The Garlic: American Indian Jazzman

Sunday, May 09, 2010

Custer's Last Stand?... FUBAR!

We know, from 'Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West', that the Native Americans labeled General George Armstrong Custer "Hard Backside", for his, seemingly, comfort of sitting atop a horse for long periods of time.

But is not to say they meant that endearingly.

Today, in Salon, there is a fascinating review, by Tom Carson, of Barnes & Noble Review, - "George Custer: An American embarrassment ...An award-winning author exposes gruesome details about Little Bighorn and revisits the story of its much-hated hero " - on a new book by Nathaniel Philbrick.

In fact Custer was anything but endearing to the Indians;

"More than anything else, he wanted to be remembered." That's how Nathaniel ("Mayflower") Philbrick sizes up George Armstrong Custer toward the end of "The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn,"and no one will dispute that America's ultimate glory hound got his wish. Too bad the victorious Lakota and Cheyenne weren't feeling respectful after wiping out his command in what's now Montana on June 25, 1876. They not only punctured the dead Custer's eardrums because he "wouldn't listen," but -- in a detail long suppressed by decorum -- jammed an arrow up the corpse's penis.

Yikes!

In short, Philbrick lays out that the Custer myth is largely overblown, and he was a suck-ass leader, probably, a roaring asshole.

But the larger enterprises the other two symbolize are less morally iffy, which is why Custer's main contribution to winning-of-the-West triumphalism was providing it with a martyr. For 19th-century audiences, Sitting Bull's morose participation in the reenactments that climaxed Buffalo Bill's hugely popular Wild West show in the 1880s must have seemed like the equivalent of the real Pontius Pilate performing in a passion play.

Today, Custer has long since become an embarrassment to educated white Americans. But the effort we've put into debunking him amounts to admitting we're stuck with him. From the Goldilocks hairdo he'd actually rid himself of before Little Bighorn to the final, almost certainly inaccurate, tableau of The Last White Man Standing as the "hostiles" close in, he's the horse's ass we rode in on.

[snip]

By 1876, Custer was a renowned enough Indian fighter to have published a bestselling autobiography two years earlier: "My Life on The Plains," renamed "My Lie on The Plains" by one skeptic who'd served under him. But after the laurels he'd won as the Civil War's youngest and most dashing model of a modern major general, his reduced peacetime rank and constricted room for initiative left him chafing. Mistrusted by his superiors, he had even more fractious relations with two of his subordinates: Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen, who didn't much like each other either. This was fateful, since Reno and Benteen were in charge of the Seventh Cavalry's other two columns once Custer's contingent rode off.

Carson has a wry sense of humor, weaving in the review "one of those engagements white people called a battle and Indians called a massacre" and "the sort of encounter Indians called a battle and white people called a massacre."

And, from the get-go, Custer's plan was FUBAR;

Custer's plan was apparently to duplicate his success eight years earlier against Black Kettle's Cheyenne band on the Washita, one of those engagements white people called a battle and Indians called a massacre. Splitting his command then as now, he'd destroyed the Indians' village -- populated mainly by women and children -- and devastated their pony herd, then gotten away before their warriors could hit him back.

Well, it didn't work out that way.

It was major-league FUBAR.

Experts may find more to quarrel with here than I did. But even if Philbrick has everything right, that doesn't make "The Last Stand" the "definitive" book on the Little Bighorn, any more than Connell's was. There clearly ain't no such animal, and never will be. What may be most to this one's credit is a humanity that can make even inveterate Custer-haters pity the men who got stuck following him, as did at least one Sioux warrior at the time. "I felt really sorry for them, they looked so frightened," Standing Bear later told his son. "Many of them lay on the ground, with their blue eyes open, waiting to be killed."

Go check out the full review, it's a good read.

Bonus Bonus

A little Native American Jazz

Jim Pepper -Witchi Tia To

Friday, January 09, 2009

Witchi Tia To

As the various posts this week might indicate, it hasn't been an auspicious start to the new year, here at The Garlic.

Still feeling under-the-weather, though the more significant, messy parts of the Head Cold have passed, we're not out-of-the-woods just yet (and battling to keep the dreaded sinus infection at bay).

So, rather than throwing up another, bland "Editor's Note", we thought we give you a little more, something new, something different (perhaps), a bang-for-your-buck, so to speak.

We'll hip you to the first (perhaps only) American Indian Jazzman.

Jim Pepper.

From Scott Yanow's All Music Guide;

Jim Pepper will always be best remembered for his popular recording of "Witchi-Tai-To," a peyote chant put to music. Pepper, who is definitively profiled in the hour-long documentary Pepper's Pow Wow (available on video), infused advanced jazz with the influence of his Native American heritage. The son of a father who also played saxophone, Pepper early in life loved to tap dance. He largely taught himself both tenor and clarinet, developing a soulful sound and keeping his style open to both free expression and the influence of world music. Pepper grew up in Oklahoma and moved to New York in the mid-'60s. He was a major part of one of the first fusion groups, Free Spirits, which made a record for ABC/Paramount in 1967. Pepper, who played in the "Everything Is Everything" band in the late '60s, was encouraged by Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry to put more of his heritage into his music. Jim Pepper worked with Cherry, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, and his own bands. He recorded with Paul Motian and Bob Moses, and led a session apiece for Europa (1984) and Enja (1987). Pepper passed away at the age of 50 from lymphoma.

Jim Pepper, on Wikipedia;

Jim Pepper was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and singer of Native American ancestry.

[Snip]

In his own projects, he recorded with Cherry, Naná Vasconcelos, Collin Walcott, Kenny Werner, John Scofield, Ed Schuller, Hamid Drake, and others. His CD Comin' and Goin' (1983) is the definitive statement of Pepper's unique "American Indian jazz" with nine songs played by four different line-ups. He worked also with the Liberation Music Orchestra, Paul Motian' s quintet, Bob Moses, Marty Cook, Mal Waldron, David Friesen, and Amina Claudine Myers, and toured Europe intensively.

Pepper died in 1992, of lymphoma.

[Snip]

In 1998, composer Gunther Schuller arranged, conducted and recorded The Music of Jim Pepper for symphony orchestra and jazz band. Pepper was posthumously granted the Lifetime Musical Achievement Award by First Americans in the Arts in 1999, and in 2000 he was inducted into the Native American Music Awards Hall of Fame. In 2005 the Oregon Legislative Assembly honored the extraordinary accomplishments and musical legacy of Pepper.[2]

In April 2007, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. accepted Pepper's saxophone and hat at a ceremony honoring his music and legacy.[3]