Black Fire

The flame that burns forever....

Stop teaching your actors freedom, teach them discipline. They were born free.

-Sun Ra

An odd thing happened to me one Saturday afternoon in Georgetown, probably in the Spring of 1984. I parked my car down by the river and was heading up 31st Street toward M Street. I was on my way to a show at the Blues Alley.

As I got nearer to Blues Alley, I started to hear music coming from around the corner on Wisconsin Avenue and went to see what was going on. It was a street concert - just a small band, maybe a quintet. The main attraction was a guy behind a Rhodes piano. They were playing a song called Re-Ron. I stayed for the entire concert and missed the show at Blues Alley.

The piano player was Gil Scott-Heron. That day he played many of what I now know to be his classics, like Johannesburg, B-movie, and Angel Dust.

In 1974 with Brian Jackson, Gil Scott-Heron recorded the classic Winter in America on the Strata-East label:

A few years before they released Winter in America, Strata-East released an album called A Message From Mozambique, recorded in San Francisco by a band called Juju and led by James “Plunky” Branch.

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James Branch was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He was educated in the city’s segregated schools and attended Columbia University in New York City before joining the Army. When he left the service, he landed in San Francisco, California, and struck out for the Fillmore district, once known as the Harlem of the West.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Fillmore district was a swinging, eclectic, and integrated neighborhood with streets full of restaurants, pool halls, theaters, and many minority-owned stores. It had no less than two dozen active nightclubs and music joints within its one square mile. However, in 1971, when James Branch got there, it had lost some of that polish. The 1949 Federal Housing Act set aside federal money to rebuild the nation’s cities and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency was formed. As part of this urban renewal, the first house in Fillmore was demolished in 1953. By the late 1950s, 4000 residents had been relocated. In 1963, a second redevelopment plan was announced, affecting more than 13,000 Fillmore residents.

According to San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown:

You look at the results and it does appear to be “Black Removal,” but I think the motivation was pure commercial greed. But it was devastating to the Black community. The churches began to lose population. The black businesses, which had been viable, wonderful, and productive, were totally destroyed. The entertainment world for African Americans virtually ceased to exist in San Francisco. The great life that was Harlem-ish for us was destroyed by the redevelopment process.

So in 1971, the community Branch walked into was still a vibrant Black community; however, it was now focused less on music and more on the anti-Vietnam war and black nationalist movements.

Branch soon met South African musician Ndikho Xaba, who became his musical mentor. He joined Xaba’s band Ndikho Xaba and the Natives. The band recorded one DIY album in 1971, self-released in 100 copies on the obscure Trilyte record label, a sub-label of the short-lived Oliver Record Company in Oakland:

This album helped connect the music of Africa with American Jazz and drew a line between the Black Power movement in the US and the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa.

While performing with Xaba’s band, Branch changed his name to Plunky Nkadinde. He and two other members of Xaba’s band, Lon Moshe (Ron Martin) and Ken Shabala (Kent Parker) were recruited to play for stage productions of Marvin X’s Resurrection Of The Dead, part of the Black Educational Theatre in Oakland, an extension of the Black Arts West Theatre.

The Black Arts West Theatre was founded in 1966 by Ed Bullins and Marvin X on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. In 1967, Marvin X, Eldridge Cleaver, Ed Bullins, and Ethna Wyatt, organized the Black House political/cultural center on Broderick Street, San Francisco. Black House later became the headquarters of the Black Panther Party. After he was released from prison in 1971, Marvin X organized the Black Educational Theater in Fresno, California, which later moved to the Fillmore district in San Francisco on O’Farrell between Fillmore and Webster.

The incorporation of jazz musicians in these productions brought new energy to the stage and helped them break free of the dominant Western theatrical form and transform it into an African and Eastern tradition of myth-ritual artistic expression.

During the plays, the musicians would appear on stage or enter from the rear to accent or expand on the script. To help promote their productions and concerts, they played on the street in front of Black Arts West Theatre on Fillmore Street, across the street from Trees Pool Hall. Fillmore was bumper-to-bumper with cars, and the musicians played along with the car horns and other street sounds. In this way, art and reality became one. In particular, they were influenced by Sun Ra, who was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley.

