“If You’re Not Still Learning, You’re Still”: A Conversation with Kahil El’Zabar on the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble at Fifty

Canadian journalist Graydon Carter once noted, “We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. ” Given these attributes, the mastodon descendant is an apt symbol for Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. The trio’s original inspiration comes from the animal, with the imagery of El’Zabar serving as the trunk and the two horn players as the animal’s ears. You can even see an approximation of this idea in the photo above. Since 1974, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble has excelled at providing music that speaks directly to the human spirit and inspires listeners to connect on a deeper and more meaningful level. These successes have not always come easy, with many not fully appreciating the trio’s contributions. Even in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) – a paragon of meaningful, free, and creative communication – the Ensemble was often seen as an outsider. But time has confirmed the significance of El’Zabar’s work with the Ensemble. After a half century, the Ensemble is still making art that has significant weight, as shown on the forthcoming album, Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit (Spirit Muse, 2024).

An elephant’s trunk contains up to 150,000 separate muscles, with no bone and little fat. It is essential to the animal’s survival. The association of the appendage with El’Zabar in the context of the Ensemble is apt. He brings to the trio the strength of almost sixty years of collaborations with Gene Ammons, Dizzy Gillespie, Pharoah Sanders, Stevie Wonder, Lester Bowie, Nina Simone, Archie Shepp, Eddie Harris, David Murray, Donny Hathaway, Malachi Favors, and many more. He also provides his experiences as chairman of the AACM for seven years. The entirety of his background is critical to the continued perseverance of the trio, even as its other musicians have changed over the years. But reflecting the pachyderm’s wisdom, El’Zabar knows he can still learn from his younger bandmates – trumpeter Corey Wilkes and baritone saxophonist Alex Harding. Like the big ears they represent, Wilkes and Harding bring a broad musical perspective, one that incorporates more contemporary works in R&B and hip hop into the group. 

As a result, Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit synthesizes older musical ideas with newer ones and, in the process, underscores their connectivity. This is perhaps best seen in “The Whole World.” The composition itself is a century-old spiritual that has been covered by some of the most important singers in history, including Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson. In playing it, El’Zabar uses a steady propulsive rhythm that sounds ancient yet, in its repetition, also oddly reminiscent of sampling. The accents added by horns and strings hint to ‘70s R&B. And the entire track is indelibly funky. 

Similarly, “Great Black Music” – an original composition often incorrectly attributed to the Art Ensemble of Chicago – finds a hypnotic kalimba/mbira-led groove providing a blueprint for the entire piece. El’Zabar is arguably one of the top practitioners in the West in incorporating the thousands of years old instrument into improvised music. The song takes the kalimba/mbira groove to build into a slow march, one which simultaneously reflects the lyricism of Ellington and Strayhorn, the boldness of Charles Mingus, and a trumpet solo reminiscent of Roy Hargrove. The two-part message behind these confluences of musical ideas is clear. First, an admiration of the great lineage of Black Music, both past and present. Second, despite socially imposed barriers, we are all united by a higher power.  

We sat down with El’Zabar before he kicked off his fiftieth Black History Month tour to discuss the new album and the legacy of the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. 

PostGenre: The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble turns fifty this year. The group has had different members, besides yourself, throughout its existence. What do you think is the constant thread for that group, across all of its different iterations?

Kahil El’Zabar: That’s a good question. I’d say the consistent thing has been both physical and non-physical fellowship. I’ve been very fortunate to have great relationships with great musicians. We share camaraderie as we socialize and hang together.

For instance, [trombonist] Joe Bowie, who played in the group for about fifteen years with me and [saxophonist Edward] Wilkerson, just did big shows with the current group in Paris and Brussels. Joe said to me, “Man when I start thinking about all the crazy stuff we did. The beautiful things we did. Our friendship. It all goes into the music.” And that’s very true. 

It reminds me of my time with Dizzy Gillespie. I played with Dizzy in Geneva, Switzerland, back in the ‘70s. Our performance was supposed to finish at eleven o’clock, but Dizzy was such a great showman and musician, so we didn’t finish until one in the morning. I was playing the congas, and my hands were raw after four and a half hours of playing. Mickey Rourke, a great drummer, was also playing at that gig. I decided I was going to go back to the hotel. Dizzy asked me where I was going and told me we should hang out, go get breakfast, or whatever. I was tired and just wanted to sleep. But Dizzy said, “The music’s not just on the bandstand; it is in the way we live. So, if you want to know anything about Bird, it’s not going to be in the notes. It’s going to be in the stories that I tell you. So let’s go to breakfast.” Of course, he was right. That camaraderie and the experiences are an integral part of the chemical and intellectual development of the music. I’m very thankful to have had the relationships I have and to play music with such great musicians.

