SPEAKER_00: Hey there, I'm Kyrie Douglas. I'm a producer here at Overheard, and this is part three of our four-part series focusing on music, exploration, and Black history. It's called The Soul of Music. National Geographic Explorers will be sitting down with some of our favorite musicians to discuss how history and the natural world inspires their art and adventures. Today's guests are explorer Justin Dunavant and musician Chief Zion Atunde-Ajawa, formerly known as Christian Scott. Chief Zion is a multi-instrumentalist and producer known primarily for his phenomenal trumpet and horn playing. He's a two-time Edison Award winner, and he has five Grammy nominations. Born and raised in New Orleans, he's the nephew of jazz innovator and legendary sax man Donald Harrison Jr. In 2019, Zion released an album called Ancestral Recall, a concept that he describes almost like a form of cultural epigenetics, a sort of tapping into the experiences of one's ancestors in the present. Zion told Justin that when he recorded the album, which you'll hear a bit of later, he found himself coming up with patterns that mirrored many traditional African rhythms. 90% of what you hear being exhibited rhythmically is me playing.
SPEAKER_01: Right? So all those layers and things that you hear on Ancestral Recall is me playing A-way drums, Akan drums, you know, Dunumba drums, you know. To finish the record up, I sent it to legitimate babas in the old way, like Weedy Brahma. And when I sent it around to these guys to have them add layers of djembe or, you know, sangbong, kinkani, these kinds of instruments to it, they were all calling me back like, where, how, you know, how, you know, Weedy specifically was like, you know, this rhythm that you're playing is casa soro. This rhythm is sunu, agui, these are the exact rhythms that you're playing. Now, I come from the initiated space in America, but I don't have the same experience of being in the initiated spaces, the backside spaces. In Nigeria, or Ghana, or Benin, or Senegal, or Gambia, you feel me? I had no idea that I was creating a frame that not only housed and had the rhythms, but also the questions and answers and the dialectic components of the rhythms as well. So it was literally ancestral recall. Somewhere in my bloodline, the experience exists.
SPEAKER_01: The notion of ancestral recall has particular resonance for National Geographic explorer and
SPEAKER_00: archaeologist Justin Dunovit. He has a special interest in marine archaeology, diving down beneath the ocean to excavate what remains of the past. Justin was a contributor to Nat Geo's Into the Depths podcast, which followed explorer Tara Roberts and other black scuba divers across the world as they searched for buried shipwrecks from the transatlantic slave trade. What would you
SPEAKER_02: call yourself? What would I call myself? Oh, shoot. What I'm telling myself right now, like when I wake up in the morning and I ask myself, who am I? I'm recovering ancestral memory. That's what I tell myself. And I'm still exploring what that means and what it entails. But that's like, yeah. Wow, that's perfect. Yeah. This is Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here in Nat Geo
SPEAKER_00: and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. After the break, Chiefs Zion and Justin discuss Zion's childhood in New Orleans, how he created a new instrument, and what he calls stretch music. But first, fuel your curiosity with a free one month trial subscription to Nat Geo Digital. You'll have unlimited access on any device, anywhere, ad free with our app to let you download stories to read offline. Explore every page ever published with a century of digital archives at your fingertips. Check it all out for free at Nat Geo.com slash explore more. Wait, are you gaming on a Chromebook? Yeah, it's got a high res 120 hertz display plus this killer
SPEAKER_02: RGB keyboard and I can access thousands of games anytime, anywhere. Stop playing. What? Get out of
SPEAKER_00: here. Huh? Yeah, I want you to stop playing and get out of here so I can game on that Chromebook. Got it. Discover the ultimate cloud gaming machine, a new kind of Chromebook.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I guess just to kick it off on thanks for coming out. Thank you here and honor that you can make time for this. Honestly, I'm just like I'm floating right now. Yeah. A moment to really just
SPEAKER_01: share energy and time with you. So I'm grateful. No, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Well,
SPEAKER_02: let's let's kick it off with just an intro about you know, who you are, what you do, and however you want to define that and take that. I'm Chief Zionatou Ndeajua. I'm a sonic architect and a
SPEAKER_01: multi instrumentalist, a producer and composer. I also own and operate an app company and record label called Stretch Music and am the crown chieftain and Oba of the Shodakan nation of Maroons or Black Indians of Louisiana and New Orleans. That's a powerful title. We were talking
SPEAKER_01: about Nigeria earlier too, you know. Yeah. Obas, you know, it's a carry over from those lineages and histories. So sometimes we refer to chieftain as Oba as well. Okay. All right, I'm gonna bounce
SPEAKER_02: around a bit. So how what does that title mean? How did you get? Could you talk a little bit about that and what it means more specifically for you to have it in this moment? Absolutely. So I come
SPEAKER_01: from West African stylized chieftain that has survived its experience in what is now New Orleans, Louisiana. The African descent people of this region, they have been able to hold on to so
