"Some say New York was founded as a way station to the West Indies. Nothing has changed. In the fifties the city rocked to an Afro-Cuban mambo beat. Around 1970 a new New York-West Indian dance music emerged. It was built on mambo, with jazz trombones blended in. The latinos called it salsa, tremors of which registered, as if upon a seismograph, in 1972:
Already large chunks of Manhattan have a...tropical feel. Ecuadorians are in the streets of Sunnyside; Argentinians read La Prensa on the Flushing IRT. Congas are played on the Concourse.
Afro-latinization of New York in the seventies was not only visible. It was an augury:
those who kept close to the streets...preserved the seeds of something authentic within themselves. In their refusal to act European, in their struggle to wrest some tropical essence from the stiff and aging baffles of this city, they built the foundation for what seems destined to become the next great subculture of New York.
In 1977-1980 that "next great culture" pulled into station, "hip-hop": break dancing, electric boogie, graffiti, rap. The women and men of hip-hop were Anglophonic Caribbean and mainland black as well as New York Puerto Rican. The reflected new immigration patterns since 1966. In addition, the Haitian presence burgeoned to the point where by 1985 major dance bands from Port-au-Prince routinely worked the ballrooms of Queens and Brooklyn.
A crisscross of island-mediated African influences now illuminated New York: Afro-Cuban, Afro-Haitian, Afro-Jamaican, Afro-Dominican, and Afro-Puerto Rican. Creole Africa, to the power of five, intensifying the earlier gifts of Garvey, Parker, Coltrane, and Malcolm X.
This was the New York into which Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960. With a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, he was part of the process.
Manhattan remains, of course, forever the island of Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Wall Street, and Rockefeller Center. Above and beyond these bastions of white power, however, new foci have emerged. In Brooklyn, Queens, the Lower East Side, and Morningside Heights, multiple streams of sub-Saharan and Western influence converge at every minute of every day.
Some critics extrapolate from Jean-Michel's Haitian name knowledge of Haiti and the religion of the Haitian masses, vodun, or "voodoo" as they put it. It isn't true. Jean-Michel never traveled to Haiti. Jean-Michel never spoke Kreyol (Creole), the language of the Haitian people. He was closer to his Puerto Rican mother, Matilde.
Parker (Charlie Parker) reinstructed the whole of jazz in the Africanizing trait of suspended accentuation, "letting a couple of beats go by to make the beat stand out." Similarly, the painter staggers the phrasings of gold and blue to make his writings ride in on change and become more visible.
The drummer Max Roach is one of the giants of twentieth century music. He studied Rada (Creolized Dahomean-Yoruba) and Petro (creolized Kongo) rhythmic phrasings in Haiti and brought back these gifts to jazz. Basquiat's Max Roach of 1984 honors his vision and his style.
Only the eys of Roach appear. His body disappears in a shimmering mist of silver, absorbed in metal signatures of sound. In the history of black music the jazz battery- partially illustrated by Roach's high hat, bass drum, and snare-represents a creative regathering, as John Szwed suggests, of Western instruments within African principles of overlapping choral sounding. African-born percussionists, performing in Kongo Square, New Orleans, in the early nineteenth century achieved this crucial synthesis of time and circumstance and bequeathed it to the world.
Pink, white, and red revolve around the drums. There is underpainting, left within the red. Laura Watt, a young New York painter, remarks: "Basquiat leaves these traces to make you move, following the red around." The drums themselves bear glints of gold, as part of their importance. By this time, the lessons of Kline and the lessons of Twombly had long since done their duty. Accordingly, the abstract allusions are non-specific.
Emphasizing continuity of black aesthetic spirit as poetic virtue in American civilization, like Diego Rivera sounding Mexico's Mesoamerican roots, these works mark a climax of Basquiat's jazz historicism.
From another essay, World Crown: Bodhisattva with Clenched Mudra
Jean had always been aware that black history is written on the Sports page, its encyclopedia is the radio; it's only logical that its museum would be in the subway. He would have to create an entire body of imagery, an iconography if you will, to people this legend slipped in when History turned her back. He would draw countless black men in crowns, with titles like Famous Negro Athlete #47. With luck the crown would land on his head if he did it fast enough.
In Santeria the outlawed Yoruba pantheon was concealed in the iconography of Catholic saints to evade detection. Under the guise of Santa Barbara, the great Chango was again able to conduct the heavenly fire through his devotees. In Basquiat's paintings, the gods have been housed nearer to their proper imagery but with an important substitution: the ordeals of Charlie Parker and Joe Louis represent Basquiat himself.
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