uptown conversation uptown conver columbia university press new york the new jazz studies sation edited by robert g. o’meally, brent hayes edwards, and farah jasmine griffin Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2004 Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Uptown conversation : the new jazz studies / edited by Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-231-12350-7 — ISBN 0-231-12351-5 1. Jazz—History and criticism. I. O’Meally, Robert G., 1948– II. Edwards, Brent Hayes. III. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. ML3507.U68 2004 781.65′09—dc22 2003067480 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 contents Acknowledgments ix Introductory Notes 1 Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin part 1 Songs of the Unsung: The Darby Hicks History of Jazz 9 George Lipsitz “All the Things You Could Be by Now”: Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz 27 Salim Washington Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970–1985 50 George Lewis When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality 102 Farah Jasmine Griffin Hipsters, Bluebloods, Rebels, and Hooligans: The Cultural Politics of the Newport Jazz Festival, 1954–1960 126 John Gennari Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album 150 Mark Tucker The Man 166 John Szwed part 2 The Real Ambassadors 189 Penny M. Von Eschen Artistic Othering in Black Diaspora Musics: Preliminary Thoughts on Time, Culture, and Politics 204 vi Kevin Gaines Notes on Jazz in Senegal 224 Timothy R. Mangin contents Revisiting Romare Bearden’s Art of Improvisation 249 Diedra Harris-Kelley Louis Armstrong, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Swing 256 Jorge Daniel Veneciano Checking Our Balances: Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, and Betty Boop 278 Robert G. O’Meally Paris Blues: Ellington, Armstrong, and Saying It with Music 297 Krin Gabbard “How You Sound??”: Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz 312 William J. Harris The Literary Ellington 326 Brent Hayes Edwards “Always New and Centuries Old”: Jazz, Poetry and Tradition as Creative Adaptation 357 Travis A. Jackson A Space We’re All Immigrants From: Othering and Communitas in Nathaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook 374 Herman Beavers Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation 393 Vijay Iyer Beneath the Underground: Exploring New Currents in “Jazz” 404 Robin D. G. Kelley Contributors 417 CONTENTS Index 421 vii acknowledgments wWe would like to thank the Ford Foundation, which has provided funding for the Jazz Study Group since its inception. We are particularly grateful to the program officers and administrators at Ford who have collaborated with the group, includ- ing Sheila Biddle, Alison R. Bernstein, Gertrude Fraser, and Mararet B. Wilkerson. We would also like to thank the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, the Ro- mare Bearden Foundation, and the Office of University Seminars at Columbia University. Our editor at Columbia University Press, Jennifer Crewe, has been endlessly supportive of this project as it has developed, and Susan Pensak has shep- herded the book through the copyediting process with extraordinary patience and a fine eye for detail. In addition, we thank the many scholars, writers, and artists who have participated in Jazz Study Group events during the past decade as well as the musicians and intellectuals who have visited the group. This book would have been impossible without the contribution of the indefatigable assistants who have helped to organize the meetings and conferences of the Jazz Study Group: J. C. Syl- van, Donia Allen, Nicole Stahlmann, Elda Tsou, Jeffrey O’Neal, Carolyn Appel, Jenny Wasserman, Dave Ellenbogen, Jennifer White, and Maxine Gordon. uptown conversation ROBERT G. O’MEALLY, BRENT HAYES EDWARDS,AND FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN Introductory Notes oOur new century is witnessing the development of jazz studies as a new field in the liberal arts curriculum at the college and graduate school levels—and with impli- cations for students at all levels. Jazz is not new at the university in the United States. For at least fifty years there have been maverick efforts as well as established classes tracing jazz’s beginnings and development; and for years there have been courses teaching students to play. (One of the wondrous oddities of our current moment is that the best advice to a serious jazz player in training is not to drop out and study in New York’s nightclubs but to attend one of the several conservatories where excellent jazz instruction, by accomplished jazz artists, is richly available. At Berkelee or the Manhattan School would-be Mileses and Sarahs can major in