Drummers clash with new Harlem residents

Drummers clash with new Harlem residents

By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 41 minutes ago

On Saturday nights in summer, hundreds of fingers pound out mesmerizing rhythms on African drums — a ritual repeated for decades in Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park.

This year, the drums have a counterpoint: the complaints of "new Harlemites."

"African drumming is wonderful for the first four hours, but after that, it's pure, unadulterated noise. We couldn't see straight anymore," says Beth Ross, who lives in a luxury apartment building near the park. "It was like a huge boom box in the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen. You had no way to escape except to leave the apartment."

Ross's complaint is just the latest sign of conflict in Harlem, where upscale apartments and hotels are rapidly changing the face of a neighborhood long considered the heart of black culture in America.

Central Harlem around Marcus Garvey Park is especially attractive, with its opulent brownstones and churches from the Gilded Age of the 19th century.

The park was formerly known as Mount Morris Park, the name given to it by developers in the 1800s, when the area was mostly white; that name is now often used by real estate agencies. The park was renamed in 1973 for the Harlem-based black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who had advocated black ownership of Harlem.

The influx of outsiders intensified after the arrival six years ago of Harlem's most famous commercial tenant, former President Clinton, whose 125th Street office is a short walk from Marcus Garvey Park. He said then that he hoped his presence would encourage others to move to the neighborhood.

Longtime Harlem residents say that while his intentions were good, the "new Harlemites" are making changes that are destroying some of what's dearest to the black community.

A community garden was bulldozed to make way for elegant new apartments — right next to the future Museum for African Art on Fifth Avenue. After 50 years in business, the soul food restaurant Copeland's closed in July, a victim of what the owner called the neighborhood's changing demographics and food tastes.

"They call this the new Harlem Renaissance — bringing in people who are able to pay for these properties, who push out people who can't, like schoolteachers and municipal workers," said James David Manning, the 60-year-old Baptist pastor of the Atlah World Missionary Church, a block from the park.

The original "Harlem Renaissance" was a flowering of literature, art, theater and music during the 1920s and 1930s, when black writers, artists and musicians became famous — from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to Josephine Baker and Duke Ellington.

In recent years, Manning said, "the community has been taken over by big business and banks, and deep-pocketed entrepreneurs. If we lose Harlem, we lose the flagship of African-American people worldwide."

Apartments are priced at $400,000 to $4 million in a condo complex set to go up on the south side of the park. About a fifth of its 26-story residential space is reserved for affordable rental apartments.

The drumming dispute erupted earlier this summer with complaints from residents of a new 23-unit co-op overlooking the north end of the park. Days later, the drummers reluctantly moved farther inside the park after a few of their representatives met with building residents and officials of the city parks department, which gave the drummers a permit for the summer.

Now, complains Agnes Johnson, a community activist and dance choreographer, "You can't hear the drummers or see them from the street. Try and find them now!"

To the drummers and their supporters, the Saturday-evening ritual that began in 1969 is part of their history and culture.

"Some of these drums are prayed over, blessed in Africa," said Benjamin Thompson, a retired security guard who plays trumpet with the group.

Carl Alexander, 71, a retired teacher originally from Trinidad, has been drumming here for 34 years.

"People come and drum for spiritual reasons — and to get away from the hustle and bustle," he said.

Ross, an executive career coach who moved into the area a year ago, says she feels "honored" to be living in Harlem alongside longtime residents. "It is their community, their history," she said. But when it comes to their drumming location, she thought it was time to change.

"It's a matter of quality of life," she said.

L.A. felt the love of the summer of '67 too

L.A. felt the love of the summer of '67 too
It wasn't all blooming up north. Jim Morrison, the Byrds, Neil Young and other greats made the Sunset Strip a must-stop.
By Geoff Boucher
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 2, 2007

Maybe it was the flowers in their hair.

San Francisco enjoys tremendous cultural traction on our collective memory lane when it comes to the Summer of Love, that swirling season currently celebrating its 40th anniversary. But what about Los Angeles? Haight-Ashbury wasn't the only California street marker that mattered. There was also a history-making strand called the Sunset Strip. FOR THE RECORD:
Summer of Love: An article about the Summer of Love in Thursday's Calendar Weekend said that John Phillips wrote the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" during the summer of 1967. The song was actually written earlier and debuted on the national charts that May. The article also said that Elliot Mintz was a radio host on KPCC-FM; he was a host on KPPC-FM. In addition, a photo of the band Buffalo Springfield gave the wrong identification for one of the band members. Bruce Palmer was pictured second from right, not Jim Fielder. —
"The Strip, that was a major center for music of the day, with the Byrds and the Doors and the Buffalo Springfield," says Lou Adler, the music producer and impresario. "In San Francisco, things were exploding and everything was new. It all happened at once. But in Los Angeles, it had been building for a while, so it was more gradual. It wasn't observed in the same way. The scene here was so well-connected with the entertainment industry too, that it was not as jolting to observers."

