Richard Brent Turner on Islam, Jazz and Black Liberation

AAJ: I feel very similar to you. You've articulated it better than I could, but I have a similar feeling about A Love Supreme. It is not a casual listening record for me. I have to approach it with a lot of intention. And not to overstate it, but it feels disrespectful to not have intention with that album. But my favorite era that I go back to the most is the Village Vanguard recordings with Eric Dolphy. That week of music and the version that came out, I don't know, in the early mid 2000s where it's all the sets from all the shows with several versions of "Impressions" and "India." That music is so profound to me, and I love how it angered and polarized people at the time. Famously, the following spring there was the interview with Dolphy and Coltrane in Downbeat where they were basically taken to task because the jazz community said, "This isn't music. This isn't jazz. What is this?" I love that era. I love Africa/Brass (Impulse! 1961). That was the first Coltrane I tried to listen to when I was about 15 years old, and it was completely impenetrable to me [laughter]. I stuck with it, and I've been rewarded for decades since. But at the time I didn't have the ears. I didn't know how to hear it.

You had great jazz music in Boston, right? You had Paul's Mall and—

RT: Yeah, oh man. I was at Paul's Mall, Jazz Workshop, all the time. That was great because the musicians at that time were not huge superstars so you could talk to them. I met Arthur Watts. He came over to my table because I had two beautiful black women with me [laughter]. I was dating one of them and she brought her sister along, so I think that's why he did that [laughter]. He came over to me. He said, "Man, you look like my brother!" [laughter]. We had some really good jazz in Boston in the 1970s into the 1980s. I saw Pharoah Sanders perform live at the Tuft University gym. I'll never forget that as a college student. It just was a mind-blowing experience. But New York is different. So much of the music developed in New York.

AAJ: What's next? You have another book in the works? Do you have a project?

RT: I'm looking at a couple of book projects. I'm working on a book project now on hip hop where I'm exploring some similar themes in hip hop. You know Islamic themes, racial justice themes in hip hop. Hip hop is fascinating.

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