In my years digging for records, I have come across copies of Big Black’s 1967 debut, ‘Message To Our Ancestors’, a number of times, but never picked it up, nor even taken it to the listening station. Sometimes, it’s just been too beat up to give a second thought, and other times, well…something about its cover art (its invasive perspective; the somewhat cruddy lettering imbued with an obnoxious level of exoticism/outsiderish-ness; even the artist’s name, “Big Black”, seeming somehow offensive to my growing brain) has always turned me off. You know, despite being the supposedly open-minded record hunter that I am, sometimes I do judge things by the cover and move on. I will be sure to pick it up the next time I see it (or, even better, if I’m so lucky to espy the original independent label release, with its much more appropriately grounded cover art), because I have fallen entranced by Big Black’s later album, the 1982 LP ‘Ethnic Fusion’.
I came upon this one in my typical discogs approach: if I come across a seller with an obscure record I’m digging on, I will browse their entire inventory to see if there’s enough other stuff at a nice bargain to add to the order to save on shipping. I end up nabbing the most unexpected things with this method. Usually, if a seller has one deep cut I’m consciously hunting for, surely they have a half dozen more that I’ve never even encountered before. It’s as close as you can get to walking into a record store with $50 burning a hole in your pocket and leaving with every wild thing they had on hand for cheap. So it was with ‘Ethnic Fusion’, it’s cover a gleaming monochrome, two humble yet quietly proud heads holding themselves serious and still just long enough to get an absolutely piercing portrait. Big Black, percussionist, and Anthony Wheaton on guitar.
The liner notes to this LP mention Big Black’s massive, crushing handshake, and you can hear the power of his hands in every second that it spins. He plays five drums, a combination of tumbas, the tallest and longest drum of the conga family, and bongos, which provide a lighter, flickering form of rhythm. Wheaton plays a delicate classical guitar in an otherworldly clean style: no stray notes, no noodling, no noise, only a nimble orchestration reminiscent of Bach played in a field, or something like Jansch. Theirs is a truly unique pairing, with Wheaton creating a ceremonial, almost jaunty air for Big Black to tumble and bombard through with his demonstrative, glittering patterns. The minimalist recording methods here (two mics and a Mark Levinson ML-5 recorder) give this LP a feeling like it could have emerged from anywhere in the last thousand years. The master volume is quiet, demanding that you turn it up louder than you normally would, which leads to hearing some roomsound: guitar leaning inward and outward from the mix, Big Black yelping after a particularly emphatic run. Like the great folk records you sometimes just have to luck your way into finding, ‘Ethnic Fusion’ expresses itself only in the moment that it captures, begging you to read further into its makers and their motives.
Big Black was discovered and signed to the UNI label on the strength of his ‘67 debut. He grew up in Georgia in a musical family, and lived for a time in the Caribbean where he picked up influences of that most classic of rhythmic genres, calypso. He moved to New York, where he joined Freddie Hubbard’s band, and gigged with Eric Dolphy, Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra, BB King, and others. Tons of credits as a sideman, as well; he’s on recordings by Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Randy Weston, Harvey Mandel, on and on. In the 70s he headed west and became an actor, appearing in an episode of Sanford & Son and, later on, Lethal Weapon 3. When Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, Big Black appeared at the music festival promoting the fight alongside James Brown, Bill Withers, Tabu Ley, and the TPOK Jazz band.
According to the limited info about him on the internet, classical guitarist Anthony Wheaton could be the same Anthony Wheaton, cousin of Dr. Dre, who later went by the name Sir Jinx and turned up on Too Short’s ‘Short Dog’s In The House’ and Ice Cube’s ‘AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted’. Based on the limitless spirit of this particular LP, I guess I can’t rule it out.