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. 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. The three contexts are; anticolonialism, pan-Africanism, and Islam from the 1920s through the 1940s; African independence, Afro-Cuban music, and religion in the 1950s; and the indefinite nature of music signification. The chapter endeavors to illuminate the principal political, religious, and musical contexts through which Art Blakey's travels to Africa and his African diasporic musical explorations of the 1950s might profitably be interpreted.
