ABSTRACT
Art Blakey’s enigmatic statements about Africa have long been a source of puzzlement and speculation. Blakey’s dismissive comments about the connection between jazz and African music have often been invoked to undermine the position more commonly taken in the post-civil rights era that jazz is deeply connected to Africa. Yet Art Blakey was one of the first jazz musicians to travel to Africa (in the late 1940s) and did so not as a musician on tour but in order to study religion and philosophy. Blakey’s music, moreover, tells a different story than his words, especially his recordings in collaboration with Afro-Cuban musicians at the time of Ghana’s independence in 1957. Unraveling Art Blakey’s relationship to the African diaspora necessitates exploration of three contexts pertinent to understanding the relationship of African
American music and culture to Africa in the mid-twentieth century: (1) anticolonialism, pan-Africanism, and Islam from the 1920s through the 1940s; (2) African independence, Afro-Cuban music, and religion in the 1950s; and (3) the indefinite nature of music signification. A rather extended historical discussion is required.
