The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (68 page)

“Listen to this, Reverend, and tell me she ain’t awesome,” Jackson elatedly beseeched me. As soon as I heard her voice—that voice—I smiled.

“Yeah, she’s incredible, amazing, Rev,” I replied. “I’ve played all three of her albums to death.”

I didn’t tell him the story of how we’d met, that voice and me, years earlier in Pippin’s house. But I told her when we enjoyed downtime in England. We’d gone there with Jackson—me as his shadow amanuensis, she as his soloist, as he talked and preached his way around London—to help celebrate Mandela’s release from prison, and to join in his campaign to keep the pressure on South Africa to end apartheid through sanctions from the world community. Toward that end, Jackson would meet with the Mandelas at the London home of deposed African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo, attend the Wembley Stadium concert for the recently released hero, and, well, just be Jesse Jackson. And that meant that Jackson would give sermons and speeches to galvanize international support for South African freedom and black self-determination.

When Jackson preached, she sang, and amazed the folk. She belted out gospel ballads and gospel blues, reveling in contemporary and traditional, soulful and jazzy, and even hipper, up-to-date songs dipped in the aesthetic fashions of black pop music. She even wowed the rapturously raucous black crowd in Brixton, so much so that Winnie Mandela grabbed her backstage and lifted her clean off the ground, no mean feat in light of the singer’s compact, substantial frame. And I remember thinking that as much as I admired Mrs. Mandela, she wasn’t a woman I’d ever want to tangle with.

Back at our hotel, I regaled the singer with the story of how I’d first heard her, and how utterly powerful and riveting an occasion it had been. A wide, beautiful smile broke across her attractive brown-doll face, set off by intense button eyes, apple-red cheeks, and framed by lush, layered, reddish brown hair. She was cute as pie and twice as sweet.

I reached into my garment bag and retrieved a copy of her first album,
Peace Be
Still,
the one that Pippin had snagged me with, which she happily signed for me, ending with a common valedictory that still touched me deeply, “Love, Vanessa Bell Armstrong.”

How did the music achieve and get assigned such lofty goals?

When you think about 1920s jazz music, you think about what led up to it. The formative period of jazz is from around 1895 till about 1905, 1910. Ragtime was big then. The music was so named because of the ragged time, the syncopated rhythmic structures, that African-inspired musicians were playing against more nonsyncopated, linear, tonal-based, harmonic European music. Musically speaking, jazz evolved out of ragtime with the assertion of the sensibilities of African communal spirits and syncopated rhythmic orders against the more regimented order of Western music. Aesthetically speaking, high society music, the music of civil and polite society performed in the chambers of the elite, was the established canon, the established norm against which all other music was judged and compared.

When ragtime came along with its raggedy, nonconventional, syncopated rhythms against the nonsyncopated, linear conceptions of music in the Western canon, it created a real rub. But I think part of the controversy erupted in response to the function of the music itself. Musicians handed out cards in New Orleans, especially in the 1920s, which had printed on them “music for all occasions.” So the social contexts and geographical spaces to which the music was
Jazz consigned determined its function. If you’re playing in parades and picnics and funerals and Mardi Gras, the music is much more lively and syncopated and fit for those situations. But if the music is played in a limited, intimate space, the music has a different sensibility. Even the popular dances of the 1920s reflected the influence of space on aesthetics. For instance, in polite society they danced the quadrille, the mazurka, the waltz, and the polka in association with chamber music. But when there were open spaces and markedly vibrant dance halls, all characteristic of the sites of “the folk,” the dances were the slow drag, the eagle rock, and the buzzard lope. All in all, the music and dance outside “official” society—and music and dance were intimately connected—reflected the infusion of African aesthetic values by means of New Orleans Creoles.

A quote: “Beware of a change to a strange form of music, taking it to be a danger to the whole, but never have the ways of music moved without the greatest political laws being moved.” That’s Plato’s
Republic.

