_“I’m an anomaly. Natchez people just didn’t come to New York. You know, there’s nothing here for them. It’s too big, it’s too rough, it’s too much concrete, the whole thing. It’s just not a place where we go.”

Seated in a coffee shop near Times Square, half a block from the neon Radio City Music Hall marquee burning red-orange through the afternoon shadows, Olu Dara is talking about the isolation he felt as a Natchez, Mississippi, native stranded in New York in 1963.

A Harlem resident, Dara has long since adapted to the Gotham life, yet his debut CD, In the World: From Natchez to New York, is rich in the earthy textures of Southern memory—of crowder peas and okra, muddy banks and summer showers. As expansive and generous as it is unself-conscious, In the World plays like what it is—the offhand work of a patient musician who has waited until age fifty-seven to release an album. Not that Dara is new to the studio. A major force in the jazz avant-garde of the ’70s and ’80s, Dara has played trumpet and cornet on scores of albums by the likes of David Murray (whom he helped introduce into New York jazz circles), Taj Majal, Brian Eno, and Nas, Dara’s son, a platinum-selling rap artist. Dara has also worked with fellow Mississippian Cassandra Wilson, whose 1993 Blue Light ’Til Dawn features Dara’s muddied horn lashing the corners of Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail.” “I like to call Olu the master of the Delta mysteries,” Wilson says.

As active in theater as in music, Dara had little interest in pushing for an album of his own, mostly because of the limitations inherent in the format; his vision encompasses space and motion and theatrical spontaneity. Only through the patience of Yves Beauvais of Atlantic Records, who had been following Dara’s career closely since the early ’80s, did In the World come to pass. Five years ago, when Beauvais was asked by Atlantic to develop a new jazz roster for the label, the first artist he called was Dara. “I thought he was one of the great unsigned legends,” Beauvais says. Still, it took Beauvais’s calling Dara once or twice a year for half a decade before the Natchez native agreed to record.

A few of the songs on In the World grew out of plays that Dara has scored. Other songs, like “Okra” (an irresistible ode to a “coal man,” or market vendor), were written twenty years ago; still others Dara composed right in the studio during the hasty three-day album session. Given such ad hoc methods, it’s a miracle the CD has any center of gravity; in less sure hands such a patchwork approach would have made for aesthetic dissonance. But for all its loose-jointed veneer, In the World coheres around Dara’s polyglot outlook—his casual vocal phrasing and multi-voice arrangements; his lacerating bottleneck guitar; his sweetly unobtrusive cornet. Sometimes solo, sometimes with a tight group of supporting singers and players, he moves from African high-life buoyancy to Delta blues austerity to streetwise hip-hop intensity without ever sounding pedantic. Lacking a brittle note anywhere, the album revels in the voluptuous pleasures of a table well-laid and “juicy lips” well-kissed, even as a blue-note subtext speaks to harsher truths. Whether joyous or grim, the truths of In the World linger because of what they withhold, because Dara so clearly did not put everything he knows into making the album—not about New York, and surely not about Natchez.

_As Dara recalls hearing, his family first moved into Natchez proper from the outlying regions some time in the late 1800s. Situated a hundred and fifty or so miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, Natchez in its heyday was a commercial and cultural crossroads that rivaled the Crescent City itself. The French brought the first slaves to the Natchez district, and by the late 1700s the surrounding counties had given over to a full-scale plantation economy. During the antebellum years, the trade in human cargo was so pervasive in Natchez that the entire town, as one historian put it, “simply reeked of the foul business.” With riverboats landing daily and with traffickers hauling goods down the Natchez Trace (an ancient Indian trail nicknamed the Devil’s Backbone), the town did a steady turn-around in prostitution and gambling in the bawdy lowland district known as “Natchez-Under-the-Hill. ”

Dara grew up keenly aware of the city’s deep river history, as well as its cultural legacy as a town that he claims celebrated Mardi Gras before New Orleans did, and that was home to the novelist Richard Wright and other artistic luminaries. “In my side of the town,” Dara says, “the first thing I heard was the first black opera singer to have any international fame was from Natchez. Her name was Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.” Dara’s own musical interests tended less toward opera than to the r&b he picked up on local radio and the blues culture saturating the Delta to the north. The “oldest sound” he heard was his grandmother’s lullabies; the first instrument he learned was the cornet.

Dara left Natchez in 1958 to attend Tennessee State, a black college in Nashville that was, in those days, a training ground for countless jazz musicians and future black music educators. (He says that he was a “peon” in that high-powered musical community.)

