Close Enough For Jazz
John Edwin Johnson was a born pilgrim, searching for his father, itinerant musician Sammy Blue, whom he didn't know, his identity, and his place in the world. While in the Manhattan Tombs on an unpaid alimony rap brought by his first wife, John was befriended by a small cadre of detainees who espoused the teachings of the honorable Elijah Muhammad.
In the mid 1950s Muhammad specialized in recruiting the downtrodden, beaten and defeated Black men from jails and prisons into his “Black Muslim” movement. Muhammad, born Elijah Robert Poole in Georgia then migrating to Michigan, met Black Nationalist Wallace Fard, who was thought to be Allah in the flesh. Muhammad took over Fard’s Nation of Islam upon the leader’s mysterious disappearance. Muhammad continued and enhanced Fard’s original doctrines. Rooted in Islam but tailored to the African American man, Fard asserted the African American as original Asiatics, once and future kings whose culture and identity was stolen and beaten out of them in their enslavement. Taking a page from 1920s Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Fard and later Muhammad, believed that the Black man would only regain their true freedom and former stature by separating from the White man’s racist, supremacist, genocidal ideology and cultivate his own culture and civilization.
In his brief incarceration and later with his fellow musician friends, John grew increasingly interested in Islam. He became a member of the Harlem Mosque Temple Number 7 lead by charismatic firebrand Malcolm X and eventually taught himself to read, write, and speak Arabic. He decided to shed his confused and empty life as John Johnson, one out of seemingly millions of John Johnsons, embrace Islam, and legally become Jamil Ibn Ibrahim. Translated from Arabic as beautiful one, son of Abraham, father of multitude, this transformation is a glowing celebration of self and a respectful nod to his grandfather Abraham, the man who raised him and encouraged his musical dream.
Drugs, marijuana in particular, are a crucial part of the jazz scene. Gage. Mary Jane. Pot. Reefer. Weed. It goes by many names, and it is the glue that holds the 1950s underground together. Be it the ersatz communists or the beatniks, they all use marijuana as a social signifier. It is the passing of the peace pipe, a communal test to see if you are "with it," and it’s something that all the users employ to discern who is friend or foe, a "hipster" or a "square." Reefer is everywhere. Considering the habits Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Billie Holliday, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and countless other lesser lights have involving heroin, marijuana is considered by its users a mild, harmless drug, regarded about as caustic a substance as cigarettes are considered at that time. Jamil smokes both heavily.
In 1956 Jamil finds brotherhood in the Nation of Islam, yet he is still not whole and indulges in reefer to further belong even though Islam forbids it, also probably as an escape from the echoing void of his dubious origins as a bastard. Though he is a charming entertainer and extremely sociable, Jamil feels like an empty man. He wants desperately to find and cultivate his own American dream, regardless of the ugly racial divides of the time coupled with the Nation of Islam’s anxious foment of imminent insurrection. He yearns to create the serene and stable home life that eluded him in his youth, complete with a hip, young, beautiful wife who can deliver to him three bright boys. He finds it in the clubs sharing a joint with Audrey Jacobs, nee Phipps, a Brooklyn-born music loving beauty of English/West Indian lineage- my mother.