JAZZ & THE WHITE CRITIC: THIRTY YEARS LATER
www.amiribaraka.com
The second article I published about the music, in Metronome, was
J&TWC. The theme was, broadly, that a fundamental contradiction,
sharp, at times antagonistic, existed between American Classical
Music, it's creators, mainly Black, and the majority of commentators,
critics, critical opinion about that music, which historically are
not.
The cause of this is obvious, whatever the slaves created was owned
by the slave owners. The fundamental social philosophy characterizing
American Capitalism (and feudalism before that) has always been shaped
by white supremacy, whether it was slavery or the national oppression
and chauvinism that still exist today.
The fact that an oppressor nation could judge the creations of the
people they oppress is not strange but "natural" in the context of
the relationship between ruler and ruled. Just as the slave was part of
the "Means of Production", (and when feudal slavery changed to
capitalist slavery ) variable capital, so whatever was produced by
the slaves was, by definition, part of what the owner of the slave
owned.
As "art", the music was useful as entertainment, social control,
pedagogy, as commerce. Black Tom" the amazing 19th century slave
pianist, who knew 10,000 pieces of music and became a touring novelty,
known throughout the South, even during slavery, is said to have
"made" a million dollars for his owners!
In contrast, there were thousands of slave "entertainers" confined to
a single plantation. At first despised in a utilitarian way, but
ironically, as democracy made it's tortured way toward the Afro American
their cultural product was more and more co-opted, commercialized
and, nowadays, even claimed.
To read Lincoln Collier or Richard Sudhalter, and their bizarre
ubermenschlichkeit is to be annoyed with a tinge of melancholy that our
oppressors are, to quote poet, Robert Creeley, such "unsure
egotists". Like a poem I wrote, MTV "We can have your life, without
being poor, &c"
The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, after the first years of the music's
emergence, claimed that the Black musicians were white. The context
of a white racist superstructure, i.e., institutions, organizations,
and the curricula, ideas and philosophies those are meant to maintain
and forward. They are a reflection of the Monopoly Capitalist
imperialist economic base, almost completely defining, "evaluating",
advancing dubious or ingenuously chauvinist theories, explanations,
about Black Music, at this point through writing, other media,
reaching incredible proportions. Each year floods of such mainly
superficial materials (from books, tv and radio series, even
calendars, t-shirts, post cards) defining and classifying Black Music
are produced.
It is this superstructure with its various critics, scholars,
journalists that have even succeeded in naming Afro --American Music,
"Rag Time", "Jass & Jazz" (in their musical and non-musical
definition,) "Swing", "BeBop", "Rock & Rol"l, all coined as media-
driven generic titles, by this collection entity. Since the creators
of the music did not have the same access to publishing, writing. &c.
Max Roach tells how Duke Ellington lst told him that when we accept
and forward this essential commercial nomenclature, foisted on the music
by others, same presence can then identify any thing commerce want as
that.
So that Paul Whiteman became "The King of Jazz", Benny Goodman, "The
King of Swing", The Rolling Stones, "The Greatest Rock & Roll Band in
The World". Then dig the grand larcenous essence of commercial
Copperheads inducting Black Musicians into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame when, Naw , Jimmy them dudes was playing Rhythm and Blues, BEFORE
THERE WAS A ROCK OR A ROLL!
There is not general commercial label for the works of Bach, Brahms,
Beethoven, &c. That music is called, more precisely, "The Music of
Ludwig Beethoven". "The Music of Bela Bartok", then why not, says
Roach, "The Music of Duke Ellington", The Music of Thelonius Monk",
&c But then that would confer a station and dignity to The Music the
racist superstructure has never wanted to allow.
To this day, there is not a single Afro American writer heading up
the Jazz Section of a major newspaper! (Imagine there were only Afro
American or other non- white writers who entirely monopolized writing
about European Concert music!) During the hot sixties there were
black writers about the music on the Village Voice, Philadelphia
Inquirer, Washington Post, but dig this, when the hot times passed,
the most fortunate of these were made sports writers! Get to that!
