STEPHEN BLAKE OLIVER O by STEPHEN BLAKE OLIVER, 2000
"Backwards Saints: The Jazz Musician as Hero-Figure in James Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues' and John Clellon Holrnes' The Hom"
STEPHEN BLAKE OLIVER
B.A,H., Acadia University, 1996
Thesis subrnitted in partial fiilfiliment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts Fnglish)
Acadia University Fall Convocation 2000
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Introduction ...... 1
Chapter Two: The Jazz Musician and Mcan Amencan Writing ...... -27
Chapter Three: The Jazz Musician and Beat Writing ...... -55
Conclusion.....~...... ~....~.....~~...... ~..... 110
Works Cited...... 120
Works Consulted ...... 123 Abstract
This thesis examines the iconic jazz player as hero-figure in modern American fiction. It argues that the Afncan Amencan bop musician is an ideal Arnerican hero. To understand jazz's statu within American culture, the theorïes of Adorno and Murray are discussed. The jazz musician is then examined within Afiican hencan and Beat writing. In the former, the texts are Ellison's Invisible Man and Baldwin's "Sonny's
Blues." In the latter, they are Kerouac's On the Road and Holmes' The Hom. The thesis asserts that the musician speaks to a marginalized audience and offers hope of transcending this marginalization. It argues that belief in transcendence is romantic, as is identification with a hero-figure. The writer, however, understanding that the human condition involves striving to reach impossible goals, displays the integrity of the musician as well as the integrity of the audience, inspired by the jazz performance to fulfill their dreams. 1would like to thank Dr. David Baron for dways being candid, intuitive, and supportive.
1would also like to thank my mother and grandmother, without whose support this thesis would not have been possible- "They are lÏke Iittle dead people for me, a Iittle like the heroes of a novel; they have washed themselves of the sin of existing. Not cornpIetely, of course, but as much as any man cm."
-Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea Introduction
One of the most compelling types of music to emerge in the twentieth century was
jazz. First played at the beginning of the century, jazz continues to be popular today
within the United States and abroad. Jazz is not only an important art form for its
musical ments, but also for its inkgration into other American artistic statements- Many
artists have attempted to adapt the structure of jazz to their own respective media in
various degrees. Amencan writers, ranging fiom Jack Kerouac to Amin Baraka, have
used jazz's improvisational features in their own work.' Jazz has also played a role in
Amencan writing by providing the subject matter for a considerable amount of both
fiction and non-fiction. More specifically, the jazz musician bas often been treated as a
hero-figure in these writings. A discussion of the jazz musician as an American literary
figure must first examine both the role of jazz in Amencan culture and the role of the jazz
musician within the jazz environment.
To begin, it is necessary to understand jazz as one product of a pervasive
American popular culture. In the year 2000, it is impossible to ignore the United States'
role in shaping a popdar culture that is becoming increasingly globalized. In Uncornmon
Peode: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz, Eric Hobsbawn points out that the United States
"penetrates, indeed dominates, the popular culture of the globe with the single exception
of sport . . ." (274). While one hundred years ago, the United States was only a looming threat to the Empire over which the sun never set, today it has taken the position of the sun, spreading its own culture across the world- The music, movies, and celebrities of the
United States have only helped to reinforce and indeed strengthen its status as a fantasy
' Kerouac's Mexico Ciiv Blues is an excellent example, as is much of Baraka's poetry. Oliver 2
realm to millions across the globe- Even those who object to the United States for any
number of reasons have undoubtedly been charmed by a Song here, or a movie there.
So pervasive is the dominance of Amerïcan popular culture that the phenomenon
is taken for granted. Of course the United States will outdo dl other countries in creating
the "newest," "coolest," or (to be a little anachronistic) "hippest" cultural products. Its
success in the culturai market can be largely attributed to a very simple but essential
technological factor: throughout the twentieth century, it has been at the forefront of
developing and supporting both recording and communication devices. Ironicdly, with
the advent of the intemet and inexpensive digital equipment, those who have been
heretofore silent will soon be capable of communicating to the rest of the world with
amazing ease. Once this new technological revolution takes place, a term such as "pop
culture" may seem as staid as "high art" did less than a ceatury ago- The Unites States,
Iikewise, may not be as perennially successfid in producing what is fashionable-
While cornputers may corne to define the parameters of the twenty-first-century
popular artistic statement, the twentieth century relied on simpler technological devices
for communication. Both the recorded picture and recorded sound dowed for the rapid
distribution of an artistic statement to millions. Because of its relevance to this thesis, 1
will concentrate on the development of technology within the popular music industry.
The technology that first launched America's pop music success was the appropriately
named record, the radio, and the gramophone. With these devices, the music ùidustry
was ready to be born. Music couid be recorded in the studio, it codd be advertised on the radio, and it could be sold to play on the gramophone at home.2
Hobsbawm calls the radio and the record, "the foundation of success in popular music," (276) and "crucial to the diffusion of Negro music ficm the 1920s . . ." (265). Of course, such an infiastructure, while essential, does little to actually produce
the appropnate climate for music-or the music itself. Capitalism provided the lubricant
to run the whole industty (Hobsbawm 265-66). Producers were fkee to attempt to sell
whatever their budget dowed, and consumers were fkee to buy whatever their budget
permitted. Naturally, pop culture is a luxury item, a product whose industry could not
exist but in successfül economies--a requirement that twentieth-century America easily
fulfilled-
Ultimately, the philosophy of the United States may outweigh any technological
or economic factors when one considers the foundation of Arnerican pop culture- Simply
put, the United States has supported (at Ieast in theory) the ide& of democracy and the
nght to personal expression. As romantic as these ide& are, and regardless of how often
they are not realized, the United States nonetheless continudly strives to meet the
potential they offer. Because of this nationd ethos, every American has the right to
indulge in a personal vision that will not oniy bring happiness to the individual, but--
ideally-to the entire country. The musician, then, is encouraged to offer his or her
audience that vision, and the audience is encouraged to pick and choose the artistic
statements to identm with what he or she fin& appealing. Such options, given at a pnce,
represent the foundation of consumer culture.
Naturally, some musicians have chosen not to participate in this supply and
demand relationship. Indeed, as the pop music industry has developed, musicians have become increasingly weary of being controlled by an industry interested in economic considerations, not artistic ones. The proliferation of independent music labels over the Oliver 4
past twenty-five yem is a testament to this fac~~The level of independence that such
labels hold within the industry is debatable; furthemore, "independent" musicians
attempt to market and sel1 their music, even if they are doing so according to their
persona1 aaistic principles.
During the early stages of the music industry, when fewer avenues for recording
and distributing music existed, the musician did not possess as many options for selling
music. If the musician hoped to make a living (let alone become farnous) by playing popular music, he or she had LittIe choice but to record for a record Company. Hugues
Panassié, in The Real Jazz, stresses this point: "The diIemma of the sincere jazz musician was great-either he must commercialize or stop eating, and of course he chose the first." (64). If the musician only wanted people to hear his or her music, the record label still represented the most efficient method for the entire country to gain access to that music. It is no surprise, then, that the music industry has never had a short supply of musicians.
The recorded music indu-, hophg to make the most profit fiom the least investment, has traditiondy oEered limitted choices from which the consumer cm choose. As the industry has grown, more choices have become avdable, to the point today that there are countless categories and sub-categories of popular music--al1 attempting to capture the attention of a portion of the listening audience. InitiaUy, however, the music industry was supported by only a handful of genres: namely, classical, vocal-and jazz.
independent labels have been started by countless pop musicians, fiom the Beatles (Apple) to Madoma (Maverick). At the same the, some artists have risen to fame through their own independent labels: Ani DiFranco (Righteous Babe) and Master P (No Limit) are two notable examples, Oliver 5
Jazz is notable for its ability to interest not only adults but also a younger
demographic, who represented to the record labels an attractive group of buyers with
disposable income. In The Story of Jazz, Marshall W. Stearns astutely points out that a youth market helped establish swing-and, more generally, jazz-in the 193Os: "The
Depression was fading out as fa as middle-class America was concemed, and a vociferous market sprang up arnong the college kids. They liked their music hot and their bands big. And they could pay for ity'(1 98). Before rock 'n' roll becarne a teenage mainstay, jazz, and particularly swing, represented one of the industry's first successes in distnbuting a genre of music popular to a large cross-section of the American public.
Stems outlines the media used to achieve this distribution: "swing music was sold--as a new kind of music--from coast to coast, with dlthe hi&-pressure tactics of modern publicity. It was brought to the attention of the public in the press and at the movies, on the stage and in the ballroom, on the juke-box and over the radio" (1 97). Jazz's success, then, helped secure the foundation of popular Amencan music.
Jazz, perhaps more than any other genre of pop music since, combined the "high" culture of Western classical music with the "low" culture of Afncan-American rhythms and, more generally, dance music. Jazz acted as a bridge between these two forms, and the genres that foilowed it have been distinguished more by their opposition to classical music than by their amalgamation with it. The orchestration of swing, predominant in jazz during its nIst mass popularity in the 1BOS, allowed an older demographic to identify with jazz as they would, to some extent, with classical music. This explains why, as Hobsbawm notes, '?he general public (assisted, it must be said, by the popular music industry) accepted the musical preferences of jazz musicians and their essentially adolescent and student constituency" (280). Jazz, more than simply pop music for a
young audience, captured the attention of the entire United States as the country
experienced one of the first attempts of the music industry to market a music on a
national 1eveI.
Syrnbolically, the fusion of European and Afiican musical tendencies represents,
aibeit somewhat reductively, the reconciliation of the United States' most antagonistic
cultural relationship. Needless to Say, jazz music did not solve the problems between
African and White Amerka, but it did indicate a pathway for possible CO-operation
between the two groups. Both African and White American musicians have created the
lexicon of jazz (although inequality and discrimination at this level is not to be
overIooked), and jazz appealed to both Mcanand White American audiences.
Moreover, combining with imagination seemingly disparate musical elements, jazz became the United States' ktoriginal contribution to the canon of world music.
Jazz has played a simiificant role in shaping the course of Arnerican popdar music, but the role of the individual jazz musician also warrants examination. Because this thesis concentrates on the treatment of jazz's bop musician, 1will give a brief ove~ewof the musician's position within the development of jazz leading up to bop.
Jazz fist became popular in New Orleans around the turn of the century. The bands were generally small--six or seven musicians-and differed considerably fiom a contemporary jazz group. Carrying the melody in fiont of the rhythm section were three main instruments: the cornet, trombone, and clarinet (Panassié 56). While improvisation has always been an integral part of the jazz per£ormance, the solo improvisation had yet to become a prevalent element in this early jazz. Panassié stresses the importance of Oliver 7
working as a group in New Orleans jazz: "a well-balanced ensemble produced a
collective improvisation of clarity and order. Moreover at this period the ensemble work
predominated-there were scarcely any soloists" (56). Consequently, the audience did
not concentrate on the jazz musician's personal musical voice, because it was subservient
to the demands of the group.
The audience did begin to notice the output of individual musicians with the
advent of swing. As 1have discussed above, swing is significant for being one of the ikst
successful genres of popular music in the United States. Swing combined the
improvisation of New Orleans jazz with a larger band and orchestral arrangements.
Alun Morgan and Raymond Horricks, in Modem Jazz: A Survev of Develo~mentssince
1939, discuss the aim of the swing musician: "With swing the musician with an inherent
feeling for improvised jazz sought to ally the emotion with the most logical presentation."
(15). Swing's goal was to make people dance, and the swing musician worked within a
large unit to "swing" the music and compel people onto the dance floor.
The individual swing musician remained an essential part of a larger musical unit.
This unit also displayed the exceptional talents of its members. Barry Ulanov, in
Handbook of Jazz, stresses the musical strengths of the swing band: "perhaps not
individually; perhaps their own achievement was not that rernarkable, not each man on
his own instrument. But en masse, regarded as a unit, no other group in any art in
America had ever before established such unmistalcable mastery over their instruments, in
the normal performance of their regular duties, as did the swing bands" (19). Each member did not Eiad individual fame, but each member did contribute to a collective musical mastery. Furtherrnore, Steams points out the discipline that each musician had to Oliver 8 possess: "The individuat musician has to work harder than ever before. He had to be able to 'swing' separately as well as with his section- And the sections had to swing together, too. It meant endless rehearsals, a comparative loss of identity (except for the solo stars), and hi&-level teamwork" (199). While teamwork was crucial to the swing outfit, some musicians, as Stemmentions, did establish themselves as stars, and were able to take their own solos during the band's performance. While these solos highlighted the most talented musicians in the band, they nonetheless were only one element in the presentation of a song's arrangement.
The jazz musician's personal artistic statement was not brought to the forefiont of the jazz performance until the advent of bop. Bop developed during the Second World
War in New York City. It was an experimental music, each musician attempting to discover his or her jazz voice. Bop's main laboratory of experimentation was a club called Minton's in Harlem (Ulanov 27). Here, each artist, although working in a small group setting, experimented fkeeIy with his or her personal sound. Morgan describes the atmosphere of this bop environment:
AImost every night musicians wodd gather and hold an informal jam
session. The public had no Say over policy or style, and each man was
allowed to improvise for the satisfaction of his own artistic standards.
Amidst a listening audience chiefly composed of fellow musicians the
soloists found an atmosphere most conducive to the fanciful roamings of
their inspiration. No brows were puckered with annoyance if a more
progressive thinker began to introduce his theories into the sessions;
theones were presented, examined and judged. (3 1) Oliver 9
It is important to notice in the above description that bop onginated apart fiom the pop
music industry. hdeed, bop can in many ways be seen as a reaction to the popularized
swing and its emphasis on technical ability as opposed to experimentation.
To mainstream Arnerica, bop appeared to arrive out of nowhere at the end of the
war. This was due to a number of reasons. Of course, the war took people's attention
away fiom the entertainment industry and those enlisted were depnved access to jazz's
developments. Martin Williams, in "Bebop and Mer: A Report," also notes that the
herican Federation of Musicians declared a ban on recordings for almost two years
(289). Anyone outside of the smal1 New York jazz club circuit inevitably missed hearing
the developrnent of bop. While the genesis of bop occurred independently of the popular
music industry, it was nonetheless dependent on the industry for exposure. Until music
could be recorded, it was impossible to gauge a national audience's response to this new
fom of jazz
When bop began to be recorded after the war, it appeared as a drastic break fiom
the swing that people had become accustorned to before the war began. Musically, bop
was fkagrnented and stressed melodic experimentation. John S. Wilson, in Jazz: The
Transition Years. 1940- 1960, gives an efficient summary of bop's key musical points:
"The music . . . was marked by complexities of harmony and rhythm that were new to jazz and by the elhination of stated melodies, leaving only the chord progressions--the skeleton on which a melody is constructed-as the basis for the soloist's improvisations"
(14). Bop, now exposed to the United States, seemed indecipherable and almost the exact opposite of the dance-oriented swing that preceded it. ConsequentIy, jazz Iost much of its popular fan base, something it was never to recover fully. Oliver 10
While bop Iost much of its popuiarïty, it nonetheless did help individual
musicians become stars to its new (and smaller) audience of bop devotees by allowing
each musician his tum to express personal experimentation within his playing. Ulanov
describes how bop was conducive to individual expression: %e captivating bnlliance of
a music bop] that was essentially nelodic, far removed really fkom the chunky rhythm
and squared-off harmonies of big-band swing, reaching with an inevitable enchantment to
the inner beings of solo-minded jazzmen" (29). Bop became the first opportunity for the jazz musician to hdthe musical limits of jazz outside the arrangements of swing. Not
surprisingly, musical arrangement was neglected in favour of bringing concrete form to
abstract musical ideas.
Bop, then, is partially a transitional genre in jazz, for its emphasis was on musical
experimentation. Morgan notes, "The music was on a contrived basis in so faas the
outpouring of the individual soloists was of an explorative nature, but at this stage few men were concerned with the possibility of a collective or group fom" <33). Perhaps it was necessary to the growth of jazz to go through such a stage that îgnored the development of group form, but, to rnany, bop represented the degeneration ofjazz.
Panassié is one such critic, and he goes so far as to Say, "4the members of progressive
[Le. bop] bands were soloists: consequently the basic rhythm went to pieces. So, while jazz music had always been a dance music, bop and progressive music could not rnake the grade . . ." (74). Such a statement may be extreme, but it does outline the problem of concentrating too much on experimentation and not enough on collective musical composition. Oliver II
By the 1950s, bop had developed into "hard" bop, which brought structure to bop
by adding an elernent of song arrangement to the series of solo improvisations over basic
chords. Hard bop drew fiom older jazz to establish its musical forms, while also
experimenting to find new ones: "The need to get close to the source was a dominant
theme among the jazzmen . . - who were emerging fiom the hard bop line ('I've found
that you've got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light,' said [JohN
Coltrane). This, and a search for freedom of musical expression, appear as a tandem in
their motivations tirne and tirne again" (Wilson 62). Despite hard bop's development of
rudimentary bop ideas, both hold the personal expression of the jazz player as
intrinsically valuable--if not essential--to the art of jazz music.
It is not surprising, then, that the bop musician became an American icon to
many. In particular, the Afncan American bop musician was often revered much like the
Hollywood star. With the prolonged bop solo, the Afncan Amencan musician gained an
expressive voice on records bought ùiroughout the United States. Where before the
Afncan Amerîcan voice was suppressed by White Arnerica, now, with bop, she found a medium through which a unique cultural statement could be made,
For his or her Afiican American audience, the jazz musician was a hero who had transcended the limitations imposed by White America. He or she represented possibility to ecanAmerica: the possibility to achieve the fkee, equal, and prosperous life the
United States promised. To White Arnenca, jazz, and especially African American jazz, had heretofore existed on the figesof Amencan middle-class society. As such, it was considered exotic, even taboo. With bop, the jazz musician delivered a "cool" statement that appealed to a young white audience anxious to challenge AmerÏcan middle-class Oliver 12 noms. Within this growing countercuIture, jazz was ofien the soundtrack, and many admired the jazz musician for his artistic ide& and love of playing. In the most general terms, the jazz musician was, and often continues to be, recognized as a uniquely
Amencan hero, sometimes shunned for existing on the margins, but ultimately celebrated for contributing to the wealth of Amencan expression.
Jazz in writing has been recognized in the United States for well over seventy years now. Indeed, although jazz has ceased to be the predominant genre of music within the sphere of pop culture, it nonetheless is stiU celebrated both in fiction and non-fiction.
During the l95Os, however, jazz retained an important role amidst the cultural shifts the
United States was expenencing. Many American writers, detecting jazz's potential to offer a distinct (and often challenging) Amencan artistic statement, chose to write of it to express their own views. More specifically, the Af5ca.n American jazz musician was often used as a hero-figure to aid the writer in portraying the United States as she saw it.
This thesis will discuss the value of the jazz musician as hero-figure, and it will examine the use of the jazz musician in two strands of American writing in the 1950s:
Anican American writing and Beat writing- Ln each case, it will discuss the reasons for incorporating the jazz musician as hero-figure, paying particular attention to the relevant cultural factors and forces. The two principle texts used are "Sonny's Blues," by James
Baldwin, and The Horn, by John Cleilon Holmes- This thesis will argue that both strands utilize the jazz musician as a romantic figure to enhance their respective illustrations of the United States. Furthemore, it wiil argue that the jazz musician represents to the writers discussed a mode1 by which the United States can realize its ideals of fieedom, equality, and happiness--as romantic as these ideals are. Oliver 13
Today, jazz in the United States has become a cultural artifact, a permanent fixture in the development of American culture. Being so, it is unfortunately often romanticized to the point of pure rhetoric, making it dif£icuIt to gain an objective understanding of the significance of jazz and the jazz musician. This romanticism is a practice supported from the beginning by the music industry. Naturally, one must remernber that jazz is a product, and the language used to describe it al1 too often falls into the category of advertising-although this writing often poses as criticism in the form of magazine articles and reviews, and in music liner notes. One ody has to examine the liner notes to jazz aiburns dating back to the 1940s and 1950s to see cnticism which offers plenty of generalized discussion of how good the jazz players on the aibum are, but
Little specific analysis of what makes the album worthwhile. While this generalized commentary is an effective means for jazz fans to share their love of the music, it keeps them oblivious to the fundamental construction of jazz composition.
Before discussing the jazz musician as an American hero, it is useful to examine the music industry infxastructure within which the musician works. The writer who chooses to herald the jazz musician as a hero cleariy values the jazz idiom and feels it is a worthwhile one. Writers such as Baldwin and Holmes wanted theïr respective audiences to appreciate the beauty of jazz, so they intentionally descnbe jazz as an ultimately celebratory phenomenon. Jazz, however, is a consumer product, and it is necessary to see the jazz musician, to a certain extent, as a tool of this industry in order to maintain a balance between the romantic and the real. Recognizing this balance, one cm gain a better understanding of the struggle jazz musicians face when they attempt to make a personal statement within an industry setting. And one can also see that the audience plays a significant role by "consuming" the jazz player's music. Finaliy, one can begin
to realize the difference between seeing the musician as a marketplace product and as an
Arnerican hero-
Perhaps the most sweeping, yet intefigent, condemnation of jazz to be written is
by the post-Marxist critic Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno staunchly opposed the
cornmodification of art, suggesting that art loses its aesthetic value once it becomes a product to be bought and sold (Lechte 180). Consequently, Adomo resisted pop music
and put his confidence only in avaate-garde forms of music existing outside the consumer market. Looking to jazz, he found a type of music that was not oniy popdar, but aisu heralded as a new art form. A closer examination, however, revealed that jazz was part of the capitalkt market industry.
