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Home , Brainfeeder, Casey Benjamin, Daedelus (musician), Derrick Hodge, Ethan Iverson, Flying Lotus

Soul, Afrofuturism & the Timeliness of Contemporary Fusions

Gabriel Solis

Abstract: The rise of jazz-R&B-hip hop fusions in contemporary 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 , , , and , 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 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 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 , 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 “ 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 , 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 .”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 , 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. the publication of Baraka’s article. This includes (but is hardly limited to) pop- My thinking on the intersection of ular artists who embraced elements of polygenericism, Afrofuturism, and jazz the New Thing–such as the soul band was first prompted by a desire to rein- Earth, Wind & Fire whose 1971 debut al- vestigate cultural critic Amiri Baraka’s bum, The Need of Love, opens with a near- ideas in the seminal article “The Chang- ly ten-minute piece, “Energy,” or ing Same: r&b and the New Black Mu- , whose work on songs such sic.”8 In short, looking at the landscape as “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)”

148 (2) Spring 2019 25 Contemporary brought inspirations from gospel-tinged technology that have constituted those Jazz Fusions r&b together with to mourn boundaries in the recent past. Moreover, the murdered African American leaders the return and reinterpretation of these of the late-1960s–as well as avant-garde sounds should remind and reiterate for us figures who incorporated signifiers of the historical significance of genre-span- and r&b, such as Pharoah Sanders, ning jazz fusions to African American au- whose long, timbrally noisy explorations diences in the 1970s. dug into Afrocentric cosmologies with Flying Lotus’s You’re Dead! is the least the underpinning of a funky, danceable obviously “jazz” project of those I discuss groove, or , whose album here.12 The album’s scant thirty-eight

Attica Blues threaded together funk and minutes is composed of nineteen short Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 “energy music” to protest the racialized, tracks, the longest coming in at just un- carceral state made increasingly visible der four minutes, and most running less by the policing initiatives now known than two. As a result, the album dispens- as the Rockefeller Drug Laws. This has es with the kind of extended, improvisa- once again become relevant in the work tional forms to modern jazz; of a group of musicians originally moreover, it does not use the kinds of from Los Angeles who have collaborat- song forms that remain the common lan- ed on a range of projects and who all tra- guage of jazz, even in the more heteroglot verse the boundaries between jazz, r&b, post-1970s era. Rather, its episodic struc- and hip hop, including producer and dj ture makes up a single, longer form. What Flying Lotus, saxophonist Kamasi Wash- is most interesting about the piece is the ington, bassist Thundercat, pianist Rob- way that Stephen Ellison (Flying Lotus’s ert Glasper, and of course, rapper Kend- given name) and his co-, in- rick Lamar. cluding Stephen Bruner (Thundercat), I focus here on this group of Los An- Kamasi Washington, and Herbie Han- geleno musicians, looking particularly, cock, use brief snippets of a wide range of if fleetingly, at recent recordings includ- genres to represent the album’s concept: ing Flying Lotus’s You’re Dead!, Kamasi a meditation on the moment of death and Washington’s aptly titled, massive al- its aftermath, seen from the perspective bum The Epic, and Robert Glasper’s work of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.13 That is, with his trio and a larger group called though the title suggests a sense of mor- “The Experiment.” These make for a use- bidity, it should be thought of as a piece ful set, since they represent a breadth of aiming at an understanding of the pro- genres and stylistic approaches that de- cess of death, a liminal state, and rebirth, fine the scene (from work that is straight- a mystical perspective journalists have forwardly within the jazz frame to work credited in part to Ellison’s upbringing as that is in significant ways outside that the nephew of . This nar- frame), and because they involve three rative of rebirth can be heard on multi- distinct approaches to making work that ple levels–personal, social, cultural, and might reasonably be called Afrofuturist. so forth–an interpretation Ellison indi- Significantly, each of these artists, in one cates (without quite articulating) in in- way or another, makes reference back to terviews around the project, including, mid-1970s jazz-r&b fusions, and each for instance: “The concept is so much works in ways that interestingly disrupt more than ‘You’re dead as a person,’ to not only genre boundaries, but also the me. Even calling it You’re Dead! goes so expectations about the relationship to deep into how I felt maybe a year ago,