(Now what that mean, Jimmy?)
Stanley Crouch was the last surviving name by-lining writing about
the music. And I told him at a forum at the Village Gate, that the VV
was going to sic him off in another direction, e.g., politics,
novels, the former which he is completely off -the- wall, the latter
…well, ax his boys, Bellow or Updike! I told Stanley, Gary Giddins
was going to get that main VV gig. And while the editorial Iblis is
working his number Stanley has still not put out a single book on the
music, though he is more knowledgeable about the straight up history
of American Classical Music than most of the chosen at the Times,
Voice, &c
Why? (A good question bu…oy!) Is it, in this case, because Stanley
could say some heavy stuff that perhaps dem udder guise wdnt dig? It
seems Die Ubermenschen hate for the darkies to sound knowledgeable about
anything, even their own lives. But tell me this glaring ugliness of
arbitrary (racial?) exclusion from access to professional position in
a subject which must bear some relationship to Afro-America is not
dagger-sharp proof of the continuing national oppression of the Afro
-American people , right now!
The ownership relationship of Big America to The Music has meant
denigration, marginalization, "covers" and dismissal. While European
concert music is produced in major US concert halls, theaters, played by
permanent resident orchestras in cities across the country, while the
authentic Classical Music of the US has historically been
marginalized, performed in the worst venues available. The conductor
of the New York Philharmonic is paid 1.5 Million dollars a year. This
music is called "Legit", i.e. "Legitimate", historically Afro
-American music, by inference, is "Illegitimate". In the NYTimes and
NJ Star Ledger, there is a category called "Music", another called
"Jazz"!
What is even more disingenuous, as it is dishonest, is that within
the last decade or so, there has been a distinct movement issuing
crab-like across the chauvinist US superstructure to systematically
distort the history & development of The Music, but also it's class
origins in the marginalization of this, only recently recognized by
Congress "American National Treasure". One main distortion made
essentially by positing a simultaneous development in the white and
black communities. Obviously chauvinist commentators, like Sudhalter,
Collier, sickening with their disinformational denigration of Black
creativity, seek to construct , at the same time, a completely ersatz
meta-history for it's actual evolution.
Collier's idiotic and bluntly racist attacks on Duke Ellington,
claiming, as the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, that Ellington's music is
just an imitation of European concert music, flies in the face of
astute European commentators like Ernest Ansermet, Ravel, Stravinsky,
Horowitz. Likewise, the testimonials of even American popular artists
like Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, &c.
Obscenities like Collier's racism confirm and pipsqueaks some
continued legitimization of the general historic American chauvinism
toward Black Music, including an earlier travesty such as The
American Pulitzer Prize committee's refusal to award Duke Ellington
that prize in 1967, even though their own group of judges named Duke
to receive the Pulitzer! The bitter absurdity of all this white
supremacy is that Afro American music is in its total possession by
the American people, American Classical Music!
People like George Gershwin, who literally learned at the feet and
elbows of Willie "The Lion" Smith, James P. Johnson and Fats Waller
could be named Great Composers and live sumptuously, while his teachers
always struggled for recognition even survival! Gershwin's
internationally acclaimed masterpiece "Rhapsody in Blue" is clearly a
skillful recombining of essential elements of James P.'s "Yamekraw
Rhapsody", orchestrated by William Grant Still, performed at Carnegie
Hall 1927, with Fats Waller as soloist!
Johnson, himself, was an awesome composer of extended works, at least
two symphonies, "Harlem Symphony", '34, "Symphony in Brown", '35.
Opera, one of which, "The Organizer", 1940 (with Libretto by Langston
Hughes) was performed, like "Yamekraw", exactly Once, at Carnegie
Hall! Duke's extended work, "Jump for Joy" performed, to my
knowledge, about the same number of times. While Gershwin's estimable
"adaptation" of these composers' works, is given grand presence as an
American Classic! Or consider for a split second, in contrast to any
of the great Afro-American composers the awesome tribute and major
repertory status given to Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess", a work derived
directly from and shaped by Afro-American life and culture.
