Antiphony in Action

Joseph Murphy | January 4, 2012

In 1964, arguably the height of what MLK Jr., called, “The Freedom Movement,” that found expression politically in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. King was asked to provide opening remarks for the Berlin Jazz Festival. His worlds, eloquent and concise as always, spoke directly to the emancipatory information carried through jazz. I quote at length:

God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create – and from this capacity has flowed three sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different circumstances. ‘ Jazz speaks for life. The blues tells us the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music Modern jazz has continued in this tradition; singing the songs of a more complicated existence. When life itself offers no order or being the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which is flowing through his instrument.

And if that call came from the earth, it invoked a response in multi-racial America. Both Coltrane and Malcolm X, whose response to racism at home was toward a thorough going equality that went beyond race based identity structure, acquired a universalist perspective that stressed the unitary freedom of body and mind. If you had to be taught about the blues, if you needed to be free from the inside out, then here were the teachers. As Dr King stated explicitly…..the blues aren’t just palliative they’re transcendent as well; providing a way through and a way forward. An orator in the black Baptist tradition rooted in call and response, King knew his congregation, knew how to invoke a response in a way no politician since has been able to pull (Sorry, Mr. President) off . But more importantly, he knew how to spread the word and find the greater response in a nation needing to heal the wounds of racism.

And along the way, the freedom movement was being abetted by the attention and respect being given one of America’s first black crossover artists, who began his path as a jazz singer, in the person of Harry Belafonte. By making explicit through his broad ranging interpretation of black African and Caribbean folk musics Belafonte linked the common aspirations of the African diaspora with other peoples throughout the world. By serving as liaison between the mainstream political establishment and the movement, he put some fire behind the tepidly liberal on race Kennedy brothers: introducing RFK to the conditions for black children in the South. All of this is well documented in the currently running HBO Documentary, “Sing Your Song” on Belafonte’s remarkable life as artist/activist and where we again witness the trans versing of the line between aspiration and transcendence played out in the lives of – by his time – generations of jazz folk.

In this manner an active call and response was being carried on between elements of jazz and blues culture and the political establishment so was the call being heard by the gander of the white youth culture aborning in psychedelia and opposition to the war. Even a short survey of the sixties pop genre reveals the aspirational modalities of Coltrane and the agons of the blues as the source material for much of that music was most expressively political and explicitly militant in tone, culminating in the triumphant triumvirate of black expressionists, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Gil-Scott Heron, who brought the vernacular expressions of pop, jazz and soul into seamless social art.

Not all who heard the call were so conciliatory in their appropriation of jazz voice, notably the poet and playwright, Amira Baraka, who expressed a decidedly Marxist perspective very different than Adorno’s, - that jazz was the vanguard music of the coming socialist revolution - that cultural militants would set the stage for political ones. And while offering an adroit reading of the essential nature of call and response in his work “Blues People” , Mr. Baraka may have misheard the call in this case as the aesthetic call and political agendas diverged while a strain of this thought would embed itself subliminally in the organization of black arts groups in the late sixties and seventies such as the Black Artists Group in St Louis and the AACM in Chicago.

Yet, by the early seventies, jazz as an ever expanding expression of freedom turned back into itself through absorption of popular forms and approaches much as the rococo variations of ‘hard bop’ brought generic conventions to the untempered expressions of the founders a generation earlier. With this deference to the markets of popular music, jazz lost its explicit link to the political and cultural niche – no longer possessed of a triumphant modernist narrative as exemplified in Coltrane - the late forms of style marked by self-referential excess, parodic motifs and pastiche In other words, jazz was now fodder for a more generic post-modern, and post political, phase of production closer, indeed, to Adorno’s notion of the music as commoditized entertainment.

While what had become known as ‘free jazz’ – with its implicitly oppositional and transgressive qualities now encoded in the language – found a distinctly limited if devoted following through the work of the AACM, the NYC loft scene and through the evolution of stalwart and surviving pillars of craft as well as iconoclasm such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Sonny Rollins. Nonetheless, as fascinating and acutely musical as these explorations were, their marginal economic and political footprint made its transgressive message a hard sell. The music may have been free, but the musician still needs to get paid. Without a cultural context both the message and means became obscured.

Yes, the stage is set for the conservative Marsalis restoration and political civil war within the music as to proper political boundaries and property rights to the legacy of jazz. It is of no little note to this discussion that during the institution building phase of the restoration movement, Wall St played no small part in the enshrinement of Jazz at Lincoln Center, in helping to raise the $131 million necessary for the construction of three state of the art jazz rooms at 60th and Broadway - placing their aesthetic mark at the center of that property.

During this time the explicit expression of political content fell on a few such as bassist Charlie Haden in collaboration with Carla Bley in their Liberation Music Orchestra projects that appropriated musics of liberation from around the world in the context of jazz arrangements and soloists. Amongst these recordings, the haunting “Ballad of the Fallen” from the early eighties and the recent “We Shall Overcome” stand out as eloquent statements of solidarity and intent, particularly in opposition to Reagan era imperialism in Central America.

So, where is the political intent – or pulse – in the music today? It’s commonly thought that the universal lingua franca of hip-hop has taken up the cultural void left by a de-politicized jazz. Certainly, when jazz has turned overtly political in recent years it has often borrowed from hip hop forms and rhyme schemes, most notably in tenor sax titian David Murray’s scintillating “Fo Deuk Revue” of 1997 or clarinetist Don Byron’s “Existential Dread” project of the mid-nineties. Both relying on poetry of the likes of Amira Baraka and Shadig as well as interpolated hip hop rhymes. While these have been effective collaborations, they have not sparked a trend within jazz.

While the spirit of the freedom movement resides in recent releases such as guitarist Larry Coryell’s, “Birmingham” – a musical portrait of the events of 1964 - and bandleader Marcus Shelby’s, “The Soul of the Movement” these represent a look back to the point of prime engagement between music and movement. More contemporaneously, we find literate homage paid to issues of human rights and the condition of labor in recent works by trumpeter Dave Douglas and keyboardist/composer Wayne Horvitz’s epic suite “Joe Hill.”

What of now? Will jazz lyricists and composers respond to the current political climate, OWS Jazz, as Mingus inferred in his fore stated description of holding company America? While a couple of composers have tipped their musical hats toward the President, there’s no bandwagon there. Or, as Mr. Higgins had it at the top, is the freedom felt and won now embodied in those playing freedom from the inside/out? Is the practice of freedom within the form what democracy really looks like?

Joseph murphy Bibliographic Notes: While it’s unfair to pick too much on Adorno’s myopia the essay “Jazz” that appears in his collection “Prisms” is an interesting study in seeing the forest for the trees. Amongst the books with the best insight into the intersection between the spiritual/political nexus transversed by Coltrane, Ayler, Shepp and others during the sixties is John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom, a collection of essays and interviews edited by academic Leonard L. Brown. Brown conducts the interviews here and comes across too strident in directing his subjects toward an Afro-militant nationalism in interpreting the music while his interviewees, including George Russell and Yuseff Lateef keep steering him back to a more inclusive – and elusive point of view. - A vital book for any semi-serious jazz scholar is Scott DeVeaux’s 1997 work “Birth of Bebop” where his introduction is particularly strong on the sociology of the jazz/political world of the forties and fifties.