In "Perennial Fashion--Jazz1' (1964), a retrospective of the actual staçis of jazz during its apparent development in the United States, Adorno is quick to devalue jazz as a legitimate art form. He States, ccThemost striking traits in jazz were al1 independently produced, developed, and surpassed by serious music since Brahms" (201). To Adomo, jazz's development is illusory; the components of jazz, all already established, are simply manipulated to create pieces that mark the supposed progression of jazz over time by soundhg slightly different. He elaborates:
Considered as a whole, the perennial sameness of jazz consists not in a
basic organization of the material within which the imagination can roam
fieely and without inhibition, as within an aaiculate language, but rather
in the utilization of certain well-defined tricks, formulas, and cliches to the
exclusion of everything else. (Terennial" 201) Oliver 15
Jazz, then, is a product of fashion, and its individual components do not work together in
a coherent manner to complete a well-formed work; instead, they are mixed and matched
to create new songs, allowing the culture industry to seli virtually the sarne product mer a
number of years with Iittie creative or hancial effort. In "On Jazz" (1936), a discussion
of the emergence of jazz (particularly swing) as a sensation in Europe, Adorno elaborates: "Through its intentions, whether that of appealing to an elevated 'style,' individual taste, or even individual spontaneity, jazz wants to irnprove its marketability and veil its own comrnodity character . . ." (48-49). It is jazz's statu as a comrnodity, which sacrifices jazz's potential to be an art fom, that Adomo objects to throughout his jazz criticisms.
Jazz, according to Adorno, is a product carefully crafted to lue in an audience.
Its predominant tnck is to stress the audience-musician relationship. He says of this relationship, "The particuiar effects with which jazz EUS out its schema, syncopation above dl, sfrive to create the appearance of being the outburst of caricature of untramnleled subjectivity-in effect, that of the iistener--or perhaps the most subtle - nuance dedicated to the greater glory of the audienceyy(Terennial" 203). The hallowed improvisation, the medium of personai expression within jazz, contains no value for
Adomo. In "On Jazz," he explicitiy denounces the jazz improvisation: "Even the much- invoked improvisations, the 'hot' passages and breaks, are merely ornamental in their significance, and never part of the overd construction or deteminant of the fom" (53).
Adomo sees the improvisation as one of the many interchangeable parts of jazz-a smoke screen to divert the audience fi-om realizing (or admitting) jazz's Iack of musical worth. Oliver
Such crïtïcisms of jazz seem to neglect the actud musician. One couid surely
argue it is the jazz player, not the industry, who actuaily creates any specific jazz sound
Adorno thinks, however, that the jazz musician, and particularly the mcanAmencan
jazz musician, is simply another tool of the music indust~y:"As the representative of
society in jazz, he is perhaps more the representative of its extremely illusory nature.
Within the process of production he functions as a guarantor for the apperception of the
product. His inventions are ernbodied withui accumulated conventions" ("On Jazz" 58).
The Afïican Amencan musician, to Adorno, is less of an artist and more a mechanism
who veils, as do the other mechanisms of jazz, its identity as a commodity.
Furthermore, Adorno believes that the audience does not attempt to discover the
musical merit of jazz, because the audience tends only to use art as a means to escape
their own existence. For jazz fans, says Adomo, "[mlerely to be carried away by
mything at dl, to have sornething of their own, compensates for their impoverished and
barren existence" ("Perennial" 206). Moreover, jazz, while it exists in a constructed
environment of fieedom and subjectivity, encourages conformity by creating a socieq of
devout fans who foilow it tirelessly, aithough, in the end, it offers them nothing new.
Adomo says, ''Jazz sets up schemes of social behavior to which people must in any case
confonn. Jazz enables them to practice those forms of behavior, and they love it all the more for making the inescapable easier to bear" (204). In "On Jazz," Adomo makes this point more explicitly by refemng to oppressed groups within society; he says,
"oppressed peoples couid be said to be especially well-prepared for jazz. To some extent, they demonstrate for the not yet adequately mutilated liberals the mechanism of identification with their own oppression7'(67). The popularity of jazz, then, arises iiom its ability to consolidate a tendency to rebel with the safety (and necessity in a consumer
culture) of conformity. In the end, Adomo sees, in Marxist fashion, jazz not as an art
form, but as a dmg sold to the masses to help them forget (and at the same time accept)
their own lack of fteedom. It is this unforgiving view of the value of jazz that many have
objected to in responses to Adomo's critici~ms.~
Indeed, many have criticized Adomo for not recognizing the musical innovations
that jazz contains. Furthemore, Adorno has been cnticized for appIying too rigidly his
Marxist theory to the then-ernerging genre of pop music. While Adomo did mttranscend
his own Marxist environment, his writing does effectively debunk many of the myths
surrounding a romantic conception of jazz. 1 chose to highlight Adomo not ody for this
reason, but also for the reason that his process of debunking raises some fundamental
questions about the artïst's fieedorn of expression and the audience's freedom of choice.
Adorno does not let us forget that to think of such fieedorns as absolute is to be romantic.
As Jarnie Owen Daniel says in his Introduction to "On Jazz," '%hether or not one
ulhately agrees with his analysis, Adomo's text deserves to be worked through, not
least of all because of the questions it raises about the affect of the now omnipresent
mechanisms of cuIturaI production he decodes on the human subject's ever diminishing
capacity to experience and act" (43).
Conversely, to consider these fieedoms non-existent is also unrealistic. The true task is to understand the levels of fieedom that both the artist and society are able to attain within the dynamic of their interaction--which is ultimately engulfed by the music industry and a capitalist society. It is also important to see this interaction as a
Two excellent rebuttals of Adorno's criticisms ofjaa are "Theodor Adomo on Jan: A Critique of Criticat Theory," by William P. Nye, and "Adorno on Jazz: Viema versus the Vernacular," by Peter Oliver 1S
reIationship, The artist, regardless of the music industry, is attempting to make a
statement. And the audience, on varying levels, hopes to hear and experience this
statement. It is romantic to express the importance of the individual within such a
developed cultural systern, but the individuai does have the capacity to act, and it is not
constructive to an understanding of popular culture to ignore the people who experience
ît*
Likewise, it is essential to remember that, in keeping with the Amencan ethos of
fieedom, equality, and the right to happiness, individuality is an important element of
what it means to be American, Of course, individuality is not a uniquely Amencan trait,
but it has been a driving force in shaping Arnerican culture @op culture being just one
example of this). While a Marxist like Adorno might dismiss the populace of America as
' mere pawns in the greater struggIe for economic and political domination, others
understand that each individual maintains a fiee WU. While many may not constructively use their fiee will, and while others may fhd that their fiee wiIl is not enough to effect substantial change in the United States, it is nevertheless a defining factor in the fieedorn and equality that the United States has gradually achieved over its history.
A social critic iike Adorno is not interested in those who, for whatever reason, do not force changes in society. Many others, however, are. The mer, in particular, ofien looks to those who bring about only minor changes in the world--sometimes none at dl.
Of course, the writer is concerned with the human condition, and the human condition includes fiee will. By dramatizing individuai situations, the wrïter may be being
Townsend. Oliver 19
romantic, but he does so to reflect a more generai tmth within a culture, a country, or
ultimately humanity- And failure, just as much as success, is part of living.
Et is no surprise, then, that the jazz musician has been a recurrent subject in
American fiction. The musician meets with a varying degree of success and failure in a
unique form of Amencan expression. The wrîter, descnbing the jazz musician,5
understands that he represents the American ideal of struggling to find happiness in an
environment that offers both opportunities and obstacles on the path to success.
Adorno, on the other hand, rarely seems concemed with the stmggle of the actual
jazz musician. In fact, Adorno rarely discusses the role of the aaist explicitly, apparently
because he oniy sees the artist as a cog in the Iarger machine- When he does mention the
jazz musician's role, it is in contrast to what Adorno sees as legitimate aesthetic
expression:
Aesthetic technique, in the sense of the quintessence of means empioyed
to objec- an autonomous subject matter, is replaced by the ab* to
cope with obstacles, to be MOUS to disruptive factors like
syncopations and yet at the same time to execute cleverly the particular
action which underlies the abstract des. The aesthetic act is made into a
sport by means of a system of ûicks. To master it is also to demonstrate
one's practicality- The achievement of the jazz musician and expert adds
up to a sequence of successfully surmounted tests. But expression, the
- * 1 will use the masculine pronoun to refer to the jazz musician as hero-figure, not because females did not make significant contributions to jazz millie Holiday, vocals, and Mary Lou Williams, piano, are two obvious exampies), but because al1 the musicians referred to in this thesis are male. Although I have found no female hero-figures in jazz fiterature, this is not Say that they do not exist. It is, at the same tirne, another topic ofresearch. Oliver 20
true bearer of aesthetic protest, is overtaken by the might against which it
protests. (Terennial" 13 1-32)
Of course, such a statement is debatable; to succeed in the face of adversity is not necessarily to negate aesthetic expression. The jazz musician, struggling to achieve his personal musical goals, represents the struggle of al1 humans to prosper. To eliminate such a struggle from art is to eliminate a crucial element of the human condition--of which art, of course, attempts to speak.
The contemporary American writer and critic Albert Murray offers a potent alternative view of the jazz musician, a view which 1 will make Meruse of when 1 discuss "Somy's Blues" and The Hom later in the thesis. In his book The Hero and the
Blues, Murray recognizes the musician as a participant in the African Arnerican blues idiom. Murray sees jazz as a direct extension of this Arnerican idiorn. The blues player-- or jazz player-4s like the master craftsrnan:
No master craftsman ever really leams everythïng about his line of
endeavor, of course. Even at best bis applications are stiil only a form of
practice. He is a practician and follows his trade. The exceptional degree
of expertise which he does develop, however, not only qualifies him to
function on his own, but also enables him to extemporize under pressure
and in the most complicated circumstances. Nor is a higher degree of
emdition and skili possible, or even relevant Improvisation, after dl, is
the ultimate skill. The master crahman is one for whom knowledge and
technique have become that with which he not only performs but also
plays (one perfiorms a dance as one plays music, and when one plays in a drama one is performing in a play). The master craftsman is dso one who,
as the hero in combat and the blues musician in a jam session, can
maintain the damer's grace under the pressure of dl tempos. (24-25)
Murray, then, sees the act ofjazz playing and the act of improvisation in a fundamentally
dif5erent light than does Adorno. For him, artistic expression does not necessarily mean perpetually departing from preceding artistic statements. It simply means that the artist who possesses the ski11 of expression can make a statement beautifùl to an attentive audience. Sometimes a single staternent may develop the medium, but other times the musician can simply play within the medium. Contrary to Adorno, moving in cycles can be of value, for the audience continually encounters similar problems in iife just as the musician encounters similar obstacles in the performance of his music. Therefore, these problems are not necessarily solved and transcended in either case. If the musician can continually succeed in overcorning the difficulties in the performance of his music, the audience can identiS. with the musician and take some solace in his success.
Nonetheless, the jazz player is not in an easy position. He is subject to the whims of producers, the audience, and fashion in general. Moreover, the musician is subject to his own whims, not to mention his own level of technique and artiçtic ability. Findy, the
Afkican American musician is subject to the restrictions placed on him by Americau society. What dl this amounts to for Murray is the heroic situation. The jazz musician represents one who, while acknowledging rhe difficulties of his position, which are representative of the etemal difficulties of life, nevertheless uses the skills he possesseç to attempt to transcend these difficulties. Murray says, "Indeed the blues statement is nothing if not an experience-conf?ontation device that enables people to begin by Oliver 22
accepting the difficult, disappointing, chaotic, absurd, which is to Say the farcical or
existentid facts of life. Moreover, even as it does so it prepares or disposes people to
accept the necessity for struggle" (104). Or, to put it more simply, "the whole point of
the blues idiom lyric is to state the facts of life" (36).
The writers discussed in this thesis concentrate on the struggle of the jazz
musician to attain persona1 gods. For Adorno, the jazz musician could ody be a hero-
figure if he were to defiver a purely aesthetic statement that transcends his environment,
subvert the culture industry, and make the masses appreciate the sacredness of art. Not
ody is such a scenario unredistic, but it also sacrifices the hurnan dimension of struggle
and failure to the socio-political formula of successfül social progress. Murray
understands that the writer's fictional characterization of the hero-figure exists separately
fkom social formulas:
in all fiction there is perhaps no more exempIary protagonist than one
who, whether he succeeds or fails otherwise, achieves a successfül
personal integration as a human being while engaged in action to promote
the general welfare. But the writer who wouid create such a hero and
would communicate the most immediate as well as the most
comprehensive implication of such a view of human behavior must do so
in tems of categories, conceptions, and dimensions of human existence
which are necessarily beyond the scope and concem of the social sciences.
(18)
The fictional character who attempts to realize his own potential within society is not concemed with society's problems as much as he is concerned with persona1 setbacks and triumphs. Consequently, the stniggle of the hero to achieve his goals within society
stands outside the commentary of the social sciences.
The writer who deals with this struggle understands that the hero cannot always
save society, nor can he always Save even himselE What is most important is that the
hero does not avoid the obstacles that block his path to happiness, but that he confkonts
them. Murray considers this confrontation intrinsic to the Western literary hero:
the absurd and outrageous intrusion of nature-in-the-raw is . . . that which
all heroes must confkont. Such is the fate and mission of every hero in
every situation, whether he is the protagonist in a Greek clrama, in a
medieval romance, or in an Amencan blues bailad; he must recopize that
which threatens human existence and must either withstand and subdue it
or be annihiIated by it. In the end, of course, it is always raw nature itself,
the unconscious and irresponsible, inexorable earth in ail its nahual chaos
which abides. Nevertheless, the hero whose aspirations are always those
of Prometheus, but whose very seriousness makes him resemble Don
Quixote, presumes, endeavors, and somehow succeeds even when he fails.
(30) The hero succeeds because he or she has not given up fighting what may seem to be an impossible situation. Such perseverance implies that even the impossible situation is bearable. Murray suggests that the presence of a hero-figure signals to the reader that there may be a solution to any difficult situation; he calls the hero, "a prediction and even a promise, and as such he may be a warning as well as an inspiration. But perhaps an ultimate function is also to make the impossible seem not only possible but Oliver 24
imminently (which is to Say presently and locally) probable" (92). In the most general
terms, then, the hero encourages the hope that accompanies possibility.
The writer, delivering hope to the audience through the creation of a hero, serves
a fündamentally public fiinction. Optimally, the writer will create a hero complex
enough to convince the audience that he or she is human--not simply a formulation--and
the audience will identm with this character. In the Greek tradition, the character will
inspire the audience to transcend their respective conditions, no matter how hopeless it
might seem. Instead of delivering a formula impossible to undertake (thereby making the
human condition seem al1 the more pitifid), the artist convinces the reader that the
individual is always greater than the formula. Murray says, "The moral of tragedy . . .
like that of comedy and farce, is that the essentiai condition of man cannot be
arneliorated, but it can be transcended, that struggle is precisely that which gives meaning
to movement, that it is in the struggle that one finds one self' (96). The value of a hero,
in this case the jazz musician, does not have to be measured strictly by his achievements
(as Adorno measures it). Instead, it can be measured by his own personai effort, with
which the reader identifies, and the digaity he consequently achieves as a diverse human
being capable of fiee choice.
Of course, Murray's whole theory is a romantic one (and this marks his opposition to Adorno). It maintains that the individual is the focal point of artistic discussion, and that the individual's struggle against the odds is a solitary one @et one which we are all capable of perfomiing). Furthemore, as Murray says, the aaist, in creating a hero, "prefigures the contingencies of a happily balanced humanity and of the
Great Good Place" (1 1). In other words, the writer, by creating the hero who is fighting Oliver 25
the ills of the present world, indirectly posits the ideal society. The society is not one that
the writer believes to be possible, but it is one that the individual might be able to achieve
internally, much like Plato' s Republic--or perhaps even the United States.
Murray admit5 that the creation of a hero is romantic, but he sees this as only part
of the romantic foundation of Western literature:
Such a conception of heroism is romantic, to be sure, but after dl, given
the range of possibilities in human nature and conduct, so is the notion of
the nobility of man. And so inevitably, whether obvious or not, are the
fundamental assumptions underlying every character, situation, gesture,
and story line in literature. For without the completely romantic
presuppositions behind such elementd values as honor, pride, love,
fieedom, integrity, human fdfilheni, and the like, there can be no tdy
meaningfül definition either of tragedy or of comedy. Nor without such
idealistic preconceptions can there be anything to be realistic about, to
protest about, or even to be cynical about. (43)
The American jazz hero, founded on these idealistic preconceptions, struggles within the very real environment of the United States to achieve a personal happiness. The writer who chooses to make the jazz musician the hero of his or her story therefore does so because the musician satisfies, as Murray points out, the elements that forrn the representative hero. Whether or not the musician is able to live up to Adorno's aesthetic demands, the writer understands that the jazz musician provides a good example of someone attempting to live up to the demands of being human. Oliver 26
"In view of what we now think we know about the physical nature of the universe," says Murray, "anybody who thinks of human life as a story is romantic. The thing to avoid is sentimentality" (6). In each of the foiiowing two chapters, I will examine the use of the jazz player in the stories of both Black American and Beat writers fiom the 1950s. 1 will focus on their respective reasons for writing of the jazz musician, and the success of the romantic heroes they create, keeping in mind the theories of both
Adorno and Murray- Oliver 27
Chapter One: The Jazz Musician and ecanAmerican Writing
"The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over al1 circurnstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitation while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go, When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a Iine upon man's own limitless assertion" (Raiph EIlison, Shadow and Act 246)
The economic boom of post-World War Two America provided many with the
hope of attaining a better life for themselves, or, to put it glibly, achieving the Amencan
Dream. Much of the economic prosperity was occmgin the bustling cities of the
North, and many Afiican Americans fkom the South moved to Northern cities such as
Chicago and Detroit, believing to fmd in these cities what Ellison calls a "Mecca of
equaiity" (286). In other words, they hoped to Ml a dream of which economic prosperity was only one of the many outcornes; the fundamental drearn was to enjoy an equality supposedly guaranteed to al1 Americans. Perhaps the most signifiant migration occurred, however, to New York City, and more specifically, to the ficanAmencan community of Harlem.
New York, which legally-udike the South--saw ali its citizens as equals, offered infinite possibilities to al1 who lived there. At the sarne time, however, the responsibility of creating a mode1 society was left to the citizens; consequently, New York as an environment was (and is) certainly not a utopia Regardless of the absence of legd segregation, then, New York contained countless examples of inequality as each individual strove to attain as much as she could (a malady, of course, of capitalism).
New York, and more specifically Harlem, offered only elusive and fleeting possibilities to Afncan Americans searching for the opportunities af3orded to White Americans across the United States. Ellison describes, in mythical terms, the difficulty African Americans had in finding happiness in the North: Oliver 28
In relation to their Southem background, the cultural history of Negroes
from the North reads like the legend of some tragic people out of
mythology, a people which aspired to escape fiom its own unhappy
homeland to the apparent peace of distant m~untain;but which, in
migrating, made some fatal error of judgment and fell into a great chasm
of mazelike passages that promise ever to lead to the mountain but end
ever against a wd. Not that a Negro is worse off in the North than in the
South, but that in the North he surrenders and does not replace certain
important supports to his personality. (285)
ficanAmericans, far fiom reaching the "peace of distant mo~ntaui,~'found in New
York an environment full of Ïnequality, yet it was not spelled out in explicit terms.
Consequently, these new Northern citizens lost the smdl comfort of a well-defined identity as a second-class citizen, even if this identity was a stereotype forced upon them that limited both their diversity and potentid. Tfie environment that now faced them was full of ambiguities, confusion, and ultimately chaos, and they were forced to conliont it with an identity both fiagile and highly undefhed.
The Afiïcan Amencan, attempting to fhd his or her identiiy as an equal
American-and al1 this entailed--faced a daunting challenge. Much of the prominent
Anican American literature wriffen in the past five decades has dealt with the relatively new responsibility of the Afî-ican American to define himself Obviously, rnany models have been created and debated, but one of the most eloquent and far-reaching in its implications is found in Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man. This novel chronicles a young Afiican Amencan's search for his identity, a search which ultimately Oliver 29
forces him to realize that he is ccinvisible," for he does not fit any of the specific
stereotypes (be it the hustler, the criminal, the preacher, the musician, etc.) by which
White Arnencans identiQ Afiican Amencans. In the end, the reader sees that White
Arnerica may have granted Afiïcan Amencans fieedom, but it did not grant them the cornplexity or diversity of the full-fledged human identity. The task for the Invisible
Man becomes to forge his own identity, for, as he says, "When 1discover who 1 am, 1711 be fiee" (2 22).
