The richness of the resume is in the details. In the late 1950s, when he was 17, Ulmer moved to Pittsburgh to live with his mother’s cousin, and traded in gospel guitar for backing up doo-wop groups. He traveled with the Dell-Vikings (“Come Go With Me”) on a Dick Clark Caravan tour, and sat in with organ trios featuring Richard “Groove” Holmes and Jimmy Smith. After three years with the Swing Kings, backing singer Jewel Bryner, he settled into the guitar chair at the 502 Club in Columbus, Ohio, where he backed touring acts. He remembers singing Ray Charles songs with Dionne Warwick, but that was nothing unusual. “Back then, if you didn’t have Ray Charles or James Brown songs,” Ulmer recalls, “you didn’t work so much.”
Ulmer hit Detroit in 1967 and landed a gig in the house jazz band at the 20 Grand Club, where the R&B band that played upstairs was the Parliaments, who were in the process of becoming Parliament/Funkadelic. He got the occasional Motown studio gig where “you’d go into the studio and do sixteen bars, and then eight and eight. But you didn’t know what song it was going in.” Ulmer never heard himself on a Motown hit. “I wasn’t even looking to hear myself on a record,” he said. “You just knew you did a session and you got paid that day, because in Detroit, you wanted to play some jazz.”
A unique style, however, eluded Ulmer. He’d learned that lesson the night Wes Montgomery saw him play in a club and was less than impressed by Ulmer’s respectful display of all he had learned from Wes. A supportive club owner told him he should go to New York and meet Miles Davis. He left for New York in 1971 and landed a nine-month gig at the home of bebop, Minton’s Playhouse.
“I rented a storefront in Brooklyn, and I filled it with all sorts of drums,” Ulmer remembers. “Kids would come in from the streets and beat on the drums so that I could play. Soon musicians would start coming by. Rashid Ali [who’d drummed with John Coltrane] came by once, and one night Billy Higgins [who’d played bass with Ornette Coleman] came by. I said, ‘Come in and play with me,’ and when we got through he said, ‘I’m going to take you to meet Ornette Coleman.’ I said, ‘Who’s that?'”
Graduate school. Coleman, a pioneer of the free-jazz movement, was devoted to what he called “harmolodic” music, which aimed to replace European harmonic structure with melody-based group improvisation. “I didn’t know there was such a thing as free music,” said Ulmer. “I’d always played chords and changes and songs. I went, ‘Wow, I can play like this?'”
Not right away. “Coleman would have me modulating from here to there with a different change on each beat,” he recalls, “and it started making sense, and sounding like an orchestrated kind of thing. But it would get tiresome, because we’d be there for six hours and all I’d be doing was playing chords.
“I needed to find another way, and bingo, I went to sleep and dreamed up this tuning — to take my guitar and tune it all to one note. I wouldn’t have chords, but the gauge of each string sounded different, so I could get different sounds with the same notes. So I woke him up and said, ‘Coleman, let’s play now. His horn was right next to the bed, and he started blowing, and when he said, ‘Play B-flat,’ I’d say, ‘I don’t have no B-flat.’ But it didn’t matter, because I was in the flow, and he said, ‘I think you’ve got a harmolodic tuning there.'”
Free jazz, however, was no free lunch. Coleman produced and played on Ulmer’s 1978 album Tales Of Captain Black, but like much of Ulmer’s discography, it’s long been out-of-print. He recorded three discs for Columbia in the early ’80s, around the time that his band was playing in Manhattan rock clubs such as Danceteria and Hurrah, but the label lost interest when it became clear that Ulmer wasn’t going to become a mainstream guitar hero like Jimi Hendrix. Ulmer cut highly-regarded free jazz with the Music Revelation Ensemble, wailing alongside David Murray’s tenor saxophone, and made other discs that had some critics calling him a wasted talent.
So maybe it was inevitable that the blues would come calling. And while the band albums used familiar songs to showcase Ulmer’s powerful voice and his instrumental inclination to paint outside the traditional progressions, Birthright is a record that is every bit as idiosyncratic as its maker. Part of its distinction is due to Ulmer’s harmolodic tuning; his use of rhythmic drone strings and offbeat lead lines creates an atmosphere that fleetingly suggests the work of bluesmen as varied as John Lee Hooker and Skip James. But the soul of the album is the singular story it tells, from Ulmer’s moving tribute to his grandfather (“Geechee Joe”) to his rumination on romance (“Where Did All The Girls Come From?”).
“The blues to me is like the concept of the talking drum,” Ulmer says. “They used to use the drums to communicate, and the blues was also about communication. I think of the blues as something that ties you into history, something that’s deeper than what you were doing last night. That’s why I wrote that song ‘Take My Music Back To The Church’, because when you go to church, your song is about Jesus. If you go in the church and sing about anybody but Jesus, you’re going to have a problem.”
Ulmer has been a Muslim for more than twenty years; he also goes by the name Damu Mustafa Abdul Musawwir. The nickname “Blood” dates from childhood, when folks would comment on his looks and say, “You’re the blood of your father.”
“I told my daddy one time, ‘I wash up before I pray.’ And he told me, ‘The devil does too.'” Ulmer laughs at the memory. “But he also said, ‘I know things about myself that I can’t tell the church, because if I told them, they might want to put me out.'”
Shortly after completing Birthright, Ulmer went home to South Carolina and cut off the dreadlocks he had worn for years. His late father would have been pleased. Perhaps Blood did it in preparation for the gig of his dreams.
“I started in church before I started in music,” said the son of the father, “so I want my music to be able to be played in the church. I want to stand up in a Baptist church on Sunday afternoon at 2 o’clock and play all my songs without the preacher coming and tapping me on the shoulder and saying, ‘Boy, get that shit out of here.'”
John Milward has covered popular music and culture for 30 years. He writes and plays music in Bearsville, New York.