26 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences where I was watching the music scene music as an inherently technologized, Gabriel shift and change.”14 collaborative composition using the stu- Solis To get a sense of this, and a feel for the dio as a medium: playing licks, loops, and ways the piece deploys a language that even just timbres with Hancock and oth- ties together hip hop’s more experimen- ers, and slowly cobbling things together tal wing and mid-1970s electric jazz (El- into tracks: lison specifically points to in interviews, but , Chick When we did the “Tesla” song, I had some Corea, Joe Zawinul, , and drums that I had already recorded–I kinda others are apparent as well), it is useful found a cool loop, and a little idea. Herbie had come by and I played some ideas, some

to consider tracks three, four, and five: Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 “Tesla,” “Cold Dead,” and “Fkn Dead.” In things I was feeling. He got on my Fender just under four minutes combined, they Rhodes and I started humming ideas out to include a compendium of stylistic signifi- him, and those became progressions. Then ers: double-time shuffle groove; additive, we did another take, and then he got even even-eighth patterns; a distorted electric more free with it. Eventually you get these guitar and electric piano pairing; a synth really fast recordings, and you just kind of choir; and what I think of as a kind of cos- jump to moments. mic . The thing that marks this It’s kind of the same as writing, with loops as something other than the 1970s jazz fu- and stuff. It’s hard to explain, but it makes sion it most clearly resembles in its sty- so much sense in my mind. Like, I try to put listic mix is the sonic quality Mark Fisch- it together just like I would make a beat, er describes as “crackle.”15 That earli- even if I’m using [other] people–if I had er consistently used the peak records or chopping up samples from the of high-fidelity recording techniques to Internet, I still do that with collaborations produce music that sounded profound- and working with people.16 ly clear. Performers as diverse as Weath- er Report, Return to Forever, and George This kind of creative practice–so Duke all worked within the jazz aesthetic much a part of the digital age, and yet still of their time, producing albums that at- so fundamentally connected with long- tempted to capture a sound as close to an standing models of musical interaction– unmediated purity as possible. Flying Lo- explodes the distinction between impro- tus, on the other hand, uses high levels of visation and composition in interesting compression, distorting the sounds of his ways. It aims, ultimately, at a fixed musi- source material to sound intentionally cal object, and in that sense is clearly com- lo-fi. Listeners may hear this as producing positional; and yet, it happens in the mo- a temporal distance or a haunted, ghostly ment, through interaction between mu- quality–as Fischer suggests recordings sicians, in the studio, and in that sense is by fellow edm artist Tricky have–or improvisational. Its reliance on the plas- they may interpret the recording’s crack- ticity of digitally recorded sound makes it le as indicating a kinship with music from distinctively contemporary, and its com- the era of analog recording; or they may bination of the human and the techno- see the sound connecting this album with logical is a hallmark of Afrofuturism. the circulation of hip hop mixtapes. Kamasi Washington’s The Epic is some- None of this is improvisatory in the way thing like the opposite of You’re Dead!17 jazz is commonly understood. Rather, El- Its seventeen tracks run nearly three lison describes the process of creating the hours, regularly extending more than ten

148 (2) Spring 2019 27 Contemporary minutes each, and most have some ver- pioneering Afrofuturist funk-rock band Jazz Fusions sion of head-solo-head form. There is no Parliament-Funkadelic.20 A voice-over obvious program to the project, in the introduces the song as sci-fi–inspired way there is in You’re Dead!, but its ti- lights flash like a mothership landing. tle and cover art imply a certain interest “This is a journey into music and sound,” in cosmic hugeness and a sense of possi- the voice intones. “Watch out and get bility. In line with this, on the whole, the ready to move your feet. Wherever you album has a fairly unified sound. Criti- are, you will be a part of it.” There follows cal commentators have pointed to John an extended introduction that features Coltrane as the key intertext, noting the the hip hop producer Battlecat, crafting

