Keeping Time is a short film by Darol Olu Kae, an artist and filmmaker born and based in South Los Angeles. It ruminates on the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (the Ark), an avant-garde jazz group from South Central LA, active since 1961, defined by its malleability and its musicians’ allegiance to pure and nuanced jazz forms as established by its founder, the late composer and pianist Horace Tapscott. The Ark emerged in an era when many Black musicians were being exploited by major record labels to manufacture music driven by record sales and po-culture appeal. The development of the Ark, and its innovative and improvised approach to jazz, was paired with Tapscott’s practice in outmaneuvering record labels to bring Black music directly to Black communities.
Kae’s film, which intersperses original 16mm, 35mm, and digital film formats with recently excavated archival footage from Tapscott’s personal home movies—often situated in sites of communion, such as homes, garages, and public parks—draws inspiration from the collective’s foundational organizing structure that foregrounds community interdependence and preservation. The title, “Keeping Time,” invokes an insular belief common among jazz musicians that timekeeping in performance is the drummer’s responsibility. However, as Thelonious Monk once declared, “just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time.” In the Ark, rhythm is accounted for collectively, a practice that gestures back to an African indigenous relationship to time that is dependent on ritual, intuition, and fellowship—elements that enable repetition. Scholar James A. Snead writes that, “whenever we encounter repetition in cultural forms, we indeed are not viewing the “same thing,” but its transformation.”1 Members in the Ark featured in “Keeping Time” embody the multi-hyphenate roles required for avant-garde music making, and they help us question how useful repetition can be as a tool for survival evolution.
In making the film, Kae studied the Ark and developed a script in collaboration with its members who also “perform” in the film, simulating their own experiences within the band’s organization. As a result, distinctions between fiction, reality, and documentary are blurred. Kae’s films follows group members and its prodigy, Mekala Session, son of Tapscott’s right hand and saxophonist, Michael Session. Appointed the Ark’s band leader after bringing the collective out of dormancy, Mekala must balance being both progeny and principal in a band that prides itself on welcoming artists of all ages. In his multigenerational rendering of the Ark, its members, and south central LA, Kae codifies for viewers what forms of ritual and relation are engendered when we share space and time to make creative work. The exhibition also includes archival materials that Kae newly excavated from private collections and the Los Angeles Public Library.
Curated by
Taylor Renee Aldridge
at California African American Museum, Los Angeles
until January 15, 2024