Keepers of the Chaos

North Philly free jazz outlaws Jamaaladeen Tacuma and G. Calvin Weston are still breaking the rules.

by Shaun Brady

Illustration By: Evan M. Lopez

When the Free Form Funky Freqs take the stage this Saturday at Johnny Brenda's, the performance will mark the 37th time that Vernon Reid, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and G. Calvin Weston have played together. The swirl of funkified noise — like P-Funk on hallucinogens after trudging through a delta blues swamp and emerging in downtown NYC — will be the result of 35 prior live shows and one recording date. No rehearsals, no sound checks, no casual jam sessions.

The trio's entire musical history has played out in front of an audience.

The fact that all three are veteran improvising musicians with three-plus decades of experience removes some of the risk from such a without-a-net proposition. Add to that their shared roots in the musical theories of free-jazz godhead Ornette Coleman, whose mad-genius approach to composition and improvisation feels more like a parallel-universe history of jazz than just a branch in our own. Tacuma and Weston were essential components of the legendary saxophonist's late-'70s/early-'80s Prime Time band, Reid a dedicated acolyte who came to prominence playing with Weston's Prime Time predecessor, Ronald Shannon Jackson. 

But Tacuma and Weston's shared history goes back even further. Back 35 years, to a time when rock, R&B and jazz were intermarrying freely. Back to a North Philly rife with musicians, where it was nearly impossible to turn any corner without hearing the sounds of a bedroom saxophonist or basement drummer emanating from one of the rowhouses on the block. Back, more specifically, to Broad and Dauphin, to the Uptown Theater, Philly's answer to the Apollo, whose stage hosted all the greats of the day and whose audience was filled with young would-be musicians who dreamed of taking their place.

Their beginnings are separated by just under three years and one mile, right in the middle of which sits the Uptown. Jamaaladeen Tacuma was born Rudy McDaniel on June 11, 1956, in Hempstead, N.Y. Growing up in the Norris Street Projects at 10th and Berks, he befriended singer Brenda Payton of local R&B faves Brenda & The Tabulations, who took the young man under her wing. In his early teens, McDaniel formed a vocal group called The Versatones with Payton's brothers, which "did steps like The Temptations" at talent shows and school dances. But by this time he was regularly attending performances at the Uptown and becoming enamored with the bass players he saw on that stage.

Born three years later, on June 6, 1959, Grant Calvin Weston may have been in the audience at some of the same shows. Weston's uncle began taking him to see Sunday matinees at the age of 6, where he caught The Jackson 5, Little Stevie Wonder, James Brown and The Temptations, among others. "I would always be amazed at all the musicians, but the one thing that caught my eye was the drummers," the 49-year-old Weston recalls, seated behind a gleaming orange drum set on the third floor of his house, mere blocks from his boyhood home at 17th and Cumberland. "They were always center stage, not in the back, and when they would play, I would see the drums shaking, rattling, like an engine running in a car."

It didn't take long for either to turn from admiration to emulation. Every summer, Tacuma's mother sent him to his uncle's farm in North Carolina "to escape the gang warfare in Philadelphia during the time of Frank Rizzo." At 16 he started playing around on an old guitar with only four strings, and by the time he returned to Philly at the end of the summer, he was determined to play the bass.

"I saw this bass that looked like a B.B. King guitar at a pawn shop on Broad and Erie," Tacuma, 52, recalls over the phone while driving through the old neighborhood. "It later became known as the Feedback Machine, because it was so cheap that as soon as I plugged it in, it just started to feed back. A lot of rock guys take years to get that effect, but with this bass it would happen even when I didn't want it to."

Soon McDaniel began playing with The Soul Experience, a group that followed the Chicago/Mandrill funk-rock template. "A lot of people went from that R&B singing group thing to more of a self-contained band. So it was a transition from the clean-cut, silk and mohair, sharkskin, highwater pants, boot-wearing concept to bell bottoms and suede fringe vests, the rocked-out, psychedelic, Sly and the Family Stone-looking, afro-wearing thing."

