MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature

The History of Racial Consciousness in African American Jazz Community

Bachelor Thesis

Brno 2018

Supervisor: Michael George, M.A. Author: Ladislav Novotný Bibliography

Novotný, L. The History of Racial Consciousness in African American Jazz Community: bachelor thesis. Brno: Masaryk University, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and Literature, 2018. 52 p. Bachelor thesis supervisor Michael George.

Bibliografický záznam

Novotný, L. The History of Racial Consciousness in African American Jazz Community: bakalářská práce. Brno: Masarykova univerzita, Fakulta pedagogická, Katedra anglického jazyka a literatury, 2018. 52 l. Vedoucí bakalářské práce Michael George.

Abstract

The bachelor thesis explores the development of racial consciousness among African American jazz community between the early 1920s and the late 1960s. The introductory section deals with the social status of its members over the course of the interwar period and the circumstances that initiated fundamental changes in their self-concept. Then, the main focus is put on the sociocultural impact of early modern jazz and the role of African American jazz artists during the struggle for civil rights, including the connection between their distinctive musical output and political activism.

Anotace

Bakalářská práce zkoumá vývoj rasového uvědomění mezi afroamerickou jazzovou komunitou od počátku dvacátých do konce šedesátých let dvacátého století. Úvodní část pojednává o společenském postavení jejích příslušníků v období mezi dvěma světovými válkami a o okolnostech, jež iniciovaly zásadní změny v jejich sebepojetí. Následně se práce zaměřuje na sociokulturní dopad raného moderního jazzu a roli afroamerických jazzových umělců v období boje za občanská práva, včetně nalezení spojitosti mezi jejich svébytnou hudební tvorbou a politickým aktivismem.

Key words

Jazz, blues, race, music, activism, protest, freedom, cultural roots, emancipation, identity

Klíčová slova

Jazz, blues, rasa, hudba, aktivismus, protest, svoboda, kulturní kořeny, emancipace, identita

Declaration

I hereby declare that this thesis is my own, that I worked on it independently and that I used only the sources listed in the bibliography.

Prohlášení

Prohlašuji, že jsem závěrečnou bakalářskou práci vypracoval samostatně, s využitím pouze citovaných pramenů, dalších informací a zdrojů v souladu s Disciplinárním řádem pro studenty Pedagogické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity a se zákonem č. 121/2000 Sb., o právu autorském, o právech souvisejících s právem autorským a o změně některých zákonů (autorský zákon), ve znění pozdějších předpisů.

In Brno on 29 November 2018 ......

Ladislav Novotný

Contents

Introduction ...... 6 1 “Black” and “White” during the Jazz Age and the Swing Era ...... 8 1.1 Jazz Meets the Nation ...... 8 1.2 The First Appreciation ...... 9 1.3 The Process of Integration ...... 11 1.4 Separatism and Race Consciousness ...... 13 2 Bebop: The First Loud Response to White Society ...... 17 2.1 A Musical Revolution ...... 17 2.2 Against Racial Oppression ...... 18 2.3 Beboppers – Political Activists? ...... 20 2.4 A Search for Identity ...... 22 2.5 Not Entertainment, but Art ...... 23 2.6 Drawbacks and Achievements ...... 25 3 Charles Mingus: The Angry Man of Jazz ...... 26 3.1 Childhood Experience ...... 26 3.2 Outbursts of Anger ...... 27 3.3 Music as a Political Weapon ...... 29 3.4 A “Protest Cat” and His Legacy ...... 33 4 Free Jazz: Radical Journeys to Freedom...... 35 4.1 A Revolutionary Aesthetic Conception ...... 35 4.2 The Cult of John Coltrane ...... 38 4.3 Politics and Spirituality ...... 40 4.4 Here Comes the Whistleman ...... 43 Conclusion ...... 45 Works Cited ...... 46

Introduction

Since its earliest days, jazz has represented one of the most unique cultural phenomena that originated and developed in the United States during the last hundred years. A genuine product of the American melting pot, it has never ceased to incorporate and absorb various, often disparate elements of diverse musical cultures and has been constantly transforming itself through the course of the twentieth century until the present. Accordingly, jazz by nature defies any attempt at precise definition, for each of its many incarnations at least partially opposes the preceding one (Schuller). Nevertheless, some general characteristics can be observed that apply to this music regardless of the particular subgenre.

Peter Gammond, the author of The Oxford Companion to Popular Music, for instance, defines jazz in the following way: “A distinctive genre of music-making, recognized by its propulsively moving rhythms, syncopated melodic nature, and improvisational (to varying degrees) nature. It is generally assumed to be of black origin and first emerged in the USA in various modified strains at the end of the 19th century” (290). Similarly, German music journalist Joachim E. Berendt states that

Jazz is a form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music. The instrumentation, melody, and harmony of jazz are in the main derived from Western musical tradition. Rhythm, phrasing and production of sound, and the elements of blues harmony are derived from African music and from the musical conception of the Afro-Americans. (371)

Last but not least, jazz historian, composer, and musicologist Gunther Schuller considers jazz as a

Musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. It was developed partially from ragtime and blues and is often characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of pitch, and the use of original timbres.

Apart from other things, it is evident that all the above definitions unanimously acknowledge African Americans to be the primary originators of jazz and that Berendt as well as Schuller overtly emphasize the biracial character of the music

6 since its very beginning. However, jazz did not evolve in isolation from the American culture of race. According to historian Burton W. Peretti, “jazz was a biracial music, but the society that fostered it was violently opposed to biraciality.” In other words, the “greatest personal and professional challenges” that the jazz creators had to overcome were those firmly grounded in the country’s institutional racism (177).

Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, one of the crucial figures in the development of jazz, once said that “artists are always in the vanguard of social change” (Gillespie and Fraser 291). On the other hand, the general public often perceives jazz as either a specific form of musical entertainment or an art for its own sake, largely elitist and not so much directly related to constant social, political, and cultural changes happening outside its territory. As a result, taking these opposing views into careful consideration inevitably leads to posing some fundamental questions: to what extent, if ever, did African American jazz performers become personally involved in the twentieth-century struggle for racial equality and justice? How frequently did their artistic output serve any explicit extra-musical objectives or at least echo the demands of black political leaders and civil rights activists? How did they see themselves in terms of their social status within American society?

Following the aforementioned observations, this bachelor thesis aims to explore the question of racial awareness among African American jazz musicians as well as their personal attitudes towards white America, focusing on the period from the 1920s to the 1960s, during which jazz music exerted a particularly significant influence on the much broader realm of American popular culture.

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1 “Black” and “White” during the Jazz Age and the Swing Era

According to H. Wiley Hitchcock, a leading scholar of American music, the existence of jazz can be traced back long before the 1920s, nevertheless, the musical style remained practically unknown to the wider American audience at that time (207). The situation gradually changed during and after the First World War, as a result of two important occurrences that proved absolutely vital for the future development. Musicologists Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman observe that the economic migration of African Americans out of the South was one of the decisive causes that helped the spread of jazz to northern cities like Chicago, Detroit and New York (63). Regarding New York, Hitchcock highlights the importance of the Harlem area “in the development of jazz and its diffusion to the white community” (207) while the South Side clubs served the same function in Chicago (Starr and Waterman 63). Eileen Southern, a specialist in African American music, states that the second crucial factor “was the exodus of tenderloin musicians from New Orleans because of the closing down of Storyville, [a famous red-light district], in 1917 by order of the United States Navy” (367).

1.1 Jazz Meets the Nation

Paradoxically, one of the greatest ironies of the history of jazz is the fact that the music was first introduced to the general public by white bands from New Orleans. As early as 1915 the Brown’s Jass Band performed in Chicago and two years later, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band directed by cornetist Nick LaRocca appeared in New York. More significantly, the latter group made the first jazz recordings just the same year (Southern 366). LaRocca, as well as many other southern white players of his generation, was a fiery adherent of racist ideology, passionately denying the important role of the African American musical tradition in the creation of jazz (Peretti 187-188). Such views were widely accepted and publicly disseminated by many leading figures of the music scene. In his autobiography, simply entitled Jazz (1926), Paul Whiteman, one of the most commercially successful white bandleaders, practically omitted any African American contribution to the development of jazz music (Starr and Waterman 62). Quite similarly, white New Orleans trombonist Georg Brunis saw the origins of jazz in barbershop singing

8 and asserted that “blues comes from . . . the Jewish hymn, like Eli, Eli. . . . Then they took the African bongos, the tom-tom, and they made rhythm to it. That’s my opinion of the blues.” Brunis’ opinion was apparently disapproving, for he remarked that to him “all blues sound alike” (qtd. in Peretti 189).

The increasing popularity of jazz-flavoured dance music among the white population provided some African American musicians with better job opportunities and sometimes even helped them to partially cross rigid racial boundaries. The most popular black orchestras led by Duke Ellington or Fletcher Henderson “appeared with increasing frequency in fancy downtown cabarets and hotel ballrooms” (Starr and Waterman 57) and “Harlem night spots, with blues singers and jazz groups, were active inter-racial entertainment centers” (Hitchcock 207).

Nonetheless, the attitude of the white audience was still deeply rooted in racial, minstrelsy-tinged stereotypes that the African Americans had to cope with. Typically, a black performer was seen as an illiterate, spontaneous savage, not even being able to read sheet music. Harlem’s Cotton Club presented its white customers with Duke Ellington’s “jungle music,” which “dense textures and dark, growling timbres,” in combination with routines by scantily-dressed female dancers, reflected such fixed notions of blackness. Later, Ellington felt rather ashamed of this part of his early career, tentatively talking about “rain forest music” that he used to play back in the 1920s (Starr and Waterman 56-58). Pianist Sam Price commented on this matter quite concisely: “If a man hired you to work someplace, you had to act a fool in order to hold a job. The drummer had to do all these stick deals, and put a stick in his mouth. If you were a pianist, it helped to be able to [dance] Charleston at the same time” (qtd. in Hentoff, “Paying Dues” 100). As stated by Peretti, black bands experienced the worst displays of racism while touring the segregated South, where “the most straightforward incidents occurred outside the dance hall, in places where musicians held no special status” (180).

