& the 20Th Century

6944.featuer3 4/20/07 11:58 AM Page 32 This article is the To say that Jenkins “pushed the limits of jazz” is third in a series to miss a larger point. He—along with many other on issues of racial diversity as they artists of African descent—was an integral part of affect the field of late-20th-century experimentalism. chamber music. Leroy Jenkins in Chicago, ca. 1968 & the 20th Century isation—and, by the 1950s, indeterminacy, mobility was the cultural staging ground This drive to mobility is symbolized the younger Pollux to improvisation’s for the innovations of Leroy Jenkins. most crucially by the Great Migration, the Castor. The lessons learned from improvi- By obscuring the pioneering role of largest internal movement of people in sation, where, as I have written elsewhere, artists of color in questioning artistic and U.S. history. Jenkins was a child of the “the possibility of internalizing alternative cultural borders, both journalists and Migration, and for his family, it all started value systems is implicit from the start,” scholars invented labels (such as “total- when his great-uncle Buck Jenkins hopped were crucial in jumpstarting the next phase ism,” “new common practice,” “transeth- a freight train bound for Chicago in the in the history of American musical ideas, nicism,” and the like) that evince a gener- 1920s, and sent for his brother Henry, the emergence of internationalism in the ally poorly developed engagement with who married his boss’s niece. In 1932, midst of the “American Century.” issues of race and ethnicity in American Leroy Jenkins entered the world, growing As performance historian Sally Banes experimentalism. On the other side of the up in extremely modest working-class cir- has shown, the (white) avant-garde of the aisle, “world of jazz” discourses that cor- cumstances on the South Side of Chicago. 1960s—as well as an entity that Banes did don musicians off from interpenetration When young Leroy was eight or nine, LEROY not recognize, a black avant-garde—pur- with other musical art worlds have proved his aunt’s boyfriend, Riley, brought a curi- sued internationalism in different ways insensitive to the ways in which the work ous musical instrument to the house. It and for different purposes. The interna- of latter-day musicians such as Jenkins has was a violin, and when Riley played some tionalism of black musicians foregrounded extended across borders of genre, race, finger-busting classical marvel on it, the what Paul Gilroy later termed the “Black geography, and musical practice, con- young boy was transfixed. He pleaded Atlantic,” a term that traced movements, tributing to the breakdown of genre defi- with his mother to get him a violin, and colonizations, and settlements along the nitions and the mobility of practice and his first instrument, a half-size, red-col- historical way-stations of the triangular method that crucially characterizes the ored violin, came from Montgomery Ward slave trade. This tendency to look outward present-day musical landscape. by mail order. It cost $25, which his moth- included Asia and Oceania as well as Thus, despite a New York Times obitu- er paid for on credit. In a 1998 interview, Jby GeorgeE E. LewisNhe recent passingK of Leroy JenkinsIwithN jazz. In 1930, WilliamS Grant Still's Africa; the repetition music of John ary’s characterization of him as a “violinist Jenkins told me that he fully realized that provides an opportunity for all of optimistic belief in the viability of a Coltrane—“repetition with a signal differ- who pushed the limits of jazz,” Leroy at first, he had “a terrible sound. I almost T us to reflect upon the recent legacy “Negro Symphony Orchestra” was based ence,” to be sure, as James Snead put it— Jenkins’s influence and legacy overflowed gave it up, but I figured I'd keep doing it of new American music. The work of this on his own experience as both composer drew for its inspiration upon the emerging journalistic and scholarly notions of genre, and I’d sound like Riley.” uniquely diverse composer and violinist and performer in classical, jazz, and popu- internationalism and postcolonialism of challenging future music historians to look Soon, Jenkins joined the church orches- served as a spearhead in bringing the border- lar idioms. Still predicted, that for the that era, impelling musicians of the 1950s more closely at what is proving to be one tra and the choir at Ebenezer Baptist crossing impulse of African American music players in such an orchestra, “their training and 1960s to create pieces whose titles cel- of the most dynamic periods in American Church, under the direction of Dr. O.W. to American art music of all kinds. This syn- in the jazz world will even have enhanced ebrated the emerging independence of music, where composers refuse to adhere Frederick, who became Jenkins’s first cretism, I believe, is the most important their virtuosity, and they will be