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Weston began even younger. Shortly after beginning his weekly sojourns to the Uptown, his cousin received a drum set for Christmas. ("A sparkling, red drum set," Weston recalls, the childlike awe still in his voice. "It was just shining.") The cousin seeming more interested in the electric race-car set also under the tree that year; Weston became fed up with his listless banging on the kit and demanded the sticks for himself. He put on the nearest record, a 45 of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and instantly began playing along.

"It was the most amazing thing," he says. "The first time I picked up a pair of drumsticks and sat behind a drum set, I just started playing. From there, it was in me. It was like a gift from the heavens."

Infected with the drumming bug, Weston walked around the neighborhood beating on cars until he finally got a plastic-and-cardboard set of his own a few Christmases later. Of course, no toy kit is going to withstand the constant pounding of an enthusiastic novice. His parents couldn't afford another set, but North Philly was a musicians' neighborhood, so Weston began cobbling together a kit from drums he found in the trash. With a pair of friends from the next block he formed a band, which grew, by the time they got to high school, into Bad Influence, a seven-piece that specialized in Earth Wind and Fire covers. They were playing regularly in bars and block parties by the time Weston was 16.  

It was at one of those performances that the fateful meeting took place.

"One day, we was just out in the street," Weston recalls, "and I see this guy walking around in Muslim garb, selling incense and oil, with a bass on his shoulder. That would be Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and he dug on us and started coming around more often just to check us out."

By: Sound Evidence Images INTERSECTION: G. Calvin Weston (left) and Jamaaladeen Tacuma met some 35 years ago, when the Uptown Theater at Broad and Dauphin was the center of the North Philly musical universe. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

By his senior year, McDaniel's interest had spread to jazz fusion groups like Return to Forever and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which melded the funk-rock sound that he'd been playing with jazz's improvisatory freedom. He began taking lessons through the Model Cities program with Tyrone Brown, then-bassist for Catalyst, the undersung fusion group that included saxophonist Odean Pope, keyboardist Eddie Green and drummer Sherman Ferguson. He'd also gotten his hands on an upright bass and was studying with Eligio Rossi, former bassist with the Philadelphia Orchestra who was now teaching at Settlement Music School. The upright bass never held much appeal for McDaniel, however, and he soon abandoned it to concentrate wholly on the electric.

It was through Ferguson that McDaniel got his first break, when the drummer recommended him to Philly organist Charles Earland, who at the time was experimenting with synthesizers and a more electric sound. McDaniel passed up a partial scholarship to Berklee to hit the road with Earland, only to be fired a year later. "He claimed that my timing was off," Tacuma says. "But he was just threatened by the fact that a bass player could capture the audience."

One week later, McDaniel got a phone call from guitarist/producer Reggie Lucas, then with Miles Davis, that Ornette Coleman needed a bassist for his upcoming European tour. The 18-year-old McDaniel signed on for a two-week European tour that turned into a 12-year stint with the legendary saxophonist, helping to define the sound of his electric Prime Time band.

"As far as I can recall, it was mostly about composing and improvising and making them both equal," the 78-year-old Coleman says now of Prime Time, on the phone from his Manhattan loft. The group was formed on the basis of Coleman's harmolodics, a somewhat slippery theory that essentially has to do with equal treatment of harmony, rhythm and melody.

"He was basically trying to level the playing field," Tacuma says. "He instilled in me that the bass guitar was equal to any other instrument when it comes to compositional improvising and melodic interpretation. So that's where I took it, trying to hear things more musically, thinking of the melody as opposed to bass riffs and cliché themes."

Along with finding his musical direction on that first tour with Coleman, McDaniel also settled on a spiritual identity.

"I was always very interested in Islam and more of a peaceful way of life," he explains. "I checked out a lot of Eastern philosophies, but Islam was the thing that really spoke to me. It was more geared toward people of the world; it didn't matter if you were rich or poor, black or white, you had an opportunity to have a good relationship with the creator."

