I like to read my poetry behind jazz music but my words spit fire in any genre.
To appreciate my poetic rants and raves you should have an idea of my history. You should know my sources, and what shaped my art. Here are some of the high points.
I’m not sure who named me Dave Wilks Jr. but I have never really cared for that name. I am my father’s only son so maybe he is to blame. On September 6, 1951 sometime in the wee hours of the morning I became my mother’s third of eight children, the product of the union of Dave & Flossie Wilks. Not too long later my pregnant mother and Dave Wilks, Sr. separated and divorced.
I went through a little more than the usual drama that comes with living life. When I was still young my mother had heart problems and became sick. I was shipped off to Gary Indiana with two of my sisters to live with my father and his woman who was ten years his senior. Gary was rough, more bad times than good times. My father was a player who stayed in the streets and his woman was extremely jealous. She seemed to take it out on me because I looked like him. She would beat me and my sisters for the least little thing we did, that bitch would beat me butt naked with an extension cord.
In the summer of 1959 or 1960 my mother got over her illness and came to get her children out of that living hell. Other than worshiping the creator, the birth of my children, and falling in love I have never been so happy in all of my life. My mother had remarried and I now had three more brothers and one more sister. We all settled in on the west side of Chicago and then all was basically good.
Growing up in the late fifty’s and early sixty’s were unsettling times. But the cultural and social upheavals, the protest, the hippies, the riots, the acid, the herb, the “say it loud I’m black and proud” would all be the catalyst that forged my art into what it is today.
The summer of 1967 was the starting point. I had run into one my friends from the old neighborhood. The conversation went:
“Hey lets go get a nickel bag smoke some weed and listen to some jazz.”
“I don’t like jazz and I don’t smoke weed.”
My boy convinced me to smoke and as I was starting to feel this new feeling when my boy dropped Christ the Redeemer from Donald Byrd’s LP and I listened. I never heard anything so beautiful in my life, Donald Byrd broke in on trumpet I was totally transported, I was gone….
Back then Motown, Philly, Stax, Chess, showcased rhythm and blues and we all loved it, but I never knew Black people could make music sound so good without singing. This jazz this jazz was something else, and when the music was over my boy said:
“Hey man Roland Kirk is going to be in town this weekend lets go check him out it's only five bucks to get in.”
That was my true introduction, my baptism to the great black music called jazz. I saw Rahsaan bend notes and ideas in ways that are still unexplainable and unbelievable.
After that night I wanted to be the next Coltrane, but I did not have the discipline of horn player. Around ‘67 or ‘68 I was exposed to the Last Poets, a group that came with a message that influenced me in a new way and I began to write the spoken word.
Cataloging those who influenced my style of writing is impossible since many influences have touched me unconsciously. I consider myself a very descriptive writer and so an early source would have to be Jack London. As a child when I read Sea Wolf and the Call of the Wild I could taste the salty ocean, walk the ships, I saw Wolf Larsen’s chiseled body. Alaska, the dogs, the whole rough adventure…
The late sixties was the dawn of cultural awakening. During this time I was a particularly avid reader, and the more I read about Black culture the more I wanted to read. I read Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, poets Amir Baraka , Don Lee, Hoyt Fuller, historians such as Lerrone Bennet Jr, Claude Anderson, Dr John Henrik Clark….. great writers who have influenced me and helped develop my identity. Three of the most important books have to be the autobiography of Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, Man-child in the Promised Land by Claude Brown, and Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim. Through reading these books and through living in these times I was transformed and I marked that transformation by taking a new name: Dawi Opara.
The story of my name change proves the point that you can not get away from where you came. It starts when I was sitting around with a couple of friends indulging in some spirits and herb talking about our struggle. We agreed that the names we carried weren’t part of our true identity but only borrowed names taken from the white world. So I took the Da out of Dave and the Wi out of Wilks and came up with Dawi (pronounced “Da-wee”). Later on I met a man from Nigeria whose last name was Opara and he told me that this meant “first son”. This name applies perfectly to me since I will always be my father’s first and only son; Pops still gets his credit, no matter what.
I first performed before a live audience with the Ameen Muhammad Quartet at the South Side Community Arts Center sometime in 1979.
Since then I have appeared in a wide variety of venues. Columbia University, Velvet Lounge Crepuscule, Dusable Museum, Jazz Showcase, the Gallery with Douglas Ewart and his various ensembles. as well as Nuevo Bebop, fronted by Yapree Howell and Boaz McGee.I have read many times on Northwestern University’s radio station WNUR, and during a 4 year stint put on a show of poets, drummers and dancers for black history month at Norris Hall.
I am a founding member of the Men’s Art Forum and this organization has helped me compile a cd and book that will soon to be released through this web site.
Look around and you can catch me at various open mikes throughout the city of Chicago.