ways Washington moves between a - an improvisation out of sampled clips of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 al language, “Giant Steps”–derived har- Washington’s own solo from monic complexity, and outside playing; the studio recording of the song. Once the ways the massiveness of the arrange- again, the effect of the spectral is intro- ments resembles Coltrane’s larger en- duced, as Battlecat’s sample is marked semble works; and so on.18 And Wash- off from Washington’s live sound pre- ington generally name-checks Coltrane cisely by crackle. The intersection here in interviews. But there’s really not very of a jazz-derived form (a precomposed much on the album that sounds like head used to bookend and as the source Coltrane; rather, the project sounds as for a series of improvised solos), a massed though it has picked up in the middle of stage presence, and explicitly technolo- the mid-1970s, “post-Coltrane” work. In gized sound–indeed a sound that might this regard, Will Layman, writing in Pop be called “cyborgian” for the ways it ex- Matters, compares it with McCoy Tyner, tends the human through first an analog Pharoah Sanders, ’s Nu Troop, instrument (the saxophone) and then a The Crusaders, Miles Davis, Wayne Shor- digital one (the sampler)–offers many ter, Joe Zawinul, and Archie Shepp.19 ways to think of this piece and its perfor- The album’s commitment to a sound mance as polygeneric. that is at once accessible and cutting Finally, I would point to two of Robert edge can be most clearly heard in the fi- Glasper’s recent recordings: the trio al- nal track, “The Message.” The song’s 7/4 bum Covered and the Experiment album funk groove supports a head and series of Artscience.21 In comparison with Wash- solos (Thundercat on electric bass, Wash- ington’s The Epic and Flying Lotus’s You’re ington on tenor, and Ronald Bruner Jr. Dead!, Covered fits most clearly within the –Thundercat’s brother–on drums) that mainstream of contemporary acoustic mine the timbres and shapes of 1970s jazz. Glasper uses the trio format to play polygeneric jazz (fusion and avant). The densely interactive music that is rhythmi- most interesting intersection between the cally complex and harmonically varied, human and the technological is best seen and that mostly uses songs as the basis not on the album, however, so much as in of extended improvisation. He has actu- Washington’s live performances of this ally played music that is much less obvi- work in the year following the album’s ously within the jazz frame–his album release. As captured in a live broadcast won the 2013 Grammy award npr made from Los Angeles’s Regent for best r&b album–but he has general- Theater for the show Jazz Night in Amer- ly separated the two genres in his output, ica, “The Message” achieves a size and releasing jazz recordings under the Rob- scope reminiscent of the 1970s shows of ert Glasper Trio and avant r&b under the

28 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Robert Glasper Experiment. For what it’s set of electronic sounds reminiscent of Gabriel worth, the Black Radio albums draw on video game soundtracks. Solis jazz (and hip hop and blues) within the larger r&b and neo-soul frame in a fair- I’m not the first to suggest a trans- or ly programmatic way, pushing the idea intergeneric frame for understanding of black radio as a polygeneric space, a black music, but it remains true that both space where listeners have heard compat- scholarship and criticism (as well as as- ibility in music well beyond the bound- pects of the newly algorithmic systems aries of genre. What makes Covered such of music marketing) remain aligned to an interesting album is that Glasper uses a strong vision of genre as the key frame

it to enact a further turn of the transge- for the music. That said, I would point Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 neric screw, to bridge the two aspects of to a few instances of work in this vein his own creativity, performing material that I take inspiration from. Musicolo- mostly from the Black Radio projects but gist Guthrie Ramsey’s now classic book doing so in his trio format. Race Music draws on the resources of oral The opening cut from Glasper’s most history and a community-based view of recent Experiment album, Artscience (a African American music-making to un- term clearly reminiscent of Sun Ra’s cover the ways similar frames of refer- “Myth Science”), continues this both/and ence informed the music across a wide hip hop–jazz fusion approach, and in- spectrum of genres and styles, from jazz deed explains it about as directly as it to blues and from to hip hop possibly could. This piece, “This Is Not in the period between the 1930s and the Fear,” opens with a minute-long collec- 2000s.22 His use of the term “race mu- tive improvisation by a quartet includ- sic” as a title is particularly telling, inas- ing Glasper on piano, on much as it points backward historical- bass, Mark Colenberg on drums, and ly to a moment, in the 1920s and 1930s, on saxophone. With when music by African American artists its quick tempo and highly interactive was marketed–and consumed, or so it sound, this sits clearly in a contemporary would appear–not on the basis of genre jazz world. As the track goes on, howev- (like blues, jazz, or r&b), but rather on er, Glasper settles into a slower pace, lay- the basis of a racialized community. Mu- ing lush, r&b-derived chords underneath sicologist David Ake and colleagues like- the more frenetic work of the other three. wise explore the gatekeeping function These two sound streams continue as of the genre label “jazz” in their edit- Benjamin’s saxophone takes up a melo- ed volume Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its dy derived from Glasper’s chord chang- Boundaries.23 Through a range of case es. Glasper intones over this sonic bed a studies, from the 1920s to the present, manifesto for contemporary polygeneri- they showcase the extent to which jazz cism: “The reality is,” he says, “my peo- musicians have reached out past those ple have given the world so many styles boundaries–into pop, light classical mu- of music, you know so many different sic, avant-gardism, and more–as well as styles; so why should I just confine my- the ways jazz communities have policed self to one? We wanted to explore them the borders of the music. all.” At this, Hodge and Colenberg set- tle into a hip hop–derived groove with a The music I’ve discussed in this es- strong emphasis on the , and say is similar in some ways to the reper- turntablist Jahi Sundance enters with a toires looked at by Ramsey or by Ake and

