Listener As Operator (3)
By Howard Slater, 20 November 2012
Image: Earliest known image of a jazz band. The cover of New Orleans newspaper The Mascot, 15 November, 1890. 'Robinson's Band Plays Anything'.
Music and Agony
2 Aimé Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’ in Salah M. Hassan, Documenta (13), 2012, p.36.
3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Paladin 1973, p.165.
4 Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969, p.99.
5 Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969, p.55.
6 Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious, Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1984, p.149.
7 Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley, Black, Brown and Beige – Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, University of Texas, 2009, p.240.
8Ornette Coleman in ibid., p.28.
9Ben Beaumont-Thomas, ‘Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith: “The black experience is American experience”’, The Guardian, 23 September 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/sep/23/ishmael-wadada-leo-smith-int...
10 Will Menter: The Making of Jazz and Improvised Music: Four Musicians’ Collectives in England and the USA, Phd Thesis, University of Bristol, 1981, p.138.
11Cedric J. Robinson, op. cit., p.276.
12 Will Menter, op. cit., p.100.
13 Cedric J. Robinson, op. cit., p.302; and Calvin Hernton, Medicine Man, Reed Canon and Johnston 1976 p.51.
14 Aimé Césaire, op. cit., p.38.
15Will Menter, op. cit., p. 21.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma_6PezH3aA
In
its encouragement of a group expression that supports musicians to
‘play beyond themselves’ and to evolve singularities within a shared
‘reservoir of artistic richness’, Howard Slater finds in jazz a response
to the experience of slavery; one that evolved outside channels of
sanctioned expression, and which preserves and propels a collective
being. This is his third column for Mute Music
We are still black
And we have come back
Nous sommes revenus
We have come back
Brought back
to our land Africa
the music of Africa
Jazz is A black power
Jazz is A black power
Jazz is An African power
Jazz is An African music
Jazz is An African music
We Have Come Back
Tellingly Inarticulate (3)
Rough and beautiful in the nobility of coarseness
– Frank London Brown
The above dedication is a verbatim transcript of words
spoken as the Archie Shepp set kicks into action at the 1969 Pan African
Festival in Algiers. The music that follows contains a mélange of
Shepp’s jazz outfit accompanied by Tuareg percussionists and Algerian
musicians and singers. At first the speaker of the above dedication
continues on with his words listing figures from jazz history, but this
verbal honouring of the general intellect of jazz is soon drowned out by
a practical rendition of a culture’s social wealth. Not an ostentatious
display, not a string of solos, but a confluence of intensities backed
by an incantatory drumming and the sharp sound of reed flutes. As the
rock and pop scenes go global, there is here, at the Pan-African
festival, an almost subterranean internationalism. The excitement of
‘being back’ whilst being welcomed by Algerian musicians is palpable; a
meeting point for something more or less inarticulate from the
perspective of the prevailing rock scenes of the time. For instance the
12 tone system is rendered inexistent; non-standard pitching thrives and
the outlines of the instrumentation, the perspective of background and
foreground (especially in the massed percussion), are blurred to the
point of amorphous joy.
Collective culture, then, sounds a little like this. It
dispenses with the sad articulation of the negative in favour of its
being harnessed as a ‘drive’. It doesn’t seek the con of the quest for
perfection. It seeks its motivating succour in a group-process that
cannot but re-articulate the negative as the pleasure of disalienation.
From Bennie Moten to Duke Ellington to Sun Ra to Shepp’s ensemble in
1969, an unquestioned togetherness informs the sound as it merges
together singularities in a tone-palate that, as Cedric Robinson has
said in reference to the radical black tradition, ‘preserves the
collective being’.1
Preserves? Yes, because that tradition has had, in the main, to
maintain itself ‘outside’ those very organisations (such as the Labour
Movement) that one would have thought were pre-disposed to it; and,
being ‘outlandish’, its wavering non-admittance could be misrepresented
as an impulse towards transcendence rather than a material effect of
racism. So, Shepp and Co. sound inarticulate because such a collective
culture (here celebrated as a jam session of black consciousnesses
across continents) cannot delineate itself as a single bounded
institutional entity. They form an assemblage of enunciation that could
be said to resist reification by being ‘out’, by not having to speak
articulately. They ignore the discipline enforced by the tenets of
‘music’, by musically claiming, as Aimé Césaire said in his resignation
from the French Communist Party (PCF), the ‘right to initiative, the
right to personality’.2
The right to free jazz. The right to singularity.
