The Politicization of Jazz

Not in my memory of love.

A friend asked me to eyeball this article that says:

The Dreher and Boornazian article is a curious piece of jazz scholarship in that it is very much at home in the climate that Trump’s return to power would rapidly create. Using Ornette Coleman as a case study, the article purports to deal with the following points, as summarized by the authors themselves:

Due in part to increasing intellectual and political polarization in the United States in recent decades, there has been a resultant decrease in viewpoint diversity and an increase in instances of groupthink and widespread conceptual bias in the construction of many jazz history narratives. One example of these phenomena is the historiographical narratives linking free jazz and avant-garde jazz with the Civil Rights Movement in twentieth-century America. In the past several decades, the narrative that free jazz and/or avant-garde jazz was predominantly artistically inspired by the Civil Rights Movement has become broadly espoused by a wide variety of both scholarly and mainstream jazz books and articles in spite of the fact that this narrative is poorly supported by the historical record and by the documented statements of many mid-century free jazz and avant-garde jazz practitioners. (emphasis added)

Badly substantiated writing about avant-garde jazz and politics definitely exists. The limits of this corpus are far from a new topic. What is notable about Dreher and Boornazian’s article is not the point it attempts to rehash, but the method used to do it.

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This is not a subject worth entertaining. Not for me anyhow. My interest and love for music has nothing to do with politics. I’m a dancer. Maybe one day I’ll try to explain that.

I have always resisted the political criticism of jazz in particular. My father had that particular volume by Kofsky on Coltrane, which I didn’t read, but noted it existed. It was clear enough to me that Coltrane was ‘revolutionary’ just listening to him and comparing him to players like Pres & Teddy whose album made a mark on me in a completely different way when I started to collect and take jazz seriously.

But I was never a fan of free jazz, and had no patience for the mystical magic surrounding artists like Sun Ra or Mahavishnu although I actually liked the latter. I could basically get into one album by Cecil Taylor. I was in my late 20s when I jumped from Ellington’s Blanton-Webster band straight over to Soca and then to Dancehall and then back to the musicians in Wynton’s band, particularly Marcus Roberts when I gave a passing thought to Don Cherry and Ornette. I bought an album by Henry Threadgill (Very Very Circus), and I just could not get into it at all. The closest I got to anything ‘out there’ was an album by a group called ‘Conjure’ (Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon). Really it was all about Ishmael Reed. And yet I still tried again with stuff by Steve Coleman. Interestingly enough his original pianist, Andy Milne was a friend of my brother’s. My late brother Bryan used to work the sound board at the Baked Potato. All said and done, I found in my love for jazz, its ability to reconstitute standards through tractable improvisation. Bands like Coleman’s improvised on improvisation and lost the whole idea of swing.

Where I was expecting novel creation was from electronic music, especially the grittier sort. So I became a big fan of Adrian Sherwood, Gary Clail, Keith LeBlanc, Skinny Puppy. In the early 90s I was all about Tackhead. A short time later I found Bill Laswell and Material. Hallucination Engine is one of my all time favorite albums. Its improvisation on Coltrane’s Naima basically redefined jazz for me, and I have never been the same.

The thread of the logos in all of this for me had to be that search for what Ishmael Reed was saying in his verbiage on the Conjure album. But the best of all of those were on Wynton’s Majesty of the Blues track Premature Autopsies. I can’t say that I expected much else or that there were any epiphanies where lyrics met sounds. With the single exception of Sekou Sundiata, I just was too literary to expect anything verbally sufficient to come from music. I was reading Umberto Eco at that formative time in the mid 90s and was convinced that there was a semiotic duplicity swamping American arts and letters. It’s why, even though Coleman made the best rap album on the jazz side of things (A Tale of 3 Cities) better than even Buckshot LeFonque, I let rap & hiphop go. It never said anything sufficiently deep - even compared to William Burroughs quoted by Material in (The Road to the Western Lands).

Saying so as someone who voted for Bill Bradley, there was nobody in public intellectual life outside of Cornel West who had anything considerable to say about jazz. My friend, trumpeter Bill Benzon, wrote some academic treatises I still haven’t fully plumbed and I just stopped expecting anything. Interestingly, my father, who loved Mike Davis’ City of Quartz and taught at Antioch never explicitly or coherently linked Coltrane to political inspiration. As well, LeRoi Jones’ Blues People -- well I can’t say much about that because when I first learned of it as a teen, it was ten yards over my head. All anybody had was Spike Lee in film and Public Enemy in rap eclipsing all and strutting and fretting on the world stage - talking loud and saying nothing. And I viscerally hated Gangstarr. So in the moment when jazz would have meant something political to me, it hit no bullseye. I was listening to the Miriam Makeba, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Hugh Maselela and they already had their revolution.

There were, all in all, three groups that made the kind of statements I found aesthetically and socially inspirational whose recordings still hold up after all these years. That would be De La Soul, Broun Fellinis and Fishbone. Of the three, only the Fellinis were jazzy. Outside of that, I think I would have to go back to the Blues, and I’ve never really been that guy.