In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton's band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension Foundation, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists-musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists-passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra's participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up-to-date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.
Industry Reviews
"The Dark Tree is just wonderful. One cannot understand the history of Black arts on the West Coast without a thorough assessment of this movement; Isoardi knows this history so well and tells a much bigger story. The book does a fantastic job of capturing the nitty-gritty nature of the music scene and resurrecting local figures in the Arkestra who have never gotten any press for their astounding musicianship. This is a remarkable book." -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of * Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original *
"This is a revelatory document, virtuosically combining scholarship and oral history to connect the dots of African American music on the West Coast. Far more than a mere historical 'overdub' of an underdocumented scene, this book disrupts the mythic notions of jazz history, showing instead how music and community unfold as one. Both a celebratory and a cautionary tale, it also delivers some of the most frank and eye-opening musicians' accounts since Arthur Taylor's Notes and Tones." -- Vijay Iyer, musician and composer
"In these pages, Horace Tapscott says to the audience, 'This is one more you wrote through us.' And this is what Isoardi has done here: given voice to the nearly lost history of a revolutionary community movement through its key players. Epic in scope, dazzling in detail, and sensual as any Coltrane solo, this rare book-informative, intimate, lyrical, scholarly, nuanced, and essential-reads like no history book you've read before." -- Chris Abani, author of GraceLand
"An impressively constructed tapestry of voices, it includes memories and opinions from myriad people while maintaining a strong narrative thread through lsoardi's authoritative voice. . . . lsoardi's interviews with dozens of members-not one of whom declined to participate-recover a wealth of information crucial to the history of Los Angeles jazz. In the process, he has made The Dark Tree a truly collaborative project that itself shares in the communal spirit of the UGMAA."
-- Matthew Blackwell * The Wire *
"Though Horace passed away in 1999, his Arkestra continues to play with three generations of players while moving forward with playing international festivals. This book is essential to understanding their ethos of paying the music forward."
-- Mike Sonksen * L.A. Taco *
