EXCERPT

Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity
Paul Austerlitz

Wesleyan University Press
2005

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One - Jazz Consciousness, U.S.A.
Chapter Two- Kente Cloth to Jazz: a Matrix of Sound
Chapter Three- Machito and his Afro-Cubans: Latin Jazz in the US Mainstream
Chapter Four- Ambivalence and Creativity: The Jazz Tinge in Dominican Music
Chapter Five- “Rhythm-Music”: Jazz in Finland
Chapter Six- “My Teacher is the Human Heart”:
The Human Music of Milford Graves
Conclusion
Bibliography
Interviews
Discography
Videography

Introduction

Percussionist Milford Graves maintains that the music he plays is “directly linked to African music.” But he also proclaims, “I do not deal with music that has any ethnic classification. I deal with human music.” Such positions are not uncommon: African American jazz players often assert black ownership of their art while declaring that it is universal or promoting it as a generically North American form. Pianist Billy Taylor, for example, espouses the idea that jazz is “America’s music” but also champions its provenance in African American culture.¹ And while Duke Ellington said that he played “Negro music,” he also insisted that his art is “international.”² The fluidity of these perspectives evince a nuanced vision, a high comfort-level with the natural complexity of our multifarious world: the major innovators of jazz have been black, but the music is played and enjoyed by U.S. citizens of all backgrounds, and indeed, by people the world over.³

In the introductory essay of his seminal 1903 book entitled The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois argued that “double consciousness,” a dual identity based in the black in-group and to the larger mainstream, characterizes African American culture:

[T]he Negro is sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world….It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness….One ever senses his two-ness, -- an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.⁴

Of course, all people have multiple identities, for it is natural to identify with different groups at different times. Race is only one aspect of African American identity, and people who happen to be black identify themselves according to many affiliations, ranging from gender to occupation and social class. But because race is a determinant factor in American life, it holds a prominent position in African American identity. For this reason, Du Bois’s concept of doubleness has became a central trope of African American studies, inspiring variegated interpretations.⁵ This book uses Du Bois’s insight as a springboard for thinking about jazz from an ethnomusicological perspective.⁶

Focusing on the ethnographic documentation of music, ethnomusicology interprets musical styles in their cultural contexts, looking at “music as culture.”⁷ The task of an ethnomusicological study is to describe and document a musical type in its context, to interpret a music culture. What is the music culture of jazz? Is it the U.S. mainstream or the African American in-group? Of course, it is both. Moreover, because jazz is performed all around the world, its lessons have become relevant to people everywhere. I thus use the term jazz consciousness to situate jazz in the overlapping contexts of the U.S., the African diaspora, and the larger world.⁸

Spiritual Striving

The separate but interrelated essays in this book look through three large lenses, considering jazz 1) as an art that is intimately tied to national identity in the United States; 2) as a music that is inextricable from its African-influenced base; and 3) as a major current of transnational culture.⁹ These perspectives are interrelated, and inevitably, they overlap. The truism that “jazz is America’s music” is problematic for several reasons. First, it fails to recognize that the music’s major innovators have been African American, and in a land that has marginalized blacks, this fact must be noted. Moreover, the statement that “jazz is America’s music” ignores the fact that this hemisphere includes South and Central America as well as North America, and that the U.S. is itself home to Latino as well as Anglo cultures.¹⁰ Jazz has long partaken of both, and this book pays special attention to Latin tinges¹¹ in the music. At the same time, jazz is indeed an important North American music that can teach us much about the United States.

The perspectives in this book are further related because, as Paul Gilroy points out, the African diaspora is a transnational phenomenon which is part and parcel of occidental civilization: the labor and expressive forms of blacks have been central to the economic and cultural development of Western modernity.¹² As Gilroy’s seminal book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, shows, “the experiences of black people …[are] a part of the abstract modernity.”¹³ Similarly, Duke Ellington affirmed that African Americans were fundamental to “building America…Working building America into the most powerful nation in the world…The foundation of the United States rests on the sweat of my people”¹⁴ While it has been integral to the development of the United States and Western modernity, African American culture has also been marginalized. This marginalization has manifested itself in slavery and segregation, and today, in subtle day-to-day forms of racial profiling. The story of the strife attendant to the 500-year legacy of the forced migration of Africans to the Americas is inextricable from jazz consciousness.

Doubleness developed through force of necessity, through confronting the extreme vicissitudes of a troubled world; as Du Bois writes, while it offers insights that amount to “second sight,” it is also tantamount to an internal “war.”¹⁵ A speech attributed to the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Sellasie and immortalized in Bob Marley’s reggae song, “War” eloquently states that as long as human relations are fraught with injustice, the world will be in a state of war: “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently abandoned, everywhere is war.”¹⁶ The anthropologist Melville Herskovits discussed a “myth of the Negro past” which is central to this strife. This myth erroneously posited that blacks living in the diaspora had lost contact with their ancestral traditions. He refuted this myth, meticulously documenting African influences in the Americas, which he called “Africanisms” or African “survivals,” and he developed the concept of syncretism, the blending of elements from two cultures (in this case, African and European).¹⁷ Herskovits discussed the discord inherent to this journey. He noted that while Haitians worship their ancestral African spirits, they sometimes feel guilty about it afterwards, developing a "socialized ambivalence" as a result of ritual “possession by the gods of his [African] ancestors...despite his strict Catholic upbringing…. [H]is “desire to understand and worship the gods of his ancestors” is followed by “remorse after having done this.”¹⁸ Herskovits’s colleague Erika Bourguignon argues that while syncretism "helps to present a complete picture of the universe...ambivalence is essentially disruptive not only to a harmonious world-view, but even to successful self-identification."¹⁹ Similarly, the Martiniquean psychologist and anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon noted that colonized and enslaved people often internalize hegemonic perspectives which cause feelings of ambivalence. He stressed, however, that this disruption is a natural reaction to societal rupture, that it is a manifestation of the larger problems of colonialism and racism.²⁰