1.2 The First Appreciation

The first generation of white musicians who started to treat their African American counterparts with certain respect and admiration for their musical skills emerged from a group of young whites born or raised in the Chicago area. Historian

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Lawrence W. Levine emphasizes that for these early 1920s youngsters, jazz meant greater freedom of artistic and personal expression and that they often compared their introduction to black music to religious conversion (294). Pianist and composer Hoagy Carmichael, one of the musicians associated with the group, later recalled hearing King Oliver’s band for the first time: “I dropped my cigarette and gulped my drink. Bix [Beiderbecke] was on his feet, his eyes popping. . . . Bob Gillette slid off his chair and under the table. He was excitable that way. ‘Why,’ I moaned, ‘why isn’t everybody in the world here to hear that?’ ” (qtd. in Levine 294).

Another white Chicagoan, clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow belonged to those who took their fascination with jazz to extremes, as he relocated to Harlem, where he made a living selling marijuana, and “again and again described himself as a Negro.” Being incarcerated several times, he demanded to serve his sentence in the section for African American prisoners. Mezzrow’s Chicago and Harlem years are vividly depicted in his autobiography, published under the lapidary title Really the Blues (Berendt 183-184).

However, Peretti argues that the attitude of the Chicagoans tended to be even more complex, ranging from cornetist Jimmy McPartland’s enthusiastic view on jazz as “the wedding of the races” (193) to guitarist Eddie Condon’s appreciative, yet racially stereotyped remark that “the Negro is born with rhythm. . . . We’ve got to learn it” (190). Therefore, it is clearly evident that even the most ardent white devotees of African American music, who the Chicagoans undoubtedly were, could not completely escape the omnipresent racial bias that pervaded the whole society.

It is of particular interest that also some African American musicians claimed to be influenced by whites and even admitted their share in the development of jazz. For instance, tenor saxophonist Lester Young was smitten by the music of Jimmy Dorsey and Frankie Trumbauer, and eventually based some aspects of his distinctive style on Trumbauer’s approach, which he absorbed by extensive listening to his solo recordings. “Trumbauer was my idol. When I had just started to play, I used to buy all his records,” Young recalled. “[He] always told a little story, and I liked the way he slurred his notes” (qtd. in Hentoff, “Lester Young” 245). Even Sidney Bechet, a New Orleans Creole clarinettist and soprano saxophonist known for his generally low opinion of white jazz musicians, acclaimed Eddie Condon for promoting the

10 early style in his New York clubs, and thus keeping it alive (Peretti 199). Louis Armstrong tended to refer to his white musical followers as “my boys” (Peretti 208) and what is more, he also praised Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians, a white sweet band famous for playing sentimental music and frequently mocked by hard-core jazz aficionados, “for its warm sound and high standards of musicianship” (Starr and Waterman 58).

1.3 The Process of Integration

Although “the world of dance orchestras remained strictly segregated” (Starr and Waterman 57), there were still various opportunities for jazz musicians of both races to meet face-to-face and share their musical ideas. Racially mixed recording sessions were a typical example of such gatherings which started to occur since the 1920s and became “an accepted institution” in the ensuing decade (Peretti 201-202). Southern considers pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton to be “the first to record with a white band” for his 1923 recording date with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and she also lists the black studio groups of Louis Armstrong and pianist Fats Waller among those “that included white musicians” (402). Moreover, several clubs on 52nd Street in New York, for example the Onyx, encouraged racial mixing on stage and some white players, like saxophonist Charlie Barnet, participated in Harlem jam sessions (Peretti 191). Even interracial band contests occurred, like one of the most memorable ones between the Count Basie and Benny Goodman orchestras in Newark in 1937 (Peretti 204).

Another important contribution to the biracial character of jazz was the sharing of musical arrangements among black and white bands. Peretti mentions such an exchange between bandleaders Jean Goldkette and Fletcher Henderson and one of Goldkette’s arrangers, Bill Challis, working regularly for Henderson’s black orchestra in the early 1930s (198). On the other hand, Henderson’s arranger Don Redman attended to rehearse Goldkette’s band, although he could not appear with them in public (Peretti 204). The collaboration between black arrangers and white orchestras became common practice at the height of the Swing Era, when, according to Southern, prominent mainstream big bands led by Tommy Dorsey or Charlie Barnet used to play charts penned by Sy Oliver or Horace Henderson respectively,

11 and even Paul Whiteman followed the fashionable trend by hiring Jimmy Mundy. Southern adds that it was probably clarinettist Benny Goodman who “used arrangements of black musicians to a greater extent than anyone,” including those written by Fletcher Henderson, Edgar Sampson and many others (402).

Definitely the most crucial step in breaking down racial barriers within the jazz community was the employment of African American musicians in white bands on regular basis, which started to occur much more frequently after 1935 (Peretti 204). Benny Goodman is considered to be the first well-known white bandleader to give full-time job to black jazzmen as early as in July 1935, when pianist Teddy Wilson joined his trio. Cultural historians Peter Rutkoff and William Scott regard this as a major breakthrough in integration, enthusiastically speaking about “the first integrated jazz group of the century” (98). Wilson was quickly followed by vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, electric guitarist Charlie Christian or trumpeter Cootie Williams (Starr and Waterman 130). Music historian Ted Gioia stresses the importance of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, where Goodman, among other things, hosted soloists from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras. Nevertheless, Goodman’s colour-blindness was obviously more of a by-product of his never- ending quest for musical perfection at any cost than a conscious act of philanthropy or social activism (ch. 5). In fact, it was young record producer John Henry Hammond, Jr. that persuaded rather reluctant Goodman to integrate African Americans into his ensembles (Peretti, 202-203).

John Hammond, a scion of the affluent Vanderbilt family noted for his strong passion for jazz, represented a remarkable exception among the 1930s white jazz promoters due to his unusual social awareness and commitment to racial justice that even resulted in membership of the NAACP board of directors. Using his huge financial resources and influential contacts, Hammond developed “a two front strategy,” which involved searching for talented African American jazz artists as well as persuading white show-business entrepreneurs and bandleaders to employ his musical discoveries. Hammond’s most notable achievements include the introduction of such important jazz stylists as Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Count Basie and Charlie Christian, who would probably have never attained their nationwide artistic success without Hammond’s initial support. With a helping hand from club owner Barney Josephson, he broke the colour line as an unofficial musical director of Café

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Society, the first fully integrated New York night club with “a leftist, popular-front ambience.” Also, a year after Benny Goodman’s famed Carnegie Hall performance, the concert venue hosted another Hammond’s historic project entitled “From Spirituals to Swing,” which aim was to demonstrate “the role of African-Americans in the history of jazz” (Rutkoff and Scott 95-103). Hammond, however, has sometimes been criticized for being deliberately selective and exerting his authority “to promote certain black bands . . . over others,” thus virtually sealing the fate of those who did not fit his artistic premises. Yet, despite such controversy, his credit for racial integration within the jazz scene remains indisputable (Peretti, 202-203).

The pioneering work of Hammond and Goodman then paved the way for others like Charlie Barnet, Tommy Dorsey or Gene Krupa, who “consistently used black singers or instrumentalists” (Southern 402). For instance, during her 1938 stint with Artie Shaw, Billie Holiday became one the first African American female singers to be featured with a white swing orchestra (Rutkoff and Scott 97). Jazz critic Marshall W. Stearns points out that the African American musicians often joined white orchestras for better financial prospects, like trumpeter Roy Eldridge who became a star soloist with Krupa, earning $150 per week instead of $120 when leading a band of his own (220).

1.4 Separatism and Race Consciousness

Unfortunately, equality on stage did not automatically imply equality outside it. Rather, black band members had to search out separate accommodation or pretended to be band servants in order to get to the white hotel, like Cootie Williams used to do during his time with Goodman (Peretti 184). Roy Eldridge finally left Krupa, exhausted from continual displays of racial discrimination (Stearns 220). Starr and Waterman add that the integration had a negative impact on “all-black dance bands, who saw some of their most promising talent, and a portion of their audience, drained away” (130). On top of that, black musicians also suffered from lack of airtime and faced difficulties breaking into the jukebox market. So the Top 10 results between 1935 and 1945 clearly demonstrate the striking economic discrepancy between white and black bands, when the former “racked up a total of 292 Top 10

13 records, of which 65 were Number One hits,” whereas the latter “scored only 32 Top 10 hits, 3 of which made it to Number One on the charts” (Starr and Waterman 125).

It is no wonder that the aforementioned socio-economic drawbacks led to an inevitable reaction. In the 1930s, some African American jazz musicians began to embrace the idea of separatism, when they aimed “to exclude whites from their activities” (Peretti 192). These attitudes, of course, had their roots in the earliest period of jazz history. Southern mentions Freddie Keppard’s purported refusal of a recording contract “for fear that other trumpet players might steal his musical ideas” (366). Others, like Sidney Bechet or double bass player Pops Foster, felt that “white musicians were inferior practitioners of jazz,” and especially questioned whites’ ability to play the blues (Peretti 192). Guy Lombardo’s recollection “that black audiences loved his music, as long as he didn’t try to play their music” then speaks for itself (Starr and Waterman 58). In general, whites were very often seen as unscrupulous thieves, who stole and spoiled jazz music and robbed African American musicians of their earnings. As a result, black bandleaders refused to integrate white players, like Duke Ellington, who turned down trumpeter Jimmy Maxwell around 1940. “I don’t want any ofay1 in the band,” was Ellington’s abrupt rejection (qtd. in Peretti 192).

