WILLIAM ROPER - LOST IN THE SANDS

I view this recording as the beginning of the final leg of my journey with Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. This is true notwithstanding the fact that neither Horace nor the ARK are playing on it. Still it would not exist without the P.A.P.A., its various arms, its history, its members, fellow travelers and spirit. I am a Los Angeles native. I was born in the 1950’s. I started playing music in the 3rd grade. I grew up in the West Adams and South Central communities and, except for my last year of high school, attended public schools in those neighborhoods. Yet I had not heard of Horace Tapscott and the ARK until ¿1987?, when I was a little past 30. My friend Joseph Mitchell and others, tell me this is not true. He says that the ARK came to Locke High School and played in the gym; that I was there. This is plausible, even likely, but I don’t remember it. One evening in 1987, I came home to find a message on my answering machine. It went something like this: “Roper. This is Horace Tapscott. They tell me you play tuba. I need you, man!” So I called him back. The gig was, I think, for the first L.A. Fringe Festival. I figured it was just a gig. Little did I know that almost 40 years later, I would still be with the ARK. Not that I have been with them continuously. It is a special organization, often with some truly trying dynamics happening. For years at a time, I couldn’t handle those dynamics. For whatever reasons, I would leave and for whatever reasons I’d come back. This album is a tribute to that long-standing and ongoing relationship.

One thing about Horace is that he made room for everybody. It didn’t matter that when I started with him, my main focus was as a classical musician. My role when I was with the ARK, was to play the ARK’s music in the ARK’s tradition. So I had to get with it. But Horace was sincerely interested in making what I did work in his context. There was / is space for me to be me. This is not the case everywhere. This project is a reflection of that openness. These pieces trace the arc of the four decades of my ARK-adjacent musical life. They all require improvisation to varying degrees. One of them is a total improvisation. Two of them have spoken word. All of the players on here have had some association with Horace and the ARK. Joseph Mitchell played Horace’s “Ancestral Voices,” with Horace as soloist with the Watts Symphony. Vinny Golia shared the stage with Horace in Europe and played with the ARK at least once. Devin Daniels, the youth of America, is a present member of the ensemble.

This recording of Wumpas, is from a 1992 live performance given in the theater at Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles. These are Vinny’s notes:

"The Wumpas series was meant to be a longer series of pieces for improvisation in a chamber-like setting. I started this series to explore a lot of the woodwinds I did not have the opportunity to play in a louder setting. I was also interested in the juxtaposition of sonic weights, ie: piccolo vs tuba, contrabass clarinet against percussion, etc, so when Roper asked if I had a piece for tuba, percussion and I could perform also, I quickly pulled Wumpas I & II out of my composition pile. I was just starting the series at that time. I remember that the concert went very smoothly. In thinking back, I believe it was put on by the Independent Composers Association."

Bleu is derived from a soundtrack composed for a video installation. It is the fourth iteration in the series Malambing Thang, by the collaborative team Les Malambing - video artist Joseph Santarromana and myself. The soundtrack was based on music from Act II of Wagner’s Siegfried, scored for a Hammond organ with Leslie speaker sample and Native American mouth bow only. Later it struck me that the video could be shown while I provided an improvised commentary on the tuba. For this recording, I added other instruments as well.

While the original work is based on music from Siegfried, it is not about Siegfried. Nor is it just about the color blue. I’ll just point out:
1. The Hammond B3 organ was developed for churches as a less expensive alternative to pipe organs. The instrument was embraced by Black churches to such an extent that for decades its sound and inflections were inseparable from gospel music. From there it made itself felt in R&B, jazz and blues music.
2. The Native American mouth bow is there to provide some balance to the heavy European-ness and modernity of those Wagner chords, to provide something from the “New World.” In the same spirit, I’ve added a gankogui bell and trumpets I have made from the horns of the eland antelope and the metatarsal of a giraffe.

Lost in the Sands is an improvisation. It has been edited to make a more cogent piece because free improvisation is, well, free. While it can all be engaging at the live event, not necessarily so for the artifact. It is the tune on this project that would not exist without the ARK. Back at the beginning of the decade, The Village created a video project pairing some of the younger members of the ARK with some of the old folk. I was tickled to be asked to participate. They paired me with Devin Daniels. Lawd knows why, but it was an inspired idea. I recommend you watch the video. Devin is a brilliant and sensitive musician, with a subtle and understated wit. The format was to play and then converse. We travelled through some interesting and unexpected territories in both mediums. And yes, we ended up in the desert for a moment. All of that sand. A place I often go walkabout. A place I can almost, but never quite, allow myself to get lost in. Because I always have my compass. In this case, my compass was Devin.

In the early 1980’s, Joseph Mitchell and I formed the percussion and tuba duo Judicanti Responsura. It served as a vehicle to compose and perform our own compositions as well as to commission works by other composers. All of our work has an activist bent. It is always about something. The duo exists to this day. Sweet Time is Precious is one of my favorite pieces by Joseph. It was not composed as a tuba feature and certainly not as a spoken word piece. It does have an improvised solo section and spoken word is a big part of what I do. Joe seemed to be all right with how things turned out at the recording session. He says:

"When I composed this piece I had no idea how prescient its creation would be. Composed in 1991, Sweet Time Is Precious (Breasts Do Not a Woman Define) was composed as a tribute to breast cancer patients. Regrettably, my wife would be stricken with breast cancer in 2005 and die from the disease in 2023. The work's essence explores personal intimate relationships, superficial notions of beauty,  spiritual peace, and human mortality. It is scored for tuba, vibraphone, gongs, and metal mixing bowls."

- William Roper