True, the only visible seasonal change in Los Angeles is the arrival of a new entertainment trend, so even a youth culture revolution could blend in. Still, the summer of 1967 is a time of landmark memories, and not just for the gigs on the Strip where Jim Morrison, Neil Young and Arthur Lee were each reshaping the idea of what a rock star should look and sound like. There was the life in the canyons, where music, art, poetry and hedonism mixed in a bucolic dream state.

Elliot Mintz, then a young, bright and bracing radio host on KPCC-FM, which was entering its glory years, remembers how the Strip was the lightning-rod center of music for the city but the canyons were a seismograph for the latest push forward in art, poetry and political thought. "Laurel Canyon was a place unto itself, a village and community, the West Coast counterpoint to Greenwich Village. When someone felt that Laurel was getting too crowded and the scene was moving away from them, they went to Topanga, they migrated," Mintz says. "It was like the Wild West there, and you lived like a pioneer. That's where you went if you wanted to truly drop out and if you wanted to embrace the forward edge of where these societal changes seemed to be going."

The changes were evident in many places. Venice Beach was taking on a strange new vibe, remembers Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for the Doors, the iconic L.A. band that had the No. 1 song on the charts 40 years ago this week with the decadent "Light My Fire."

"Venice was getting interesting; it had a leftover beatnik spirit to it that made it ready to catch this new scene coming in, so it was turning hippie in '67," says Manzarek. "Things were everywhere, though. Elysian Park had love-ins -- that was fun -- and Laurel Canyon had these kids like bands of gypsies. The center of it all, music-wise, though, of course, was the Whisky."

The Whisky a Go-Go, the Galaxy, the London Fog, Gazzari's, the Crescendo, the Interlude, the Trip; these were some of the clubs of the era where the scene met crowds of kids streaming into town from all points east to find the soundtrack to this tradition-shaking new youth culture. The music was an electrified extension of a folk sound popularized by the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas, but darker, more psychedelic sounds were percolating up thanks to bands such as Love and the Doors.

There were culture clashes aplenty. Older Angelenos were appalled by the scruffy bands of youngsters and trippy vagabonds invading the Strip. The police weren't far behind. In early 1967, Buffalo Springfield had released "For What It's Worth," the pulsing, ominous single that became an anthem for the turbulent decade -- the lyrics "Stop, hey, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down" became shorthand for young people's anxieties about authority and the Vietnam War -- but the true topic was closer to home. Springfield's Stephen Stills wrote the lyric "field day for the heat" about a clash between cops and kids over the closure of the Strip's Pandora's Box club; the lyrics may have felt national, but it was tailored to L.A. first.

The friction is memorable, but so, according to Manzarek, are the Summer of Love's gentler generational encounters. He points to established L.A. institutions such as Barney's Beanery and Canter's, which were serving a strange and shaggy new generation that was taking L.A. from its "Dragnet" persona toward something that would be caricatured by "The Mod Squad." "After 2 a.m., everyone would pile into Canter's, one of the best Jewish delicatessens in town, because it was open all night and it had great pastrami and corned beef on rye," Manzarek says. "I remember rolling in there late one night and seeing Frank Zappa at a table with Captain Beefheart. Now these were high-desert guys, from Lancaster and out there, and they were like the insane, mad-monk squadrons that Tom Wolfe wrote about. We talked and they couldn't have been nicer. The waitresses who had been there for decades were unfazed by this band of gypsies that came from the Sunset Strip every night. That was Los Angeles at that moment."

David Houston, co-owner today of Barney's Beanery, said anyone wanting to bask in that infamous summer can still do it simply by inspecting the wonderfully dank corners of his storied bar. "You can see and feel the past here, which is one of the reasons so many writers still come and drink here. That's why Quentin Tarantino and Johnny Depp and others come through the door." The place began in the 1920s (it's L.A.'s third oldest restaurant), and although Clark Gable and Mae West dined there, the real historical draw for most patrons and tourists today is that such fabled 1960s clientele as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin -- who scrawled graffiti on a wall and on another night threw a bottle at Morrison -- hung out at Barney's. "The Doors' offices were across the street, and our rehearsal hall, where we would eventually record 'L.A. Woman,' was downstairs," Manzarek says. "Jim hung out at Barney's a lot. That was one of his favorite places. There were so many great places in L.A. But there still are and there always have been. It's hard to remember them all."

That may be the reason for San Francisco's "ownership" of the Summer of Love. That city not only took on much of the counterculture persona it still wears like a wonderful consignment-shop jacket, it also documented it well. Rolling Stone started in San Francisco in the heat of 1967, and the literature and underground comics of the Bay Area have frozen that moment in memory in a singular way.

Maybe it's just that L.A. doesn't need that summer as much. The Dead are still the most Grateful in San Francisco, for instance, but our city has had plenty of signature bands since the Doors closed with Morrison's death. L.A., says Mintz, moves too quickly to be frozen in memory. "That is the history of Los Angeles. The 1960s happened here in ways that they happened everywhere else, but then they also happened in ways that did not happen everywhere else."

