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Chief Adjuah is planting the seed with the Doris Duke Artist Award

Chief Adjuah
Chief Adjuah

I was excited to talk with one of the most groundbreaking voices in jazz and in music today. He hails from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, and is very dedicated to not only keeping its tradition alive, but at the same time, he's about creating his own lane and his own voice. He's a recipient, along with Somi, of this year's very prestigious award, the Doris Duke Artist Award, presented in a special ceremony and concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center on February 13. It's an honor that has been held by legends like Wayne Shorter and Terri Lyne Carrington. While the Grammys have been the awards that people have been talking about for a while, this one is just as important, because it's truly about artists making an impact in society and throughout this world.

Watch our conversation here:

Interview Transcript:

Nicole Sweeney: Congratulations to you, no stranger to Grammy nominations.

Chief Adjuah: Yeah, we've had a few. Actually, a student of mine recently tried to make me feel old. They told me that technically, I've been nominated in Grammy's in three different decades. I haven't won but it was kind of a sobering moment. I think a lot of times when people come to the shows and they see us—the fashion and the style and the sort of swagger pointing to a very younger approach in style—and sometimes they don't realize that I've been going and playing on the road since I was about 11 or 12 years old and I'll be 40 in March. There's a lot of time that's been put towards building and developing this music. But my students, they make fun of me all the time. They say you're getting pretty old there. I'm getting some wrinkles here too. I feel like I earned my wrinkles in my first little patches of gray.

How dare they? Forty? Wait till they get to that age.  But I'm going to share something with you because I don't believe in coincidences.  My first introduction to your music was the album Rewind That.  You might not know this, but I'm a very big person on album anniversaries. Apparently, February 9th through the 11th, meaning today, 2005 is when you went into the studio in Berkeley, California. The album is 18 years old. It's legal. Do you remember going into the studio?

I will never forget that experience. It was such a fun time. What was great about it was my uncle being involved. For those of you who don't know this part of my history, what my Uncle Donald is for us and our generation, we look at him like our Charlie Parker or John Coltrane. He's a guy that has the skeleton keys to harmonically and melodically what's going in the music—the root and initiated cultural spaces that created the rhythmic bed for what happens with this music as a chief that is the ruler of Congo Square in our tradition. He literally is the sovereign for the territory where the Africans actually held onto their cultural expressions.

I was really fortunate to grow up in his orbit and under him, and to be trained by him. When we made that first record, he was kind enough to come into the studio and to help us from a production standpoint. Obviously he is playing, but my uncle is an NEA Jazz Master, Big Chief Donald Harrison, Jr.

That's right. I got a chance to see him over the summer with The Cookers, and I couldn't help but tell the audience about his connection to hip hop and Biggie Smalls.  And the reason why I say that is because you have a version of “So What” on that album.  I always think of hip hop because it's just got this vibe.

Yeah, we had another way we were going to play it. It was really funny because all the musicians in my band at that point, we were maybe 19, 20 years old, we looked up to him [and] revered him. He came into the studio and we were rehearsing. He was like, “I got something for y'all” and he kind of changed the arrangement on us. To this day, almost 20 years later, that one comes up more often than not when I'm conversing about that era in our music. What an incredible talent and for him to be so willing to impart and so open. My uncle was with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and Miles and Lena Horne and all of these great practitioners, but all of those folks were also great teachers. You could see how intentional he was about making sure that he was going to impart as much information to us as possible. And that was one of the moments where it was actually documented.

You have an incredible year for that. Now I'm going to take you back. I have to mention my first time at the Detroit Jazz Festival, you and Donald were there.  And I remember y'all, you two were getting into the elevator and I remember you kept saying “Uncle Donald.” And there was something that was so warming about that because I look at both of you, these musicians that I admire, but in that moment I can relate. I have an aunt that even though I'm a grownup, I still look up to her.  I love that moment when you say, “Uncle Donald” because he's truly a legend, Donald Harrison. That word gets tossed around a lot, but I think when it comes to someone like Donald Harrison, they're real ones.

