Milford Graves
The Full Mantis....
I’m going right to the praying mantis. That’s the boss, not some human.
-Milford Graves
Vibration, cycles, wavelets, and pulsations seem to be the substrate of our experience of reality…. The transformational aspect of art-making is what interests me, the way a creative engagement with your sensory experience can lead you toward previously uncharted ways of thinking and being.
-Milford Graves
I don't want to go down to the basement
There's somethin' down there
-Johnny Ramone
There’s something about basements….
When I started tap dancing in elementary school, the studio was just up the street next to the Red Owl. I could walk there. I carried my tap shoes in a brown paper bag. The following year, the studio moved to downtown White Bear Lake, in the basement of The First National Bank of White Bear:
You entered the building from the back and went down a long stairway, where the dank basement was magically transformed into a dance studio. There was something about going down into the bowels of this historic stone building to tap dance - it was like going into a bunker. Shut off from everything, I could focus. Dance class became, in some regards, a ritual. I was there to practice my art. I was inspired by Fred Astaire, for sure, but I was also inspired by Bruce Lee.
Lee’s Enter the Dragon opened in August 1973, one month after Lee's death.
The following year, when it found its way to Minnesota, I must have gone to see that movie five times. Incidentally, I also remember liking the film’s score, which was composed by Argentinian musician and composer Lalo Schifrin.
In his own way, Bruce Lee had the same style that Fred Astaire had. Lee’s fight sequences were like elaborate dance sequences. During those first few years, in the basement of the bank, dancing became a form of artistic martial arts for me - a melding of Fred Astaire and Bruce Lee.
Perhaps for this reason, what fascinates me the most about Milford Graves, even more than his music catalog, was his association with martial arts and Japanese dancer Min Tanaka.
Milford Graves and I share the same birthday: August 20th. He was born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, twenty-one years before I was born in Sacramento, California.
He grew up in the South Jamaica Houses, also called the 40 Projects, later the home of rappers 50 Cent and Nicki Minaj.
He traveled hours a day on the subway to Boys High in Brooklyn so he could run on the famous Boys’ track team. He recalls, “Running for Boys, that was the top. I loved that stripe on their pants and the way they passed the baton with the left hand, everyone else did with the right….” Here’s a photo I found on a Facebook forum for members of the Boys High School Track Team in Brooklyn:
However, he “grew up” on the streets of Jamaica. In an interview with America bassist Melvin Gibbs, Graves recalled:
I came out right them streets, out of PAL (Police Athletic League) boxing…. I was 112-pound champion in the PAL. Champion Headquarters Gym…. I was sixteen years old, man. I was with the 103rd precinct. Ham Willoughby was our trainer. I trained with guys like John James, who became All-Army Champion. George Foster, who became Army champion, these are all my buddies around here (South Jamaica), man. I was in the ring with all these dudes. And after that, I was hangin’ with the baddest dudes…them gang leaders, man…. So, I was rugged.
During the 1960s out of this environment, Graves created his own martial art called Yara. In a 2018 interview with saxophonist Aakash Mittal, we shared, “Well, the kind of martial arts that I wanted to develop was based on my experience as a teenager and in my early stages of growing up in the area here, South Jamaica, and then moving into the housing projects when I was eight or nine-years-old.”
The idea of Yara started when he wanted to learn the Chinese praying mantis style, whose founders claim to have created their style after witnessing a praying mantis fight and defeat a bird. When he went down to Chinatown, he was told the instructor didn’t teach certain techniques to non-Chinese people. “So I went to the best teacher; I went to the praying mantis himself. And that was better than any human could teach me, because if you go through another human, he may have a limitation. Maybe he can’t move a certain way? If he can’t move a certain way, then that means I’m not going to get full mantis. I’m going to get only a little bit of the mantis.”
By the late 1960s, Graves identified Yara as “The Black way of self protection.” Here’s a poster from a Sight and Sound event in New York City in 1969:
Yara was Graves’ improvised martial art that focuses on flexibility and dexterity, to create a system “where people truly become their so-called warrior within.” From 1971 to 2000, he taught Yara in a studio in the basement of his three-story house at the corner of 156th and 110th Avenue in Queens.
However, it wasn’t until I thought about Graves’ Yara and his innovative music in the context of his association with dancer Min Tanaka that things started to click for me. As a dancer, this made sense to me and made me think deeper about the idea of performing.
In a 2022 conversation with Artist Space’s Jay Sanders, Min Tanaka got down to what I think is the essence of Milford Graves when he states, “The drums - not the instrument, but the drumming itself - hearing the sound of him playing drums and having the sound of the drums enter my body, I knew that spending serious time with this person would better me for years to come, benefit me greatly.” It was never about the drums. It was always about the energy and the vibrations and their effect on the body.
