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Overview
Contributors. Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822354253 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2013 |
| Series: | Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Rob Wallace is a teacher, writer, and musician. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the author of Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism. As a percussionist, he can be heard on recordings from the pfMentum and Ambiances Magnétiques record labels.
Read an Excerpt
PEOPLE GET READY
the future of jazz is now!
By AJAY HEBLE, ROB WALLACE
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5425-3
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
"NOW IS THE TIME"
Voicing against the Grain of Orality
Take 1: "The Cry of My People"
"What time is it?" It's still a good question four decades after the composer and saxophonist Joe McPhee shouted it into a room at Vassar College's Urban Center for Black Studies, as a kickoff to a burning performance of his composition "Nation Time." McPhee's question was timely; it was, to borrow a phrase out of that time, "right on" time, though his performance was, in a sense, before its time. Recorded live, this concert was seldom heard in its time, circulated as an LP from CJR Records, only to become more widely known when it was rereleased three decades later by the appropriately named Atavistic Records in their still more appropriately named "Unheard Music" series. This particular unheard music comprised a nineteen minute instrumental extravaganza built around the simple opening riff (a riff growing out of the spoken question, "What time is it?) but rapidly gathered impetus and fire from the improvisational coauthorship of McPhee's small band of jazz giants, including Mike Kull on keyboard, Tyrone Crabb on bass, and two percussionists, Bruce Thompson and Ernest Bostic. A review of the later rerelease, published in the Alternative Press, reports that McPhee "takes his sax to places Maceo Parker never dreamt of," a judgment that is in no way a negative comment on James Brown's great collaborator (118). Rather, it is a reminder for any who may need it that the "out" Jazz of the Black Arts and Black Power years could be every bit as funky, every bit as danceable, every bit as "relevant," to use another term of the time, as anything Soul had on offer. And this is important to recall only because so many seem in need of just such a reminder. At a conference some years ago, when a presenter played a segment from Amiri Baraka's Motown LP Nation Time titled "Who Will Survive America?" poet Askia Muhammad Toure could be heard to comment from his seat in the front row, "We used to boogaloo to that." Many have forgotten the purchase that the most avant-garde music and poetry had on an energized youth audience in those years. We have been told so often that because Free Jazz (free verse?) somehow turned away from the audience and killed the genre, this music requires a certain amount of rerelease to overcome the negative commentaries that were circulated, mostly (with always the exception of the exceptionally dour Stanley Crouch) by people who had not been there.
An urban center for Black Studies is not the sort of thing most now associate with Vassar, but it was there and it provided time for McPhee to unfold his music. The recording of "Nation Time" happened during concerts in December of 1970, only months after Amiri Baraka had published his chapbook It's Nation Time through Don L. Lee's Third World Press. It was work that had quite deliberately not been included in Baraka's last significant collection of poetry from a major commercial press, Black Magic, work that he was to perform incandescently at the climax of the Black National Political Convention, in Gary, Indiana, in March of 1972, an enactment of the poem so effective with the massive audience there gathered that even so mainstream a figure as the Reverend Jesse Jackson immediately took up the call and its response: "What time is it? It's Nation Time." Baraka had explained the origins of his poem as coming directly out of the greetings black people offered to each other in the streets back in the day, a way of calling one another to the time. Both Baraka's poem and McPhee's music underscore something too easily and too often forgotten in the intervening years: while it is true that any amount of essentialism could be sensed floating in the air like incense at any such gathering in the late 1960s and early 1970s, nation was not a given. Nation was, to put it mildly, a social construction in time. Like the gathering at Vassar in December of 1970, nation was a constant improvisation within the parameters of the day.
