Eubie Blake

Al Rose's biography of composer and pianist Eubie Blake is not great. It's perhaps too short and clearly written by someone who lacks objectivity when ranking the works of Blake. Moreover, Rose is at times condescending in tone when describing African Americans (perhaps a reflection of his times and upbringing?). Nevertheless, this is a very useful read for anyone interested in the life and times of Eubie Blake, who lived long enough to experience early ragtime and jazz while also participating in the ragtime revival of the second half of the 20th century. Covering his life from his birth to formerly enslaved parents in Baltimore, Rose chronicles, often in the voice of Blake himself, his development as a pianist and composer in ragtime and popular music venues to his renewed status as an elder statesman of ragtime in the 1970s.

For someone primarily interested in jazz and its history, Blake's career is perhaps more accurately seen as one of the early ingredients of jazz. Reflecting vaudeville (including his early partnership days with Noble Sissle), ragtime piano, and black musical theater in NYC, Blake's music contains jazz elements and some of his compositions themselves became standards ("Memories of You"). However, Blake himself, despite his repute as a pianist since the early 1900s, and his influence on younger musicians like James P. Johnson, was perhaps more akin to James Reese Europe and Wilbur Sweatman. Like those other early jazz pioneers, his music straddled pre-jazz ragtime, musical theater, and vaudeville while keeping up with the new sounds of jazz and blues by the late 1910s and 1920s. But Eubie doesn't quite fit in with the stride pianists like James P. Johnson or Willie the Lion Smith, despite sharing their penchant for improvisation. Perhaps, since most of Blake's recorded music consisted of rags or recordings featuring the vocals of Noble Sissle, I detect more the influence of showtunes and vaudeville (with the occasional nod to blues, jazz or the Negro spiritual).

In spite of this, Blake is certainly a key figure in the history of ragtime and jazz. His musical partnerships with James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle were also significant for the development of black music in New York. Through the Clef Club, they helped organize and professionalize black music. Through musicals like Shuffle Along and their vaudeville performances, Blake and Sissle created music that did not depend on blackface or the most pernicious racial stereotypes (think of some of the unforgettable love songs from their collaboration). The indignities Blake had to endure to make it the entertainment industry are shocking nowadays, but it is thanks to musicians like Blake and James Reese Europe that African Americans in entertainment could surpass some of the limitations of a Jim Crow musical industry. Blake, as the son of former slaves, certainly lived long enough to witness the transformations in the lives of African Americans. Undoubtedly, this process is mirrored in our music.

Mister Jelly Roll

Alan Lomax's seminal biography of Jelly Roll Morton, Mister Jelly Roll The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz" is a fascinating read. Based on his interviews with Jelly Roll at the Library of Congress in the late 1930s, Lomax manages to capture much of Jelly Roll's voice in his prose, including additional interludes and other interview materials to paint a fuller picture of Jelly Roll Morton's life and works. As a product of a folklorist who, in the case of some of his field recordings and research abroad in places like Haiti, Lomax demonstrates a persistent interest in the historical and folkloric elements that contributed to the rise of jazz. Part of that interest carries into a keen attention paid to the Louisiana Creoles of Color and the particular social factors that led many to gravitate to music, with less of the primitivist lens used by others who studied "hot jazz" (although the attention Lomax pays to "voodoo" and "hoodoo" may be a remnant of his interest in the exotic cultures he experienced in nations like Haiti, where some of Morton's ancestors came from).

Unfortunately, Alan Lomax was obsessed with the wedge between Creole blacks and non-Creole blacks. Relying on rough generalizations of Creole sophistication meeting black pathos and soul to create jazz music, he pushes a narrative of black/mulatto dichotomy that was already breaking down by the time of Jelly Roll's career. Indeed, as Jelly Roll's own words make clear, he knew and experienced racism across the South (including the infamous chain gangs and fear of lynchings), and was very well aware of the racism in the music industry. However, Jelly Roll Morton and other Creoles interviewed by Lomax for the work were occasionally colorist and dismissive of non-Creole African Americans. Calling him a racist or insinuating he was accepting of Jim Crow is unfair. Especially after Jelly Roll's own experiences with race riots, segregation, a threat of lynchings, and his later marginalization by the seizure of jazz by white-dominated groups in music publishing and the record industry. Like future generations of jazz artists, such as Charles Mingus, Morton lived long enough to see whites make way more money than he ever dreamed of from playing black music. Without a doubt, Morton was critical of the Jim Crowed jazz industry and hoped serious, professional black musicians could maintain some status and protection from its rapacity. 