Nevertheless, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, a Washington-born pianist, composer and bandleader, occupies an extraordinary position in the development of African American culture. Ellington, as emphasized by Gioia, always kept some distance from the consumerist music industry of the Swing Era and advocated jazz as “a serious art form” (ch. 5). One of his most ambitious compositions at the time, an extended three-part work entitled Black, Brown and Beige (1943), was meant, in Ellington’s own words, as “a tone parallel to the history of the American Negro” (qtd. in Ulanov 254). The individual movements symbolize the African roots and coming to the New World in chains (Black), the years of slavery (Brown), and the African American of the interwar period (Beige). Similarly themed lengthy pieces like Liberian Suite, Harlem, Deep South Suite, or New World A’comin’ followed, referring to the centenary of the independent state of Liberia, the inimitable atmosphere of New York’s African American sociocultural centre, the place where

1 white people 14 jazz was born, or to hopes for a better life without racial prejudice and discrimination respectively. This gives us clear and convincing evidence of the composer’s strong race consciousness, for Ellington embraced both the African past and the American present of his people, knowing well “that the American Negro had more in common with the world of the white man than with that of black Africa” (Berendt 60-61). Interestingly, similar motifs can be found in the post-war works of Charles Mingus, who often mentioned Ellington as one of his major sources of artistic inspiration (see Chapter 3), and what is more, music critic Gary Giddins observes that some parts of Black, Brown and Beige apparently influenced Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (1960), particularly its first two movements, “Driva Man” and “Freedom Day,” that echo the message of Ellington’s “Work Song” and “Emancipation Celebration” respectively (Rhythm-a-ning 35).

In 1939, Ellington openly expressed his views on the African American musical tradition in Down Beat magazine: “Our aim has always been the development of an authentic Negro music, of which swing is only one element. We are not interested primarily in the playing of jazz or swing music, but in producing a genuine contribution from our race. Our music is always intended to be definitely and purely racial. We try to complete a cycle” (qtd. in Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 1). Historian Eric Porter considers Ellington’s article to be an important turning point, for it was published when African American music, generally seen “as a product of instinct,” had been persistently exploited by “commercially oriented white bands,” whereas “most black bands remained marginal” (What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 2).

Indeed, there were others, ranging from famous jazz celebrities to lesser-known musicians, who employed various ways to oppose widespread racism and marginalization of African Americans between the two world wars. For example, pianist and bandleader Earl Hines saw jazz as a mighty weapon to fight racial prejudice and years later described his southern tours as a way of challenging Jim Crow laws: “My band was among the first Freedom Riders, because we were riding through the South many, many years ago, and creating all kinds of excitement. . . . When Southern whites wanted to board our bus, the [white] driver would say, ‘This is a private bus.’ Of course, he and these people would get into all kinds of arguments” (qtd. in Peretti 205). Singer Billie Holiday, who personally experienced

15 racism while touring with the bands of Count Basie and Artie Shaw or performing in the segregated clubs on 52nd Street, recorded “Strange Fruit,” a dark, explicit song about lynching, which “stark realism” must have been perceived as considerably bold in 1939 (Shaw 136-137):

Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black body swinging in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh Then the sudden smell of burning flesh (Holiday, “Strange Fruit”)

Last but not least, trumpet player Frankie Newton and several others represented a small, politically engaged core whose members found the Black Nationalist thoughts of Marcus Garvey or even the Soviet Five-Year Plan particularly appealing and discussed these matters quite frequently (Rutkoff and Scott 102).

However, the most dramatic impulse came from the upcoming generation of young African American jazz musicians who entered the scene in the early 1940s, introducing their own unique aesthetic concepts that irreversibly altered the future course of jazz and its relationship to American popular culture, which was to become less and less direct (Gioia, ch. 6).

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2 Bebop: The First Loud Response to White Society

In the early 1940s a group of young African American musicians started to meet regularly at Minton’s Playhouse, a Harlem nightclub, for after-hours jam sessions. Their hard core was formed by pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, guitarist Charlie Christian and trumpeter John Birks Gillespie, better known by the nickname “Dizzy.” These were later joined by alto saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, along with Gillespie one of the principal architects of the new style to come, pianist Bud Powell or drummer Max Roach, to name but a few. Their gatherings primarily served as a platform for experimenting with more challenging musical ideas than those commonly practiced in the jazz circles at that time (Southern 487- 492). According to Gioia, the endeavours of early modern jazz, which was subsequently called bebop2, meant a revolt against “the pop music pretensions of Swing Era jazz.” In other words, this music symbolized an outcry against various displays of commercialisation, such as kitschy sentimentality and pandering to the tastes of mainstream white audiences (ch. 6).

2.1 A Musical Revolution

Joachim E. Berendt, a German music journalist, argues against the widespread myth that the birth of bebop was an entirely intentional, conscious attempt to abandon everything old and create new things at all costs and notes that the seeds of the new style also sprouted in various places outside Harlem, for instance in Kansas City. Yet he recognizes the importance of Minton’s as “a focal point,” where all the influences gradually melted together (15). Similarly, Gioia views the emergence of bebop as “an extension of jazz’s inherent tendency to mutate” rather than “an abrupt shift . . . in the music’s history,” pointing to the distinctive inclination to constantly change and absorb diverse musical idioms that has characterized jazz since the earliest days of its existence (ch. 6). Nonetheless, as the advent of modern jazz coincided with the rise of African American political and social demands during the Second World War, bebop transformed jazz into “a music that spoke to observers of social and cultural resistance” and simultaneously initiated “its move into its current,

2 An expression of uncertain derivation; it probably originated as an onomatopoeic imitation of the flatted fifth, a musical interval favoured by the modernists (Berendt 15). 17 albeit precarious, position at the intersection of high art and popular culture” (Porter, “Dizzy Atmosphere” 423).

Sociologist Richard A. Peterson comments that each new clique of African American musicians has strived for the creation of music which “whites won’t understand, can’t play and therefore can’t steal” and accurately describes unorthodox bebop practices as “iconoclastic, humorous and irreverent” (143-145). These statements perfectly define the peculiar nature of early modern jazz, for beboppers took their musical estrangement from the mainstream to extremes. The new music was characterized by overall complexity of melody, harmony and rhythm and by its focus on lengthy, virtuoso solo improvisations, largely executed at an uncompromising, breakneck tempo. Lush big band arrangements, which dominated the Swing Era, gave place to jagged unisons of small combos. The basic bebop repertoire was often derived from older jazz standards; however, the songs typically underwent a thorough reworking that they hardly bore any resemblance to the original tunes (Gioia, ch. 6). Kenny Clarke, one of the founding fathers of bebop, recalls how he and his companions at Minton’s used to embarrass the older players, both black and white, who tried to join in: “To make things tough for outsiders, we invented difficult riffs. Some of our tunes used the ‘A’ part of one tune, like I Got Rhythm, but the channel came from something else, say Honeysuckle Rose. The swing guys would be completely hung up in the channel. They’d have to stop playing” (qtd. in Russell 139).

2.2 Against Racial Oppression

As already mentioned, bebop was not only a musical revolt, for its foundations were in fact much more complex. Gioia’s apt remark that it “was defined by its social context as much as by the flats and sharps of its altered chords” is worth considering in greater detail (ch. 6). For example, sociologist Charles Nanry perceives bebop, although not completely, as a response to the process of “bureaucratization” of Swing Era jazz, as “both musical and social protest” against cliché-ridden swing rituals as well as “Uncle Tom” stereotypes, which shaped the way white audiences usually treated black musicians. Thus, as he continues, beboppers “saw themselves as the antithesis of a complacent and desiccated society

18 and its popular art” (177-178). Pianist Hampton Hawes’ recollection “that bebop was his way of rebelling against societal oppression” supports the accuracy of Nanry’s point of view (Haber).

These antagonistic tensions within the jazz community were further intensified due to a non-musical, historically important event that affected the whole American nation – the Second World War. Although the wartime economy started to partially remove racial barriers in the job market and improved the financial situation of African American workers to a certain degree, the United States’ involvement in the conflict was still seen as “a white man’s war” and some black leaders were rightly worried that “the fruits of the victory would not go to the Negro.” (Stearns 219-221). Dizzy Gillespie may serve as an example of a young musician who deeply shared these feelings, for he decided to evade conscription for the said reasons as well as for his fear of “barracks conditions in the South,” taking advantage of the fact that he was travelling from one place to another because of his work, so there was little chance of being caught by the conscript officers (Rutkoff and Scott 114).

On top of that, the overseas military campaign against white supremacist Nazi Germany stood in sharp contrast to the persistent race-based discrimination at home. Hence, the angry voices demanding equal opportunities for African Americans grew considerably stronger, often accompanied by Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist sentiments. So this “climate of militancy and expectancy” became the cradle bebop was born into (Porter, “Dizzy Atmosphere” 426-429). And it was Gillespie again who retrospectively observed the link between the music and its background: “. . . your music reflects the times in which you live. My music emerged from the war years, the Second World War, and it reflected those times in the music. Fast and furious . . . it might’ve looked and sounded like bedlam . . . (Gillespie and Fraser 201).

Regarding the pronounced aversion to swing clichés and Uncle Tomism, Gioia speaks about “a twentieth-century African American way of ‘épater les bourgeoisie’3.” He highlights the fact that the modernist revolution in jazz was not led by well-established stars and name bandleaders, but by their relatively unknown sidemen. These “outsiders even within the jazz world,” unrestricted by show

3 shocking the middle classes 19 business ties and pressures like their famous employers, did not hesitate to take full advantage of their musical innovations and use them to shock the more conservative musicians and audiences (ch. 6). In a similar way, the modernists openly defied racial prejudice. Not only did they consider earlier jazz styles as old-fashioned and irrelevant for being too much connected with stereotypical expectations on the part of average music consumers and make unflattering, sarcastic comments about playing “Mother Goose Rhymes,” but they also developed a specific way of dressing that reflected their discontent with the status quo. With a penchant for berets, goatees and horn-rimmed glasses, beboppers adopted an intellectual look that was diametrically opposed to racist assumptions about African American mental inferiority (Porter, “Dizzy Atmosphere” 430-431). Generally speaking, they felt strong enough to free themselves from the role of a stupidly grinning, happy-go- lucky servant-entertainer and publicly demonstrated their contempt for white supremacy.