After college Dara spent a couple of years in the Navy, a critical time that brought him into direct contact with the music of Africa and other regions. “I was prepared for African music because the blues they sing in Mississippi and the rhythms they play connect with it,” he said in a recent Bomb interview. Discharged in Brooklyn in 1963, Dara “stayed a couple days too long” and wound up marooned there. The shipwreck proved fortuitous, however, for his neighborhood turned out to be thick with some of the top jazz talent in New York. Such heavyweights as guitarist Grant Green and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard lived near Dara, and saxophonist John Coltrane would visit frequently and play at a local club called the Blue Coronet. Dara would eventually retrace the entire journey of his coming of age—from Natchez to Nashville to Herkimer Street in Brooklyn—within the Delta-dust arrangement of his “Natchez Shopping Blues”: “I bought my mind and soul on the river/I bought my heart in Nashville, Tennessee...”

Dara marked time in the late ’60s and early ’70s playing live r&b. That scene began dying beneath the pulse of the disco strobes, so when he received an offer to join jazz drummer Art Blakey’s group, he jumped at the chance, becoming one of the few musicians in modern history to turn to jazz as a step up the financial ladder. Since the ’50s, numerous trumpet giants have owed a lingering hot streak in their blood to the tutorial impact of Blakey’s drive; Dara nevertheless grew bored with Blakey’s relatively locked-in musical routine, and by the mid-’70s he had fallen in with David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Julius Hemphill, Hamiet Bluiett, and other young avant-gardists exploring the free-form music labeled “loft jazz” (because critics found it easier to describe where it was played than what it was). Though Dara excelled in that domain, adapting his “songlike” trumpet style accordingly, his principal ally was drummer Phillip Wilson, who shared with Dara a secret affinity for the blues.

Eventually feeling as constrained by the atonal and astructural tendencies of the avant-garde as he had by the hard-bop rigidity of the Blakey band, Dara formed his fabled Okra Orchestra and Natchezsippi groups, an alternating pair of rhythm-rich performance troupes that knocked the New York cognoscenti flat. As leader, Dara would bring in singers and dancers and thought nothing of having a woman onstage washing clothes to the beat of the music. The effete jazz labels couldn’t have cared less about okra, or Natchez, but the theater community flocked to the Mississippian’s shows, as did other musicians. “I went and saw every performance that he had,” Cassandra Wilson says, “because it validated me. In fact, I think it was instrumental in me going back into that music and going back into my past and coming to grips with the blues, you know, confronting and addressing that part of my musical experience. I think that seeing Olu was really the beginning of that.”

Dara began getting calls from producers, playwrights, and choreographers, some wanting his music, others wanting him onstage. “He kind of disappeared from sight, as far as playing live gigs,” Beauvais recalls. “And then I saw his name reappear, but in the dance-theater context.” Since then, Dara has collaborated with the poet Rita Dove and has scored the music for regional productions of several plays by August Wilson. Dara’s most frequent partner has been the choreographer Dianne McIntyre, with whom he has worked for nearly fifteen years, writing and performing improvisatory “plays with no scripts,” as he puts it. Their most recent production, Blues Rooms, opened at Virginia’s George Mason University in March.

“Theater has affected my life more than anything else,” Dara emphasizes. “More than bebop, more than avant-garde music, more than rhythm and blues. It’s just the theater itself—basically, because it’s a combination of everything.”

The most intriguing result of Dara’s immersion in theater is the way In the World unfolds as a long conversation, with each song building from and commenting on the ones before it. The result is a layering of mood that gradually transforms Dara’s good-time music into something as emotionally complex and immutably solid as its core component: the blues. “Harlem Country Girl,” for instance, sets the stage for “Zora,” a song that calls on the spirit and vision of the writer Zora Neale Hurston, in which Dara laments, “I heard they ran you out of Harlem,” a theme that in turn reverberates through the muted-horn tone poem “Bubber (If Only).” The latter, with lyrics written and whispered by Mayanna Lee, honors Duke Ellington Orchestra trumpeter Bubber Miley, the co-writer of such Ellington classics as “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and the man from whom Ellington learned the phrase “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Like Hurston, Miley was a native Southerner who made his mark in the Harlem of the ’20s but came to a dismal end—Hurston died alone in a Florida welfare home in 1960; Miley died of tuberculosis before his thirtieth birthday.

Similarly juxtaposed are two songs relating to Dara’s family. “Jungle Jay,” a stark collaboration with son Nas (the B3 organ groove sounds as menacing as a night wind through an empty subway station), and “Kiane,” a lullaby for Dara’s “little baby boy” of that name. As the final cut on the CD, “Kiane” brings the whole Natchez to New York odyssey into poignant focus. Singing over a serenely elegant guitar-and-cornet arrangement, Dara, wanting only to prolong his young son’s innocence, urges Kiane to sleep. But Dara’s words belie the very shield of slumber the father would will for his child:

Oh your mama, as you know has gone, gone away

She may not be back

It’s a doggone shame, yes we know.

It’s a closing scene worthy of any dramatist. At such a moment of conflicting love and pain, there is nothing to sustain a man like Dara, except for the ritual singing of a father’s blues, so far from his own father’s house.