SPEAKER_01: many vestiges of their known past and also unknown past through this tradition. My grandfather's a guy named Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr. This is the only man to lead four nations of what we call Maroons. Some people also use the terminology Black Indian or Mardi Gras Indian. Mardi Gras Indian specifically is perceived as a pejorative and belittling term because it essentially labels a group of people in these nations with a cultural exhibition they were not allowed to take part in because now it's something that the city and municipality can monetize as a great cultural component of New Orleans so we label them Mardi Gras. But these specific nations have their roots in West Africa. As we learn about this tradition there are many different pillars and roots to it. There's a root that deals with the arrival of West Africans into the region in the 17-teens. Many Senegambian people were brought into the region so when the French decided they were going to build New Orleans they didn't just grab any Africans they went and grabbed Africans that were from areas that were alike. You understand what I'm saying? So they're gonna grab Africans that come from the Volta region and these sort of spaces because we know that they're gonna be able to cultivate these things because it's their lifestyle already. But also because of that many of these folks were able to self liberate and go into the marshlands and swamps and rebuild because this looks like my neighborhood. So for lack of a better way of putting it. So this is one of the roots of this culture. You know another known root is obviously after emancipation the experiences and the relationships between blacks and natives obviously having interacted with each other for centuries at this point. The blacks in New Orleans wanted to also pay homage to them and this is part of the reason that the ceremonial regalia resembles some the Plains natives. Some people deal with that in other ways. The conjecture about you know some of them seeing the Wild West shows and their ceremonial regalia maybe being a bit more dynamic than some of the ceremonial regalia you'll see with tribes from Southeast Louisiana. So in other words what you may look at in as a traditional western depiction of a natives dress you know with the war bonnet and these things a bustle those sort of things. Those are not as common among the indigenous in Louisiana. So part of the distinction and dress comes from also seeing some of those images. But again it is a culture that is a secret culture. You have roles obviously you have your chieftain and his queen you know your younger the next generation a little chieftain this sort of thing these are the English versions of these lieutenants titles. You also have an equivalent to a medicine man or the sort of shamanic energy. There's a person called a wild man who sorts in English this is the tribes enforcer. You have a flag boy this is the man that carries the gang standard is generally the diplomat so he can speak multiple dialects. And yes in Louisiana we have multiple ways of expressing and traditionally when you see the Maroons on Carnival Day and St. Joseph's night they are they're not speaking English to each other right. So generally a diplomat is the one that can speak the different dialects. So in other words he may be meeting a tribal banner that can say that they have as an example maybe they are Fula and Aticapa right which is this is you know in terms of their sort of cultural energy one is a Louisiana indigenous space the other one is a is a West African space that actually exists in multiple countries like Fulani right. So when you're meeting with them they may be words that come from their shared experience that don't necessarily come from yours. Maybe your corridor may be speaking vestiges of Bambara right and and so so there may be some synergy but not a lot. So it's a highly stylized West African retention and culture that essentially it constitutes a new world chiefdom that was built out of those experiences that has a priority historically of also acknowledging our native brothers and sisters. That's powerful and you know coming through this of course you have been drawn to music as a tool
SPEAKER_02: to do the work that we're doing. Right yeah the shared work. And the shared work and the horn
SPEAKER_02: was the initial entry way in. Could you talk a bit about how that how that relationship emerged and if there was a piece of music or a note that you heard that just blew you away and made you realize I gotta pick that thing up. Yes absolutely. I think well firstly learning to play music in
SPEAKER_01: Louisiana and specifically in New Orleans I think it's a really interesting experience for a younger person in that you have to learn the music in Canon right. So let's say you you're going to learn to be a creative improviser but you're growing up in Cleveland because of the the histories of that space and levels of access to certain information generally you're going to walk into the music from the space that either feels good to you musically or from the known spaces that your elders have right. But maybe their relationship to to creative improvised music of black American music we say stretch music we don't like the term jazz but maybe their beginnings in the music starts in the 50s right. So most of your teachers after they were after the children of the folks that seated that moment they're gonna start you in the 50s. In New Orleans generally they're gonna start you in the 1890s right where the spasm using these things really started to grow out and have a more cosmopolitan relationship to what was going on and exist in our zeitgeist in a way where the music became popular right. So when I'm 11 years old I'm starting to learn to play the trumpet I couldn't go into a space and say I want to play Donnely which is composed by Miles Davis in the 40s or 50s right without first playing the Tiger Leaf Rag. Okay. Do you get what I'm saying? So you have to start it at the beginning right. And so that made it so much more fun to me because there was sort of