In his search to find his identity, this protagonist assumes many stereotypical identities that he believes wili lead to his acceptance by society--and ultimately to his fieedom. The identity he assumes for his work with the "Brotherhood," a fictional underground movement that scientincally applies socio-political theories in an attempt to effect sweeping changes in society, occupies most of the narrative. He enters perhaps too quickly into this society because he is confused by the many identities--al1 subtly dinerent-which one can assume in the ci* He says:
In the South everyone knew yoy but coming North was a jump into the
&om. How many days could you walk the streets of the big cie
without encomtering anyone who hewyou, and how many nights? You
couid actudly make yourself anew. The notion was fkightening, for now
the world seemed to flow before my eyes. Al1 boundaries down, fieedom
was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of
possibility. (43 1)
The Brotherhood is attracted to him for his skills as an orator, his ability to persuade an audience of a specific point through the improvisation of emotion and technique. In this Oliver 30
way he is much like the jazz player caught within the economic drive of the music
industry, The Brotherhood even openly endorses the fact that the individual's will is to
be bowed to the collective, and the Invisible Man readily accepts this, saying, "I'm no
hero and I'm far fkom the top; I'm a cog in a machineyy(343).
He begins to realize, however, that the machine's message--similar to Adorno's
Marxist politics--is not a positive one, because it maximizes the theoretical progress of an idealized history while mhimhhg the individual's plight--and consequently the individual's identity. Finally, he leaves, because he realizes that the Brotherhood only sees his identity and the identity of ail Afncm Amerïcans as an element to be manipulated for the ends of their ideology. Of course, this scenario serves as a representative example of White America's manipulation of Afi-ican Americans; whether it is for economic gain or political persuasion, Afncan Americans have repeatedly been used only as a means to an end,
Zn a response to bis new philosophy that "Life is to be livea not controlled; and humanity is won by continuhg to play in the face of certain defeat" (499), the Invisible
Man becomes one of the many non-identities who make up the United States. There are so many, of course, because the dominant power structure does not recognize their identities. He describes these individuals:
What did they ever think of us transitory ones? Ones such as 1had been
before 1found Brotherhood-birds of passage who were too obscure for
learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound;
of natures too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words, and too distant
fkom the centers of histoncal decision to sign or even applaud the signers Oliver 3 1
of historical documents? We who write no novels, histories or other
books. (380)
These C'tramitory"ones are those who do not act as a type, but simply exist as hurnans
trying to fiilfil the potential of their lives. The simplicity of this act, however, leaves
them in a terrible isolation.
The jazz musician, who fits one of White Amerïca's stereotypes of the Açican
American, is in a different position. He or she represents one of the accepted identities
that are acknowledged by White Amenca. The problem is that such an acknowledgement
exists only on a surface level, for the music of the jazz musician is aIl that is recognized,
not his or her own humanity. Moreover, the jazz musiciau, while "seen" by White
America, represents only a small segment of the Afncan American population. In the
folIowing passage, the Invisible Man, hearing music as he walks, womes that a large
percentage of the McanAmerican population wiIl never be remembered:
1moved with the crowd, the sweat pouring off me, listening to the
grindhg roar of trfic, the growing sound of a record shop loudspeaker
bIaring a languid blues. 1stopped. Was this all that would be recorded?
Was this the only true history of the times, a mood blared by trumpets,
trombones, saxophones and drums, a Song with turgid, inadequate words?
(3 83)
In retrospect, we cm Say that his fear is justified to an extent. On the other hand,
Invisible Man as a novel acts as another recording of history, one that will, as long as it is read, affect the history and identity of Afkïcan Americans. In fact, in creating the ''non- identity," Ellison has created a hero with whom many Afrïcan Americans cm identiQ--a Oliver 32
hero who will persevere in an attempt to be fiee. This fits perfectly the mode1 of
Murray's romantic storybook hero.
Invisible Man shows that an imposed identity not only limits the diversity that dl
human beings possess, but it also can easily be manipulated to accomplish various ends.
At the same time, a person who creates his cwn identity cm act as a figure with whom others can idente and gain their own strength to persevere. The Invisible Man learns this when he attempts to send the people home on the occasion of Tod Clifton's fimeral.
None will leave, even though he sees the words he speaks as futile--and says so-and he
Gndy realizes that the people simply want to hear words spoken with emotion, words that express how they feel. The process is identical to the ritual of Iistening to the fimeral
Song:
And yet dlwere touched; the songs had aroused us d. It was not the
words, for they were dl the same old slave-borne words; it was as though
he'd changed the emotion beneath the words whiie yet the old longing,
resigned, transcendent emotion still sounded above, now deepened by that
something for which the theory of Brotherhood had given me no name.
(3 92)
Naturally, then, if one is to create heroes, it is better to create heroes that represent the self, and therefore reflect honestly how one feels, and subsequently how those similar to the selfwill feel. By creating such heroes, a dialogue is set up between aaist and commUILity, ideally creating mutual understanding. Engaging in this relationship, the
Invisible Man, before he Ieaves the fimeral, looks at the audience and sees "not a crowd but the set faces of men and women" (397). Oliver 33
WeEllison, in Invisible Man, concentrates on identmg those who did not fit one of the many representations of the Afiican American that society had corne to expect, an equally famous African American writer, James Baldwin, in his short story
"Sonny's Blues," tackles a prevalent African Amencan stereotype: the jazz musician.
Certainly the Afiican American rnusician had become the heroic underdog for a segment of White America as well, as the next chapter will ciiscuss, but the musician perhaps played a more important role within the McanAmerican community, where he or she originated. In "Sonny's Blues," Baldwin examines the often-distorted jazz figure and uncovers his importance to the ecanAmencan community.
Murray, in The Hero and the Blues, cornplains of those writers who-much like
Jack of the Brotherhood and Adorno--think they can use social science to show the evils in society, and that this exposure will cause society to fix itself. Murray says:
In effect, protest or finger-pointing fiction such as Uncle Tom's Children
and Native Son addresses itseIf to the humanity of the dragon in the very
process of depicting him as a Eire-snorting monster: "Shame on you, Sir
Dragon," it says in effect, "be a nice man and a good citizen." (Or is it,
"Have mercy, Massa?") Indeed, in theù fiction no less than in their
essays, writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and their Mitators
often seem to be appeding to the godiiness of the dragon: "O, you who are
so al1 powerful, let my people go." When you name the dragon the devil,
as Malcolm X used to do, or pig, as Eldridge Cleaver does now, aren't you
really tryùig to convert him by putting the bad mouth on him? (45-46) . He includes Baldwin in this category, but, as this chapter will show, such a description,
although perhaps valid for other works by Baldwin, is not applicable to "Somy's Blues,"
his most famous story. Instead, Baldwin describes the struggle of a jazz player, relatively
detached fiom the difficulties of the fashion world described by Adorno and fiom White
Amenca, More generally, he portrays one person's attempt to simply persevere and lead
a fulfilling life-and this is the root of its romanticism.
As mentioned, "Sonny's Blues" has little to do with the culture industry. It is
essential to any discussion of the jazz musician in literature, however, for it deals with the
musician first as a person attempting to survive, and second as an example to an audience
that in many ways acts as an extended family. And at the heart of the story lies the
struggle of two broîhers to deal with loss, both, harbouring their own romanticism,
wishing to return to the impossible state of childhood innocence.
The story is narrated by Somy's unnamed brother, who is a math teacher and
family man. While the brother may be the story's protagonist, narratîng a story about his
eventual acceptance of his brother, Sonny is nonetheless a hero-figure for his stnrggle to
survive-and to identa hùnself-as a jazz musician. We leam about Sonny through his
brother's gradua1 acceptance of bis Mestyle as a musician. Through the brother's
narration, the reader is able to begin to understand the music world that defines Sonny.
Of course today, few would consider the jazz world Baldwin describes an unusual one,
but the reader of 1957, used to hearhg of the parties and drugs that often accompanied it,
might have considered it unsavory. Baldwin, by using a rniddle-class narrator who at
first shares these negative views as a mediation device, is able to introduce gently the
idea that the jazz musician, exotic as he might seem, is a representative Amencan hero. Oliver 35
The faceless antagonist of "Sonny's Blues" is the Harlem environment described
throughout the story. It is a dangerous environment that threatens to destroy the
innocence of those who inhabit it. The examples of this danger are numerou. Referrïng
to heroin, the brother says, ''this menace was their reality" (107). He also refers to his
neighborhood as the "kilIing streets of our childhood" (1 12), and he says "the hedges wiIl
never hold out the streets, and they kmw it" (1 13). Sonny's father, knowing all too wefl
the dangers of Harlem, exclaims, "Safe, hell! Ain't no place safe for kids, for nobody"
(1 14). The characters do not protest against this environment; they simply atternpt to
live peacefully within in it. More specincally, they do not protest against the racist structure that brought on social inequality--and the consequent poverty, dmgs, and violence. Instead, they endure it. As Sonny's mother states, Sonny's father was tormented by those who killed his brother: "Till the day he died he weren't sure but that every white man he saw was the man that killed hïs brother" (1 18). He, like Sonny, accepts such events as facts of life, and simply continues to look for "something a little bette? (1 14). While looking, Harlem's citizens must ward off the dangers that the commdty continually supplies.
The brother, as a teacher, observes the effect of the Harlem environment on the children. He sees that the adults protect the children fkom being subjected to Harlem's dangers for as long as they cm. He describes the child who listens to his family talk of the external world, a world the child has yet to expenence:
The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces fiightens
the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead
will never stop--will never die. He hopes that there will never corne a Oliver 36
time when the old folks won't be sitting around the living room, talking
about where they've come fiom, and what they've seen, and what's
happened to them and their kinfolk. (1 15)
The situation wilf not change, but the children will become the old folks- The brother says, "The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they have come &om. It's what they endure" (1 15), and the children too must begin to endure this the moment they walk outside alone. To endure, each chiId must discover his or her own means of overcoming the obstacles that block the path to the healthy development of his or her identity as an adult. Learning to make such personal choices, the child, becoming an adult, must learn to cope without the constant supervision of family or aduits.
Unfortunately, few children are equipped with the necessary confrontaOon devices to successfully deal with such a menacing environment. Consequendy, many replace innocence with confùsion, anger, and a desire to escape:
they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptiy against
the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage.
Al1 they really knew were two darknesses, the darlmess of their lives,
which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which
had bhded them to that other darkness, and in which they now,
vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other
time, and more alone. (1 04)
Instead of tuming to each other for support, these children attempt to grasp the same rnoney and fame they see characters in the movies possess, having no idea, however, how Oliver 37
to attain either one. This drives them to compete agauist each other, and this
cornpetitiveness even taints their laughter and underlines their loss of innocence: "It was
mocking and insular, its intent was to denigrate. It was disenchanted, and in this, also,
lay the authonty of their curses" (104). These childhood attempts to transcend this
environment lead them into the maladies of the adult world: "The playground is most
popuiar with the children who don? play at jacks, or skip rope, or roller skate, or swing,
and they can be found in it &er dark" (1 13). Too weary of the streets to be content with
children's games, the children turn to drugs and violence in a desperate attempt to achieve
some sort of happiness amidst the misery that surrounds them.
This attempt to use limited means to escape--and the failure that al1 too often
accompanies it--continues into adulthood. The brother watches the adults of Harlem,
many graduates of the school playgroud, continue to make the romantic effort to retuni
to the impossible happiness and security they only knew as young children. He observes
a barmaid: "When she srniled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, stiil-
struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore" (107). As the adults
struggle to find happiness, each takes a different path-and each meets with varying success. The brother watches a revival take place on the street and sees the intrinsic similarity of a performer and an audience member:
The woman with the tambourine, whose voice dominated the air, whose
face was bright with joy, was divided by very little fiom the woman who
stood watching her, a cigarette between her heavy, chapped Iips, her hair a
cuckoo's nest, her face scarred and swollen fiom many beatings, and her
black eyes glittering like coal. Perhaps both know this, which was why, Oliver 38
when, as rarely, they addressed each other, they addressed each other as
Sister, (129)
One woman looks to religion, the other to companionship. The reader senses that the respective choices, however different, stem fiom the sarne struggle, and that each woman might easily have found herself in the other's shoes.
Both Somy and his brother recognize that Harlem will trap them, and ultirnately destroy them, if they do not fight back and escape its clutches. The dividing line for these two brothers is the method of their escape. The brother has gme to school to become a teacher, living a middle-class lifestyle and distancing himself fiom the streets as much as possible. Somy, on the other hand, has become ajazz musician, leading a life that initially centres solely on his music, but degenerates into a heroïn addiction and a consequent incarceration. While Sonny meets with failure and the brother success, both lose part of their identity by separating themselves fkom the culture in which they grew up. The brother describes this loss in the children he sees: "boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animais amputate a leg and lave it in the trap" (112). Somy and his brother, in addition to losing part of their identities by escaping the streets of Harlem, also, by concentrathg on different escape routes, lose their intimacy as brothers.
The narrative centres on the brother's avenue to understanding Sonny's way out of the ghetto. Only by gaining this understanding can'the brother realize the integrity of
Sonny's personal stmggle. Such an understanding, in turn, would allow the possibility of Oliver 39 reconciliation between the two. This process only begins to occw once the brother expenences the first loss of his adult life for which he cannot account-the death of his daughter. Early in the story, he States, "1 didn't write Sonny or send him anything for a long time. When 1 finally di& it was just after my little giri died . . ." (109)' and later he expands upon this, "1 think I may have written Sonny the very day that little Grace was burïed. 1was sitting in the living room in the dark, by myseif, and 1 suddenly thought of
Sonny. My trouble made his reai" (127). Of course, the brother chose to take a path out of the ghetto that was supported by middle-class America; he joined the army, went to school, and got married. His route, then, was a relatively easy one when compared to
Somy's, who lost both his parents before he is Ml-grown, and who had to justie his choice of music as a career to a critical world. Menhis brother feels the pain that accompanies a loss out of his control, he begins to understand the idea of loss and injustice that underlines Sonny's struggle.
Before the death of his daughter, however, Sonny's brother has little patience for him and does little to understand his addiction or to try to help him overcome it. When
Sonny's fiend asks hirn what he is going to do about Sonny, he says, "Look. 1 haven't seen Somy for over a year, I'm not sure I'm going to do anything. Aoyway, what the heli cari 1do?" (106). This ambivalence stems fiom the brother's split with Somy earlier in Sonny's music career, a career his brother never condoned; he rernembers, "his music seemed to be merely an excuse for the iife he led It sounded just that weird and disordered" (126). The end of their relationship cornes during an argument about
Sonny's lifestyle; the brother remembers, "he told me not to worry about him any more in life, that he dead as far as 1 was concemed" (126). The brother, unwilling to Oliver 40 recognize Sonny's goal of achieving happiness as a musician, is content to consider his own brother dead. This stubboniness to acknowledge that Sonny has made a legitimate life choice in playing jaw only relaxes once the brother experiences the concrete loss of a fdymember and understands that he mut work to communicate with his brother, not ignore him.
This process of communication is a slow one and does not filly occur within the space of the narrative. At kt,he feels that Sonny's heroin addiction is only a death wish-and that Somy's way out is a nihilist's escape. He slowly begins to see, however, that Sonny's heroin use is a coping device, not a death wish. Sonny's %end first points out the tmth to him: "He don't wânt to die- He wants to live. Don't nobody want to die, ever" (108). And when Sonny's brother remembers Sonny's development fiom a child to an ad&, he begins to see the truth in this statement.
As a child, Sonny was always trying to transcend his condition: "He read books about people sittilig on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and wallcing barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom" (1 11). Men Sonny declares as a teenager that he wants to be a jazz musician, and his brother objects, he romantically states, "1 think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they dive for?" (122-23). In retrospect, the brother admits, "1 sensed myseif in the presence of something 1 didn't really know how to handle, didn't understand" (1 19). What he does not understand is that Sonny wants to transcend his condition on his own terms, without the help of anyone (unless they are willing to constructively support his personal choices), whereas his brother is content to rely on an avenue of escape that is supported by middle-class America. Oliver 4 1
Wortunately, Sonny is not able to achieve the transcendence he hopes for by
himself, and he falls into the trap of relying on heroin to keep fiom suffering. When, as
adults, Somy's brother asks him if there is any way not to suffer, Somy gives a
characteristic reply: "'1 believe not,' he said and smiled, 'but that's never stopped anyone
fiom tryïng"' (132). He continues to Say, referring to heroin, that people like to think
they caused their own downfall: "Maybe it's better to do something to give it a reason, any reason" (132). To survive arnidst the chaos of life, the will of drugs--or the wiU of
God--mi@ be used to counteract the lack of reasons that accompany any tragedy.
Ultimately, as Sonny says to his brother, "nobody just takes it. . . .Evervbodv tries not to.
You're just hung up on the way sorne people &y--it's not yow way!" (132-33). Somy, so detemiined to alleviate the pain he feels, is willuig to try anything, no matter how destructive it might be, to eluninate his su£fiering. His brother, on the other hand, is only willing to use accepted means to avoid this pain. When he loses his daughter, however, he has, for the first time, no effective means to cope with his persona1 tragedy.
Finally understanding unrelievable anguish, Sonny's brother has a hard time convincing himself that Somy may not be right in mgany way he can find to make himself feel better. He says, ''1 wanted to talk about will power and how life codd be-- well, beautifûl. 1 wanted to Say that it was all within; but was it? or, rather, wasn't that exactly the trouble? And 1wanted to promise that 1would never fail him again. But it would al1 have sounded--empty words and lies" (83). It would al1 be "empty words and lies," because Sonny's brother, by judging his lifestyle, had failed at being a brother, consequently forcing Somy to search out his own methods of survival. Oliver 42
The brother sees that the last thing he should have done was judge Sonny, when
he remembers his mother's words: "don't let him fdl, no matter what it looks like is
happening to him and no matter how evil you gets with him" (1 18) and she continues,
"[y]ou may not be able to stop nothing f?om happening- But you got to let him know
you's there" (1 19). The brother does not do this, however; he abandons him. He
constructs a world around himself that is secure, and he cannot tolerate the insecurity of
Sonny's life- The broîher also remembers that he caught Somy "just before he feii when he took the first steps he ever took in this world" (1 II), but, separated fiom Somy by his prejudice toward Somy's lifestyle, he is not there the second time he falls. Furtherrnore, he makes the situation worse by not heIping Somy once he has fallen. As he notes when the brothers talk about heroin, "there stood between us, forever, beyond the power of time or forgiveness, the fact that 1 had herd silence-so long!--when he had needed human speech to help him" (132). In effect, Somy's brother tries to escape the world he observes fiom the window of his house, but he merely ends up losing his brother- At the same time, the world remains as dangerous--and unpredictable--as ever.
While Sonny may not want to kiU hùnself with heroin, his solitary nature does lead him to seek solace in it before he wouid tum to others for help. This is a pattern the reader learns is recurrent throughout Sonny's life. While his brother has put a wall around himself, Sonny has delved into his inner self. As his brother says, 'Tt doesn7tdo any good to fight with Sonny. Somy just moves back, inside himself, where he cadt be reached" (1 14). This self-imposed isolation carries over into Sonny's jazz: "it was as though he were al1 wrapped up in some cloud, some fie, some vision al1 his own; and Oliver 43
there wasn't any way to reach him" (125). Of course, as even his brother admits, "Sonny
was playing that piano for his life."
In his success, Sonny becomes the solitary and transcendent boy his brother hears
in the scboolyard: "One boy was whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very
simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird, and it sounded very
cool and moving through all that harsh, bright air, oniy just holding its own &ou& al1
those other sounds" (104). In his failure, however, Somy becomes someone too close to
himself, someone who ironically must take heroin to be able to ded with the temble
responsibility of defînïng himself by the music he makes:
Sometimes, you know, and it was actually when 1was most of the
world, I felt that 1 was in it, that 1was with it, really, and 1could play or I
didn't really have tu play, it just came out of me, it was there. And 1don't
know how 1 played, thinking about it now, but 1know I did awfid things,
those times, sornetimes, to people. Or it wasn't that 1&cJ anything to them
--it was that they weren't real. (1 34)
Sonny lives in such an intenial world that the heroin helps him to maintain the illusion that the rest of the wold is not real. With no externa4 responsibility, he fïnds it easier to face himself through his music. Furthermore, heroin allows Sonny to avoid being responsible for even himself-
Naturally, heroin, although Sonny thinks it a solution, inevitably delivers more suffering. As part of his recovery, Sonny begins to realize that he is responsible for his actions while also realizing that he will never be able to control the many external influences that will affect his life. The search for the recognition of such a balance brings Oliver 44
him to his brother, someone he must not only accept as a different person than himself
but dso trust as a brother. Sonny's attempt to rely on others for help brings the story to
the linal reconciliation at a small bar, where Sonny pfays for the first tirne since his fd.
