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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue “White Woman” as Jazz
Collector in the Film New Orleans (1947)
by Sherrie Tucker Katrina and the New Jazz Orthodoxy by Salim Washington Dusty Springfield and the Motown Invasion by Annie J. Randall Review: Searching for Robert Johnson by Nathan W. Pearson Review: From Paris to Peoria by Nancy Newman |
Hurricane Katrina and the New Jazz
Orthodoxy by Salim Washington
Sidney
Bechet at Childs Paramount Restaurant, New york City, August 1953
Courtesy of Bob Parent/Archive Photos Editors’ note: The following opinion
piece is a response to an article by Wynton Marsalis that appeared in Time on
19 September 2005. The original article is available at
<www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1103569,00.html>. Has
Hurricane Katrina failed to blow the wool from our eyes? The recent disaster
in the Gulf region is not only historic, but mythical. It provides a window
into our political, economic, and social life, and our ideas and fantasies
about who and how we are. Not surprisingly, in a nation that is habitually
self-congratulatory and completely sentimental about its own history, the
government and media pundits have too often framed this disaster and its
consequences with a narrative that emphasizes individual heroic efforts over
the systemic racism, class-based oppression, and fiscal and managerial
mishaps inherent in modern day capitalism; the modest tweaking of the ideals
of a bourgeois, liberal democracy over a serious critique of imperialistic
domination upon which that affluent lifestyle is based; and the fiction of a
melting pot culture over the reality of
widening alienation and vicious behavior between various
“Americas.” In “Saving America’s Soul
Kitchen: How to Bring This Country Together? Listen to the Message of New
Orleans,” Wynton Marsalis, our
de facto national voice of jazz, addresses the nation, rightly
admonishing us to consider the cultural worth of New Orleans through its
cuisine, architecture, and music (or at least one strand of the latter). And
while he urges us to see the mythic scale of the current crisis, his choice
to view New Orleans’s place in the nation’s soul only through the
lens of culture continues a long tradition of myth-making that hides more
about our national character than it reveals.
Marsalis has been an indisputable force as trumpeter, music educator,
and promoter of young talent. Nevertheless, I feel it important to address
the philosophical basis for some of his views, which can nearly have the
effect of policy in the jazz world.
Lest anyone be seduced into thinking he is just a straw man, however,
let me also say that his is the iconic voice of a chorus of jazz thinkers,
most notably Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, who have sought to redress the
criminal marginalization of jazz’s significance by emphasizing its
elegance and artistic stature. This
project continues what Ellison saw as a corrective of Amiri
Baraka’s overly sociological treatment of the blues aesthetic. However,
to my mind they have taken the remedy too far. It is as if they focused on only one third of the late scholar Harold
Cruse’s admonishment to include culture in all considerations of the
plight of African Americans, to the exclusion of considerations of the
political economy. Marsalis laments that Americans
“have never understood how our core beliefs are manifest in
culture—and how culture should guide [our] political and economic
realities.” Culture, politics, and economics are part of a whole in
life, and must be considered together if our lived experience is to progress
towards our highest ideals. But what Marsalis fails to acknowledge is that
many in America care no more about saving America’s “soul
kitchen” than they do for the liberation of Uncle Ben or Aunt Jemimah.
While Marsalis, in his celebration of the cultural triumphs of the “Big
Easy,” fails to mention injustice and inequality, white America and
black America (to cite only two groups) differ in their perceptions of the
salience of race and class in this crisis. The
black poor have been rendered invisible to such a degree that their current
plight is seen as an isolated event rather than a condition constitutive of a
political economy continuing from slavery to today. Our inability to
acknowledge that fact also makes us blind to the racial overtones of the
Katrina crisis, a state dramatically highlighted by the mythic proportions of
what is only the most recent massive dispossession. The color-blind ideology
implicit in Marsalis’s New Orleans-centric version of “the birth
of jazz” story, based upon a fictive American melting pot, ignores the
bitterness and fractiousness that has existed between the so-called races of
New Orleans musicians and the ways they have affected the music. In one famous example, Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe, the great pianist,
composer and band leader Jelly Roll Morton, showed deep resentment toward his
demotion to de facto blackness when New Orleans’s Creoles of color, who
had lived between the states of whiteness and blackness, were suddenly lumped
entirely into the latter category. In contrast, reed player Sidney
Bechet, who also grew up as Creole and spoke French in his household,
considered himself black, identifying both himself and his music as African
in his autobiography, Treat It Gentle. His story of jazz’s
origin differs considerably from Marsalis’s in this regard.