A few years earlier, when I was still a high school student, one of the local television stations in Washington, D.C., sent a camera crew and reporter to cover the activities of the recently established New School for Afro-American Thought. Its founding director, Gaston Neal, explained the aims and aspirations of the new (and too short-lived) institution while standing next to a table obviously organized to give the camera a view of the intellectual equipment for the cultural revolution in progress. There were heaps of books displayed against an African-themed fabric, and in their midst, centered in the camera's shot, was the posthumously released, final recording session of John Coltrane. The New School, located on Fern Place, Northwest, grew out of the activities around the Cardozo Area Art Committee and had links across the continent to the young activists who had formed the proto-Panther organization at Merritt College, in Oakland. I couldn't have known it at that young age, but Gaston Neal and Amiri Baraka had long been friends. The two met when Baraka, who was then named LeRoi Jones, visited D.C. on a reading tour with Allen Ginsberg and Ray Bremser, a visit memorialized in Baraka's poem "One Night Stand." Neal had been part of D.C.'s own black Beat scene and, along with Baraka, A. B. Spellman, and others, had made the political move to a cultural nationalism that found its most efficacious expressions in music, poetry, and drama. Coltrane had already in 1967 come to serve as a synecdoche for all that was summed up in the characterization of the new institution's educative goals. Here was an essential, if one were required. Clearly Coltrane was central to any curriculum in the new consciousness, to any syllabus of new Afroamerican thought.
That confluence of the black Beat with the emergent New Thing in jazz and the new consciousness called for in the seemingly unending series of manifestoes of the day was the key to a remarkable phenomenon that has yet to be fully acknowledged (though it has often been fully questioned), a genuinely popular and populist avant-garde. It was a structure of innovation and collaboration that had been building for many years. While it was certainly the case that poets of the Harlem Renaissance had made much of jazz, and that some musicians befriended the poets and politicians of their day, there was nothing quite like what was to be undertaken by the Black Arts Repertory Theater School and its innumerable progeny. Composers such as Ellington had often made racial politics a core thematic in their work, and poets, including Sterling Brown, had seen in jazz an embodiment of black aspiration and accomplishment. By midcentury, a new constellation of mutual influence was becoming visible. In a posthumous work titled Don't Deny My Name, Lorenzo Thomas observes: "The militant attitude of writers such as [Larry] Neal was reflected—and perhaps instigated—by jazz musicians, whose playing matched the intensity of an entire generation of African American intellectuals who were too young to know much about Jim Crow but old enough to see that integration was, at best, a barely hatched chicken if not a bird in the bush" (116). By the time Baraka published his first collection of poetry, Charles Mingus had already composed the searing "Fables of Faubus." Shortly thereafter, Max Roach had gone into the studio with Abbey Lincoln, Walter Benton, Julian Priester, Booker Little, and even Babatunde Olatunji to record his monumental We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite. Nearly contemporaneous with the advent of what can truly be termed "Free Jazz," Roach's work signaled a rising sense of political commitment among jazz artists following on the radical heels of the Bop generation, of which Roach had himself been a featured player (though Roach was an early resister of the Free Jazz assault upon harmony). Much as there was clearly a new political spirit abroad in the land, as the resurgent Civil Rights movement gathered force, there was an evolving sense among the artists that their own creativity was moving parallel to the creativity of the movement. In his volume This Is Our Music, which takes its title from a landmark Ornette Coleman album, Iain Anderson argues that jazz musicians were coming more and more to view their work in much the same way as Beats, abstract expressionists, and poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, seeing the work "not as self expression but as self alteration" (54). And, as Roach's composition "Tears for Johannesburg" demonstrated, tracking closely with the demonstrations of the poets themselves (one thinks here of Baraka's meeting Touré for the first time, at a demonstration outside the United Nations), black musicians, poets, and political activists all saw their work as part of a growing internationalist development. This was a progressive globalization in the wake of decolonization and the worldwide struggles for liberation.