The reader, at this point in the narrative, is aware of Sonny's musical tendencies;
when his brother asks the teenage Sonny what type of jazz he wants to play, suggesting
Louis Armstrong, Sonny snaps, '%o. I'm not talking about none of that old-time, down
home crap" (120). It is obvious that the gap between Somy and his brother is analogous
to the gap that developed in jazz music. Somy cites Charlie "Bird" Parker as his
influence, a musician who was a master of bop. What is essential to point out in relation
to "Son.ny3s Blues" is that bop was culturally significant to the Afncan Amencan struggle
for fieedom. Bop became an affirmation of isolation for the A£rican Arnerican; as John
M. Reilly, in "'Sonny's Blues': James Baldwin's Image of Black Communityfmexplains:
In its hip style of dress, its repudiation of the middle-brow noms, and its
celebration of esoteric manner the bebop sub-culture made overtly evident
its underlying significance as an assertion of Black identity. Building
upon a restatement of Mo-Amencan music, bebop became an expression
of a new self-awareness in the ghettos by a strategy of elaborate non-
confonnity. (142)
More specifïcally, bop acted as a revolt agaînst the whitewashing of jazz that had taken place once it became a mainsttay of American culture. Pancho Savery, in ccBaldwin,
Bebop, and 'Somy's Blues,"' notes that, ''Musicaily, Bebop was to a large extent a revolt against swing and the way Afkican Amencan music had been taken over, and diluted, by whites. Perhaps no more emblematic of this is that the aptly named Paul Whiteman and Oliver 45
Benny Goodman were dubbed respectively ''The King of Jazz" and "the King of Swing"
(169). EIiison suggests that bop was an even more overt attack on those white musicians
who had reaped the economic and social gains fiom adapting ecanAmencan
creativity:
the inside-dopesters will teli you that the "changes" or chord progressions
and the meIodic inversions worked out by the creators of bop spmg
partially fiom their desire to create a jazz which could not be so easily
imitated and exploited by white musicians to whom the market was more
open simply because of their whiteness. They wished to receive credit for
what they created, and besides, it was easier to "get rid of the trash" who
crowded the bandstand with inept playing and thus make room for the real
musicians, whether white or black. (Shadow and Act 212)
The black jazz musician, aware that the jazz industry--regardless of its geographic situation--was just as biased against Afi5ca.n Americans as my other Amencan industry, concentrated on making a music which they codd, at the least, daim as their own.
Sonny is obviously such a musician. As an individual who sees the lack of opportunities availabIe to him, he turns to jazz to Save his Me and to make it worthwhile, if only for himself. Discussing "Sonny' s Blues," Richard N. Albert says, "Sonny is clearly Thoreau's 'different dnunmer"' (179), and Reilly explains how this type of music separates him from his brother:
In comrnitting himself to the bebop sub-culture Sonny attempted to make
a virtue of the necessity of the isolation Mposed upon him by his color. In
contrast, the narrator's failure to understand what Somy was doing Oliver 46
indicates that his response to the conditions imposed upon him by racial
status was to try to assimilate himself as well as he could into the
mainstream American culture. (142)
Of course, the predominant theme of "Sonny's Blues" is the rebuilding of communication between the two brothers. Before the two are able to bridge the gap they have created, each must recognize that, in choosing alternative cultures with which to identm, each has lost the comrnon cultural ground he shares with the other-
Although both brothers must strive to find this common ground to once again share, Sonny's brother has the additional task of learning that, while jazz may not speak to him, it does speak to a large portion of the Harlem cornmunity, whose inhabitants share with Sonny feelings of oppression. This communication through music is in stark contrast to the industry of sellingjazz that Adorno limits himself to describuig (as he mut, if he is to maintain his Mamist stance) in his attacks on jazz. Sonny's jazz wcrld consists of Sonny playing with small groups of musicians for relatively small audiences.
He does so not to advance his career, nor to advance his musicianship; he does so to regain his own ficanArnerican identity through bis music. In "The Black Musician:
The Black Hero as Light Bearer," Sherley Anne Williams describes the AfKcan
American musician's use of music as a balancing force to accept the past and confiont the füture:
The musician is also for BaIdwin an archetypal figure whose referent is
Black Iives, Black experiences and Black deaths. He is the hope of
making it in America and the bitter mockery of never making it well
enough to escape the danger of being Black, the living symbol of Oliver 47
dienation fiom the past and hence fiom self and the rhythmical link with
the mysterious ancestral past. That pst and its pain and the transcendeme
of pain is always an implicit part of the musician's characterization in
Baldwin. Music is the medium through which the musician achieves
enough understanding and strength to deal with the past and present hurt.
(147)
Sonny is this archetypa1 figure, and his music represents his stniggle to accept his identity
as an Afncan American-and the inherent injustice that accompanies this position. Somy
realizes he will never be able to Mycontrol his life, knows he may never meet a level of
success to match his musical abilities, but he nonetheless continues on, ifonly to stop
himself fkom giving up completely. The role of his music extends beyond Sonny, for, as a form of communication, the jazz Sonny plays represents to the audience his own struggle, thereby giving their respective struggles meaning. Although never explicitly stated in the narrative, Sonny, by residing in the Village and divorcing himself from the
Harlem jazz community within which he developed, not only isolates himself from his broîher, but also £rom his ficanAmeXcan audience. By retuniing to this audience,
Sonny is once again able to speak to the-and for them.
Somy is a hem because of his ability to speak to his audience, much like the
Invisible Man does. He is not a hero because he is especidly noble, but because he is able to display his difnculties and fears, his failures and tnurnphs, through his musical efforts. And, though this procedure, he is able to produce something beautifid, which every member of the audience naturally hopes to do with their lives. This is why, when the revival on the street takes place, people sa1watch it. The brother says, 'Nat a sou1 Oliver 48
under the sound of their voices was hearing this Song for the fist tirne, not one of them
had been rescued. Nor had they seen much in the way of rescue work being around them.
Neither did they especially believe in the hoiiness of the three sisters and the brother, they
knew too much about them, knew where they Iived, and how" (129). Because, in the
end, the music and the performers still persevere, and the audience cannot help but be
affected, "the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and tirne seemed, nearly, to
fall away fkom the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to
their first condition, while drearning of their Iast" (129). The audience's experience is a
retum to the romantic sense of innocence and security that the children experience before
they are exposed to the hardships of Harlem.
Somy's jazz, however, is much more musically accomplished than is the music of
the revival, and it is therefore a larger risk for the performer, who rnight fail at any
moment. His brother, at the club, admits:
AU I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And
even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the
music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are persond,
private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is
hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising fiom the void and
imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of
another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too,
for that same reason. And Estriumph, when he triumphs, is ours. (137)
Sonny as the representative hero, then, is embarking at the outset of the performance on a dangerous journey. He must not only cornmunicate the emotion conveyed by those in the Oliver 49 revival, but he must also do so through a medium that demands technical proficiency and perpetual inspiration- Either his failure or his triunph, as he and the crowd weii know, will be unrnistakable.
The brother, perhaps for the fkst the, fully realizes this danger, and is astounded by it:
1 had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between
the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the
breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And
a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little
hmersand big ones, and hry- While there's only so much you can do
with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do
everything. (1 3 8)
Once his brother fuially understands what is required of Sonny, he watches his every action with held breath:
He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started
another way, panicked, marked time, started again, then seemed to have
found a direction, panicked again, got stuck. And the face 1saw on Sonny
I'd never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the
same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and
fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there. (138)
Sonny, on the stage, reenacts the eternal ritual of testing one's limits. Creole urges Sonny
'90 leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the sarne thing--he had been there, and he knew. And Oliver 50
he wanted Sonny to know" (138). Sonny does leave the shoreline, but this process is one
that strips hirn naked, for he can maintain no pretensions in his struggle to achieve self-
knowledge.
As Savory astutely notes of the Song performed, "'Am I Blue' is exactly the type
of song that by itself wouldn't do much for anyone, but which could become nch and
meaningfid after being heated in the crucible of Bebop" (173). Sonny, in this instance,
succeeds in heating the song, and dtirnately he delivers a worthy jazz performance. The
signincance of this performance for the group is that he is able to assert his own identity
whïie joining with the whole, and as his brother observes, "Sonny was part of the family
again" (139). As part of the family, he is able to begin to shed his isolation and accept
the support of the community of which he is a part.
Though it may be romantic to stress the importance of an individd's success
during one Song in a small nightclub, this success does offer hope not only for the
individual, but also for ail those expenencing the performance. Sonny's statement is the
blues statement belonging to all members of the Afiican American community, and his
success on stage is their success, their hope. During the performance, Creole, through his own music, underiines the blues statement for the audience:
Creole began to tell us what the blues were d about. They were not about
anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the
nsk of niin, destruction, madness and death, in order to find new ways to
make us listen. For, while the tale of how we seer, and how we are
delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. Oliver 5 t
There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we7vegot in dl this
darkness. (1 3 9)
This view of the blues statement is in accord with Reilly's idea that the "implicit proposition of the Blues esthetics is that while the form is what it's al1 about, the form is transitory The Blues is an art in process and in that respect alien from any conception of fixed and ided forms" (145). To Adorno, seeing everything in terms of exchange value, there is no need for this type of re-creation. Whether or not Baidwin wants the reader to think Sonny has helped advance the state of jazz or music in general is, of course, unknown. But the narrator, at least, wishes to convince us that the audience is affecteci by the performance. While the reaction may be illusory, the reaction is an honest one, and if we dismiss it, then we dismiss the emotions-and the identities--of those who experience it.
In his attack on jazz, Adorno wants to reveal that people are having insufnciect reactions, that they are wasting their lives reconciling themselves with the brief--and escapist--cornforts of jazz when they couid be enacting change in society. Moreover, the jazz musician, at the centre of this exercise, however sincere his or her intentions may be, is fighting a losing battle. At the same time, the mcan Arnerican battle has gown out of the impossibIe situation. And the changes effected within the African American communïties, as "Sonny's Blues" demonstrates, often occur, to use the brother's words, as 'cpersonal, pnvate, vanishing evocations" (137). To the Brotherhood or to Adorno, these moments of change may appear minuscule and inçignificant, but the possibilities they possess should not be discounted. Oliver 52
The brother experïences such a revelatory moment when listening to Sonny's
music and understanding the effect it has on the crowd and on himseK He says, Somy
"instded me, by myself, at a table in a dark corneryy(136), which is evocative of his
childhood hours spent listening to the adults tallc. The brother listening, Sonny teils his
story:
Sonny's fingers filled the air with Iife, his life. But that life contained so
many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the
spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the Song. Then he began to
make it his, It was very beautifid because it wasn't hurried and it was no
longer a lament. 1 seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his,
with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease
lamenting, Freedom lurked around us and 1understood, at last, that he
codd help us to be fiee if we would Iisten, that he wouid never be free
untii we did. (140)
The brother, by listening carefülly to Sonny for perhaps the first be, has heard a statement of freedom, a statement which may, in its recognition, lead the brother to a stronger self-identity, and in turn allow him to emerge fkom his self-constructed-and unemotional-world, Ultirnately, he may realize, when he and Somy fought in
Greenwich, why: "1 started down the steps, whistling to keep fiom crying, 1 kept whistling to myself, You aoina to need me, babv. one of these cold, rain~da@' (127)-
Although there is no final reconciliation between the two brothers within the narrative, the reader senses that, because Somy's brother finally listens to what he has to Say, both inevitably will regain a tangible sense of the brotherhood they experienced as children. Oliver 53
While Somy's jazz does offer inspiration to the brother and perhaps some of the
audience mernbers, all recognize that jazz will not Save them, that their own identity is up
to them. As the brother notes, %is was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as
hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky" (140).
"Sonny's Blues" finally affirms the necessity of family, be it imrnediate, extended,
musical, or an entire community. This family allows one to tell others of the dangers of the world, and the experience one has had with them. At the same time, realizing the
finite amount of strength which anyone can possess, it allows the sarne heroic figure the opportunity to sit, Iike the innocent child, in the dark and listen to others speak, safe for that moment. This may be the first step toward a grassroots change which depends on
but it still relies on a romantic hero identification to inspire, for the musician and the audience, a rnomentum toward this unity.
Any path to fkeedom is bound to be full of diaculties, and although Adorno encourages us to be fiee in what we produce and what we experience, he only sees one path. Baldwin, on the other hand, understands that no path--or person--is perfect, and explains in ccSo~y'sBlues" that any path to salvation or widespread reformation must accommodate--and even endorse, as it is a human trait-fdure. Thus, Baldwin's reply to
Adorno's statement, "The Negro spirituals, antecedents of the blues, were slave songs and as such combined the Iament of unfkeedom with its oppressed confirmationyy
("Perenniai" 200) might be that fieedom and failure are not mutuaily exclusive, and he might add that an impossible situation does not warrant silence. Instead, it demands a statement that, however romantic it may be, encourages those to whom it is addressed to Oliver 54 persevere. The next chapter will examine the appropriation of this blues-jazz statement by a different, and in many ways foreign, community. Oliver 55
Chapter Two: The Jazz Musician and Beat Writing
"Jazz music has haunted America for seventy years- It has tempted us out of our Iily-white reserve with its black promise of untrammeledjoy" (John Clellon Holrnes, The Hom Preface)
During the 1 SOS, the United States, whiie experiencing post-war economic
boom, also experienced the emergence of a powerfiil youth culture. The entertainment
industry, which recognized the potential of a new market with disposable incorne,
fostered this burgeoning culture. At the same tirne, amongst those who were not content
with accepting a pre-fabricated popular culture, a few formed a genuine voice of dissent.
By the mid-1 WOs, America effectively villainized this group, oflen known as hipsters or beatniks (a pun on the Russian "Sp~tnik'~satellite), with such terms as "deviant."
At least ten years before, however, there was a smdl group of intellectuds and artists who began to descnbe in unison their disillusionment with the United States.
Referred to as "Beats," these individuals were neither seduced by what Adorno calls the marketplace of fashion, nor were they attempting to overthrow American stability with deviant acts. Instead, they were attempting to hdtheir identity as intellectuals, artists, and ultimately as Americans living in an increasingly powerful United States. In "The
Beat Generation and the Continuing Amencan Revolution," John Tytell details the Beats' critical stance towards the United States' promotion of nationaikm and greed: ccRejecting the glut of post-war materialism and obsessive national conformisrn, the Beats proposed a creed of individuality and a cornmitment to the life of the spirit with a passion that recalls the stmggles of the Amencan Transcendentalists . . ." (57). Voicing such opposition, the
Beats identified with bop musicians because of their common goals. In "Beat Jazz: The
Red Thing," John Swenson outlines the Beats and bop musicians' similar struggles: "In the aftermath of a Worid War II culture that made noncomformity a crime, the beboppers Oliver 56
and the Beats shared a rewlsion for the status quo, a desire to challenge the artistic
complacency of the era and new ideas to do something about ity' (27). While the jazz
musicians protested through their music, the Beats, who were primady wrïters, protested
through their wrïting.
Two Beat writers, Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes, are the focal point of
this chapter. It wiil examine the relationship between Kerouac's On the Road and
Holmes' The Hom to jazz music. The primary focus of this discussion wili be these
writers' definition of the beat character as a romantic Amencan hero-figure and the
marner in which they identify Amencan heroes to represent in wrïting the
marginalization they as Amencans were expenencing--as well as the options they saw to
transcend this identity crisis. More specifically, the chapter will examine the reasons
why the jazz musician became an exemplary beat hero for these Beat writers to describe.
This analysis will reveal that the Beats' treatment of the jazz musician, as with other beat
figures, was often highly romanticized and unredistic, but it nonetheless sought to
redeem those searching to find their own American happiness.
The Uony of the Beats writing about jazz is that their group was primarily
composed of White Amencan males who were granted the freedom to be the potential
new leaders of an increasingly prosperous United States. Although the United States
offered them the fieedom to become both powerful and successfül, such prosperity often required compromishg their ideals. Moreover, issues of sexuality, ethnicity, and experimentation would cause these individuals to be acutely aware that they must conform to middle-class noms to achieve success. This potential fulfillment of an
Amencan dream, then, was of little use, for they could not, with good conscience, Oliver 57
reconcile the United States they lived in with their ideals of a fiee and equal country- Of
course, this diIemma of the Beats stands in contrast to the problems the characters face in
"Sonny's Blues." These Afncan Americans, judged by their race, are never granted the
opportunity to prosper, let alone tum this opportunity dvw.
Furthering the Beats' discontent was a United States that had, to them, actuaily
lost many of its ideals, albeit romantic ones. Geraid Nicosia, in Memory Babe: A Critical
Biomphv of Jack Kerouac, explains the environment in which the Beats struggled to
develop their identity:
After the war the country seemed to have grown suddenly mean, crue2,
dominated by an overgrown military filled with warmongers who
immediately wanted to encounter Russia. . . .Al1 of them . . .like so many
other young people, felt themselves misfits. They were products of the
Depression, raised on an idealism that had died dong with basic decency
in the ovens of Auschwitz, in the bomb rubble of London, Dresden,
Cologne, and, above dl, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the country bent
wearily, with brute inciifference, toward the Cold War of the 1%Os, these
young people groped hopelessly in a world in which they simply did not
how how to live. (149)
These young people, who were raised on the ideals of a prosperous United States and the pursuit of individual happiness, did not have the means to cope with a country filled with the unpleasant redities of war, greed, and indifference. The United States, far fkom realizing its own ideals, raised anew the debate over what it means to be Eree and equal for these young thrnkers. Oliver 58
The Beats owe the strength they achieved as a *oup to two important factors.
The first is that they operated as a close-knit group. AU existing on the margins of a
society in which they were expected to achieve, they had empathy for each other and
were quick to defend each other, be it on a personal level, or in their writing. Nicosia expands: "Though they were excluded fiom the mainstream of pubhshing by their forbidden subject matter and unconventional expression, they had one advantage over popular writers: the loyalty of a few compatriots who would unquestionably champion them when the chips were down" (474). As a group, then, they gathered strength to withstand the blows of consemative critics.
The second reason they became such a formidable collective is that they represented a group of eccentric, intelligent individuals who easily provided endless situations to chronicle in their own writing. Blessed with so much raw matenal about which to write, they had no interest in chronicling corporate Amenca, nor were they particularly interested in the staunch intellectuals they encountered on various university campuses. At the same time, their wild parties and experirnentation isolated them fiom the social standards dictated by middle-class America. When .writing, then, the Beats drew prïmarily fiom their own expenences. Writing about themselves, they felt they were representing a new United States that had heretofore been underrepresented--or, more likely, ignored.
When the Beats chose to write about others, they tended to look to the lower classes of the United States, because there they witnessed people who had little vested in
Arnerica (because they knew it would extend them few favours), but who nonetheless celebrated their own existences. This is the genesis of the Beat---the person who has Oliver 59 been "beat down" in life, who has nothing, but who, having nothing, is most able to experience directly the surrounding beauty. The Beats wanted to experience the worid through the eyes of the person who had nothing, so they often went without money, food, and general cornforts (or, on the opposite end of the spectnim, they took various fonns of drugs) to put themselves in this state. This beat philosophy is witnessed in the Beats' various road trips, on which they would often embark with little money and no traasportation, relying on hitch hiking and their own ingenuity to get them safely to their destination,
One also sees this ethos in Kerouac's enjoyment of the jazz performance. Nicosia describes the preparations made for the live jazz expenence by Kerouac and his university fnend Hal Chase:
Hal joined Jack on walks al1 over the city. To get going they would chew
a strip of benzedrine inhalers (wrapped in chewing gum), and with
occasional strips to renew their energy and enthusiasm, they sometimes
managed to go four or five days without sleep. At the end of such a
marathon, totally exhausted, they would listen to bop, and they would hear
the music in a way they felt it could never be heard otherwise. They
thought that this pushing the body and mind to the furthest limit amined
them to the essence of bop. (148)
Underlying this quest for the beat experience, then, is the romantic notion of experiencùig the beauty of the world in to order to experience an interna1 beauty--or, speaking outside this rhetoric, a relaxed and open mindstate. Throughout the years, the Beats experimented their way into what their cntics saw as oblivion, but the Beats thought they Oliver 60
were experiencing collectively the only joys they could find in the United States. These
joys were a far greater experience than the alternatives offered by middle-America, and
the Beats thought themselves ncher with these experiences than without-
At the forefi-ont of the Beat movement was Jack Kerouac. In 1957, his novel Qg
the Road was published and subsequently inspired a whole generation (and generations
after) to criss-cross the country in beat fashion. The novel, however, chronicles
Kerouac's adventures fiom 1947 to 1950; in fact Kerouac wrote a large portion of his
published work before 2 957 in direct response to post-World War Two Arnenca.
Although he grew up in LoweI1, Massachusetts, Kerouac was of French-Canadian
descent (French was his fïrst language) and subsequently felt himself an outsider.
Nicosia points out that, "Growing up in a French-Canadian colony (itself a hybnd
culture) separated by choice from the Arnerican melting pot, Kerouac came by double
vision early" (502). Furthemore, he was embittered by the lack of opportunity he felt he
had; his father "Leo bequeathed to bis son a social anùriosity, a feeling that the civilized
world was arranged for the exploitation of poor minorities like the Canucks, and this
sense of injustice led to a rebelliousness against the standing order" (Nicosia 37). Feeling
marginalized became a weapon to Jack, and he was able to use it to create texts which-
both in form and subject matter-stood outside the paradigm of conventional American
thought, consequently ushering in a whole new Arnerican literary phenornenon. Nicosia
comments upon this: "What was to make hirn a great writer was his abiiity to break fi-ee
from almost every traditional American value he had been bred to accept-to break fkee enough, at least, to view himself aS the crippled product of those values, and as such typicai of millions of very neurotic midcentury Arnericans" (130). Oliver 6 1
Al1 of Kerouac's tex& were highly autobiographical: he would consistently
describe the adventures of the Beats with other groups on the margins of society. Anne
Charters, in her Introduction to the 1991 edition of the novel, states, "Writing On the
Road, Kerouac findly found his own voice and his tme subject-the story of his own search for a place as an outsider in America" (xxi). Kerouac and his Kends looked to others not just for adventures, then, but also to discover their own identity in the United
States.