Claiming these rights and claiming them via the wordless illicity of
colliding continents and the partial egocide of a heavy hearing of the
other, is to claim that the alienating line between the individual and
the collective, is here and in countless other ensemble jazz moments,
not so much surpassed but corroborated as non-existent in the first
place and preserved in the music of jazz from a moment prior to
bourgeois enlightenment. This ‘prior moment’ (disqualified from
‘history’) that goes back further than a memory of the land, has been
celebrated in the form of musical praxis by such as Duke Ellington who
called-out the collective black tradition in such tracks as ‘Rhythm Pum
Te Dum’, and albums like Liberian Suite and Black, Brown and Beige.
Such a musical praxis, from the crafting of the very instruments (the
‘banza’ or ‘strum strum’ which eventually becomes the banjo) through
‘derisive singing’ and the prohibition of slave dances to Ellington’s
symphonic history-writing, makes jazz an ongoing moment of politicised
disalienation. It is an implied politics, a praxis that, making its own
form as it moves, is often unintelligible. It is tellingly inarticulate
because, caught up as many of us are in the unavoidable pathology of
individuality (its inferiority-fears and interior walls), we cannot hear
the liberation-from-self as a politicising practice that singularises
itself by means of an assemblage (be that, in this case, the jazz
ensemble or the black radical tradition), because this would be to
similarly face the trauma of psychical placelessness across time; a kind
of dispersal to points of inarticulacy where the boundary between self
and other dissolves but, and aptly, the 'new' begins.
Music and Agony (3)
I am sick of these weeping half-days
– Henry Dumas
In Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon offered ‘before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation’.3
It is an agony to kind of know that ‘freedom’, like ‘love’ can take on
mythic proportions. These very proportions garner an idealistic hue that
further trap us within the painful limits of a bourgeois self. A
heavily signposted way-out gets blocked. So, the interpellation of aims
and ambitions take the form of ego-ideals and the concomitant activation
of a de-communalising narcissism not only build internal walls against a
recognition of our interior world as a social-psyche, they ward-off the
dangerous outbreak of singularities. Is Fanon’s advice to make an
effort at disalienation partly connected to arriving at an awareness of
our social psyche? To become, as strange as it may sound, disalienated
from an individualism that, deep rooted, disbars the notion of a self as
already a collective? Free Jazz, without having to articulate a
‘politics’, seems to effortlessly concur with such propositions.
Image: Earliest known image of a jazz band. The cover of New Orleans newspaper The Mascot, 15 November, 1890. 'Robinson's Band Plays Anything'.
Such a disalienation is agony enough. One is placeless,
no longer the centre of anything. One is interchangeable. One can only
labour abstractly. But isn’t there in the sound of jazz some supreme
overcoming of the temptation to an alienating negativity? Listening to
many jazz players it is possible to be enlivened by the very lack of
shame of the singularities that are set free by means of the music.
Singularities are maybe embraced in the assemblage of jazz not simply as
a harnessing of a mythic Dionysian creativity, but as a result of the
urge-inducing agony of genocide that Black Codes and then Jim Crow Laws
set going in the American South: ‘Anyway, when we got there in the
woods, everyone started crying and turning their heads away in horror. I
looked up at the man. I knew him, yet he was so messed up I could not
tell who he was. He was naked and they’d put tar on him and burnt him’.4
As hard as it is to write that out it’s maybe necessary to have this as
backing to our appreciation not just of the spleenage-at-the-reed of
players like Ayler and Sanders, but also to honour the supreme effort of
jazz musicians to maintain their propellant positivity. More than that,
is it not the experience of Jim Crow barbarism that binds these jazz
musicians to a collective notion of their self as black from which basis
singularising becomes an easier next step to take? A step unfraught by
the guilt of standing out and standing up and one that is no longer
afraid to express. A hundred years after the ‘Emancipation Proclamation’
trumpeter and ensemblist Philip Cohran could say: ‘We’re all denied the
privilege of expressing what is in us’.
