Mandel, he was thrown into combat two days after landing in Vietnam.

As a squad leader, he had to maintain intense focus in combat. There was no music in his life then.

"Only the music of machine guns," Bang told Mandel. "The rhythm of that is what I heard. The only instrument I had was an M-79, M-14 and a .45."

At least initially, the period after his service was hardly any better. In 2005, Bang told Roy Hurst of NPR's News and Notes that returning was a shock.

"When I came home from Vietnam — when I got off the airplane — the next thing I was on was the New York City subway, and that was extremely traumatic for me — I mean, just really destructive to my whole system," Bang said. "I couldn't take the sounds. I couldn't take the people all around. So I finally got home; I didn't want to come outside for a long time, which I didn't do. So my mother was coaxing me to come out and sort of — she was trying to help me to get back to some kind of normality. But I still criticize the United States government for not having a real bona fide re-entry program for veterans."

Bang's trauma led him to heavy drinking and drug use. He joined a Black Liberation group that drew on his wartime experience to help it buy guns. On one trip to a pawn shop, he saw a violin and that led him back to music. After discovering the way that free jazz artists like Leroy Jenkins and Ornette Coleman were using the instrument, he began taking his own study seriously. He moved from the South Bronx to the Lower East Side and immersed himself in the counterculture of likeminded artists.

Bang proved to be an active, passionate performer. Though he was associated with free improvisation, his concepts also came from more traditional jazz and Latin music, and he often incorporated that language into his playing. Tom Vitale's 1993 profile of Bang centered on his project paying tribute to pioneering jazz violinist Stuff Smith.

Dustin Ross/Courtesy of the artist

Billy Bang across the street from his house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

By the new millennium, Billy Bang had already become a well-respected musician within the jazz world. He spent 10 years with an important group called the String Trio of New York, an improvising ensemble with his violin, guitarist James Emery and bassist John Lindberg.

The Vietnam albums proved to be more high-water marks for his career. Bang called up fellow musicians who had also served in Vietnam for the recording sessions, including conductor Butch Morris.

"It was quite heavy," Morris told Howard Mandel. "I've never seen so many grown men cry. It's not only how he brought this thematic stuff back — it's how he brought the experience back, the experience of being there, the experience of smelling, the experience of seeing, the experience of feeling, the experience of fear, the experience of joy, the experience — he brought back all these experiences. That's what was so frightening in the studio. He brought back the same experience that each of us had."

Billy Bang was scheduled to perform at the Rochester International Jazz Festival in June of this year. Last year, he released a well-received album called Prayer for Peace.

Related articles

• Album review: Billy Bang's 'Prayer for Peace' (avantmusicnews.com)

A Bluesman at Home in New York Jazz - WSJ.com

Cover of In the World: From Natchez to New York

A Bluesman at Home in New York Jazz - WSJ.com

In June 1986, Sun Ra, a pianist and bandleader with an adopted name, who claimed Saturn as his birthplace but was really from Alabama, and who cloaked his unclassifiably swinging music in celestial references, inaugurated SummerStage, a concert series sponsored by New York's City Parks Foundation.

The next year, SummerStage's headliners included Olu Dara, another inventive musician with an invented name, who proudly claims his actual birthplace of Natchez, Miss., and whose eclectic songs feature earthy details—chickens in the backyard, a peach tree, the dust of unpaved roads. Mr. Dara, who will play a free SummerStage show at Queensbridge Park in Long Island City on Wednesday, has been elemental to the series, which this year celebrates its 25th season with more than 100 events, nearly all free, throughout the five boroughs. A nine-minute version of his "Your Lips," drawn from his 2004 appearance, appears on "Live From the Heart of the City" (Sunnyside), an album marking SummerStage's 20th anniversary.

Olu Dara, seen here performing in 2008, is scheduled to play a free concert in Queens on Wednesday.

For four decades, Mr. Dara—whose given name is Charles Jones III—has popped up throughout New York: Whether playing cornet or pocket trumpet (and, occasionally, wooden Aboriginal horn) or strumming his Gibson guitar as he sings, he radiates off-handed confidence. A darling of the 1970s avant-garde jazz loft scene, Mr. Dara, 69, has also composed music for August Wilson plays and worked extensively with choreographer Dianne McIntyre. Though his music touches on references ranging from early jazz to Afro-Latin rhythms, avant-garde improvisation to R&B, he is a bluesman at heart, spinning yarns about, say, his favorite vegetable, okra, or the nature of desire. (His slow stomp, "Rain Shower," describes a man who, sans umbrella, slides home to his woman.)