In On the Road, Kerouac romanticizes the car-thief and Western legend Neal
Cassady, with whom Kerouac was a very close fiend. Cassady is the prototypical beat
Amencan hero, and the philosophy by which he leads his life represents the critena upon which other beat heroes are identified and subsequently described in writing. In the novel, Cassady (narned Dean Monarty) represents the ideal beat life for which Kerouac strives. Kerouac, who is Sa1 Paradise, the narrator of the story, is a thinking man, and dthough he enjoys living his life on the edge, he stiil stands back from uninhibited expenence with hesitation. EarIy in the novel he confesses:
1 shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest
me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are
mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everythïng at the
same time, the ones who never yawn or Say a comrnonplace thing, but
burn, bum, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like
spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop
and everybody goes "Awww!" (8) Oliver 62
Kerouac was in awe of Cassady because Cassady never hesitated. Nicosia says, 'The secret, of course, was that Neal lived faster than any man Jack had ever knowa
Ginsberg, Holmes, and most of his intellectual fiends considered problems; Neal dealt with them instantaneously because he knew the consequences of delay (especially at 110 miles an hour) could be worse than intuition's occasional gaffe" (29 1). Furthemore,
Cassady was a consummate con-artist, but Kerouac saw this as a positive quality, for, by being so, Cassady existed outside conventional morality and therefore had to use continually his intelligence and instinct to get what he needed to survive. In effect,
Cassady possessed the courage that Kerouac lacked to step outside the acceptable ways to live and expenence the United States; by doing so he was able to expenence a transcendent plane of American fkeedom-a fieedom al1 the Beats desperately sought. To expand upon this, Nicosia comments:
For the sake of his survival scam, Neal had sold out everything Americans
were supposed to cherish. But that con itself--as any W.C. Fields fan
knows-couldn't be more American. Besides, al1 artists deai in illusions.
Neal permanently changes the direction of Jack's writing by showing him
that a man could both be an artist-if only a con artist-and live in the
world at the same time. (1 78-79)
Kerouac chronicles his "living" in On the Road, but unlike Cassady, he looks for a higher significance in the fieedorn he seeks. Charters States, "On the Road can be read as a quest taken by Sal Paradise, who sets out to test the American dream by trying to pin down its promise of unlimited fieedom by following the example of Dean Mori-.
Dean is the dream's redity. On the margins of society, he has no illusions about the end Oliver 63
of the road" (xxi). Kerouac could not permanently remain in this dream, however, for he
as the obsenrant derconstantly reflected the ideal United States Cassady incorporated
(living a life outside the Iaw and society on his own tems) with the real United States he both Iived in and observed,
Although the Beats were critical of the double standards of the United States they
Iived in, they stiil embraced the ide& of their country. Even though Cassady is celebrated as the marginalized American, he still loves the United States, because it is his home: "Furtherrnore we know America, we're at home; 1can go anywhere in Arnenca and get what 1 want because ifs the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly cornplicated sweetness zigzagging every side" (Kerouac 12 1). As it is their home, Kerouac and Cassady hope to take advantage of the fieedom it offers: "He and I suddenly saw the whoIe country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there" (Kerouac 138).
While the United States offers "the pearl" of fieedom and an ultimate joy, On the
Road is written in the shadow of humans who have demanded too much. While in
Mexico with Cassady, Paradise comments on the Natives he witnesses:
They had corne down fkom the back mountains and higher places to hold
forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and
they dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't
know that a bomb had corne that could crack ai1 our bridges and roads and
reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and
stretching out our hands in the same, same way. Our broken Ford, old Oliver 64
thirties upgoing America Ford, rattled through them and vanished in dust.
(299)
On the Road is, in many ways, a romantic attempt to start &esh-it is an atternpt to act on
the sarne ide& of fieedom and equality that the United States was founded upon but
without tarnishing these acts with greed and corruption. Accordigly, On the Road
shows a remarkable lack of rnoralizing, but one message Kerouac clearly promotes is that
his country needs a second chance to rediscover its own freedom. The Beat, having
nothing, wants no more than to enjoy experience, and this humility would not only, in
Kerouac's eyes, bring salvation for him or her self, but also for the United States. Of
course, American literature has always charnpioned the idea of the second chance:
Huckleberry Finn is a prime canonical example.
In On the Road, Cassady is an Amencan hero, an example for the country of how
to enjoy fkeedom, but he is not the only exarnple. Kerouac peppers the novel with the
exceptional characters he encouuters as he travels dong the beat road. Part of the novel's
charm is that Paradise is never condescending towards these people; he instead only regrets not being able to be closer to them. Charters points out that, "Being poor himself,
Sal sympathizes with the underclass characters he meets on the road, the itinerant laborers, the Mexicans, the Afr-ican-Arnericans, even as he rornanticizes their lives"
(>Wi). Kerouac, troubled by his own American identity, thinks, somewhat naively of course, that those people born into a beat Iife do not have the same self-awareness of their plight as he does.
At one point Paradise overtly reflects upon his envy: "At Mac evening 1walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored Oliver 65 section, wishing 1were a Negro, feehg that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night"
(1 80). Paradise draws a distinct line in his country between the White Amencan world of
"disappointment and 'white sorrows' and al1 thaî" (18 1) where he is a "'white man' disillusioned" with ''white ambitions" and the Afi-icao Arnerican world of the ''the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of Amenca7' (1 80) where "[t] here was excitement and the air was filled with the vibration of really joyous life that knows nothing of disappointment . . ." (18 1). To Kerouac, exercising an albeit simplistic view, Afr-ican
America represented a truer existence where happiness was easier to find.
The thrust of Kerouac's distinction here--and of the novel-is a desire to return to a childhood innocence. Paradise (note the name) does not muse upon this desire often, but when he does, it is explicit: "Isn't it tnie that you start your Me a sweet child believing in everythuig under your fatherysroof? Then cornes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life" (1 OS).
Although Kerouac's romanticism limits his capacity to fdly appreciate American diversity, he does make an earnest effort-borne out of romantic notions--to understand all Amencans. By examining how others live in the paradox of American freedom simultaneously offered and withheld, he hopes to understand how the United States can begin afiesh to validate its own ideals.
Now that the concept of the beat as hero-figure, and the impiicit rornanticism that identification with such a figure entails, has been established, the discussion can proceed to the Beats and their relationship with the jazz musician. While Kerouac meets the Oliver 66
spectnim of Arnericans in On the Road, Kerouac writes with the most excitement about
the various jazz musicians he hem, sees, and meets throughout the narrative. Kerouac
had a great appreciation for jazz and wrote about it extensively throughout his fiction and
non-fiction. Nicosia points out that Kerouac "seized upon the jazz world as the nchest,
most imaginative source of Amencan folk tradition'' (366); Charters says ''jazz is in his
heart's blood and gives him his best times on the road, symbolizing the source of
Amencan fieedom and creativîtyy'(xxii). Jazz, crucial to Kerouac's appreciation of
American culture, is also crucial to his description of the United States.
Bop was Kerouac's primary jazz passion and he appreciated it on several levels.
The improvisation of the musicians anècted his own forms of writing to a great extent
(particularly in his several series of "Blues" poems), but Kerouac was also acutely aware
of the jazz musician's cultural significance in the United States. The jazz musician, like
much of marginalized America, was leading a hand-to-mouth Me, but his joy was
apparent in the jazz he played tirelessly every night. The power of this contrast
was not lost on Jack- Pbilip Larnantia, a fellow Beat writer, shared Kerouac's love for jazz.' Nicosia explains their understanding of the jazz musician's role of rebellion in a
struggle to be fiee:
Along with Hiroshima had been annihilated all of the previous
generation's hopes for a socialist utopia, indeed for any political solution
to human misery. Seeking to transcend a world of unrelievable horror,
Lamantia took the same route as Kerouac in attempting to sacrdize the
mundane. In the jazz milieu they found people who abjured conventional
Lamantia, a poet, apparently did not incorporate jazz into his writing. Instead, Larnantia preferred ta work within the context of the surreaI and mystical. society in a rebeliion that wadt in the least political. Et was based on a
dialectical relationship between the way these people were living-their
fi-antic outward pursuit of kicks-and the tremendous inwardness generated
in them by way of compensation. The wilder the action, the deeper the
meditation that followed it. In the same way: being beat led to an
enthusiasm for whatever lay beyond fatigue. Listening to jazz was a way
of crossing such boudaries into new worlds, where the magic of the
unexpected converted you like a miracle. (366)
Not only could the jazz musician efficientiy fkee himself to exist in a beautifid state of
bliss-a state Kerouac relishes in describing--but he could also inspire the same
transcendent state in his listeners, another point no t lost on Kerouac. For, while the
majority of the underclass--1ike Cassady--were stmggling just to survive, the jazz
musician, like al1 artists, was able to alleviate the struggle of others by expressing
fieedorn through beauty--even if only temporarily. Kerouac, as a Writer, hoped for the
same, so in the jazz musician he found not only sorneone of whom he could make an
exemplar; he also found a peer.
In On the Road, the jazz musician tums out to be Cassady's only equal for living
life to the fullest. It is interesting to note that Kerouac, when he was considering developing a fictional side to the characters of On the Road, had for some time envisioned Cassady's character as a combination of American beat heroes, named Red
Moultrie: "a man in his late twenties who had been a minor league bal1 player, a jazz drummer, and a seaman who had been jailed as an accomplice in a robbery" (Charters xv). While Cassady lacks any jazz talents (or professional baseball talents, as far as the reader can tell), he does show an appreciation of the jazz musician that rivals only
Kerouac's. In fact, Cassady's one major ideological contribution to On the Road-the
time-space transcendence of"it"--is delivered through the context of jazz. Moriarty
elaborates:
Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's
on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then Iines up his ideas,
people, yeah, yeah, but gets it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow
equai to it. Al1 of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he g-
-it-everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries.
Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives,
confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrame of ideas, rehashes of
old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and corne back and do it with
such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that
everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT- (206)
In effect, Cassady has conjured the same jazz musician as hero that Albert Murray and
James Baldwin describe. The musician has taken on the task of improvising his own path
with his music and acts as a representative of the audience's own paths through Me. As
his path of musical experimentation is one composed of constant choices (and relies on the fact that they will be successfid ones), these choices become more important than the time and space that he occupies.
While Baldwin's Sonny, as an African American musician, speaks directly to the EcanAmerican audience about their troubles, their plights, and their dreams,
Cassady look to the black musician for the experience of his energy, his joy, and his Oliver 69
madness. Cassady understands that the jazz musician is improvising onstage in the same
manner that he himself improvises in Me. Both nsk everything for bnef moments of
success. The reader sees this affinity between Cassady as audience member and the jazz
musician as performer in the following passage:
Dean was in a trance. The tenorman's eyes were fmed straight on him; he
had a madman who not ody understood but cared and wanted to
understand more and much more than there was, and they began dueling
for this; everything came out of the horn, no more phrases, just cries,
cries, "Baugh" and down to "Beep!" and up to "EEEEE!" and domto
clinkers and over to sideways-echoing hom-sounds. He tried everything
up, down, sideways, upside down, horizontal, thirty degrees, forty degrees,
and finally he feu back in somebody's arms and gave up and everybody
pushed around and yelled, "Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!" Dean wiped
himself with a handkerchief. (1 98)
Just like Cassady, the musician has no Iimits-only pure exhaustion stops him fkom merexperimentation. And to Kerouac, writing about Cassady and the musician, they both exist as ideal Americans for testing the limits, for being passionate, and for ultimately expenencing happiness.
For Baldwin, the jazz musician is not rnarginalized by Afncan Amenca but is at the center of the community, empathizing with his people, and leading the way forward to improvement. For Kerouac, Cassady and the jazz musician are rnarginalized, but only because the United States does not recognize them as the leaders they are. Nicosia describes Kerouac's vision of true happiness in the United States in this context: ''the Oliver 70
real key to tranquility would be found in the gentle tolerance toward all one's neighbors,
even the so-cded criminais like Neal, who if treated with sufficient kladness wodd turn
out to be merely backward saints" (253). Whereas Baldwin and Murray understand the
jazz musician to be a beacon of the Afncan American cornmmity, Kerouac hopes for al1
those who are marginalized to be beacons for a Iarger Amencan community. Ody
through such an acceptance would the United States realize its ideals of fkeedom,
equality, and happiness.
Much of the power of On the Road stems fiom Kerouac's ability to so accurately
describe the energy of everyday experience. In this context, the entire novel serves as an
example of how middle-class Amerka was missing the point by not seeing that "it" was
under their noses al1 the tirne; that happiness could be found by simply not being
cornplacent. Nicosia expands on this in his definition of "it": "E was their term for the
meaning and happiness most people spent a lifetime seeking, but which was available to
anyone who just stayed in touch with his own consciousness. One could only find & by coasting nom moment to moment with the flux of the mllid. & represented the dissolution of time and the immediate expenence of immortality" (247). In On the Road,
Monarty realizes, however, that relying on one's consciousness leaves most feeling far too insecure: 'Iheir souk really won? be at rest at peace udess they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with if which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too womes them no end" (208-09). Sec*, of course, has the advantages of a home, money, and material possessions, but to Cassady and the jazz musicians, it was not enough to Lure them away fiom searching at any cost for the Oliver 7 1
unsullied experïence of joy. Kerouac understood that this joy was what the United States
promised them, and On the Road acts as a testament to this search-
The fear of takuig risks represented the limitations of the United States to Cassady
and Kerouac, but they both knew that some-like the jazz musicians they enjoyed--were
ready for any test the country put forth for them. In the foilowing passage fkom On the
Road, the reader encounters jazz musicians not only struggling with themselves, but also
with the very developrnent of their music. Here the musicians attempt to play after the
piano Legend George Shearing (who, although British, contributed much, particularly
during the early stages of his career, to the lexicon of modem jazz):
Something would corne of it yet. There's always more, a little Mer--it
never ends. They sought to find new phrases after Shearing's
explorations; they tried hard. They writhed and twisted and blew. Every
now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that
would someday be the only tune in the world and wodd raise men's souls
to joy. They found it, they lost, they wrestled for if they found it again,
they laughed, they moaned-and Dean sweated at the table and told them
to go, go, go. (241)
For the musicians, and if Cassady is any indication, for the audience, the development of jazz is a serious and heart-felt endeavour, nof as Adorno argues, a systematic senes of musical tricks. Adorno calls such experimentation a myth, a façade. He thinks jazz as a genre can be confined to a limited amount of simple variations on a basic theme. If
Adorno is correct, these musicians are simply nIling the book of jazz variations, but-and this is what both Baldwin and Kerouac find important-they do so unconsciously; their attempts are made with integrity and sincerity (it was to many what defined their lives).
As the musicians believe in the power of their art form, the audience believes in the music-and musicians. It gives all-the musician, the audience, and the writer-hope.
And hope, in all its validity, is predicated upon not knowing al1 the facts, be it about your music, your community, or your country. Just as the jazz musician rnight be romantic to think that he or she can invent a new sound, so is the Afiican American who thinks she cmtranscend oppression-and so are the Beats who think they can reinvent the Unites
States. Although al1 these gods are unrealistic, the struggle to achieve them results in smalier accomplishments. Compared to the complacency of those who cling to whatever security they possess, then, the struggle of these three groups deserves to be celebrated, for it brings them one step closer to their ideals.
On the Road is perhaps the most famous Beat writing to discuss jazz, but a lesser- hown novel The Horn, by John ClelIon Holmes, certainly provides the most extensive
Beat examination of the musical form. Holmes writes the story of a tenor saxophonist,
Edgar Pool, who strives to create that next sound in jazz, and in doing so, loses his identity in that sound. Whereas in On the Road the reader encounters, for the most part, the joys that accompany living a beat me, the reader of The Hom encounters the rnisery that surrounds fleeting moments of success.
The Hom (1958) was pubfished one year der On the Road, and as Holmes says,
"got respectable reviews, and slowly slipped fiom sight" (Preface, The Horn). Much the same could be said for his fint novel, Go. but for the fact that it holds the distinction of being the first novel of the Beat Generation. Although Holmes is not ofien remembered Oliver 73
in the same Company as Kerouac and Ginsberg, he was very much part of the close-knit
Beat community.
It is relevant to note that, in particular, he and Kerouac were extremely close
fiends throughout the late-forties and the mes; Nicosia describes him as Kerouac's
"blood brother" (223), and they continually confided in each other about their writing.
They also appear in each other's fiction: in Go, Kerouac is Gene Pasternak; in On the
Road, Holmes is Tom Saybrook, "a sad, handsome feliow, sweet, generous, and
amenable; oniy once in a while he suddenly has fits of depression and rushes off without
saying a word to anyone" (125). This is not to Say, however, that they did not have their
differences, mostly over Wnting-although Jack did also have an affair with Holmes'
wife, Marian (Nicosia 35 1).
Since they, like most of the Beats, were interested in describing the life they
immediately expenenced, both attempted to form some sort of agreement over who could
write about what. Nicosia gives an example of the diEculty they faced writing of the
same events: "One of the problems they had discussing . .. On the Road was due to the
fact that Holmes had dealt with many of the same events in his own novel [Go] and had
corne to a different, generally more moralistic, understanding of hem" (348). This
conflict was heightened by Kerouac's passion for jazz. In fact, at one point while writing
On the Road, Kerouac begins thinking of a jazz novel: "Amongst Jack's burgeoning plans was a novel about jazz called 'Hom.' By contrast with the 'spontaneous unartificed too-pure too-raw criticizable "Road,"' he intended to give 'Hom' a fomd structure."
(Nicosia 353). Consequently, Kerouac was not happy that Holmes wanted to write a jazz Oliver 74
novel (aiso with a forma3 structure), but they did corne to an-at the least tacit-
agreement:
Hohes seemed to be treading on ground Jack had staked out for a
proposed novel called "Hold Your Hom High" (which he now thought to
cal1 "Blow Baby Blow") [and formerly just "Hom"]. Jack felt John was
breaking an agreement he had made to let Jack do the history of jazz.
More disturbing was Holmes' intention to use a story about Biilie and
Lester that Jack had told him. Still, Jack thought it possible for both of
them to do jazz novels, as long as Holmes dealt chiefly with jazz as a
social phenomenori, leaving Jack the spiritual aspects: the c'mystery" of
'Tazz charactersYyinteracting, and the evolution f?om joyous to cool.
(Nicosia 4 12)
And this is where the main distinction between the two writers lies: Kerouac relished the
experïence of jazz, whereas Holmes, although a fan of jazz, concentrated on its cultural
significance. Whiie On the Road offers many ecstatic jazz performances, The Hom
neglects this ecstasy to portray the underside of the jazz musician's Hie. In fact, Nicosia
calls Holmes "a creator of avant-garde allegorical fiction" (225)' and, as we will see, The
Hom is just that.
This is not to Say, however, that Kerouac and Holmes did not envision the same
heroes for the United States, but they chose to &te about them differently. Nicosia points out that, "As Jack and Holmes envisioned him, the great Amencan of the future would be 'the hitchhiking Negro sainty--anapotheosis of the Arnericans ctmently most despised. It was the beat-down Amencans who put the rnost effort into the search for Iove . . ." (253)- Although Holmes decided to concentrate on the negative side of the jazz
musician's He, he does it to reinforce the jazz musician's hero status. In On the Road,
Kerouac rarely moves beyond the jazz performance (or recording) when speaking of jazz
musicians, and it is easy to believe that the jazz musician leads an easy Me of wild
perEonnances in fiont of energetic crowds. In The Hom, on the other hand, the reader
sees that, outside the performances, life can be a beat one devoid of hope; therefore it is
dl the more remarkable that the jazz musician continually struggles to create a new sound
for him or her self and for the audience.
Kerouac concentrates most on the difficulties of living a beat Iife in his chronicles
of Cassady (who, of course, is the hero figure of the novel). Cassady nuis fkom the Iaw, has little or no money, has very few Mends, and is rejected by his family. Holmes appreciated the plight of Cassady (and understood Cassady and the jazz musician's common ties):
Like Jack, John had been strongly af5ected by Neal's lifelong joy ride. In
his notes for a narrative cailed "The Mernoon of a Tenor-man" pefirst
chapter of The Horn], Holmes tried to define what Neal sought-and what
bop musicians seemed to seek in almost the same way-as "the Kirillovian
[sic] moment of immersion in the It." nie allusion was to ~osto~evs~~'s
character Kirilov, who craved a single meaningful moment, and Einally
traded his life for one in the act of suicide. HoImes and Kerouac were
both attempting to deal with the post-war cornmunity of writers, artists,
musicians, jazz bds,junkies, and street people, who shared (in Holrnes'
words) c'precious connections as though Iife were a continual emergency Oliver 76
situation, and they allies in a commtin cause." In addition, bey both
tapped the reservoir of "visions" that attend lives of spultual tonnent; but
Jack's mystical temperament always gave him an edge in understanding
the visionary experience, as distinct from merely reporting it- (Nicosia
298)
Kerouac, equipped with prodigious wrïting talent, excels at describing the jazz performance as a visiomry experience. Holmes, certainly a lesser talent, nonetheless offers a more complex picture of the jazz musician as beat.
