WingsOfAnAngel
Banned
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 3
I've been thinking ever since I picked up this old Kenny Garrett CD, African Exchange Student, about the mythic-Africanism that has showed up in jazz music basically since its inception. In the big band era, it was references to "jungle drums", and in the fifties it was tunes named after places in Africa, such as "A Night in Tunisia" and "Airegin" (which is Nigeria backwards).
But in the 70s, it started to take on a deeper effect on the music. It wasn't just the shallow exoticism of a repeating drum groove during the intro to a basically standard big band chart; it wasn't just an African name to a bebop song that could as easily have been named after a stick of margarine (as in "Oleo") or a science (such as "Ornithology"). If Coltrane's musical autobiographers are to be believed, his philosophical and musical neo-Africanism stemmed from an interest in real extant African musical traditions, systems operating on completely different assumptions where tuning was radically different from in the European system.
Trane wasn't the only musician to get turned on to Africa. His acolyte Pharoah Sanders explored a lot of African materials, not just names of songs (like the title track of the album "Thembi") but also melodic materials and instrumentation. More recently (like, in the last decade or so), groups like Trevor Watts's Moirי Music Drum Orchestra and The World Saxophone Quartet made interesting attempts to fuse African traditions with contemporary jazz.
The politics of neo-Africanism wasn't just musical, of course. Until the Marsalises and their followers forced "serious jazz men" into suits and ties, numberless black jazz musicians took to donning neo-African wardrobes like many other black Americans experimenting with their African heritage.
That African heritage, of course, is a strange thing. It is largely rooted in a kind of fantasizing of what Africa is and was, or what Africa "means." The validity of any statement about what a place &emdash; or the idea of the place &emdash; means is not something that can be objectively measured, of course. It has to do with subjective meaning and experience and so on. This is as true of Germany or Ireland or Scotland as it is of that large and, to most North Americans (including most black North Americans) vaguely conglomerated continent of Africa.
In fact, mythic Africa is more of a "world" than a place. It is a loaded set of potential and imagined meanings, completely hyperreal and contiguous not to Africa the continent but to the political life of America. The real Africa is much less useful to blacks outside of Africa as a source of inspiration and heritage than the imagined Africa. The real Africa is a place that is largely economically, politically, and ecologically wrecked by the heritage of the colonial experiment.
Meanwhile, the imagined Africa of green fields, lions and tigresses and kings and beautiful maidens is always accessible. It is not scourged by dictators, guerillas, separatist governments, continual war, and famine. It is a place of culture and purposefulness and beauty. (This is not to say beauty, purpose, and culture are not to be found in Africa. But they exist in Africa among a lot of absolutely horrific conditions which we do not normally find in Mythic Africa.)
Now, it's important to note that the same is true of almost every Old Country's status in the minds of socially-integrated North Americans (I imagine this is true both in Canada and the USA, and particularly in those who are of the 3rd or 4th generation to live in the New World.) In an of itself it is probably natural: what is past, gone, and inaccessible is usually beautified and made into something of much greater wonder than it actually ever was in the real world.
But in terms of the neoAfricanization of jazz music, I think the case is particularly hairy and complex.
First of all: I would never come down from on high and declare that it's wrong of black jazz musicians to stand up and proudly and acknowledge that this music is their heritage, and doesn't exist somewhere off the continuum that also includes Africa, the slave experience, and the political personal struggles that stretch not just back to the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement but all the way back several centuries.
Musical explorations like those I mentioned earlier sometimes produce some astounding results. I saw Courtney Pine deconstruct and reconstruct an African folksong live, a tune called Zaire that he claimed was taking from a traditional song from the region. He had half of the audience clapping in twos, and the other half in threes, and it was wonderfully polyrhythmic. Coltrane, the WSQ, and many other musicians did this before Pine, and their efforts should be applauded.
Certainly, restating the Africanness of jazz (and of much American music... American dancing, for example, is a far cry from the traditional popular dance of Europe - and the discovery of the movability of the hips was something white people experienced witnessing Africans dance, as a matter of fact) is all well and good when it is about the music, or the music and the politics.
However, it is important to note that jazz is not African music. It is, in fact, a fusion of African elements with European musical traditions that stretch back a long way. The harmony of jazz, while tinged by Africa, is largely European. The melodies are largely designed to fit European harmonic structures, and aside from swing (not that swing is negligible) the rhythms of jazz are much simpler than those of traditional African music... they are in general the rhythms of European music, swung.