Of course, Lomax was right, in a sense, about the origins of jazz msuic. Jazz was a union of sorts of downtown Creole sensibilities and "rougher" or bluesier African American uptown music. But such a statement could be made about African American music generally (a combination of "refined" and formal musical training with folk, blues, spirituals, work-songs, and others with African influences). Today, it is easier to pinpoint the problems of assuming a New Orleans origin of the music, just as one can be skeptical about Morton's claims to have been the first jazz artist. Clearly, in several cities across the US, the seeds for early jazz were sown by a plethora of different African American musicians active in black musical theater, vaudeville, ragtime, popular music, and blues. Nonetheless, one cannot deny the prominence of New Orleans musicians and their influence in early jazz, especially for Chicago. Morton was, perhaps, the finest composer of the bunch, and had traveled widely earlier than many of them. He may not have "invented" jazz, but Morton was one of the early ones to perfect its form and record some of the best "hot jazz" in the New Orleans style in the 1920s

Unfortunately, with the exception of Johnny St. Cyr and a few other bandmates of Morton, like Omer Simeon, the reader does not find more information about how exactly the Red Hot Peppers excelled so often in the recording studio. The statements of St. Cyr and Omer Simeon reveal Morton to have been a flexible bandleader who allowed members to express themselves on their solos and during breaks, but Morton struggled to maintain a consistent band by the end of the 1920s. Refusing to allow them to drink and excepting a certain degree of professionalism, plus his ego, may have irritated too many bandmates. Things allegedly reached the point where Morton expected the band to play just as he wrote the music, although some of these difficulties may have been due to working with a number of musicians untrained in the New Orleans style. Indeed, from the 1930s through the end of his life, Morton struggled and was considered old-fashioned by the rising swing generation of musicians. However, no one can deny that Morton's mastery of the New Orleans style has bequeathed some gems to the jazz standard repertoire, while showcasing the importance of composition and arrangement in early jazz to create sophisticated, multilayered pieces. 

Overall, Alan Lomax's biography lives up to its reputation. Despite the editorial assertions and unfair characterizations by Lomax, this is undoubtedly the closest thing to how Morton would have liked to be remembered. Despite the many gaps in its narrative structure or lack of details for certain moments in his life, Morton's life from a Creole childhood in New Orleans to his unfortunate death in Los Angeles, are vividly brought to life. The gambling dens, brothels, low-lives, hustlers, musicians, failed businesses, wives, girlfriends, and good living made for a storied life, even if Morton embellished or exaggerated. His high opinion of himself, musical genius, and belief that everyone was cheating him must have inspired Charles Mingus, and resonated with other luminaries of the jazz world who sought to escape the confines of the Jim Crow musical industry. 

As Serious As Your Life

Valerie Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life is a must-read for all interested in the history of the new thing in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on her own involvement and extensive interviews with the musicians themselves who championed their art, it resolves all doubts of free jazz's roots in the Black community and earlier forms of jazz (as well as African music, since free jazz represented a return to the percussive nature of African music). As as they struggled to survive in a world hostile to their music, the artists came together in cooperatives, ensembles, the loft scene, and related artistic endeavors in the Black Arts Movement to pursue creative music reflecting their cultural, social, musical, and intellectual environments. By letting the musicians speak for themselves, they are further humanized as we learn of their shortcomings, desires, personal lives, and aspirations. 

One cannot speak of Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, the AACM, or Andrew Cyrille as disconnected from larger currents of their era, particularly as the opportunities for profit in jazz were dwindling and the new music artists sought to define themselves and leave a legacy for future generations. Outside of academia, grants, and a few organizations like the AACM, it does seem like this spirit of jazz is long gone, but one can see in it perhaps the last great creative surge in jazz that existed in tandem with popular Black music of the era, despite its arduous path to reach the masses of African Americans. Black cultural nationalism, socialism, and mystical notions had a certain attraction to these artists, and shaped their music and their self-conception as artists beyond the confines imposed on jazz music in the past. The concert hall, rather than the nightclub, was their ideal performance venue, but they also wanted to reach a large audience and retain links with communities outside of their artistic circles. 

