Photo by Michelle Watt Sharel Cassity plays the alto saxophone in front of a mural of jazz greats. The Cherokee musician recently performed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“I believe that jazz comes from the powwow drum,” said Cassity, who lives in New York. “There are elements from Africa. The harmonic consistency comes from Europe. But you don’t get that thump, that boom, boom, boom in the bass and drums without the powwow.”

Jade Synstelien, the first bandleader to hire Cassity, says she brings a Native sensibility to all her work, including her new CD, “Relentless.”

Cassity performed with the Tony Lujan Septet at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian last spring. The concert introduced Cassity to bebop pioneer Oscar Pettiford, who was Choctaw and Cherokee. The concert also paid tribute to Pettiford’s friend Dizzy Gillespie.

Pettiford, who led a New York band with Gillespie as bebop was emerging in 1943, redefined the importance of the bass to jazz. He told the magazine Jazz Times that jazz was attempting to render American Indian rhythm.

Cassity’s family is musical on her Cherokee father’s side. Her father is a music therapist, her grandfather a harmonica player and her aunt a concert pianist. She recalls being “surrounded by music” during the time she spent with her father. “But I lived with my mom, who worked at a federal prison,” said Cassity, who spent much of her adolescence in the Oklahoma City area. “I would close myself in my room and practice all the time.”

Those long hours won her scholarships, ultimately to the Juilliard Institute of Jazz Studies, where she earned a master’s degree. Synstelien remembers meeting Cassity nine years ago at Smalls Jazz Club in New York City.

“She would be in the very back room by herself, practicing long notes, long tones on the saxophone, while she was putting herself through music school,” Synstelien said. “She has a work ethic greater than any musician I have ever met and she is growing into a better musician moment by moment.”

Synstelien recruited her to play in his Fat Cats Big Band. Since then, Cassity has become a member of a handful of bands of regional and national repute. Two years ago, Sherrie Maricle asked Cassity to join the Diva Jazz Orchestra, and last year the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band also added her to its lineup.

Maricle’s website describes Cassity as being able to draw “upon the polish and discipline of her conservatory training to augment what Jazziz Magazine called her ‘beautiful, highly-personal tone… this altoist’s flights are positively Bird-like.’”

As a student and later a professional musician in New York’s jazz scene, Cassity is often the only American Indian in the room. Yet she longs for the connectedness she recently felt when she met a Navajo trombone player, or learned about Pettiford’s Choctaw and Cherokee roots.

Synstelien says Cassity brings her own uniqueness to the international language of jazz, but also her talent, which allows her to play with the big cats. She can play “the fat sound of Cannonball Adderley,” he said. “She can play any style of jazz.”

“All the things people love from all time, from different jazz records,” Synstelien said. “She can do it right, with all the required soul and passion.”

Visit Cassity’s website at www.sharelcassity.com.

Hear Cassity lead her own band on alto saxophone at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL9zehYBITc&feature=related.

Hear Cassity on soprano saxophone with the Diva Jazz Orchestra at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mtq7ytBrcc.

Listen to Pettiford at www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Ji8VAceLk&feature=related.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Kim Cournoyer North Dakota’s Standing Rock High School Band performs on the back of a flatbed truck.

An urban Indian, Cournoyer was raised in the Chicago suburbs, far from the rural reservation of her forbears, which straddles the border of North and South Dakota. But the University of South Dakota-trained clarinetist had a dream of starting an all-Indian high school band.

“I believe the students need to embrace their culture, kind of like I did,” said Cournoyer, 45, who is Standing Rock Sioux, like most of her students.

American Indian marching bands emerged in the boarding-school era, when students were trained in European musical instruments and patriotic marches. From the 1930s through the 1950s, dozens of Indian nations had their own marching bands made up of musicians trained in boarding schools. A few of these bands survive, such as the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe Band of Arizona and Nevada, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2006.

But today all-Indian high school bands are rare, said Georgia Wettlin-Larsen, director of the First Nations Composer Initiative. Musical education, beyond culturally-based drumming and singing, is almost nonexistent in tribal schools, she said. That makes Cournoyer’s program both distinctive and important.

The high cost of music instruction is a common barrier, but the Standing Rock Sioux community, where unemployment hovers around 70 percent, does not let that stand in the band’s way. The school district buys all the instruments, although the band lacks marching harnesses, equipment to support massive instruments such as tubas.