This is not to say that jazz was not essentially created by black people. It is to say that jazz is a peculiar music that fuses European and African elements in a new form. It is to say that jazz was the first kind of intercultural fusion music, and that perhaps the way ahead for jazz music is further exploration in this vein. After all, while some of his albums are execrable, it seems to me that Jan Garbarek offers the white man's response to neo-Africanism; some of his music has a tremendous Northern-European folk element. And Toshiko Akiyoshi's work, especially with the big band she led with Lew Tabackin, created some stunning combinations of Japanese traditional music and jazz.
I think what I am saying is that I understand what neo-Africanism is good for, but that it costs too much. It's like any neo-ism, including the neo-bop-ism that dominated American jazz today, with Wynton Marsalis at its conservative head. How is it that such a stuffed shirt, posturing fellow as Wynton has taken managed to hijack an art form that was led by visionaries and madmen like Trane, Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, Bird, Monk, and the others? Today jazz is suitable for public television, formulaic and highly produced. It is about virtuoso talent alone, and nothing of the creative fire, the half-sight of something beyond the ghetto. Jazz has been forced to become "African American classical music," as Delfeayo Marsalis once called it.
Why should it have to be that? Does something need the somberness, the professionality of a soulless businessman, in order to be respected? Hell, the reason I head Wynton claim he and his cronies (I mistyped that as "cornies" and almost left it that way) wear suits when they play is to garner respect from the audience by showing that they are serious about jazz music. And yet I respect Medeski, Martin, and Wood and they don't wear suits when they play. I respect Joe Lovano whether he's wearing a suit or a T-shirt. I respected David Murray when I saw him play in Edmonton in a Duke Ellington T-shirt. And my respect was commanded by the way they played, and the unflinching honesty and passionately explorative nature of their playing.
When the word "ghetto" comes up in conversations about jazz music, it far too often comes up as a reference to the way that many black people in America today live in poverty, as a reference to "the ghetto" as a geographic set of locations in which black people have rather nastily been sequestered by city planners and by the economics of, well, let's just call it "the system". But there is another pertinent ghetto that is deeply disturbing, and not all that dislocated from that one: the mental ghetto that jazz musicians are living in. Jazz, after all, has suffered the first seizures of ossification, and while this is good news for record companies and conservative, unimaginative musicians, it is bad news for the art form. It means stagnation, and the beginning of the sinking process that will cause it to end up at the bottom of the tar pit, a fossil.
If you listened to those young black jazz musicians who were, throughout the nineties, designated by the press as "the young lions of jazz", you heard a lot about the jazz greats. People praised Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong with a forcefulness and regularity approaching religious devotion. Or perhaps it was really just a required article of faith that required proclamation in every interview. People spoke of the greatness of the golden age of jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, and
But what was left out was the insanity. Charlie Parker telling Miles Davis to stick his head out the window if he didn't like hearing what the hooker was doing to him in the back seat of the car. Miles Davis stoned out of his mind. Louis Armstrong being treated like shit backstage. And most important, the insanity of this crazy music. Bebop, when Charlie Parker started playing it, wasn't called bebop. It was more likely called, "What the fuck's that noise, boy, you get off the stage NOW!" It sounded bizarre, shocking, and wild.
These days, bebop sounds familiar to us. it is eminently packageable, clean and unchallenging; it may ask you to listen, but if you refuse it behaves and slinks off into the background, in a way that late Coltrane, or Medeski, Martin, & Wood, or World Saxophone Quartet simply cannot do, and we can ignore it in a way that Toshiko Akiyoshi's Japanese-jazz fusions cannot be ignored.
Jazz, it must be said now, is no longer black music alone. It is the product of the black American experience, doubtless, but it is not longer black music any more than film is a white European art form. Neo-Africanness, and the suited faux-historicist black jazz ghetto of the elder Marsalis, are ways of limiting jazz, choking off the revolutionary core which has always been present. That revolutionary nature, I would submit, is the product of people honestly grappling with the massive loss sustained during the slavery experience.
It was, I would argue, a limited foretaste of what I think is now a global process of cultural decimation. (For more on this see my essay Appropriation and Art (an attempt at an eclecticist manifesto).) I would say that jazz music is a positive example of the collapse of firm boundaries between cultures.