Marvin X and Sun Ra, Black Educational Theatre, 1972

Sun Ra took them deeper with his demand for discipline as opposed to freedom. In 2011 Marvin X wrote about this influence:

Dewey Redman and bassist Donald Garrett were probably the most free in teaching us what would become known as Ritual Theatre, that smashing of the wall between stage and audience, merging them into the oneness so well known in the Christian ritual. The difference between the church ritual and the Black Arts ritual was that we came to smash tradition, not enforce it. Of course, we must know tradition before we can smash it. So Dewey, Donald, and the rest taught us tradition then how to transcend it.

They forced us to abandon our concept of European theatre, dragging us, sometimes screaming and hollering, back and forward to our African dramatic tradition, freeing us once and forever.

Of course, the ultimate transformer of our dramatic consciousness was Sun Ra, the Grand Master of African theatre. Sun Ra taught the necessity of African mythology as the basis of ritual expression, and with his Arkestra demonstrated the unity of music, dance, poetry, and mixed media.

While playing at the Black Educational Theatre, Nkabinde, Moshe, and Shabala were joined by pianist Al Hammel Rasul and percussionists Babatunde and Jalango Ngoma. This is the sextet that became the founding members of the band Juju.

In 1972, Juju recorded A Message From Mozambique in San Francisco, which was released by Strata-East in New York:

The idea of “Juju” reflects Archie Shepp’s The Magic of Juju. The face paint reflects the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The cover layout - the thick black border of A Message From Mozambique - showed allegiance to Black Jazz Records. This was important in that a lot of what they were doing was to make a connection with the people who were influencing them.

The album caught the attention of D.C.-based Black American DJ, promoter, and distributor Jimmy Gray. He thought the cover encapsulated the idea of black fire, with the painted faces. To him, it looked like war paint and that they were at battle for the future.

In 1973, Jimmy Gray started Black Fire magazine, which lasted for three issues:

Black Fire was founded in collaboration with Strata-East Records and featured lists of records released by Black-owned independent labels including Strata-East out of New York, Tribe out of St. Louis (read about Tribe here), and Black Jazz out of Oakland (read about Black Jazz here and here), among others. Notably, every label featured in the magazine presented their address for contact, to facilitate connections within the community.

As you can see, the first issue used the image from the Juju’s album:

Plunky was furious and called up their label Strata-East demanding legal action. They responded that they had nothing to do with it. They told him it was Jimmy Gray, a guy down in D.C. who was promoting their music, and they had only given Gray permission to distribute his record. They suggested that he work it out with him. So Plunky contacted Gray and instead of suing him, they became friends and even helped Gray expand his business by working with him to create in 1975 Black Fire Records.

Jimmy Gray in his studio

When Plunky Nkabinde returned to Richmond, Virginia, he formed the Oneness of Juju. The band’s first album African Rhythms was released in 1975 and was the perfect fusion of jazz, deep African polyrhythms, and empowering lyrics. The Black Fire label documented the aesthetic of Washington D.C. during the 1970s and 1980s, during the time I was in Georgetown and ran into Gil Scott-Heron.

In fact, it was Gray’s experience with Strata-East and the release of Scott-Heron’s Winter in America that inspired them to create their own label. The way Strata-East worked was that each artist produced their own manufacturing for the first 1000 to 2000 copies of an album. If those sold out, the label would take over and replenish the supply. They didn’t want to relinquish any control of their music, so they started Black Fire and released the Oneness of Juju’s first album, African Rhythms.

Now let’s listen to some of their music. There are so many songs to choose from in the Black Fire catalog, I think it’s best to just play them all when you have the time. But I want to pick out a few of my favorites.

The Oneness of Juju’s second album was Space Jungle Luv, released in 1976. From that album, here is Mashariki:

I find that the next song from Experience Unlimited’s 1977 album Free Yourself owes a lot to Gil Scott-Heron’s sound on songs like Pieces of a Man and Save the Children. Here is the wonderful People:

Finally, here’s one more for the road. From The Oneness of Juju’s 1980 Make A Change, here is the funky Love’s Wonderland:

Plunky Branch is still active today. Black Fire - The Documentary was released in 2022 and is making the rounds at film festivals, so be on the lookout for it. Let’s keep the fire burning!

Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of Miles Davis’ Jack Johnson.

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Until then, keep on walking….