Moreover, while Kerouac offers jazz music as a backdrop to the United States through which he travels, Holmes spends considerable time establishing jazz music's signifïcance for the United States. Whereas Kerouac uses jazz to highlight the antics of
Cassady and Company, Hoimes foregrounds jazz to aid his discussion of the plight of his countryfryhdeed, The Hom finds its genesis in Holmes7fkm grasp of jazz in the United
States:
Yet at this point Holmes may have realized more fidly than Kerouac the
stakes nding on jazz and jazzlike art. Writing to Jack in February 3, 1950,
he expressed the cosmic potentiality of the tenor player's odyssey as <'the
trek of the American across his wastes. On all sides fie the dangers of the
journey : police, temerity, wildness, spiritual impoverishment. Ahead lies
what? Some intoxicative moment of fruition, some undefinable phrase or
note or tone that will be hit, will be hit, wiU be hit! . . .Al1 he knows is
that something speaks within him and he has been bestowed with-the
mechanics of prophecy. The tenor-man swings on and on in a vaccuum Oliver 77
M. He is thoroughly self-indulgent, but he threatens at any moment to
Save the rest of us with his eamest efforts of grace." (Nicosia 298)
The Hom, in many ways, is a challenge to the United States to recognize the underdog
heroes who the American ethos both makes and breaks-just as On the Road is in its
depiction of Cassady. The difference is that Holmes chooses to concentrate on the jazz
musicians while Ieaving the Beat community in the background. Holmes says of The
Hom: "1 had been in a seethe of excitement during its composition, discoverhg that the quintessential American artist was the black jazz musician, discovering as well my own limited adequacies to deal with black experience and black music, yet deciding, nevertheless and early on, to go with my love for both, and let the flaws jus* themselves by my passion and sincerity" (Preface). As I will discuss, The Hom goes to great lengths to make White America recognize the jazz musician as hero, while at the same time attempting to portray the jazz world in al1 its complexity. Wntùig of the jazz world fkom the outside, Hohes faces a formidable task, and, as will be seen, he does not escape romanticizing this world. Ironically, written f%omoutside the jazz world, Holmes' novel remains consistent with the Beat tendency to romanticize the United States' marginalized to in tuni validate the marginalized Beat community.
In The Hom, Holmes tries to convince the reader to see the jazz musician as an ideal American artist. In tems of structure, he links Iegendary jazz musicians with the then canon of American writers. Nicosia notes:
On May 28, Holmes wrote Jack that he was beginning work on the jazz
novel he'd fmt sketched out in early 1950, "The Aftemoon of a Tenor-
Man." His conception of the book had become much more ambitious. Stretching the time span to inclilde a night in the clubs, he planned to base
characters on aii the jazz stars of the tïme. Each would also represent a
certain nineteenth-century Amencan writer. The Charlie Parker figure
would typie the brash, obsessed brilliance of Melville; the Billie Holiday
figure would suggest a damned Emiiy Dickenson, and so forth. The novel
wodd also contain supemumeraries like Jerry Newman, Seymour Wyse,
Jack, and John. Hohes' thesis, however, was unchanged fkom the eady
notes he had sent Jack; it was matjazz musicians most perfectly
epitomize the sorry, and often fabuious, condition of the artist in
Amenca." (4 12)
Creating such links, Holmes establishes a connection between celebrated Amencan
arîists and current jazz musicians (fictionalized, of course, in The Hom). Such a
connection is an avenue for the reader to access a world of ecanAmencan jazz
musicians that would not only have been foreign, but also considered forbidden and
dangerous.
HoImes' use of American writers to introduce the American jazz.musicians is
similar to Baldwin's use of the respectable, middle-class brother as a narrator to introduce his jazz-playing brother, Sonny. In both cases the writers have decided to use a mediation device (for Baldwin, the brother, for Holmes, the American writers) to introduce a world to the reader that they hope to celebrate. Although jazz hardly seems a threatening subject matter now, in 1950s Amenca jazz was considered by many to exist aiongside such criminal activities as drugs and violence. Moreover, since jazz was predominantly an Afncan American form of expression, it existed as a taboo for Oliver 79 respectable White Arnenca. Consequently, both Holmes and Baldwin are very carefül in how they introduce jazz into their narratives, for both, of course, hope the reader to enter their respective jazz worlds and sympathize with the jazz musician's plight- More than sympathize with him, they both hope that, by the end of the narrative, the reader wiI1 see the jazz rnusician as a hero,
The success that each writer meets with in the use of his respective mediation device is where the two differ. Baldwin makes the brother integral to the very telling of the story, thereby encouraging the reader to "warrn up" to the jazz musician just as the brother does. Consequently, the reader has the duration of the narrative to accept slowly, like the brother, Sonny's music career as a legitimate one. Holmes, on the other hand, ody uses a quotation fiom an American author to introduce each jazz musician's respective section. These epigraphs, unfortunately, only hction on a superficiai level.
After one reads the quotation, there is litiie within the section to luik duectly the musician to the author quoted. Consequently, the reader forgets to whom the musician is comected and faces the jazz world Holmes describes without any devices to link it to the
Amencan culture farniliar to the middle-class reader. Holmes has even admitted in the
Preface to the novel that the epigraphs were "added with some trepidation derthe fact"
Moreover, the central character, Edgar Pool, is not introduced through an American author until the second-last section of the novel--at which point the reader has read suEcient information about hun to guess that he will be lhked to Edgar Allen Poe.
The reader knows so much about Pool, however, because of a second mediation device utilized by Holmes: Pool's life is told through the self-contained sections of five other jazz musicians-in which they each give their individual recoIIections. Each of Oliver 80
these recollections is caIled a "'chorus-" 'Riffs" divide the recollections and update the
plot-Pool's progress through one long day. The jazz terminology used to divide the
novel into parts works oniy on the same superficial level as the epigraphs for each
section, but the recollections effectively contrast Edgar's situation with those who
surround him. None of these musicians, although they may have flirted with it, have led
the beat life to the extreme that Pool has- At the sarne tirne, none have been able to equal
his musical breakthroughs, either. They dl-provide a perspective that is a step Mer
away from the bnnk upon which Edgar seems so often to teeter. These musicians are
extremely usefùi because they allow the reader to see a very rational jazz world and to
identi& with the reasonable perspectives they possess (one rnight argue they are d too
reasonable; that Holmes' own voice often speaks through them).
Beyond their use as a mediation device, the musicians' individual recollections of
Pool al1 serve to establish his complexity. While their recolections may not conflict with
each other, they do reveal several sides to Pool's personality. Consequently, the reader,
who rnight see the jazz musician only as a one-dimensional stereotype, is forced to
concede Pool's humanity. At the same tirne, Pool, like Cassady, is a difficult person to tolerkte, for his persoILality is, at best, abrasive. As each musician comes to terms with
Pool, much as Kerouac comes to tems with Cassady, the reader is able to see not only
Pool's humanity, but also his dignity as a person and his potential to be a hero to those around hïm.
In The Hom, Holmes disguises the jazz musicians by giving them false names and partly fictional backgrounds. Essentially, the novel describes the jazz community directly surrounding the fictional Edgar Po~l-~~outof whose obsession with his sound the Oliver 8 1
irreverent furor of bop had come" (35)-and of course concentrates on Pool himself. This
jazz world contains the same bop musician-heroes, dthough fictionalized, that Kerouac
describes in On the Road. Indeed, one passage of On the Road offers an efficient
synopsis of the jazz colll~unityHolmes details:
Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother's woodshed in Kansas
City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days,
coming out to watch the old swinghg Basie and Benny Moten band that
had Hot Lips Page and the rest--Charlie Parker leaving home and coming
to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonious Monk and madder Gillespie--
Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in
a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also f?om
KC, that gloomy, saintly god in whom the history of jazz was wrapped;
for when he held his hom high and horizontal fiom bis mouth he blew the
greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched-out,
his hom came down halfway; till it finally fell al1 the way and today as he
wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can't feel the sidewalks of his life
his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy
getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night. (240)
From this passage, the reader sees that both Kerouac and Holmes idolized the same group of American musicians. While Monk and Gillespie appear in the novel partly- fictionalized (dong with Billie Holiday), Edgar Pool is an amalgamation of both Parker
(woodshedding in Kansas City) and Young (holding the sax high and horizontal), fitting both descriptions that Kerouac offers above- Oliver 82
Nicosia points out that "Many of bop's innovators were extremely tormented men
and died early deaths. In this case, the energy to explore the inexhaustible reaches of soul
seems to have corne, in large part, fkom equally inexhaustible stores of anguish" (125).
The saxophone was a dominant force in bop because it was capable of such a wide array
of sounds suitable for the experimentation of bop. Saxophonists, then, such as Parker and
Young, both tormented men, provided an ideal mode1 for Holmes to use for his own jazz-
musician hero, Edgar Pool. Holmes reveals that the musical fenror the reader so ofien
encounters in On the Road is accompanied by ovenvhelming beat anguish. As 1 will
show with Pool, it takes an insatiable hunger to achieve (and experience) these musical
"highs" while aiso enduring the "beat lows."
The opening of The Hom is a recollection of the night before, when Edgar Pool, a
bop legend, is "cut" by a new saxophone player, Walden. "The Hom," as he is simply
Iaiown, has supplied the most experimental sound bop has ever hown. This night,
however, he is confkonted by a younger musician, who has learned everything he hows
fiom the Horn, but who has also experimented with the sound in a manner unbeknownst
even to the Horn. Now "officially" the fallen jazz legend, the Hom decides he must
reinvent his sound and thereby bis status. He intends to return fkom New York to his
home of Kansas City and ''woodshed," a process in which the jazz musician retreats fiom
the jazz community to practice alone in search of the concrete musical expression of an
abstract, inner sound. Holrnes describes this process as "the lonesome discoveries with which a man becomes hself--that harrowing exile in the soul that jazzmen know as
'woodshedding' . . ." (Hom 59). TU undergo this exile, the Horn must raise the funds for a bus ticket to Kansas City. As a beat musician, he only sustains hirnself day-to-day, so he must ask, beg, and con the money fiom aII the people he knows (just as Cassady does
in On the Road). In the course of one day, we learn about the Horn through this meager
quest.
The leader learns immediately that the Hom stands apart fiom the comrnon:
"There are men who stir the imagination deeply and uncomfortably, around whom swirl
unplaceable discontents, men self-damned to difference, and Edgar Pool was one of
these" (6). As the detached artist, Edgar attempts in fact to stand apart Tom everyone,
"for like great poets and great sinners and all the men who live by an ideal or an illusion,
that same sornething about him disowned their part of Me, as if he had been spoiled for it
by a vision they codd not understand" (23). Being such a visionary, he is "straight,
embittered, but full of his peculiar isolated tmWY((92). Regardless of how far he distances himself fiom his fellow musicians, he has a fhm relationship with them as the originator of the bop they al1 play; he is an ccironicalfather" (39), cceverybody'sevil father " (3 5)--a "Black Angel" (1 6).
The Hom became a legend because of his bop innovations. There is a universal respect for him by ail îhe musicians the readers meet, because they know that he played bop before they codd even imagine it. But by the time we meet him, the jazz commmity has appropriated his bop lexicon, and he no longer represents 'Yhe cutting edge." Instead, the Hom represents the last Iink to a jazz sound that has becorne more retrospective than vital. Holmes provides a biblical metaphor to describe the Hom's statu in the jazz community of the novel:
if jazz was a kind of growing OLd Testament of the Negro race-and of aLI
lost tribes in Arnenca, too-a testament being ettennight after night by Oliver 84
unhown, vagrant poets on the spot . . .then Edgar had once been a sort of
Genesis, as inevitable and irreducible as the beghîngs of thüigs; but
now, mincing, chewing, flabby, he sounded the bittersweet note of
Ecclesiastes, ironical in his confoundment. (1 1)
The Hom once rnaintained a vital role shaping the puise of ficanAmerican musical expression, but oîher musicians al1 too quickly surpassed his sound, leaving him with much pride, but little musical purpose. While it may be natural to question why he continues to play after his popularity passed, one must understand that playing jazz defined the Hom's life--and his identity. It is his unstoppable drive that Ieads him to discover bop-a. to continue blowing his sound împervious to the world around him and even to his own limitations:
His sound was disamiingly feeble, eamest, but meant to prove, by some
inmost private irony, that he was, if he so chose, a timeless man. The
limpid pathos of his Song was somehow a denial of the past, a denial of
any power over him but his peculiar self-abusive ability. . - .he would be a
slave to nothing, not even the genius inside him. His obsession was his
last secret, the note he carefully never blew. (14)
If the Hom were to understand how the jazz community truly sees hun, or if he were to gain an objective view of himself, he would be devastated by the fact that his sound, and therefore bis identity, has become dated. Avoiding such self-knowledge, the Hom continues to blindly consider himself, full of pride, as the innovator he once was.
To his credit, the Hom approaches his jazz playing with humility, asking for nothhg fkom Iife but to play: "He hung on through fashions, he played his way when no one Oliver 85 cared, and made money as he could, and never argued" (7). As jazz is the Hom's one successfül endeavour in me, he cannot envision abandoning it, nor can he abandon his identity as a timeless individual that he has created for himself. The Horn sums his ethos up in his own words, "Why? Why do 1 got to stop?" (195). Of course, he does not have to stop, but the longer he denies the reaiity of his position, the further he moves away
£rom understanding who he is.
The irony of the Horn's plight during the course of the novel is that he is the only one who does not realize--at least until moments before his death-that he is not Gmeless, nor is his sound. As the characters learn of his plan to return to Kansas City to woodshed, however, they cannot deny hun the possibility that he might achieve his goal; as his former lover Geordie muses, "Hehad no limitts; there was nothing which the outrage couldn't do. It codd even take him home" (1 12). While the possibility exists, it is not one that the jazz players he asks for money can believe in. One such musician,
Wing Redburn, considers the Hom's situation:
Edgar had been a doomed hero who had persisted beyond his drama to
becorne absurd. But one thing does not change the other, and alf men fa11
fiom drama into melodrama; and . . .he realized that Edgar was still out
in the world while the night moved off the Atlantic over them all; and
though he knew things as dark as Edgar now, and knew beyond them too,
still a man's work, his blind pursuit of the single truth, cannot be
destroyed, even by himself. And Edgar, no matter what had happened
since, had chased it selflessly once. (48) The Horn, through sheer wïil, has gained the respect of the jazz co-unity, but his self- assurance has pushed everyone so far away that he exists only "out in the world," even in his tirne of greatest need. The Horn's predicament is best summed up in the line, "he should have been pimbut somehow, damnably, was net" (82).
To understand the Hom's predicament, one mut understand how he made jazz his life. At the beghuing of the novel, Holmes describes Walden-the heir apparent to the
Horn's jazz throne--and his relationship to the saxophone: "To Walden the saxophone was, at once, his key to the worId in which he found himself, and the way by which that world was rendered impotent to brand him either failure or madman or Negro or saint"
(5). Later in the novel we find that the Homsees the saxophone also as the key to his identity. When he is only a teenager in Kansas City, before he can play more than one
Song, he defiantly, and naively, states to his father, Tmgonna play horn, and that ain't white or colored" (180). This transcendence is the key to understanding the Hom, for he realizes when still young that the Çeedom the United States is willing to offer him cornes in iimited forms. He could be a respectable ficanArnerican, but such a distinction had a low ceiling of potential. Living such a life requires constantly adhering to a formal set of des--as Ellison's Invisible Man recognizes-and is only rewarded with a pre-defined fieedom (surely an oxymoron). The Hom wants to burst through this irnposed ceiling; he wants
to escape . . .the knowledge . . .that this was the best that you could hope
for . . .to escape . . .the inescapable knowIedge that you were what you
were circumscribed, and had attained some giddy zenith for your race, and
should be happy and complacent even supercilious (nunberless boys back home had envious dreams of you, remember); to escape into fieedom, any
kind of fieedom-or as Edgar said, gesturing sharply toward the fiont of the
train, Y'd rather ride coId and nothing back here, than warm and nigger up
there." (165)
And this is precisely what he does. The Hom sacrifices a respectable life for the beat life of an Afncan Amenca jazz musician, but he does so zealously and without hesitance, because he firmly believes it will set him fkee in the United States to enjoy ail that it has to offer. Like Cassady, he abandons the comforts of security to establish his own path in a country that supposedly supports such a pursuit.
The product of this trade-off, of course, is Edgar's music. He does not want to enjoy the freedom only afforded to the hitchhiker with nothing; he wants to taste the fieedom afforded to those who are successfbl and in demand by the public. Esmusic, which he fuels by his determination to achieve the "Amencan Dream" is, perhaps surprisingly, a success, and he is allowed to experience the potential that the United
States perennially promises. By the time he is able to experience it, however, it tums out that fÎeedom is not as simple as he once thought it was:
America does not give to a man commensurate to his talents. It despises
or it idolizes him. He is a dog or he is a god, and no man is ever really
either. Edgar experienced both positions in too short a time, and hding
that what had lost him jobs two years before ("Don't play that nightmare
music in my band!") attached disciples to him now, Çoze something in
hùn that would never thaw again. The very fickleness that made him the
one horn to everyone in those years seemed to shatter some idea of equity Oliver 88
that even Geordie had not dreamed was crucial to him. Irony overtook
him, and &ove bim on to play well and at the same time scom those who
listened, to mock them, and then himself, and fiaily even what he played.
(LOO)
In his quest for equality, the Hom finds that his success and subsequent freedom are at
the whim of curent tastes and fashions. Even in his realization that his music may not
Save him, the Hom does no t abandon if he simply treats it with an ironical distance!
Holmes never offers an explanation as to why the Horn does not fiee the music world, but the reader assumes that he carmot leave it--his determination to play has Ieft him able to do nothing else. Because of this, the Hom loces himseIf in his music; or it might be more appropriate to Say that he hides within the mask of his musical success.
He even admits to himself6'thatnobody knew him, and nobody had ever seen him, and he was a mask over a mask to them, and even he had not glirnpsed his own true face for years" (207). Sadly, the Hom's failure to achieve the absoIute fkeedom to which he aspires within the jazz world leads him to restnct himself through the masks he wears.
No longer believing that jazz will Save him, but also not able to escape it, the Hom, full of irony, loses the fieedom to be himself-the very fkeedom he initially sought.
Regardless of his success, or his sustaining status as a legend, the Hom is Mer embittered by the fact that, despite al1 his achievements, he is still only an AEcan
Amencan musician to the White Americans around him. Geordie, in fact, realizes that
"he was like a white man who had to keep recalling to himsetf, in bittemess and irony,
It is significant to note that Holmes does, to a certain extent, show the reader elements of the Hom's success in achieving the American dream, but this is done away fiom the main thmt of the narrative. Through the last day of the Horn's life, we know him as a broken and defeated man; it is only through a series of flashbacks that we are able to see his moments of success. Oliver 89
that he was not . .." (84). Of course, this is an evident fact to the reader, but young
Edgar, füll of hope, can ody believe that the music will set him fiee. Through the
success of his music, however, the Horn does offer himself and his audience the
possibiIity of fieedom. This is the extent of the jazz musician's role in On the Road,
where the jazz musician's only passion seems to be to "outblow" his previous night's
performance. The Horn, however, goes beyond the joy of performing to gamble his
identity on his musical success. Unfortunately, musical success does not, as the Hom
lem,necessarily equate with happiness.
While the Hom's knowledge of this fact lead to his sense of irony and bittemess--
and to the mask he wears-his musical success is not without value. Indeed, the Hom
would not have contributed to the birth of bop, he would not have given so many listeners
so much pleasure in listening to hirn, and he probably would not have seen and
experienced the United States as he did, if he had not chosen to be a musician. And perhaps at his most noble, the Horn used this success to allow others to find a piece of
fkeedorn as he had a generation before:
His buried years, his woodshed: the obsessed hours of listening in bars, in
deys, to records, always al1 alone, to someone whom now (because of
hun) everyone had fbrgotten, but who had then seemed to give a flawless
rhythm to the night; the added hours, snatched in evening fiom the dreary
days he paid the world for his obsession, in a Louisville warehouse and an
Omaha stockyard and a Baltimore elevator--the hours of getting to know
the beat as he (whoever it rnight have been-the current idol) knew it; the
Merhours, by now gigging with the local week-end bands, during which rank imitation finally gave way to knowing as the id01 knew, as
well as piaying as he played, until the other man's eeedom had fieed him,
and he could listen for himself. (2 14)
The Hom's problem, of course, is that he cannot let go of the musical success he has attained, even though he knows it has never allowed him to hdhis own fieedom.
Unlike Sonny, who seems content to use his music as a therapy for finding his own balance, the Hom desperately clings to his jazz fame, blindly hoping it will still be his saviour. And he continues to believe this after his fame finally abandons him, attempting a desperate joumey to his birthplace to rediscover his "sound."
His final attempt is paralleled by WaldeYs fïrst, who "did not understand, and lmew little of the concepts upon which men struggle to define their existence (although down in his heart waited a single note of music that he felt would shatter al1 discord into harmony) . . ." (1 6). The Horn has been looking for the sound that "would shatîer al1 discord into harmony" al1 his life, and he had found it for a time, but even it had not been able to sustain hirn. Al1 he had to remember it by was the irony that was impressed upon him by the struggle. Finally, as he nears death, the Hom realizes:
that his life and his work had betrayed him somewhere, long ago perhaps,
and he had gone on refbsing to see it, his pnde swelling Iike a boil around
the dark suspicion of the tmth, until there was nothing but the pride,
festering upon itself, to burst with sickening abruptness when an eamest
and respectfûl youth walden] stood up, and loving him, opposed him too,
because the truth belongs to no one. (213) The Horn, obsessed with having no limitations ïmposed upon hirn in the search for his
own truthyin fact distorts his own identity by refùsing to accept that limitations are inevitable.