A democratizing impulse in the music can also be found in the period. Wilmer was likely one of the first to seriously consider the question of women in the new music. Besides Alice Coltrane, Amina Claudine Myers, Carla Bley or Linda Sharrock, women artists in the new music were scarce, yet without their finncial, emotional, and artistic contributions, the jazz avant-garde would not have survived. Working women provided the necessary income to support musicians who struggled to find work as the jazz nightclubs were disappearing and the music was not supported by most of the large record labels (with the possible exceptions of Impulse and Atlantic). There was also a push for greater inclusion of women as instrumentalists in the music, not just vocalists. In a sense, jazz was democratizing itself further as women fought for their space. The sidemen versus leader dichotomy was also challenged in this democratizing push, since creative ensembles in which leadership was equally shared were perceived as better for the spirit of musical collaboration and cooperatively-run labels or associations. Jazz, like other forms of music, continue to struggle with these questions, but undoubtedly the free jazz scene paved a way forward for the music.

Treemonisha

After finally reading the libretto for Scott Joplin's opera, Treemonisha, one can see the limitations of Joplin's attempt to create an opera entirely on his own. Joplin wrote the libretto and score, and while the music is fantastic, the actual story is quite thin. In short, one year after the US Civil War, an infant Treemonisha is found under a tree at a plantation managed by Ned and Monisha, who adopt the child as their own. Fast forward several years later, and Treemonisha is the only educated person in her isolated, all-black community (she is also the only one who does not speak in "dialect"). Conjure men, who prey on the ignorance and superstition of the community, peddle their magic wares and, after Treemonisha stands up to them, kidnap her. 

She is saved by Remus, a man she taught, who dons a scarecrow costume to frighten the conjurers just as they're about to throw Treemonisha into a wasp's nest in the forest. The rest of the men in Treemonisha's community capture the conjurers, and just as their about to punish them, Treemonisha persuades them to not beat or kill them. She forgives Zodzetrick and his cohort, and the community nominates her as a leader. This is basically all that happens, with the exception of some musical scenes featuring a ring shout, Parson Alltalk (just talking, an ineffective figure in the community), corn huskers, cotton pickers, and miscellaneous additional scenes. Some of these appear to have no relevance to the plot, but they provide opportunities for songs and dances associated with black folk culture in the South.

Alexander Berlin's biography of Joplin suggests the character of Treemonisha or at least her surroundings were inspired by one of his wives, Freddie. Berlin and Rick Benjamin contextualize the opera in the context of Joplin's exposure to classical music, black musical ambitions of the era, and the political message of Treemonisha. Intriguingly, the opera is critical of organized religion as represented by Parson Alltalk, although Treemonisha is a deist of sorts. Obviously critical of the conjure men, who are inexplicably frightened of a man dressed as a scarecrow, Joplin seems to reject African-derived religious or folk traditions and the organized black church while suggesting rational, assimilation of Western education would lead the black community onward in progress. 

Yet, Joplin seems to enjoy drawing on black folk music and ragtime, incorporated into the opera. The Negro, it would seem, should embrace the best of Western knowledge but retain traditions into the future, creating a distinctly black art aesthetic that can stand beside Wagner, Dvorak, or Verdi. To reach that lofty goal, however, required leadership by the educated of the race, including women, like Treemonisha. As a "Black Athena" of her community, she will become the spark for general education and uplift of their Arkansas plantation. Of course, Treemonisha's mysterious appearance suggests mystical, supernatural conditions of the "insider-outsider" who can lead her community out of darkness and isolation. It would be interesting to compare this opera with Freeman's Voodoo.