PG: Do you feel that camaraderie has changed as you have progressed from being a young musician to an elder statement of the music?

KEZ: In a way, the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve had to become a student because things change. When Henry Huff, Edward Wilkerson, and I decided to form this trio, we were going out and doing bills with people like Joe Henderson, Joanne Bracken, or Old and New Dreams. Of course, we were scared. These were the masters, and we had weird instrumentation. We decided we had to play really strong. We had to play very hard because we wanted to create names for ourselves and say we were capable and deserved to be there.

After you’ve been around for a while, if you’re not still learning, you’re still. So, as I went from playing with people who were my peers to [current band members] Corey [Wilkes] and Alex [Harding], who are young enough to be my children, I continued to learn. Corey and Alex both come from the hip-hop generation, which, in my opinion, moves backward and forwards. I’m the last of a generation born when the mode of life expression moved side to side. So, I had to change my whole orientation. It’s similar to Miles [Davis]. Miles played with [John Col]trane, Cannonball [Adderley], Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb, and Paul Chambers but had to change to make his electric music. Miles had to learn how to sound like Wawa Watson.

I’ve had to learn the idioms of hip hop and house. I’m from an older generation than that music, but you can hear it in my music today because I had to become a student of the other players. Without studying them, I couldn’t have truly equal communication. You have to allow yourself to hear others and accept changes that happen with that to form a new conversation. And so, with that perspective, the relationship changed. 

PG: Alex Harding plays baritone sax in the current incarnation of the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. Granted, they play the same instrument, but there is something about Alex’s sound that is reminiscent of Hamiet Bluiett, whom you had worked with a lot over the years.

KEZ: Well, Hamiet was also Alex’s teacher.

PG: Ah, that makes sense. Do you have any favorite moments from your times with Hamiet?

KEZ: Oh, man. 

You know, I think my favorite moment with him was a time when I wasn’t even playing. I was just a fan of his back when he was with [Charles] Mingus. You would hear George Adams play all this shit on the tenor [sax] and then, afterward, Hammiet went to an even higher register than George did. I was like, “What kind of dude is this?” 

I was with George Lewis when he was offered a gig with Mingus. Douglas Ewart and I had gone with George to a place in Chicago called The Quiet Night. Some folks had told Mingus about George, and this was the first time George met him. I had seen the chemistry between Mingus and everyone from Don Pullen to Dannie Richmond to George Adams to George Lewis. But I saw Mingus respond to Bluiett in a way very different from how he responded to other musicians. You could tell how Mingus thought Bluiett was special.

When I studied with Atu Harold Murray, he sent me to New York to study with his teacher, Chief Bey, who played with Olatunji. It was on that trip that I met Bluiett. I was seventeen and our chemistry was apparent from the beginning. Bluiett also had a sense of dry humor that sometimes made people think he was being aggressive, but he was actually teasing in a tender mode. And towards the end of his life, when he got sick, I went and brought him from New York to live with me for two years. He was my big brother.

PG: Going back to your comment about weird instrumentation, in George Lewis’ book on the AACM [A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago, 2008)] it is mentioned that even in an organization as broad in scope and open as the AACM, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble was seen as an outsider. Why do you think that was? 

KEZ: It’s because of preconceptions about my instrument. There are not a lot of people who fully see percussion as an intellectual voice. Western development often looks at percussion as not as intellectual as other instruments. 

I had a real concept, I had a real voice. And I am a composer. The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble wouldn’t have worked if I didn’t understand arranging. The Ensemble has always been three instruments, but the sound always had a breadth and bigness to it within its minimalism. That’s due to the voicings I’ve chosen for songs that are considered simple or motifs. That approach is very different from that associated with mathematics and the chromatic scale. It’s different from Roscoe [Mitchell]’s approach in terms of multiphonics. It is also different from drawing on the historical associations from ragtime to jazz, as you can see in the works of [Henry] Threadgill. I think what I do is as sophisticated as their music, but it comes from a different vernacular.