SPEAKER_01: historians approach to learning the music right. Because you had to excavate right. And so when I was small that was always the most fun was to be around the really really old musicians right. Like you know there's pictures of my brother and I and my cousin Brian on the laps of Danny Barker you know Lulu Barker this is a couple that Danny specifically was you know this is a guy that was responsible for what we now see as the resurgence of jazz in New Orleans right. In the 60s he's a guy that took all of these kids that were going to the church bands and things and organizing them into brass bands and things and teaching them the old way. I think for that reason I initially gravitated to the trumpet because it was generally the leaders instrument. Like the trumpet is a proclamatory instrument right. So you know there's stories about you being able to hear Buddy Bolden play on the other side of the river right. Buddy Bolden is one of the men as credited as the creators of jazz along with folks like Jelly Roll Morton. But it's an instrument that no matter what is going on it has the ability to call you in right. And when I was small you know my elders they would always say that I had a sound that could call the children home. I was a kid myself. And I just appreciated how open and warm they were and willing to impart. People don't talk about those things generationally so much anymore. You know I learned from Danny Barker you would always say little Harrison blues and jazz are synonyms for each other. You know you're a kid I'm like maybe six I don't know what a synonym is at that point but I'm listening. You know you say blues and jazz are synonyms for each other and you know the only difference is that jazz is blues that learn to speak all languages. And I carry that with me in every moment where I'm composing it. You know all these things these are things that I was told as a little little boy. You know what I'm saying. So I think that part of it made it so attractive to me. And then also to see how much love the musicians interacted with. Man New Orleanian musicians I think may be the most
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_01: loving community of people I've ever seen. And so and but the guys that were generally at the forefront of those instances were the trumpet players. And it sounds like there was an
SPEAKER_02: intention like not just on your part but of course on the people around you that saw you had something going in you. And you had the ability to pick up this horn and do some things with it that not everybody else was capable of doing. You know the thing is it's like what's
SPEAKER_01: interesting is from growing up in that environment and really seeing what was going on. You know when I was in elementary school the school had a hundred trumpeters. You can't tell a young black kid in New Orleans that they couldn't be those things because the airport is named Louis Armstrong.
SPEAKER_02: I'm wondering too I know you brought up this idea of stretch music. I think it's important that we have definitions and we define definitions and we have the ability to name and rename as we need to. And I want to give the opportunity to elaborate a little bit about stretch music. Absolutely. Ancestral recall maybe. Yeah absolutely. Well you know we were creating music that tried to
SPEAKER_01: unify everyone in one understanding. Which was really that it doesn't matter what cultural purview you have. All human beings are valid. And the music that they make to express themselves and to share stories and to heal and for cathartic moments all of those things are valid. The imperative in stretch music is really about turning the singular into the plural and acknowledging that someone that is playing a Polish folk song or a Celtic traditional song or an opera from France or rhythms from the Saramaka or you know an Indian raga that if they look for each other musically first as a priority and see all of the things that each party is contributing it humanizes them in a way that allows them to be able to walk together in the actual world. I want to get into some of these tracks. Okay. Alright so my favorite track we're
SPEAKER_02: gonna start off with that one. Cool. Diaspora. I already hear it. Yeah I was humming this on the way over. Oh so good I love this one. Oh man. It's cold. Elena. Oh my god. Yeah. I remember you said something about her playing the flute. Yeah. She's gonna redefine how it is. Oh yeah. Yeah she um I always say this every night from the band
SPEAKER_01: stand about Elena Penderhughes contribution in this moment. I've always felt that if record label interest and you know the business folks you know stay out of her way and she is allowed to see her own vision that we will have a very difficult time remembering what the flute sounded like preceding her contribution. She is that great. The song is about many things. Most people conjecture that it's about the transatlantic diaspora specifically and it is but it has a wider definition of diaspora. We know that you know when you're in spaces with intellectuals when they speak about the diaspora they don't include Africa. You get what I'm saying? It's the very specific and most people don't think about that but it's true. But for me when I think about the African diaspora it includes Africa. So I wanted to make and build a composition that tapped onto all of these different energies in terms of how the harmony is laid out, what the melody is doing, what the rhythms are doing. Right so it's like there is a moment in the beginning with the piano riff that you hear that harkens to salsa music and Afro-Latin music. You know you can look at music from from Havana. You can look at music from San Juan. These kinds of energies are kind of bomba playing on music you know merengue music. These things that came out of the African experience in those spaces but the way that the harmony is actually moving is really maybe more akin to what you would hear from an embera or a thumb piano or traditional music you might hear in Tanzania on the thumb piano. So the melody you can find that kind of phrase in most spaces where you have deep blues roots. You might somewhere say I don't know but I was told you know what I mean these kinds of things right so it feels as much rooted blues as it also does baptist and pentecostal church and all of those things. So a lot of times we break up you know the spiritual and the secular and non-secular all of