James P. Johnson: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Scott E. Brown's biography of James P. Johnson is, to my understanding, the only book-length study of the life and music of the stride pianist. Due to my interest in early jazz and, increasingly, ragtime, I decided to read it to learn more about Johnson's place in the history of jazz. Brown's biography emerged from a student thesis, which can be clearly discerned. However, the provocative title is warranted because Brown's study illustrates many of the innovative and important features of Johnson's music on jazz and black music. Through his influence on Fats Waller, his composing of "serious music" drawing on African American spirituals and blues, and later generations of jazz pianists adapting the stride style, such as Thelonious Monk and Jaki Byard, Johnson's legacy in jazz is large and multifaceted.

As an active participant in the musical scene of New York in the 1910s and 1920s, Johnson witnessed the transformation of ragtime piano and the development of early jazz. Ragtime musicians in New York and New Jersey were, by the time young Johnson began playing in saloons, "ragging" popular tunes and engaging in "cutting contests." The Clef Club's emergence led to better gigs for black musicians and their refined mannerisms were, according to Brown, emulated by Johnson's generation. However, the older Clef Club musicians were not eager to embrace the blues or the polyphony of New Orleans jazz, so the younger artists like Johnson were the ones to channel the blues scale, blue notes, and vocalization to their instruments.

Indeed, the strong influence of black southern folk music and traditions, like the "shout," also help explain the emergence of stride as a distinct piano style from ragtime. The ringshout and similar black southern dances, rooted in the religious musical culture of black slaves and their descendants, transferred to secular expression after Emancipation. The "shout" was witnessed by a young Johnson in the dances held by his parents, and the riffs of stride were based on the rhythmic variations of shout dances. Johnson wasn't alone in attributing the origins of stride to the shout dances brought from the south by black southerners. His friend, Willie the Lion Smith, also noted the influence of the shout dances on stride piano, which, especially in its rhythmic riffing and blues influences, is more jazz than ragtime. 

Besides his ingenious stride piano style and songwriting for black musical theater, what most distinguishes Johnson is his desire to compose "serious" music drawing on the Western classical tradition. In Yamekraw, his Negro rhapsody, or The Organizer-A Blues Opera, a collaboration with Langston Hughes, Johnson drew on the blues, spirituals, and black folk material for classical works. Indeed, he knew Gershwin and likely understood the sources of black folk music better than the latter, although none of his symphonies were as successful as Gershwin's. Just as Joplin's opera, Treemonisha, was steeped in black folk music elements, Johnson endeavored to pursue a similar goal of fusing the "high" art of classical forms with black folkloric and blues roots, something many Harlem Renaissance critics and literary figures were hoping to accomplish in their own works. 

His musical contributions to the blues opera project with Langston Hughes also hints at social reformer or even socialist sympathies of Johnson. Hughes was, for a time in the 1930s, writing militant poetry reflecting his left-wing convictions. His opera with Johnson expresses those sentiments, too, as it involvements a labor organizer among black sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South, teaching them the path to their liberation is organization (to create a world without hunger, with no color line). Unfortunately, Brown's biography does not explore this, but it may suggest something of the degree to which the Communists during the Depression were influencing Harlem jazz musicians as well as intellectuals like Hughes. 

This desire to be taken seriously as a composer has been a consistent theme with many jazz musicians, who encountered a racist music industry and social prejudice. For instance, Johnson's music for black musical theater, often considered the highlight of the various musicals he was involved with, were limited to black musicals often reliant on racial stereotypes and ignored by the white musical establishment. He also sought to live on his composing rather than the brutal nightclub or dancehall circuit, which were the only venues jazz could be heard in during the 1920s. Although it seems like Johnson still enjoyed performing at Harlem rent parties where fellow stride pianists like Fats Waller and Willie the Lion Smith would also pop in, one can see see how he sought to find a place for his music beyond the limitations imposed on jazz as "entertainment" unfit for the high arts. In addition to his efforts at "serious" music and the consolidation of stride piano, his presence at the early days of jazz in New York surely attest to his importance in the jazz pantheon.

Blutopia

Graham Lock's Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton is a thought-provoking and serious work in Jazz Studies. Anytime one can encounter a serious work on jazz that takes the musicians themselves seriously and endeavors to engage with their ideas should be applauded. Lock also manages to impressively integrate an analysis of Sun Ra and Anthony Braxton with Duke Ellington, despite vast differences in style, thought, and age among these titans of jazz. However, Lock raises more questions than he answers in much of the text. 

