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.

Elizabeth Lange

Source

Lange was a fascinating product of the Haitian Revolution. She moved to Cuba as a result of the Haitian Revolution, then settled in Baltimore where she started the first black sister organization in the Catholic Church (as well as educating black students). Lange's life demonstrates the links connecting different areas of the Black Atlantic, and thus an appropriate historical figure to learn about this month. 

A Problematic Scene in The Wire

A powerful but problematic scene from "The Wire" on the question of violence in Black America. Though Bunk is right in many ways about how death ripples out, regardless of the victim's background or status, his statement about how "fall we done fell" is problematic and can be easily twisted into some form of culture of poverty or black dysfunction as a product of the black urban proletariat themselves. In other words, the urban poor of Baltimore and other black communities elsewhere and the alarming homicide rates are seemingly placed solely as the responsibility of the black urban poor themselves rather than a product of the War on Drugs and structural racism. Personal responsibility is obviously huge when discussing violence and homicide, but in this context, and for primarily white audiences, it's a little unclear and potentially dangerous to hear this kind of Moynihan-esque explanations for violence among the black underclass (blaming the victim essentially). 

This kind of stuff is something I observed as a pattern in the television form of "The Boondocks," which has led me to rethink my thoughts about "The Wire," too. Though David Simon's pessimistic program is more about systemic or institutional dysfunction rather than black cultural pathology, notions and ideas from the latter do appear in the series, something picked up on by black critics, such as Ishmael Reed. In addition, it's another example of white men profiting from and being recognized as 'experts' in the field of 'urban literature' and art, even though African-Americans from Baltimore's troubled neighborhoods would be far better at telling their own story than a white guy. This ain't to say that whites can't write about black life, but my sympathy for some of Reed's critiques of the show and how blacks are exploited and used in ways that prevent them from telling their own story for mainstream ('white') America has led me to a healthy skepticism and natural resistance to a lot of the shows touted as 'realistic' depictions of black life (and yes, I know 'black life' means many things, there is no monolithic standard of 'blackness). 

The Wire, Edgar Allan Poe and Baltimore

I recently read an excellent collection of essays on The Wire which included one by a scholar noting the Poe influence in the excellent program. For instance, in one scene of the show, some white tourists ask a group of lower-class African-American gentlemen, "Where is the Poe house?" Their response, hearing it as "po" as in poor, is to essentially take your pick, since every house in that particular westside neighborhood is a po' house. However, a more startling literary revelation arises in the method through which Marlo Stanfield's crew disposes of corpses, placing them in unoccupied houses. Many of Poe's excellent macabre short stories feature similar themes, of characters placing corpses into walls of homes in an attempt to hide them. For instance, "The Black Cat" story, if i remember correctly, concludes with the aforementioned black cat revealing where a husband placed his wife into a wall. Likewise, "The Tell-Tale Heart" consists of a similar story, where the still-beating heart of the villain's victim reveals his crime. Fascinatingly, the writers of The Wire reincorporate themes from the dark fiction of the genius, Poe, for the rather disturbing practices of crews in the city of Baltimore. The character of Marlo Stanfield, a ghastly person in 'love with the game' and the violence of the corner, unsurprisingly, perpetuates similar misdeeds of Poe's fictional characters of 19th century American fiction. As an undisputed master of Gothic fiction, it is no surprise Poe's influence would appear in a very dark urban fiction populated by drug dealers, killers, corrupt government and police, and the bleak urban landscape of a once great American city. This is an interesting look at David Simon and Poe.