Ultimately--and regardless of any musical accomplishments it af5ords the Hom- the reader is inclined to admire him for continuing to struggle against the inevitable, because it proves that his will cannot be subdued. Although it has become a trite motto, the United States owes much of its distinct culture to the simple phrase, 'Yhe pursuit of happiness." The Hom may harm himseif and others in his blind struggle to find this happiness, but it is a struggle that we cm identifi with, for happiness is an elusive goal that al1 struggle to attain The Hom as an individual, whose dying words still continue this ~truggle--~~Youbastards! you creeps! you squares! There's more, 1 know there's more!" (240)--acts as a symbol of this struggle, and his music acts as a symboI of his success.
As the Hom's world is defmed by jazz, so is his downfd. Since Holmes fictionalizes the post-war New York bop communityyan understanding of the musical sh& that occurred within this community is helpfùl to understanding the Hom's fd.
Although Adorno dismisses any significant changes in the sound of jazz, there is a distinguishable shift fiom the "hot" bop of Charlie Parker and Company and the cccooS' jazz of the likes of Miles Davis and Ahmad Jarnd. Whether or not this new form of jazz added anything to the jazz lexicon is another argument altogether, but it did cause a gap between many of the early bop musicians and the newer "cool" ones.' This is the gap that the Hom must bridge when attempting to play with the younger musicians, such as
' Lester Young was actually a pioneer of the cccooi"sound at the same time bop emerged-Holrnes seems to borrow more from his biopphy than his discography for The Hom. Oliver 92
Walden, in the novel, And this is the sound that the Horn wants to himself reinvent to
astonish these new players. In On the Koad, Kerouac gives a fitting description of the
shift between these two sounds: "At this tirne, 1947, bop was going like mad all over
America. The fellows at the Loop blew, but with a tired air, because bop was somewhere
between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and amther period that began with Miles
Davis" (14). The Hom does not get the opportunity to attempt to better this new sound
because of his death, leaving his true potential--at least as a musician-unknown, and
making a fitting legend for the annds of Arnerican music.
The musicians, as peers, are crucial to demgthe Hom's status within the world
of jazz, but so is his audience. Just as the musicians in The Horn are aware that a new
sound is emerging, the audience is as well. Adorno wodd never gant the audience so
much active choice, but it is clear in the novel that they play a large role to the Hom.
Nowhere is the importance of the audience more clear than in the session he sits in on during his last night: "'Sornebody,' he murmured desperately. 'KI had somebody to
listen, somebody who digs--Man, I'm used to playing for a mob. You can't work when there ain't nobodyy-he who had scomed the breathless and attentive crowds hanging on his merest note, in the giddy years, the dead years, giving them on& his backside then at which to gape, purposefûlly not playing well" (216). Aware that he had their support, the
Hom was allowed the luxu~y,during his peak years of fame, of ignoring his audience.
The reader suspects that this is partly the Hom's revenge on his audience, who hated the same music when he originally played it years before. Although the Hom's usual stance towards injustice is imny and bittemess, his hurt is obvious when he descnbes these early audiences to his piano player, Cleo: And anyway, you don't know what it's like when they hate you You
never heard 'em mble when you playing something they don't dig, and
makes 'em mad because it just don? bounce dong ricky-ticky, empty,
nothing . .. You never saw 'em shift around, al1 starting to nimble at the
same damn time, and hating you--and I mean c'Let's-rough-that-solemn-
nigger-up" kind of hate . . .Cause it ain't like that no more, there's too
many of you new cats, and enough words written now, and enough records
out, so they just walk away. But in my day they walked towards you
when they didn't dig, they walked towards you. . . . (148)
Experirnenting in a musical genre not yet estabrished, the Horn endures the audience's intolerance only to see younger musicians rest on the respect he has earned for jazz. To worsen the situation, the Hom, during his last gig, is again faced with a hostile audience.
They might not be violent, but they are certainly unsympathetic to the fact that he is having a Wcult tirne perfolming- And the Horn hdshimself back where he started, on stage and under scrutiny.
The audience of The Horn is portrayed more as consumers than as supporters, for their support is contingent on the pleasute the Hom offers them. In contrast to the supportive audience presented in "Sonny's Blues" or the idealized audience posited by
Murray, the Hom faces an audience that is ody supportive when he is in fashion.
Othewïse, they have no patience for his music or his sû-uggle. In his final night, the Hom begins to realize that the musician-audience relationship is a parasitic one, not a symbiotic one: Oliver 94
He had never cared before that a jazz musician was condemned to utter his
truth in the half dark of dangerous, thronged rooms where everyone's
breath tasted of alcohol and cigarettes, and everyone left something of the
day behind him at the door. But suddeniy he saw that he had spent his life
like a moody fugitive among sensation hunters, enunciating what seemed
to him just then (because he could no longer remember how it went) a rare
and holy truth in the pits of hell. (200-01)
The audience does not support hirn in his ascent, nor his climax, so it is no surprise that they are not forgiving in his descent--perhaps the time when any hero needs his onlookers the most. As he performs for the last tirne, the Horn has diffi.culty staying conscious, let alone playing, but he sees that the audience demands the same level of satisfaction: "He had given them a vision once, and they expected him to have it stiil, Like a birthmark or a scar that no amount of life effaces, and they would settle for nothùig less. He was a victim of his own past excellence" (200). Of course, the one thing the Hom needs at this point is sympathy--or at least understanding--and although he has played an active role in alienating his audience, even the casual onlookers of the bar, as we see in his last set, have no patience for any sound short of excellence.
Holmes draws a connection in The Hom between an unforgiving audience and an unforgiving Arnerican society. Uniike Adorno, who sees both artist and audience as manipuiated cogs in a machine, Holmes shows that the audience maintains the active role of either accepting or rejecting any performer who cornes onstage. Just as the audience refuses to acknowledge the human struggle of the artist in The Hom, the United States, to
Holmes and the Beats, refûsed to acknowledge the struggles of those looking to find their Oliver 95 own version of Amencan happiness. Similar to the artist who strives to communicate his or her unique representation of the world, the Beats strove to realize the diverse forms of happiness that the United States promised. Both the artist and the Beats were marginalized because of this search. The Beats were often described as "hip," which could aiso be read as "deviant," but to Kerouac, hip, like Beat, represented the celebration of society, not the destruction of it: "Hip to Jack was the quintessence of holy, the hrthest refinement in a civilized understanding of We. It meant showing the utmost kindness and consideration to one's fellow suiFerers in a wodd becoming progressively more flawed" (Nicosia 206). In The Hom, the audience cannot see the Hom as a fellow sufferer, but only as a product of fashion, which, depending on the tirne, they either celebrate or scom.
Of course, much of the apped of the jazz musician to the Beats was that he shared their beat-artist duality. The diversity of the jazz musician as a human being cannot be entirely realized through his performance of jazz. At the same the, the stereotype of the
Af55ca.n American in the 1950s was far less dynamic than that of the jazz musician in its view of his human potential. The Beats, deviants to much of the world in their writuig and in their public image, certauily could empathize with this ostracism. So it is no surprise, then, that the United States becomes the Hom's antagonist in the novel--fiom bis fist artistic desire to his final failure. Holmes offers the foundation of this struggle in the following passage: ccAmerica. . .has always been bigger than any man, forcinp hirn to think, to imagine, to create, just to keep fiom drowning in sheer insentient nature, and thaï has made Americans slaves to rhetoric, abstraction and idealism, in an effort to match the manless Rockies always looming in the corner of their eyes" (241). The artist, Oliver 96
trying to match the United States, often becomes the marginalized "beat," who sacrifices
a cornfortable Iife for one of many ideals. Such a path, although perhaps bringing one closer to the ideal fkeedom that the country's spirit is founded upon, will never match the potential that the United States offers. Consequently, ''America, as ody they knew it who had wandered Iike fûrtive minnesingers across its billboard wastes to the screaming distances, turned half a man sour, hard-bitten, barren, but awakened a grieving hunger in his heart thereby" (19). In other words, the artistic journey will never be an easy one; as the Hom says of the second-hand instrument aIl beat musicians play, "Man, that hom was always somebody else's hom before, who got tired, or beaf or quit, or dropped dead holding it" (146).
The Hom, having nothing to show for his music other than years of memory, knows well that even his horn is a temporary asset. He feels, however, that the United
States does not stop there; it continues to push the artist until she has nothing lefk to give.
At one point in the novel, in frustration, he actudy lurches out directly at the United
States: "But 1 played the music for you, you wild old Bitch, didn't I? 1blew the tmth for you sometimes, didn't I? . . . Why do you have to destroy something to create something here! Why! And it's always yourself, it7salways m!" (225-26). Of course, the United
States, being bigger than any one artist, is always going to win this battle. While this may be inevitable, the Beats stress the importance of showing compassion towards the artist in this situation. Such an act may not upset the system, but it would at least recognize the hurnanity of the individual caught in the struggle.
More than just an artist, the Horn is an AfEcan Amencan male, and a beat jazz musician at that. Holmes argues, however, that this an inconsequential fact, for the Oliver 97
Horn's humanity is equal to the reader's. Cleo, the Horn's piano player, states in the fial
pages (although the reader quickly realizes that Hoimes is philosophiPng through the thin
veil of Cleo's surprisingly introspective voice):
And you will have another hero soon, Arnenca, to join the John Browns,
Houstons, Poes. What matter that he was black in sou1 and skin and that
sometimes he hated you and that, like dlyour heroes, he fell so far? A
man is dead, the Iast drained, the last girl loved, the last hom 10% and
he is dead too young. You will have another hero, and it does not matter if
the way you think of him is not the way he was. He will join the others
who obsess us still. . . - (242)
Holmes may understand that a hero transcends, in some ways, the descriptive abilities of the writer, but he does attempt to show the scope of the hero 's diversity. Holmes, who has already developed the diversity of the Hom's character, correctly points out that it is not the Hom's ethnicity, but his passion and complexity of character that make him a hero. Furthemore, Holmes astutely shows that because he is a hero, neither the writer nor the audience wili ever be able to capture perfectly his identity, regardless of our efforts.
The -cm Amencan jazz musician of the 1940s, having little to lose and everything to gain, represented an excellent figure for Holmes to dramatize. Using this character2Holmes is able to show effectively the cycle of the Amencan who starts with nothing, attempts to gain everything, but who ultimately ends up at the same point at which he or she began. Holmes sees this as a cycle that al1 Arnencans are capable of experïencing, and ultimately he celebrates it. Commenting on the Hom's saxophone, finally resting in a pawnshop, Cleo thinks: Oliver 98
No- Leave it there. For somewhere at the suburb end of a subway line,
where the wet streets glisten in the fauit street lights, a gawky, awkward
youth, black or white (or something in between), walks in a fonnless
discontent, dreaming a new dream, hoping a new hope, loving a new love;
and perhaps tomorrow he will begin his arduous woodshed, and (rank and
living in armpit and in crotch) will give up his hoarded money, and go out
carrying the hom, to fashion on it a new song-a merchorus of the one
continuing song-as he, too, progresses inevitably down his own bleak
street, toward his own blank wall, where al1 the music ends; for only the
Song goes on, continually creating the need to create it anew. (243)
The Horn cannot admit that his fame as a jazz musician has ended, for to do so would be
to relinquish his identity as an innovator. The reader, however, understands that no musician can maintain the endless song forever, but he or she can contribute to it. This cycle allows music to chronologically develop. Hoimes argues that, as the musical he continues, it should be opened to all those with artistic passion. This way, the dreams and hopes of the United States wïil be represented equally by al1 segments of its population.
Clearly, Hoimes envisions an arnalgamation of American people-in terms of artists and audience alike. That we should value the musician, whatever his background, just as we should value al1 Americans, whatever their background, is the moral of the story. It is how the United States, in turn, will take one srnall step toward becoming the fiee and equal country it promises to be. Oliver 99
In contrast to Cassady in On the Road, who maintains a positive disposition no
matter what predicament he hdshimself, the Hom is ironic, embittered, and downright
grouchy for most of the novel. Of course, this is understandable, considering the Me he
has Ied. Unlike Kerouac, who chooses to show the jazz musician in his moments of
ecstatic fieedom onstage, Holmes gives us the underside of these moments of joy. In this
respect, Holmes certainly has a better grasp on the plight of a jazz musician, for he is not
so naïve as to think that the Afiican American is inherently happy within the situation in
which he nnds himself. Nevertheless Holmes, separate from the Afkican Amencan jazz
community, uses the Hom as a prop to celebrate the American artistic struggle--even in
its most bleak scenario. By using the Horn as such a symbol, he cannot help but
romanticize this stniggle by attempting to paralle1 it with the struggle of every American artist. Each artist encounters a unique environment of supports and obstacIes; to compare each artist as a hero-figure is to oversimplify the situation.
Although Holmes clearly supports the Hom's plight, he suggests an even more romantic solution to the Hom's difficulties toward the end of the novel. The last testimonial the reader encounters is fiom the Hom's boyhood friend, Metro Myland.
Metro is also a tenor saxophone player, but unlike the Hom, lie is a "Yawper in wild
Harlem bars" (1 52); "Two men less alike could never be bagined" (156). Metro, in contrast to the Hom, MllsKerouac's image of the joyous, life-afEming jazz prophef as is witnessed in the performance he gives:
searching for . . . the few right notes that would distill everything the
music was to him . . . then blowing "zonk, zon.zonS., zonk!" with all
the joy-ful certainty of the discovery, knowing that was it, feeling the Oliver 100
rightness of it in himsew, and in the rhythm that quickened behind him,
and the throng that yelled "Ah-h-h!" in fiont, and so roaring out "zonk!
zonk! zo*! zonk!" on top of the careening dms, like a chant wrenched
fiom a mouth out of which al1 the thwarted joy of the body pours at once--
crude as the flesh most naturally is when the mind lets go; loud, wanton
and repetitive the way a chant mut be--so that the crowd stared,
hypnotized, fearfùl, aghast, lest he suddenly fa11 to his knees . . .
announcing with his wild insistent "zonk!" that only beyond such breaking
loose would al1 things finally be reconciled, howling his idiot-tmths like
the fïrst prophet of joy who dared to Say there was no sin; and already a
hundred pairs of feet pounded in terrified unison that paralyzed the air,
thighs shivering, breasts shaking, eyes popping, and mouths gasped open
in wild continuous "Ah-h-h!" . . .and then, of course, he did go down, as
someone shouted "Ohyes! Ohyes!" right there in the dust, right down on
separated knees, without losing one piercing "~onk!~~-faceall puckered in
a crazy fist around the gleaming mouthpiece, as if he rnerely held it and it
played itself . . .something in Jbietro gave up, something capable of pride
or weariness or doubt. . . . (154-55)
Metro, playing ''where joy was the only reason that you raised your hom" (157), stands in stark opposition to the Hom "enunciating . . . [a] holy truth in the pits of hell" (20 1).
Clearly, Metro is happy to play tirelessly every night the same rudïmentary somd, and the people seem genuinely happy to hear it. Oliver 10 1
Although Metro's music differs fkom Sonny's, who plays an introspective jazz
similar to the Hom's, his humility is the same. Mer his expenence with heroin, So~y
returns to his roots to play in a Harlem bar in fiont of a farnily-like audience. Metro has
never left Harlem with hopes of hding fieedom tiilough success in the jazz world;
instead he has found his own happiness in the knowledge that "dwas one, pride or
humility; and that the only sacrament was Iife, the very breath itself. And just because of
this, Metro's God laughed, Metro's God loved; and Metro took his horn into his mouth
to Say in Song, as he said it every night, his single, simple hnith: Go, and do thou likewise" (188). At the same time, "he was aware of the rivalries and antagonisms that sometimes erupted among those who played a more ambitious jazz than his-the bitter, fluctuating prejudices (grown out of prejudice to begin with) that often marked the scramble to make a living and a reputation . . ." (1 57), but for this precise reason "he kept to the Harlem dance halls, and the gaudy roaxing bars . . ." (157).
The Horn, pride as his aibatross, must succeed at any cost, regardless of the price he pays, be it irony, bittemess, isolation, unhappiness, or ultimately death. While Holmes could consider the Hom's pnde with the same contempt that Cassady holds towards the insecurities and fears that force people to lead pre-fabricated lives, Holmes instead shows that, working fiom the margins, it is difEcult not to covet the fieedom that you are inherently denied. The Horn wmts the fieedom to be himself as an Afncan Arnerican and as an artist anywhere he goes in the United States, and he is ready to sacrifice everything-including any type of compromised happiness-to find this specific and unrestricted happiness. Metro, of course, restricts himself to his own community, within the walls of which he knows he cm both produce and expenencejoy. Both musicians lead beat lives, caring for little but the happiness they will find through music they play;
living this life, the Hom is more ambitious, while Metro is more successfûl.
A question still lurks: is it appropriate to celebrate both types of hero? Ambition
seems necessary to any pursuit of the American dream, so it is unfair to fault the Hom for
reaching too far and failing. His goal is noble, and he is prepared throughout his adult
life to lead a beat life to attain it. And perhaps for an occasional moment he was able to
experïence a feeling of fieedom only few in his position had expenenced before.
Furthermore, although the Hom dies trying to be the timeless artist, many jazz musicians have reinvented their sound and become timeless doing so--MïIes Davis is the most obvious example. Furthermore, th& to the work of many progressive groups, Beats included, the United States has improved, if only to a smaU degree, in treating dl people equally. While absolute fieedom does seem impossible, constant struggles, successful or not, have allowed for the progress that has occurred.
At the same tirne, an alarming number of jazz musicians died-often of heroin addiction--in the stniggle to find Eeedom. The loss of so much talent seems hardly worth its elusive goal. It seems better to hda community with which one is cordortable and revel within it--as Metro does. This establishment of a community, of course, is the impetus behd the Beat community itself. The Beats celebrated the marginalized not only because these people found their own fieedorn, but also because they did not have to live up to the demands of conventional society. Being beat, one could shrug off al1 responsibility for a personal happiness. One might not possess anything, but one would not have any duties to fülfill either. This vÏew defines the ethos of the hobo, another figure greatly admired by the Beats. Oliver 1O3
The irony is that, in many ways, the Beat co~nmunity,comprised of young and
intelligent White Arnerïcans, represented the fiture of the United States. Celebrating
such figures as the hobo and the jazz musician, they in effect avoided taking on the task
of confkonting the American power system they despised When the Beats finally did
become successfüi in their writing, as the Hom does with his music, many had a difficult
tirne functioning under the spotlight of fame. Kerouac, particdarly, was devastated by it,
and it only worsened his alcoholism and drug addiction. And, at least at the time, the terni
"Beat" became synonymous with "deviant"--with al1 its negative connotations. This is a
sad fact, considering how hard Beats like Holnies and Kerouac attempted to show the
United States that the so-called deviant was often one of the United States' most noble
citizens.
It is no surprise, then, that The Hom, published during the ensuing media fienzy
of On the Road's release, wavers between celebrating the Hom and celebrating Metro.
The Hom, in dl his unhappiness, is nonetheless romantic for pursuing such an abstract
struggle, but he at least leam to fight his battle as an adult and not to rely on a childlike joy to sustain himself. Metro, on the other hand, like the Beat community, relies on this same joy to celebrate his identity and the identities of those around him. One senses that he, like the Beats, would celebrate any American, regardless of his or her ethnicity or social position, if that person possessed this same joy.