The knotted agony of not being able to speak up or
protest (an inculcated ‘terror of the self’ as Calvin Hernton refers to
it) comes undone and the dam is burst by the mid ’60s. The ‘liquid lyric
moans’, as poet and communist activist Claude McKay describes ’20s
jazz, are transformed into the guided rage of having so much to say that
words are bypassed by the dense emotional simultaneity of free jazz
propulsion. That Calvin Hernton, writing of his childhood in the
American South, speaks of taking a beating from his grandmother for
regularly chatting with a white girl (a danger he could not perceive at
the time), and that he talks also of a social life that has to be
closely self-monitored down to a control of glances, is just one element
of racism’s psychic damage that surely must inform free jazz as a
disalienating force. Calvin Hernton: ‘I am not absolutely certain at
what age I became conscious of my colour as a limitation on where I
could go, sit, or with whom I could associate.’5
Such constant vigilance may train the mind in an acuity of perception
and contextual sensitivity that, as agonising as it is, could well
inform the later ease of a non-fanfared collective awareness and free
space for singularities that marks those early ’60s assemblages such as
Charlie Mingus’ Jazz Workshop, Sun Ra’s Arkestra, Horace Tapscott’s Pan
Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM) and Philip Cohran's Artistic Heritage Enemble.
Jazz and Organisation (1)
Where no one is more alone than any other
– Joseph Jarman
There can be no agonising terror of the self (a block to
singularising) when the shared trauma of racist genocide comes to bind
you tightly to a collective notion. The same could well be said of
exploited classes in general upon whom is meted out an ongoing psychic
damage that ends up in self-loathing, affective insecurity and the
internalisation of inferiority (its ‘epidermalisation’ in the words of
Frantz Fanon). These latter can amount to a terror of the self, a terror
of subterranean force that can be a serious hindrance to the
consistency in any coming together. Whether this supra-personal
fragility be dealt with as an isolating retreat or as an appeasement of
the terror of the self by recourse to the ideological mediations of a
joining up of ego-ideals, the terror can be both repressed through the
ongoing act of an ‘abstract’ belonging as well as projected (as
repressed) into forming the wayward unconscious forces of the group. The
organisational form that results can come, after Didier Anzieu, to be
one that could be described as bearing a ‘group illusion’: ‘There was a
desire in the group for a superficial unity to plaster over the
contradiction between declared principles and actual behaviour’.6
The problem for groups may well lie, then, in these
‘declared principles’ that become a disconnective abstraction, that
determine the meaning of group membership and that give rise, not to
singular expressions, but to a guilty vigilance that comes from
conformity. Throughout the history of jazz, save for the sizeable
Pan-African and Black Nationalist political hue of the ’60s, there has
been scant recognition of its ensemble practice as providing methods and
means of organisation for political movements. Larry Neal, viewed as a
co-founder of the Black Arts Movement, still had cause, in the 1980s, to
bemoan this and urged his readers to ‘consider [...] a system of
politics and art that is fluent, as functional, and as expansive as
black music’.7
Perhaps a factor in this lack of fluency is the blockage created by the
subterranean persistence of, as Fanon said, self-evaluatory comparison
and the quest to fulfil the ego-ideal. In other words the persistence
within organisations of forms of bourgeois individualism (personal merit
and self-fulfillment) mediated by organisational forms that militate
against what Aimé Césaire called for as he resigned from the PCF: ‘the
deepening and co-existence of all particulars’.