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_01: these things we separate those those things in in in terms of like the western mind separates those. In terms of our actual cultural exhibition and the way that we interact as black people we don't separate any of those things right so it's like to me it never made sense that they were labeled and and codified in the way that they were because they're not separate right this is how these human beings actually communicate musically. So every single part in this song every single thing that you hear has multiple points of entry that relate to the larger diaspora. That's powerful that is powerful. All right so I have a question for you. All right you know all right you know
SPEAKER_01: it's so interesting to me you know what what you do and what you've built you know I think particularly having the moment where there's a focus on the maritime you know and and what happened in so many of these actual exchanges is the way I'll put it. Right. For me I wanted to know like what was it specifically if there was a specific instance or or or experience that you had that made that feel like a priority in this moment. Yes and it's it's wild it's literally this
SPEAKER_02: moment that replays like a movie whenever I recall it. It was when I was working to help excavate the Clotilde. Okay. Which is known as the last slave ship to come into the United States the movie descendant just came out talking about it people of Africa town built that community. I was helping to excavate and while I was leaving my grandmother's ring snapped and I were actually wearing my grandmother's ring now I actually glued it back together but it snapped and I had been wearing it for a long time to get that energy of my literal ancestors and I was like okay I don't know what this means. A couple days into excavating the Clotilde I find myself just waking up in the
SPEAKER_02: morning and crying and it's not like a sad cry it's more like a relief and I was trying to figure out what exactly is going on and what does this mean and I talked to my colleague who was excavating with me and I told her like yeah this is what I'm feeling experiencing and she said it's a heavy emotional she said her elders told her you need to fortify yourself spiritually because there's a lot of things that are going to come out of this and it's also this opportunity to channel that energy into places it needs to go and that coupled with the fact that we interviewed two black scuba divers that literally dove into the hull of a slave ship for the first time and them talking about this release that they felt and it was part of it was sort of confusing and disorienting but also part of it was sort of liberating and yeah when I was excavating on that on the boat my mother texted me and was like you know your grandfather's buried in Alabama and I still had no idea and she sent me his niece's phone number and address and I was literally it hit me that I'm literally while I'm exploring this thing that we call archaeology and studying black history on a big level I'm also literally going deep into my own personal family story I could train anybody to do what I do if you just want to know how to pick up a trial and know how to scuba dive and do but the level of intentionality and the level of responsibility that I have means that I'm the only one that's going to do it the way that I'm going to do it right and I came back from that trip and literally meditated for about an hour and I just started balling right and again
SPEAKER_02: it wasn't a sad it was a release and I realized I gained my grandfather as an ancestor because for so long I had been paying attention to my grandmother and I had been paying attention to my grandfather right and I was in physical exactly and then that's when it hit me like I tell people all the time is recovering this memory we've forgotten more things than we remember absolutely yeah and my job what I see my role as is us trying to explore and recover as many of those as possible and putting them to work in a productive manner for the moment in time that we need it now and that's sort of the the moment that that happened yeah man talk about heavy
SPEAKER_02: I know we got a couple of uh questions that came in from Instagram yeah they're like why do you
SPEAKER_01: sound like a newscaster I'm always like hi this is chief
SPEAKER_02: no no it's good all right what is your favorite instrument don't have one okay I like um
SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to have a house party so you can come to my crib and see all these drums and instruments you know it's like um there's a musical instrument museum in Phoenix outside of Phoenix and they have stuff from all over the world and I would say that my collection of instruments through the diaspora rivals their collection okay I have stuff from everywhere man and uh so so it's hard to say one instrument um but if I had to reduce it to one I was on an island and you got one yep oh that's hard that makes it different okay yeah because well what I
SPEAKER_01: was going to say before you said yes I was chief Adjois bow which is a really beautiful and um you know sort of golden uh you know double-sided harp that we've created uh so a couple of years ago I embarked on this journey to try and create a 21st century corollary to the types of rooted string instruments specifically double-sided harps from west Africa that actually are the harmonic roots uh to what we now refer to as blues in the delta in places like New Orleans and