What is politically and ecologically crucial at this point is, I would argue, also artistically crucial. The Africa that truly matters is not the mythic Africa to which some jazz musicians retreated during the 70s, and to which some still do. As important and useful as that Mythic Africa is, it is the Africa millions of years before which has something to say about Africa today, and the rest of the world along with it.
For the Mythic Africa creates a very small "us"; admittedly, a perhaps empowering one, for a specific segment of black Americans, but a limiting one. Whereas examining the older Africa can help people to see a bigger "us", one encompassing all of humanity.
It's important to add the caveat here that this kind of idea, that humans are, in fact, members of a single species, doesn't undo the responsibility of the privileged, or render moot the complex political and economic concentrations of power. Far from it, it makes those problems far more dire... as a single species, we have a responsibility to set our collective house in order. Distance is negligible now, and money is essentially a secondary concern after the question of the quality of life of our brethren (something that is undisputably posited by any government that spends money on anything at all).
Similarly, jazz in the ghetto is useless. Jazz is not "African-American Classical Music"; it is not an art form or a method of making music. Jazz is an underlying approach to music, a philosophy of playful and fervent assimilation and transformation of materials, of recombination and experimentation with sounds and performance itself. Jazz is simply the vital heart of improvised music. The first branch of it was the crucial fusion of European and African elements into a specific set of styles, work that was predominantly done by black American musicians. But today, the masters of jazz come in many colors and shapes, each bearing some different tradition in and mixing it into the whole.
It is important that musicians plunge out from the ghetto at full speed, tear into every other genre and mess every other genre up. If jazz is like the Mother Africa, it is a place from which most of us must leave; Mother Africa, like mainstream jazz, was an easy enough place to survive in that most early innovations in agriculture happened after humans spread outward, into the Near East. The people who left were both messengers and the message itself. Similarly, jazz musicians must leave the ghetto of Mother Africa, and spread their ideas, their seeds, as it were, near and far. They can breathe a new life into music, tear apart the artificial structures of genres, and win people over by the power of surprise.
I believe that jazz as a mindset is the source of the only revolutionary music left in the world that can touch many minds (composers may be more revolutionary from time to time but their battle is already lost). And I think it can do that only by stopping its insistence on being jazz. Colonization, outreach, call it whatever you like... it's something we need to do.
But in the 70s, it started to take on a deeper effect on the music. It wasn't just the shallow exoticism of a repeating drum groove during the intro to a basically standard big band chart; it wasn't just an African name to a bebop song that could as easily have been named after a stick of margarine (as in "Oleo") or a science (such as "Ornithology"). If Coltrane's musical autobiographers are to be believed, his philosophical and musical neo-Africanism stemmed from an interest in real extant African musical traditions, systems operating on completely different assumptions where tuning was radically different from in the European system.
Trane wasn't the only musician to get turned on to Africa. His acolyte Pharoah Sanders explored a lot of African materials, not just names of songs (like the title track of the album "Thembi") but also melodic materials and instrumentation. More recently (like, in the last decade or so), groups like Trevor Watts's Moirי Music Drum Orchestra and The World Saxophone Quartet made interesting attempts to fuse African traditions with contemporary jazz.
The politics of neo-Africanism wasn't just musical, of course. Until the Marsalises and their followers forced "serious jazz men" into suits and ties, numberless black jazz musicians took to donning neo-African wardrobes like many other black Americans experimenting with their African heritage.
That African heritage, of course, is a strange thing. It is largely rooted in a kind of fantasizing of what Africa is and was, or what Africa "means." The validity of any statement about what a place &emdash; or the idea of the place &emdash; means is not something that can be objectively measured, of course. It has to do with subjective meaning and experience and so on. This is as true of Germany or Ireland or Scotland as it is of that large and, to most North Americans (including most black North Americans) vaguely conglomerated continent of Africa.
In fact, mythic Africa is more of a "world" than a place. It is a loaded set of potential and imagined meanings, completely hyperreal and contiguous not to Africa the continent but to the political life of America. The real Africa is much less useful to blacks outside of Africa as a source of inspiration and heritage than the imagined Africa. The real Africa is a place that is largely economically, politically, and ecologically wrecked by the heritage of the colonial experiment.
