Soul, Afrofuturism & the Timeliness of Contemporary Jazz Fusions
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Soul, Afrofuturism & the Timeliness of Contemporary Jazz Fusions Gabriel Solis Abstract: The rise of jazz-R&B-hip hop fusions in contemporary Los Angeles offers an opportunity to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 reflect on the ways jazz matters to black audiences today. Drawing on recent Afrofuturist art and theo- ry as well as on Amiri Baraka’s analysis of the “changing same” in black music, this essay traces out the significance of work by artists as diverse as Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and Robert Glasper, positing that their music tells us that jazz matters not only in itself, but also in its continuing ca- pacity to engage in cross-genre dialogues for musicians and audiences who hear it as part of a rich con- tinuum of African American musical expression. We are, it seems, in an age of Afrofuturism. The release of the Black Panther feature film in Febru- ary 2018 was greeted with a spate of think pieces across a range of media, explaining the term Afro- futurism for an unfamiliar audience. “T’Challa, also known as the Black Panther, the title character of the blockbuster movie, wasn’t the first person to land a spaceship (or something like it) in down- town Oakland, Calif.,” starts one such article.1 Such pieces point back to bandleaders Sun Ra and George Clinton (and sometimes to Jamaican dub artist Lee “Scratch” Perry) to provide background for the film’s mix of the old and the new, technolo- gy and the spirit, space-age Africa, and, eventually, a sense of diasporic culture that travels in both di- rections across the Black Atlantic–in ships in the gabriel solis is Professor of sky rather than the sea–suturing the fissures rent Musicology at the University of by the middle passage, by war, and by colonial mo- Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. dernity’s many terrors. He is the author of Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at At the same time, we are in an age of poly- or Carnegie Hall (2013) and Monk’s even omnigenericism in music. That is, in many cas- Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz es, musicians and their audiences are liable to con- History in the Making (2007). nect multiple genres, creating new fusions, and © 2019 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences doi:10.1162/DAED_a_01740 23 Contemporary even to view all genres of music as poten- in its value to a broad audience and to Jazz Fusions tially available to them. This is notable, musicians who may not identify with the if only because of how strongly it rep- genre term “jazz” but who, nonetheless, resents a break from the immediate past. make music in dialogue with it in one way Over the course of a period from per- or another. haps 1960 to 2000 (to speak in very rough If the contemporary meaning of jazz terms), genre became not only the key does not necessarily point to either a fu- way to interpret popular music, but one turist position or an imbrication in the of its most powerful modes of creating a midst of a broader space of black popular hierarchy of value. From the authenticity music, its history certainly provides con- –and authority–of rock to the “Disco siderable precedent. To a remarkable ex- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Sucks” campaign of the 1970s, and from tent, in fact, seeing the continuing rele- the much-touted “realness” of country vance of the music requires an account- music to Wynton Marsalis’s increasingly ing that understands it as having always strange, transphobic comments from the been more than a narrow style catego- early 1990s on fusion as a kind of musi- ry, always more than simply a musical cal “cross-dressing,”2 Baby Boomers and form. To see it today as the cultural met- Generation Xers invested heavily in a dis- aphor, artistic movement, and range of course of genre purity as a way of attach- sonic signifiers that it most certainly is, ing value to their chosen object of atten- it is critical to recognize its broad back- tion. That discourse seems less and less ground.3 Regarding this background, jazz relevant every year. occupied an odd place in the twentieth- Jazz–beyond the singular instance of century imagination: situated between Sun Ra–seldom enters into discussions worlds, it was “both/and” in many con- of either Afrofuturism or the contempo- texts. Racially, for instance, historian and rary omnigeneric black music so strong- journalist J. A. Rogers’s famous article in ly connected with it. And yet, following The New Negro saw it as a “marvel of par- the theme of this issue of Dædalus, I wish adox”: the music was both particularly