musician
Personal Information
Born Charles Jones on January 12, 1941, in Natchez, MS
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Navy, early 1960s.
Career
Has played with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Henry Threadgill, the David Murray Octet, and Don Pullen; led own bands, Okra Orchestra and Natchezsippi Dance Band; has also worked in theater as an actor and composer of music; signed to Atlantic Records; released first solo album, In the World: From Natchez to New York, 1998.
Life's Work
A highly regarded figure in the jazz scene since the 1960s, trumpeter and cornetist Olu Dara recorded his first solo record at the age of 57. Dara had always shied away from the spotlight, preferring to work with others like Art Blakey, saxophonist and composer Henry Threadgill, and the late pianist Don Pullen. Encouraged by his son, the rapper Nas, Dara finally agreed to record an album of his own songs in 1998. In the World: From Natchez to New York earned enthusiastic critical accolades for its fresh sound, which mixed Delta blues with African and Caribbean rhythms. That sound, Dara, asserts, comes from the fact that "I never practice the cornet," he told Down Beat writer Alan Nahigian. "I never did. I was brought up that way. My teacher never said go home and practice. He said, how can you practice life? Music is life! Always go in fresh."
As the title of his solo record hints, Dara hails from Natchez, Mississippi, where he was born Charles Jones in 1941. He was a performer from an early age, learning to tap dance and then picking up his first instrument. "This man gave me a horn, and told me to blow into it like I was blowing up a balloon," he told Ed Bumgardner in the Winston-Salem Journal. "Next thing I know, I am playing the theme from 'Woody Woodpecker' and all these other cartoons I loved. If I could hear it, I could play it. Still can." Dara left Mississippi to serve in the U.S. Navy, and played in a Navy band. He also visited parts of the Caribbean and Africa, whose musical traditions made a lasting impression on him.
Discharged, Dara was stranded in New York City in 1964 without funds to move on, and so he remained there. He claims not to have even owned an instrument for the next six years, but chance encounters with old friends from Mississippi and the Navy drew him back to music. As he recalled in the interview with Nahigian in Down Beat, his friends "were asking about playing music. I would just go and listen. When I finally started playing again, it was in the rhythm & blues bands, the natural place for me to be. We'd use two or three horns, and it was very creative." But when this R&B style fell out of fashion, Dara moved on to jazz. Saxophonists Bill Barron and Sam Rivers helped him meet other musicians and find work in jazz ensembles, but it was still a difficult transition. "I was like a fish out of water," Dara told Down Beat. "I loved to entertain, a song-and-dance man. I had to change my demeanor."
Dara performed with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, a famed bebop ensemble, for a few years, even though he had never before played bebop. Blakey, realizing that Dara's heart wasn't in the genre, encouraged him to try something new. And so, while he was on tour in Spain with Blakey, Dara began singing, making up the words as he went along. After leaving Blakey's band in 1974, he fell into the loft scene among New York City's jazz set. He played with Pullen, Threadgill, and the David Murray Octet in the early 1980s, and appeared in recordings. "While the music he played was often far out, Dara won praise for an emotionally direct style that recalled traditional jazz trumpet masters Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge," remarked Boston Herald journalist Larry Katz about this phase of his career. Still, Dara claimed to have been continually mystified by the jazz scene, though he was sometimes compared to Louis Armstrong. "I learned jazz in a couple of days so I could work," he confessed to Katz. "I'd make sounds in a trumpet and they considered that top level musicianship. It really confused me. I just smiled and didn't say anything.... Then I'd go do my best work with my own bands."
Dara's bands included the Okra Orchestra and the Natchezsippi Dance Band. He also enjoyed working in the theater in New York City, as an actor and composer of music. Playwright August Wilson became a fan of Dara's compositions, which included music for Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama The Piano Lesson. Moving forward and constantly moving on seemed to keep Dara's interest piqued and his sound fresh. For many years, Dara played the trumpet, but then returned to the cornet. "When I played the trumpet, I sounded like all the other trumpet players," he explained to Down Beat. "When I picked up the cornet, I went right back to the way I used to play." He was sometimes hailed as the heir of cornetist Don Cherry, but at other times his musicianship evoked comparisons to African performer Hugh Masekela.