Meanwhile, the imagined Africa of green fields, lions and tigresses and kings and beautiful maidens is always accessible. It is not scourged by dictators, guerillas, separatist governments, continual war, and famine. It is a place of culture and purposefulness and beauty. (This is not to say beauty, purpose, and culture are not to be found in Africa. But they exist in Africa among a lot of absolutely horrific conditions which we do not normally find in Mythic Africa.)
Now, it's important to note that the same is true of almost every Old Country's status in the minds of socially-integrated North Americans (I imagine this is true both in Canada and the USA, and particularly in those who are of the 3rd or 4th generation to live in the New World.) In an of itself it is probably natural: what is past, gone, and inaccessible is usually beautified and made into something of much greater wonder than it actually ever was in the real world.
But in terms of the neoAfricanization of jazz music, I think the case is particularly hairy and complex.
First of all: I would never come down from on high and declare that it's wrong of black jazz musicians to stand up and proudly and acknowledge that this music is their heritage, and doesn't exist somewhere off the continuum that also includes Africa, the slave experience, and the political personal struggles that stretch not just back to the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement but all the way back several centuries.
Musical explorations like those I mentioned earlier sometimes produce some astounding results. I saw Courtney Pine deconstruct and reconstruct an African folksong live, a tune called Zaire that he claimed was taking from a traditional song from the region. He had half of the audience clapping in twos, and the other half in threes, and it was wonderfully polyrhythmic. Coltrane, the WSQ, and many other musicians did this before Pine, and their efforts should be applauded.
Certainly, restating the Africanness of jazz (and of much American music... American dancing, for example, is a far cry from the traditional popular dance of Europe - and the discovery of the movability of the hips was something white people experienced witnessing Africans dance, as a matter of fact) is all well and good when it is about the music, or the music and the politics.
However, it is important to note that jazz is not African music. It is, in fact, a fusion of African elements with European musical traditions that stretch back a long way. The harmony of jazz, while tinged by Africa, is largely European. The melodies are largely designed to fit European harmonic structures, and aside from swing (not that swing is negligible) the rhythms of jazz are much simpler than those of traditional African music... they are in general the rhythms of European music, swung.
This is not to say that jazz was not essentially created by black people. It is to say that jazz is a peculiar music that fuses European and African elements in a new form. It is to say that jazz was the first kind of intercultural fusion music, and that perhaps the way ahead for jazz music is further exploration in this vein. After all, while some of his albums are execrable, it seems to me that Jan Garbarek offers the white man's response to neo-Africanism; some of his music has a tremendous Northern-European folk element. And Toshiko Akiyoshi's work, especially with the big band she led with Lew Tabackin, created some stunning combinations of Japanese traditional music and jazz.
I think what I am saying is that I understand what neo-Africanism is good for, but that it costs too much. It's like any neo-ism, including the neo-bop-ism that dominated American jazz today, with Wynton Marsalis at its conservative head. How is it that such a stuffed shirt, posturing fellow as Wynton has taken managed to hijack an art form that was led by visionaries and madmen like Trane, Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, Bird, Monk, and the others? Today jazz is suitable for public television, formulaic and highly produced. It is about virtuoso talent alone, and nothing of the creative fire, the half-sight of something beyond the ghetto. Jazz has been forced to become "African American classical music," as Delfeayo Marsalis once called it.
Why should it have to be that? Does something need the somberness, the professionality of a soulless businessman, in order to be respected? Hell, the reason I head Wynton claim he and his cronies (I mistyped that as "cornies" and almost left it that way) wear suits when they play is to garner respect from the audience by showing that they are serious about jazz music. And yet I respect Medeski, Martin, and Wood and they don't wear suits when they play. I respect Joe Lovano whether he's wearing a suit or a T-shirt. I respected David Murray when I saw him play in Edmonton in a Duke Ellington T-shirt. And my respect was commanded by the way they played, and the unflinching honesty and passionately explorative nature of their playing.
When the word "ghetto" comes up in conversations about jazz music, it far too often comes up as a reference to the way that many black people in America today live in poverty, as a reference to "the ghetto" as a geographic set of locations in which black people have rather nastily been sequestered by city planners and by the economics of, well, let's just call it "the system". But there is another pertinent ghetto that is deeply disturbing, and not all that dislocated from that one: the mental ghetto that jazz musicians are living in. Jazz, after all, has suffered the first seizures of ossification, and while this is good news for record companies and conservative, unimaginative musicians, it is bad news for the art form. It means stagnation, and the beginning of the sinking process that will cause it to end up at the bottom of the tar pit, a fossil.