At his hotel in Paris, McDaniel met a man who explained the differences between traditional Islam and what Tacuma calls the "distorted view" as preached in America. So he converted and took the name Jamaaladeen Tacuma. ("Jamaaladeen," he explains, translates as "beauty of the faith.")

A few months later, Coleman was looking for a guitarist and turned to his new bass player for a lead. Tacuma thought back to the old neighborhood and to the Uptown, where one of the local bands he'd often seen was The Ambassadors, whose guitarist was another North Philly boy, Charlie Ellerbee.

When Ellerbee joined Prime Time, he naturally asked Coleman what kind of sound he was looking for. "He literally answered my question, 'You.'" Ellerbee says. "He didn't know me, but he wanted the natural you, and he would much rather deal with correcting the side effects of that than to have you mimic or be influenced by something he'd already done."

The process repeated a couple of years later when drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson left to form his own project, the Decoding Society. "It was like the domino theory," Ellerbee says. "If you ask a chicken once and it gives you a good lottery number, you go back and say, 'Are there any more at home like you?'" So when Coleman asked that question, Tacuma and Ellerbee called G. Calvin Weston.

"I was 17 years old," Weston laughs. "I never heard of no Ornette Coleman. So I went up to audition for him, my first time in New York, and I didn't know what being nervous was, so I wasn't nervous."

His experience being almost totally restricted to R&B and a smattering of straightahead jazz, Weston was wholly unprepared for Coleman's otherworldly sound. "Ornette counted off 'one-two-three-four' and bam, everybody started playing. It was like a tornado, this wall of sound just hit me."

When it was his turn to try out, Coleman again counted off with no warning and Weston, at a loss, simply started playing a swing beat. The saxophonist immediately stopped the music. "He said, 'No, Calvin, this is not jazz.'" Weston remembers. "That five, 10 seconds was the only time I played. I sat back and listened for the rest of the night, asked Ornette for another week so I could gather my thoughts, and caught the train back home."

The first thing Weston did upon returning to Philly was to collect as many Mahavishnu Orchestra records as he could get his hands on and immerse himself in the work of drummer Billy Cobham. When he got back to New York, he had Cobham's parts committed to memory. "I never told Ornette," he admits, "but I picked Mahavishnu songs to play on his tunes. He would call one of his tunes and I would play 'Birds of Fire.' And it worked out until I got to learn his concept of music."

Tacuma remained with Coleman through 1987's In All Languages, Weston through the following year's Virgin Beauty. "Jamaal and Calvin were very creative when they were playing with me," Coleman says. "Most of all, they were very individual in the way that they wanted to express themselves in a creative form of work."

Both credit their experiences under Coleman's tutelage with showing them a path toward a freer, more expressive way to fill the rhythm section's role, following their own paths instead of playing a mere supporting role. At times that may cause tension — Ellerbee says they both have "the same aggressive DNA," and Weston admits, "Jamaal likes to be the dominant force when he plays, and so do I, but together we know when to hold back from each other."

By: Sound Evidence Images (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Over the next two decades, Tacuma and Weston largely went their own ways. Tacuma began a solo career in 1982. He's played with everyone from Grover Washington Jr. to Bill Cosby to The Roots when not leading his own groups or his all-bass quartet Basso Nouveau. When we spoke, he was back in Philly for less than a week between European stints with his own Coltrane Configurations group and the Last Poets' 40th anniversary tour.

Weston became more of a serial monogamist as a sideman, playing for 13 years with guitarist James Blood Ulmer and then embarking on a 10-year run with John Lurie's Downtown hipster ensemble the Lounge Lizards. Through that band he formed ongoing relationships with drummer Billy Martin, with whom he regularly performs percussion duets, and Steven Bernstein, occasionally sitting in with the trumpeter's quartet Sex Mob.