jazz.) What is new here is the conviction that jazz is not just for players and afi- cionados who can count the horns and boxes of the music “from Bunk to Monk,” as the expression goes; but that knowing about jazz and its cultural settings is part of what it means to be an educated woman or man in our time—this regardless of a student’s own specific major or field. Certainly this does mean that citizens of the new century should know who Bunk Johnson and Thelonious Monk are, that they should be able to trace a crisscross line from early cornettists and trumpeters to brass players of our own era and from early jazz pianists and composers through Monk and beyond. Jazz experts love to chart the ingredients that jazz lovers listen for: Where is the melody? Where is the harmony? What are the colors? How to de- fine the polyrhythmical universe in which jazz reigns, the complex rhythmical play? Where’s the music’s sense of momentum called swing? Where is the dance- beat orientation? Where is the individuality of sound? Does the soloist “tell the story?” Where is the call and response? The sense of conversation? Where is the improvisation? The bluesiness? The “Latin tinge?” The sense of a jazz tradition, the artwork as archive? How to chart the will to spirituality? The vocal qualities of the instruments, the instrumental sound of the voices? What is the magic that makes a piece with only one or two of these qualities somehow a “jazz” piece any- how? And, by the way: Why do so many musicians, including veteran percussion- ist-composer Max Roach and trombonist-composer George Lewis, disapprove of the word jazz? How is such a word constricting? What might such a label leave out of what Roach and Lewis do as artists? These questions of definition, history, and form will always be part of jazz stud- ies. Getting a small part of the answers to such questions right can be the work of a lifetime. But what more is there to explore? Uptown Conversation asserts that jazz is not only a music to define, it is a cul- ture. Which is to say that not only might one study Bunk and Monk as individual musicians in a broad stream of musicians who influenced them and by whom they in turn were influenced. One also can consider the immeasurably complex worlds through which they moved, and which they helped to shape. What would cultural historians—with their insistent drive to questions of nationality, race, sexuality, gender, economics, and politics—say about the extraordinarily complex terrains of the New Orleans of Bunk Johnson, the North Carolina and West Side Manhattan of Thelonious Monk? Of these artists’ other geographical travels? What did their images, including mistaken conceptions of who they were, tell us about the cul- 2 tures that mythologized them? How did these jazz musicians influence not just musicians but other artists of their era and milieu: the poets and novelists, painters and sculptors, photographers and filmmakers, dancers and choreographers who regularly heard them play and of- ten shared with them a sense of common project? One thinks of Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he spun the drips of paint on canvasses placed on the stu- dio floor; of Langston Hughes writing detailed instructions to the musicians he hoped would accompany performances of his poetry; of Romare Bearden’s beauti- fully turned stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre, whose improvisatory jazz dance workshop was called Sounds in Motion; of the drummer Jo Jones in an interview naming as key influences a series of tap dancers he admired; of Stanley Crouch, stirring his high-powered essays in a room where jazz drums stand at the center, the old dream-kit inspiration; of Ralph Ellison, who kept in touch with his beginnings as a musician in Oklahoma City through hour- long conversations with his childhood friend the singer Jimmy Rushing; of Toni Morrison reading her brilliant prose to improvisations by Max Roach and the dancer Bill T. Jones; of the pianist Jason Moran playing at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he introduced his group as including Beauford Delany, whose paintings hung on the wall near the bandstand—vigorous call and recall across the art forms. What is a jazz painting? A jazz novel? What is jazz poetry? What is jazz dance? What is a jazz film? What are the sources of jazz as an art form? What are the robert g. o’meally, brent hayes edwards, and farah jasmine griffin robert g. o’meally, sources and meanings of art? What work does the music do for the whole commu- nity? With such questions now we are talking about jazz “across the curriculum”—as our colleagues in English departments say about teaching students to write: not just the province of Ph.D.s in English but of the whole liberal arts faculty.