By Craig Bailey, Perspective Photos - Martha Redbone in performance at Hopestock: Music to bail out your soul, a 2009 concert series.

Redbone is an independent artist who is as likely to include a powwow drum as she is jazz riffs in her highly danceable music. Her second album, “Skintalk,” is a sophisticated blend that is powered not by electronics but by a funk-rock band of veteran musicians. Released in 2005, she has toured behind it for five years—pausing only to have a son in 2008—bringing her songs to the indie-music scene in New York City and to festivals on reservations and across the U.S.

“Because we released it independently, it gave people more chance to discover it,” she said. “It is like a new album in each new community that we visited.”

In 2011, a new album, continuing in the danceable soul style of “Skintalk” and recorded with all live instruments, is planned for release.

“Martha has two sides to her, on her father’s side a lot of R&B and soul,” said her husband Aaron Whitby. “We are trying to put that together with some relevant messages and ethical messages, and with her mother’s heritage.”

Redbone, who grew up in Brooklyn and calls herself a mixed blood, Cherokee, Shawnee and Choctaw on her mother’s side, and African American on her father’s. She was in art school, drawing cartoons for George Clinton & the P-Funk All Stars’ Mothership Reconnection project, when she was coaxed in front of a microphone and, as she says, “fell into singing.” She went on to sing background vocals on Clinton’s 1996 album, “T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership).”

Her British-born husband has been her friend and her producing and song-writing partner since they were in their early 20s. That was when the music industry first took notice of their talent.

As a young artist rooted in Otis Redding, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the stomp dance songs of her mother’s tribes, Redbone already had this vision for blending musical traditions. Whitby, a jazz pianist who toured Europe in jazz bands, brought the third ingredient into their musical gumbo. The sheer talent she and Whitby displayed on a demo drew the attention of the recording industry.

“I’ll tell you what happened, we had a really powerful manager at the time,” she said.  “He didn’t like the fact that I wanted to include my culture into my music. He didn’t understand. ‘You sing soul music, you sing R&B,’ he said. ‘No one cares about that kind of thing.’”

Whitby says he was probably the biggest manager in America then, but things ground to a halt.

“When he said, ‘Drop the Indian (influences)’ we decided to go on our own. We said, ‘We’ve already written our record and we write for other people too,’” Whitby said. “We have the right talent, but I don’t think we were the right personalities for that world.”

As songwriters and studio musicians they joined Warner/Chappell Music, writing songs including chart topper “Don’t Push” in both Canada and France sung by Jazmin and “Love is the Deepest Hurt” recorded by British Grammy winner Shola Ama. They turned down a year-and-a-half long tour with the band Simply Red, choosing to continue on as artists and writer/producers.

In 2000, Redbone released the solo album, “Home of the Brave” on Blackfeet Productions, a record label which she and Whitby co-founded. The album won her the Best Debut Artist award at the Native American Music Awards and Indian Summer Music Award for Best Pop Album. Backed by a tight funk and pop band of veteran New York musicians, Redbone’s powerful Native-infused soul delivery and social commentary won her accolades in the indie music world. The Village Voice called her an “heiress to such luminaries as Sly, Philippe Wynne and Roberta Flack.” Billboard’s Larry Flick wrote that, “She sounds the kind of artist who sets trends, a true original.”

“It’s really important that there are people like me representing and telling our stories to the world,” Redbone said, “regardless of MTV. Not that I would turn my nose up to a No. 1 or Top 10 song, but not at any cost. I am not prepared to put a headdress on and dance.”

“Sharing the Dream: A Multicultural Celebration of Love & Justice” will be held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on Jan. 15 and 16. It is a celebration of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The festival is an event of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Latino Center and National Museum of the American Indian. Martha Redbone is one of the many artists invited because of their expressions of love and justice through their music, spoken-word and storytelling performances.

Redbone’s heritage guides her life.

When after a performance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival she met Brenda Dardar-Robichaux, then the principle chief of the United Houma Nation, and heard about the tribe’s efforts to share culture with their youth. Redbone offered to help, and for the last four summers she has traveled to this bayou nation where she shares songs that are culturally relevant to Houma’s six to 12-year-olds. Some songs are Choctaw, some in Houma French, and others are just beautiful when sung with a hand drum, Robichaux said.

“She is so gifted and talented, and she uses her gift not for self promotion, but to give to others,” Robichaux said. “It is evident in her coming to Louisiana and teaching our kids, she is not about promoting Martha Redbone. When she comes to camp she is out there, whether it’s serving food or cleaning up. It is not uncommon for me to receive phone calls from her. She is constantly brainstorming how she can help not only the Houma but youth across Indian Country.”

Redbone remembers where her name came from; it was a derogatory word from her youth for someone of mixed black and Native ancestry. As an adult, she embraced being mixed race, interpreting her father’s love of soul music and her mother’s Native heritage into who she is.

The “Skintalk” album’s “Children of Love” starts with a powwow drum led by Dennis Banks, Ojibwe, and a rap by Gyasi Ross, Blackfeet, that dissolves into a mid-tempo groove, but runs underneath and rises to the surface between verses. The purpose, she said, was to draw people into Native culture and music. The effect was provocative, even political. The song became a soul hit in Europe and England, where, she said, “they don’t even know that Indian people are still here.” Most people liked the powwow drum, but some didn’t. Still Whitby and Redbone stand by their vision of blending musical traditions.

