In Africa Speaks, America Answers, renowned scholar and Thelonious Monk biographer Robin D. G. Kelley offers a unique narrative on the trans-Atlantic history of African American and African jazz music that celebrates the potency of one particular moment in a collective struggle for freedom and an emergent identity. Simultaneously complicating and enriching the discussion on diasporic musical collaboration during the period of African decolonization, Kelley re-examines this revolutionary era as experienced by drummer Guy Warren, pianist Randy Weston, bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin. Although, with the exception of Abdul-Malik, each musician has been the subject of more extensive writing by other scholars (to whose work Kelley frequently refers in his expansive footnotes), the success and originality of Kelley's approach derives from his carefully arranged narrative that presents these four musicians as interrelated voices mediated and situated in individual moments and places. The author eschews generalization, alluding to a much larger dialogue of trans-Atlantic African diasporic relations through the potent lenses of the particular and the unique. In this way, Kelley challenges the notion of unidirectional cultural influence between African and African American jazz musicians, reasserting the presence of African musicians as modern subjects rather than merely as ahistorical, imagined ancestors within the musical and cultural events of African American and African jazz. Kelley also brings praiseworthy attention to the sociopolitical contexts of these musicians' lives as constitutive elements of their music. He enriches his text with interwoven layers of cultural, historical, and political context, supported by the exemplary research and writing methodologies that characterize Kelley's scholarship.
Unfortunately, his discussion of the music itself lacks the same rigorous evidence and citation that characterize these other passages. There are large corpuses of ethno/musicological and jazz studies scholarship that would have provided needed support and scholarly context for the book's discussions of transcultural musical fusions, the absence of which – especially when compared to the thoroughly documented and exhaustively researched historical and biographic sections – presents a major shortcoming of the text. Failing to include these sources denies the reader access to a more dialogic and fluent conversation, presenting instead a rather trippingly cadenced solitary perspective on a foundational element of the text – the music itself.
This sense of unbalance lingers in Kelley's selective inclusion of quotations from his subjects, unnecessarily flattening out the dialogue that must have characterized his interviews and those that he cited. Where he could have included his interlocutors as essential participants in the book, Kelley renders the exchanges into brief sound bites, relegating their actual voices to the periphery of the text's narrative. This is most evident in the chapter on Sathima Bea Benjamin, in which, despite his critique of similar past treatment, Kelley's discussion of the music and career of Abdullah Ibrahim – Benjamin's husband – greatly overshadows Benjamin herself in both quantity of words and probity of analysis. This approach is perhaps best encapsulated in the chapter's title, ‘The making of Sathima Bea Benjamin’. Although the other chapter titles feature grammatically parallel constructions, Benjamin's is the only one in which the subject of the chapter is denied ownership and agency: Warren wages his ‘drum wars’, Weston embarks on his ‘sojourns’, Abdul-Malik conducts his ‘experiments’, but only Benjamin is made. She is re/presented as the object of processes thrust on her, denied the self-determining agency afforded to her male counterparts in both the author's titular and main texts. The net result of these shortcomings is a failure to render into constructive, cohesive dialogue all the elements of the text that the author unfolds at length: the musicians, their performances, critical and popular reception, and their cultural and political contexts. Kelley succeeds in describing the complexity of these conversations on musical fusion in the African diaspora, but misses a prime opportunity to augment it through analysis or critical reassessment, through which he could have enacted similar, dialogic transpositions and translations of the biographical, historical, musical, and scholarly perspectives in the text.
As an overview of a singular, emergent moment for jazz musicians in the trans-Atlantic African diaspora, Kelley's book is an accessible, well-researched discussion of the interrelationship of music and culture. In particular, his representation of the intertwined, collaborative, yet highly individualistic engagement of artists with African diasporic space and place highlights the complexity of the era he discusses and underscores the need to thoroughly contextualize scholarly research. The author's attention to unfolding the uneven, complicated, and sometimes cacophonous, characteristics of intra- and inter-cultural exchange provides a successful model for jazz scholarship that has too frequently glossed over the collective dissonance of global conversations in favor of a more streamlined and deceptively coherent monologue. However, for those looking for a critical and expansive engagement with either these musicians or their music, Kelley's book provides only a short opening statement in what is a much more polyphonic dialogue.
