ABSTRACT
LeRoi Jones had moved to Greenwich Village in 1954, where he cofounded the infl uential Beat journal Yugen as well as Totem Press, which published the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg. But he also became increasingly involved with political activism and especially with black nationalist cultural politics, moving to Harlem later in the 1960s, opening the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, and adopting the Arabic name, Amiri Baraka. Jones’s role as an artist at this time – he was a successful poet and playwright – folded into his investment in black cultural nationalism to make his account of jazz both essentialist and ambivalent. Blues People was the fi rst book to suggest that jazz was in essence African-American, tying it to a black tradition of the blues, that is, to a conception of African-American musical practices already distinguished from mainstream, white America. Black jazz musicians were thus cultural representatives, the individual musician transmitting, as well as standing for, an explicitly African-American cultural system; a ‘machine inside the machine’, in the black novelist Ralph Ellison’s words (cited in Dinerstein 2003: 128). But jazz was also an open, mutable form. Sometimes, it seemed to deviate from black musical traditions altogether, which is the view Jones presents of the big-band ‘swing’ phase of the 1930s, for example. ‘Swing’, Jones writes, ‘had no meaning for blues people’ (Jones 1963: 181). Despite the prominence of black musicians such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie, it seemed like an ‘assimilated’ form, its audiences as well as its best-paid stars (like Benny Goodman) being white. A newer jazz form seemed more promising, however. Bebop emerged in the mid-1940s, identifi ed with jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk: all African-Americans. It was played by smaller ensembles in smaller nightclubs, like Minton’s Playhouse which opened on New York’s 118th Street in 1938 with a house band that featured Thelonious Monk on piano. For Jones, bebop produced a ‘wilfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound’ that helped to return jazz ‘to its original separateness, to drag it outside the mainstream of American culture again’ (181, 182). It ‘re-established blues as the most important AfroAmerican form in Negro music’ (194) and it also appeared to turn away from commercialising imperatives. White jazz critics didn’t seem to understand it: Jones quotes the jazz broadcaster and ragtime enthusiast Rudi Blesh, for example, who wrote that bebop ‘comes perilously close to complete nonsense as a musical expression…exploiting the most fantastic rhythms and unrelated harmonies that it would seem possible to conceive’ (cited 190): rather like ranting, we might say. Bebop provides a perfect example here of the way in which black cultural nationalism expresses itself subculturally, as socially distinctive and nonconformist. But the subcultural characteristics of bebop make this particular jazz movement no less open and mutable. ‘Socially’, Jones writes, ‘the term bebop…came to denote some kind of social nonconformity attributable to the general American scene, and not merely to the Negro’ (190). For all its pathologisations, Norman Mailer’s essay on the ‘white Negro’
– discussed in Chapter 4 – had at least noted the openness of the bebop subculture to whites as well as African-Americans. ‘Self-segregating’ whites may well have come to identify with the ‘anti-assimilationist’ world of bebop, but as Jones suggests (in a way that puts Becker’s point into its racialised context), the conditions of that identifi cation are diff erent:
The white beboppers of the forties were as removed from society as Negroes, but as a matter of choice. The important idea here is that the white musicians and other young whites who associated themselves with this Negro music identifi ed the Negro with this separation, this nonconformity, though, of course, the Negro himself had no choice.
