The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles (review)

In her 2005 article, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Jacquelyn Dowd Hall called on scholars to complicate the story of civil rights by looking beyond a traditional narrative that begins in 1954, ends in 1965, focuses on the South, and features Martin Luther King, Jr. as the leader of a single-voiced chorus of interracial activists who overcame racial barriers nonviolently. The recent wave of histories about arts movements in African- American communities (e.g., Point from Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis, by Benjamin Looker, 2004, and One O’clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma Blue Devils, by Douglas Henry Daniels, 2007) also encourage us to look past the chronological narrative and traditional means of protest and resistance to see how change occurs.

Another example is Isoardi’s book, The Dark Tree, which looks at the fortyyear life of the black arts movement as it unfolded on the west coast. In New York it was the Jazzmobile, in Detroit it was the Tribe, and in St. Louis it was BAG. In Los Angeles it was the Ark that nurtured race pride and enterprise through music and in doing so nurtured creativity and self-discovery for young people. Like most African-American communities, Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood suffered early from a post–World War II economic depression that stretched into the 1960s. The Ark was a community reclamation project.

Part biography, part community history, and part cultural history, The Dark Tree blends these themes to present a compelling local story about a national movement. The biography is of Horace Tapscott, the center person of the Underground Musicians Association (UGMA), founder of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (the Ark), and creative visionary of the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA). As a community history, the book describes urban decline exacerbated by unemployment and a police state atmosphere (the underlying causes of the Watts insurgencies of 1965). Here, UGMA, the Ark, and UGMAA proffered a constructive outlet, and the practice and performance places provided a communal space. As a cultural history, the book describes how music’s all-inclusive nature encouraged artists, observers, participants, and audiences to become involved in the music and thus the community (5).

UGMA began as a varied assemblage of people who participated in what was essentially a 24/7 jam session. Tommy Trujillo, who used to carry his guitar and amplifier around in the back of his VW bug, recalled that he was one of the few non-black members of UGMA. He benefited from UGMA because “I just got a lot of real serious information and more understanding as to the music and culture and the way of thinking” (96).

That “way of thinking” blended arts with political consciousness. At its height, in the 1970s, the black arts movement gave literal expression to nationalist sentiments and the shifting spirit of activism, and UGMA’s work reflected the local milieu. Through programs like the UGMA, artists and art forms converged with, emerged from, and bore witness to the black freedom movement. When the civil rights movement is writ large in time, place, and direction, we will hear how musical developments coincided with trends in hope and frustration, consciousness raising and community building, organized struggle, and urban transformation.

The black arts movement found roots in two places: American musical traditions of both blacks and whites and the cultural beliefs and practices of West African communities whose themes emerge in the Ark’s performance style. Playing in local parks, community centers, and festivals, the UGMA activists used music, theater, writing, painting, sculpting, and other arts in a communal environment to “recover and rebuild community, to forge an ethic of community involvement and to create an aesthetic derived from and as part of that involvement” (xii). In the way that the...