to look at the remarkable presence of jazz African American, American, and, at the (understood broadly) at the heart of pre- same time, universal.4 Also, aesthetical- cisely these two phenomena. Indeed, de- ly, as Ingrid Monson notes, pointing to spite the prominence of Marsalis’s voice mid-century jazz’s “Afro-modernism”: as an arbiter of jazz in the 1990s and “at once more populist than its European 2000s, it is my contention that the turn [modernist] counterpart, yet committed to stylistic plurality is reasonably seen as to articulating its elite position relative to a return, a move that echoes and recap- the more commercial genres of r&b and tures a crucial element of the ethos that rock and roll.”5 And, indeed, generical- underlaid jazz in the 1970s. My intention ly, the music has been open to incorpora- in locating jazz in relation to the specula- tion from the most disparate of sources– tive, Afrofuturist current of our contem- Western classical and Afro Caribbean, porary moment is twofold in relation to Nordic, African, and Indian musics have claims about why jazz still matters: first, all informed it–and yet has also policed to ask about the music’s contemporary its boundaries; and of course, many of visibility and, second, to ask what we the musicians past and present who have might still learn from it today. Ultimately, played this music reject jazz as a genre in answer to both of these questions, I ar- label altogether. Here I explore an as- gue that the relevance of jazz can be seen pect of this in-betweenness, focusing on 24 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences the movement across genres as produc- of African American music in the mid- Gabriel ing a kind of transcendence, and on the 1960s, Baraka, then writing as LeRoi Solis role of technology as a symbol of this Jones, saw an emerging gulf between the genre-crossing gesture and as a generator jazz avant-garde (the “New Thing” or of the music’s sound and social meaning. “New Black Music,” as he called it) and To get at this body of ideas and to clar- the working-class black audiences that ify why they matter, I’ll start with a dis- had sustained jazz in earlier decades. Ad- cussion of a few pieces that clearly occu- dressing the same question that animates py a relation to both jazz and other forms this issue today–why jazz matters–he of black popular music, in order to get at argued that there should be no alienation the musical aesthetics at play. I am be- of black audiences from avant-garde jazz. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ing intentionally vague with regard to Rather, as he saw it, there was much for genre in this formulation. My point is black communities to find in the New to see both sonic signifiers of jazz and a Thing, that in fact the two kinds of mu- jazz “impulse” in an explicitly polygener- sic (r&b and New Black Music) explored ic music scene, rather than one that co- the same territory, gave voice to the same heres around style or other features of a longings, and did the same work, just in coherent genre.6 Some of the music I dis- different registers. His argument goes cuss here clearly comes out of a primary into quite abstract, metaphysical direc- orientation to jazz, but much of it draws tions: “To go back in any historical (or on jazz from another space. This discus- emotional) line of ascent in Black mu- sion leads me to a reading of Afrofutur- sic leads us inevitably to religion, i.e., ism as a discourse in contemporary Afri- spirit worship. This phenomenon is al- can American and African Diasporic arts. ways at root in Black art.”9 And further, The central notion animating the study “The blues (impulse) lyric (song) is even of this music is, to paraphrase Nigerian descriptive of a plane of evolution, a di- American science fiction author Nnedi rection . coming and going . through Okorafor, that black speculative arts rou- whatever worlds. Environment, as the so- tinely trouble ontological boundaries, cial workers say . but Total Environment whether through a kind of liminality (including at all levels, the spiritual).”10 as “in-between-ness” or as “both/and- From James Brown to Albert Ayler, Sun ness.”7 Like the music discussed here, Ra, and John Coltrane, “The song is the such work disrupts distinctions, such as same and the people is the same.”11 that between science fiction and fantasy, Following Baraka, but offering a more between demotic and avant-garde, or mundane line of argument, I am interest- more broadly between human and non- ed in the fact that there was considerable human, sitting at the intersection of the mutual interest in making music across biological, the technological, and the that genre divide within a few years of cosmological.