From swing to the be-bop era, the space to solo, to
singularise within the assemblage, was given to all musicians in the
combo. Extemporisation around a theme (or in other parlance, playing
with particles of the general intellect of the ‘standard’) enables these
particulars to be co-extensive with other particulars. In the world of
free jazz one could say that the mélange of particulars (simultaneous
soloing) forms the universal itself! So, what to many ears, say in the
Archie Shepp track mentioned above, is a mess, is not only an
un-recouperable mess (deliberately inarticulate), it is the sound of the
overcoming of a terror of the self by means of creating together the
incomparable through which the question of merit does not arise. Neither
does it seem that the contradiction between declared principles and
actual behaviour arises: the principles aren’t ‘declared’ but outline a
problem of action. So, in the 1969 track we are not listening to a
‘group illusion’ that stems from the fear of ‘wrongness’ and
ambivalence, but to an almost definite disalienation that, being a
group-effort, does not have to ‘watch itself’. Here improvisation
adds-to rather than detracts-from the ad-hoc organisational form as the
‘indefiniteness of not knowing how the music is going to sound’ is a
non-declaration of principles, but yet is a declaration of co-existent
singularities attempting disalienation by means of the jazz ensemble and
its historical preservance.8
By the late ’60s it could be perhaps remarked upon that
the era of combo, the steady line-up group (i.e. Coltrane’s classic
quartet, Coleman’s too) were being replaced by looser, ad-hoc, almost
nomadic, groupings of musicians and a temporary assembling when studio
time was being paid for. The form of organisation of the swing era, the
big band with its large personnel and long-term performance engagements,
was maybe, after the 1944 Cabaret Tax, becoming less viable. The be-bop
combo could be said, as Will Menter mentions, to replace the band
leader/arranger with a lead soloist and an ‘equal opportunity’ to solo
(rather than maintain the backing riff so elegantly scored as
tone-parallels by Duke Ellington). This form of the combo was adopted by
the likes of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, but they began to break
up this form of organisation by adding to their combos and as with
their large ensemble pieces (‘Free Jazz’ and ‘Ascension’ respectively)
there was a step, as with Mingus, Max Roach and Sun Ra, into
re-articulating the backing-riff of the big band, but this time
atonally: an ‘inarticulate’ and confident move that, at the threshold of
the civil rights movement, tells of an organising rise in black
political consciousness. So, it is not like there is some supercession
of organisational forms as we are want to believe by a system that would
rather have us forget, but an infusement of a collective tradition in
which the general intellect figures as, after Cedric Robinson, an
‘ontological totality’.
However, if we focus on the late ’60s and this sense of
the ad-hoc session we are maybe in the realm of the meeting of
singularities that bring with them an instilled and moveable collective
awareness: an ‘ontological totality’ of belonging to a history that is
shareable and shared-in. At his first ‘audition’ for the AACM in
Chicago, Wadada Leo Smith reports that he was playing together in an
ensemble with other musicians and then one by one his fellow players
stepped down and began talking in a huddle, leaving Wadada to play
alone. One could say that in this moment Wadada was left with the terror
of the self as well as being made aware that, as far as the AACM was
concerned, there was no ‘group illusion’ in the AACM; that ‘declared
principles’ and ‘actual behaviour’ would be resolved by a singular
praxis within a collective assemblage (that ‘Together Alone’ is the
title of an LP by AACM members Joseph Jarman and Anthony Braxton is
perhaps testament that they had a similar experience to Wadada Leo
Smith). Such an experience seems to suggest that as an individual player
you are nothing special, but as an individual player you have to have
the confidence in your instrument and its place in the tradition: you
have to be able to singularise without becoming an individualist (be
prepared to improvise-amidst) and to be a member of the AACM without
losing your particularity (play to enhance another’s score). Such an
incomplete musing may be an example of the functional fluency that Larry
Neal was calling to be more widely applied as a politics.
Jazz and Organisation (2)
How do individuals enter into composition with one another?
