The time has come for the tale of the Sisyphus Syndrome.

Black American history as it is depicted in The Sisyphus Syndrome is a modern reworking of the famous classic Greek allegory about a king destined to perpetually keep a gigantic boulder from rolling over him and his people.
In the hands of playwright Amiri Baraka, this story symbolizes the contemporary struggle of African Americans fighting for a great democratic role.

But this ancestral struggle, inherited and passed down from one generation to the next, is made up of ascending and descending phases, as illustrated by the history curve designed by Amiri Baraka (cf. below).

The premiere of The Sisyphus Syndrome in Oakland, California, was anchored in the grand vein of revolutionary theatre of the 1960’s and in the uninterrupted tradition of the Black Art Movement.

It was this creation, initially staged in the form of a musical comedy by the East Side Center of Oakland, California, that inspired 3D Family to stage this Bop opera. To adapt it in a musical version in which the fifteen members of the Deep River Gospel Choir of Washington, DC, sing Baraka’s texts, accompanied by the relentless rhythm composed by Renzel Merrit (drums) and Jamaaladeen Tacuma (bass), arranged and orchestrated by David Murray.


HISTORY

As part of the history of the United States, there is a sort of recurring and laborious movement of time endured by Blacks. Every time they win a battle, they lose it again a few years later. Like an eternal starting over…
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois calls that the Sisyphus Syndrome. Dubois, a major African-American activist known for fighting all forms of racism and discrimination and a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP – the largest and oldest civil-rights organization in the United States), said that the struggle for the liberation of Afro-Americans could be defined in the same way as the Greek myth of Sisyphus. In that tale, the son of the Wind God, Sisyphus of Corinth was condemned to death, but when deal came to find him, he resisted, claiming he saw no reason why he should have to meet that end when he was still young and strong. The Gods then punished the impetuous Sisyphus. The famous king, too avid and greedy, was condemned for eternity to push a heavy rock towards the top of a mountain that he could never reach, because the rock would always fall back down before it reached its goal.

“Dubois was saying that every time Black Americans succeeded in rolling the rock of what is represented by civil-rights equality to the top of the mountain, the cruel gods always pushed that rock down the mountain, so that Sisyphus’s people had to start the struggle over and over again.” As if “the gods” added to the weight of this rock segregation, discrimination, the Jim Crow laws (which strengthened the old slave culture of the Southern States) and the Ku Klux Klan.
I therefore tried to isolate the historic tendencies of the struggle movements acting positively and those marked by tragic defeats for black people. So the end of the anti-slavery struggle is logically a part of an ascending tendency, while the founding of the Ku Klux Klan or the Jim Crow laws are part of a backward movement. I envisioned this work through the history of African Americans in the United States, using key movements, events and characters in this history.”

Amiri Baraka and David Murray explore the contemporary aspects of the Greek allegory of Sisyphus, symbolizing American society’s constant struggle to maintain and develop the democratic space, and more generally representing the fight of the “many” against the “few”…
Working on a selection of ten poems by Baraka, Murray has composed music that complements and gives life to this work.
The project was first presented at the East Side Center in Oakland, California, in May 2008, with the composer and the poet in attendance.
A musical review was inspired by this initial stage, adding a chorus out of the great singing tradition of the very Baptist Church of God of Christ, which for the occasion will trade in its holy repertory for these inspired by the poems of Amiri Baraka. The famous meeting of the sacred and the profane.