Such an attitude is clearly evident in Dizzy Gillespie’s cool-headed, wordless refusal to play “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” a corny song with apparently racist connotations, requested by a white Arkansas farmhand (Russell 151-152). Likewise, Charlie Parker and other members of Billy Eckstine’s band deliberately broke Jim Crow laws during their stint at the Plantation Club, a whites-only establishment in St. Louis, by using the front door, fraternizing with guests and ridiculing racism with audacious, theatrical gestures. On that occasion, drummer Art Blakey witnessed merciless mockery of the absurdity of segregation policies when Parker smashed approximately two dozen glasses the other bandmates had been drinking from, claiming they were “contaminated” by them, thus unusable for the white patrons (Haddix 69).

2.3 Beboppers – Political Activists?

There has always been controversy over the connection between bebop and politics. Authors like social historian Eric Lott interpret this music as a political manifestation, “intimately . . . related to the militancy of its moment” (599). Similarly, music writer Arnold Shaw emphasizes the “unabashedly antiwhite” character of bebop and presents it as “an expression of anger, frustration, resentment

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– and challenge” (161-164). On the other hand, jazz scholar Scott DeVeaux considers any overt activism among beboppers as “oblique at best,” for their “professional world . . . isolated them, physically and psychically, from the mass” (26), whereas Rutkoff and Scott attribute the lack of active political involvement to the musicians’ fear of being blacklisted for their beliefs although they do not deny their interest in politics (113-115). Porter also does not see a clear-cut answer to this issue, arguing that beboppers were rather reluctant to claim any straight links between organized socio-political activism and early modern jazz (“Dizzy Atmosphere” 424-429). Kenny Clarke, for instance, when asked if the music served him to make “a statement about the world around,” answered quite ambiguously: “Yeah, in a way. The idea was to wake up, look around you, there’s something to do. And this was just a part of it, an integral part of our cultural aspect.” Whether bebop contained a direct political declaration, he noted: “Whatever you go into, go into it intelligently. As simple as that” (qtd. in Porter, “Dizzy Atmosphere” 426).

Dizzy Gillespie echoed Clarke’s view on the subject: “. . . we didn’t go out and make speeches or say, “Let’s play eight bars of protest.” We just played our music and let it go at that. The music proclaimed our identity; it made every statement we truly wanted to make.” Even so, as Porter argues, he did not totally dismiss the role of bebop as an instrument of social activism: “. . . we were creators in an art form which grew from universal roots and which had proved it possessed universal appeal. Damn right! We refused to accept racism, poverty, or economic exploitation, nor would we live out uncreative humdrum lives merely for the sake of survival” (qtd. in Porter, “Dizzy Atmosphere” 426). Hence, said with Porter, the early modernists indubitably shared “a sense of African American pride joined with a rejection of social, creative, and even national boundaries,” though they primarily regarded themselves as musicians (“Dizzy Atmosphere” 426). Moreover, there were exceptional individuals like Max Roach, whose political consciousness later led to the active participation in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s (see Section 3.3).

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2.4 A Search for Identity

Since the 1940s, a number of African Americans also began to take interest in non-Western cultures. Stearns stresses the importance of a “Mohammedan cult” which swept through Harlem at the same time as the bebop revolution. Its devotees adopted Muslim names, clothes and showed interest in learning Arabic language. Some of them even “toured the South in turbans and robes defying segregation” (221). Berendt explains the conversion to Islam as an expression of “the emancipation [of African Americans] from the white man” and provides some examples of bebop musicians that joined the cult like saxophonist Ed Gregory or influential drummer Art Blakey, who changed their names to Sahib Shihab and Abdullah Ibn Buhaina respectively (25). As for Blakey, his religious conversion was preceded by a severe beating he received from a white police officer in Albany, Louisiana, just because he did not address the latter as “Sir.” The incident that almost cost him his life made Blakey search for spiritual fulfilment that he managed to find in launching a Muslim mission in 1947. The group started to meet in his New York flat and eventually relocated to a mosque on 13th Street (Porter, “Dizzy Atmosphere” 437). Dizzy Gillespie later saw these tendencies among African Americans as their quest for new, better identity that would guarantee social dignity: “. . . everybody was joining the Muslims to try and keep from being black. Because ‘Negro’ didn’t give you identity. If you say you are Italian or German, that’s something you can recognize. But we didn’t have none of that, and when you became a Muslim you had identification, a new name. You were no longer just a Negro” (qtd. in Giddins, Riding on a Blue Note 225-226). Gillespie himself became a Baha’i convert (Giddins, Riding on a Blue Note 218).

Another way to partially dilute the omnipresent influence of white society, both musically and socially, was the study of West African rhythms that were introduced into modern jazz by Afro-Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo, a member of Gillespie’s band in 1947-1948. Pozo had learned his craft in Havana’s slums, where the ancient tradition of the Abwaka religious cult remained virtually untouched, and showcased it, along with chants in a West African dialect, to the stunned audience at New York City’s Town Hall in the winter of 1947. These rhythmical concepts greatly influenced innovative bebop drummers like Max Roach or Art Blakey, who even visited Haiti and Africa respectively to learn from the local artists (Stearns 243-244).

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Blakey’s interest in his African heritage resulted in the recording of Orgy in Rhythm, a ground-breaking 1950s album that employed an entire percussion ensemble. Blakey used the format again in 1962 on The African Beat in which the musicians played authentic African instruments like the talking drum or the chekere (Berendt 285). The increasing awareness of non-Western cultural roots of the African American musical tradition is wittily summarized in one of Gillespie’s memorable wisecracks. Once asked for his opinion about the future of jazz, he simply replied: “Probably it will go back to where it all started from: a man beating a drum” (qtd. in Berendt 77). Even though this tongue-in-cheek remark might sound a little disrespectful, beboppers were concerned with African cultural issues in a serious way. For example, Parker and Gillespie performed together with Sierra Leonean dancer Asadata Dafora to raise money for the African Academy of Arts and Research, and pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams joined Dafora for an April 1945 Carnegie Hall show which aim was to thoroughly explore the relation between the African performing arts, such as music and dance, and their Western counterparts (Porter, “Dizzy Atmosphere” 436-437).

2.5 Not Entertainment, but Art

According to jazz critic and social activist Nat Hentoff, bebop achieved “the major shift in the attitude of the jazzman toward his music and his public” (“Paying Dues” 106). This statement clearly points out one significant difference between the young modernists and those who made their name during the 1930s or even earlier. The preceding generations of African American musicians generally accomplished their success as entertainers and the mainstream white audience accepted and even praised them as such. Yet, young black jazz performers in the 1940s aspired to attain “acceptance as artists, as esteemed practitioners of a serious musical form” (Gioia, ch. 6). As Giddins explains, Gillespie, Parker, Monk, and other exponents of the bebop movement were not the first black jazzmen who felt more like artists than entertainers. Nevertheless, the fact that they grew up during the Harlem Renaissance, when African Americans started to make “great inroads into the nation’s cultural life,” resulted in their open resentment of “the banalization of jazz by popular dance bands and novelty recordings” (Riding on a Blue Note 216). Suddenly, a whole new generation emerged demanding their equality with classical composers, poets,

23 playwrights, painters and other “purveyors of highbrow culture,” which was something that had previously been sought only by exceptional individuals like Scott Joplin or Duke Ellington (Gioia, ch. 6). Interestingly, these aspirations also led to beboppers’ ambivalent relationship with the blues. Although some players like Charlie Parker were heavily rooted in this tradition (Southern 492), others felt rather ashamed of it as the blues evoked them the stereotypical image of “the unlettered Negro singing lewd blues to his guitar” (DeVeaux 345).

The artistic elitism combined with a strong sense of racial pride became a trademark of Miles Davis, a promising young trumpeter who emerged during the bebop period. A son of an affluent St. Louis dentist, he was raised in an atmosphere of strong race awareness that undoubtedly informed his self-confident, often arrogant conduct towards whites. In his highly personal autobiography, Davis remembers his father being “very pro-black,” sympathizing with Marcus Garvey’s ideology of Black Nationalism (Davis and Troupe 22). Davis’ characteristic boldness may be also attributed to his unparalleled artistic and commercial success. For instance, the outcome of his celebrated appearance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival meant a notable landmark in jazz history as for the first time the best-paid artist was an African American (Berendt 82). What is more, Davis contrived to preserve “his musical leadership as an innovator and influential jazz trumpeter” up until the 1990s (Southern 492). Conscious of his exclusive status, Davis did not hesitate to participate in the 1960s protest concerts (Pinheiro 1) and openly spoke about racial matters, retaining scorn for white America throughout his entire career. His acrimonious denial of the entertainer role epitomizes the feelings of the whole bebop generation:

I didn’t look at myself as an entertainer . . . . I wasn’t going to do it just so that some non-playing, racist, white motherfucker could write some nice things about me. Naw, I wasn’t going to sell out my principles for them. I wanted to be accepted as a good musician and that didn’t call for no grinning, but just being able to play the horn good. And that’s what I did then and now. Critics can take that or leave it. . . . Anyway, Max [Roach] and [Thelonious] Monk felt like that, and J. J. [Johnson] and Bud Powell, too. So that’s what brought us close together, this attitude about ourselves and our music. (Davis and Troupe 83)

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2.6 Drawbacks and Achievements

Unfortunately, such an attitude often did more harm than good. Above all, beboppers’ artistic emancipation tended to be grossly exaggerated, frequently accompanied by ostentatious detachment and hostility that included playing with the back to the audience or leaving the bandstand during the performance, sometimes “to the point of commercial self-destruction” (Stearns 320). Another problem was the music itself. Because of its excessive complexity, it gradually lost its ties with a considerable number of listeners that finally moved towards more accessible genres like rhythm and blues, which had just started to gain popularity in the second half of the 1940s. The situation was made even worse by the widespread availability of heroin in the whole jazz community that took a heavy toll on many beboppers, including the maestro himself, Charlie Parker (Giddins, Riding on a Blue Note 216). Last but not least, the attempt to prevent the music from being stolen by whites also did not completely succeed, as white players like tenor saxophonist Stan Getz or pianist Dave Brubeck introduced their own, more accessible adaptions of bebop and made them commercially successful (Berendt 138).

