Many people and jazz critics in particular often don't get what Randy Weston was about. There's a provincial (white) misunderstanding of the idea of Africa in the mythos of black America, and the aching symbolism of a black American translation of the idea of Africa. Weston and others knew in a deep way the enduring homelessness of black Americans in their own country, as well as the recency, from a historical and hereditary memory standpoint, of their forced removal, torture, family separation and brutal lives of violently enforced labor here. The adoption of Africanisms is a radically symbolic act, and, something like Sun Ra's Afro-Futurism, is a conscious strategy aimed at affirming a non-assimilated identity in a country that attempted total genocide and failed.
In many ways that white people have never and will never experience, "blackness" is constantly enforced in America. Kenny Clarke, when asked why he moved to Europe, said "Because I am not required to be a Negro here." This is something Americans do not understand and refuse to understand. Our racism is a peculiar form, arising out of our "peculiar institution." American blackness is a particular cultural reality. In some ways, it has been defined by white people as distinctly *not* white. For example, the cultures of funk, rap, hip hop, often adopted by middle class whites as a way of rejecting whiteness, but only insofar as they reject the trappings, but retain the enduring privilege. It's a white rejection of corny white style, which, ironically, tends to bring the corn to hip hop, rather than erasing it.
The sub-genre of Africanisms in American jazz music is highly politicized, consciously adopted, intentional, never intended to be literal and a form of resisting assimilation. Weston created a Romantic theater of a performance of a myth of Africa as a lost home, and his poetry was all the more gorgeous as a result.
It's not for nothing that the brilliant opener here is called African Village/Bed Stuy.
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