LINE UP

Amiri Baraka – poems and readings

David Murray – composition / direction, tenor sax, bass clarinet

Boots Riley – MC

Aamil Islam - Skeleton

Ranzel Merrit – drums

Jamaaladeen Tacuma – bass

Longineu Parsons – trumpet

Mingus Murray – guitar

Thorston Hudson Jr. – organ

The Deep River Gospel Choir – choir


BIOs

AMIRI BARAKA

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Amiri Baraka is the author of many novels, collections of poetry, plays, and music histories and critiques.
He first studied science at Rutgers University and later attended Howard University where he studied philosophy, religion and German and English literature. He then settled in Greenwich Village where he worked first in a warehouse for a music company. His interest in jazz dates from that time. He also joined the very young Beat Poets’ movement. These artists were the new bohemians who engaged in a vigorous and libertarian creativity. They produced a corpus of works dominated by spontaneity, a quasi-automatism in writing, to create a free, rhythmic prosody. This episode had a major influence on Baraka’s future writing. In 1958 he founded Totem Press which published the Beat idols like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Then, in 1960, he took off for Cuba, a journey that began his transformation into an activist artist.
Later he published Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (in 1963), as well as The Blues People, today acknowledged as one of the signature works of jazz criticism, especially with regard to the advent of the Free Jazz movement.
After the assassination of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, formerly known as Leroi Jones, left the Beat Poets and moved to Harlem, which was now committed to black cultural nationalism. He is also recognized as the initiator of the Black Art Movement in Harlem, the artistic branch of the Black Power movement.
In the 1980’s, Amiri Baraka became a full-time professor. In 1987, with Maya Angelou and Toni Morison, he was a reader at the commemorative ceremony for James Baldwin. In 1989 he won the American Book Award and the Langston Hughes Award.
In the 1990’s, he also participated in writing the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and in Warren Beatty’s film Bulworth.
Recently he collaborated in a project with the famous Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, Return to Gorée, a documentary on the African roots of Jazz and Black History.
A poet and revolutionary activist, Amiri Baraka is also famous for his readings of poems denouncing the political and cultural problems of the United States, the Caribbean countries, Africa and Europe. As a griot, he rages against the oppression of the weak and brings to mind a sort of public memory of present and past injustices. His revolutionary work attacks contemporary racism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and develops the principles and reasons behind Black Rebellion.
Nourished by jazz and the blues, Baraka’s writings have contributed greatly to an understanding of the various evolutions and changes that black music has undergone.
Amiri Baraka is a percussionist of words.


DAVID MURRAY

For many aficionados, David Murray is already something of a jazz dinosaur, if we consider the number of albums recorded, crowded theatres and awards that have crowned his career (Grammy Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Bird Award, Danish Jazz Par Prize, Guiness Jazz Festival, musician of the decade (1980) by the Village Voice….). And yet, with barely a quarter-century behind him, we still find verve and youthful inspiration expressed through his career that is so prolific in terms of both productions and musical orientations (from the World Saxophone Quartet of which he is a founder to his octet and including his big band and the Caribbean jazz of the GWO Ka Masters), all with the greatest musicians. David Murray is the worthy successor of the greatest names in jazz, and he is now contributing to the rise of young talents like Lafayette Gilchrist, a young pianist already hailed by critics.

“Just Bop and shut up!” That was impossible for the young David, a contemporary of free jazz, the last adventure of the fin-de-siècle jazzman. Impossible for this son of Methodists, who found in Coltrane and Ayler the figure of the spiritual Negro, not to be politicized to his very core. Today David Murray is in his fifties, with a 130 albums to his name and participation in another hundred recordings as invited guest.

At the end of the 1990’s people spoke in regard to David Murray of fusion, world music, even Pan-Africanism, after he undertook a backward journey through the Caribbean, the “little” Americas, via South Africa and Senegal.” Before starting that journey, David Murray lived the history of jazz: born in Oakland, he grew up in Berkeley and studied with Catherine Murray (David’s mother, an organist), Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, Stanley Crouch, Margaret Kohn and many others until he left for Ponoma College (Los Angeles), and then New York where he settled in 1975.

In New York he was encouraged by Cecil Taylor, with whom he played, and Dewey Redman. There were more meetings, men and music: Sunny Murray, Tony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Don Cherry. As part of Ted Daniels’ Energy band, he worked with Hamiett Bluiett, Lester Bowie and Frank Lowe.

In 1976, after his first European tour, David Murray founded one of his legendary groups, the World Saxophone Quartet (with which he came out in 2006 with a much-noted “Political Blues”) with Oliver Lake, Hamiett Bluiett and Julius Hemphill. He got into a period of intense creativity with one recording after another, in a variety of groups.

From Jerry Garcia to Max Roach by way of Randy Weston and Elvin Jones, David Murray had one encounter after another until 1978, when he developed his quartet and later octet and devoted himself to his own groups. Nonetheless he didn’t hesitate to get into other areas, working for different projects on strings (concert at the Public Theatre in New York in 1982), Ka drums of Guadeloupe (Creole, 1998, Gwotet in 2004 and a new album, ”The Devil Tried to Kill Me,” in preparation for 2009), or musicians and dancers from South Africa (M’Bizo, 1998).

Recently he threw himself into his Black Saint Quartet, with “Sacred Ground,” an album released in June 2007 (Justin Time) featuring the magical voice of Cassandra Wilson, an album whose sumptuous compositions pay homage to one of his richest periods under the legendary Italian label Black Saint, and digital reissue of this entire catalogue on the major digital downloading sites. This work was also followed by the rediscovery of 26 rare pieces on the DIW label, now available for downloading exclusively on Emusic, as a good way for fans to measure the expanse of an already dizzying career.

Always open to new territories, Murray is now working on writing a new musical opera with Amiri Baraka, after the homage to Pushkin he composed in 2005 with his friend Blaise Ndjehoya. An opera that won’t be out until 2009 or 2010. What is it? “There’s poetry, music and themes. Look, I wrote this composition this morning. It’s going to be entitled “You Vote, You Die.”

David Murray is not ready to put the brakes on his appetite for new musical flavours, or to concede.