Chief Adjuah: It's true. My reverence and care and love for him is [in addition to] our musical reality, but the kind of man that he is. He's probably the most fatherly person that I know, just in general, not just with his blood, but with all of the young people that he teaches.

He teaches in so many different contexts. I think because he was a person that was intentional about making sure that the children and the next generation of players could develop and comprehensively build and live in mastery. There were choices that he made and in terms of his recording career, when you look at what it is that he's done in those spaces. Anyone that listens will tell you that as a master level player, you know where Donald is, he's the top of the heap.

But when I think in terms of popularity and social media and these kinds of things I always think of this Denzel Washington quote where he says, “Don't confuse movement with progress.” A lot of times we're running in place because folks are playing in the circuit and the game of jazz and what's being presented in those kinds of things, but they're not progressing. He's a person that I can literally say I watched for my entire lifetime prioritize progress and forward movement in a way. It’s very rare when you're thinking about many of his peers. It was just who he was as a person.

He's just open-hearted and willing to give and willing to share. I think for me, even as a 40 year old, whenever I'm in his presence, I'm so thankful and grateful because I wouldn't be here. I can think of maybe 20 musicians that you could also mark as the 45-and-unders who are already are walking into having a comprehensively built, sort of an ethnomusicology approach to limitless fusion that can all point the roots of them learning how to play in that style to Donald.

So when we talk about Stretch Music and the things that I've contributed and people say it's innovative and it's all these things, a lot of times I have to hit the pause button. It may be innovative to you in so far as you're hearing it in a frame that maybe in terms of the sonic architecture, maybe a little bit different from things that you've heard before, but you can almost point a direct [line] to so many of these expressions to Donald's work. This is the person that has the skeleton keys to all of the ways of expressing from inside of the root cultural imperative, right? So that's different from going to Juilliard, and learning to play jazz in that kind of space, versus learning the how to express freely in rhythm from people that descended from the tribes that maintained the rebel for lack of a better way of putting it. He's just another level. And honestly, it's like for me, not only is he our high chief, but he's our G.O.A.T. as well.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: The New Chief | In The Making | American Masters | PBS

But you know that where you are, is a testament to his greatness. Those that are great, don't just keep it to themselves. The great ones know that they're almost better when they can share it.  That definitely comes across with you. Now take me through this journey of, and if I can say Christian Scott, rewind that to today, Chief Adjuah. Making that change and the connection to your history and your homeland. That's a deep journey that not many people take.

The thing is we also live in a system that makes it difficult for them - it penalizes them, right? So we can look at a person like myself or look at a person like Muhammad Ali or Malcolm X and [realize] that you're just dealing with de-Westernization of a name. And more often than not, when a person elects to do that, they become persona non grata and viewed as a potential enemy to the state and a threat just because they are not willing to accept you calling the boy for however way a better way of putting it.

We have a very long, extensive and heartbreaking history in this country of forcing people that come from our cultural purview, to essentially having to navigate this system in a way that says that what I am has to be under something else. I know a lot of people don't word it that way, but I'm wording it that way for a reason, because that's exactly what that is. What else would be the rationale for you? Forcing someone that comes from a very specific reality and cultural space to walk around with a name like Scott.

I remember being a little boy and when people would call me that as a child, I had legitimate issues with those things because when, when I would read about the great African warriors or kings or queens. I'd read about Sundiata Keita, I'd read about Mansa Musa. Their names weren't like mine.

At some point I was smart enough to ask why not. When I found out that these kinds of things were tactics that were used by slave holding persons pre- emancipation to make sure that once emancipation happened, that these people would be able to identify who was and wasn't their property. The plan wasn't for you to maintain your freedom. The plan was for them to codify a new way to put you in chains, which they did. We understand the 13th Amendment didn't abolish slavery. It just changed the means that you could be an enslaved person here and if you look at the prison industrial complex and systems that we built in this space, you see this systemic context full well.