Oh, by the way, that song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" was a product of L.A. It was written by John Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas, right here, during the Summer of Love.

geoff.boucher@latimes.com

Ethnomusicological Qu'ran Project in Philadelphia

An interesting sketch (five pages long) in the University of Pennsylvania Gazette of how ethnomusicology academia partners with and studies the musical elements of the Islamic Call to Prayer.

SF? How Laurel Canyon Dominated the Summer of Love's Music

NYT
June 9, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
(Don’t Go Back to) San Francisco
By MICHAEL WALKER

Los Angeles

SHAKE the stems and seeds out of the Persian rug and put some flowers in your hair: the Summer of Love is 40 years old. The patchouli-scented commemoration has fixated on San Francisco, the Summer of Love’s blissful nexus. What wretched Midwestern longhair-in-waiting in the summer of ’67 could resist the siren of Scott McKenzie’s Top 5 hit, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”? Untold VW microbuses from Ann Arbor to Amherst chugged west on little more than the song’s purple-hazy promise: the tribes were gathering, and they were gathering in San Francisco.

But as a lasting cultural artifact, San Francisco’s Summer of Love can’t hold a stick of incense to the rafter-shaking sounds coming out that same year from a Los Angeles neighborhood 370 miles south, above the Sunset Strip. If we measure ’60s pop-cultural landmarks by the epoch-producing music they generate — and, from Liverpool to Woodstock, we do — then Laurel Canyon was the more evolved and influential destination that summer.

Laurel Canyon had been filling up with the baby boom’s brightest musical lights since 1965, when members of the Byrds, Los Angeles’s seminal folk-rockers, moved in, just as their version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a triumphant, worldwide smash. Soon, it seemed, every musician of note in Los Angeles had moved next door: members of the Mamas and the Papas, the Doors, the Seeds, the Turtles and Love were later joined by Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Frank Zappa, Carole King and untold transient rock royalty from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones.

By the summer of ’67, the Laurel Canyon mafia had defined the budding West Coast counterculture with an avalanche of generation-unifying songs that blended the last vestiges of the folk-music revival with the impudent exuberance of the British Invasion.

Laurel Canyon and Los Angeles were home to the murderers’ row of rock: alongside the Byrds — “America’s Beatles” according to the not entirely undeserved hype — lived Buffalo Springfield, from whose ranks would come Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay. The Mamas and the Papas, Laurel Canyon’s house band, had already recorded a string of landmark hits starting with “California Dreamin’.” The revolutionary flower-punk of Love produced the blistering “Seven and Seven Is,” a slap to the face masquerading as a hit single. The Turtles bounced the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” from No. 1 with “Happy Together,” and a couple of months later, The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” with brooding couplets that juxtaposed sexual longing and funeral pyres, rode the charts for weeks during the putatively flower-strewn summer.

San Francisco’s music scene developed under conditions vastly different from those in Los Angeles. Unstructured gigs at the city’s acid-drenched ballrooms encouraged epic jams of the sort perfected by the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Jefferson Airplane, along with a naïve anticommercialism — hit singles were for the hacks in Laurel Canyon. The irony is that San Francisco’s bands are remembered today chiefly for the few times they made commercially successful music, as with Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 “Surrealistic Pillow” album and its Top 10 singles “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.”

Where San Francisco’s music scene was administered by a handful of show-business novices, Los Angeles was home to Capitol Records, the Beatles’ label, as well as the world’s finest recording studios, producers and engineers. Laurel Canyon’s proximity to this infrastructure — the unsparing proving ground of the Sunset Strip’s clubs was a five-minute hitchhike away — instilled in the musicians a professionalism that stiffened the spine of the material they wrote and performed.

In the end, 1967’s most prescient generational temperature-taking can be found in yet another Los Angeles song that hit the Top 10 just before the Summer of Love took off. Buffalo Springfield’s chilling “For What It’s Worth,” inspired by Stephen Stills’s eyewitness account of police officers brutalizing longhairs on the Sunset Strip, questioned the motives of both the establishment and the self-congratulating counterculture. Given the turmoil that lay just around the corner in 1968, the paranoia of “For What It’s Worth” strikes deep and true: “there’s a man with a gun over there,” it turned out, would have as much to do with the baby boom generation as would wearing flowers in your hair.

The Summer of Love will forever be entwined with San Francisco. But the rock critic Robert Christgau predicted in 1967 that “the real music would come from Los Angeles.” And he was right. The songs that came out of the Haight that summer now seem fixed in amber, as temporal as a Fillmore poster, while the music from Los Angeles and Laurel Canyon soldiers on, impervious to age and ridicule.

Even the Summer of Love’s anthem, Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco,” was written and recorded in Los Angeles. The song was conceived by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas expressly as a come-on for the Monterey International Pop Music Festival, which Mr. Phillips and Lou Adler, the Los Angeles record producer, were organizing. The lyrics vividly imagine a hippie-sanctified San Francisco, but the flowers in the title are literally from Los Angeles: Mr. McKenzie recorded the song while wearing garlands of wildflowers plucked in Laurel Canyon.

Michael Walker is the author of “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock ’n’ Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood.”