Though he was offered the occasional chance to make a solo record, Dara spurned the offers, preferring instead to work with performers like Cassandra Wilson, in whose 1991 album Blue Light 'Til Dawn he appeared. He also appeared in the soundtrack for the 1996 Robert Altman film Kansas City, which fictionalized that city's flourishing jazz scene in the 1930s.
It was only the urging of his son, on whose 1994 LP Illmatic Dara appeared, that he began to think about making a record. "He kept telling me he wanted his peers to hear me," Dara told Bergen County Record writer Ed Condran. "He wanted to show me off, but I declined. Five minutes later Atlantic Records called and asked me to put out an album. I thought it was an omen, and I decided to make a record." The result was In the World: From Natchez to New York, released in 1998. Dara wrote all the songs himself, sang, and played trumpet, cornet, and guitar for it. The Winston-Salem Journal's Bumgardner described it as "a potent dose of rural blues, decorated with the street-party twitch-and-twinge of hip- hop." Bumgardner noted further that the record "pays homage to past and present while keeping the listener spellbound and, most likely, a little off-balance." International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin commented on Dara's vocal style, finding him a "a mature, acoustic, melodic and poetic rapper--a rare and delightful cadence. He 'blows' his lyrics like improvising on a horn."
Some of the tracks on Dara's next effort, Neighborhoods, were hailed by Rolling Stone journalist Robert Christgau as "history lessons" whose force would only be appreciated twenty years hence. Again, the record featured Dara on vocals, and playing the cornet, wooden horn, and guitar. Cassandra Wilson and Dr. John appeared on tracks, and Dara also wrote a tribute to his longtime conga player, Coster Massamba. Down Beat's Glenn Astarita liked "Massamba" and the title track, as well as other songs in which "the artist shuffles through the Delta blues and New Orleans voodoo style r&b while also extolling the virtues of nature, love and life." Another writer for the magazine, Michael Jackson found it a record that "seeps with Delta blues, inner-city soul, Bo Diddley-fied shuffle-funk and African rhythms, furthering Dara's voyeuristic, nostalgic odyssey through life's highways and byways." The Bergen County Record's Condran also commended it as an "intense, gritty, but atmospheric jazzy release, which sounds like a slice of New York."
Dara also earned accolades for his live shows. "What he proffers has a timelessness with context," declared Variety reviewer Phil Gallo, "everything he plays feels familiar, with roots linked to a distinct time and place, whether it be the Mississippi Delta in 1934 or Times Square circa 1971." Dara's two other sons are also involved in the arts. A resident of Harlem, he was bemused by the Rolling Stone review. "It's not that I'm ungrateful that some magazine thinks I'm cool, but, see, none of that matters to me, even though I suppose it is supposed to," he told Bumgardner in the Winston-Salem Journal. "But if it helps bring my music to more people, if it broadens minds and heals spirits, then that can only be a good thing."
Works
Selected discography
- In the World: From Natchez to New York, Atlantic, 1998.
- Neighborhoods, Atlantic, 2001.
Further Reading
Periodicals
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 15, 1998, p. D2.
- Boston Herald, March 8, 2001 p. 45.
- Down Beat, May 1998, p. 36; June 2001, p. 16; July 2001, p. 66.
- International Herald Tribune, June 13, 2001, p. 10.
- Record (Bergen County, NJ), January 18, 2002, p. 15.
- Rolling Stone, May 10, 2001.
- Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), March 4, 2001, p. 6.
- Time, June 24, 1996, p. 79; February 26, 2001, p. 72.
- Variety, April 16, 2001, p. 36.
- Winston-Salem Journal (Winston-Salem, NC), May 4, 2001, p. E1.
— Carol Brennan