– Gilles Deleuze
The ongoing debates about spontaneity and organisation,
about structure and structurelessness can maybe be tempered by the
example of such organisations as the AACM. The AACM has been noted for
the special place it allots to both composition and improvisation. One
seems not to be valued over the other and it’s maybe that there is a
synthesis in AACM practice that leads us in the direction that Larry
Neal urged. That said any synthesis is not visible as a ‘declared
principle’, but as a singular praxis that differs from Roscoe Mitchell
to Muhal Richard Abrams to Anthony Braxton to Wadada Leo Smith; each of
whom, Will Menter informs us, have all developed their own notation
systems and ways of using notation within improvisation (composing
themselves). This goes against the grain of hearing in free jazz a pure
visceral spontaneity as some level of organised sound is sought-after by
those who learned through the AACM. However, it seems to be that the
improvisatory element is that which brings through the ‘emotional
counterpoint’, that in a sense, brings in the ‘non-accordant sounds’ of
the tellingly inarticulate that is at the roots of the black jazz
tradition. When Wadada Leo Smith spoke recently of his work with an
orchestra on his Ten Freedom Summers, he reported that in order
to bring flexibility to the orchestral players he wrote music that was
impossible to play: ‘My instruction to them was while you’re playing
this and you cannot completely play it correctly, keep going forward. At
some point it’s going to breakdown completely – at that point you’re
improvising’.9
In terms of organisation it is the emotional
counterpoint, an attention given to the terror of the self, that gets
lost amidst the declared principles of the group; the struggle to
express articulately enough that, without recourse to the ‘tellingly
inarticulate’ (the breakdown of the playing) makes us give up trying to
speak (or more aptly, give up trying to ‘play’) beyond ourselves. In his
discussion of Roscoe Mitchell’s ‘Little Suite’, Will Menter offers that
what marks out this piece (and it applies to other pieces by AACM
members) is that ‘it sounds spontaneous overall, even though one is
aware that it must have been substantially pre-structured.’10 He goes on to suggest that this is achieved through ‘ensuring musicians oriented their playing towards the growing music
as opposed to individual expression’ (my emphasis). Perhaps one cannot
discount that both are in operation as ‘individual expression’ is not
placed in the service of a bravura performance (the sections of this
piece are too small and collage-like), but in service of the partially
structured score that is in-formation as the piece progresses through
time. However, the organisational advantage that can be gleaned, and
which Menter mentions in relation to Mitchell, is that ‘a method of
distancing has been developed which meant that no longer must every
sound that was made be taken at face value as a serious personal or
collective expression’. These latter two, the ‘face value’ of
individualism and its competition for recognition and the pathology of
its illusory ‘supercession’ through group membership alone, are the bane
of organisations as they can still be experienced.
We Dare to Sing (2)
What we could not say openly we expressed in music
– Duke Ellington
This modulation of improvisation and composition, of
what was formally instinctual and impulsive being acted upon and
informing a grounding structure, does not so much mean that either one
is replaced by the other, but that when both are taken together there is
an expansion of the ‘ontological totality’. There is, as Cedric
Robinson puts it, a ‘breaking of the evolutionist chain’.11
Instead of succession and development that pampers to the bourgeois
logic of hierarchies and linearity, instead of a carpetbagging there is a
contributing-to, in this case, the black radical tradition that is
jazz. Muhal Richard Abrams urged his collaborants in the AACM to ‘add
copiously to an already vast reservoir of artistic richness handed down
through the ages.’12
Such ‘adding-to’ resonates with the distancing necessary to elude
bourgeois individualism whilst at the same time liberating expressive
and ‘impersonal’ singularities. A fine example of this can be heard on
Arthur Doyle’s solo sax and vocal rendition of the ’40s tune ‘Nature
Boy’. Whilst much of what’s being said here is far better expressed by
Arthur Doyle is it not by such means, a ‘preserving the collective
being’, that the guilt of self-expression is appeased? Is it the
‘ontological totality’, the belonging to something multi-personal and
meta-categorical, that can dare us to sing?