If Mr. Dara has marked New York's cultural scene, so has the city shaped him. "I always refer to Brooklyn as my second home," he says, "because it's where I really started my own world." While in the Navy, he met the Yoruba priest who gave him his adopted name (meaning "God is good"). After a final year of service in port at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he stuck around, working a succession of jobs: delivery driver, nightclub manager, hospital attendant. He held on to his horns and his Gibson and began sitting in with bands. He played in drummer Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for a year. His purposeful cornet tone soon grew prized, especially by the avant-garde jazz musicians he worked with in the '70s.

"Olu can play with one note what most people can only play in a whole solo," conductor Butch Morris once said.

"I never considered myself a jazz musician," says Mr. Dara. "But I had a jazz sensibility, which I didn't find out until I worked with Blakey." Still, such music-making felt more like work than honest expression, so he formed his own band. It swung hard, drew audiences into a deep blues feeling, and often incorporated theatrical elements: Once, women with washboards, soap and water scrubbed away to the band's rhythms onstage.

If mystery shrouds Mr. Dara's music, it's not just his shape-shifting aesthetic: It wasn't until 1998, at age 57, that he made his recorded debut as a leader with "In the World: From Natchez to New York" (Atlantic). A live album, "Neighborhoods," followed in 2001. "I was just never that interested in recordings," he says. "I've always been after the live thing."

Mr. Dara has inspired many musicians, especially younger ones who, like him, arrived in New York from other places. For singer Cassandra Wilson, who hails from Jackson, Miss., "Seeing someone who was as country as I was and who did not try to hide it was important. Olu never talked to me about what was technically driving the music. He talked about what was emotionally driving the music, what was the story inside."

And his influence extends to his eldest son, Nasir Jones, better known as Nas, the most successful rapper to emerge from the fertile hip-hop scene in the Queensbridge Houses project. On a 2004 single, "Bridging the Gap," which features his father, Nas raps: "Born in the game, discovered my father's music like Prince searchin' through boxes of Purple Rain." A bit later Mr. Dara sings, "Little Africa is where we lived, better known as Queensbridge."

"That's what the neighborhood elders called this place," says Mr. Dara, who now lives in Harlem. When he plays Queensbridge Park on Wednesday Mr. Dara will make a resonant homecoming: to a concert series he's helped shape and the place where he raised his sons, in the city where he found his muse.

—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal.

____________________________________________________

Olu Dara is a remarkable musician and a true Renaissance man. I have had the good fortune of both knowing Olu Dara and producing concerts and dances involving him during the 80s and early 90s. Mr. Dara's music incorporates elements of jazz, blues, Caribbean and West African musics. At his core Olu Dara is a storyteller. He can weave a story out of the most mundane daily experiences. I have heard him sing songs telling stories about walking through the mud or I should say sliding through the mud on the way home to see his girlfriend. I have seen him make up songs or lyrics that have arisen from situations that have occurred in a nightclub or dance club setting. I've seen him playing and start to talk to people in the audience and begin to weave them into the fabric of the songs he is performing. In fact one night at the old "Sweet Basil" jazz club in New York, now Sweet Rhythm Olu Dara wove me into a story that he was telling through song. Olu Dara's music relates to everyone. He knows how to reach people on a very basic, human level. He is a very funny and engaging man. Since his early days performing in New York City he has incorporated elements of theater and dance into his musical performances. He worked for years, in collaboration, with choreographer Dianne McIntyre's "Sounds In Motion Dance Company". Mr. Dara has the ability to spontaneously adjust to the movement of dancers while still maintaining a set pace and rhythm for them to work with. Olu Dara is interested in the simple things of life. I have heard him even create stories surrounding the purchase of a chicken sandwich. Olu Dara is an urban griot, a New York sophisticate with roots in the deep South. He worked as a social worker prior to his career as a musician and he brings that knowledge of people to his music.

Do not ever miss the chance to see Olu Dara perform. I have seen many artists perform in my life, from all genres of music, dance and theater. Olu Dara is unique among them. He has recorded two wonderful CDs, "In the World From Natchez to New York" and "Neighborhoods". They are both well worth your purchase.

John H. Armwood

Related articles by Zemanta

• Nas Has N.Y. in His Heart, World on His Mind (online.wsj.com)