“We don’t have tubas, so I substitute with bass lines,” Cournoyer explained. “What we do is get a flatbed truck, we put a generator on there, we plug in the electric bass, and we play.”

In the 10 years since the band started—with 14 kids—nearly 100 percent of the band members have graduated. Some of them have used the discipline gained from learning to play music to go to two- or four-year colleges.

This year the band began a collaboration with Courtney Yellow Fat, the lead singer of Grammy-nominated powwow drum group Lakota Thunder and a culture and language teacher at Standing Rock Middle School.

Cournoyer worked with Yellow Fat to as she wrote sheet music for an ancient Lakota song so her student band could play it. The song, “The Land You Fear,” which originated before Columbus landed in the Americas, had not been written down before, like much indigenous music.

“That song was meant for a warrior to go off to war and not have any fear,” Yellow Fat said. “In contemporary times, we put out a warrior who must be a well-rounded person, who must be a warrior for the people.”

The New York debut of the song came at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, with Cournoyer playing the cedar flute, Yellow Fat singing and the band playing.

It is the band teacher’s prayer that her students, as the ancient song says, will learn to walk with victory, instead of fear: “I want them to know that this world is bigger than they think it is, and that they are capable of so much more than they think they are.”

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Photo by Graham F. Page, courtesy Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. Jimi Hendrix, the Royal Albert Hall, London, Feb. 18, 1969.

Hendrix—who not only identified himself as Cherokee but also performed at Woodstock in buckskin, and elsewhere wearing a hand-beaded jacket—is featured in an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian called “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.”

Ron Welburn, a Native poet and English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who contributed a chapter to the book accompanying the exhibition, explains that the roots of the blues lie deep in Native America. It was the blues guitar that Hendrix taught himself as a young man.

The blues were born at a unique moment in history when the slave trade and colonization of the American South forced people and their musical traditions together, he said. The blues came to life on the Tuscarora Indian trails that the Underground Railroad followed across the Niagara River to the Six Nations and freedom, said Elaine Bomberry, host of “Rez Bluez,” a show on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada.

The blues peculate up from the soil of the experience of stolen peoples and stolen lands.

“There are things (in blues music) that say to me that someone knows something about stomp dancing,” said Welburn, who is Gingaskin and Assateague, Cherokee and African American. “It’s the call-and-response phrasing, and the length of the statement, which may be longer than the response.”

The chika-ching syncopation, pioneered in jazz by innovative Mohawk and African drummer Jesse Price, sounds much like the bells or deer hooves that Native dancers wear. As Oscar Pettiford, the Cherokee, Choctaw and African-American bandleader, told  Jazz Times in 1960, it’s jazz attempting over and over to render an American Indian beat.

Or as Carlos Santana said in 1995 to “UniVibes,” a Hendrix fanzine, “Most music comes from Indian reservations,” from cultural and spiritual practices interpreted by “just two people—Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, you know.”

Late in his life, Hendrix drew on these Native roots for help.

Hendrix traveled to the Tuscarora reservation in New York to seek a cure for sleeping problems with medicine man Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson, said nephew Wray Anderson. The elder Anderson agreed to help Hendrix obtain a cure, but told the musician he would have to give up his prescription drugs. Hendrix set a time to return after the Isle of Wight Festival in England in 1970. He died before he could.

As the exhibition’s text muses, “Out of the struggles and triumphs, African-Native American people have created cultural innovations by bringing together sensibilities from two ancient and beloved continents. By ‘eating out of the same pot,’ delicious cultural fusions arise, such as gumbo and the blues.”

View the exhibition online at www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/indivisible/ or buy the book at www.nmai.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=shop&second=books&third=IndiVisible.

Hendrix at Woodstock

By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian. Murray Porter, Mohawk, leads the Rez Bluez All-Starz in concert at the museum. In his signature tune “Colours,” Porter sings, “He’s a red man, singing the black man’s blues, living in a white man’s world.”

But Elaine Bomberry, host of “Rez Bluez,” a show on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada, explained to an audience at the National Museum of the American Indian that the roots of this American form of music also extend deep into Native American musical traditions.

“The whole heartbeat of the blues is very much like our drum,” Bomberry said, during a discussion called “The Blues: Roots, Branches and Beyond.”

Ron Welburn, a Native poet and scholar of jazz, said that he can hear the influences of music from many Native nations on early blues recordings.

“There are things that say to me that someone knows something about stomp dancing, a part of Southeastern Native American music from before European contact,” he said. “It’s the call-and-response phrasing, and the length of the statement, which may be longer than the response.”