But while they never shared a regular gig, Tacuma and Weston rarely went for long without playing together. They were frequent guests on the jam sessions that each led at Tritone during the '90s — Tacuma's DNA Galleria, followed by Weston's Mad Cow series. It was at Tacuma's urging that Weston finally formed his own band, Big Tree. In 2000 they appeared on two very different albums: Mirakle, a trio with British improvising guitarist Derek Bailey, and hard-blowing saxophonist James Carter's Layin' in the Cut. The latter also featured guitarist Marc Ribot, with whom they toured over the next few years as The Young Philadelphians, as a trio and a quartet with keyboardist Anthony Coleman.

It was at Weston's insistence that they finally came together with Vernon Reid last year to form the Free Form Funky Freqs. Despite having known each other since, according to Reid, "back in the Mesozoic," Reid's guest appearance for one track on Tacuma's second solo album was the only time he'd played with either. Weston lined up a date at the lamented Lower East Side club Tonic, but the Philly crew didn't arrive until minutes before showtime, leaving no space for sound check or discussion. Their second gig, at Tritone, suffered much the same fate, as another gig delayed Tacuma until the club was already packed with an impatient audience. Both shows went so well that the approach went from inconvenience to methodology.

"We just went for it," Reid says from Warsaw, at the tail end of a European tour with Living Colour. "And that's when I thought, maybe this is what this is. Everything we do is totally improvised; we've done some spontaneous cover tunes, but we just go wherever it's going. When we sound check, we sound check in pairs. The three of us do not play together until we're playing in the performance."

During that first gig, Tacuma called attention to the fact that it was the first time they'd ever been onstage together, so the guitarist began keeping track of the number of performances. After Tonic and Tritone, their third gig was the recording of Urban Mythology: Volume One. A few European tours and scattered Stateside appearances later, they're up to performance 37. Reid has two numbers in mind: 100, which is an initial target and would most likely include another studio record; and, if that can be reached, 365, representing a collaboration for every day of the year.

No matter the project, Tacuma and Weston bring a sense of free funk, informed by the emphatic grooves of their early days in R&B and the sense of constant evolution wrought by harmolodics. They make Derek Bailey's abstract, jagged excursions sound like a cubist Hendrix and lend a deep-pocket soul to James Carter's aggressive neo-bop. With the Freqs, they've found an ideal vehicle, venturing into hard rock, dub, funk, blues or whatever else comes to mind.

"They have a kind of telepathic, empathic lock," Reid says. "Oftentimes, Jamaaladeen will start with a kind of freaky, funky bass line and they'll lock right in. But it's not a static groove. I'm struck by how they'll play a groove and all of a sudden they'll just change tempos with no preamble. Whenever it feels like a particular groove or vibe has peaked, there's a really satisfying sense of change without talking about it."

"We're both Geminis," Weston offers as one possible explanation for his and Tacuma's long-running partnership. "So when we're together we're actually four people." 

There is something of a yin and yang aspect to their personalities. Weston is a gregarious ball of energy, talking a mile a minute, a homebody who nonetheless will play with any musician who tracks him down on MySpace and offers "a plane ticket and a hotel and the fee." Behind the drum kit he's easily carried away, at times loosing a primal scream when his muscular skin-bashing can't quite channel all of his momentum.

Though just as athletic in his playing, Tacuma is far less animated on stage and off, a wide grin the only sign that he's liking what he hears. Notoriously elusive, phone calls and e-mails are no more effective than signal flares in the middle of the ocean, with about as predictable a chance of eliciting a response. He's a nomad, back and forth to Europe so often that he barely needs more than a revolving door to call home.

"We have a good friendship," offers Weston. "We don't talk to each other a lot, but when we do we have fun, we laugh together, we cry together. The key to our relationship and playing is that we're friends."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Free Form Funky Freqs play Sat., Nov. 29, 9:30 p.m., $15-$17, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com.