The self-organizing efforts of poets and musicians were also converging during these years. The poetic avant-garde of the mid-twentieth century recognized that there was little point in addressing themselves to the New Yorker and set about the construction of their own national and international networks of publications and readings. This phenomenon in turn tracked closely with the renewed emphasis among political and cultural activists on the creation of alternative community institutions, institutions such as the New School for Afro-American Thought. As jazz musicians developed newer modes of composition and performance, they rapidly outgrew (and wore out their welcome in) the traditional jazz venues of clubs and festivals. Recognizing this situation, groups such as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago, the Black Artists Group in Saint Louis and the aspirationally named Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension Foundation in Los Angeles arose to work collectively for the expansion of performing and recording possibilities. In 1964, WBAI, a radio station broadcasting from New York, gathered a panel to discuss the situation jazz artists faced, a panel that included Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, George Russell, Gunther Schuller, and LeRoi Jones. Taylor foresaw that jazz artists would not only create new forms of their art, but that they would be required to create new venues and that new audiences would potentially create themselves. This is exactly what came to pass. Though many continue to argue, conveniently forgetting the changing economies of the club scene and the changing profit motives of club owners, that the New Thing in jazz literally ran audiences out of the room (audiences, it seems, who really just wanted to dance), as Free Jazz became a self-organizing radical activity it began to gather an ever widening and appreciative audience. There is nothing like a free concert to draw a crowd and, once drawn, crowds tend to be more open minded than we give them credit for being. Two key moments in this evolution involved Amiri Baraka. The first, known as the October Revolution in Jazz, was a stellar concert that included poets and jazz artists, held in downtown New York. Baraka was one of the prime organizers of the concert. The concert was recorded, and a subsequent LP, The New Wave in Jazz, released on the Impulse label, brought the best of the new music to a large audience outside the New York epicenter. Not long after, Baraka made the transformative move to Harlem, and the series of outdoor concerts and theater events sponsored by the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School (BARTS) program during his tenure there provided a vibrant counter to the much-discussed reluctance of Harlem club owners to sponsor any of the newer musicians. While BARTS imploded quickly, its example was emulated at new arts centers around the country, and even by official government efforts such as New York State's popular Jazz Mobile, which brought music on flatbed trucks to communities around the state.
The key here is that most of the more radical young writers and painters had grown up listening to the innovations of Bop. When they moved into the bohemian communities of America in the years after World War II, they shared those spaces with the younger musicians who had found their way to the city. In the same way that a Cecil Taylor would lend a hand at the mimeo machine to help LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima get out the next issue of their newsletter, The Floating Bear, the writers were more and more likely to become the new critics that the new music required. Jazz criticism was an enterprise that, in at least its most visible form in publications such as Down Beat, had been dominated for decades by white enthusiasts. Now a new generation of bohemian black artists took to the field, arguing in favor of the most recent and most radical experiments in the music, often doing battle with the moldy figs and hobbyists who viewed the defense of the tradition as their calling, much as a contemporary generation of traditionalists, though themselves African American this time around, have taken to the airwaves and print media for yet another round of retroactive denunciations of the avant-garde. Then, too, a greater proportion of the new jazz musicians of the post-World War II years than in past generations saw themselves as interdisciplinary artists. Cecil Taylor was a poet and was engaged with modern dance. Archie Shepp was a poet and playwright. Joseph Jarman was a poet. Herbie Nichols was a poet. Not surprisingly, these composers and performers felt a comradeship and common cause with the now politically charged avant-garde among black writers.
None of which should come as a surprise to anyone. Had you attended any large antiwar rally in the late sixties, chances are you would have witnessed, in addition to the unending speeches of the rally organizers, poetry by the likes of an Allen Ginsberg and rock music that was straining the boundaries of the form. In an era of widespread popular experimentation in all the arts and sciences and politics, it would have been curious had black artists not done what they in fact did do. What we are still in need of recognizing these many years later, though, is the extent to which African American artists generally, and those associated with the Black Arts Movement in particular, played a leading role in taking the most experimental art to a broad and attentive audience. Whether in college concerts, at Black Arts-oriented community theaters, in venues such as skating rinks and parking garages that had been appropriated for the occasion, or in open air concerts in parks and at block parties, the Black Arts era played host to a general flowering of popular engagement with music that tested the limits of listening. When Joe McPhee asked his audience, "What time is it?"—in that very asking bringing musicians and audience together in a new collective time—he was answered with that same sound that moved Calvin Massey four years earlier to compose the Ellingtonian "The Cry of My People." The piece was recorded by Lee Morgan in the same year as McPhee's "Nation Time," and reappeared two years later as the title track on an LP featuring Archie Shepp; Shepp, who wrote poetry and plays, lived in the same building as Amiri Baraka. The LP carried liner notes by Bill Hasson, coordinator of the Institute of Pan-African Culture and a poet who appeared on an LP by Marion Brown, the same Marion Brown whose conversations with Baraka and Shepp aided them in their thinking through of the relationships between the American jazz avant-garde and African musical traditions, and who had stood next to Shepp among the orchestra Coltrane had gathered for the recording of his Ascension. All were artists joined in time, joined together as they put into play the question, "What time is it?"
