Weston, Randy [Randolph E.] (Brooklyn, New York, 6 April 1926) Pianist and composer Randy Weston first heard Thelonious Monk when Monk played with Coleman Hawkins in the mid-1940s. By the late 1940s and early ‘50s, Weston was among the few pianists to really assimilate some of Monk’s ideas. Initially a reluctant piano student, Weston developed a profound love for the music of Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, and other masters of black music. He started out working with a number of jazz and R&B bands, many in his neighborhood of Brooklyn, and in 1954 was the first jazz artist to record on the Riverside label. He was also drawn to African music through his high school buddy, bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, whose father was Sudanese. Abdul-Malik played the oud, an Egyptian ten-stringed lute, and together he and Weston used to listen to musicians in downtown Brooklyn play North African instruments. Abdul-Malik continued to explore North African music in a jazz context, both in collaboration with Weston and as a leader.Weston discovered Africa through other sources as well. He heard West African rhythms by way of Dizzy Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban explorations. In the 1950s, Asadata Dafora, the great drummer and founder of Dance Africa, introduced Weston to Guinean music and gave him advice he has never forgotten: “a drummer not only has to play but has to be a poet, too . . . to be able to tell stories with the drums he has to have fantastic depth.” Finally, he met an English professor turned jazz historian by the name of Marshall Stearns. Stearns was one of the first scholars he had heard trace the origins of jazz back to West Africa, and he sensed an immediate affinity. Beginning in 1958, Weston and Stearns put together a series of lectures/performances on the history of jazz for New York public schools that also toured several college campuses.By the time Weston had begun his long-term collaboration with trombonist/composer/arranger Melba Liston in 1959, he was already deeply immersed in the study of African music. He sought out ethnographic recordings from many parts of the continent and began hearing rhythmic, timbral, tonal, and spiritual qualities of African music in Louis Armstrong, Ellington, Charlie Parker, Monk, and in the blues more generally. Some of his earliest compositions, like “Zulu” (written in 1955) were paeans to African history and yet drew its harmonic and melodic language from Monk and Ellington. Weston’s early explorations of African culture coincided with the African independence movement, to which he and other musicians were deeply committed. Weston, after all, was founding president of the Afro-American Musicians’ Society. Along with Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Horace Parlan, and others, Weston composed works celebrating African freedom. In 1960, he put together a big band with artists from West and East Africa, Cuba, and the U.S. and recorded his spectacular four-part suite, Uhuru Afrika (Swahili for “Freedom Africa) was recorded in 1960. Arranged by Melba Liston with poetry/lyrics by Langston Hughes, Uhuru Afrika was a truly diasporic statement that both acknowledged Africa’s ancient roots and charted a new path for modern music. The following year, Weston embarked on what would be the first of several trips to Africa. Weston returned to Africa again in 1967, this time for a fourteen country tour sponsored by the State Department. By the tour’s end, he knew he could not return to a country short on spiritual values and long on racial tension, so he moved to Morocco—first to Rabat and later to Tangier where he opened the African Rhythms Cultural Center. Weston walked away from commercial opportunities in order to study with masters of traditional music, develop a dialogue with African artists of all genres, and to continue what had evolved into a spiritual quest. During his five-year stay in Morocco, he worked with the Gnawa, the descendants of slaves taken from sub-Saharan West Africa who were known for their sacred healing songs. Whether it is Congolese folk music, West African “Highlife,” or the healing songs of the Gnawa musicians of Morocco, Weston has drawn from the musical well of the entire black world, from blues to spirituals, Macbeth to Monk, without losing his individual voice. All streams of this music, including Monk’s, can be heard in the performances of his current group, “African Rhythms”: Talib Kibwe on alto, soprano and flute, Benny Powell on trombone, bassist Alex Blake, and percussionist Neil Clark. Robin D. G. Kelley Copyright Robin D. G. Kelley