Bobby Zankel's Biography
For Bobby Zankel, one of the greatest things Ornette Coleman ever said to him was, “Music is not a style, it’s an idea.” Says Zankel, “I love that statement because my music covers a lot of different areas without fitting anybody’s notion of style.”
For the esteemed Philadelphia-based alto saxophonist, who has played and/or collaborated with such modern music legends as Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Steve Coleman—and studied with Ornette Coleman, to whom a recent song, “The Trickster,” is dedicated—“a lot of different areas” might be an understatement. His bands have run the gamut from trios to big bands, from hard bop to free jazz to Latin and R&B. And then there’s dance.
Zankel’s revelatory new album, A Change of Destiny, recorded with his Wonderful Sound 8—an offshoot of his Warriors of the Wonderful Sound big band—is based on music he wrote in the early 2010s for a dance piece, The Spirits Break to Freedom. Created with distinguished photographer and printmaker John Dowell and dancer/choreographer Germaine Ingram, the work is a response to the discovery of slave quarters in George Washington’s President’s House—the first White House, located in Philadelphia.
Dowell took photographs of the excavation site where nine slaves were quartered. Zankel was inspired by the nighttime photos, which conjured a vision of the slaves dancing through the fog of history. The titles of the songs on the alternately high energy and soulfully searching; A Change of Destiny tell the story. “Naming Names” is about the identification of the nine slaves. “Ring Shout” channels the religious dance of African origin done by slaves. “Rituals of Resistance,” “Spirits Break to Freedom,” and “To Be a Human Being” need no explanation.
The band he assembled for the project is a new one, but as ever consists of closely tied Philadelphians: longtime Roy Haynes altoist Jaleel Shaw; Robin Eubanks, whom Zankel regards as “the best trombonist in the world”; violinist Diane Monroe, known for her work with Max Roach’s Double Quartet and the Uptown String Quartet; acclaimed pianist Sumi Tonooka, a “provocative and compelling” artist (New York Times); veteran jazz and R&B bassist Lee Smith (father of Christian McBride); and drummer for all seasons Pheeroan akLaff. Ruth Naomi Floyd, a distinguished composer and educator whose recordings have featured contemporary masters such as Terri Lynn Carrington, Gary Thomas, James Wideman, and Zankel himself, is the vocalist.
When Zankel moved to Philadelphia in August of 1975, Tonooka was the first musician he met and began playing with. He first met Shaw when the saxophonist was 13 and Eubanks when the trombonist (like Zankel a Buddhist) was a freshman in college. “It becomes easy to write when I know who I’m writing for,” says Zankel. “And having those players provides such a rich palette. I like a big band, but I prefer a midsize unit because you can hear everything. I love the transparency in Ellington’s music. No matter how busy or intricate my music is, I’ve never wanted to write music that people couldn’t hear or feel.”
Bobby Zankel was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 21, 1949. His father owned a violin that Bobby never heard him play; his older brother played a little clarinet. In school, starting in fourth grade, Bobby wanted to play the saxophone but was assigned the clarinet, an instrument that “never spoke to me.” After high school, he finally turned to the alto. “As soon as I picked it up, I said to myself, ‘I can do this.’
“Playing the saxophone was what I wanted to do every day. I mean, I was no child protégé. But you have to trust your instincts. People might try to tell you you’re crazy, and your instinct is based on some kind of a delusion. But if it’s coming from inside you, you’re gonna feel a lot better if you follow it. I had spent seven years learning to play a woodwind instrument and read music in a half-hearted way. At 17 my heart was touched, my intellect awakened, and I became completely devoted to this music, primarily through listening to records.”
Zankel attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, at the height of the protest era. “It was a madhouse,” he says. “I was only there a week and I thought I was gonna go to jail. I went to a demonstration about Dow Chemical. We were resisting in a building and the police responded by beating on some of the demonstrators with billy clubs. I reacted by throwing rocks, which I was convinced the police had pictures of.”
Having dodged that bullet, Zankel spent his days playing the alto all day, skipping classes. When he went home that summer, he took lessons with Sid Cooper, a distinguished saxophonist whose session credits included Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong. “He was a good teacher and a very nice person, and he really made me feel I could do this,” says Zankel. “So I went back to Wisconsin, but my head just wasn’t there and I dropped out. I started working in the post office in Brooklyn and saving money to go to Berklee [College of Music] up in Boston. During the summer of men on the moon, I was studying jazz and playing with R&B bands in Boston.”
“When I told my family I wanted to go to Berklee,” he continues, “they said they would not support that, but I could go back to Wisconsin and become a music major there. This proved to be a great twist of fate. After passing the audition to the music school I met the Dean who informed me that Cecil Taylor was coming to Madison to be the artist-in-residence. I had heard Cecil’s band (with Sam Rivers, Jimmy Lyons, and Andrew Cyrille) a number of times in New York, and they were the greatest performances I had seen. When I heard that he was coming, I got this chill in my body. I mean, it was destiny!”