The arrogant cultural and musical "autonomy" American critics
bestowed upon Gershwin and the work was so aggressively and
subjectively chauvinist that it even caused Ellington, usually a
consummate diplomat about these things, to express his irritation
openly at such haughty white nationalism.
Yet, to be bluntly precise, just as the history of European
"Classical" music would not be essentially changed by the exclusion
of the many non-European artists who have contributed to it, by the
same measure Afro-American music, which is the Soul of what must be
regarded as American Classical music, would not be changed if not a
single white artist's contributions were included. And, face it, this
analysis is not black chauvinism, but like they say, hard fact!
One important development and change in the US since my earlier
article, is that where I saw, as principal, the contradictory
relationship between Black Music, it's creators, on one hand and The
White Critical establishment on the other , today it should be more
and more obvious that that contradiction, still, at times,
antagonistic, is, at base,, the contradiction of class and class
"stance", distance and alienation, which exist generally in bourgeois
society and are no less clearly perceivable in the context of this
relationship between "critic"and creator. Even though this
contradiction is still most obviously visible as "Black Vs White".
That it, there has been, since the late 50's, a very visible and
impacting increase in the size and influence of the Black
petty-bourgeois (middle class). This has been caused directly by the
political-social upsurge of the period, of the Civil Rights-Black
Liberation Movement or more precisely what substantive changes
occurred because of the interlocking force of the twined Afro
American national movements for Democracy and Self- Determination,
one aspect loosely labeled "integrationist", the other,
"separatist". (The essentially anti-imperialist anti-war movement
should also be factored into this analysis.)
Ironically, but predictable scientifically , this development has
created a much larger "gap" between the burgeoning, but still mustard
-seed sized, recently emerging Black petty bourgeoisie and the great
majority of Afro-Americans with
considerably more distance between the black majority and the so called
"neo-con" (neo-conservative ) Negroes, now hoisted into profitable
visibility with attendant official "Hoorahs" as a fallacious display
of American "democracy".
This has meant that more and more we see "well placed" Negroes
co-signing the most backward ideas of the US rulers. The most bizzare
for instances, the "three blind mice" The Colon, The Skeeza and Tom
Ass, at the top of Bush-2's junta. They have been made seemingly
ubiquitous by the power of relentless duplicity. At American Express,
Newsweek, across the media, as film stars, &c.
In the field of Jazz commentary, we have Stanley Crouch, Albert
Murray, who have taken up many of the reactionary, even
white-chauvinist, ideas of the racist U.S. superstructure and its
critical establishment. A few years ago, at a Midwestern seminar
headed by Dave Baker, Crouch, in a discussion on intellectual
contributions to The Music, and in response to this writer's
statement that it should obvious that it has been Black people who
have contributed the fundamental and essential intellectual
innovations to the music, spontaneously ejaculated, that "Black
people have not contributed …" Breaking the statement off in mid
ugly, apparently shocking even himself, at the ignorance of his
intended comment. Especially, I would imagine, in the face of several
scowling "Bloods", most, prominent musicians, including Muhal Abrams,
who commented immediately on the tail of my repeated requests for
Stanley to finish his thought!
Crouch also wrote more recently in the New York Times, that Black
musicians didn't like George Gershwin because he was a better composer
than all of them (except Duke). It should be clear to most folks with
any clarity that both statements are false and reek of the national
(racial) foolishness that characterizes white supremacy. And this
from a "Negro" (as Crouch, with objective accuracy, prefers to be
called)!
What it means is that the creators and artist-guardians of American
Classical music must create, as part of a revolutionary democratic
movement, an alternative superstructure, i.e., institutions,
organizations, venues, critical journals, in order to rescue the
history, socio-economic productiveness and potential and even it's
artistic strength and free them and themselves from dependence on the
socially exploitative and artistically diluting mechanisms of
corporate commercialism and its attendant racism.
There is a howling need for more independent journals, performance
circuits, educational institutions, whose form and content relate
directly to the artists, the history, the socio-economic and
political needs of the masses of Afro -American people and to the
whole of the US majority itself.
