Logan Richardson | Afrofuturism: “Our choice should be to love and understand, each one of us...”

The brief opening track ‘Say My Name’ on the New York-based alto saxophonist-keyboardist-composer Logan Richardson’s new album release Afrofuturism could almost be a soundtrack that accompanies a boxer as he struts his stuff on a ringside walk. It starts with an audio sample of vibraphonist Stefon Harris reading out a cross-generational roll call of alto sax giants: Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, Kenny Garrett and… Logan Richardson. Cue a round of applause and a fanfare of ominous sci-fi synth and a trip-hop beat for the new alto sax star. Whether he belongs in such illustrious company is another thing, but Richardson has proved an indefinable, forward-looking and singularly expressive artist over his five albums to date as well as sideman with the likes of Jason Moran’s Big Bandwagon and Christian Scott among others. If anything it’s his background that more directly ties him to jazz royalty. As with his idol Bird, he’s a native of Kansas City Missouri.

“When you’re from a place [like Kansas City] sometimes you can be a little - I don’t want to say blind - but dismissive of the depth because you don’t have this other perspective,” he says on a line from New York. “I was very fortunate 'cause I had literally a jazz wonderland from the moment I was getting into jazz and at the same time I was getting into the saxophone. That’s when I discovered Charlie Parker. That’s who led me to jazz, bebop or whatever initially. ‘What? there’s another guy from Kansas City who plays alto saxophone too, shit, who’s this?’

"And then once I heard his first recording that was it. I was trying to find out where to get into this so there were these various programmes that ran at the same time. Around about 1995 or 96 Robert Altman was also filming the movie Kansas City in Kansas City; and obviously Joshua Redman and Christian McBride, Jesse Davis were in Kansas City at that time, and a lot of money had gone to the school district and different public outlets. So they started this 18th and Vine Jazz Institute. I was just turning 16 the next week. I started this four-week programme at the 18th and Vine Jazz Institute.

“Every Wednesday they would bring in an international clinician. Every day you would have the local masters and keep in mind that at this time Jay McShann and Claude ‘Fiddler’ Williams were still alive, my great master teacher Ahmad Alaadeen was there and so you had a lot of these guys that were 60-80 years old who were playing dominos and hanging out at the musicians’ union and this type of vibe.

"Our first clinician on the first Wednesday was Max Roach. This was the type of shit that was going on. When I was 16, I performed with the City’s symphonic orchestra when I’d only been playing for three years. I was induced with so much art around me and this particular time in Kansas City I felt like it was another secret heyday that happened in a four year period in the 1990s. That thing was really, really deep. So for me I’ve really come from two different worlds. I’ve really experienced the 20th century very much. I was born in 1980 so I got a nice decent amount of it and it’s really very much me. So this 21st century really shocked me as much as anyone.”

These two worlds collide on the new release. It’s certainly Richardson’s most personal take so far on the ‘Afrofuturism’ aesthetic, broadly defined as an intersection of the African diasporic culture with technology. Throughout the interview he refers to his artistic journey in terms of a continual 'refinement' of his African-American roots. While bands that illustrate certain aspects of Afrofuturism, such as Sun Ra and Parliament/Funkadelic, are certainly not off of Richardson’s radar, the new album looks to an expansive, no-holds-barred sonicworld where the blues and jazz through to R&B and Trap overlap with his interests in rock/pop singer-songwriters; contemporary concert music through to the world of epic synth-prog and electronica-inspired, studio-based transformations.

It’s at opposite ends musically to his highly impressive 2007 acoustic jazz debut Cerebral Flow and follow-up Ethos that highlighted the flowering of a noteworthy new alto sax voice who’d fairly recently graduated from the New School, New York. In 2015 a Blue Note Records release with his Shift band, featuring Pat Metheny, was followed three years later by Blues People, released on hip US indie Ropeadope. On Afrofuturism the raw ‘live’ energy of the Blues People band meets layered synth soundscaping and studio-based constructions with Richardson’s raw, spacey sax piercing the ether.

“At the core, Afrofuturism was looking at how my writing process has lent itself a lot to production, and actually realising the full song versus actually writing it out,” he says. “It’s actually taking advantage of all the immediate technological capabilities in terms of music creation and also tying it back really at the core as an artist and a musician, obviously with my own ancestry coming from the African diaspora, and being an African-American from the heart of the Mid-west.

