After
he stops singing,
you try to get your head back under your
hair and figure out where this kick-ass
holy man is coming from.
From
the way Dwight Trible handles "A
Love Supreme," you can tell that
Coltrane has taken over his spirit, a
phenomenon he refers to as being born
again. "We must extend a hand of
peace to all mankind," he cries
grandly, as his pianist, bassist and
drummer, known collectively as the Oasis
of Peace, sound the booming African beat
we all got to know from Trane's signature
tune.
For
the past few years, Trible has been
letting out his hair-raising yowls so
they can be heard all over Leimert Park
in Los Angeles. He stands on the little
platform where the musicians play at the
World Stage Performance Space or he leads
the Voices of Ugmaa, standing for the
Union of God's Musicians and Artists
Ascension, at the eulogies and tributes
at the converted movie theater around the
corner. He seems to feel they can hear
him on the banks of the Nile and points
south.
It
may be true,
because Leimert Park is known
the world over these days as the Brooklyn
Heights of Los Angeles; and the musicians
that live there are seen as the M-Base
Collective of the West. One of these was
Trible's mentor, the late Horace
Tapscott, a pianist whose roots go back
to the revolutionary band of beboppers
that Billy Eckstine, Mr. B., once led.
Tapscott
kept the revolution going, trundling a
piano on a flatbed truck to play for the
beseiged residents who were surrounded by
the National Guard during the Watts
riots.. And when he heard Trible shortly
after the 1992 disturbance, he took him
aboard the Pan African People's Arkestra,
to sing Tapscott numbers like "Why
Don't You Listen?," "Warriors
All," "People Like Us,"
"Little Africa" and
"Thoughts of Dar es Salaam."
"My
ears are radars charting the whispers of
my ancestors," Tapscott said, and
Trible seems to follow his example on the
stages where he sings these martial
numbers, for which he draws on his gospel
background.
Trible
does do love songs, however, "Green
Dolphin Street" or "From This
Moment On." But they come out in
wonderfully sinister versions during
which the Trible voice, ranging from a
silken Billy Eckstine pianissimo to a
wide open Al Hibbler fortissimo,
constructs a series of wordless cadenzas,
intricate little concertos that accompany
the banal pop lyrics, like a black man
taking a white visitor through the
ghetto. Every once in a while there's a
piercing falsetto, like a siren on an
emergency vehicle.
The
Trible song
doesn't
come out of Trible throat. The mouth
opens, yes, the head tilts back, the
hands dance, but the sound seems to
emerge from the whole arching body. Every
note is lovingly attired and patted on
the head as though it were a child being
sent off to school.
You
would not think this kind of intensity
could come from Cincinnati, Ohio, but
that is where Trible grew up. The songs
his mother taught him were his earliest
inspiration.
"My
mother was a great singer," Trible
remembers. "I can recall just
sitting on the couch for hours just
listening to her sing while she worked
around the house, sort of Doris
Day-oriented material she liked."
"My
brother worked in a shoe shine parlor
where they played Kenny Burrell and Jimmy
Smith all day long, so of course he went
out and got a guitar and started
imitating Kenny Burrell and Wes
Montgomery and stuff like that.
"And
when we were kids he had girls that he
fancied and he'd go hide behind the
bushes and play his guitar and I'd sing
the song to the girl."
At
17, Trible started singing with a gospel
group that toured the country, God's
Earth With Love, and on weekends when he
was home, he sang at a local theater with
an R&B group.
"But
I got bored with singing R&B
and
gospel," Trible said.
"One
day I saw this record and it had this
lady on the cover I never heard of her
before. She was kind of old, or old to
me, but she didn't have a bra on, and I
said, 'Well hey, this lady looks like
she's probably progressive, and she might
be singing jazz.' And I took this record
home, and played it and it was Betty
Carter.
"And
when I heard that I said, this is what I
want to do."
So
his trek began. With that the
revolutionary Carter sound in his head,
Cincinnati was not big enough any more.
"When
I got out here to L.A. in 1979,"
Trible said, "I found that the
competition was very fierce, and the $300
that I came out with ran out pretty
quick. Every night of the week I had a
talent contest that I would go to, where
they would pay like $50 to $100 to the
winner. And you really, really learned
how to give your all, because it meant
eating."
After
reaching rock bottom, a
job in the warehouse at Leo's Stereo,
Trible landed a singing job in a
black-owned restaurant called Gaston's.
"That lasted for about three years,
and gave me a chance to get a lot of
material together. And I began to do
showcases around trying to get a record
deal."
Trible
began to perform weekends at Artworks4,
Carl Burnett's Leimert Park community
performance space that was the
predecessor of the World Stage. Burnett,
a veteran jazz drummer, gave him a chance
to sing with his band on weekends. He
landed a weekly gig at Jazz, Etc., a new
club at Crenshaw and Exposition, where he
was due to go on the weekend the 1992
riots erupted.
"After
the riot, the first thing I wanted to do
was drive down there and see if the club
was still there. And of course it wasn't
there, but you could still see my name on
the marquee"
Sort
of symbolic.
Because
that shifted him to the World Stage,
along
with the rest of the non-industrial
jazzers of the South side of L.A., and
that's where Tapscott heard him. Soon he
was traveling to Europe with the
Arkestra..
"Once
you begin to work with Horace, then you
become even more popular because in the
community Horace was so well respected,
and if Horace chose you to sing with him,
you know, if Horace said you were OK,
then everybody respected you."
All
this can be heard on his current CD
"Horace," for Working Class
Prods., on which he appears with his
group, the Oasis of Peace, with John
Rangel, piano, and Trevor Ware, bass.
Billy Higgins guests for Dexter Story on
drums and Charles Owens is the alternate
for George Harper on tenor.
