A fine profile of Sadik Hakim, one of the unsung heroes
of the musical revolution we call “bebop”—and subject of one of our earliest posts—appears in the first issue of Zenith City, an online newsletter devoted to
all things Duluth. David Ouse, author of
Forgotten Duluthians and a research
librarian for “the air-conditioned city’s” public library system, deserves the
gratitude of jazz lovers for helping solidify Hakim's place in the history of the music in the popular mind. For as of 2012, that place largely depends
on the ability of information-hungry jazz fans to notice, recall, and connect the
scattered references to him in the biographies and memoirs of others.
Mr. Ouse
enriches his few paragraphs with just enough genealogical and sociological
detail to help us envision Hakim's journey from a Black working-class musical
household in Duluth just after World War I, to 52nd Street in New York in its
glory days in the mid-'40s, his conversion to Islam, his participation in the
recording of the bop classic "Ko-Ko," to the concert halls of Japan
"before enthusiastic crowds" in 1979-1980. (It brought me great
satisfaction to learn the last-cited fact.)
Sadik
Hakim (1919-1983)
If there
is to be a sequel to Mr. Ouse’s book, I hope Sadik Hakim finds a place in
it. In that spirit of recovery, we are pleased to refer again
to Tom Surowicz’s 1990 “Forgotten Man,” a substantial appreciation of Hakim for
the Twin Cities Reader, available via this blog. (Last
year Dave Lull provided me with that article, scanned with the resources of the
very library Mr. Ouse serves, and tipped me off to the latter’s recent item only
today. Thanks again, Dave!)