“So really at the core, Afrofuturism is trying to get back to understanding the core of who I am, where I come from, where I was born and even ideally trying to imagine what the sound of my mother’s voice would have been like inside of the womb knowing that this would have been the first resonant sound. Black culture – at least for the current moment – is something that’s now popular and then consequently with my album being called Afrofuturism it seems to slide right into a particular type of theme. But for me it’s a constant. If you go to Blues People, one of the songs is titled ‘Black Brown and Yellow' and the whole chant ‘Black Brown and Yellow is so beautiful’ is trying to identify who you are, just in a refined sense. Afrofuturism is a deeper introspection inside of my sense of finding mother.”

Throughout the album Richardson looks to address both political and social issues, by connecting past and present. It’s no more so evident than on ‘Black Wall Street’ a composition that references the Tulsa Race riots of 1921, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history. The link to one of the next tracks ‘Round Up’ is not a casual one. Somewhat reminiscent of the saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s Bowie band, it’s an ominous musical commentary on police misconduct in more recent protests.

“‘Black Wall Street’ is in commemoration to Black Wall Street in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was bombed by the United States. It’s a part of the history that they write out. They had started this community that started competing in the end with Wall Street in New York in terms of stock markets and had their own bus systems, movie theatre, this kind of thing. It was annihilated and it’s one thing for something like that to happen for sure, beyond tragic, but then to have a society and a system where how could I have ever have gone through school and never learned about this until I was a young man close to my thirties? Somehow I never knew.

"I wrote it back in about 2010 as a string quartet. I never put it out and so we revised it where I had cellist Ezki [Karakus] come in and layer the string quartet with all these cellos. Then my part was kind of an echo of a past, future, present. Then it fades and that goes into ‘Round Up’ because that’s typically the next process, that you’re eliminated from something that you build and that was just, and then it was unjust in every single way.

“One thing I realised recently that just destroys me is that people don’t realise all the numbers of people you see in jails are from the worst to the most minor offences.

"For example, say I jaywalk like any other New Yorker; technically it’s illegal. So say I get not only a ticket but for some reason I also get arrested. It happens too much every day. Then say I ended up in Rikers Island which is where they have inmates that are paedophiles and murderers but I’m a dude who just jaywalked – but I don’t have any family and I’m super-broke.

"So literally there’s no one for me to call to pay the 500 dollars to get me out. So I’m stuck in the system because they keep pushing back my date and then I’m in jail for eight months at this point but my case isn’t any closer. These type of cases are not that uncommon. So that’s really the idea and the mindset that went into ‘Black Wall Street’ going into ‘Round Up’.”

While these tracks might point to Richardson’s rage against an imbalanced machine, there’s equally a spiritual dimension to Afrofuturism. It’s evident on tracks such as ‘Farewell Goodbye’, that’s introduced by a field recording of his grandma singing a spiritual and the closing futuristic gospel setting for ‘Praise Song’ (“Ryan J Lee played like a gospel drummer and it felt like a Sunday church service but still a la Sarah Connor at the very end of [James Cameron's 1984 movie] The Terminator where she’s driving off from the gas station. This haunts me and then the church sews it back together somehow.”)

On the track ‘Awaken’ Richardson appears to embrace the complexity of the issues surrounding injustices. A Weather Report-ish dreamscape accompanies a short poem written by his mother. The line ‘Families are fractured because we don’t do as God said and embrace the differences’ is particularly incisive. It’s evident the world is in need of spiritual repair. The current tendency, especially within the frequently divisive culture of identity politics, is to shift the blame away from personal responsibility towards society and other ‘oppressive’ groups. As a result, people aren’t talking about facing up to some of the realities of disengagement in the home and family depicted in his mother’s poem.

“You’ve got it 100 percent,” he says. “In a mean way if you were ever trying to destroy someone in an argument or having an emotional upper hand, it’s so easy to just like to tap into ‘isms’. Probably you can immediately trace that back to when you were the age of five or seven years old, so you’ve basically still doing the same shit and it’s so fundamentally wrong. That’s why you look like a child. It’s something that never got refined because it was never developed.

"Looking at it in a positive sense, it’s really just saying we were communed with people genetically but inside of this we still have a choice. This choice should be to love and to understand, each one of us, that specifically God has put us here because there is a reason and a meaning for this. So the bigger part is for us to get over ourselves, to be able to now see the other person. We’re trying to put ourselves in front of them but really we have to remove ourselves and really that requires an extreme amount of fragility and a true love for someone to be willing to do that. That’s the thing, we don’t embrace the differences. We can identify the differences, we can have all different types of debates and discussions about the differences and we’re all experts on analysing the differences but who’s the expert on embracing the differences?

"That’s usually the main fracture of a family. We know they’re different, we fought with them for 20 years when we could have just given them a hug whether we like it or not.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2021 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today