Upon first glance, you might not think Kahil El’Zabar, 70, is a spiritual jazz musician. Tall and sprightly with taut skin and a thick mustache, wearing dark sunglasses and a stylish black suit on a January afternoon, he looked more like a fashion model or a recently retired athlete. That’s not to say avant-jazz guys can’t be chic, but rarely do they look this dapper.
“My mother owned a bridal formal-wear business, so fashion was always a part of my life since I was a little kid,” he said over cups of green tea at the Moxy Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I have friends that are 70, and they’ll look at me and say, ‘Why you got those little silly clothes on?’ It’s like, ‘We wore wingtips and khakis in ’69. This is 2023, and just because I’m a senior citizen does not mean I can’t be current.’”
For the past 50 years, El’Zabar has toed the line between fashion and music, the present and the future, American jazz and West African compositional structure. In 1974, he founded the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble as a quartet blurring the edges of traditional jazz, Afrocentric rhythms and cosmic expanse. Much like the Pyramids, the Ohio-based band that wore African finery and played polyrhythmic arrangements lifted from the continent, El’Zabar’s group wasn’t fully appreciated by American listeners. The quartet came at a time when jazz musicians started blending their sounds with stadium-sized funk and rock, and psychedelic African jazz was considered a bridge too far.
As a result, El’Zabar has been underrated in the pantheon of spiritual jazz luminaries, despite his healthy résumé. For someone who’s played with Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, his name doesn’t ring like those of Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane and Sun Ra.
It’s because “he’s a percussionist,” said the film director Dwayne Johnson-Cochran, who’s made five documentaries on El’Zabar, during a phone interview. “With Kahil as a drummer, it’s kind of discounted because he’s the guy keeping the beat. He has melodies that are simple yet complex in the counterpoint; in a lot of ways, he’s a genre within himself. People are not in tune with what he’s putting out, but it’s really quite spectacular.”
On Friday, El’Zabar will release “Open Me, a Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit,” the Ensemble’s 18th album, a long, meditative LP of remade songs from his personal discography alongside reimagined ones by Miles Davis and McCoy Tyner. It not only celebrates the lineage of Black music, it takes pride in his own longevity.
El’Zabar was born Clifton Blackburn in November 1953 in Chicago. His father was a police officer and an amateur drummer, and his family lived in the same Chatham neighborhood as the pianist Ramsey Lewis, and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Eddie Harris. “And my next-door neighbor was Mamie Till,” the mother of Emmett Till, he said. “My mother said, ‘Mamie doesn’t have her son, so you have to do her snow and you have to cut her grass for no money.”
He became interested in jazz as a little boy after seeing how Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong operated, culturally. His father bought him a drum set when he was 4, and scatted with his son to help him learn the instrument.
“I’m pretty much that last generation that came up in what I call segregated elegance,” El’Zabar said. “There was a certain way you had to dress, a way you had to speak. Style, persona and courage were extremely valuable commodities in how we identified ourselves as people. And the jazz musician emulated that.”
The music, he continued, was equally aspirational. “When you thought about Miles Davis and how he carried himself, and you listened to the music, it had refinement. It had incredible blues sensitivity informed by the harmonics, informed by the quarter progressions and the advances from each generation. And so my generation wanted to do that same thing.”
El’Zabar started playing professionally at 16, learning the ins and outs of the road with Ammons. (When he wasn’t playing drums, he was a teen basketball star who served as captain of his high school team.) He went on to play with Gillespie, the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and Simone, quickly making him a full-fledged working artist with powerful credits.
He changed his artistic name after his peer Fred Walker switched his to Derf Reklaw (Fred Walker spelled backward), which intrigued the young Clifton Blackburn. “Notfilc Nrubkcalb — that ain’t gonna work,” he said with a laugh. “My mother’s family name is El’Zabar, and my great-uncle had given me Kahil, so I went with that.”
As a teenager in the late ’60s, El’Zabar took classes at the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago, where he was mentored by the multi-instrumentalist Muhal Richard Abrams and the trumpeter Phil Cohran, learning how to compose songs and lead his own band. After he graduated from Lake Forest College and studied West African music and culture at the University of Ghana, he was elected chairman of the AACM at the age of 22, a hefty post for such a young composer, and remained in the seat until 1981.
The saxophonist David Murray first met El’Zabar on a Chicago basketball court in 1975. He had seen El’Zabar play a gig in the city and was taken by his work. “He’s a first-rate drummer and a strong leader,” Murray said in a phone interview. “It seemed like he always had a direct conversation with a higher power.” Calling him a connector with a tireless work ethic, Murray also praised El’Zabar’s ability to draw people in. “He can speak everyone’s language,” he added. “You could be talking to a guru at the same time.”
Or a fashion designer. El’Zabar has been sewing his own clothes since he was 11, at the behest of his mother who taught her children the craft. “I actually hated it, but we had to do it,” he remembered. “But then leaving home and trying to make a living playing music, well, we all know what that’s going to be like. So then making clothes was a way I could make money when I wasn’t making money playing music.”
He made West African clothing for Simone and flowered sundresses for the actress Frida Payne. He made pants for other musicians and charged $50 a pop. Today, El’Zabar runs an invite-only resale shop in Chicago, filled with one-of-a-kind pieces that he acquired over the years, along with his own designs.
Though the new album celebrates 50 years of his first band, it also unpacks the evolution of Black music through the lens of hypnotic soul. “All Blues” reimagines the Miles Davis classic by paring down the horn section and giving it a walking drum line to actually sound like the blues. “The Whole World,” a gospel standard, is modernized through rhythmic funk-adjacent drums and looping horns by the trumpeter Corey Wilkes and the saxophonist Alex Harding. Where Les McCann and Eddie Harris’s “Compared to What” is a grand affair with soaring piano chords and lively vocals, El’Zabar’s version is quiet and introspective, the sound of a man softly taking stock of modern-day America.
For someone who’s achieved so much yet hopes for greater fanfare — “He’s a nice person who wants his flowers now,” Johnson-Cochran said — El’Zabar is still keeping himself open to new creative possibilities. “Open Me” looks back, but still pushes forward.
Still, it’s been 50 years of doing this. Where does the time go?
“I can’t believe it,” El’Zabar said, laughing. “It hasn’t been easy. We’ve had to constantly prove our viability from the construct of our music. A lot of people never had to do that. And now when I see people saying I’m really doing something, I’m thankful, but it’s 50 years later. Being different comes with a price, but it gives you a joy for the authenticity of your own expression and the ability to live through it.”