I’ve never seen percussion limited in terms of complexity. I have also never limited the melody to instruments like saxophones, guitars, or violins. When [the Ensemble’s] music first came out, to some people it seemed not as advanced. But I’m very proud to say that even my first recordings are still being played on the radio fifty years later. I know my concept was valid and as competitively as strong as those of my peers whom I greatly respect, listened to, and borrowed from to develop my voice. People say the hardest thing to do is to find your own sound. So, when everyone tells me that the Ethnics are very different, it’s like telling me that I authentically developed a sound that was all my own. To me, that was the cradle of the AACM; each person could develop their voice and then come together and have tolerance of diversity within our performance and positional directions. I’m very thankful there was a platform like that where I could develop a voice that, hopefully, at some time, will be understood as having the same intellectual value as these other approaches.

PG: Do you feel that your time studying in Africa is part of what made your approach to percussion different from other musicians? [editor note: El’Zabar formed the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble a year after returning to the US from nine months studying at the University of Ghana at Accra under the tutelage of J.H. Kwabena Nketia. Nketia was an acclaimed musicologist who is probably the most published and best-known authority on African music and aesthetics in the world.]

KEZ: No. I mean, I went to Lake Forest College, which I read just last week was the number one liberal arts college in the country. Tuition there cost fifty grand back in 1971, so the school is very wealthy with many resources available. I studied composition at Lake Forest and was actually in a classical program there.

However, I went to Ghana as part of Lake Forest’s exchange program. I saw the sophistication of the sophisticated music the traditional drummers there play. If I said in the native language “That’s my home”, the musicians in Ghana could phonetically reproduce that on the drum. They have a very sophisticated form of complex syntaxes of harmonic arpeggios. There were compositional complexities in regards to being able to duplicate language into music.

So, it’s not only the rhythms, the patterns, and the grooves. Whether it’s Schoenberg in twelve-tone scale, traditional chromatic scale, or the West African pentatonic, it’s still all the same main notes. Or, in the case of Indian music, the complexity of three places of a note in one. But they are all still the same vibrations, frequencies, and all of these things. You should use the various social orientations of how music is interpreted to communicate the story through music that no culture is superior to the other. European composition is not superior to any other form of organizing music. It is one of the advanced forms, but not the only one.

I knew from my studies in Africa, as well as my studies in European classical music that the African systems were sophisticated. When everyone else is looking at from [John Col]trane or [Maurice] Ravel, I’m coming out of the music of [Babatunde] Olatunji.

The other point is that I think my work is just coming into perspective for many people, which is interesting. A music critic said two weeks ago that I was emerging with Lakecia Benjamin, Makaya McCraven, and Shabaka Hutchings. I’ve been doing this for fifty years. The recordings document the quality of my consistent level of performance as a composer and player. But because people are now more aware of my music than before, a younger generation seems to connect with my mission, which I’m thankful for.

PG: The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble started as a quintet but quickly became a trio and has stayed a trio since. 

KEZ: Yeah, it’s usually two horns and percussion. The reason we were reduced from a quintet was mostly due to economics and social conditioning. We went to Europe for almost a year. Most of the groups at that time would go to Europe for a long period because the opportunities were better there, in terms of making money and the level of performance. It wasn’t just performing at a loft, an art center, or a bookstore. These were real concerts, and we wanted to be a part of everything that the Art Ensemble, AIR, and the Creative Construction Company with [Wadada] Leo [Smith] and Leroy [Jenkins] did. Some of the guys in the group were nervous about going and didn’t feel like we needed to. But, Edward [Wilkerson], “Light” [Henry Huff] and I realized we had to do it. It didn’t matter whether everyone else thought going there was necessary. We decided to go with just the three of us and find a sound within the uniqueness of our instrumentation. Economically, you can move quicker with three people than with five anyway. I’m very thankful for those earliest experiments in figuring out how to create a full sense of harmony, how to communicate with one another, and how to get horn players to learn to play rhythmically at the same time as playing harmonically. Those things made the band sound fuller than what appeared in instrumentation.

PG: The idea of you having a trio with two horns came to you in a dream.