148 (2) Spring 2019 29 Contemporary others, inasmuch as they involve both a oriented, often mystical precursors.25 Jazz Fusions matter of working through current social Building on Womack’s groundbreaking and aesthetic issues across some genre exploration of the concept, black specu- divides, and a desire to reach across and lative arts scholars Reynaldo Anderson around those divides to develop hip new and Charles Jones have described it as sounds. And yet, given their particular “the emergence of a black identity frame- place in time–at the end of a history that work within emerging global technocul- already includes the stories those authors tural assemblages, migration, human re- are telling–they need more interpretive production, algorithms, digital networks, resources. Ramsey’s “blues muse” and software platforms, [and] bio-technical 26

the dynamic of “up South” that derives augmentation.” Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 from the mid-century Great Migration Musically speaking, this technotopian may tell us something about this work, vision is commonly seen in spatial terms, but not much at all about its technological in the outer space/Egypt (or perhaps - bent or speculative leanings. And though ter, Nubia) pairing, as for instance, in Sun the jazz/not jazz dyad may describe how Ra’s work, or on the cover art of Earth, some listeners respond to much of this Wind & Fire’s All ’n All. Aside from Ra, music, I see something more complicated Afrofuturists have tended to focus on the going on. If nothing else, most of the mu- soul/funk/hip hop continuum, in such sicians here (with the exception of Glasp- figures as Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, er) could as easily be described as outsid- or Janelle Monáe, or on Jamaican Dub, ers reaching across a boundary into jazz as as Michael Veal points out in his book on insiders reaching out. the genre.27 The relative absence of Afro- I draw on Afrofuturism as a way of futurist writing on jazz can be explained framing this material because of that tra- in large measure as the result of a his- dition’s clarity in identifying the critical torical accident. The dominant voices engagement with speculative culture as a in jazz during the theory’s emergence in repository of black thought and resource the 1990s were the so-called Young Lions, for black liberation. In brief, Afrofutur- a group of musicians who were explicit- ism describes Afrocentric work in the arts ly past-oriented and came off as luddites. and philosophy that investigates African Coalescing around Columbia Records’ diasporic engagements with a vanguard- marketing of Wynton Marsalis, this com- ist orientation, technoculture, and/or the munity of musicians was race conscious, fantastical. The term Afrofuturism was even if they may not have been interest- first coined by Mark Dery, a cultural critic ed in more pan-Africanist politics of the who identified a trending interest in both generation before them; but, at least as science and technology and science fic- Columbia and the pbs Jazz documenta- tion among African American artists and ry would have it, they rejected both the intellectuals in the 1990s.24 Writer and fusion and avant-garde styles of jazz that critic Ytasha Womack identifies a dou- defined the 1970s and early 1980s in fa- ble process whereby the growth of the vor of playing within a postbop style that concept in the 1990s and 2000s took two was canonized in the 1950s and 1960s; forms: first, the production of an Afro- and their decision to play acoustic music futurist ethos in new work, largely in liter- was couched in an explicit opposition to ature, film, and the visual arts; and second, electric (and electronic) instruments.28 the reinterpretation of older black arts Perhaps most important, they cultivat- to find experimental, technoculturally ed a specific antipathy toward hip hop,

