Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem

by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

Overview

This study is about how four representative African American poets in the 1960s, Langston Hughes, Umbra’s David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement’s Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of African griots, in poetic dialogues with aesthetics, music, politics, and Black History, and in so doing narrate, using jazz as meta-language, genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and Black (hi)stories. In intersecting and complementary ways, Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka fashioned their griotism from theorizations of artistry as political engagement, and, in turn, formulated a Black aesthetic based on jazz performativity –a series of jazz-infused iterations that form a complex pattern of literary, musical, historical, and political moments in constant cross-fertilizing dialogues with one another. This form of poetic call-and-response is essential for it allows the possibility of intergenerational dialogues between poets and musicians as well as dialogical potential between song and politics, between Africa and Black America, within the poems. More importantly, these jazz dialogisms underline the construction of the Black Aesthetic as conceptualized respectively by the griotism of Hughes, of Henderson, and of Sanchez and Baraka.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739166741
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	06/27/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jean-Philippe Marcoux is a professor of American Literature at Université Laval in Quebec, Canada. He specializes in African American Literature, Postmodernist fiction and poetry, and in Jazz Studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Intravernacular Dialogues, Jazz Performativity, and the Griot’s Meta-linguistic Praxes
Chapter 1: The Sound of Grammar: Blues and Jazz as Meta-languages of Storytelling in Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama
Chapter 2: Move On Up: Free Jazz and Rhythm and Blues Performativities as Creative Acts of Cultural Re-inscription in David Henderson’s De Mayor of Harlem
Chapter 3: Sister in the Struggle: Jazz Linguistics and the Feminized Quest for a Communicative ‘Sound’ in Sonia Sanchez’s Home Coming and We A BaddDDD People
Chapter 4: Birth of a Free Jazz Nation: Amiri Baraka’s Jazz Historiography from Black Magic to Wise Why’s Y’s
Coda

What People are Saying About This

Bertram D. Ashe

It is fitting that Jean-Philippe Marcoux’s own prose is nearly as lyrical as the poets he addresses in this thoughtful, penetrating and engaging study of the griots of the 1960s revolution. The movement, Marcoux suggests, was about vernacular sound as much as it was about words and intent, and he seems to have used that same approach himself to discuss the work of these important poets: he carefully unpacks the poetry of Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka in a voice that swings of its own accord. The result is a book that is both pleasurable and informative. Jazz Griots not only responds to the call of previous books about jazz and poetry, but will likely stand as a statement that must itself be responded to by poetry theorists of the future.

Daniel Kane

'This is not a book about the Black Arts Movement.' How true! Knowing full wellthe ground that’s been covered, Jean-Philipe Marcoux takesreaders into uncharted territory. Langston Hughes, David Henderson, Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka are, Marcoux insists provocatively, jazz artists. Poetry is their instrument. Like modern-day griots, these 20th and 21st century 'prophets of the planet' sing to each other across pages, across time, to enact a vibrant and dissident black history. Fairly humming with passion and originality, Jazz Griots is the kind of book you talk to, marvel atand argue with. It will talk back.

Editorial Reviews

Marcoux’s book performs deft readings of works by Langston Hughes (whose formally experimental collection Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz is from 1961), David Henderson (the Umbra poet who collaborated with Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman), Sanchez (who, we are reminded, is the daughter of a drummer), and Baraka.

American Literature

While the role of the griot is often noted in studies of Black Arts poetry, no book has concentrated so intensively and persuasively on the importance of this role for African American poetry as Jazz Griots.. . .If Marcoux’s musicological and historical expertise in jazz studies makes this study of Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka so rewarding, the intergenerational dialogue that he accentuates is also suggestive for reconsidering the significance of jazz in African American—and African diasporic—literature beyond the 1960s.

