ABSTRACT
Modern black culture, in its insistently revisionary quest for an authoritative voice, wants to remake that fundamental activity of mind we call "art". At the same time, whether revisionary or revolutionary, resurrective or iconoclast, it has come to realize that all real transformations in the form of expression, especially when envisioned as integral to fundamental shifts in the structure of collective consciousness, can take place only within a transfiguration of the idea of expression itself. "Art" names the political and cultural aspiration of black modernism when it becomes the scene of reinscription, a critical intervention within inherited practices that may well appear first as a shattering of convention but sustains its subversive energy as a perpetual interrogation of the world as "given." Thus, while the new "black aesthetic" turns inside-out all the pieties of life and art, speaking 'outlandishly' against the grain of normative African-American aesthetic discourse, it still speaks for the life and increase presumably afforded by a new syntax of desire. That it has dared to do so in such assertive tones is certainly attributable to the starding innovations of contemporary jazz musicians, chief among these John Coltrane.