SPEAKER_01: Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, these areas um for me that was a really important thing to do because I could hear uh specifically in rock and roll uh specifically in a lot of modern blues and also creative improvised music stretch music we like to say for jazz um that the fundamental
SPEAKER_01: pillar harmonically uh being the blues is the root um that people were you just heard less of it so in other words you you can't make a gumbo without a rue you get what I'm saying it's soup right do you get what I mean and so from my ear when I would hear the modern rock and roll records I heard no blues which makes it not that to me right and so a huge part of it was to try and
SPEAKER_01: make sure that we could create records and musical uh spaces uh that really served as a means of saving the blues of tomorrow right and so I wanted to embark on that kind of musical journey but in order to do that I had to excavate first right and and the things that I found you know it's it's actually astonishing to me that even in this moment in time when we define uh forms like jazz a lot of times those definitions are limited you know people will say that it's west African rhythms or African rhythms mixed with European harmony which is to say that a continent as large as Africa has no harmonic traditions right let's learn to read between lines here right this is false those people when they were captured and brought over here they brought a lot of elements of their culture to it and obviously the harmony and the melodic components of their music also survived those experiences right right so what I wanted to do was to create an instrument that was tethered to west Africa in a way that had ancestral memory built into the actual methodology and how it's actually shaped uh for specifically for young black children in New Orleans to be able to learn to play music on musical instruments that actually had their fathers and mothers memories and hands in them
SPEAKER_02: all right I'm gonna give you choice of the last song okay uh there's west of the west okay and there is ritual rise of chief yeah definitely ritual all right hands down
SPEAKER_00: so
SPEAKER_01: man this song has so many layers in it and such a fun song to record because it's um I try to to recreate the kind of energy that you get in call and response music which is traditionally a very African approach you know with you go you can go anywhere throughout the larger diaspora and hear that back and forth so it's done with strings and also the trumpet voice they're answering each other you know questions and answers calls and responses um but what I really loved about building this one was you can hear the trumpet sound is a really unique kind of layered sound it has kind of a bite to it there's an octaver on it and I built this sound specifically to feel like it was multiple generations or ancestors speaking through the horn right so it's like maybe you have a baritone maybe that's your grandfather a great-grandfather and then you have a soprano that might be your mother or grandmother or on or whatever it is all of it is built into the one sound so even though I'm speaking it's all those energies speaking through that sound um I wanted it to feel that way and to have those layers because in legitimate moments
SPEAKER_01: of right in these spaces when we talk about ritual it's always the best moments when they're multi-generational moments when I think about those memories all of them are rooted in the elders imparting to the youngers or guiding the youngers sometimes people look at the titles and they're like oh god just this guy's grandiose titles about himself but it's not about me right do you get what I'm saying so it's like when people you know as when people hear a title like that or view a title like that they automatically think about that the adua part of it but that's not what I'm speaking about what I'm speaking about is all of the people that lifted me and carried me to now being adua to now being that the person that we mark as the chief and all of these things all of those small specific moments all of those moments of calling and responding and me following not leading and learning these ways so the trumpet having all of their voices wrapped up in my voice was um as a conceptual pillar that was one of the most fun things to record on that record that was musician chief zion attuned a adua in conversation with explorer
SPEAKER_00: justin denovant if you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a national geographic subscription that's the best way to support overheard go to natgeo.com slash explore more to subscribe learn more about zion at his website chief adua.com that's spelled c h i e f a d j u a h and you can follow him on instagram at christianscottofficial you can also download his stretch music app which is an interactive music player in the google play store or the apple app store you can also follow justin online to stay up to date with his latest adventures he has a website justin dunnavant.com that's spelled j u s t i n d u n n a v a n t or follow him on social media at arch field notes that's all in the show notes right there in your podcast app this week's overheard episode is produced by me kyrie douglas our senior producers are brian gutiérrez and jacob pinter our senior editor is eli chin our manager of audio is carla wills who edited this episode our executive producer of audio is devar alder lon our photo editor is julie hough ted woods sound design this episode and hans dale sue composer theme music the soul of music series is produced in collaboration with national geographic music special thanks to hannah grace van cleave jennifer stillson and britney greer this podcast is a production national geographic partners the national geographic society committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world funds the work of national geographic explorer justin dunnavant michael tribble is the vice president of integrated storytelling nathan lump is national geographic's editor-in-chief thanks for listening and see you next time
