Community Spotlight: Bill Summers
Bill Summers in his Uptown studio. Photo credit: Tami Fairweather
Spotlight by Tami Fairweather
Bill Summers is a musical genius. One of the top percussionists in the world, he’s been Quincy Jones’ go-to for decades, collaborating on the film score for The Color Purple and the television mini-series Roots among others. His worldwide repertoire of rhythms is the heartbeat of his acclaimed New Orleans-based Latin jazz group Los Hombres Calientes, whose award-winning albums were co-created with local musicians on location in the global birthplaces of music like Africa, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad...and New Orleans.
The opening drum groove that he wrote and produced with his bandmates on The Headhunters 1975 track “God Make Me Funky” has been sampled over 300 times by the likes of DMX, 2Pac, Beastie Boys, Santana, and Digable Planets to name a few.
“The rhythms they concocted on that record have not been able to be duplicated to this day because it’s a feel you can’t capture. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” says David Jackson, one of Summers’ “projects.” David was young and inexperienced when Bill took a chance on him as a road manager for one of his world tours with Teddy Pendergrass some 40 years ago. “Bill taught me everything I know about the music business,” he says. Jackson now works with and reps some of the biggest producers in hip hop, and still checks in with his “big brother” and mentor on a regular basis.
David is the one who testified to Summers’ musical genius on speakerphone the morning I was sitting across from Bill in his longtime studio in Uptown New Orleans when he called. Bill wouldn’t say that himself. He doesn’t even like being described as a teacher, because “I share, I don’t teach.”
In addition to being a sharer, Summers is also very clearly a businessman. He’s also an activist, a humanitarian, a mentor, a historian, a music scholar, a classical pianist, a flautist, a saxophonist, and--in his own words--a professional Black man. “I have my Ph.D. in being a Black man in America,” he says. Most of all, he’s a drummer. A priest of the drum actually, initiated and ordained in Cuba by his musical and spiritual godfather--a high priest of the drum under whom he studied for nearly 30 years.
Bill Summers reaches for his sacred drums.
Photo credit: Tami Fairweather
A drive to affect social change within the music industry is where his spirituality intersects with his business acumen. Primarily, he wants to make sure the musicians who create music are the people making money from that music. Black musicians especially, who historically have not.
Bill founded the non-profit Klub K.I.D. as an extension of what he’s always been called to do: serve and empower his community, a trait he attributes to growing up in a family of civil rights activists. What began as a Sunday open house at his New Orleans studio for kids of every ethnicity and background (and their parents) to come and learn music became something bigger. He named it Klub K.I.D. “not as a moniker for little people” but rather an acronym for Knowledge, Independence, and Determination (with the intentional periods between the letters to amplify the point).
Thanks to private donations and grants like the Preservation Hall Foundation Community Grant awarded in 2020, Klub K.I.D. is available free to any school or community that welcomes the program, which is, in short, the setup of a full-fledged entertainment company.
“No one ever came to my school and did what we do,” Bill says. “It’s what I wish someone taught me.” The program starts with recording (“the fun shit first”) and ends with a full-blown album, mastered and ready for release. In between is applying for a business license, opening a bank account, assigning artists to recording contracts, and negotiating that contract, the royalties, and the intellectual property rights. The end deliverables include a music video and 10 complete tracks ready for commercial release, which are written, choreographed, performed, recorded, produced, and mixed by the students themselves. They even make the album artwork and manufacture the CDs. “You ain’t graduating from this,” he says. “This is a lifelong endeavor.”
The number one commandment of Klub K.I.D.? Get paid. “There’s no excuse for not having a job after going through this.” Could be any job, really. Bill’s current attorneys went through his program themselves years ago, which is what inspired them to go to law school. Getting paid allows dreams to thrive, and builds generational wealth in his community.
Though his family roots run deep in New Orleans (upriver, to be more exact), he was raised in Detroit. Showing an early proclivity to music, he was only five when his parents enrolled him in the Detroit Conservatory of Music. By age eight, he was spinning Aretha Franklin, Thelonious Monk, and James Brown records from his parent’s vast jazz and R&B collection, none of which were being taught in school.
