Musician, Singer, Composer Olu Dara

DATE February 23, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Filler: By policy of WHYY, this information is restricted and has
been omitted from this transcript

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Interview: Olu Dara discusses his musical career
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev in for Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. OLU DARA: (Singing) Strange things happen every day. Oh, strange things
happen every day. Rode in town on a horse named Tilly. Took a bath in a tub
full of rimmy. Had my companions with me. I slow runnin' tiger. Yeah. Fast
walking snail. I skinny be locked in a jaybird jail. Skinny be locked in a
jaybird jail. Yeah. Be drained left me at a gasoline train. Yeah. Three
girls beggin' for a date with I might. I might. Yeah. Three girls beggin'
for a date with I might. Lord. Alabama corn bread dipped in Georgia
buttermilk.

BOGAEV: Music from Olu Dara's new CD "Neighborhoods." Olu Dara started his
career in the '70s and '80s when he was part of the avant-garde loft scene and
worked as a side man with such adventurous jazz composers as David Murray and
Henry Threadgill. In 1998, he released his first CD, a recording that bridged
the music of Mississippi where he grew up with the sounds of New York where
he's lived since the '60s. Jazz critic Bob Blumenthal wrote in a review, `Olu
Dara creates a folk, blues, Afro beat CD stew where his singing and
guitar-playing are as prominent as his horn.'

In his new CD "Neighborhoods," Olu Dara adds a good bit of funk to the mix.
Terry Gross spoke with Olu Dara in 1998.

TERRY GROSS:

Now how did you learn to play trumpet? And, you know, just like the cliche of
Mississippi is almost that when you're born they issue you a guitar so you can
sing the blues.

Mr. DARA: Yeah.

GROSS: How did you end up with a trumpet?

Mr. DARA: Well, the trumpet, I guess we came from another side of town, I
guess, and I met a man who just found his way into Natchez, and he was looking
for a place to stay, something to do, and he turned out to be a very brilliant
man. And I would help him--I helped him unpack his goods. His name was Levon
Nikines(ph), and he was a very young man. I thought he was older because he
was mixed gray. But he asked me what did I want to do, and I asked him what
could he teach me. He said, `Anything.' I remember that today; he said,
`Anything.' So he did teach me anything I wanted to learn. I started with
clarinet first, piano, and the coronet. And I learned typing in there with
him. I set a typeset for a newspaper, you know, photography, filmmaking--this
was in the '40s--tap dancing, metaphysical talk, you know, art, everything.
He was that kind of a guy. So I stayed around him at all the times, and I
started playing coronet with him at the age of seven. And at the age of nine
or 10, I was traveling with him throughout Louisiana and Mississippi.

GROSS: Playing?

Mr. DARA: Playing; yeah, playing coronet.

GROSS: Huh. Was it unusual for him to be traveling with somebody that young?

Mr. DARA: No, it wasn't unusual for young kids in Mississippi to travel
young. I mean, during that time, kids could--I mean, I was driving car at
11...

GROSS: Wow.

Mr. DARA: ...you know. And, you know, we were drinking at 12 in public. That
was in the '40s and early '50s, you know. So I thought the whole world lived
like that, you know. But Mississippi, evidently, is different.

GROSS: Now you left Natchez in 1958 to go to Tennessee State in...

Mr. DARA: Yes.

GROSS: ...Nashville to study music--Yes?--to study music there?

Mr. DARA: I went to study medicine.

GROSS: Medicine?

Mr. DARA: Medicine, yes. I was going to go from there to Mahara
University(ph), which is right there--medical school--which is in the same
city. That was our plan. I say `our plan' because, you know, my mother was
involved in that plan also. But I decided that Nashville was so rich with
music and the campus where I went to school in Tennessee State was so rich
with wonderful musicians, I decided to join the band and still studying
medicine--pre-med, taking pre-med courses. But I just got the music bug. So
what I did was I decided to go to the Navy School of Music. I joined the Navy
and went to the Navy School of Music in Washington, DC, only because I'd heard
that John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly and Clark Terry had gone to that
school. So I decided to go to the Navy, and that's what happened. I did a
year in the school there, and then I played for another three years on ship.

GROSS: So you went through the Navy in the naval band?

Mr. DARA: Yes. Yes.

GROSS: So what kind of material would you have to play on ship?

Mr. DARA: Anything from "Nearer My God to Thee" to marches to dance music.
I mean, we would be out to sea sometimes a long time and we played dance
music, you know. We played dance music; we played anything. Anything they
wanted you to play, you had to play it. And then back on shore, you play
nightclubs, officers' clubs, you play jazz clubs, you know, officers' clubs
who like jazz and play for dances. You have to play everything, play big
bands also.