Richard Wright wrote of jazz as the ‘rhythmic flaunting
of guilt feelings’ and Calvin Hernton wrote that ‘each in our idiom hold
the nightmare of our singularity’.13
Both Wright and Hernton (as members of a radical intelligentsia) seem
to me to be expressing something that a replenishing jazz tradition
helped them to overcome. For Wright in the ’40s and ’50s it may well be
that the voiceless and inferiorised have no ‘right’ to express
themselves and those that ‘dare to sing’ do so, but yet feel guilty to
transgress both the taboo on their expression from a racist society and
from being misconstrued as trying to escape from their own communities
(c.f. Charlie Parker and heroin). For Calvin Hernton, on the other hand,
the ’60s seem to throw up the sense that the terror of the self (its
traumatic disalienation) is what both inspires and holds back
self-expression as a process of singularisation. There is a massive
risk, Hernton seems to be saying, in expressing yourself within a
bourgeois context that tempts one to lose oneself through what Aimé
Césaire refers to as ‘walled segregation in the particular or dilution
in the universal.’14
Image: Engraving by Granger, after a sketch by James H. Moser, The Negro Exodus,
1879. The wharf at Vicksburg, Mississippi, from which many black
migrants departed following the end of Reconstruction for points North
and West.
But this singularity is no nightmare when it takes as
its ground the multiplicities that have formed it and with which it
communicates. That the jazz ensemble figures as a collective assemblage
of enunciation from which some dare guiltlessly to sing is a testament
to the preservation of a collective being that contains within it the
attempt to disalienate. This attempt is made almost unavoidable because
of the abreactive proviso to much jazz playing. Nat Hentoff says of
Charlie Mingus that ‘he expected his men to learn their parts through
what their own feelings tell them about the music’. This isn’t a
technique of playing the right notes but, as an abreaction of feeling,
it’s maybe more a matter of playing between notes and, as a player,
bringing to the ‘part’ the unwritten states of feeling that cannot yet
be named. This shared abreactive premise to the music, audible as
plaintive anger and rough sonority on Mingus’ ‘Faubus Fables’, may make
it possible to say that ‘individual expression’ as such is annulled in
favour of processes of singularisation that can be expressed as simply
as in these words of AACM member Fred Anderson: ‘All music is basically
the same, but what makes it different is different cats have different
ways of speaking and communicating’15
These different ways could be the source of guilt, the ‘nightmare of
our singularity’, in that without the abreaction of feeling they can
become aids to separation, but they are also the challenge of performing
and enacting a complex communication (a modulation of feeling) whereby
neither is dominated nor subsumed by the other, but complemented and
encouraged to make a composition of the assemblage, to be disappearing
in the elasticity of a form. If we dare to sing we may find that the
structure no longer expresses us, but that we, instead, come to form an
assemblage, a re-iterative structure that is expressive of us: the
anonymous singularising solo of the general intellect.
Howard Slater <howard.slater AT gmail.com> is a volunteer play therapist and writer. His book, Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings, was published by Mute Books in January 2012.
Appendix One
Tellingly Inarticulate
In his sleeve notes to Max Roach’s ‘We Insist! Freedom
Now!’, Nat Hentoff records that there was an impromptu squawk from
Coleman Hawkins’ tenor sax on the track ‘Driva Man’. Hawkins is reported
as saying: ‘No don’t splice it... when it’s all perfect, especially in a
piece like this, there’s something very wrong’. This track sung by
Abbey Lincoln with lyrics from Oscar Brown Jr is still seen as one of
the more forthright political jazz records of any day:
Git to work and root that stump,
driva man will make you jump.
Better make your hammer ring
Driva man’ll start to swing
Ain’t but two things on my mind
Driva man and quittin’ time.
When his cat-o-nine tails flies
You’ll be happy just to die
This record was out around the time of the Greensboro
student sit-in in 1960 and was released on Candid, an independent record
label. Another strong statement was made by Charles Mingus on his
‘Faubus Fables’ track. This latter features an ongoing call and response
between Mingus and drummer Danny Richmond:
CM: Name me a handful that’s ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.
DR: Faubus, Rockefeller, Motherfucking Eisenhower.
