Often referred to as a 'guerilla scholar' of African art and music, Robert Farris Thompson died of complications from Covid in 2021 at the age of 88.
His was a loss I marked with great sadness. His usefulness in the world we shared was simply astonishing. Never having met him, I considered him a friend, an ally, a teacher.
I had stumbled on Thompson's landmark book, "Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy" at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts shop in 1986.
Always attracted to the sales bin first, I found the title and cover art fetching and cracked it open to pages that would shortly change my view of my work and the work of others.
At first sight, from his introduction:
"Listening to rock, jazz, blues, reggae, salsa, samba, boss nova, juju, highlife, and mambo, one might conclude that much of the popular music of the world is informed by the flash of the spirit of a certain people specially armed with improvisatory drive and brilliance.
"Since the Atlantic slave trade, ancient African organizing principles of song and dance have crossed the seas from the Old World to the New. There they took on momentum, intermingling with each other and with New World or European styles of singing and dance.
"Among those principles are:
o The dominance of a percussive performance style (attack and vital aliveness in sound and motion)
o A propensity for multiple meter (competing meters sounding all at once)
o Overlapping call and response in singing (solo/chorus, voice/instrument---'interlock systems' of performance)
o Inner pulse control (the 'metronome sense,' keeping a beat indelibly in mind as a rhythmic common denominator in a welter of different meters)
o Suspended accentuation patterning (offbeat phrasing of melodic and choreographic accents)
o And, at a slightly different, but equally recurrent level of exposition, songs and dances of social allusion (music which, however danceable and 'swinging,' remorselessly contrasts social imperfections against implied criteria for perfect living).
Throughout this work–as Thompson explicates the ins and outs of the cultural mores of different tribes and regions across Africa and relates them to surviving and still thriving cultural practices in the New World–one is drawn across centuries of suffering and celebration, oscillating between tears and elation.
In the end, we are left to marvel at the durable strength, power and beauty of a very particular human culture pulled off the African continent and forcibly inserted into so-called Western Civilization.
I recommend this book to you heartily.
And I give you permission to gloss over the scholarly exactitude of the sources and cultures. Without a map of the geography and tribal domains at hand, much of the text will have you bouncing to an atlas or racing for the footnotes.
Trusting the scholarship is critical, but that done the text can be read for its conclusions. They are remarkable.
It is Thompson’s chapters detailing the deep and still-relevant Yoruban roots of 'cool' that have held my close attention for all these years. I'll write more about them in a future version of BluesNotes.
But for now–if you are interested in the ideas and practices that underpin Blues and other Black music and culture here in the Western Hemisphere–Thompson's work and publications will help you develop a deep and far-reaching appreciation for the trans-Atlantic connections.
And you may well bow your head in gratitude for the scholarship and for the people whose spirit he worked so diligently to discover, document, and present to us. His was a life well-spent.
All the best,
s.
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