Musical Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers by William C. Banfield

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'Musical Landscapes in Color' by William C. Banfield

Bach, Ellington and Bird—that’s J.S. Bach, Duke and Charlie Parker. Composer Dwight Andrews hears commonalities between them in one of many insights collected in Musical Landscapes in Color. The book’s new edition is comprised of interviews with more than 40 African American composers who emerged in the late 20th century, representing symphony, opera, film scores, music education and jazz.

Andrews is best known as playwright August Wilson’s right hand, writing music for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Seven Guitars. On Bach, Ellington and Parker, what we hear, he said, are the “wonderful irregularities in their music.” He added, “what needs to happen, happens at precisely the right moment, and couldn’t have happened two bars sooner.”

Although he modelled his Ma Rainey compositions on Black music of the 1920s and looked to ’40s R&B for Seven Guitars, he cites a pair of surprising musical influences—The Beatles and Milton Nascimento. “Black music has nothing to do with race,” he says. “I think it has everything to do with an understanding of what it means to be the ‘other’ in this society.”

George Duke is likewise eclectic, citing Cannonball Adderley and Frank Zappa as primary mentors. “We all learn from each other. Jazz, for example, is a combination of European and African elements,” he says. Again, the commonalities.

Most of the artists interviewed by the author, himself a jazz musician and composer, insist that their work must have some purpose beyond itself. “I just hope that we can make the planet worth living in,” Herbie Hancock insists.