CM: Why are they so sick and ridiculous?
DR: Faubus, Rockefeller, Motherfucking Eisenhower.
CM: Why are they so sick and ridiculous?
DR: Two, four, six, eight: they brainwash and teach you hate.
Yet again Hentoff writes up in his sleeve notes for this
album a comment made by Eric Dolphy: ‘I play the notes that would not
ordinarily be said to be in a given key, but I hear them as proper’. The
squawk, the non-key, the emotional counterpoint, proper.
Appendix 2
We Dare to Sing
A great song arose, the liveliest
thing born this side of the seas. It was a new song. It did not come
from Africa, though the dark throb and beat of that Ancient of Days was
in it and through it. It did not come from white America – never from so
pale and hard and thin a thing, however deep those vulgar and
surrounding tones had driven. Not the Indies nor the hot South, the cold
East or the heavy West made that music. It was a new song and its deep
and plaintive beauty, its great cadences and wild appeal wailed,
throbbed and thundered on the world’s ears with a message seldom voiced
by man. It swelled and blossomed like incense, improvised and born anew
out of an age old past, and weaving into its texture the old and new
melodies in word and in thought.
– W.E.B. Du Bois
Appendix 3
Jazz and Organisation
each man-string
doing his own thing
vibrating at the
each-to-each volume
sounding at the
each-to-each pitch
all being heard
at the same time
no one pushing
no one behind
each knowing each’s
rhythm and sign
-
Henry Dumas (from Greatness)
Appendix 4
Music and Agony
Hair – braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher’s rope,
Eyes – faggots,
Lips – old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath – the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame
– Jean Toomer (Portrait in Georgia)
Discography
Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious, Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1984.
Anthony Braxton & Joseph Jarman, Together Alone, Delmark 1974/2008.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’ in Salah M. Hassan, Documenta (13), 2012.
John Coxon in conversation with the Author.
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, City Lights, 2001
Arthur Doyle, ‘Nature Boy’ at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6l6rAyZeN8
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, Free Press 1998
Henry Dumas, Knees of a Natural Man, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Paladin 1973.
Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969.
Calvin C. Hernton, Medicine Man, Reed Canon and Johnston, 1976.
Claude McKay, Selected Poems, Dover 1999.
Will Menter: The Making of Jazz and Improvised Music: Four Musicians’ Collectives in England and the USA, Phd Thesis, University of Bristol, 1981.
Charles Mingus, Mingus Presents Mingus, Candid, 1960/1989.
Ken Rattenbury, Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer, Yale University Press 1990.
Max Roach, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, Candid 1960/1989.
Cedric J.Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley, Black, Brown and Beige – Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, University of Texas, 2009.
Jean Toomer, Collected Poems, University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Archie Shepp, Live at the Pan-African Festival, Get Back, 1969/2002.
Footnotes
1 Cedric J.Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, University of North Carolina Press, 2000, p.171.2 Aimé Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’ in Salah M. Hassan, Documenta (13), 2012, p.36.
3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Paladin 1973, p.165.
4 Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969, p.99.
5 Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism, Paladin 1969, p.55.
6 Didier Anzieu, The Group and the Unconscious, Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1984, p.149.
7 Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley, Black, Brown and Beige – Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, University of Texas, 2009, p.240.
8Ornette Coleman in ibid., p.28.
9Ben Beaumont-Thomas, ‘Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith: “The black experience is American experience”’, The Guardian, 23 September 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/sep/23/ishmael-wadada-leo-smith-int...
10 Will Menter: The Making of Jazz and Improvised Music: Four Musicians’ Collectives in England and the USA, Phd Thesis, University of Bristol, 1981, p.138.
11Cedric J. Robinson, op. cit., p.276.
12 Will Menter, op. cit., p.100.
13 Cedric J. Robinson, op. cit., p.302; and Calvin Hernton, Medicine Man, Reed Canon and Johnston 1976 p.51.
14 Aimé Césaire, op. cit., p.38.
15Will Menter, op. cit., p. 21.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma_6PezH3aA