Twentieth-Century Literature

It is fitting that Jean-Philippe Marcoux’s own prose is nearly as lyrical as the poets he addresses in this thoughtful, penetrating and engaging study of the griots of the 1960s revolution. The movement, Marcoux suggests, was about vernacular sound as much as it was about words and intent, and he seems to have used that same approach himself to discuss the work of these important poets: he carefully unpacks the poetry of Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka in a voice that swings of its own accord. The result is a book that is both pleasurable and informative. Jazz Griots not only responds to the call of previous books about jazz and poetry, but will likely stand as a statement that must itself be responded to by poetry theorists of the future.

Bertram D. Ashe

'This is not a book about the Black Arts Movement.' How true! Knowing full well the ground that’s been covered, Jean-Philipe Marcoux takes readers into uncharted territory. Langston Hughes, David Henderson, Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka are, Marcoux insists provocatively, jazz artists. Poetry is their instrument. Like modern-day griots, these 20th and 21st century 'prophets of the planet' sing to each other across pages, across time, to enact a vibrant and dissident black history. Fairly humming with passion and originality, Jazz Griots is the kind of book you talk to, marvel at and argue with. It will talk back.

Daniel Kane

Marcoux's study of African American poetics in the 1960s is interesting and scrupulous in its scholarship. Marcoux (American literature, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada) employs the vocabulary of current critical discourse starting with the introduction, "Intravernacular Dialogues, Jazz Performativity, and the Griot's Meta-Linguistic Praxes." It is amusing to see beneath this title a short epigraph: "The rhythm of life / is a jazz rhythm." Linguistic contrasts of this kind abound; whereas the subject is poetry rooted in folk tradition, the discussion is largely academic. The author discusses in depth exemplary figures central in the emergent revolutionary poetry of African Americans in the 1960s—Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and David Henderson. He also considers Nikki Giovanni and Larry Neal along with "free jazz." ...Unique for its coverage of a single decade, this volume can be read in tandem with Meta DuEwa Jones's The Muse Is Music (CH, Dec'11, 49-1920) and Tyler Hoffman's American Poetry in Performance (CH, May'12, 49-4915). Marcoux's book is an important addition to this growing field. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Marcoux's study of African American poetics in the 1960s is interesting and scrupulous in its scholarship. Marcoux (American literature, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada) employs the vocabulary of current critical discourse starting with the introduction, "Intravernacular Dialogues, Jazz Performativity, and the Griot's Meta-Linguistic Praxes." It is amusing to see beneath this title a short epigraph: "The rhythm of life / is a jazz rhythm." Linguistic contrasts of this kind abound; whereas the subject is poetry rooted in folk tradition, the discussion is largely academic. The author discusses in depth exemplary figures central in the emergent revolutionary poetry of African Americans in the 1960s—Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and David Henderson. He also considers Nikki Giovanni and Larry Neal along with "free jazz." ...Unique for its coverage of a single decade, this volume can be read in tandem with Meta DuEwa Jones's The Muse Is Music (CH, Dec'11, 49-1920) and Tyler Hoffman's American Poetry in Performance (CH, May'12, 49-4915). Marcoux's book is an important addition to this growing field. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice

Marcoux's study of African American poetics in the 1960s is interesting and scrupulous in its scholarship. Marcoux (American literature, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada) employs the vocabulary of current critical discourse starting with the introduction, "Intravernacular Dialogues, Jazz Performativity, and the Griot's Meta-Linguistic Praxes." It is amusing to see beneath this title a short epigraph: "The rhythm of life / is a jazz rhythm." Linguistic contrasts of this kind abound; whereas the subject is poetry rooted in folk tradition, the discussion is largely academic. The author discusses in depth exemplary figures central in the emergent revolutionary poetry of African Americans in the 1960s—Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and David Henderson. He also considers Nikki Giovanni and Larry Neal along with "free jazz." ...Unique for its coverage of a single decade, this volume can be read in tandem with Meta DuEwa Jones's The Muse Is Music (CH, Dec'11, 49-1920) and Tyler Hoffman's American Poetry in Performance (CH, May'12, 49-4915). Marcoux's book is an important addition to this growing field. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

CHOICE