“I was playing Chopin, Bach, and Beethoven every damn day,” he says. “But I was in love with Black music.”
One day he brought in the sheet music for the Ray Charles song “One Mint Julep” to ask his teacher if he could play it. He vividly recalls her picking it up, glancing at the cover, then setting it down away from him and saying, “when you’re done with this, then you’ll have time for that,” as she handed him back pages of Chopin. “Well that just took me to the other side,” he says.
Shortly after he bought his first set of bongo drums and was hired to play percussion in a Cuban band led by a friend of the family. This was the early 1960s, when “I Love Lucy” was the most popular show on TV, in which Lucille Ball co-starred with her then-husband, the Cuban-American musician and actor Desi Arnaz. Arnaz’s signature song (and phrase) was “Babalu” and something about the word had struck Bill enough to compel him to research.
His research dove into Afro-Cuban rhythms where he discovered that Desi’s Babalu catchphrase was a derivative of a West African word. Babalú-Ayé is the name of an Orisha (a spiritual deity) from the religion practiced by natives of the African Yoruba culture and members of the African diaspora around the world. It has also influenced Santeria and Voodoo religions in the Caribbean and in New Orleans (widely considered the northernmost Caribbean city). It literally translates to “father of the world.”
“Music is such an integral part of life in Africa that most Africans don’t even have a word for it,” explains Bill. And in the Yoruba religion, playing the rhythms on the drums are actual prayers. A spiritual ceremony begins by playing a series of specific rhythms to honor each of the Orishas. There are specific rhythms and songs he can play and sing for the trees, or the grass outside. “This makes music a totally different experience because you’re not just playing music, you’re praying.”
This is part of Bill’s genius. He knows so much about music and the history and philosophy of music and rhythm, it’s head-spinning. He can break down, for example, how American jazz, R&B, and hip hop were born in New Orleans, and wouldn’t exist without the African rhythms brought by the enslaved people who were forced to be here against their will. Those rhythms were played on drums and percussion instruments in Congo Square, where enslaved Africans were--for a time--allowed to gather on Sundays.
When the white colonizers got nervous about those gatherings and shut the activities down (“taking our medicine away from us”) Bill says that Africans “took all of that energy and knowledge and put it into new instruments.” The drum rhythms shifted to European instruments like the trumpet, trombone, tuba, and marching drums, which evolved into brass bands and the melodies created by Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong in the form of jazz. All rooted in those ancient African beats.
“There would be no hip hop without Congo Square,” he says. The number of times that the “God Make Me Funky” beat has been sampled is a solid testament to that statement.
This past year, Klub K.I.D. has been going strong, operating in a mostly outdoors format on Bill’s farm property about 50 miles outside New Orleans. Bill finished his memoir and also recovered from a case of COVID himself.
In April, Bill gathered an incarnation of The Headhunters with New Orleans-based musicians to perform a tribute to the original bassist Paul Jackson, who passed away in March. It was his first show since the pandemic shut everything down, and one of the first live club shows in New Orleans since the restrictions began to ease. You could feel the excitement in the room and relief to be in the presence of live music again, despite the requirement to be seated, six feet apart.
As he took to the stage, Bill spoke to the healing power of music, and how important it was that we--the audience--were there to receive it. “We’re so happy to be playing music again. We’re playing for God and we’re playing for you, to heal you.”
It reminded me of something he said in our long conversations. “Music is not just music, it’s a power that’s more powerful than any bomb or device that a human could make,” he preached. “It’s not possible to be more powerful than music, it’s just not gonna happen.”
“And you can’t have power without spirit. That comes first.”
This article is part of an ongoing storytelling series, powered by local writers and correspondents, celebrating community leaders and creatives awarded the Preservation Hall Foundation Community Engagement Grant during the COVID-19 pandemic. To learn more about this grant and its outstanding awardees, click here.