Letter From The Editor Even before we published the first issue of Home Rule Magazine back in June 2022 – to coincide with and serve as an expanded guide to the first Home Rule Music Festival – we knew we could not leave it as a one-off, one-issue publication. The work we did in pushing D.C. music history, vinyl culture and creative musicians to the forefront felt like necessary work, especially as more of that history is forgotten or destroyed by gentrification; AND there is a great resurgent interest in the music of D.C. thanks to reissue labels and the current vinyl culture. We worked over the last several months to dive into these topics more and flesh out these areas of interest more for this issue. The thread of legacy records prominently comes up in three pieces in this issue. Our feature story focuses on saxophonist and bandleader Idris Ackamoor, a Chicago-born, now Bay Area-based artistic polymath who led a pioneering Afrocentric, free jazz group out of Yellow Springs, Ohio – the Pyramids – in the early 1970s. The group’s first three albums are being celebrated now by Strut Records in a box set, Aomawa: The 1970s Recordings, made as part of the label’s celebration of Ackamoor’s catalog. The Pyramids’ and Idris’ story of being ahead of time, unacknowledged by the jazz hierarchy, relates very much to the stories we tell about D.C. jazz artists, especially those captured on the Black Fire label. In fact, Jimmy Gray included advertising about The Pyramids in the second issue of his own Black Fire Magazine. Tommy Gartman talked to Wes Felton, son of the great D.C. pianist Hilton Felton, about the renewed interest in his father’s work and his own part in channeling that artistic legacy. The third pillar in this issue’s focus on artistic legacies comes from the brilliant writer and curator
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Marcus J. Moore – a proud son of Prince George’s County – who is letting us reproduce entries from his sharp, insightful newsletter “The Liner Notes” (for the first time in print). In this entry, “Stop Erasing Women from Free Jazz History,” Moore looks at the recent reconsiderations and celebrations of
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free jazz and asks where are the myriads tributes, accolades and think pieces for women like June Tyson, Linda Sharrock and Margo Ackamoor like there are for their male contemporaries. We also dive into the recent and longer histories of live, public music festivals with a trio of fantastic pieces by historian Briana Thomas and writers Majeedah Johnson and Leon Spinner. Thomas, a historian of the U Street neighborhood, takes us through the history of Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park as a space for music in the city, from its origins through CapitalBop’s second iteration of NEXTFest (which Spinner recaps) – as part of a regular series we will do every issue focusing on different legendary concert venues in the D.C. area. Johnson provides a splendid recap of the 18th annual D.C. Jazz Festival and looks at the legacy of Lou Stovall’s work as an artist who helped visually capture the mood of D.C. jazz in the 1970s. We also take a dive into the history of one of our headliners – E.U. – with an interview frontman Sugar Bear did with Dr. Bryan Jenkins for E.U.’s 50th anniversary and the first Home Rule Festival last year.
Dig in and stay curious,
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