Jungle Nights in Harlem

"Jungle Nights in Harlem" is one of those classic pieces of Ellingtonia reflecting the "jungle" phase in his music. It's a wild, inventive ride that shows just how advanced jazz composition already was by 1930. 

Radio Rhythm

Another classic from Fletcher Henderson & His Orchestra, 1931. The band's impeccable sense of rhythm and playfulness in interpreting the composition are pure delight. In a live context, perhaps at Connie's Inn up in Harlem, Henderson and the band must have delighted audiences. I'll have to search for more recordings of Billie Holiday's father on guitar, too. 

Cotton Club Stomp

A classic from Duke Ellington's Cotton Club years. This swinging number, coauthored with Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney, is a good indication of the sort of dance material used by Ellington's band at the legendary (and whites-only) club.

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.

Stompin' At The Savoy

I was listening to live recordings of Benny Goodman's group from 1938 and came across their take on "Stompin' at the Savoy." Goodman is great, but Max Roach's lyrical drum solo on the 1954 recording with Clifford Brown is unforgettable. Roach is undeniably one of my favorite jazz percussionists, and moments like this illustrate how bop and post-bop freed the drummer from the restraints they had to deal with during the swing phase of the 1930s and early 1940s. Roach's lyrical side as a soloist is a treat on Saxophone Colossus and Monk's Brilliant Corners, too. Perhaps Roach's M'Boom phase is next on my list for jazz to devour. More drummers could use Roach's sense of melodicism.

Black No More

"Getting the Negro leaders together for any purpose except boasting of each other's accomplishments had previously been impossible."

As a fan of Ishmael Reed's early novels, George Schuyler's Black No More, an excellent piece of satire in a 1930s America where blacks can become white, shows some of the brilliant tradition of satirical fiction by black writers before Reed. Schuyler, who, at the time of Black No More was not a "total" conservative, had spent time with socialists, mainstream black civil rights organizations, and reveals an astute understanding of the racial and class politics of the 1930s. Indeed, much of the novel consists of Schuyler's acerbic one-liners on the ignorance of the white working-class, the vanity of the black misleadership class (including humorous satirical versions of Du Bois, Walter White, and Garvey), the horrid obsession with race and status in a society in which most whites lack the power and privilege of the tiny "pure" Anglo-Saxon elite, and a jolly good science fiction story of how race-obsessed we are. Indeed, the scientist responsible for inventing the process of artificially inducing vitiligo to turn Negroes white, Crookman, is a proud Race Man who believes in the black race's potential, yet has no problem turning the black race white for our benefit...these kinds of contradictions on race, from blacks and whites, are at the heart of this rather hilarious novel, which concludes in a rather intriguing way that reminds one of the "cosmic race" theory of Vasconcelos or Frederick Douglass's belief in amalgamation as the solution to the "Negro problem."

Despite its science fiction premise, as Dr. Buggerie makes clear, quite a few white Americans are tarnished by the taint of Ham and "passing" has been ongoing since 17th century Virginia, but to posit a world in which the vast majority of African-Americans can "pass" into whiteness while tying it together with the general farce of American politics, intellectuals, white supremacist lynch mobs and Knights of Nordica, co-founded by an ex-colored man, labor, and religion was too much. One cannot read this novel without rolling over in laughter. Even if one finds the critique of the NAACP and Garvey too harsh, I suspect black leftists of today will find it resonates with the persistence of race relations administration or management class of African-Americans, and white America's obsession with its darker-hued neighbors. Any fans of Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Japanese by Spring or Reckless Eyeballing will appreciate this, although Reed, from my memory, is not so scathing on the race men and civil rights leadership class for their arrogance, colorism, and corruption as Schuyler. 

Voodoo Macbeth

Watch the last four minutes of Orson Welles's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, set in a fictionalized Caribbean world that is clearly Haiti. Featuring an all-black cast, the project was tied to the WPA Theatre Project during the Great Depression. The play features verse for dialogue, much like the original, and is only different in that it features a Caribbean setting and 'Voodoo' instead of European notions of witchcraft. For those curious about scripts and photographs from the play's production, check out this site.

Haitian Blues

Check out Fats Waller's recording of "Haitian Blues," a song first recorded by Clarence Johnson and Creole singer Lizzie Miles. While there is nothing really distinctly 'Haitian' about this blues, Lizzie Miles had ancestors from Saint Domingue/Haiti. It's more interesting as another example of Harlem's multicultural musical environment and the stride style, something Fats Waller perfected like Johnson. 

Carlos Cooks: Dominican-American Garveyite and Black Nationalist

Carlos Cooks, a Dominican-American black nationalist who influenced much of radical Harlem back in the day. He reminds me of Arturo Schomburg as one of those rare Afro-Latinos who moved to the US and became a part of various forms of Black intellectual and political circles in New York. This faithful Garveyite designated Garvey's birthday a black holiday, helped organize buy black campaigns in NYC (although an African-American Muslim called the "Black Hitler" by Jews who accused him of anti-Semitism also shaped 'buy black' consumerism in Harlem by organizing boycotts of white-owned stores in Harlem), influenced Malcolm X and shaped various forms of Pan-Africanist organizations and ideals. 

It really shows one how transnational and transcolonial Marcus Garvey's UNIA was in the circum-Caribbean world, probably spreading to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Central America through West Indian workers (and from them to New York, where Caribbean immigrants have shaped black resistance and radicalism since the early 1900s. 

Sources:

http://moorbey.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-contributions-of-carlos-a-cooks/

http://unapologetically-black.tumblr.com/post/5921374218/carlos-a-cooks-the-ideological-son-of-marcus-mosiah

http://unapologetically-black.tumblr.com/post/5921374218/carlos-a-cooks-the-ideological-son-of-marcus-mosiah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xwhv9oqXNs