Randy Weston, jazz pianist who traced Africa in music, dies
Randy Weston, an esteemed pianist whose music and scholarship advanced the argument—now broadly accepted—that jazz is, at its core, an African music, died Saturday at his home in New York. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by his lawyer, Gail Boyd, who said the exact cause was still being determined.
On his earliest recordings in the mid-1950s, Weston almost fit the profile of a standard bebop musician: He recorded jazz standards and galloping original tunes in a typical, small-group format. But his sharply cut harmonies and intense, gnarled rhythms conveyed a manifestly Afrocentric sensibility, one that was slightly more barbed and rugged than the popular hard-bop sound of the day.
Early on, he exhibited a distinctive voice as a composer. “Hi-Fly,” which he first released in 1958 on the LP “New Faces at Newport,” became a standard. And he eventually distinguished himself as a solo pianist, reflecting the influence of his main idol, Thelonious Monk. But more than Monk, Weston liked to constantly reshape his cadences, rarely lingering on a steady pulse.
Reviewing a concert in 1990, The New York Times’ Peter Watrous wrote of Weston: “Everything he played was edited to the essential notes of a phrase, and each phrase stood on its own, carefully separated from the next one; Weston sat rippling waves of notes down next to glossy and percussive octaves, which led logically to meditative chords.”
Even before making his first album, Weston was giving concerts and teaching seminars that emphasized the African roots of jazz. This flew in the face of the prevailing narrative at the time, which cast jazz as a broadly American music, and a kind of equal-opportunity soundtrack to racial integration.
“Wherever I go, I try to explain that if you love music, you have to know where it came from,” Weston told the website All About Jazz in 2003. “Whether you say jazz or blues or bossa nova or samba, salsa—all these names are all Africa’s contributions to the Western hemisphere. If you take out the African elements of our music, you would have nothing.”
As countries across Africa shook themselves free of colonial exploitation in the mid-20th century, Weston recorded albums such as “Little Niles,” in 1958, and “Uhuru Afrika” (Swahili for “Freedom Africa”), in 1960, explicitly saluting the struggle for self-determination. The latter of those recordings included lyrics written by Langston Hughes, and sales were banned in South Africa by the apartheid regime.
Both albums—and others throughout his career— featured the marbled horn arrangements of trombonist Melba Liston, who left an indelible stamp on Weston’s oeuvre.
In 1959 he became a central member of the U.N. Jazz Society, a group seeking to spread jazz throughout the world, particularly in Africa. In 1961 he visited Nigeria as part of a delegation of the American Society for African Culture, beginning a lifelong trans-Atlantic exchange.
After two more trips to Africa, he moved to Morocco in 1968, having first arrived there on a junket sponsored by the State Department. He stayed for five years, living first in Rabat and then in Tangier, where he ran the African Rhythms Cultural Center, a performance venue that fostered artists from various traditions.
Weston drew particular inspiration from musicians of the Gnawa tradition, whose music centered on complex, commingled rhythms and low drones. While in Morocco he established a rigorous international touring regimen and played often in Europe.
In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Weston released a series of high-profile recordings for the label Verve, all to critical acclaim. Those included tributes to his two greatest American influences—Duke Ellington and Monk—as well as a record dedicated to his own compositions, “Self Portraits,” from 1989.
Weston earned a Grammy nod in 1973 for his album “Tanjah” (nominated for best jazz performance by a big band), and in 1995 for “The Splendid Master Gnawa Musicians of Morocco” (in the best world music album category), a recording he produced and released under his name, but on which he left most of the playing to 11 Moroccan musicians.
In 2001, the National Endowment for the Arts bestowed Weston with its Jazz Masters award, the highest accolade available to a jazz artist in the United States. He was voted into DownBeat magazine’s hall of fame in 2016.
He also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and United States Artists, as well as awards from the Moroccan government and the Institute of the Black World.
He held honorary doctorates of music from Brooklyn College, Colby College and the New England Conservatory, and had served as artist in residence at universities around New York City. Weston’s papers are archived at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
In addition to his wife, Fatoumata Mbengue, Weston is survived by three daughters, Cheryl, Pamela and Kim; seven grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild. Weston’s first marriage, to Mildred Mosley, ended in divorce. A son, Azzedin, is deceased.
Randolph Edward Weston was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 6, 1926. His father, Frank Weston, was a barber and restaurateur who had emigrated from Panama, and who studied his African heritage with pride. Randy’s mother, nee Vivian Moore, was a domestic worker who had grown up in Virginia.