Immediately after emancipation, they codified a new way via the perception of Black people as being adjacent to the criminal fraternity used as a rationale to take their bodies away from them. So that process and that journey was something that started in my early childhood. As an adult, I came to want to understand more about my history. I didn't know that I was going to be selected as being a Chief, but I certainly took the initiations and the learnings that I had from before I could speak with the utmost seriousness because my grandfather was a guy that led the city and it wasn't lost on me, the kind of power that they had and what they could actualize because they actually were morally upright and ethically upright and also had legitimate lives. It was important to grow into a man that also had elements of that as a part of my makeup.

I also can't take full credit for that. The difference from my journey and maybe my grandfather and maybe his grandfather's journey is that we live in a time and a moment now where some of the things that are a byproduct of you de-westernizing your name, some of those things are not as prevalent as they were in eras where if you made a choice like that somebody might show up to try and kill you.

At least you know those are real realities. You asked and I want to give comprehensive real answers. I've had to go through some of those experiences. We've done performances and gigs before where you get backstage and there are letters and notes to you. Death threats. I'll never forget getting to a gig that we did in Indianapolis and getting to my hotel. There was a doll, a Black doll, in the hotel room that was in the shoebox that had a noose around it. And that said that my name wasn't Adjuah, it was N_____. Those things are real.

I'll just say this, if you feel like these things are over as a Black person, you should really process de- westernizing your name. The things that are going to come up in that moment are going to hurt you if you're honest with yourself. Because you'll realize all kinds of things when you think about, “Well, if I have to go to a lending company or deal with trying to get a mortgage for a new house. Am I less likely or more likely if I have a name that says this, right? If we're being honest about all of the levels of it, if I want to sell my house, is the property value going to be higher or lower based than in this fact?

There's been studies done on that this is a real thing, right?

The point is that in every way that we interact in our culture, there is a vestige of that. Why does that exist? Because for me, when you add those things up, the answers that you get should really make the hair on the back of your neck standup. My thing is, don't brow-beat me with this idea of the types of freedoms that we enjoy in this place because I think, first, you're insulting my intelligence. Second, it is incredibly disrespectful and reductive to all of the different groups of people. I'm not just speaking about the African American experience, but also about the First Nation experience, the LGBTQ experience. All of these communities in our society, they endure more than if you're not in those communities. For people to be aware of that.

I want to talk to you about the Doris Duke Artist Awards. Apparently, this year it's going be the first to be televised, but also one of the biggest amounts that they've awarded to an artist. You are truly deserving. How does it feel?

Like I said, the Grammys are important, but there's something special, I feel, about the Doris Duke Artist Award and how they recognize artists. It's because people like Maurine Knighton and Brandi Stewart, and Lillian and Jeremy, all the folks that I've worked with over there in different capacities—they were amazing enough to fund a festival that we put on at Harlem Stage in New York for many years, the Street Music Festival. These are folks that are intentional about their giving. They're intentional about also awarding to folks that they know are going to put in the work and that are also going to be assets and resources for the community.

For lack of a better way of putting it in terms of what's actually happening there. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation would kind of have to skydive to get to where the Grammys are if we're just being honest about it. I've been in those rooms and behind the curtain and all of that, and it's really much more of a popularity contest. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that I have the answer and know exactly what they should do, but jazz as an art form that is based on people's subjective interpretations of what you are contributing and art in general is very difficult to judge in the kinds of ways that we try to judge them.

I've always been a kind of champion and the notion that just the nomination is enough should be fine because mainly because they aren’t going to line the bands up. And even if you did, that would be a really impractical way to do it. It has always been a strange thing to me when I think about the types of competing and sometimes vitriolic and dark things that come up when peers of artists are actually competing with the Grammys, just because of the structure of it.

What I appreciate about the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and what it is that they're doing is that they're trying to figure out a way to contribute that actually moves the needle forward in a way that creates more light and sustainable financial and fiscal realities for artists. To just give someone an award and say, “You good?” is one thing. But to put them in a position to where they can now take time to ideate and seed and build things that will actually build a future where there are more things like that. Yes. It is just a different level, planting the seed.

Nicole Sweeney is a Queens-born, Long Island-raised music lover. Growing up in New York with West Indian parents, she was surrounded by all types of music every day and the influence of jazz was constant.