Well, there’s no question that the high purpose of music was captured in William Congreve’s phrase: “Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast.” It has been widely, and wrongly, quoted as saying “the savage beast,” which appears on the surface at least to be redundant. In any case, music from either perspective is a modifying element with a modulating effect: It brings sensibility and order to chaos. Those musical forms that reflect chaos are seen to be, from a hegemonic, elite perspective, unworthy of recognition or respect. In fact, they don’t count as music at all. The aesthetic value of these nonmusical, chaotic forms—the frenzy of ragtime, the frenzy of jazz—reflected in part the chaos of the social circumstances faced by its artists, including Creole musicians losing their jobs downtown, where they were playing European-inspired music in New Orleans, to go uptown, where they had interactions with these more indigenous Negro populations. That meant that there was some kind of fusion going on, and therefore the musical and aesthetic values of the musicians were being “corrupted,” so that the “high” and redemptive purposes of the music—to regulate the savage—was compromised by the influence of the very forms of chaos that the music sought to relieve.

The perception of music’s purpose is always indivisible, I think, from the political and social contexts through which folk, including critics, interpret the music. Remember in, I think, 1918, the
Times-Picayune
, the newspaper in the birthplace of jazz, New Orleans, the Crescent City, argued against the uncivil-like behaviors of musicians, as well as the uncivil character of the music. “This is not music that is fit for polite society,” they opined, and I’m paraphrasing here. “As a result, we should suppress it.” So musically speaking, the aesthetic representation of the Western conception of music, with melody and harmony and thematic resolution and tonal structure and so on, was juxtaposed in the minds of the cultural elite to musical forms that fell outside of the realm of music’s purpose, or, in keeping with the Greek philosophy of your quote, its telos. The rhythmic intensity of African
music, emerging from racially subordinated communities, subverted the telos, the goal of music as determined by dominant society, resulting in a huge bifurcation of musical priorities and aesthetic choices. For the dominant, elite society, music facilitated the rituals of intimate social interaction in close quarters. For the masses, music accompanied big social events that facilitated a sense of social cohesion and personal agency in chaotic and conflicted social circumstances. Now that bifurcation, like all dualities, isn’t pure, since social phenomena are fluid and complex, but I think it’s a functional definition of the social and aesthetic tensions that prevailed.

From a social place, what is being said?

Well, in a sense, I think we can look at what was happening in New Orleans at the time, from the late 1890s to about 1915 or 1920, as a precursor to the culture wars that are now going on as we debate the differences between Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, multicentrism, multiculturalism, and the like. There were racial forces behind distinctions between European music and so-called non-European, or African-inspired, music. Those distinctions were really about racial caste, about keeping Negroes in their place, and about assigning less merit to African cultural products and forms of music than to European ones. The irony, of course, is that white musicians later appropriated African forms of music. The first jazz recording, which appeared in 1917 from the Original Dixieland Band, was a whitened and diluted and domesticated version of African-inspired black music. If it wasn’t quite rhythmically challenged, it was certainly a watered-down version of black music rendered palatable to a wider, whiter American audience.

The racial distinction between European and African music was sometimes coded as the differentiation between what’s good and bad music, what’s productive and nonproductive music, and what’s edifying and what’s debased music. Folk were trying to figure out the place of African people in American culture, and the arguments over music were key to the process. So the aesthetics were politicized. The question of what to do with ragtime, and then blues, jazz, and gospel, was never simply a matter of taste, or should I say, that taste was never merely a matter of musical preference extracted from the prevailing racial context. Syncopation indexed race as surely as black skin. Plus, the caste question was never far away, since these ragtime musicians were not often educated musicians who had absorbed the finer points of European music. Their musical trace had to be washed away from the palette of American music, which was little more than an imitation of the so-called classical forms flowing in from Europe. The kick is that across the waters, European classical musicians and composers are digging this indigenous American music being created by mostly black musicians of an ostensibly degraded and inferior pedigree. Figures like Debussy and Stravinsky, and even Charles Ives, are being influenced by ragtime, even as the aesthetic guardians of Western culture are dissing ragtime.

