Liner Notes
This composition, Charlie’s Suite, was inspired by experiences and work I did at a workshop called Fathers, Sons, & Brothers conducted in Lindrith, New Mexico during June of 2006. F, S, & B is a men’s retreat based on the work of Virginia Satir. My father’s ancestral line was used in a piece to illustrate the process of claiming and how my male ancestors had come to know how to claim a child and behave as fathers. We went back into my family history identifying and mapping the families of my father, Brian, my grandfather, Felix, my great grandfather, Roscoe, and my great, great grandfather, Charlie. When we met Charlie in the story, we hit a wall, we really couldn’t know who he was except that he was a slave in Texas. We didn’t know if he was born here or in Africa...we didn’t know if he knew his father...we didn’t even really know his name. We called him Charlie just to call him something. Just touching him as an unknown fact of my ancestral line was a powerful moment for me.
This composition was written for Charlie.
In learning the story of Charlie and his descendants down to me I found a tragically, beautiful twist in the story. My great-grandfather Roscoe was born inTexas during 1864. Roscoe may have been born into slavery. Word of the end of the Civil War didn’t reach Texas until June 19th, 1865 when Union Forces landed at Galveston. Roscoe was the son of Ann Neal, Charlie’s daughter, a woman of African and Native American heritage who was seen as Black by her owner. She was raped on numerous occasions by her owner. Roscoe was the product of such a rape. Roscoe was "white enough" to be offered the opportunity to declare himself white on a census form. Ann is the link to Charlie that makes a composition about my male ancestors possible, and so this piece is also about her and the love I feel for her because of her part in the story.
Charlie’s Suite, Part I
1) Charlie’s Theme
I tried to write a simple, yet lyrical, theme for the opening section. I hope it sounds ‘sweet’ to you, and I hope you can hear the blues under it all as a pleasing, bittersweet, beautiful pain. Meeting Charlie left me wanting to express my appreciation for his gift to me through my family. So let me tell you about him through this music.
2) Ann Neal’s Interlude
This transitional piece appeared between the first two sections after I had ‘finished’ the suite, but before I had heard Ann’s story from my father. I figured the section belonged to her.
3) Africa
I don’t know what part of Africa that Charlie, or his people, came from...odds are we’re talking West Africa.
I wrote the rhythm in seven; seven sounds like Africa to me. The melodies just came together over the rhythm.
4) Middle Passage
When I ran a search on the Web about the Middle Passage the number of sites and entries was over 6,000,000. The number of people who made the trip may have been triple that over the 350 some years of the Atlantic slave trade. I could find no reliable consensus about the numbers of slaves traded or the number of Africans who perished along the way. After the first ship leaves for the New World what difference does the exact number make...the die was cast and the done deed become part of what Europe and America kept doing for the next two or three centuries. The whole thing is a human travesty of monumental proportions...I can’t really say how I feel about it...too much pain. I wrote this section for solo piano and I hurt when I play it...
I probably want you to hurt with me when you listen.
Part II
5) White and Black
This section was written for Roscoe, my great-grandfather. Roscoe was born in 1864 in Texas. He and his family moved to Booneville in Central Missouri when he was 14 or 15. As a Union Slave State, Missouri has always been ambiguous at best for African-Americans. I don’t know what it was like in the mid-1870s. Roscoe hit the road as a teenager with a friend, Turkey Tom, and lived pretty much like a murderous outlaw for the next 25 or 30 years. He was almost lynched for killing a man who slapped his wife. He stuck the ‘O’ on the Neal of his last name to make it easier to hide. Later in life he settled in Oklahoma and started a church. By the time he died during WWII he had redeemed himself and was something of a hero to his community there. My grandfather Felix was born in 1904, the 9th or 10th child in a family of 18. The last time Felix saw his father was when he was 5-years-old; Roscoe was waving goodbye hanging from the side of departing freight train. The section is in two parts: the first part is a nod to ragtime and stride piano. the bridge is played in straight time with no syncopation. Roscoe lived as a Black Man with the option to move over the tracks with the White People.
6) Felix Bebop
The line for Grandfather Felix’s section is built around a ‘Parker Blues’ progression. Charlie Parker wrote the first tunes over this progression.
7) Good Time Charlie’s Blues
My father, Brian, was born in 1953 in Kansas City. Ironically, he was called ‘Charlie’ by my grandfather because he would start dancing to a TV show called Good Time Charlie or something. I tried to write something that sounded like the type of jazz that was being played in the early to mid-60s when Brian was 10-years-old or so. I’ve always loved the music of Wayne Shorter and I looked to some of his ‘walking ballads’ from the mid-60s like House of Jade when I wrote this section.
8) Panther
My father left home when he was 11-years-old and took to living by his wits on the street. He became something of a teenage Roscoe by the time he was 16 or 17. I’m sure if it hadn’t been for my Uncle Pete, his older brother, he probably would not have survived his twenties. Uncle Pete joined the Black Panther Party becoming the head of the Kansas City Chapter. He recruited my father and inspired him to turn his life around. I don’t know what the Panthers mean to you or anybody else...but in my community the Panthers were seen in a positive light. I suppose the Panthers were naive in some of their politics, but we saw them as revolutionaries...heroes.
