I started out to be an Open Negro in the late '50's. That meant that I wanted to reflect -- in my presentation and in what I wrote -- the things that I'd experienced, to be black, not incidentally but deliberately , culturally . I'd like to think I was in the wave [of Afrocentric artists; which drop of water I turned out to be, I don't know.
Oscar Brown Jr. - Washington Post 1992 I remember watching Oscar Brown Jr. work his hosting gig on the PBS produced From Jump Street: The Story of Black Music series. I was a child but even then I knew cool when I saw it. Oscar was as cool as they came. It helped that my mother was able to fill in the blanks around the man's persona. She knew Oscar from their shared hometown of Chicago. She explained that he gave me a nickname, No Pill Phil one day when she was helping the cast of Big Time Buck White run through their lines. Luckily, the name didn't stick. What stuck though were her descriptions of the rehearsal parties Oscar and his better half Jean Price, the talented singer and dancer who was even hipper than he was, would host after work was done. Water coolers filled with red wine, walls swathed in mosaic patterned fine cloth, all the legendary Jazz cats casually lounging around. It was like a scene out of those old Hugh Hefner televised Playboy parties, only everyone was cool. I mean really cool. I mean Oscar Brown Jr. cool.
That cool doesn't dwell down here on earth anymore. It passed when Oscar Brown Jr. died on Sunday, May 29, 2005 . You see, before the Last Poets, before Gil Scott-Heron, before Melle Mel, there was Oscar. More contemporary than Paul Robeson, more politicized than Sammy Davis Jr. or Quincy Jones, more civic minded than Miles, Oscar was the true renaissance man of his generation. But perhaps Renaissance man is a played out conceit. A term that tumbles far too casually off the lips of publicists and marketing types hustling up cross promotional vehicles for th eir media manipulating clients. That doesn't resemble Brown. That doesn't have anything to do with Brown. But what term fits? What do you call a man who could spellbind, harmonize, liberate and improvise in the same song, the same gesture and the same breath? I mean this was a man who would make the stage so hot that even cool-ass Miles couldn't deal with the heat of following him in performance order. A Playwright and play producer as well as a first string Musician, he put Music in the theater and the theater in the Music. He was the entertainer's entertainer.
But entertainer is too small and limiting a word to describe Oscar Brown Jr. His reach, his power, his artistic and intellectual range stretched too far for that. This is a man that ran for the Illinois State House of Representatives in 1948, lost in a landslide, and then ran for the US House of Representatives in 1952 as a republican. A man that tired of his unfulfilling marriage with the Communist Par ty and ended things with the simple but expressive statement, I'm too black to be red. A man who helped anchor the Musical arm of the civil rights movement through his collaboration with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, the phenomenal We Insist! Freedom Now Suite album. The man put the P's in progressive politics.
But he wasn't a politician. Never that. His generosity of spirit and open faucet of creativity along with the activist spirit that flowed naturally from these traits wouldn't allow for such a misleading and limited characterization. His commitment to education and community building was too deep. Brown was born and bred in a Chicago that was adjusting to its real-time absorption of the waves of Black Folk that took the straight shot north from Mississippi , Alabama , Arkansas , Missouri and Louisiana. Some found their fortune in the city of broad shoulders, others found misfortune. Oscar stood for them all just the same. This is the man that produced the p lay Opportunity Please Knock with the Blackstone Rangers: the Black P. Stone nation, the Black Stones, the gang that owned the streets of Chicago in the late 60's and early 70's. Oscar worked with them, took them on the Smothers Brothers show and introduced them as children, young men and artists instead of gang bangers. Oscar talked to them, told them things like this:
I discovered then that this is something that they don't want. They're ready for the guy who says Off the Pig! Cause they're ready for that. They wish the hell you would come with that. You know. Because they want to kill you. But if you say something that is going to create a beauty. If they're going to see you in another light. That, the establishment will not tolerate.
Still, even the term activist doesn't quite do the trick. The truth is that you can use any of these terms and you'll never be wrong: Musician, entertainer, artist, politician, activist, educator, choose one they all work. But I think I'm going to go with Hero. Yeah I like that, Hero. Rest in Peace Mr. Oscar Brown Jr. Whatever anyone else says, you'll always be my Hero.
Phillip Harvey is the editor of http://www.natcreole.com/, an online global Urban culture magazine. Visit the site weekly for updated news, reviews, profiles, playlists, essays, travel journals, and upcoming events.
Author:: Phillip Harvey
Keywords:: oscar brown, Jazz, Chicago, Music, Musician, civil rights, Playwright, black culture, Urban
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