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State of the Art


BY MICHAEL ENDELMAN

Who is Olu Dara? Depends who you ask. To jazz aficionados, he’s an accomplished trumpet player and a graduate of New York’s 1970s avant-garde loft scene. To hip-hop heads, he’s known as the father of multi-platinum rapper Nas. And to thousands of blues and world-music fans, he’s recognized as an excellent singer and songwriter with a taste for pan-African rhythms, deep country blues, and folksy character sketches. But that last one’s a recent development.

Dara didn’t release his first solo album, 1998’s In the World: From Natchez to New York (Atlantic, 1998), until he was in his late 50s, but the material was far from new. “I’ve been doing this style of music for almost 25 years. I just didn’t have a record out,” he explains over the phone from his apartment in New York. When the album finally did appear, it got a glowing response from critics and fans, who were charmed by Dara’s laconic delivery and cross-genre scope. He’s followed that success with the new Neighborhoods (Atlantic) and a tour that will bring him and his Natchezsippi Dance Band to the Paradise next Thursday.

Neighborhoods continues Dara’s Taj Mahal–esque mix of easy-going cadences, conversational vocals, and a battery of American, Caribbean, and African rhythmic sources. Which doesn’t strike him as unusual. “If you look at early American rhythm and blues, those rhythms were always there. Now people are sophisticated and they have to name them. Back then, they just called it rhythm and blues.”

Still, Dara’s ease in a variety of contexts —from Fela-style Afrobeat (“Massamba”) to N’awlins funk (“Herbman”) to urbane soul (“Butterfly”) — is striking. He says the eclecticism is a result of growing up in Natchez, Mississippi, where he listened to music ranging from “opera to country blues and everything in between.” He also spent a few years in the Navy, an experience that introduced him to plenty of non-American music, including the Bahamian sea shanty “Out on the Rolling Sea” (made popular by Joseph Spence), which gets a touching interpretation on the new disc.

Dara’s time playing on New York’s heady jazz scene with Henry Threadgill and David Murray also informed his new work, though not in a positive way. “There wasn’t enough variety in the rhythms — the same walking bass line and swing beat all the time,” he remembers, as if recalling a bad dream. “It was like eating the same meal every day. The audiences didn’t seem to be happy, they were more analytical than anything. People were dealing with it like it was a sport — who’s the best, who’s the fastest. To me, music is a joyous occasion. It has nothing to do with anything anthropological.”

For an artist whose new-found success owes much to his recording career, Dara doesn’t have much interest in the medium. “I don’t listen to recorded music, never really did,” he quips. “Any music that’s live, I can appreciate . . . and whoever’s there when I’m buying my little drink is the greatest artist to me, the one who’s playing. With the advent of CDs and records, people can listen to music all alone. But to me, music is not a thing of solitude, it shouldn’t be. The personal connection, the audience participation — that’s what music is really about.”

Olu Dara plays the Paradise, 969 Commonwealth Avenue, next Thursday, March 8. Call 423-NEXT.