Struggles over music were about social regulation because music was the front line of breaking down racial barriers. Later in the twentieth century, black musicians would play a crucial role in brokering an acceptance of African Americans, limited though it was, within the regime of American apartheid in the South, where segregation ruled. It sounds trite to say but black music, to a degree, united peoples of different races and genders and cultures in this kind of polyphonic expression of African sensibility. But they had to fight through the social stigma attached to blackness, even though, interestingly enough, in New Orleans, jazz music is also being created by Creoles. I think James Lincoln Collier, the jazz critic, has read this entirely wrong. He says because those musicians were Creoles, they weren’t black, and therefore we can’t claim that jazz music has black origins. But as Mike Tyson might say, that’s ludicrous. Such an argument as Collier advances denies the complexity of race, how it is not simply a biological fact but a socially determined identity. The notion that jazz is not a “black” music because it was created by Creoles not only is a reflection of phenotypical literalism but ignores the politics and history of racial identity in America. A crucial feature of the American racial contract has involved the thorny question of interracial or mixed race identity, or what is anthropologically and sociologically termed miscegenation.

That debate has been renewed recently with the rise of Tiger Woods to prominence in golf. Is Tiger black or Thai, or both, and how do we talk about being both and hence not exclusively either, and how does that nuance our comprehension of racial identity? Contemporary debates about miscegenation were precipitated by the sorts of arguments around race and music that occurred in the Creole–influenced Crescent City of New Orleans back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was an Americanization of New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase in the early 1800s. New Orleans, racially and ethnically speaking, was a mixture of French and Spanish and indigenous American elements. The Creole, or the lightskinned Negro, the French-inflected mulatto, was the product of a fusion of black and white. Creoles began to create ragtime and jazz music only after they had interactions with indigenous Negro or African-inflected musicians in New Orleans, a fact that causes me to be skeptical about Collier’s argument that jazz is not identifiable as black music. One can hear in such denials reverberations of the stigma of blackness—of black skin and skill, of black blood, metaphorically speaking, of black styles—that was rife in American culture at the turn of the twentieth century. It’s a stigma that persists to this day, even if, ironically enough, black popular culture is the idiom, is the grammar, through which America is globally articulated.

Finally, I think piano-based ragtime accentuated percussive features of black music that were later expanded in ensembles, which highlighted the shift to the multi-instrumentality of jazz music, including, say, a saxophone, a trumpet, and a drum, which facilitated the process of improvisation that was strictly forbidden in classical music, which had to be read note for note off a sheet. It was eye music versus ear music, music that had to be read versus music that had to be heard and learned by ear, the visual versus the aural, so to speak. Since there was initially
little sheet music in jazz, at least not to the degree or in the manner of classical music, musicians were free to improvise, to remake the song as they played it each time. There was a structural freshness to the music’s improvisational quality, allowing the musicians to enlarge or diminish themes, to rearrange musical elements, to alter tempos and tones, as the occasion or mood dictated. There’s still a corpus there, a body of ideas and themes and techniques, but they are the raw material of the riffs that constitute and extend the impulse to improvisation. A huge feature of the debates over African versus European music was over what sorts of music contained our cultural and, really, our political values. If democracy is what jazz is about, glimpsed in the equal participation of varying elements in the construction of a whole, European classical music is about a kind of oligarchy of aesthetic taste; that is, there is tight control over what can be played, what can be said, what can be articulated, and who gets a chance to play it.

Talk about the imagery.

An interesting feature of African music is how it incorporates the communal basis of racial and cultural survival into its aesthetic vocabulary. That’s number one. Number two, African-inflected music, at least in the case of black music in America, existed and eventually flourished in a foreign land, in a context where black folk had to struggle to create a culture of signification among each other as a survival strategy in an oppressive culture. So the double entendre, from the spirituals, blues, and so on, allowed blacks to communicate with one another in liberating fashion. When slaves sang “Green trees are bending/My soul stands a’trembling/Ain’t got long to stay here,” white plantation owners were being entertained while black slaves were being emancipated, since they were signaling each other about when Harriet Tubman was coming through to liberate slaves and lead them along the Underground Railroad to freedom. So the double entendre fused emancipation and entertainment in many African and African American musical forms. But black emancipation and white entertainment weren’t the only functions of the double entendre.