If Metro were the hero of The Hom, Holmes' insertion of White "Beats" at two key points in the novel is understandable. Since the Hom is the hero, however, it is initidly baffling. The fnst appearance occurs while the Hom is in a drunken stupor on the
Street with his piano player, Cleo. He is entirely caught up in his own plight when he Oliver 1O4
sees two young White Americans listening to records and says, immediately and
enthusiasticalIy, "'But, hey, look!' he interrupted himself in a different voice, actually
painting. 'Man alive, dig them! "' (150). Holmes then gives us a description of the scene
in fiont of the Hom:
in front of a record store that had an outside speaker tbrough which a
husky tenor sa-poured its poignant wail upon the de& thronged
sidewalks, were two young white men, muMed to the chins in fiapping
raincoats, transfixed upon the curb by the very sound, heads bobbing,
fingers snapping as they sang dong dl unaware that they were singing,
catching hold of one another as they teetered toward the gutter, their
laughing, exultant faces astream with rain and sweat, rining and
entranced, oblivious of everything but that wild, hot hom. (15 1)
Hom, just moments ago dru&, sick, and practically incoherent, is now transfixed:
Edgar stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, a few feet fkom them,
letting people jostle past him, staring at them, a cunous, warm half-smile
unconsciously starting to touch his lips, utterly outward for an instant, just
as the dark-haired one seized the shoulder of his Eend in the glasses, and
exclaimeci, ''Listen to it, listen! That's aat new tenor, Paul that's the one,
that's him! . . . Oh, man, this crazy country! . . . And I'U bet he7sgoing to
blow his first, vas& really great solo tonight, just tonight--IYUbet you, and
everyone'll be destroyed by it, and amazed they could have gotten through
their lives not knowing it, not reaiizing!" He shook his fiend by the
shoulder, his face fiil1 of gooe, excited laughter. "Where the hell& he, Oliver 105
Paul! Where is he!--And just think of his old bedroom down in
Fayetteville or someplace, and his yellow Saturday shoes, and his hair
straightener before he came up North, copying records all these years, ail
alone-Man, think of it! And maybe just tonight he's going to blow
somethimg nobody ever heard before! .. -1told you about him! That's
him, that's him-" (15 1)
The tenor in question, we are to assume, is Walden, who had cut the Hom the night
previous. And, after finishing the Hom's last set by IiteraUy taking over the Hom's
famous solo note-for-note when the Hom can no longer perform, we are to assume that
he does blow his "rediy greaty'solo. Although the Horn may not have known they were
speaking of Walden (and therefore would not be embittered that they were marveling
over the person who was replachg his sound), it is incredible, given the level of bittemess and irony he maintains throughout the novel, that he would soften his embittered disposition at this point for two White Amencans. Two White Amencans, who, although celebratory of jazz, certaùily propagate a stereotype in their description of the jazz musician. As hehas little love for anyone (let alone white people), it is surprising that "Edgar stared after them as they went jiggling and gesticulating off into the crowds, his ravaged face, for that moment, no longer taut with irony or pnde, but warm with his amusement and absorptiony'(1 5 1).
Tt is even more surprising that the Horn, a man fighting to survive in an uncaring world, decides he should tell Cleo (twice) to, "Blow for them" (15 1). It seems, if anything, and particularly at a point when the Hom feels the most isolated fiom those around him ,that he is going to blow only for himself, as he had done al1 his life. At the Oliver 106
most, he is going to blow for his fellow musicians or his fnends, not for two mdom men,
certainly not familiar with his situation, but nonetheless rnythologizing right in fiont of
him.
At his gig later that night, after the Hom struggles to muster al1 the musical
direction he can, the set finally cornes together, and the Hom Yelt that quick la in the
hem that occurs only when everyone, inexplicably, rniraculously, has found the same
pure groove; the good, hopefül lift ofjazz (which is always deeply on Godysside, after
all); the lift forward and up" (23 1). This is the moment of fieedom that he has striven to
feel ail his life, and that the audience hopes to experience themselves. It is, in fact, the
closest we see the Hom corne to expressing the communal feeling of goodwill between artkt and audience that we witness in "Sonny's Blues" and as described by Murray. At this point, he sees two White Americans (presumably the same two fiom earlier in the day) :
his eyes lit on two young white men tmnsfixed at a table right before him,
their faces full of ecstasy and music, and all at once, staring and shivering,
he seemed to know them, their ver-souk; the dark one, who was
probably the sort given to muttering with dninken frvstration at four in the
morning, CcJusygive me a piano and a dm. Man, I'lI make the bass,
doom, doom, doom. But, oh, let's jump;" the one with the glasses,
Listening a Iittle too intently, as if he did not quite trust bis ears or heart--
one of those sad, somehow cnppled young Americans whom jazz alone
has reconciled to his country . . .And probably their fathers had
Charlestoned indefatigably to Louie, and felt more than a planter's itch for Bessie. And in the thirties he himself had watched-their older sisters
dance tirelessly past the stand in the grave dips and glides of fox trots,
their wistfil prom gowns ha-mooned with girlish perspiration. And, yes,
hadn't he seen these very two, perhaps, riffing exuItantly on windy
rnidnight street corners in stark winter, brandishing a sorrowful quart of
beer, and imitating him? (23 1-32}
Although the Horn feels relieved that the set is going weil, and surely he is appreciative that the audience, whom he has been trying so hard to get to support the set, is enjoying it, it seems unlikely that he would concentrate on these two men so întently-especially since he is on the verge of death and is doing everything he can just to stand up.
While this might simply be dismissed as a stylistic flub on the part of Holmes, the
Horn proceeds to validate their experience as the same as his own: "'It's al1 the same,' he thought, staring at them. 'it's just the same for them as me,' bIack or white--no matter how they shouted at hirn now, no matter what they said; in spite of bittemess and irony and scars. They loved the thing he loved, and it had spoken to all of them alike, and that generous, eager, joyful softness of anticipation in their faces had been in tiis face, too"
(232). While, admiîtedly, the Hom is not thinking coherently at this point in the novel, it nonetheless seems incongruous, given his staunch bittemess, that he sirndtaneously forgives and forgets dlwrongs because of a common joy (something he seems not to have expressed in a long time himself) in the faces of two anonymous men. Nicosia provides a more general social context for this scene to make it al1 the more unbelievable:
"In New York the fast driving tempo, hovative rhythms, and improvisations that made jazz 'hot' could be heard mostly in Harlem, where many musicians lived hand-to-mouth Oliver 108
on the shared proceeds fiorn der-hours sessions in the poorest cellar bars. Black men
had no reason to welcome visitors fiom the race that had put them in such places" (65).
The Hom's gig is at such a ceilar bar, and while it rnight have been extreme, particularly
at bop's height of popularity, for a white audience's money to be rejected, their presence
would not have been embraced.
This inconsistency is easily explained: the two men, by their descriptions, are
Beats; furthemore, there is a strong possibiiity that Holmes (the man with the glasses)
wrote himself into the novel along with fellow jazz enthusiast-Kerouac. At the very
least, these are two peers of Holmes and Kerouac. Since these two are crucial in two
major revelations by the Hom (that he should play for whoever enjoys the music and that their Iove for jazz was the same as his), it is obvious that Holmes wants the reader to see them in a favourable light. More than that, he hopes that, just as he has chosen to validate--and celebrate--the jazz musician as an Amencan hero, the jazz musician, recognizing their similar piight-at least in spirit--and their similar joy, wiil tum around and celebrate the Beats as essential Americans. This, apart fkom romanticizing the jazz musician, is a fancifd notion of Holmes: there are nof as far as I can teli, any songs by jazz musicians celebrating the Beats. But by placing this parallel in the novel, Holmes is able to stress his point that America as a whole, and artists in particular, need to celebrate each other in order to flourish.
If The Hom were about Metro Myland, and not Edgar Pool, these epiphanies would make sense. Metro might admit that al1 jazz is for the joy of al1 and proceed to embrace humanity. The problem, naturally, is that Metro already embraces humanity- there is no epiphany to be had. Furthemore, Holmes would have succeeded in providing Oliver 109
the same over-simplified version of the jazz musician provided by Kerouac in On the
Road a year before. In tackling the life of the jazz musician from the outside, Hohes
attempts both to detail the truth bebind the jazz world and to embrace it as parallel to the
world of the Beats. While he draws many parallels, he also shows, in spite of himself,
that they are inherently separate worlds. And in this sense, his notions of the jazz
musician are just as romantic as Kerouac's. This duality of the realistic and the romantic conceptions of the jazz musician haunts the novel, particularly when Holmes atternpts to celebrate the Horn and the Reats on the same level.
As Holmes notes in the Preface, "it was the music that mattered most-beauty, lift, swing wrestled out of sordidness, the miraculous concatenation of Afiïcan rhythm and
European melody in an America sauncertain of its soul. It seemed a story worth the telling. At tirnes, pencil pushing dong the page, I fancied that 1 knew what it was like to be them." The history of jazz a st0x-y worth teliing, and, at times, the reader fancies too what the jazz world was like to musicians and audiences of the time. In this sense,
Holmes succeeds, for The Hom, flaws aside, celebrates the jazz world, and it reminds us that every American artist who struggles is following in a tradition of artists whose collective visions have helped form the United States of today. Oliver 1IO
Conclusion
In the examples of Afncan American and Beat writing discussed in this thesis, jazz has represented the possibility of fkeedom and individual transcendence to its
audience, to the writers who have chosen to describe it, and to the readers who read about
it. The jazz musician acts as the hero to his audience, and displays, as Murray describes,
personal perseverance in a world filled with difficulties. While the writer who chooses to make a hero of the jazz musician often romanticizes the musician, he nonetheless
displays the power of communication that the jazz player holds over a captive audience.
In this sense, the writer has found value in jazz, for she understands that jazz is a forrn of comm~cation(the jazz musician being the direct speaker) that speaks on severai leveïs to various groups of people, be they White Americans, Afncan Americans, musicians, writers, and so on. As Townsend, in a critique of Adorno, comrnents, jazz exists as a form of communication apart fiom Amencan rnainstream culture:
Jazz music cornes under the heading of a vemacular Ianguage because it is
not a taught standard (util recently it was not taught at dl), because it has
been a kind of "home" musical language to certain sub-groups within
society, and because both its meanhgs and its methods of transmission
have been derived £kom the self-directed activity of these groups of
people. (84)
Both African Americans and Beats are two such sub-groups who have identifïed with jazz as an idealized statement of their own experience. It represents to them not only their discontents but also their triumphs, as we have seen fkom the experiences of both
Sonny and the Hom. Both characters mut resist the stereotypes created by mainstream Oliver 1 1 1
Arnerica to label the jazz musician. In each situation, the musician, as a hero, succeeds in displayïng the diversity ofthejazz musician, the Afncan Amencan, and the individual living on the margins of the United States. Consequently, both Baldwin and Holmes succeed in creating for the5 American audience heroes who explode the stereotypes that were commonly upheld by the United States.
While al1 the writers 1have discussed have helped to establish the human diversity of the jazz musician, ail have also dispIayed that jazz as a musical form has had a tenuous relationship with Amencan popular cuIture, As my thesis has show-n,jazz was a signifïcant foxm of expression, at its peak of popularity as swing, to millions of people in the United States alone. During jazz's bop era, while a vital form of expression to urban Afiican Arnericans and Beats, it relinquished its status as the focal point of youth music culture. Swenson sums this shift up when he says, "bebop transformed jazz nom the mainstrearn pop music it had been during the war to an occdt science" (27). As such, it foregrounded the importance of personal expression and experimentation in jazz, but it downplayed its adherence to the tastes of a mass audience.
To decide the relative merit of jazz, and consequently the jazz musician, is a difficdt ta&. Whether speaking to the masses or to sub-groups within culture, jazz exists as a departure fiom the traditional distinctions between "high" art and "low" art. In both cases, jazz's success hinges on live audience reception and on the number of albums it sells. Naturally, then, Adorno, in his consideration of jazz's relationship to high art, thinks there is no cornparison:
The organization of culture into "levels" such as the First, Second, and
Third Programs, patterned after low, middle and highbrow, is Oliver 112
reprehensible. But it cannot be overcome simply by the lowbrow sects
dechring themselves to be highbrow. The legitimate discontent with
culture provides a pretext but not the slightest justification for the
glorification of a highly rationalized section of mass production, one
which debases and betrays culture without at all transcending it, as the
dawn of a new world sensibility or for confusing it with cubism, Eliot's
poetry, and Joyce's prose. (Terennial" 205)
For Adomo, jazz represents not a cultural revolution in the name of art, but a cultural degeneration in the name of capitalisrn. Al1 jazz, whether it be popular swing or insular bop, represents an effort by the music industry to sell records to a gullible audience.
Whïle swing was one of the industry's first mass successes, bop was one the of the industry's fist experimentations with cultivating a musical sub-genre for a specinc audience.
Although Adorno is right that jazz is not a creation of the transcendent aesthetics that characterized so much of high modemism as sublime, he em in thinking such an artistic transcendence of culture is necessary. Perhaps Adorno is only nostalgie for modemism; as the contemporary theorist Fredric Jameson, in The Cultural Tm:
Selected Writings on the Postmodem. 1983-1 998, points out: "In a previous era, art was a realm beyond commodification, in which a certain fieedom was still available; in late modemisrn . . .there were still zones of art exempt fiom the cornmodifications of commercial culture . . ." (134-35). Within pop culture, such distinctions disappear; art and culture do jain to offer the predominant form of aesthetic expression. To debate the value of this amalgarnation is redundant, just as it is redundant to debate the sacredness of Oliver II3
art, for pop culture is an increasingly pervasive form of commUL2ication- The task now is
to assess the value in each forrn of expression that emerges fkom pop culture, as Baldwin
and Holmes do, not to dismiss it, as Adorno does-
%y condemning jazz as "al1 culture and no art," Adomo misses an opportunity to
understand the role of the artist in the emerging consumer culture- Townsend offers a
concise description of Adorno's partisan thinking: "he has a simple and monoIithic mode1 of the relation between art and society which allows no rniddle case between the absolute domination of the artist-hero to his society, and the absohte domination of commercial society over al1 the others" (70). As Murray stresses, the arîist as hero, in this case the jazz musician, exists within the balance of these two poles. The writer, understanding that characters do not exist as absolutes, but as combinations of various conditions, be they psychological, political, religious, or cultural, searches to iden- and descnbe these elusive shadings that comprise the diversity of any human being.
Of course, the gap between hi@ modemism and jazz is large, so it is understandable that Adomo would be upset when he mistakenly views jazz as existing alongside the poetry of Eliot. Regardless of the size of this gap, not to see the ground between the two is to be reactionary. Jameson hints at this tendency in modemisrn when he writes of the
effacement of the older distinction between high and so-called mass
culture, a distinction on which modemism depended for its specificity, its
utopian funcion consisting at least in part in the securing of a reaim of
authentic experience over against the surroundhg environment of rniddle-
and low-brow commercial culture. Indeed, it can be argued that the Oliver 114
emergence of high rnodemism is itself contemporaneous with the first
great expansion of a recognizably mas culture. .. . (3 1)
Art, by rejecting the society of which it is a part, becomes political, for it expresses reaction, not beauty. Moreover, to conceive of art as transcending the world it describes is an idedistic notion. Adomo is an idealist for believing in the necessity of a separate art world, and he is even more an idealist for beiieving that such a separation could lead to a perfect society.
The writer, on the other hand, also an artist, understands that art will not Save society, nor does it have to transcend it. In this sense, he has a more realistic understanding of art's role in society than does Adomo. Ironically, Adorno, while cnticizingjazz for its escapism, indulges in an escapist fantasy by envisioning his own perfect-and impossible-society. Adorno, hoping for a utopia, sees little of value in anythïng short of an ideal art in an ideal society.
In its philosophy, the United States shares much in common with the utopia: its very constitution promises the ideals of equality, freedom, and happïness. Over the course of its history, we have seen that reali;lj,g these ideals is a constant stmggle. And, although the United States does strive to reach these goals, few of its citizens are naïve enough to believe that it wili reach and surpass these goals. Instead, these ideals exist perennially as benchmarks by which the success of the country is measured.
The American writer, then, is given the best of both worlds, for she is able to depict the individual, struggling within the reality of the United States, attempting to achieve the ideal promised by the United States. Through this duality, the reader is exposed to the failure and triumphs of the individual and of the socies. In The Hom, the Oliver 1 15
reader encounters a United States ?bat ccannt admit that out of imperfection al1
perfection cornes, but which, despite everything (the ugliness, the hate, the greed and the
hypocnsy), has always been an infinite possibility to match man's inhite desire. Yes.
Jazz was as much a celebration of this American reality (everything, eveqthing!) as a
protest against it. Yes" (241). While the ideal remains impossible, the writer, iike the
jazz musician, is able to encourage the audience to reach for it nonetheless. Baldwin and
Holmes recognized the struggle of the jazz musician for himself and for his audience, and
they chose to describe the jazz musician to idealize Merthis struggle of every
American.
While this creation of the jazz hem is a romantic one, it at least acknowledges the
fact that the musician will not solve his audience's troubles. He may inspire his audience, perhaps only comfort them, but the ultimate responsibility lies with each individual. Both the wxiter and the rnusician understand that their task is not to solve the problems of a culture, but only to display the perseverance of the individual. Nicosia, comrnenting on Kerouac as an artist and his relationship to jazz, states one possibility for the artist "is to assume the role of Charlie Parker and assert by sheer will that al1 is weii, guarding hurnanity fkom the killing face of nothingness . . ." (490). The writer, like the jazz musician, attempts to prove that, even in the seemingly impossible situation, it is possible to reach one's persond goais.
Nicosia also points out that the writer and jazz musician, by using their imagination, prove that humans are able to transcend any situation, if perhaps only internally: 'To Kerouac, man is blessed because whatever is, he can see or dream beyond it. The mind continualiy allows for something better, or at ieast something Oliver 1 16
different" (508). Both Parker and Kerouac were able to imagine "something bette? and
go one step fûrther to create it in face of adversity, giving hope to their audiences.
Nicosia expands upon this point when he discusses Kerouac's view of art and religion:
"Unlike Buddhism, art makes no claim to 'extinguishYsuffering. But the delightfiil
deceit of art . . . makes existence a good deal more bearable. No Buddhist saint who
works transcendental miracles without liftuig a finger, Parker is clearly a Christian saint
insofar as his work is to make the earth more livable" (489). He, like the writer, makes
life more bearable by perseve~ghimself, and by inspiring his audience with an artistic
statement to persevere as weu.
One might argue, naturaIIy, that such comforting is really only lulling the
audience into submission. The key, 1 think, is to evaluate every consumer product for its
aesthetic value. While some products are wortbwhile, others are simply constructs of the
pop culture industry, and, as such, contain little redeeming substance. Adorno sees jazz
as an example of a woahless industry construct, while Murray understands that jazz, by
creating its own language, is more than an industry invention, and therefore it has
redeeming qualities. While this language is a repetitive one, as it stems fiom the blues,
Murray finds worth in its cyclical nature. For him, the artistic expression of the jazz
musician is reenacted for an audience over and over again. It laments the same troubles and offers the sarne balance and artistic triumph as it always does. While jazz may develop musically, it must also continue to speak to its audience of their problems and offer them solutions.
This consistency assures an audience of the possibility of success, but it also acts as the realization of our own artistic desires. In The Hom, the reader is told of the American popular song that strongly resembles, for its recurrent content (namely, love
and love lost), the blues Song played by the blues-jazz hero: c'Tho~dsof songs that
were only variations of the one Great Twilight Love Song that has changed in forty years
only as Americans (hungry, inquisitive, restless in their audacious cities) have themselves
changed; songs that for a moment seem to crystallize the music, which chunis inside us
here, forever seeking adequate notes" (76). While Adorno argues in ccPerennialFashion-
Jd'that jazz has changed only to mark its progress over time, jazz may have changed,
as the popular Song has changed, to meet the needs of an ever-changing audience- At the
same time, the audience continually faces certain constants: love, death, injustice, and so
on. Popular music, jazz included, while developing as an art form, must speak of these issues to gain an audience. This replaying of the audience's concems ccsometimescaused millions to think an original thought, or dream an extravagant dream, or be startled by the inexplicable poignante of a memory" (75-76). Such a retelling of the human condition is essential to aU artistic statements, as art, fimdarnentally, is a form of communication.
Accordingly, the writer who recreates the romantic hero-figure, only in different guises, is simply retelhg the fûndamental story of the individual encomtering adversity and prosperity.
If one is to consider this artist-audience reIationship in the context of present day ideology, it quickly becomes apparent that such a debate over the worth of the individual's struggle in the light of postmodeniism's deconstruction of the identity, is, to some extent, outdated. The idea of a hero stniggling against the odds, no matter how comforting he or she may be, is nonetheless becoming increasingly difficuit to identify with. Jameson asks what the new task of the writer might be: "if the experience and the Oliver 1 18
idwlogy of the unique self, an experience and ideology which informed the sty1isfic
practice of classical modemism, is over and done with, then it is no longer clear what the
artists and the writers of the present period are supposed to be doïng" (6-7). Without the
task of encouraging an audience to identiQ with his or her work, there is indeed Iittle,
particdarly for the creator of romantic heroes, to accomplish through contemporary art.
Both jazz and jazz writing of the 195Os, however, anticipated to some degree the
postmodem trends that would later develop. Jazz functioned dunng its penod of mass
popularity as a connecter between the modem composition and the pop Song. In this
sense, it is one of the fïrst developments of postrnodernism within music. Baldwin and
Holrnes (along with Ellison and Kerouac) did retain the literary tradition of the romantic
hero-figure when descnbing jazz in American literature. But what jazz writhg did do
was explore the heterogeneity of a developing postmodem United States. In it, the writer finds that there are countless people, some respected, some shunned, who deserve to be considered American heroes.
Contemporary pop culture, according to Warhol, will give everyone their fifteen minutes to be a hero. Making the hero universal, however, takes away much of its hction as an idealized character. Whether or not "the hero is dead," is an entirely different thesis, but regardless of the answer to this question, it is still necessary for all
Americans not only to observe, write, and debate the American dream, but also to attempt to live if just as the jazz musician did. Kerouac, who extolled the virtues of experience, held a similar view:
Jack liked the fact that so much of America was unconscious, because he
was the sarne himself; in fact, he wrote out of that unconsciousness. Jack identifieci with America insofar as they both contained a great many
paradoxes; and, as he saw it, it was important not to resolve them ail. The
liberal-radical quest to "find the answers" would get one irretrievably lost.
Jack's way, like that of pioneer America, was to live the answers.
(Nicosia 155)
Ody by living Iife, like the jazz musician, can an individuai realize her own potential- and the potential of the United States to fùlfill its inherent ideals. Oliver 120
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