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian Corey Harris, performing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, is a student of anthropology and linguistics, and MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient. Harris, who is Cherokee, Creek and Chickasaw, said, “Africans being taken in by Native American communities was always spoken of in our families….You couldn’t see it in a book, but it was passed down through families.”

The Aug. 22 conversation was followed by a concert in the museum’s Indian Summer Showcase series. Performances featured blues artists George Leach of the Sta’atl’imx Nation in British Columbia; the Rez Bluez All-Starz with Murray Porter, Mohawk, and Beaver Thomas, who is Cowesseness First Nation; plus special guests Corey Harris, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

The blues were birthed in a unique moment of history when the slave trade and colonization of the American South forced people and their musical traditions to come together, explained Welburn, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American IndianGeorge Leach, Sta’atl’imx, won Best Male Artist of the Year and Best Rock Album at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards in 2000 for his debut album, “Just Where I’m At.” Denis Rondeau plays bass behind Leach at a National Museum of the American Indian’s Summer Showcase concert.

Plantations brought together Irish indentured servants, African slaves and also Native slaves. “All lived together, all procreated together,” said Justin Robinson of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Later escaped slaves found refuge in Native communities from the South and, in time, up the Underground Railroad to the Six Nations in Canada.

“The Underground Railroad was Tuscarora Indian trails to the Niagara River and across. Tuscaroras would bring the escaped slaves across to Six Nations, where I’m from,” Bomberry said. Watch a clip from Bomberry’stelevision show at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpi_vQOb4w.

When the blues began to be recorded in the early 20th century, many artists self-identified as Native American. Welburn said Charley Patton, who is called the father of Mississippi Delta blues, was Choctaw. Scrapper Blackwell was Eastern Band Cherokee. Listen to Blackwell atwww.youtube.com/watch?v=yjZO44o0E8A.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian The Carolina Chocolate Drops—Dom Flemons on four-string banjo, guitar, jug, harmonica, kazoo, snare drum, and bones; and Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson on fiddle and five-string banjo—strive to carry on the traditional music of the communities of the Carolina Piedmont.

But ancestry isn’t as important to musicologists as what can be documented in the music, said Welburn, who is Gingaskin/Assateague, Cherokee and African American.

“They want to know what a person picked up from another musical source, like four beats to the measure,” he said. “Powwow drumming is four beats to a measure.”

Welburn counts: boom, boom, boom, boom. He hears this beat in the earliest blues recordings, though later it would be expanded upon.

“‘Chika, ching, chika, ching, chika, ching’ was started by a drummer—a Mohawk and African American guy, Jesse Price,” he said. Price lived in Kansas City and toured with the likes of Count Basie on a circuit that included Oklahoma. His peers said they believe his drumming style came from Native music.

“Because of that location you can associate certain dances,” Welburn said. “In round dancing, there is a ‘chika, ching’ syncopation. Even guys who have bells or deer toes on garters make a similar sound walking around.”

The blues’ call-and-response song structure, which has been attributed to African-American folk music, may also have older roots in Native American music. “It’s not a matter of someone trying to take credit,” Welburn said. “It’s about finding the roots.”

Blues and jazz artists have made similar observations.

Oscar Pettiford, the late Cherokee, Choctaw and African-American bandleader, gave an interview in 1960 to the magazine Jazz Times, in which he stated that jazz attempts to render an American Indian beat.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian Blues singer and bass player Shakti Hayes, Plains Cree, of the Rez Bluez All-Starz performs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian with guitarist Beaver Thomas, Plains Cree from the Cowessess First Nation. Thomas has opened for country star Dwight Yoakam.

In the 1970s, Welburn remembers Lewis McMillan, a drummer with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra who was mixed-race Cherokee, telling him, “Ronny, don’t ever let anyone tell you that our people didn’t have anything to do with jazz.”

Recently, singer and percussionist Cyril Neville, the youngest of the famed New Orleans’ group the Neville Brothers, told Bomberry, “Sister, we both own the blues.”

Murray Porter, who first heard B.B. King as a teenager at the Six Nations in Ontario while listening late into the night to radio from Chicago, said the genre has always been about cross-pollination.

“It’s not an African thing; it’s not a Native thing,’’ he said. Later, in concert before more than 1,000 people at the museum, he improvised a sort of musical invocation, singing, “Everybody get together. Everybody get together. Everybody get together and let the good times roll.”