If you listened to those young black jazz musicians who were, throughout the nineties, designated by the press as "the young lions of jazz", you heard a lot about the jazz greats. People praised Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong with a forcefulness and regularity approaching religious devotion. Or perhaps it was really just a required article of faith that required proclamation in every interview. People spoke of the greatness of the golden age of jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, and
But what was left out was the insanity. Charlie Parker telling Miles Davis to stick his head out the window if he didn't like hearing what the hooker was doing to him in the back seat of the car. Miles Davis stoned out of his mind. Louis Armstrong being treated like shit backstage. And most important, the insanity of this crazy music. Bebop, when Charlie Parker started playing it, wasn't called bebop. It was more likely called, "What the fuck's that noise, boy, you get off the stage NOW!" It sounded bizarre, shocking, and wild.
These days, bebop sounds familiar to us. it is eminently packageable, clean and unchallenging; it may ask you to listen, but if you refuse it behaves and slinks off into the background, in a way that late Coltrane, or Medeski, Martin, & Wood, or World Saxophone Quartet simply cannot do, and we can ignore it in a way that Toshiko Akiyoshi's Japanese-jazz fusions cannot be ignored.
Jazz, it must be said now, is no longer black music alone. It is the product of the black American experience, doubtless, but it is not longer black music any more than film is a white European art form. Neo-Africanness, and the suited faux-historicist black jazz ghetto of the elder Marsalis, are ways of limiting jazz, choking off the revolutionary core which has always been present. That revolutionary nature, I would submit, is the product of people honestly grappling with the massive loss sustained during the slavery experience.
It was, I would argue, a limited foretaste of what I think is now a global process of cultural decimation. (For more on this see my essay Appropriation and Art (an attempt at an eclecticist manifesto).) I would say that jazz music is a positive example of the collapse of firm boundaries between cultures.
What is politically and ecologically crucial at this point is, I would argue, also artistically crucial. The Africa that truly matters is not the mythic Africa to which some jazz musicians retreated during the 70s, and to which some still do. As important and useful as that Mythic Africa is, it is the Africa millions of years before which has something to say about Africa today, and the rest of the world along with it.
For the Mythic Africa creates a very small "us"; admittedly, a perhaps empowering one, for a specific segment of black Americans, but a limiting one. Whereas examining the older Africa can help people to see a bigger "us", one encompassing all of humanity.
It's important to add the caveat here that this kind of idea, that humans are, in fact, members of a single species, doesn't undo the responsibility of the privileged, or render moot the complex political and economic concentrations of power. Far from it, it makes those problems far more dire... as a single species, we have a responsibility to set our collective house in order. Distance is negligible now, and money is essentially a secondary concern after the question of the quality of life of our brethren (something that is undisputably posited by any government that spends money on anything at all).
Similarly, jazz in the ghetto is useless. Jazz is not "African-American Classical Music"; it is not an art form or a method of making music. Jazz is an underlying approach to music, a philosophy of playful and fervent assimilation and transformation of materials, of recombination and experimentation with sounds and performance itself. Jazz is simply the vital heart of improvised music. The first branch of it was the crucial fusion of European and African elements into a specific set of styles, work that was predominantly done by black American musicians. But today, the masters of jazz come in many colors and shapes, each bearing some different tradition in and mixing it into the whole.
It is important that musicians plunge out from the ghetto at full speed, tear into every other genre and mess every other genre up. If jazz is like the Mother Africa, it is a place from which most of us must leave; Mother Africa, like mainstream jazz, was an easy enough place to survive in that most early innovations in agriculture happened after humans spread outward, into the Near East. The people who left were both messengers and the message itself. Similarly, jazz musicians must leave the ghetto of Mother Africa, and spread their ideas, their seeds, as it were, near and far. They can breathe a new life into music, tear apart the artificial structures of genres, and win people over by the power of surprise.
I believe that jazz as a mindset is the source of the only revolutionary music left in the world that can touch many minds (composers may be more revolutionary from time to time but their battle is already lost). And I think it can do that only by stopping its insistence on being jazz. Colonization, outreach, call it whatever you like... it's something we need to do.