The title "Ken Burns Jazz" is disheartening up front. Whether there
is an apostrophe or not! It's always gratifying to see tapes and cuts
of the musicians and hear some of the music. But it is maddening in
the extreme not to hear them speak for themselves!
For all the petty jealously that Wynton Marsalis elicits behind his
Lincoln Center visibility , even from otherwise knowledgeable people,
Wynton was the single saving element to the series. Without him it
would have consisted of almost random images and largely superficial
injections by Burns' obligatory clutch of "ultimate" critics,
"scholars", "Gee Whiz"-ologists and now a smaller group of Negro
autodidacts, Crouch, the most prominent, but also a Negro "Gee Whiz"-
ologist, Gerald Early, who was an embarrassing tourist of very
limited relevance to any serious discussion!
At one point, Crouch referred to the musicians in Ellington's great
orchestra as "knuckleheads"! You mean Hodges, Gonsalves, Webster,
Carney, Tizol, Cootie, Tricky Sam, Blanton, Strayhorn…&c.? What kind
of thoughtful analysis could come from such contempt? But such is one of
the seamier products of the vaunted "social equality" of the fake
"post- civil rights era". But in addition to this direct
class-deformed commentary, a more subtlely obvious ignorance and
dismissal characterized the series as "white critic, black musician
apartheid".
>From the top, Burns said he knew nothing about the music! Then how
did he get to do a series? I wonder if the producers would allow some
similarly self-described "Non" to do such a series on European
classical music? Please!
But this similar "Gee Whiz!", essentially non-intellectual, attitude
and method has always been allowed in what passes as serious
commentary on the music because of the predominance of Afro- American
artists. It is a ruthless paternalism!
This is one reason I support Marsalis' work of, to some extent,
archiving the music at Lincoln Center. By re-presenting the music's
classics in repertory , a consolidating stability and status is
accorded to it, not seen before. Just as Lincoln Center does its
annual "Mostly Mozart", we should be gratified to see something like
a "Mostly Monk" repertory established. Even if Marsalis' orchestra is
sometimes not fully up to the task of say, reincarnating Duke
Ellington, but could Bernstein improvise like Herr Beethoven?
The essence of Burns' piece is the implied ideological dictum that
the collective "braintrust" Burns gathered , largely white, mainly
"un-hip", is the paradigm for the intellectual source for any lasting
analysis and measure of this music and that is the deepest content of
its vulgar chauvinist presumptions.
This accounts for the general absence of any impressive philosophical
analysis of the music itself and except for Marsalis, scant discussion
of it's changing genres as music as art or social expression!
What the music means, at a given period, as aesthetic, social and
philosophical expression. Why it moved from one genre or style to
another. Why the abiding classical elements of its constantly
reconfigured continuum?
Often specific musicians were characterized by racounteurish gossip
or cliched retellings of flaws in their personal lives. Sidney Bechet
described as "a thug". The drawn out docudrama of Bird's drug
addiction, likewise Billie Holiday, without a similar depth of
musical, aesthetic and philosophical analysis of their music. Nor was
there a historical overview of these constantly developing factors
intrinsic to the music.
Just serious interviews with a representative group of the great
musicians still around would have offered a much more profound composite
and intellectual and social access to this still unplumbed cultural
treasure chest of American culture and art. Far from opposing the
interview of critics, scholars, writers, club owners, the greater and
more informed inclusion of the artists themselves (not just
contemporarily but from existing archives) would have provided a much
more incisive, scholarly and entertaining document to inform the ages.
Before saying "Later!", I would add that like Fred Douglass, after he
whipped on the "white church" in his majestic "Fourth of July" speech
and so had to make some slight qualification, if my analysis of
"white critics" seems inaccurately sweeping, I should point out that
at root it is aimed at "the establishment" of what passes and has
passed, for over a century, as "Jazz Criticism"
I say this because some of the young critics I met when I first came
to New York, Dick Hadlock (whom I worked for at "The Record
Changer"), the always penetrating, Martin Williams (though we had a
running argument about whether Billie Holiday sang the Blues or not).