First, Sun Ra. It's been a number of years since I've read Szwed's Sun Ra book, but much of Lock's analysis felt 'new' or 'fresh' to me. In a literature class over the last several months, Sun Ra came up more than once and we discussed the parallels of his work with Negro spirituals, but because I know very little about spirituals, Lock connecting spirituals and Sun Ra's chants (in addition to the ring shout and the way the Arkestra moved counterclockwise around the audience) was informative. However, I was at times struck by how Lock seems to take Ra's mythology too much at face value, as if there are not several troubling implications from Sun Ra's Astro Black Mythology. I think Lock came closest to grappling with this issue by identifying Ra as someone who chose to identify with Pharaoh over Moses. 

Wilson J. Moses has written about the Pharaoh-Moses dialectic with regards to African American black nationalists and intellectuals, but it seems as if the despotic aspects of Pharaoh are left out of the discussion while the 'authoritarian collectivism' of Moses (and, by extension, Christianity) are rightfully included by Lock's discussion of Ra's opposition to Christianity. As a result, Sun Ra's ideas of the past and future, not to mention the present, are not fully considered since the Moses-Pharaoh conflict is never resolved or rejected (are African Americans stuck with only Moses or Pharaoh? What of Legba?). 

As for Duke Ellington, a composer I have not listened to seriously in probably 5 or 6 years, these two chapters were a breath of fresh air. Ellington's fight for jazz to be taken seriously and the complexity and nuance of African American music to escape essentialist and condescending treatment in the eyes of white America are still relevant, as are his attempts to fight minstrelsy, blackface, and 'Uncle Tom' depictions of black life in popular culture. I think Lock also hit the nail on the head about Duke Ellington's view of black America's history as (mostly) based in the US, and his race pride was inseparable from his patriotism. Such a sentiment is lacking in Sun Ra's revisions of the black past and black present, and Duke Ellington's views are probably the most 'mainstream' when it comes to African American perceptions of their nation. 

Nonetheless, I was a little surprised that Duke Ellington's middle-class background and support for respectability politics was not integrated into the two chapters (Duke believed African Americans must behave in ways that command respect, according to Lock, plus he opposed the confrontational aspects of the Civil Rights Movement). Given the climate around respectability politics among those in African American Studies today, what are the limitations of Duke Ellington's revisions of the past and future? How does his Blutopia fall short? In what ways are Duke Ellington's US-centered black history and future limited by exclusion of Africa? What do we make of the 'world music' aspirations of his later LPs?

Last but certainly the most confusing and perhaps less relevant to Blutopia, Anthony Braxton. I do not entirely buy the argument of Mackey about Legba's limp and jazz swing or syncopation. It seems too fanciful and impossible to 'prove,' plus it may neglect the ways in which Legba's limp may be more a product of dances and music rather than the other way around. I have no evidence for my own assertion either, but I remain skeptical of a Legba interpretation of Braxton's multiformity. Lock is right about Braxton's synesthesia and the heterogeneity of black creativity (not to mention the critiques of jazz critics), but the Legba interpretation and the chapter on Trillium operas was somewhat less successful or convincing. Braxton's 'vibrationism' and spirituality were fascinating, but one must visit his esoteric writings directly to get a more detailed 'feel' for his views. Lock, to his credit, admits this and acknowledges that the chapters on Braxton did not go in depth. 

Overall, however, this is a provocative and insightful reading of three significant jazz artists. Jazz musicians as intellectuals is a growing interest of mine, and Lock has increased my appreciation for artists like Ra, Braxton, and Ellington. Some recent readings of mine on AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago have tangentially included Braxton, but I think an interesting project would be to focus solely on the differences between Braxton and Art Ensemble of Chicago's approach to "Great Black Music" and revisions of the past and future. Perhaps that will be my next rambling post?

Francis Johnson and Haiti

Source

How many people are aware that famed African-American composer and bandleader, Francis Johnson, was an avid believer in Haiti? Like many free blacks of the North, he seems to have looked favorably on Haitian independence. So much so, in fact, that he composed "Recognition March of the Independence of Hayti" after France finally recognized their former colony's independent status. Unfortunately, I have not come across any recordings of this song, but its an interesting case of historical links between Haiti and African-Americans.