GROSS: Now how did you end up staying in New York after your years in the
Navy?

Mr. DARA: I spent my last year in the military in New York. I was
discharged in New York. I stayed around and I ran out of money in New York.
I was planning on going back to East Africa or Spain somewhere to live. I was
only 24 years old, so I had, you know, nothing but freedom, nothing but time.
And I ran out of money in New York, so I wound up in New York City.

GROSS: I understand after you ended up in New York and decided to live there,
you went for eight years without performing.

Mr. DARA: Yes. I think it was around '64; yeah, maybe eight years or
whatever.

GROSS: Why?

Mr. DARA: Well, I was kind of intimidated with the big New York scene. You
know, I'm still, you know, a small-town person.

GROSS: Uh-huh.

Mr. DARA: And I was living in a neighborhood with all these great artists,
artists I'd heard about and I had seen them in person, I've seen their
records--heard their records or whatever, and I didn't think I was capable of
playing on their level. And I hadn't tried, so, you know, I just thought that
I was not good enough to play with them; until I was basically forced into
playing with them in a way they would--I would run into musicians who knew me
in school, high school or college or the military, and they remembered my
talent better than I did. So eventually, I got pushed back into the music
world. So it just happened naturally, I believe.

BOGAEV: Olu Dara, speaking with Terry Gross in 1998. His new CD is
"Neighborhoods." We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BOGAEV: If you're just joining us, we're featuring an interview with jazz
musician Olu Dara. His new CD is "Neighborhoods."

GROSS: You ended up playing in Art Blakey's band for a while, the Jazz
Messengers...

Mr. DARA: Yes.

GROSS: And Blakey's band was always considered just like a training ground...

Mr. DARA: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...for great musicians. I'm wondering what it was like for you.

Mr. DARA: Yeah, it's a good training ground for jazz musicians, especially.
But I felt that I had had enough of that. I thought I needed that, and I
thought that's what I really wanted, but you have to go somewhere to find out
what you don't need, you know. And I found--Blakey was very nice, he was a
very sweet man. He saw that I had another vision, so he let me explore my
vision within his group; and most musicians would not allow you to do that.
He allowed me to sing--which I wasn't a singer--or to tell jokes, or to play
different trumpet styles that I didn't get a chance to play with other bands.
And when I left his band, I had another vision. I knew exactly what I wanted
to do.

GROSS: What?

Mr. DARA: I wanted to explore music that I really enjoyed; I guess you'd call
it world music now. But at the time in the early '70s, my thinking was that I
wanted to play everything that I could play that was enjoyable to me and I
knew would be enjoyable to my listeners, and I didn't want to bore myself or
my listeners with the same sound.

GROSS: A lot of jazz listeners were introduced to your work in the mid-'70s
through the '80s when you were playing early on in that period in what was
known as the loft jazz scene. And then you were a really important side man
in bands led by the emerging composers of the period, composers who had a foot
in the avant-garde--I'm thinking of people like Henry Threadgill and David
Murray, Julius Hemphill--and I'm wondering how you fell in with that group
of people, those emerging composers of the time who were very adventurous in
their compositions and drawing on, basically, all of jazz history.

Mr. DARA: Well, it was--I don't know how it happened either, but I do
remember being here before they were here, and they were, you know--you could
say emigrating from cities--Chicago, the St. Louis musicians and California
musicians--and I was already here, and they found it very difficult to find
good trumpet players who could interpret their music since it was new to this
area. And I was also looking for something else to do, because I had just
left Blakey's group and there was nothing else happening here. And so when
they came here, it was a perfect opportunity for me to do something and to be
able to help them expand the sounds they wanted to get out here. And I found
it very easy for me to fit in with their groups, and I found that I was of
some use to their bands. And it really helped me, and I think I really helped
them.

GROSS: I want to play something from a 1980 album that you were on. This is
the David Murray Octet. The album is called "Ming." And I'll play a David
Murray composition called "Dewey's Circle." And you're featured on--coronet
or trumpet on this? I'm trying to remember.

Mr. DARA: Oh, it...

GROSS: Probably trumpet.

Mr. DARA: ...must be trumpet. It must be trumpet.

GROSS: Trumpet. Yeah, trumpet. And you're very prominently featured on
this, and you take the first solo, so let's hear "Dewey's Circle" recorded in
1980. My guest Olu Dara on trumpet.

(Soundbite of "Dewey's Circle")

GROSS: That was "Dewey's Circle" from the 1980 David Murray album, "Ming."
And we heard David Murray on tenor, Henry Threadgill on alto saxophone, my
guest Olu Dara on trumpet.