30 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences the black music most clearly technologi- to publish the list, they gave Francis Da- Gabriel cal in both material and ideology as well vis the opportunity to pan the album: Solis as most relevant to the 1990s American This sprawling 3-cd debut by a Los-Ange- zeitgeist. les-based tenor saxophonist who’s record- However, looking beyond this partic- ed with as well as Gerald ular constellation of references, there is Wilson is being talked about by its more much in Afrofuturism that comes to seem fervent admirers as if it were jazz like we’ve highly relevant to much jazz, and certain- never heard it before. It’s not, though. ly to the work I am discussing here. Not Strings, voices, cosmic graphics, Washing- only the orientation to technology as a ton’s dashiki and all, it’s merely jazz like resource for liberatory, improvisation- we haven’t heard it in a while–an inten- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 al music, or the extensions of the human tional throwback to those “spiritual,” early into new realms through technology, or ’70s Impulse, Black Jazz and Strata-East the intersections between science and lps whose greatest appeal might be to lis- mysticism, but also perhaps most signifi- teners too young to remember the dead end cantly Nettrice Gaskin’s vision of Afro- for jazz this sort of thing led to back then. futurity as “the artistic practice of nav- Washington’s obvious sincerity, while ad- igating the past, present, and future si- 29 mirable, isn’t enough to save The Epic for multaneously.” Although theorists of those like me, who do remember all too Afrofuturism do not routinely identi- well. Then, I don’t hear what others say fy polygenericism as a core component they do in Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterflyor of the movement, I believe it is reason- Broadway’s Hamilton, either.30 ably seen to be one. The multiplicity that marks both its spatiality and its temporal- The final throwaway line aside, Davis’s ity is similarly found in the genre orien- complaint is that this work isn’t origi- tation of its major figures. Sun Ra’s work nal. I suggest the return to older materi- spanned approaches from as disparate of al is not simply derivative, as Davis would sources as swing jazz and electronic noise have it, but rather part of an Afrofuturist music; George Clinton’s P-Funk project “back to the future” gesture (and indeed, was explicitly an attempt to mediate be- a return to the specifically Afrocentric, tween funk and psychedelic rock; more Afrofuturist past embodied in the tech- contemporaneously, Janelle Monáe has nologically experimental, at times spir- made a career of “tipping on the tight- itually inclined, funky music of George rope” strung between hip hop, r&b, bub- Duke, , and Earth, Wind ble gum pop, and more. What’s more, the & Fire, among others) in order to take ad- figures of the cyborg, the android, and vantage of its potentiality for a futurity of the monster–all of which have been fix- the present. tures in Afrofuturist work since at least the 1970s–are themselves hybrid. To think further about the stakes of the The response to the music I’m looking polygenericism that ties these musicians’ at here among jazz critics has been mixed, work together, and the investment in the but I find the following telling: among the technological as a resource for music that interminable end-of-year listicles in 2015, is profoundly human, it will be useful to npr’s jazz critics poll rated The Epic at #4, turn for a moment to the notion of poly- after work by such established figures as genericism as critique and as a mode of Rudresh Manthappa, Maria Schneider, making the culture at large better. In mu- and Jack DeJohnette. Yet when they went sical cultural studies, the most extensive

148 (2) Spring 2019 31 Contemporary recent meditation on this capacity of mu- much more difficult. One way to get at Jazz Fusions sic is music critic Josh Kun’s Audiotopia, it is to look at the ways this music is em- which locates this possibility not only in bedded in a recommendation matrix by the work of artists, but in the work of lis- the streaming services through which teners. At base, Kun narrates the experi- many audiences now consume music. A ence whereby cross-generic listening cre- glance at the “related artists” pages for ated for him “an alternate set of cultural Flying Lotus, Washington, and Glasper spaces” through which he could envision is instructive. In a sense, they tell a sto- a world larger and different than the one ry about how an artist may or may not in which he lived while growing up.31 be understood beyond conventional no-