In spite of the aforementioned failures, bebop with its sophisticated musical vocabulary never completely vanished from jazz. Rather, it became one of its core elements as it was constantly emulated and refined by the succeeding generations of musicians, both black and white, and also the audience ultimately accustomed themselves to its dissonances (Bergerot and Merlin 13-14). On top of that, the changing socio-cultural climate of the bebop period also formed the attitudes and visions of one prominent African American artist that took the process of emancipation initiated by the early modernists even further (Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 101) and, according to Giddins, fully embodied “the black-music experience in the United States” (Riding on a Blue Note 171). His name was Charles Mingus.

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3 Charles Mingus: The Angry Man of Jazz

Throughout his prolific musical career, Charles Mingus, a virtuoso double bassist, composer and bandleader, was renowned for his passionate advocacy of jazz as an integral part of African American cultural heritage (Berendt 259). Jazz critic and journalist Leonard Feather characterized him as “a brilliant man of strong convictions,” who “was outspoken on racial and social matters and became a storm center in many confrontations during his peak years.” Similarly, biographer and literary scholar Krin Gabbard highlights that “Mingus was one of the first black artists to build an important career even as he consistently and aggressively asserted himself as an African American” (13). Although his erratic temper often led him astray, Charles Mingus undoubtedly raised one of the strongest voices of black protest in the post-World War II jazz scene (Bergerot and Merlin 64-67).

3.1 Childhood Experience

Born on 22 April, 1922, in Nogales, Arizona, Charles Mingus Jr. was raised in Watts, a poor Los Angeles neighbourhood, growing up in a mixed-race family. Mingus’ father was allegedly the illegitimate son of an ex-slave and a Swedish woman, whereas his mother, who passed away when Charles was less than six months old, was of African American and Chinese descent (Gabbard 13-16).

Watts was also the place where young Mingus experienced open racial hostility for the first time. Mingus senior, an abusive man that was apparently proud of his partially white origin, strictly prevented his children from making any contact with their peers whom he referred to as “black niggers” (Gabbard 25). So being called “nigger” by a bunch of Mexican boys left Mingus shocked, confused and hurt. In his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, he later recalled: “For the first time it came to him4 that whatever shade he was, he was going to be nothing but a nigger to some people” (Mingus 27).

Besides the painful experience of racism, the Watts years had a profound impact on Mingus’ highly personal attitude towards music that Porter describes as

4 Mingus refers to himself in the third person. 26

“catholic”5 (What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 101). According to Gabbard, one of the positive outcomes of the father’s racial denial was a thorough introduction to European classical music, ranging from Bach and Beethoven to Debussy, Ravel and even Richard Strauss. What is more, young Charles was also exposed to distinct sources of the African American musical tradition, varying from the gospel sounds of the Holiness Church worship services, which he attended with his stepmother, to Duke Ellington’s radio broadcasts. The fascination with Ellington even caused that Mingus started to identify himself as “a black man” (22-27). He later told Nat Hentoff: “When I first heard Duke Ellington in person, I almost jumped out of the balcony. One piece excited me so much that I screamed” (qtd. in Hentoff, The Jazz Life 164).

3.2 Outbursts of Anger

The beginnings of Mingus’ professional career can be traced back to the early 1940s, when he played with traditional jazz musicians like Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong (Gioia, ch. 7). Subsequently, he joined Lionel Hampton in 1947, contributing his original arrangements to the orchestra’s repertoire, and three years later he became a member of the Red Norvo Trio, where he achieved respect as a soloist (Berendt 259-260). The circumstances of Mingus’ departure from Norvo’s band in September 1951 are shrouded in mystery, yet there were rumours that he fell out with the bandleader over being forbidden to appear in a television show because the broadcasting authorities were afraid of their southern viewers’ reaction to a “mixed” group (Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 111). A 1953 stint with Duke Ellington, his idol and inspiration, ended in a similarly abrupt manner after a heated confrontation with Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol, when enraged Mingus finally chased his bandmate with a fire axe (Haddix 149). Again, there have always been questions about the actual cause for Mingus’ burst of aggression. According to Mingus’ own interpretation, there was a disagreement over the bass part to Tizol’s arrangement. When Mingus did not follow the notation as he found the part pitched too low, Tizol purportedly commented that he could not read music “like the rest of the niggers in the band” (Mingus 324). Tizol himself, however, denied that he had ever made a racial slur on Mingus (Gabbard 48).

5 broad in sympathies, tastes, or interests 27

Frustrated by the omnipresent racism in the music scene, Mingus acquired a reputation as a fierce, uncompromising hater of white establishment who “did not take well to insults, real or perceived” (Gabbard 47). For instance, Miles Davis recalls in his autobiography a car trip that he made with Mingus and Max Roach to California in 1953:

We got into this discussion about white people, and Mingus just fucking flipped out. Back in those days, Mingus was death on white people, couldn’t stand nothing white, especially a white man. In his sex thing, he might like a white girl, or an Oriental girl, but him liking a white girl didn’t have nothing to do with how much he disliked the American white male, or what people call WASPs. (Davis and Troupe 165)

Such an attitude is clearly evident in the comments that Mingus made as a guest on Leonard Feather’s “Blindfold Test,” published in Down Beat magazine on 15 June, 1955 (Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 118). Feather hosted this event to support his colour-blind assumptions about jazz, selecting rare, unfamiliar recordings to challenge those who claimed that they could always distinguish between black and white musicians (Berendt 119). Nevertheless, jazz scholar Ingrid Monson questions the objectivity of Feather’s selections and argues that “rather than view white ability to play jazz as a blackening of mainstream musical style, colorblind discourse of the day preferred to claim that the ability to swing and play the blues could be divorced from any necessary connection to blackness and African American” (80).

Not surprisingly, short-tempered Mingus turned the interview into a “color- conscious” denunciation of racial inequality and discrimination in the jazz world that culminated with a scathing attack on Dave Brubeck, a bestselling white pianist associated with the West Coast style, whom he accused of not playing true jazz. The root of Mingus’ anger did not lie so much in his personal distaste for Brubeck’s music, but in the fact that Brubeck and other white modernists were highly praised in the national press and even attained financial security, whereas many of their African American counterparts barely earn enough to live on. On top of that, some critics continued to marginalize, if not completely omit, the role of African Americans, connected “blackness with immorality in jazz,” and advocated the style represented by Brubeck – the archetype of a 1950s family man – “as a step forward from an unhealthy past.” (Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 118-121). Taking all these

28 issues into consideration, Mingus’ irritated reaction to Feather’s colour-blindness is absolutely justifiable.

It was also the inattentive, chattering club audience that became a frequent target of Mingus’ fury. One of the most notorious, highly publicized onstage rants occurred during his performance at New York’s Five Spot Café in 1955 (Laver 211). Mingus suddenly stopped playing and interrupted the sound of clinking glasses and the rattling of cash register with an enraged monologue in which he scolded the club visitors for being “a bunch of poppaloppers,” unable to “stop to listen to a word of artistic and meaningful truth” (Dorr-Dorynek 14-15). According to historian Scott Saul, such furious tirades should not be perceived as a mere uncontrolled “lashing- out against a backsliding congregation of listeners,” for they were actually part of a broader strategy. Considering his music as an art form that “required an act of devotional listening,” Mingus always strongly protested against its commercialization and mindless mass consumption in the nightclub. Hence, he did not hesitate to deliberately use even the most extreme ways to focus the attention of the audience back to what he regarded as essential – to the things happening on the bandstand (399-401). “I think in my own way . . . and my music isn’t meant just for the patting of feet and going down backs,” wrote Mingus in “An Open Letter to Miles Davis.” “Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever.” It is evident that some of his artistic visions were not dissimilar from those promoted by the first generation of beboppers in the 1940s (see Section 2.5).

3.3 Music as a Political Weapon

In the second half of the 1950s, many leading African American jazz musicians like Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, or Randy Weston started to reflect the ideas of the burgeoning civil rights movement and of the concurrent African struggle against colonial rule in their respective works (Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 129). Rollins, for instance, pioneered the use of social, political and cultural criticism “as a core conceptual framework” on his album Freedom Suite (1958). Furthermore, the saxophonist’s idiosyncratic Mohawk hairstyle expressed his solidarity with another socially marginalized group – Native Americans (Pinheiro 2).

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Even those who did not act as explicitly began to embrace a new aesthetic conception that echoed the socio-political upheaval with its demands for integration as well as for “the right to be different.” Generally known as hard bop, the newly forged jazz idiom drew inspiration from the very roots of African American musical tradition – blues and gospel – and became “the expression of a proud black community, sure of the outcome of its struggles.” Instrumental compositions like “Blues March” or “Song for My Father,” written by Benny Golson and Horace Silver respectively, are classic examples of such feelings and expectations communicated through music (Bergerot and Merlin 32-39). This can also be said about Oliver Nelson’s big band debut, Afro/American Sketches (1962), with its “Emancipation Blues,” “Freedom Dance,” or “There’s a Yearning” (Pinheiro 3).