able to African nations. to the ethnicized limitations on practice formal music teacher. Jenkins grew up American art-music tendency of the late play perfectly passages that would be diffi- Given a racialized intellectual and social and genre held as axiomatic by previous under the baton of Dr. Frederick, with 20th century, and a marker by which cult for a man trained only in the usual climate whose warped effects did not, by generations. By any reasonable standard, his spouse, Miss Rita Love, at the piano, American music will be known in the 21st. academic way.” Here, Still’s striking pre- any means, exclude music-making, artists we can clearly position Jenkins as an inte- performing at church socials, teas and For much of the 20th century, the science lay in realizing that a focus on of African descent who came of creative gral part of late 20th-century American banquets, often playing the music of black boundary between high and low culture in sound alone was not enough. For a new age in the 1960s and 1970s were perhaps experimentalism—indeed, one of its more composers such as William Grant Still, the United States was symbolized musical- American music, historically imbued and as crucially invested as any Americans in prominent exponents. Across a career that Clarence Cameron White, and Will Marion ly by the great competition between the culturally situated bodies would provide the border-crossing freedoms and mobility spanned more than five decades, the life of Cook. I would submit that the roots of jazz and classical traditions, a stand-in for the base for the music of the future. that the civil rights movement and its suc- Leroy Jenkins exemplifies the geographic Jenkins’s mobility as an artist are to be a more fundamental cultural struggle. In In the 1940s, as bebop musicians cessors—second- and third-wave femi- mobility that rugged American experi- found here—with his family and his com- the musical realm, these debates tended inspired the world by demonstrating the nism, gay rights, and the various ethnic mentalism has displayed, a diversity that I munity. Indeed, another great musician at first to focus on how—and indeed, possibility of an art music based in improv- advocacy movements—were then placing would encourage the current generation of to whom Dr. Frederick taught the violin whether—an emerging American “art isation, debates began to turn once more on the larger U.S. cultural and political music historians to examine more closely, was Ellas McDaniel, later known as “Bo music” should adopt sounds associated upon the how and the whether of improv- agenda. This internationalized drive for and perhaps even embrace. Diddley.” 32 june 2007 33 6944.featuer3 4/20/07 11:58 AM Page 34 “In Paris, Jenkins and the ensemble he formed with Smith, McCall, and Braxton explored At Chicago’s DuSable High School, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors, Steve silence, space, Jenkins studied with “Captain” Walter McCall, and Lester Bowie. “L'École de timbre, extended Dyett, celebrated far and wide for the Chicago” was breaking all the rules; no pupils he had nurtured to success in the sound was excluded and no tradition was instrumental techniques, music world, such as Martha Davis, Dinah sacrosanct. As the AACM musicians real- collectivity, and form.” Washington, Nat “King” Cole, Milt ized that their music was succeeding in an Hinton, Richard Davis, Eddie Harris, international arena, Jenkins observed with whimsically titled opera Fresh Faust, and Dorothy Donegan, Gene Ammons, his customary self-deprecating humor, engaged electronic and computer music as Clifford Jordan, John Gilmore, and later, “Country boys from Chicago, we weren’t early as the mid-1970s, culminating in work Joseph Jarman, Jerome Cooper, and used to that kind of thing.” with writer Mary Griffin and pianist “Blue” Henry Threadgill. Like Dyett, Jenkins In Paris, the explorations of silence, Gene Tyranny on an interactive video opera. became a multi-instrumentalist, playing space, timbre, extended instrumental tech- Ultimately, no form of creativity was saxophone and clarinet as well as violin, nique, collectivity, and form being pursued foreign to Leroy Jenkins, and the legacy he and attending historically black Florida by Jenkins and the collective ensemble he left us, of the sheer joy of making new A&M University on (of all things) a bas- formed with Smith, McCall, and Braxton music in an environment of artistic mobility soon scholarship. There, Leroy continued exposed not only the infrastructural limits, and cultural diversity, will endure. In that his classical violin studies with his other but also the cultural provincialism of the light, we need to affirm, to a later genera- major teacher, Bruce Hayden, as well as then internationally unquestioned natural- tion of composers, improvisers, and musical teaching himself the craft of composition.

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