Redbone’s hybridization of soul, R&B and Native music is in the tradition of contemporary artists like Keith Secola and Bill Miller, and it is a vision shared by Whitby.  He likes to quote legendary producer Quincy Jones, who said there are only 12 notes in a scale, or only so far that each style of music can go before it runs out of fresh material.  “The only way forward,” Whitby said, “is to make new hybridizations.”

“I think the Native American perspective is different,” Whitby said, “more interesting. As another way of putting it, it is real folk music, made for the people by the people without the help of corporations. It is really from the community, and that gives it some real legs.”

Still in Redbone’s hands it is also pop music in the best sense of that expression. Redbone credits the work ethic that has kept her and Whitby creating for 17 years, and making choices that were anti-intuitive. It’s work that she plans to expand with more albums, with more styles of music, more types of writing.

“You can turn on the television and see people who want to be famous for nothing,” she said. “People do something ridiculous and then they are on Oprah and writing a book about it. I look at it that this way, how is this going to look 20 years from now. I live my life that way.”

—-

By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

Download this article as a Word document.

By Linda Martin of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian - Guitarist and singer Derek Miller, who is Mohawk, performs on Canada Day, July 1, at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. He also performed last month at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian as part of the 5th annual Indian Summer Showcase.

At 35, and soon to release his third album, “Derek Miller with Double Trouble,” Miller’s rock roots trace back to a fellow Native guitarist—Link Wray, the Rockabilly Hall of Famer credited with inventing the power chord central to rock, heavy metal, pop and blues music. The Shawnee musician’s distorted electric guitar keyed hits like 1958’s “Rumble.”

For Miller, who once felt like a misfit kid playing roots rock in the era of rap, Wray became “my beacon of light.”

“I found a kinship with Link Wray,” Miller says. “There was so much intensity, passion and furiousness.”

Miller used to say his singing voice was made of “lots of whiskey and cigarettes.” Since completing rehab three years ago for alcoholism and drug addiction, Miller now says the music he makes with his voice and guitar emerges from the experience of growing up Mohawk on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, and later making his way in Toronto’s thriving aboriginal music scene.

“I have never backed away from being a Native artist, but for me it is now about crashing through this glass ceiling of being a Native artist,” he said.

Miller started performing at age 13. In the late 1990s, he toured with Buffy Sainte-Marie. In 1999, he co-produced Keith Secola and the Wild Band of Indians’ “Fingermonkey.” Two years later, Miller released “Music is the Medicine,” which earned the Juno Award for Aboriginal Recording of the Year. With a pause for rehab and recovery, which Miller notes in his iTunes bio, in 2007 he released the album, “The Dirty Looks.” On it, Miller uses “compressed, modern sounds on otherwise standard blues songs like “Devil Come Down Sunday,” said Chris Turner, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Last month, Miller performed at the museum, covering songs made popular by some of the Native artists represented in the current exhibition, “Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in Popular Culture.” These included Peter La Farge’s “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” which Miller made his own.

“Derek always reminded me of Jimi Hendrix, a Mohawk Jimi Hendrix,” Turner said. “But take a song like “End of the World,” where he fools you, laying down a nice, subdued setting—almost sacred. Then out of nowhere comes this little wah-wah guitar warning before he punches you in the gut with a Link-style power chord.”

The new album’s first single, “Damned if You Do,” is a duet with Willie Nelson, who had not heard of Miller before. But while recording at Nelson’s Pedernales Recording Studio near Austin, Texas, Miller and the band talked a gardener into slipping Miller’s disc to the singer. After a listen, Nelson agreed to record the duet.

The song could be either man’s personal tale of drinking whiskey all night and wondering if morning will come. The new project somewhat inadvertently turned out to be a concept album, Miller says, telling the story of a man falling in love with a woman, and the terrible violence in the wake of love falling apart.

“At the end of the story you think the man is going to make a choice of killing her and her lover,” Miller said. “It’s dark, with songs leading up to that, and you don’t know whether it’s murder-suicide or just murder in the end.”

To Miller, “it’s Americana, or it’s Native Americana, really.”

For his new album, Miller is sporting his black hair cut short and slicked back, like his hero Wray in the 1950s. Miller never met Wray, who died in 2005 at 76. But he talks about starring in a Wray biopic.

Whether a movie ever gets produced, Miller is the latest in a long line of musicians to take inspiration from Wray. Like The Kinks, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young—many of whom are lobbying for Wray to be put in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—Miller aims to ride his inspiration to the sky.

“When I think of Link Wray, I am an eagle and I let the wind blow me where it may,” Miller says. “That is the freedom that encompasses Native America.  It encompasses what America was trying to do when it borrowed our constitution, our freedom of creativity. It is the freedom of inspiration to let your mind travel like an eagle.”

—

By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

Download this article as a Word document.

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.

—-

By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

Download this article as a Word document

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.”

Download this article as a Word document.

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

Download this article as a Word document.

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.”