Zankel found a mentor and, for two years, “We rehearsed and played almost every day.” When Taylor got a job at Antioch College in Ohio, he was able to bring along Lyons and Cyrille, and Zankel followed them there. “I I moved to Ohio thinking, man, I can be with Jimmy Lyons every day!” He played almost nothing but Taylor’s music, soon becoming a member of the legendary Cecil Taylor Unit Core Ensemble (the recordings have never been released). For the next 40 years, Zankel performed with Taylor periodically in New York and Europe, all the way to Taylor’s final historic performances at the Whitney Museum.
After moving back to Brooklyn in 1973 (and acquiring an undergraduate degree from Empire State College in New York), Zankel moved two years later to Philadelphia, where he was needed to care for his two young daughters (the elder, Astara, had Down’s Syndrome; the younger, Miriam, is now a chef and mother of four) while their mother studied for her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. He has lived in Philly ever since, marrying poet-activist Seka’afua adero-Zankel in 1997.
In 2001, he founded Warriors of the Wonderful Sound, Inc., which was dedicated to promoting new jazz and jazz education. Julius Hemphill, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Steve Coleman, and Muhal Richard Abrams were among the famous artists who wrote music for the 18-piece big band named after the organization.
One of the high points of Zankel’s career was using funding (Pew Foundation) to commission Abrams to compose a full-length composition for the big band. The AACM legend traveled from New York nine times to direct rehearsals of his through-composed work Soundpath in Philadelphia, where it was performed in 2012 for the first of only two times, with Abrams conducting. He encouraged Zankel to perform and record the piece, both of which occurred after Abrams’s death. The album, with Marty Ehrlich conducting, was released in 2020 on the Portuguese Clean Feed label. “As far as I know, it’s the only recording of a full-length piece covering a whole record in Muhal’s discography,” Zankel says.
Philadelphia introduced Zankel to any number of standout artists including Jymie Merritt, who is best known as bassist for the Jazz Messengers in the late ’50s and early ’60s but was a visionary all to himself. “He was a genius, a real visionary innovator with the heart of a mentor,” says Zankel, who played in Merritt’s Forerunners. “His system of rhythmic organization influenced me so much.” Zankel also had the good fortune to study, record, and perform frequently with the great innovative composer/saxophonist Odean Pope, and studied for 15 years with Dennis Sandole, a Philadelphia elder best known as John Coltrane’s teacher.
And then there is the bond Zankel formed with an imposing New Yorker, bassist and composer William Parker. In 2007, the altoist recorded an as-yet-unreleased album with Parker and pianist Marilyn Crispell at the acoustically wondrous, Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. In 2017, Zankel and his Wonderful 6 released Celebrating William Parker @65, a tribute to his friend and colleague that was released on the Polish Not Two label. It featured Parker, Diane Monroe, Muhammad Ali, trombonist Steve Swell, and legendary pianist Dave Burrell.
Looking for a label to release the Unity Temple recording, Zankel was directed by Parker to saxophonist Chad Fowler and his Mahakala label. As great as the playing on the recording was, Fowler asked to listen to and look at other things Zankel had recorded or written. What most captured his fancy was music from The Spirits Break to Freedom—not only the pieces that made it into the dance production, but also pieces that were left out. “It was a wide-ranging variety of concepts but with a narrative through-line,” says Zankel. “That’s what we decided to record.”
Zankel’s other recordings include Seeking Spirit (1992), featuring trumpet great Johnny Coles and saxophonist Odean Pope; Emerging from the Earth (1994), with violinist John Blake, pianist Uri Caine, and drummer Ralph Peterson; Human Flowers, with Crispell and drummer Newman Baker; Prayer and Action (1996), with trumpeter John Swana and vibraphonist Bryan Carrott; and the trio efforts, Transcend and Triumph (2001) and Many in Body, One in Mind (2008) with legendary drummer Edgar Bateman.
He has composed three jazz ballets and a jazz opera. For his composing, he has received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Jazz Composition Fellowship and the prestigious Pew Fellowship. He has balanced the artist’s life with over 30 years of teaching music in Pennsylvania’s state prisons.
And if all that wasn’t inspiring enough, Zankel has maintained a high level of activity as an artist and educator while contending with Parkinson’s disease. While he’s usually not one to go public with private concerns, he does so this time in the hopes that he serves as a positive example to others coping with illness: “My Buddhist practice of chanting, exercise, acupuncture, diet, and optimism are my tools.”
If the music on A Change of Destiny doesn’t lift you up, nothing will. •
Bobby Zankel: A Change of Destiny
(Mahakala Music)
Street Date: September 22, 2023
Web Site: https://mahakalamusic.com/
Media Contact:
Terri Hinte
510-234-8781
