The Arkivists

Unearthing the treasure of Horace Tapscott, musical phantom of South L.A.

Comments (0) By Matthew Duersten Wednesday, Apr 5 2006

Photo by Adam Beinash

Tapscott preservationists Kamau Da�ood, Michael Dett Wilcots, Michael Session, Cecilia Tapscott (Horace's wife) and Steven Isoardi. (Photo by Adam Beinash)

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The copying work is as tedious as it sounds. Sharps takes a moment to practice runs on his soprano sax amid the ephemera still left in Tapscott’s garage, where the Phantom rehearsed the Ark every Saturday afternoon with the door flung open and the orchestra spilling out onto the driveway. The point, he says, is making sure the band has something to pass on as well as feed off. “These young guys are the next generation who are gonna take over; we gotta have their energy. The reason no one’s been playing the old pieces is because they’ve been in there.” He points over to an olive-drab World War II–surplus file cabinet filched from a friend’s workplace. “See, everything’s connected: Without the archives you can’t have a band, and without a band you can’t have an organization, and without an organization the band has no support. We have to take it upon ourselves to invest in ourselves, in order to not lose everything we have.”

The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, conducted by Michael Session, plays the World Stage on Sunday, April 30, at 3 p.m. Steven Isoardi reads from The Dark Tree at Eso Won Books, 3655 S. La Brea Ave., on Saturday, April 15, at 5 p.m.