---

Photo of Griot Galaxy [left to right: Faruq Z. Bey, Tani Tabbal, Jaribu Shahid, Anthony Holland] Barbara Weinberg Barefield, June 1, 1981


Cover: detail of HAIKU MEMORIEZ OF CINQUE by M. Saffell Gardner and Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts,1994-2007. 40 x 26 inches, monoprint on black etching paper. Courtesy the artists.

WHAT’S IN A NAME Griot Galaxy. Griot, per Oxford: “a member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa.” Galaxy, you probably have that one down. You could translate the compounded term to Afro-centric and in-no-way circumscribed. Tradition-rooted, but not tradition-bound. They were also self-described as the “science fiction band” with their dashikis and silver face paint. Faruq Z. Be later said, “We were the griots of the galaxy … or at least our quadrant, anyway.”

WHERE THEY CAME FROM You could think of them as the distillate of a certain artistic milieu of post-1967 — meaning post-rebellion — Black Detroit. The Bey Brothers’ band of poet-musicians with their “aura of mystery,” as one observer of the time put it, then the sprawling, free jazz of the First African Primal Rhythm Orchestra, then the numerous iterations of Griot around saxophonist Bey, beginning as a trio circa 1972, then the flux of dozens of musicians coming and going, and sometimes roughly that many on the stage, until the final formation of Bey + rhythm section of drummer Tani Tabbal and bassist Jaribu Shahid + horn section of Anthony Holland and David McMurray, both if possible, either if need be. Cumulatively you could work back fro those five to musical teachers, band leaders and associates, including Leon (brother of Joe) Henderson for largely autodidact extraordinaire Bey; Roscoe Mitchell for Holland; Phil Cohra for Tabbal; Sun Ra for Bey, Tabbal and Shahid; and Albert King for McMurray.

WHEN  If you saw them drive an audience to ecstasy in their 1980s heyday — say at an African World Festival or what were then the Montreux/Detroit Jazz Festivals, conclaves hardly primed for just any avant offering — you asked when would they conquer the rest of the world? Whe would the rest of the world get swept into their off-kilter-and-still-rocking, complexly polyrhythmic and kaleidoscopically polychromatic maelstrom … the poetry and the theater and the ritual … the mastery of dynamics, the tension and release … the everyone-simultaneously soloing to pure ensemble combinatorics … sonorities and screams … theme and variation … call and response … text and commentary … referents and extrapolations … post-Coltrane and so, so Motor City? When? When? When? At the time, “how” seemed irrelevant. It was inevitable, right? How could the rest of the world resist? And if that was a little pie-in-the-sky, how about the rest of the international jazz fest circuit?

WHAT IF Then, when they didn’t … you asked how it might have been different. What if  they’d had one record with solid distribution? One solid, world-shaker that reached that broader, imagined audience? Was that too much to ask for? Like an Arista Novus-level release that at least hit a cross-section of hip little college-town record marts across the country? How about that instead of one disc on a hard-to-find European label (Sound Aspects), a couple live selections on a jazz fest promo disc through the Stroh Brewery Company (an important four-disc set of Detroit musical history, by the way) and then the ill-fated Kins on Black and White (2,000 originally pressed and 1,500 or more of those set out in the trash, a sad story not be recounted here)? Killer discs all … but who heard them at the time? And what if time hadn’t run out? What if their heyday hadn’t been cut short by the mid-1980s motorcycle crash that sent Bey into more than a decade of convalescence and the group into fractious disintegration? Or the group had somehow reconvened before Bey’s passing in 2012? What if … what if … what if?

WHAT NOW So, let us welcome the first addition to the Griot discography in twenty-plus years, since the epic Entropy release in 2003 of Live at the D.I.A. — recorded, in turn, a symmetric twenty years earlier. And what a record this is: a quartet edition of Griot (Faruq and Holland killing it on reeds — McMurray was yet to be added — plus that rhythm section), the earliest recording of the scant discography showing all the elements that make their music matter recorded live in the studio of the University of Michigan’s WUOM-FM in 1979 for the “Studio Showcase” with host Michael Grofsorean. Then there’s an amazing bonus track: Eighteen minutes of Grofsorean interviewing the four members, their responses explaining origins and approaches, influences and instrumental strategies, talk of Miles and Coltrane, Roscoe Mitchell and P-Funk, and Sun Ra, Sun Ra, Sun Ra. It’s a rare document, four Afro-guys explaining how the past led to their intense present … while leaning in our future. 

W. Kim Heron is a former editor of Detroit Metro Times and former host of “Destination Out” and “The Kim Heron Show” on WDET-FM. His article “Musician Interrupted” in Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond (Painted Turtle Press, 2016) is the most comprehensive article on Faruq Z. Bey to date (not that there isn’t room for much more).

tracks Side A · After Death (Faruq Z. Bey) Blackout Music, BMI Zychron The Incessant (Tani Tabbal) Thumtiki Music, BMI  Side B · Dragons (Faruq Z. Bey) Blackout Music, BMI Osiris (Faruq Z. Bey) Blackout Music, BMI Side C · Androgeny (Jaribu Shahid) MaSha Music, BMI | "Icarus" by Faruq Z. Bey Side D · Necrophilia (Jaribu Shahid) MaSha Music, BMI credits Releases August 2025 Recorded at WUOM Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1979 Mastered by Warren DeFever, Third Man Mastering Faruq Z. Bey - Alto, Soprano, Tenor Saxophones; Bass Clarinet [Blackout Music] Anthony Holland - Alto, Soprano, Tenor Saxophones; Bass Clarinet Jaribu Shahid - Double Bass [MaSha Music] Tani Tabbal - Drums and Percussion [Thumtiki Music] Mastered by Warren Defever, Third Man Mastering [Detroit] Produced by Two Rooms Records [Detroit] Manufactured at Archer Records [Detroit]