Drawing on sociologist Ruth Levitas’s tions of genre. Of the three, only Wash- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 reading of Foucault’s notion of “hetero- ington’s really describes an omnigeneric topias,” he describes recordings not as frame. Notably, while his page points to “maps of the future,” but as “adequate both Glasper and Flying Lotus, neither of maps of the present,” believing we can their pages points to him or to each oth- find, in music’s cultural polyphony, maps er. Glasper’s is composed primarily of that “point us to the possible.”32 well-known artists solidly within the jazz The same, I suggest, is true for musi- world–, Kenny Gar- cians, as well as for audiences. For in- rett, , , Nich- stance, Ellison (Flying Lotus) identifies olas Payton–and Flying Lotus’s includes jazz as a source of possibility for him, I almost solely other experimental, elec- think, precisely because he is inside it as a tronic, sample-oriented artists–Sami- listener, but not fully inside it as a music- yam, , , Knxwledge, maker. The recordings I’ve looked at here Shigeto. Washington’s page points in express a range of critique, but togeth- both of these directions. Interestingly, his er perhaps their most crucial interven- is also the only one of the three to point tion is in the critique of genre. It’s not directly to other new or canonical artists that they reject jazz so much as that they associated with Afrofuturism, including reject a genre-based conception of it. In- Sons of Kemet, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah deed, each of them is happy to claim jazz Sanders, and Sun Ra. as a description of their work; but in do- ing so for such varied work (and for work This is a good moment to stop and take that moves past both the sounds of post- some historical stock of the aesthetic cri- 1980s acoustic jazz and its ideological at- tique embedded in polygenericism. This tachment to genre purity and distinc- is not just the oddball feeling of a few mu- tion from other forms of ) they sicians at the edge of things, but rather push it to integrate into a holistic, poly- or an emergent structure of feeling (much even omnigeneric black music. Nonethe- as I think Marsalis’s rejection of fusion less, while it is clear that the artists I have was in its moment), and one that can be looked at here want to speak to an audi- multiplied over and over within the pop- ence that is interested in hip hop, r&b, ular music world. It accounts for the rise and jazz, it’s less obvious that the indus- of extended instrumental music with or try either can or cares to help make that without room for improvisation (wheth- happen, or that listeners share their inter- er in math rock or in electronic dance mu- est. While the first of these issues can be sic) and the rise of explicitly hybrid styles grasped using older methods, the latter (in work as diverse as that of Rhiannon two–listener’s activity especially–are Giddens, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, or

32 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Kendrick Lamar’s ). jazz as a specific musical style, but as an Gabriel It also accounts for the move away from orientation to music-making that has the Solis monogeneric listening–at least as a form capacity to diffuse into many genres, in- of middle-class/elite distinction. While deed, into any genre. There is more to this is no doubt significantly related to the this, however, than simply a kind of flex- massive shift to online subscription lis- ibility or breadth to the jazz fusions of tening, it is a site where jazz clearly mat- the 1970s as a way of understanding why ters, specifically the jazz of the 1970s. The jazz–this jazz–still matters: it is to be critique of the 1970s fusion and avant- found in the shared Afrofuturist lean- garde movements by the succeeding gen- ings that connect the music these artists

eration was that the music had lost its are making today with that of the past. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 way: the experiments had led to a dead Beyond the specific elements that might end and the way forward in jazz was to mark art as Afrofuturist–the connection look at the moment before, to the early of Egypt and outer space, the interest in 1960s, and explore a new path from there. cyborgs and other posthumans, the in- The artists I describe here have found a vestigations of fugitive myth-science– relevance of a different type in 1970s jazz these works share an affect that we surely fusions. That music offers not a vision of need at this moment.

endnotes 1 Glenn Kenny, “Exploring Afrofuturism in Film, Where Sci-Fi and Mythology Blur,” , March 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/movies/touki-bouki -streaming-afrofuturism.html. 2 Rafi Zabor and Vic Garbarini, “Wynton vs. Herbie: The Purist and the Crossbreeder Duke It Out,” Musician 77 (March 1985). 3 I do not wish to engage in the exercise of defining jazz here, but I note that such a definitional discourse is common and has colored both scholarly and critical writing, as well as occasional statements by jazz musicians such as the (in)famous rant by Pat Metheny on whether or not Kenny G should be interpreted as a jazz musician. Pat Metheny, “Pat Metheny on Kenny G,” Jazz Oasis, 2000, http://www.jazzoasis.com/methenyonkennyg.htm (accessed June 22, 2018). 4 J. A. Rodgers, “Who is the New Negro, and Why?” in The New Negro: Readings on Race, Rep- resentation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene An- drew Jarret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). 5 Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2007), 71. 6 A note is in order here about what I mean by “genre.” The term is commonly used as short- hand to describe a musical style or tradition defined by a set of shared sonic features, forms, and, where applicable, textual themes. In addition, music scholars who have written about genre formation have pointed to two other defining features: first, industry practices (from studio norms, to venues, to pr and more); and second, audience behaviors. See David Brack- ett, Categorizing Sound: Genre and 20th Century Popular Music (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 2016); Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London: Routledge, 1999). While I will primarily discuss aspects of style in this essay, in fact my contention is that the polygenericism of the music I am interested in here extends to both of these other aspects of genre production as well.