The energy on that recording is so great and really typical of some of the
best kind of playing of that period, combining, like, the energy of the avant
garde with the energy of, say, New Orleans music of the '20s and '30s and the
Duke Ellington orchestra. Did you like that kind of energy, that combination
of contemporary adventurousness with the early spirit of jazz?

Mr. DARA: It was a very difficult period for me, to be truthful.

GROSS: OK.

Mr. DARA: I was like a fish out of water because I didn't come up playing
that type of music nor was I playing it ever up until that time. And I was
just listening to that recording and knowing what I was feeling then when I
was playing it, you know? It's hard to explain in words, but I like to use
the word `interesting' because...

GROSS: Oh, yes, I know...

Mr. DARA: You understand what I'm saying?

GROSS: Right.

Mr. DARA: Yeah, I was trying to find my way within the--on the sharp edges
of that music because that music was all--was atonal in a lot of ways, you
know. And I came up in a tonal world, you know? So it was geometrical, if
you can understand what I mean by that, you know, trying to fit--sometimes
like trying to fit a triangle into a square?

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. DARA: OK. And it was scientific in that way, so I enjoyed the scientific
aspect of the music, and I enjoyed being from another culture. It was like
being from another culture and trying to play into another culture's thing.
That's really all it's about. And you don't know what it is, but you try to
figure out what you can do to help it. And that was my job, you know, to
try to make it better than it was or try to add an ingredient that they did
not have.

GROSS: So, you know, being from a small town, being from the South, being
from a tonal world, did you sometimes feel like you were in another country
when you were in New York playing?

Mr. DARA: Look, you just read my mind because that's just the way I felt. I
always felt that New York--the island of New York is another country, you
know, when you really look at it, you know. It feels--it's a natural feeling,
of course, but I could be anywhere. You know, I've been in other places and
it feels--has the same feeling, out of this country.

GROSS: You've said about your own music, `I've been put here to relieve
tension.' I thought that was a very interesting thing to say. Tell me what
you mean by that.

Mr. DARA: Well, I guess I've felt it all my life because I always felt that
people have their little problems, you know. Even in the first grade, I felt
that people were so uptight, not comfortable with themselves or their
surroundings. And I always had a sense of humor, and I think I used my sense
of humor to relax people, to relieve tension. I found that that was my job in
my community, in school, in my family or whatever. Even now today, I find
people are very--I don't know what word to use, but not comfortable, you know?
And being an artist, an entertainer, I felt that my job to relieve tension
because, you know, when I get up on stage and the light comes on, I look out
in the audience first, and I'm comfortable and they're not, and they've paid
to see me. And I used to always wonder why. They should be really
comfortable, I should be the nervous one, you know? But I found it's the
other way around, people are just not very relaxed. I don't know what--if it
has to do with the culture or has to do with human nature or whatever. The
human being is very tense and very aggressive and can be very scary. So I
felt the way to help myself get through this maze of uptightness is to have a
sense of humor and to be a stress reliever myself. You don't have to go to
the pharmacy to get me; I'm right here in the flesh.

GROSS: How did you get your name Olu Dara?

Mr. DARA: An African priest, a Yoruba priest, spoke to me one day. He said,
`You know, I was dealing with coconut shells, reading coconut shells the other
night and asked my god, through the shells, what your name was, you know, in
another life. And the shells told me that your name was Olu Dara.' And the
name fit me so perfectly. This was in the '60s.

GROSS: Is this when you were in the Navy?

Mr. DARA: Right after I got out of the Navy. It means `God is good.' And I
accepted that name. I called my father and told him that I had accepted
another name that fit my personality.

GROSS: What did your father say? I think sometimes parents would be very
offended by having, you know, the family name replaced.

Mr. DARA: Well, he just said, `Are you a Communist?' That's all he said.
That's all he said, and I laughed, you know. You know, I think he thought it
was a Russian name or something, you know?

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. DARA: Thank you, Terry.

BOGAEV: Olu Dara from a 1998 interview with Terry Gross. Here's some more
music from his new CD, "Neighborhoods."

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. DARA: (Singing) I'm gonna go, bah, bow. I'm wanna go to the movie show,
me and my baby. Come on, let's go. Going to the movie show. Let's go. How
about a popcorn as soon as we hit the door? My two brothers Bill and Franz,
sittin' in the front row. They bought some candy. We don't need nothin'
more. I love a movie show, I tell you. Black and white. I don't care what
it is. I don't care how small the theater is. I don't care who's playin'. I
don't care as long as they got popcorn and candy bars. Butterfly my queen,
she's "Gone With the Wind." I love the films of Anthony Quinn. The "Creature
from the Black Lagoon," "Red River," "Color Purple." I love the movies.
Clark Gable, all the women out there, the Barrymores and Sidney Poitier.