However, it was Max Roach that turned into one of the most outspoken, passionate adherents of the civil rights movement among jazz artists. Roach, a veteran bebop drummer who had made his name co-leading a superb quintet with trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown, firmly believed that art should serve as a medium to convey a report of its time and devoted himself to mirror the feelings of African Americans in his music (Gioia, ch. 7). His politically motivated efforts reached their peak with the landmark 1960 album We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, released to pay homage to the forthcoming centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation (McShane 51). Co-written with lyricist Oscar Brown Jr., the suite featured singer-activist Abbey Lincoln, who was Roach’s wife at that time, Nigerian percussionist Michael Olatunji, and tenor saxophone legend Coleman Hawkins. “Perhaps the strongest political statement made by jazz musicians at the turn of the decade,” its five movements overtly explore three prominent themes in African American political discourse around 1960: the past experience of slavery (“Driva’ Man”), the contemporary civil rights struggle (“Freedom Day,” “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace”), and sympathy with the African affairs (“All Africa,” “Tears for Johannesburg”) (Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 167-169). Roach’s civil rights zeal permeates some of his other recordings as well and is directly reflected in the album titles, such as Speak Brother Speak (1962) or Lift Every Voice and Sing (1971) (Pinheiro 2).

Charles Mingus, with his extreme sensitivity to socio-political and racial matters, very soon joined the hard core of activist musicians. The beginning of his

30 involvement with politically engaged material dates back to the establishment of his own band, the Jazz Workshop, which served as a main instrument for achieving his artistic endeavours (Saul 389). This event roughly coincided with a 1955 live recording session at the Café Bohemia, during which Mingus performed two original pieces, “Work Song” and the then-unreleased version of “Haitian Fight Song” (Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 128). Pianist Mal Waldron, who participated in the session, considered “Work Song” to be the first-ever tune that openly demonstrated the composer’s social consciousness: “In particular, I think Mingus thought of the men who worked out their bondage by driving stakes or laying railroad ties. In a broader sense, he thought of the whole Negro race with its oppressions and problems.” Regarding the latter composition, Mingus commented that it could be also named “Afro-American Fight Song” (Hersch 103) and passionately talked about its close ties with the struggle for social justice: “I’d say this song has a contemporary folk feeling. My solo in it is a deeply concentrated one. I can’t play it right unless I’m thinking about prejudice and hate and persecution, and how unfair it is. There’s sadness and cries in it, but also determination. And it usually ends with my feeling: ‘I told them! I hope somebody heard me.’ ” (qtd. in Hentoff, The Clown).

A number of Mingus’ compositions and recordings contain a direct political commentary that is clearly apparent from their explicit, often provocative titles. For example, “Prayer for Passive Resistance” (1960) and “Meditations on Integration” (1964) candidly proclaim a strong affinity with the ideas of the civil rights movement (Hersch 103), whereas the parodic blues “Oh Lord, Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me” (1960) ridicules the Cold War nuclear strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (Santoro 186-187). With respect to the unsettling, volatile character of Mingus’ music, Saul argues that the Jazz Workshop represented a close musical parallel to the civil rights movement, for they both applied the strategy of provocation through nonviolence to their fight against social and racial injustice (388). Sometimes Mingus even employed lyrics, like in one of the most notable pieces, “Fables of Faubus,” that refers to the infamous attempt of Governor Orval E. Faubus to defy the desegregation of the school system by preventing nine African American students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 (Bennet 61). Mingus and his drummer, Dannie Richmond, sneer at Faubus and

31 the whole American political establishment in a violently sarcastic, ferocious conversation:

Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie Governor Faubus! Why is he so sick and ridiculous? He won’t permit integrated schools Then he’s a fool!

………………….

Name me a handful that’s ridiculous, Dannie Richmond Bilbo, Thomas, Faubus, Russell, Rockefeller, Byrd, Eisenhower Why are they so sick and ridiculous? Two, four, six, eight They brainwash and teach you hate (Mingus, “Original Faubus Fables”)

According to Richmond, the acerbic dialogue was spontaneously improvised to an already existing untitled melody during a performance of Mingus’ Jazz Workshop (Kernfeld 3). The composition, however, was first released on the seminal recording Mingus Ah Um (1959) in an instrumental version, for Columbia Records censored the highly controversial lyrics. A year later, a version with vocals eventually appeared under the title “Original Faubus Fables” on the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, which was released on Nat Hentoff’s independent Candid label (Pinheiro 1-2).

Apart from the songs with a relatively straightforward message, Mingus also projected his broad socio-political visions into much more complex, extended symbolic works inspired by dissonant tone-poems of German composer Richard Strauss, which fully corresponded with his “catholic” musical approach. One of his most outstanding projects, a tone-poem entitled “Pithecanthropus Erectus” (1956) represents an allegorical depiction of “Promethean ambition and slave revolt.” It tells a story of the first man, describing the individual stages of his live: the ascent from his hominid roots, the growing feeling of his own superiority, the enslavement of other human beings, and his inevitable fall due to the emancipation of those that he wanted to rule over (Saul 387). Political scientist Charles Hersch observes that “the applications of this anthropological tale to U.S. race relations are obvious” (106)

32 while Saul is much more specific, stating that the story of “Pithecanthropus” is “indebted to a long tradition of African American moderns, from Frederick Douglass to Ralph Ellison, who questioned the myth of “progress” from the standpoint of the slave” (411).

3.4 A “Protest Cat” and His Legacy

Mingus’ rebellious nature permeated with a strong sense for social justice not only influenced his artistic output but also manifested itself in the preoccupation with financial concerns of his own and of the fellow musicians. Well known for his deep mistrust of the white-controlled recording companies and other cultural industries that constantly exploited African American jazz players (Laver 202), Mingus declared himself a “protest cat”6 and often took action to challenge the status quo (Saul 397). These activities ranged from his infamous public rants and various displays of “creative anger” – once Mingus arrived to discuss overdue royalty payments in khaki clothes and helmet, holding a shotgun in his hands (Laver 213) – to more seriously meant attempts to run his own independent record labels. In 1952, he joined Max Roach to found the first of them, Debut Records, the biggest contribution of which was the release of a legendary 1953 bebop concert at Massey Hall, Toronto, featuring the all-star line-up of Gillespie, Parker, Roach, Mingus and pianist Bud Powell (McShane 51). Nonetheless, Mingus’ entrepreneurial skills did not match his high ambitions as practically all of his labels and publishing companies were fairly short-lived and not so financially successful (Laver 214).

Mingus’ protests against the underpayment of African American jazz musicians culminated in 1960 during the Newport Jazz Festival, organized by promoter George Wein. Mingus did not accept Wein’s considerably low offer of $700 for the whole band and insisted on being paid not less than $5,000. As Wein refused to pay the sum, Mingus, with the assistance of his long-time friend Roach and woodwind player Eric Dolphy, arranged a counter-event, the Newport Rebel Festival (Laver 212). The do-it-yourself character of the protest happening strikingly contrasted with its official sixty thousand person counterpart, for the organizers spent the night in tents, build the stage themselves, and walked around with a can to collect

6 cat – a slang term for a jazz musician 33 financial contributions from the audience (Saul 397). The anti-festival also initiated the establishment of the Jazz Artist Guild, an organization aimed to “promote economic and artistic self-sufficiency.” Three years later, Mingus announced probably his most ambitious venture – a plan to establish the School of Art, Music and Gymnastics. The principal idea was to introduce jazz to “unprivileged youths.” Unfortunately, both the Jazz Artist Guild and the School of Art followed the fate of his previous projects and failed to fully materialize (Laver 214).

In 1964, Mingus was deeply affected by the death of one of his closest musical partners, visionary multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy (Bergerot and Merlin 66), and remained in relative isolation until 1970, when he celebrated a successful international comeback initiated during his remarkable European tour (Berendt 260). Still, he never abandoned his critical, anti-establishment orientation and continued to demonstrate such an attitude through the intentionally bizarre titles of some of his new composition like “Free Cell Block F, ‘Tis Nazi USA” or “Remember Rockefeller at Attica,” which often became subject to censorship (Bennet 62). At the end of 1977, however, Mingus was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,7 to which he finally succumbed on 5 January, 1979, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he was seeking alternative medical help (Gioia, ch. 7). He is survived by his second wife, Sue Mingus, who manages her late husband’s estate and promotes his work by means of various repertory ensembles (Laver 223).

The most important part of Mingus’ legacy undoubtedly lies in his highly personal, revolutionary music created at the advent of the African American socio- political awakening of the 1960s that witnesses his role of an “important pathbreaker” for the upcoming developments and changes in the jazz world. Even though he never completely identified himself with the younger generation of avant- garde musicians, the unpredictable and often disturbing sounds of his Jazz Workshop paved the way for their free improvisations and, what is more, infused jazz with vociferous protest against racism and strong desire for social justice more than anything else (Berendt 357-358).

7 a degenerative muscular condition, generally known as Lou Gehrig’s disease 34

4 Free Jazz: Radical Journeys to Freedom

In the heated atmosphere of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the jazz world witnessed a sudden boom in highly innovative musical concepts, some of which were even more radical than those pioneered by “protest cats” like Charles Mingus or Max Roach. More specifically, it was the year 1959 that marked a watershed moment in music history, for during that time four landmark jazz albums were recorded. Apart from the already mentioned Mingus Ah Um (see Section 3.3), these were Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. However, it was the last one that aroused unprecedented controversy for its “stark contrast to other directions in jazz of the period.” Ornette Coleman, whose series of live performances at New York’s Five Spot Café in the same year also caused substantial excitement and confusion, became a jazz enfant terrible and divided other musicians, critics and listeners into two decidedly opposing camps. While some of them praised Coleman as a visionary innovator, many others accused him of being an insane eccentric and a charlatan, denouncing his saxophone playing as out of tune (Robinson). However, why did Coleman’s music ignite such a firestorm of criticism and hostility?

