Kahil El’Zabar has an enduring allegiance to the spoken word, which is not always the case among musicians. The percussionist and bandleader is a published poet and struggled to create a performance space a few years ago, the First Amendment Cafe, for music and verse. As curator of Steppenwolf’s interdisciplinary “Traffic” series, he’s thrown together musicians and wordsmiths from Amiri Baraka to Sam Shepard to Kurt Vonnegut in often unexpected ways.
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El’Zabar has a thing for dance too. He takes to the hoof amid conga and kalimba solos in such bands as the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble and Afrocentrix. In the early 80s he started bringing African drummers and avant-garde jazzmen to hip-hop dance clubs around town to play against the synthesized rhythms–an early version of what later became known as “acid jazz.”
The fortysomething El’Zabar expects that most of the attendees will be less than half his age. “The spoken-word community at this point is very sophisticated; it’s cross-generational,” he points out. “The audiences are often younger, but they’re listening to older poets and readers. They’re looking for extensions of what they’ve been listening and dancing to for the last three to five years.” That makes them a perfect target for El’Zabar, who has increasingly preoccupied himself with passing artistic wisdom from his generation to the next. Gangsta rappers need not apply. “The Chicago hip-hop community is different from those in New York and LA. They’re speaking to community, to a cleansing, rather than about ego and sex; they see that they can perform a service as communicators. I’m very inspired by it.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Dan Machnik.