Take 2: Cecil Taylor: Sounding the Poetics of Black Voice
In 1929, the year of the great stock market crash, the year that marked the end of the "Jazz Age," RCA acquired the Victor Talking Machine Company, acquiring at the same time the Victor company's famous "Nipper" logo, that seemingly ubiquitous figure of my listening youth (mine, my parents' and their parents'), featuring the dog, whose name I had never known until researching this essay, listening intently, head cocked, to "his master's voice." Nipper had been painted in his striking pose by Francis Barraud three years after the model dog's demise. Barraud had at first titled his painting Dog Looking at and Listening to a Phonograph, only later rechristening it with the phrase that was to be so intimately associated with RCA Victor and the sheer act of listening, His Master's Voice. The British Royal Academy rejected the painting when Barraud offered it for exhibition, reputedly declaring that no one would know what the dog was doing. According to Erik Østergaard, whose compendium of Nipper lore I am relying upon here, the painting again met with rejection when Barraud offered it to the Edison Bell Company. Presumably Barraud thought Edison would be interested because it was one of their cylinder recorders that Nipper was depicted attending to. Edison, however, was no more encouraging than the Royal Academy. The company's response was that "dogs don't listen to phonographs." It was only later, when Barraud discussed his painting with a gramophone company, that Nipper became the Nipper of trademark history. The old Edison cylinder machine was replaced as the object of Nipper's attention, in an act of painterly revisionist history, by a gramophone, with its signature bell, and Barraud went on to paint twenty-four versions of his finally successful memorial to the dead dog.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. "People Get Ready": The Future of Jazz is Now! / Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace 1
Part I. Beyond Categories: Histories and Mysteries
1. "Now is the Time": Voicing against the Grain of Orality / Aldon Lynn Nielsen 31
2. The Antiquity of the Avant-Garde: A Meditation on a Comment by Duke Ellington / John Szwed 44
3. Listening Trust: The Everyday Politics of George Lewis's "Dream Team" / Julie Dawn Smith and Ellen Waterman 59
4. Jeanne Lee's Voice / Eric Porter 88
5. Kick Out the Jazz! / Rob Wallace 111
Part II. Crisis in New Music? Vanishing Venues and the Future of Experimentation
6. Days of Breads and Roses / Marc Ribot 141
7. Subsidy, Advocacy, Theory: Experimental Music in the Academy, in New York City, and Beyond / Tamar Barzel 153
8. Subsidizing the Experimental Muse:Rereading Ribot / John Brackett 166
9. One Musician Writes about Creative-Music Venues in Toronto / Scott Thomson 175
10. Somewhere There: Contemporary Music, Performance Spaces, and Cultural Policy / Alan Stanbridge 184
Part III. Sound Check
The Jazz Photography of Thomas King 197
Part IV. Get Ready: Jazz Futures
11. Black Jazz in the Digital Age / Greg Tate 217
12. Improvising Digital Culture / DJ Spooky and Vijay Iyer 225
13. Ancient to the Future: Celebrating Forty Years of the AACM / Douglas Ewart, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Wadada Leo Smith, and Corey Wilkes 244
14. People, Don't Get Ready: Improvisation, Democracy, and Hope / Tracy McMullen 265
Works Cited 281
Contributors 295
Index 301