Horace Tapscott with The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra - Live at LACMA 1998 (2020 Dark Tree Vinyl LP)

Horace Tapscott with The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and The Great Voice of UGMAA - Live at LACMA, 1998 | Vinyl LP - 2020 Dark Tree Roots Series (DT(RS)11LP)

• Tapscott's last public performance, recorded live at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on 24 July 1998, seven months before his death in February 1999, with the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the twelve-voice Great Voice of UGMAA choir reconstituted for this occasion
• Two extended pieces, each over fourteen minutes: "Fela Fela", a tribute to Fela Kuti composed by Tapscott and conguero Najite Agindotan, and "Why Don't You Listen?", co-written with Linda Hill, whose lyrics call the roll of jazz's ancestors
• Recorded and mixed by Wayne Peet, mastered by François Lê Xuân, pressed at Pallas on 180-gram vinyl, released on Dark Tree's Roots Series in 2020 with liner notes by Steven L. Isoardi and a photo insert by Warren Berman
  

On 24 July 1998 Horace Tapscott led the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Great Voice of UGMAA choir in a public concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was already ill with the cancer that would kill him on 27 February 1999. He was sixty-four years old. This LP, released by the Paris-based Dark Tree label in June 2020 as part of their Roots Series documenting previously unreleased recordings from the Los Angeles avant-garde scene, presents two pieces from that night, each running past fourteen minutes. "Fela Fela" is a tribute to Fela Kuti composed by Tapscott and Arkestra conguero Najite Agindotan, written following Kuti's death in August 1997 and performed here for what was likely one of the first times: its groove draws on the African percussion rhythms in Kuti's own music, with three basses providing a dense low foundation under the choir's Yoruba-inflected singing, Michael Session's soprano saxophone and Phil Ranelin's trombone. "Why Don't You Listen?", co-written with Linda Hill, is a vocal invocation of the jazz tradition, its lyrics addressing the listener directly in a roll call of names: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Max Roach, James Moody, Dizzy Gillespie. Dwight Trible sings lead and directs the Great Voice of UGMAA, which includes vocalist and percussionist Ndugu "Jingles" Chandler among its twelve members.

The personnel assembled here are a concentrated version of what Tapscott had been building for nearly four decades. Phil Ranelin, who had co-founded the Detroit Tribe label in the early 1970s before relocating to Los Angeles, plays trombone. The rhythm section comprises three bassists (Alan Hines, Trevor Ware and Louis Large), Donald Dean on drums, Agindotan on congas and Bill Madison on percussion. The total ensemble, with choir, is twenty people. The Great Voice of UGMAA had originally operated from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s before Tapscott dissolved it; it was reconstituted here. Licensed under exclusive arrangement from the Horace Tapscott family, recorded and mixed by Wayne Peet, the full five-track concert was first released on CD and digital in 2019 as "Why Don't You Listen? - Live at LACMA, 1998"; this LP presents two of those five pieces, "Fela Fela" and "Why Don't You Listen?", in a 180-gram pressing from Pallas in Germany, cut at Pallas, with liner notes by Steven L. Isoardi, author of the definitive Tapscott study "The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles", and photographs from the concert by Warren Berman.