Celebrating the Arts at Esalen – Remembering Baba
Esalen President Gordon Wheeler's Blog
June, 2010
Fourth of July Picnic/Party and Celebrating the Arts are two traditions that have gone hand in hand at Esalen for at least the past 30 years. It was some 25 years ago now that the legendary Babatunde Olatunji, known to generations of fans and followers as "Baba," first brought his special brand of cross-cultural artistry to Esalen. And then it was only a few years later that Baba and his whole magical mystery entourage of African and other musicians were forming the centerpiece of our July 4th celebrations each year.
Baba’s incredible gift – one of them – was first to meld his message of peace and solidarity into music, rhythm and dance; and then to wave some special alchemical dust over a group of mostly neophyte Esalen seminarians – somehow transmuting them into "real" singers, drummers, and dancers (which after all, all of us are, somewhere in there!). The incredible result: a multimedia extravaganza that always had surprises in it, always came off more professionally than we could have dreamed at our faltering rehearsals, always brought cheers of delight from the throngs of holiday celebrants, many of whom would leap up to join the show. It didn’t seem to matter if July 4th fell on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday – meaning that the performers might have had three or four days to create and prepare, or they might have only had one or two! Either way spirits would be high, and amazingly, the drummers and even the dancers would somehow know complex rhythms and steps, always including some astonishing solo feats.
The show featured music, drumming, and dance, but of these three it was drumming that held a special place in Baba's mind and heart. It was not for nothing that he was known as the master/ambassador of African rhythmic influence and beat to the world of Western music down through the decades from the 50's through the 90's and into the new millennium, influencing a generation of performers and composers and in the process recording with what seems like every prominent rock group of those years (and many great jazz groups as well, in addition to his own many records and cds.)
To Baba, teaching and learning drumming was never just a technical or even just a musical skill. It was always a spiritual and political act, basic human communication cutting across dehumanizing boundaries of mere language, political party or nation, race, gender, culture. To sit with him in "class" for a week, as I did one July ten years ago together with my then-15-year-old son Alex, was to feel you were getting the direct transmission of a wisdom culture that transcended all those meaningless divisions between people (and peoples), with roots reaching back into a timeless world before or beyond borders. Decades before we had Doctors Without Borders doing their amazing work of healing and transformation in the world, there was Baba, teaching Drumming Without Borders to generations in the West – and to a whole generation of grateful students at Esalen.
And then no sooner did we learn it, than we got up and performed it, at the picnic, in front of hundreds of people. The performance, really, was the final rehearsal (and one we needed!) – but one infused by the presence of a Baba who was himself suddenly transformed – rising (toward the last) literally from his deathbed, to be young again for an hour, encore after encore, and infusing us all with the same magic spirit.
And in those moments, the whole fractious, sometimes murderous human family was healed and whole again, through the magic of drumming, speaking directly to the primordial rhythms of body, of the earth, of each other, and of our mothers' and fathers' hearts.
In this way an Arts seminar with Baba was the quintessential Esalen Arts experience. After all, an Arts workshop at Esalen – music, dance, voice, prose, poetry, drama, plus all the wonderful visual and plastic arts – is always something more than, and other than, "just" a course in skills training. It's always about personal transformation – finding (or re-finding) the artist within us and between us, through contact with the materials, the medium, the teachers and other seminarians – and then often with the public as well, in a performance or exhibit. And always, always, with Baba there was an alive subtext and message of deep spiritual activism and politics, inseparable as that all is from the arts themselves.
All this is why we find professionals and "amateurs" as well in Esalen arts courses – in the best sense of that word: an amateur as "one who loves." They meet and work side by side in most of our Esalen Arts courses all through the year – and in the magical July 4th courses and performances that continue to be celebrated each summer at Esalen. These festivals carry on Baba's large spirit, transcending narrow divides of "professional/non-professional," "master"/"beginner's mind," age and gender, nation and culture.
Today at Esalen this legacy goes on in full force, under the impresario wizardry of "Esalen’s own" Jayson Fann, who weaves and blends spirit and show alike. (Jayson has long since "graduated" out of Esalen and into the world of multimedia production and arts activism – but we still claim him as one of our own). This year you can see Jayson and his own magic circus of festival and creativity at Esalen on Saturday July 3rd for the picnic/show itself – or all weekend long, July 2-4, when you participate in one of our transformational Esalen Arts courses.
Baba lived out his last several years at Esalen, in failing health, no longer able to tour and perform widely (though he rallied and made exceptions for old friends like Carlos Santana, and for Esalen's 4th of July Celebration – despite dialysis, near blindness, weakness which seemed to vanish for a time when he stood up at a microphone). As he suffered through his final illness, I happened to be undergoing what looked like it might be mine, some 3000 miles away, in Boston. Reaching out across distance as always, he wrote me a letter during that long summer, enclosing one of his last CD’s. Scrawled by hand in large block print that wandered across the page (due to his near-blindness), it read: "Dear Ones: I salute the Divinity in you and yours. Always remember God, Who is our only recourse in the present situation. I send you love, Sir Gordon.– (according me the elder respect title, since it looked at the time like I might well predecease him, for all that I was 30 years younger). –May you get well soon, and meanwhile enjoy the enclosed. With love – Baba.–
At Baba's funeral a few months later in New York City in April of 2003, hundreds of mourners paraded down 125th St across Harlem, many of them in stunning African dress, many with instruments, a real New Orleans funeral with an African beat on a glorious springtime New York day. At the end of the procession more than a thousand spilled out of Riverside Church into the Upper West Side of Manhattan, while inside the church the music went on and on, with speeches, elegies, and messages from musicians and politicians, family members and longtime associates in the great pan-artistic, pan-African, pan-human, 50-year project of arts and politics that was the life trajectory of Baba Olatunji and his work.
We honor Baba today and every day, at Esalen and beyond, when we remember his words, and most of all, remember the rhythm of his drumming, which he taught us to know as the beat of the loving, celebrant heart. As Baba taught us:
Rhythm is the soul of life.
The whole universe revolves in rhythm.
Everything and every human action revolves in rhythm.
- Babatunde Olatunji
Gordon Wheeler, President, Esalen Institute