9) Back Home Where I’ve Never Been
In time the Panthers were destroyed from the outside as they became corrupted from the inside. My Uncle Pete left the country to escape from the authorities and has lived as an exile in Tanzania for the last 30 years where he has remained politically active. When the Panthers were destroyed my father saw it as the destruction of a dream. Disillusioned, he went back to the street life. Pete stayed in contact and convinced him to emigrate to Tanzania. When my father got there he told me that he cried...cried for finding a place where Black was just the color of his skin, not a bulls-eye on his soul. Rick wrote this piece when a friend of his was dying of cancer.
But it never sounded like that was what it was about...it sounds like what this section is about.
Part III
10) Wedding Song
In Tanzania, Brian met my mother, Mafutari Swai, in the village where they both lived. They are still married and live in Kansas City in my grandparents house. Rick had already written most of this for another wedding.
11) Muji Swai-O’Neal
I was born in Tanzania and lived my first three and a half years there. For my father, returning to Africa and having a child with an African woman was like a reconnection that brought him and me back into the life stream that would have been our home if not for the reality of slavery in our history. I was named Harold, but my mother and father still call me by my African Name, Muji. We lived the whole National Geographic bit in the country side, drum circles most nights while something was cooked on an open fire. I have memories from that time that I still confuse with moving and living back in US. After my younger sister died my parents brought me to America.
I wrote this section with little ‘Motown’ ornaments on the melody.
12) Wat Wuz Ur Name, Charlie
I still don’t know his name...probably never will. Doesn’t really matter that much anyway. All of us can trace it back to some nameless hero to whom we owe it all. We’re all at the end of an unbroken chain that started
somewhere in East Africa. Haven’t they traced it back to a female hominid they call ‘Lucy’?
Why not call her husband...everybodies’ father..., Charlie?
13) Charlie’s Sweet Cadenza
Thank you for listening to the story of my ‘Charlie’.
Harold and Rick would like to thank the following people without whom all of this would not have been necessary:
Steven Young, Bill Packer, John Elliott, and the men of F, S, & B ‘06 for their part in the composition, especially Chris Rasheed who played ‘Charlie’, Larry, Debbie, David and Michael Thompson for opening their home to us, Michelle Ryan and Dean Chapla and everybody else who got the posters out in Boulder, Matt Mayfield for the picture, Larry Bermann for the karate, everybody at the Boulder Center for Human Validation and Peoplemaking of Colorado, Donna Gail, Mary Hubbard, Rabbit, and the crowd up Left Hand Canyon who listened the first time, Craig Patterson and Gary Dunn at PME Records, Everett Freeman, Bobby Watson, Greg Osby, Jeff ‘Tain Watts, Andrew Hill, Wynton Marsalis, and Herbie Hancock for their tangible support and encouragement, Ed Bame and Martha and all the AKKA people in Kansas City, El Paso, Pueblo, Juarez, and Boulder...especially the people running schools: Mike Acosta, Santiago and Kari Barela, Tom and Dee Burt, Adrian Cordova, Matt and Michelle McDaniel, Sam and Katie Middleton, Jeff Nell and Andrea Jonson, Anthony Williams, Christina Williams, and the best Republican Mike Mentesana, Brian, Mafutari, Hakim, Alifa, and Chalis O’Neal, Lennie Bruce, Kenny Kirkland, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Jimi, Oscar De La Hoya, Johnny Tapia, Ali, Bruce Lee, Kwai Chang, Master Po, Keye Luke, Pat Morita, Kirk Russell, Roy Searcy, Steve Harvey, Sam Johnson and John Nichols from the House Band du Jour, Sonny Kenner, Jay McShann, Michael Brecker, John Scofield, Walter Reuther, Mother Jones, Elvin Jones, Joe Jones, Bobby Jones, Tiger Woods, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Picasso, Matisse, Paul Klee, Tony Soprano, Christopher, Marlon Brando, Adam Kabak, Lawrence Leathers, Kevin Cerovich, Ray Reed, Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, Dave Robicheaux, Alexis Arquelo Matthew Sahaad Muhammed, Dwight Braxton, Mickey Ward, Arturo Gatti, Jack Johnson, Bird and Diz, Ken Kesey, Moorey Amsterdam, Buddy Hackett, Rose Marie, Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff, Vlad the Impaler, George Clinton, Bootsy, Jed Clampett, Milburne Drysdale, Titian, Canaletto, Paula Poundstone, Richard Brautigan, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, Dosteovesky, Camus, Sartre, Gide, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ornette Coleman, Lawrence Block, Leon Russell, Ollie Gates, Colonel Sanders, Arthur Bryant, Marcel Duchamp, The Zig Zag Man, Yogi Bear, Boo Boo, Desi Arnaz, William Frawley, Vivian Vance, all the Lounge musicians in Vegas, Matthew Atkinson, Daniel Boorstin, Muddy Waters, Les Paul, Leo Fender, Moondog, Lisa, Logan and Peter, and....well, er...ah....everybody.