4.1 A Revolutionary Aesthetic Conception

From a musical standpoint, Coleman’s experiments sounded so iconoclastic for one simple reason. Coleman, a blues-influenced alto saxophonist from Texas, practically abandoned the logic of Western harmonic system that had been an integral part of jazz since its early days in New Orleans. Instead, he promoted “the feeling and authenticity of expression” as the key elements, while his unmistakably individualistic tone echoed the almost-forgotten folk roots, drawing inspiration from country blues, slaves’ field hollers and other archaic sources of the African American musical tradition (Bergerot and Merlin 52-55). Nevertheless, Coleman was not alone. There were other creative players who went in a similar direction and put their own effort into breaking the established rules, for they felt trapped within the harmonic constraints of bebop and its derivatives, which had become an all-too-common language of modern jazz. Therefore, the music seemed “rigid in its clichés and predictable formulas” and its further possibilities were virtually exhausted (Berendt

35

22). The resulting countermovement, formed by a considerably heterogeneous group of dissatisfied musicians, started to be known as “free jazz” among jazz aficionados, whereas the critics preferred the term “avant-garde jazz” and many of its creators referred to it as “the New Thing” or “the New Black Music” (Baskerville 484).

It is important to emphasize that the rejection of the crucial elements of the Western musical tradition was motivated extra-musically as well, being “part of a greater racial, social and political emancipation” (Berendt 23). As the birth and development of free jazz coincided with the period of the civil rights movement and the burgeoning demands of its leaders, with the ghetto riots and the violent acts of militant organizations like the Black Panthers, socially conscious African American musicians began to challenge the privileged position of Western art in American society and the legitimacy of cultural appropriation of jazz by the white mainstream. Hence, their primary objective was to eliminate all the aesthetic criteria that tied their music to the white man’s world, including the purity of sound, instrumental virtuosity, regular rhythm and logical structure, and to preserve only those fundamentals that truly define the very essence of African American musical heritage – raw, emotional sound, bodily involvement and spontaneous improvisation (Bergerot and Merlin 55-57). Sunny Murray, one of the most important free-jazz drummers, was especially explicit on this matter as he contemptuously called traditional drumming techniques “cliché beats” and compared them to “slavery or poverty.” For him, “freedom drumming” was “an aspiration toward a better condition,” both musical and social (qtd. in Berendt 24). Saxophonist Archie Shepp evidently shared Murray’s point of view as he sharply pointed out: “Where my own dreams sufficed, I disregarded the Western musical tradition altogether” (qtd. in Berendt 22).

Not only did free-jazz players disregard the Western tradition, but they also sought to replace it with a permanent substitute that would be more relevant to their world view. They often found it in various non-Western cultures, especially African and Indian, which provided them with a rich source of new musical inspiration as well as with religious and spiritual concepts that offered an appealing alternative to Christianity and mainstream American values (Pinheiro 3). Writer and social critic James Baldwin commented upon this situation: “It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being . . . must first divorce himself

36 from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him” (46). As a result, the musicians studied Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism, explored traditional African religions like Yoruba, and also found interest in ancient Egypt (Pinheiro 3). Some of them, like keyboardist and composer Sun Ra, even blended all these influences together to form the basis for a completely new African American culture, totally independent of its white counterpart (see Section 4.3).

Free-jazz artists also challenged the music industry controlled by white agents and managers. A lot of them viewed it as “plantations of the new slavery” that just exploited their creative talents, suppressed the artistic freedom of their music, and robbed them of the money they deserved (Baskerville 488-489). As Ornette Coleman pointed out in an interview with critic Dan Morgenstern, expressing his deep mistrust of music business:

As a black man, I have a tendency to want to know how certain principles and rights are arrived at. . . . I do not wish to be exploited for not having the knowledge or know- how required for survival in today’s America. It’s gotten so that in your relationships to every system that has some sort of power, you have to pay to become part of that power, just in order to do what you want to do. This doesn’t build a better world, but it does build more security for the power. Power makes purpose secondary. . . . (qtd. in Berendt 99-100)

To emancipate themselves from the unsatisfactory conditions, the avant- gardists employed two basic strategies. The former meant a boycott of playing in commercial jazz clubs and introduction of an alternative – the “loft jazz” movement, when the musicians played in their oversized flats and charged reasonable admission fees themselves (Baskerville 489-490). The latter, undoubtedly inspired by the pioneering activist work of Charles Mingus (see Section 3.4), involved the establishment of “various collective organizations that aimed at supporting the new music.” The Jazz Composers Guild was among the first in New York, formed by trumpeter Bill Dixon in 1964 as a result of a successful series of six concerts presented as the “October Revolution in Jazz.” Similar groups soon emerged in other cities, including Los Angeles, Detroit, or St. Louis. Yet, the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) became the most

37 influential artists’ collective, playing a prominent role in the free jazz scene since its foundation in 1965 until now (Gioia, ch. 8).

4.2 The Cult of John Coltrane

The revolutionary aesthetic innovations of free jazz were eagerly embraced by a number of radical African American intellectuals, including Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, Addison Gayle, Jr., Ishmael Reed, or Larry Neal, to name but a few (Robinson). This group of writers, poets and playwrights, known as the Black Arts Movement, represented an artistic outgrowth of the Black Power movement and echoed the nationalist voices of Stokely Carmichael and other young activists that “had become disenchanted with nonviolence [of the civil rights movement] and with the organizations led by conservative, older leaders” (Baskerville 484). Baraka, who was also an author of influential books on music history and criticism, became probably the loudest, most outspoken advocate of the 1960s African American jazz avant-garde, for which he coined the term “New Black Music” and promoted it, among other art forms, as one of the “vehicles to fight racism and oppression while asserting a self-determined vision of identity.” He and his followers “looked to music as a model of black expression in the arts,” sharing an immense affection particularly for tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, whose musical influence resonated with many of their works and whom they worshipped as the living embodiment of African American identity (Robinson). Miles Davis, who was Coltrane’s bandleader in the second half of the 1950s, states that

Trane’s8 music . . . represented, for many blacks, the fire and passion and rage and anger and rebellion and love that they felt, especially among the young black intellectuals and revolutionaries of that time. He was expressing through music what H. Rap Brown and Stokeley (sic!) Carmichael and the Black Panthers and Huey Newton were saying with their words, what the Last Poets and Amiri Baraka were saying in poetry. He was their torchbearer in jazz . . . . He played what they felt inside and were expressing through riots – “burn, baby, burn” – that were taking place everywhere in this country during the 1960s. It was all about revolution for a lot of young black people – Afro hairdos, dashikis, black power, fists raised in the air.

8 John Coltrane was known by his nickname Trane among jazz musicians. 38

Coltrane was their symbol, their pride – their beautiful, black, revolutionary pride. (Davis and Troupe 285-286)

On the contrary, Coltrane’s rather reserved, introspective personality and all- embracing spiritual orientation prevented him from being closely connected with the militant attitudes of many of his worshippers (Bergerot and Merlin 50), and his move to the African American jazz avant-garde also did not happen overnight. Born in 1926 in North Carolina, he had played professionally in various rhythm and blues bands since 1947, spent two years with Dizzy Gillespie, and achieved instant fame as a member of Miles Davis’ quintet. During his solo career he gradually shifted from the bebop tradition to more experimental playing styles which eventually led him into the realm of free jazz. This musical evolution draws a strong parallel with his personal development. In 1957, after a long-time battle with heroin addiction, he underwent a “spiritual awakening” that turned him into “a ceaseless seeker” after self-transcendence, which he aimed to attain through his music (Berendt 90-103). This never-ending quest resulted in a series of religiously oriented albums like Om, Expression, and the most celebrated one, A Love Supreme (Robinson). “I believe in all religions,” said Coltrane in 1962 (qtd. in Berendt 95), expressing his conciliatory, pantheistic visions that went far beyond the demands of the Black Power movement and opposed its militancy as well.

Even though Coltrane never fully adopted an activist role, the composition “Alabama” (1963), with its overtly political stamp, marked his partial involvement in the civil rights movement. It was recorded in response to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, a racially motivated attack by the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham, Alabama, during which four African American children were killed. The following year, Coltrane performed a series of eight concerts in support of Martin Luther King and the movement. At that time, the plaintive wail of his saxophone markedly resembled King’s famous speeches “with its progressive intensity,” which gave his solos a quality of “a crescent cry for justice” (Pinheiro 2). Quite interestingly, Coltrane also appeared at the New York Village Gate in a 1965 benefit concert of “New Black Music,” aimed to support Amiri Baraka’s short-lived project of Black Arts Repertory Theatre-School (Berendt 95). Thus, it is evident that although Coltrane directly associated himself neither with the civil rights movement nor the much more radical concepts of the Black nationalism, he possessed a considerable

39 degree of racial consciousness and, as critic Martin Williams points out, his music was definitely “related to the mood of American Negroes, and particularly the awakenings and frustrations of young American Negroes” (16).

4.3 Politics and Spirituality

As Coltrane’s music during his free jazz period was immensely appealing to the younger generation of avant-garde musicians, it is little wonder that for many of them the instrument of choice was the tenor saxophone. Drawing on the 1950s tradition of the wildly aggressive, “howling” saxophone style of rhythm and blues, free jazz players experimented with the most extreme ways of overblowing and transformed the tenor into what French authors Franck Bergerot and Arnaud Merlin call a “mouthpiece of the black community in revolt” (62). Coltrane’s album Ascension, recorded two years before his sudden death in 1967, featured two of these uncompromising young disciples (Berendt 95). The first of them, Pharoah Sanders, combined his highly idiosyncratic style with a very intense form of mysticism and exotic, non-Western musical influences, paying “homage to Mother Africa” (Bergerot and Merlin 57, 62). The latter was Archie Shepp, who established himself as the epitome of a radical, politically oriented African American jazz artist of the 1960s.

Born in 1937, Archie Shepp grew up in Brickyard, a small ghetto neighbourhood of Philadelphia. In 1961 he relocated to New York, where he encountered Amiri Baraka, then still known as LeRoi Jones, and other left-oriented intellectuals and artists, and began his active involvement within the African American community in Harlem as a musician, poet, playwright and social critic. (Walden 150-151). Bergerot and Merlin consider him “a historian of African American music” because of his distinctively passionate renditions of jazz classics by John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, infused with soul, blues and gospel influences (62), which primary aim was to “reconnect [Shepp’s work] with earlier forms of African American music” (Robinson). Feeling very strongly about racial issues, Shepp even rejected to refer to his music as jazz because, according to him, this term was no longer relevant and too much connoted white people’s bias and

40 prejudice against his race: “If we continue to call our music jazz, we must continue to be called niggers” (qtd. in Baskerville 485-486).