Bechet’s myth has jazz, African music made American through the
crucible of slavery, told in a remarkable romance that includes slave owners,
slaves, maroon communities, psychosexual expressions with respect to race,
dismemberment and loss, disenfranchisement, and other topics of historical
and cultural significance. Maybe his neglect as a pioneering early jazz
soloist (an honor universally awarded to Louis Armstrong), and the even more
egregious oversight as one of the first great saxophonists in the tradition
(honors that “properly” belong to Coleman Hawkins) are due in
part to his cultural views about jazz, which do not neatly fit the heroic
narrative of the canonical jazz story. How might our views of the
music’s meanings and aesthetics be different if Bechet’s example
were as prominent as that of Pops or Jelly Roll? Marsalis points out the injustice of “[t]he genuine greatness
of Armstrong [being]reduced to his good nature.” But does not the ease
of this reduction stem from political and economic realities that informed
the culture, just as much as the culture informed the political economy? The
willful refusal to incorporate this truth into art is the biggest weakness in
the aesthetics of the nearly triumphant neo-conservative movement in modern
jazz. If it is true that jazz embodies, as Marsalis puts it, a
“flowering of creative intelligence” brought about “where
elegance met an indefinable wildness,” at its best the music has historically
critiqued American hegemony through its blues-based revolt against the
strictures of Western aesthetics. In a deal with the devil, jazz is
threatening to become respectable with the full trappings of mainstream
institutional support. We are constantly reminded of that old saw, “be
careful what you wish for.” The not-so-hidden costs of this deal
include redefining jazz as America’s “sole” art form rather
than as an African American art form, the reification of certain styles and
artifacts over the processes and dynamic interactions of the music, and the
acceptance of liberal bourgeois ideology over the revolutionary aspirations
of earlier generations of jazz musicians. These are hefty costs indeed, and
if paid in full will rob the United States of one of its historically rich
voices, a potential resource in the humanization of a nation that values
commodities over people. It is America’s perceived “me
first and damn the world” attitude that has earned us the disdain of
much of the globe. The attitude is so pervasive that some of us occasionally
sink into its grasp even when trying to provide a prophetic voice. Hip hop
artist Kanye West’s blistering attack on the Bush administration
notwithstanding, I lament the lack of substantive critique of the American
empire from the hip hop community in a time when the decadence of American
culture and the viciousness of its politics have landed us into yet another
war. Perhaps the willful ignorance and apathy of our artists only mirror the
historical amnesia of a people who act surprised by the New Orleans crisis,
despite the clear example of the Mississippi flood of 1927, when the black
poor were forced to repair the levee at gunpoint and abused in rescue
camps. Our peculiar lack of historical consciousness
is an apt companion to the clouded vision in the discourse around
“rebuilding” New Orleans. Musician, scholar and activist Fred Ho
raised the central issues that should be taken into account when he
questioned (in a recent private correspondence) “the notion of
rebuilding a defective New Orleans in which the wetlands were degraded and
eviscerated, in which the ocean surrounding the coast has become a
‘dead zone’ devoid of oxygen and nutrients to support marine life
due to the scarring and pillaging by oil rigs and pipelines.” This
disregard of environmental needs when they interfere with profits is mirrored
in the local government’s plans to revitalize the tourist district as a
key point of the city’s restoration, rather than develop a way to
incorporate humanitarian values into city planning. It
is not possible to rebuild—or even plan—culture, history, and
community per se. What is possible is to examine how we can excuse the
failure of our political will and our government’s administration to
prepare for a disaster that was inevitable and foreseeable. We could confront
the self-image of a nation that always holds the morality, civility, and
ultimately the humanity of black people in question. If this is a tall order
for a country that cannot muster appropriate outrage at what many view as an
illegitimate administration bent on imperialism, cloaked under calls for the
expansion of democracy, it is also a stretch for the spiritual resources of
an aesthetic that has come to privilege technical brilliance over truth
seeking, and institutional respectability over revolutionary zeal. —Salim Washington Brooklyn College ISAM home Who we
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