BOGAEV: Coming up, a review of the new film "Monkeybone." This is FRESH
AIR.

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Review: Movie "Monkeybone"
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

"Monkeybone" is a new movie that combines live action with stop-motion and
computer animation. It's directed by Henry Selick, who made "The Nightmare
Before Christmas" and "James & the Giant Peach." Film critic Henry Sheehan
has a review.

HENRY SHEEHAN:

In these days of "South Park," an animated live-action comedy about a
cartoonist in explicit sexual competition with one of his own creations
doesn't exactly come hurtling out of left field. But Henry Selick's
"Monkeybone" is unique. Partly that's thanks to its imaginative and ingenious
mixture of pared-down cell animation, stop-motion and computer generation.
Partly it's because its action unfolds in both the real world and the
unconscious, perhaps even a Jungian universal unconscious.

For all its adolescent jokes about erections and other comically irrepressible
elements of desire, "Monkeybone" is about the mysterious link between sex and
death. Shorn of romance, sex, at least the male adolescent variety, is
depicted as the ultimate psychic reflex, an instinctive craving that will
cannibalize the rest of the self in order to get what it wants.

Brendan Fraser stars as Stu Miley, your basic schlubby cartoonist whose comic
book hero, a lively monkey named Monkeybone, is about to become the star of
its own TV series. The first episode, which we see in its cell-style
entirety, depicts the birth of Monkeybone from the crotch of a junior-high
school kid having his first unexpected, and alarming, erection. This birth is
embarrassing not just to the kid in the cartoon, but even to Stu, who's
watching the film along with network executives, sponsors, his manager and his
long-time girlfriend Julie, played by a prettier-than-ever Bridget Fonda.

Fraser, who does cute-but-shy the way Mt. Etna does lava, plays Stu as so
bumbling and bashful that he stays `aw, shucks' simple even after he gets into
an auto accident that leaves him in a coma. His self-effacing consciousness
descends into a strange limbo called Downtown, which is inhabited by all
manners of creatures, including a newly personified Monkeybone.

Downtown is just the sort of off-the-wall experience you'd expect from Selick.
Stu arrives by roller coaster. Strange, stop-motion hybrids meet him on a
ramshackled platform pitched precariously over an endless void. The town
itself is based on the overworked theme of the nightmare carnival. But the
inhabitants, who range from more stop-motion creatures to animatronic puppets
and elaborately costumed and made-up actors, help make up for the
over-familiar housing stock. The grandest of them all is the local ruler,
Hypnose(ph), the Greek god of sleep. He has the head, shoulders and arms of
the actor Giancarlo Esposito, but his tiny goat body and legs are--well, who
knows what? Whatever they are, they are deliciously nightmarish.

Downtown is a way-station. Its human guests are visited by death's messengers
who hand them either a ticket out or a summons to Thanatopolis, the capital of
death. With the encouragement of Monkeybone and Hypnose, Stu sneaks into
Thanatopolis to steal one of those exit tickets, only to become the victim of
betrayal. Here's what happens when he returns to Downtown, ticket in hand.

(Soundbite of "Monkeybone")

Mr. BRENDAN FRASER (Stu Miley): Wait. I think, you're going about this the
wrong way. Come back here. Wait. No, you don't understand. He's got my
exit pass.

Mr. GIANCARLO ESPOSITO (Hypnose): Oh, I'm so sorry, Stu. It's just all part
of the deal.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ESPOSITO: We've got big plans for that body of yours.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. FRASER: What? No, this can't be happening. Julie! Julie!

SHEEHAN: Hypnose and Monkeybone have cut a deal to keep Stu stuck in
Downtown, where his troubled sleep will provide entertaining nightmares for
the residents. Monkeybone gets to inhabit Stu's body back on Earth and get a
shot at having sex with Julie.

The noisy clip is a fair indication of the movie's raucous tone, which can get
a bit overwhelming. And its humor, though mostly provocative and satirical,
sometimes is merely facetious, as when Whoopi Goldberg shows up to portray
death. Still, the animation alone makes "Monkeybone" worth a look. Selick's
decision to pitch a film at the young male audience while still hewing to a
theme of unusual seriousness, makes it remarkable.

BOGAEV: Henry Sheehan is film critic for The Orange County Register.

(Closing credits)

BOGAEV: For Terry Gross, I'm Barbara Bogaev.

We'll close today's program with music from guitarist John Faye, who died
yesterday following open-heart surgery. He's best know for his solo guitar
work that combines blues, folk and experimental sounds. John Faye was 61.

(Soundbite of guitar music by John Faye)
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