Shepp always claimed that his music was functional (Walden 153), as he associated himself with those musicians who “felt a close connection to the Black Power movement” (Baskerville 485) and possessed a sense of moral obligation to spread its philosophy to the masses through their artistic output:

The Negro musician is a reflection of the Negro people as a social and cultural phenomenon. His purpose ought to be to liberate America aesthetically and socially from its inhumanity. The inhumanity of the white American to the black American, as well as the inhumanity of the white American to the white American, is not basic to America and can be exorcised, gotten out. I think the Negro people through the force of their struggles are the only hope of saving America, the political or the cultural America. (qtd. in Jones 177)

Shepp manifested his political fervour musically on the notable 1965 record Fire Music, which featured the song/poem “Malcolm, Malcolm – Semper Malcolm,” dedicated to the memory of radical leader Malcolm X (Robinson). Because of his uncompromising viewpoint and social activism, Shepp very often came into conflict with mainstream America on all levels. His conservative adversaries labelled him as a “Neo-Neo-Tom jazz musician,” an opportunist who just made “a crusade and career out of being Black” (Walden 152-153). Renowned music critics, such as Leonard Feather or Martin Williams, called Shepp “a phony” and decried his music as “raw, shrill, and antijazz” (Baskerville 493). He was even accused of being an extremist because of his participation in a Communist Youth Festival in Finland in 1962 (Walden 153). In spite of these withering attacks, Shepp’s music did not lose its core of devoted supporters (Baskerville 493).

Nevertheless, other free-jazz musicians did not always share Shepp’s political radicalism and approval for the use of force. Ornette Coleman, for instance, expressed his strong disagreement with violence and hatred, rejecting “this war-jazz, race-jazz, poverty-jazz, and b.s.” (qtd. in Robinson). Similarly, tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler, one of Shepp’s generational contemporaries who represented more religious and philosophical than political stream, focused on “carrying a message of love and peace” (Bergerot and Merlin 62). Like Coleman, Ayler was heavily rooted

41 in the tradition of archaic pre-jazz music of the turn of the century, which he moulded into “the freedom of his tenor breaks” (Berendt 208). Together with his brother, trumpeter Donald, they intended their songs “to act as a panacea to divisive social issues” in order to “move [people] into higher levels of peace and understanding” – a conception that considerably clashed with the Black nationalism of Baraka and other exponents of the Black Arts Movement, who frequently enthused over the Aylers’ music (Robinson).

Probably the most elaborate spiritual philosophy created by a jazz musician was introduced by eccentric bandleader Sun Ra, who was born in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, as Herman Poole Blount. Sun Ra formed his Solar Arkestra in Chicago as early as the mid-1950s and soon presented an extraordinarily eclectic mixture of seemingly disparate elements of the whole Black tradition, ranging from the legacy of the 1930s Harlem big bands to quasi-mythological costumes, voodoo rituals and mystic trances (Berendt 337-338). He adopted his obscure stage name after the Egyptian sun god and shrouded his music in deep mysticism that embraced both the ancient African past and the space-age Afrofuturism, which is particularly evident from the titles of his compositions such as “Angels and Demons at Play” or “Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus” (Robinson). Although Sun Ra was often mocked for the apparent gimmickry and naivety of his performances, Berendt points out that for intellectuals and activists like Amiri Baraka such musical idiosyncrasies meant “the most precise expression of ancient black existence” transformed to the present (338). Yet, like in the case of Coltrane or the Ayler brothers, Sun Ra’s visons transcended and often collided with the nationalism of the Black Arts Movement, for the bandleader considered it “too materialistic” and was afraid that it would initiate a violent conflict between the races (Robinson). Said Sun Ra: “I paint pictures of infinity with my music, and that’s why a lot of people can’t understand it” (qtd. in Berendt 338).

As a matter of fact, Sun Ra’s remark unintentionally alludes to one of the crucial problems of free jazz. Because of its largely abstract character and frequently overemphasized rejection of established musical norms and rules, this music never gained a larger audience as it very often discouraged and alienated its potential listeners, including the members of the African American community (Baskerville 495); probably even more than bebop twenty years earlier (see Section 2.6). Peterson

42 considers this as a general tendency in the development of jazz, stating that “each [new circle of African American jazz musicians] has created a sound that is appreciated by an even smaller audience whether white or black” and that “each has been less commercially successful and more outspokenly hostile to white, bourgeois, capitalist society” (145). Furthermore, it was also the increasing popularity of rock and soul as more accessible variants of protest music during the 1960s that finally relegated avant-garde jazz to the periphery (Bergerot and Merlin 64).

4.4 Here Comes the Whistleman

The socio-political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s also witnessed the arrival of one of the most extraordinary African American artists and activists that the jazz world has ever had. This man was Rahsaan Roland Kirk, a blind multi- instrumentalist who specialized in various kinds of woodwind instruments, including exotic flutes and whistles, and who made his name for playing two or even three saxophones simultaneously (Gioia, ch. 7). Born as Ronald Kirk in 1935 in Columbus, Ohio, he was blind since his early childhood, and after having a visionary dream he changed the spelling of his first name to Roland (West). Spirituality and mysticism were integral parts of Kirk’s entire life, for he said: “I dreamed that I was playing two horns at once and I decided to do it. My life has been motivated by dreams. I have had a series of dreams throughout my life, and each one I had changed my life. That’s why I added Rahsaan to my name. I’m not a Muslim” (qtd. in West).

Kirk’s musical scope tended to be considerably broad and his artistic output always defied being pigeonholed into a single category, for he blended all the existing jazz styles into his own unique musical amalgam (Berendt 207). Soon after his arrival in New York in the early 1960s he began to perform with many top-notch jazzmen like Charles Mingus, with whom he recorded the famous album Oh Yeah (Himes), and quickly established himself as an outstanding soloist. Even though some critics dismissed him as a mere gimmick for his ridiculous costumes and bizarre onstage acts, not completely dissimilar from those of Sun Ra, Kirk frequently demonstrated his musical competence by improvising in the purest bebop tradition. Moreover, he always maintained a strong affinity with the African American matters

43 and a serious interest in politics that he publicly demonstrated on various occasions. A frequent target of Kirk’s onstage rants was Richard Nixon, whom he scolded in an almost Mingusian manner (Shoup). Also the titles of many of his pieces, such as “Volunteered Slavery,” “The Seeker,” or “Blacknuss,” echoed his deep social concerns (West).

In the early 1970s, after a series of gatherings at the Village Vanguard jazz club, Kirk became a leader of the newly-formed Jazz and People’s Movement (J&PM). This activist organization was also a product of his spiritual visions, with the intention to protest against the lack of African American artists in radio and television programmes. In August 1970, Kirk assembled a group of sixty demonstrators, which included notable jazz musicians such as Andrew Cyrille, Billy Harper, Ron Jefferson, or Lee Morgan, and interrupted the filming of The Merv Griffin Show at the CBS television studios to publicly articulate the J&PM’s demands (Wilmer). Waving banners and placards and blowing their whistles, the J&PM similarly invaded other famous events like The Tonight Show on NBC, and The Dick Cavett Show on ABC (Wilmer), as well as the Guggenheim Foundation, which also largely overlooked African American artists (Shoup).

As a result, The Ed Sullivan Show invited the J&PM to officially participate in their programme. Kirk arrived with an all-star band consisting of jazz heavyweights like Archie Shepp, Charles Mingus, or drummer Roy Haynes. However, in place of Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour,” which they were supposed to play, the band blasted a six-minute deafening rendition of Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song” (Shoup).

Rahsaan Roland Kirk was one of the few avant-garde jazz artists that managed to gain considerable success as well as financial reward. For him, jazz was “black classical music” and he “played “on” the black tradition as if it were an instrument.” What is more, he “deliberately elevated this tradition into a program not in the sense of historicizing backward looks, but quite to the contrary by incorporating it into the sounds of the seventies” (Berendt 207). Said Kirk: “People talk about freedom, but the blues is still one of the freest things you can play” (qtd. in Berendt 207). Unfortunately, his premature passing on 5 December, 1977, after suffering a major stroke, prevented him from carrying his message into the ensuing decades (Marshall 12-13).

44

Conclusion

The thesis showed that the question of race played a not inconsiderable role in the development of jazz between the 1920s and the 1960s. From the very beginning, African American jazz musicians frequently saw the fruits of their original artistic invention turning into an object of unscrupulous cultural appropriation. However, the mere fact that more and more white instrumentalists and singers became attracted to black music and began to imitate it would not have posed a major problem.

As discussed in Chapter 1, the heart of the whole matter lied in the inherent, institutional racism in American society with its discriminatory practices that deprived black jazz players of their rightfully deserved recognition and eventually pushed them into a marginal position with significantly limited opportunities to improve their economic condition and social status, in comparison with their white counterparts. As a result, being influenced by various socio-political events and changes occurring around them, a number of African American jazz performers started to transform their music, at least partially, into an instrument of emancipation from the oppressive social system and a symbol of their racial pride and collective identity.

Nevertheless, the connections between their musical output and organized black activism were in many cases rather indirect and covert, for the first and foremost objective of jazz greats such as Ellington, Parker, Davis, or Coltrane, to name but a few, was to pursue their creative artistic careers through which they sought professional as well as personal fulfilment. Even those who proved themselves the most politically outspoken, namely Mingus, Roach, Shepp or Kirk, were primarily musicians to whom any form of activism represented only a single, albeit undeniably important, facet of their lives, not the other way round.

Still, the personal experience of being African American proved too strong to be totally supressed from their work and one may even wonder what directions jazz music would have taken if its chief creators and innovators had not been exposed to any displays of racism and discrimination. What would it sound like? Or would there be any jazz at all? Unfortunately, there will never be a clear answer to these questions.

45

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