Others like Larry Gushee, Dan Morgenstern
(once he began to dig that the music did not stop after Duke Ellington,
if he ever really believed that), my man, John Sinclair, the mixed up
Frank Kofsky, I have always had respect for, whether we totally
agreed or not.
Still other "white critics" like the great Sidney Finklestein was an
immense contributor to what storehouse of scientific discourse there
is about this music. I could add the redoubtable Stanley Dance,
Ellington's shadow, not a deep thinker, (but European analysis of the
music for a long time was always more objective and scientific) the
anthropologist Herskovits. There were even some dudes we will always
jump on we learned something from, (I wont even mention Nat Hentoff
till he returns from the land of national -liberal crypto chauvinist
social- hypocrisy). Suffice it to say, there is That and there is
Them. I know the difference.
But just to add some reminder of the kind of stilted hollowness most
commentary on the music resembles, recently there was an article in
the New Jersey Star Ledger , some of us call The Star Liar, by writer
George Kanzler. (How are you spelling that?) In claiming to list the
musicians coming out of and associated with Newark and environs, he
left out the following:.
** SALOME BEY, Lead Singer with Andy( Bey) & The Bey Sisters,
Jackie Bland, Leader of the legendary teenage bebop orchestra out of
which came Wayne Shorter, Grachan Moncur 111, Harold Van Pelt , Hugh
Brodey, Walter Davis, "Humphrey" the Be Bopper's Be Bopper., Blakey's
Pianist for years; EDDIE GLADDEN , Dexter Gordon's regular drummer;
VICTOR JONES, Getz' regular drummer, the last years; Harold Mitchell,
who played with Willie The Lion, Basie, Lionel Hamptaon, Gillespies Big
Band' , NAT PHIPPS, Leader of the other wonderful '50's teenage
orchestra, which featured Nat & Billy Phipps, Moncur 111, Ed Station
, Wayne and (& Allen) Shorter, L,ightsey: Danny Quebec, one of the
earliest Bop saxists, also with Babs Gonzalez , Tadd Dameron, JJ
Johnson in Babs' classic 3 BIPS & A BOP; Lawrence Killian, long time
hand drum master; SCOTT LAFARO, Ornette Coleman bassist, LaRue, an
unsung master piano teacher to Newark musicians, ask Moncur, Gladden,
Morgan, &c : Freddie Roach, one of Newark's organ funk- masters,
along with Larry Young &c; CHRIS WHITE, one of Cecil Taylor's early
stalwarts
Also absent: The entire Newark Phipps Family, Harold, Ernie, drums,
Gene, Nat, pianist, Billy, Gene Jr., the rest well known saxophonists,
Robert Banks, piano, Herbie Morgan, Tenor & reeds, Jimmy Anderson,
tenor, Ed Lightsey, bass: Bradford Hays, tenor, Steve Colson, piano,
, Ronnell Bey, vocal, Chink Wing, drums, Chops Jones, Bass,) Rudy
Walker, Drums, Pancho Diggs, Orch leader, piano, Rasheema, vocal,
Eddie Crawford, drums, , piano, Orch leader, Santi DiBriano, drums,
Pat Tandy, vocal, Charyn Moffett, trumpet, Hugh Brodey, saxophone, ,
, Eli Yamin, Piano, Gloria Coleman, vocal, Bernie James, sax, Ed
Station, Trumpet, Art Williams, bass, club owner, "The Cellar"; Shad
Royful, Orch leader, piano, Harold Van Pelt, Tenor, Geri Allen,
Piano, Wilber Morris, bass, Connie Pitts Speed, piano, vocal, Gene
Goldston, vocal, Everett Laws, vocals, Warren Smith, drums,
Long Time Area Residents :RAY BROWN, DIZZY GILLESPIE , DONALD BYRD
Recent Residents: David Murray, tenor: Reggie Workman, bass, Oliver
Lake, alto, reeds, Andrew Cyrille, drums, Steve Turre, trombone.
So thirty years later….you dig?
Amiri Baraka 5-7/01
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