The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles [Paperback]

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists—passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. InThe Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.USIn this revised and updated edition ofThe Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi tells the story of Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group in Los Angeles that provided community-oriented jazz and jazz training for African American musicians, poets, playwrights, and artists for four decades.Steven L. Isoardi is an independent scholar; editor ofSongs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott, also published by Duke University Press, and Jazz Generations: A Life in American Music and Society; and coeditor ofCentral Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles. He is the author ofThe Music Finds a Way: A PAPA/UGMAA Oral History of Growing Up in Postwar South Central Los Angeles.“The Dark Treeis just wonderful. One cannot understand the hls)