KEZ: Right. At first, I was a little scared about reducing the group down to a trio. I wasn’t sure how it could exist as only a trio. I started thinking about it and ultimately saw the head of an elephant. I saw the trunk coming out of the front and the two ears flapping as if getting through it all. I realized I was the middle part; the trunk. And each of the two horns was going in a different direction, as though on the ears of an elephant. That image of the elephant – which is also a symbol of luck and strength – gave me the confidence to move forward with that sound.

PG: Do you often take inspiration from images like that when it comes to creating music?

KEZ: Yeah, I mean, I pretty much live my life in the pursuit of the creative and that goes beyond music. Everywhere I go, people ask me to cook because they’ve heard about my cooking.

When I’m performing with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, at least 90% of what I’m wearing I made myself, because I believe when I’m in that particular ritual I need to adorn with the armor that’s of the same creative spirit as what I do with the music. 

I’m lucky that, pretty much my whole life, I’ve done only creative things to earn my living. When I was with Nina Simone, I made all her clothes. My parents owned a bridal shop; a formal wear business. We were taught that when you live in a family and with their own business, you have to work. So I grew up working for my family. When the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble was in Europe in the mid-70s, I got to meet incredible fashion designers like [Jean Paul] Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, and John Galliano. They’re all around my age, between 70 and 72 years old. It meant a lot to me to meet with them. I try to take something from everything and then find ways to express it through my ways of expression.

PG: One thing that always stands out the most about your music is the spiritual component. You have also previously worked with Pharaoh Sanders, who made very spiritually focused-works. In a prior interview, you were quoted as saying that “Genre is a specific observance of what becomes the norm in a certain style of music, and there are individuals who move beyond style, to direct communication to the source of the spirit.” How does an artist find themselves in direct communication with the source of the spirit and not overrun by the status quo of what other people think they should sound like?

KEZ: Man, you’re asking great questions. I’ll go to Miles again because a lot of the descriptions besides his genius from a creative perspective are his aloof or mysterious persona, his arrogance, and those kinds of things. When you think about the purity of Miles’ tone, it’s the acceptance of his vision as a way to find internal strength. The unknown becomes much more of a peering opportunity to discover than the known. To me, it all comes down to trust; whether you can trust in your heart that your intelligence can interpret and allow you to express something genuine with a seeking of purity.

PG: Which also implicates the question – what exactly is music and where does it come from? It’s obviously more than just a collection of notes and rhythms.

KEZ: For me, music is the vibrational essence of the universe. We’ve been privileged with the opportunity to interpret it, as both performer and listener. Music’s core is profound magic. And its effect is endless.

PG: Do you have any sense of the future of this music – “spiritual jazz” seems to be the term most people use – in a society that too often commoditizes music and undervalues it?

KEZ: Oh, yeah. Man, I love your questions. If you think about the current state of technology regarding robotics and artificial intelligence, we can predict that human behavior and labor will not be the same in the future. And if that is true, then the relationship of time associated with functionalities, such as labor, would have to take a different turn. If it does, we have to start talking about what the future role of human beings would be if it’s not the same as what was considered to be a responsible mature adult for the last two thousand years. When you look at cultures, it’s the art-making that usually determines the advancement or the lack of advancement of that particular culture. 

Looking at art and music and thinking about this relationship to the metaphysical that we call spirit, we’re saying something that’s not of the body. It comes from something above the body. There has always been spirit. You can’t physically hold it. You can hold an instrument and have sound go through you. You can feel different things from that, but you don’t have a physical barrier. So, names like spiritual jazz, even jazz itself, are a reaction to the human desire to claim. But what you feel from [John Coltrane’s] A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965) or from [Pharaoh Sanders’] “The Creator has a Master Plan” [Karma (Impulse!, 1969)] is an epiphany beyond mechanical operation into something that becomes internally infinite. Or, at least, the desire for that. 

As we move out of the force of labor, if we can help one another acquire a higher consciousness, we can find importance in using time differently than we have in the past. Pretty much everyone will become an artist or musician. There will be frequencies and exchanges that produce variances of harmony. Very different from war. Very different from hate. How long can we keep going in patterns that we all see are destructive? If there’s anything that the idea of spiritual jazz represents, it is an internal connection that the music brings us.

The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble’s ‘‘Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit’ is out March 8, 2024 on Spiritmuse Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Kahil El’Zabar may be found on his website.

Photo credit: Christopher Andrew