148 (2) Spring 2019 33 Contemporary 7 Quiana Witted, “‘To Be African is to Merge Technology and Magic’: An Interview with Nnedi Jazz Fusions Okorafor,” in Afrofuturism 2.0, ed. Reynaldo Anderson and Charles Jones (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016), 207–208. 8 Gabriel Solis, “Timbral Virtuosity: Pharoah Sanders, Sonic Heterogeneity, and the Jazz Avant-Garde in the 1960s and 70s,” Jazz Perspectives 9 (1) (2015): 48. 9 LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], “The Changing Same (r&b and New Black Music),” in Black Mu- sic (New York: Akashic Books, 2010 [1966]), 181–182. 10 Ibid., 184. 11 Ibid., 187. 12 Flying Lotus [Stephen Ellison], You’re Dead!, Records, 2014. 13 Arun Rath, “Music from Death’s Doorstep: A Conversation with Flying Lotus,” npr: All Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Things Considered, October 12, 2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/10/12/354599863/music -from-deaths-doorstep-a-conversation-with-flying-lotus (accessed June 22, 2018). 14 Ibid. 15 Mark Fischer, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5 (2) (2013): 42–55. 16 Rath, “Music from Death’s Doorstep.” 17 Kamasi Washington, The Epic, , 2015. 18 Adam Shatz, “Kamasi Washington’s Giant Step,” The New York Times Magazine, January 21, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/kamasi-washingtons-giant-step.html. 19 Will Layman, “The Kamasi Washington Phenomenon,” Pop Matters, January 14, 2016, https://www.popmatters.com/the-kamasi-washington-phenomenon-2495458272.html (ac- cessed June 22, 2018). 20 The full video of the concert can be found at Jazz Night in America, “Kamasi Washington’s ‘The Epic’ in Concert,” YouTube, uploaded August 7, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0YbPSIXQ4q4. “The Message” begins at 1:44. 21 Robert Glasper, Covered: Recorded Live at Capitol Studios, , 2015; and Robert Glasper, Artscience, Blue Note Records, 2016. It is challenging to write about Glasper in this context at this point, inasmuch as he is most visible in the jazz press now for a set of misog- ynist comments exchanged in an interview between himself and pianist and blogger Ethan Iverson. Ethan Iverson, “Interview with Robert Glasper,” Do the Math, March 2017. (See Michelle Mercer, “Sexism from Two Leading Jazz Artists Draws Anger–And Presents an Opportunity,” The Record: Music News from npr, March 9, 2017, https://www.npr.org/ sections/therecord/2017/03/09/519482385/sexism-from-two-leading-jazz-artists-draws -anger-and-presents-an-opportunity, for quotes from and commentary on the Do the Math post, which is no longer available.) I abhor those comments, but still find the music compel- ling in relation to the topic of contemporary soulful jazz fusions. 22 Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 2013). 23 David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark, Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries (Berkeley: University of Press, 2012). 24 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel Delaney, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). 25 Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013). 26 Reynaldo Anderson and Charles Jones, “Introduction: The Rise of Astro-Blackness,” in Afro- futurism 2.0, vii–viii.

34 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 27 Michael Veal, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican (Middletown, Conn.: Gabriel Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Solis 28 Jazz, dir. Ken Burns, pbs miniseries, 2001. 29 Nettrice Gaskins, “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space,” in Afrofuturism 2.0, 27. 30 Francis Davis, “The 2015 npr Music Jazz Critics Poll,” npr Jazz: A Blog Supreme, December 21, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2015/12/21/460527087/the-2015-npr -music-jazz-critics-poll (accessed June 22, 2018). 31 Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 2.

32 Ibid., 23. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/148/2/23/1831401/daed_a_01740.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021

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