In 1977, Graves was invited to Japan by jazz writer and promoter Akira Aida to perform at the Seibu Theater, the predecessor of today’s PARCO theatre in Tokyo. This is when Graves met Min Tanaka. After the show, he overheard in an interview that Graves was going to Hachioji for a performance with saxophonist Kaoru Abe. Since Tanaka was from Hachioji and offered to escort them there. This was the beginning of an important relationship and Tanaka would go on to become one of Milford Graves’ most cherished and longstanding collaborators.
Born in Tokyo in 1945, Min Tanaka is a pioneer in the world of dance and well-known in Japan as an avant-garde solo dancer. He trained in classical ballet and modern dance but decided to break with these forms to explore a solo career in the early 1970s. Though deeply influenced by butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata, instead of becoming his student, in the same way, that Graves created Yara, Tanaka chose to search for his own way of dancing and specialized in performing with the environment. He says, “We do not dance in a place, we dance the place, affected by the spirit of the very place.”
To that end, in the early 1970s, he began developing Body Weather. He recalls, “In the 1970’s I was struck with an idea to connect body and weather. This allowed me to make a major leap in terms of my imagination and creative activities.” In 1978 he created the Body Weather Laboratory in Hachioji.
In 1985, Tanaka moved to Hakushu outside of Tokyo and established Body Weather Farm where he engaged in dance and farming. In this setting, the bodies were trained by farming life, communal living, and dance laboratories. In his words, now “Body Weather and farming became reality in words as well as in terms of the way we live. Body, weather, and farm—these are primordial terms.”
In 1978, Tanaka made his international dance debut by participating in “Time-Space of Japan—MA, ” during the Le Festival d'Automne à Paris:
Based in Paris at the time of the festival, Japanese photographer Keiichi Tahara followed Tanaka while he was there. They began to collaboratively study the relationship between light and the body, resulting in some amazing pictures, like this one in the streets of Paris:
Tahara’s pictures and experiments with light soon established him as an internationally recognized photographer and, at the same time, helped Tanaka gain recognition in the avant-garde community as the dancer who used “the naked body as costume.”
Before returning to Japan after his 1978 Paris debut, Tanaka went to New York City to dance at the Clocktower Gallery. Graves went to see him. After the show, they got together and rekindle their relationship and discussed a duo performance opportunity. The following year they performed together for the first time in Bennington, Vermont, where Graves was teaching with Bill Dixon in the Bennington College’s Black Music Division.
Graves and Tanaka continued their collaborative study for many years, and in 1998 Graves was back in Japan performing with him. Here they are on the “Mountain Stage” in Hankushu, Japan:
After a recent performance in Paris, Tanaka conversed with the audience. A woman remarks, “Inside, a lot of people are dancing with you.” Tanaka responds, “Yes, and that in itself is dance, I think. My ideal is that dance happens in the space between me and the people watching.” I think this exchange strikes at the heart of the collaborative work between Tanaka and Graves - it was never about the drums or the dance, it was about the space between the drums and the dance. They both discarded existing traditions within their art and explored the possibility of organically-driven experiences to change the human condition.
Here’s one more for the road. In 1981, Graves and Tanka performed at a school for autistic children in Japan, that ignited the student body into an ecstatic display of spontaneous collective energy. In his own words, in 2022 Tanaka recalls the experience:
When we did a performance in front of a group of autistic children, they started to look at us while lying down. And then some of them turned their faces towards us. Eventually, they got up and came up to me and hitting me. Some other kids came over close to Milford’s drums, and jumped up and down. I felt this was a great thing. The teachers struggled, as they wanted to get the kids back to a healthy condition. The drums and the dancing had broken up their daily routine, which Milford and I were very happy about…. I believe that drum and dance are a very fundamental act, but it is not so much that they are “by Milford and Min Tanaka,” it is more that the drumming and dancing were destined to exist very closely with each other. I think it is one of the most important acts of expression of humanity.
To me, this is what Milford Graves was all about. Here’s a photo from that day, with Tanaka in white dancing with a child in front of Graves's drum set:
That stunning performance can be seen in Milford Graves Full Mantis, a 2018 documentary by Kake Meginsky and Neil Young.
Milford Graves was a warrior. With only a high school diploma and minimal formal medical training, he taught music healing and drumming classes at Bennington College in Vermont for nearly 40 years before retiring in 2012. Although I may not understand the many worlds of Milford Graves, I respect that he did not compromise. He followed his heart and it still beats now for all of us.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll portage our canoes and take a walk in the fields of Composer and sound artist Pierre Mariétan.
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Until then, keep on walking….
I saw Milford Graves once in the late 70s in NYC. After his performance, I asked my friend (a jazz writer) “is this guy a dancer, a drummer, or a performance artist?” My friend answered “Yes.”