Ambivalence, however, is a natural reaction to the contradictions that all sensitive people face, and I believe that it is by honestly confronting and working through internal contradictions that we grow. Invocations of double or split consciousness had already been made when Du Bois presented his concept of doubleness. The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called the unreconciled conflict between spiritual and mundane experience “double consciousness” in his 1843 published lecture, “The Transcendentalist.”²¹ Goethe also grappled with questions of spiritual duality.²² Du Bois was certainly aware of, and was likely influenced by, both these invocations. Moreover, his Harvard professor, William James, was carefully considering the nature of consciousness during the period that Du Bois studied with him.²³ James was a psychologist, philosopher, and scholar of religion. In his work as a psychologist, James, like many of his colleagues, was particularly interested in pathological states of “split personality.” It is James’s work on religion, however, that resonates most powerfully with the concept of jazz consciousness as developed in this book. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James contrasted two kinds of spiritual seekers. One type has a “’once-born’ type of consciousness, developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis.”²⁴ The other type, by contrast, is acutely aware of evil and has a “divided self” which must undergo a “process of unification” and be “twice-born.”²⁵ St. Augustine, for example, was a tortured soul who was torn between his carnal desires and his spiritual path.²⁶ James, however, sees this type of ambivalence as a good thing: he argues that it is through grappling with adversity that we learn and grow. Augustine and other tortured, “divided selves” eventually resolve their crises, moving on to higher planes of existence. While this resolution can take many forms – it need not be religious -- James calls it “conversion” and describes it as “the process…by which the self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy…”²⁷ Similarly, Du Bois writes that doubleness engenders a “longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” This merging of the black self and the generically American self negates neither of its components, instead giving rise to a higher consciousness characterized by “second sight.” Du Bois was not a particularly religious man, but significantly, the essay in which he articulates the concept of doubleness is entitled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” and as Du Bois’s biographer David Levering Lewis asserts, it is “profoundly mystical.”²⁸

The concept of consciousness suggests a valuable -- and provocative – way to look at music. My thinking here is influenced by the new wave of “consciousness studies;” while this burgeoning field is related to neuroscience, it is also emphatically humanistic and several of its major figures are philosophers as well as scientists.²⁹ This book does not treat the neuroscience of music, nor does it consider music in relation to altered states of consciousness. Instead, calling upon Du Bois’s thinking, it invokes the concept of consciousness in a humanistic sense, as a trope that can help us understand music, culture, and identity. Consciousness implies awareness, sentience, mind-set, world-view. Musical consciousness is different from other forms of consciousness because musical experience makes us aware, mindful, and sentient in ways that non-musical experience does not. At the same time, musical experience cannot be separated from other experience, so while it issues from a particular backdrop, music can inform, and even influence, other aspects of life; musical consciousness is an active agent in culture.³⁰ Even thinking about music or possessing a world-view that is informed by musical experiences is musical consciousness. Of course, musical consciousness is ineffable; it is impossible to describe it in words. But precisely because it speaks its own language, music can tell stories that otherwise go untold. One of the hallmarks of musical consciousness is that it can unite things that are separated in non-musical reality. For example, despite racial segregation, Duke Ellington seamlessly integrated European influences and African-derived musical traditions.
Musicologist Christopher Small celebrates music’s ability to reconcile competing currents of culture and identity. He writes that music can

articulate and reveal to us some of our deepest values…All human beings carry around with themselves any number of contradictions and paradoxes, and we need not worry ourselves too much by that ( I am comforted also by Walt Whitman’s superbly confident “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself!”). [In the musical experience] we have a tool by means of which our real concepts of ideal relationships can be articulated, those contradictions can be reconciled, and the integrity of the person can be affirmed, explored, and celebrated.³¹

The spiritual striving of double consciousness has manifested itself in various musical movements, some based in the black in-group and others reaching out to the wider world. Graham Lock’s aptly-titled book, Blutopia elucidates blues-based utopian projects instigated by African American musicians.³² On one hand, they have responded to the “war” of doubleness by turning inward and focusing on the in-group. This trend has manifested itself in various forms of utopian black nationalism. Jazz projects celebrating black identity range from Duke Ellington’s many compositions devoted to telling the story of his people, to Afro-Cuban jazz, and the “new black music” (or “avant-garde”) of the 1960s. As general rule, however, musicians have cultivated an extraordinary openness; developing during the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights movements, the consciousness of the jazz community has articulated an aesthetic of inclusivity and an ethos of ecumenicity. By melding together many different influences, ranging from the blues to North American popular song, from European art music to Indian raga, from samba to hip-hop, jazz creates an expansive space. The experience of playing, listening, or dancing to jazz – and even feeling its lingering effects after the sound has stopped – manifests a holism that reconfigures the mind-set.

A creative tension resulting from African Americans’ equivocal position both within and without Western modernity speaks eloquently to the contradictions that all people face. This book argues that jazz creates a virtual space where we can confront, learn from, and even heal the contradictions resulting from social rupture. Developing through force of necessity in a context of inhumanity, in a state of “war,” the inclusivity of jazz works with conflict and ambivalence to arrive at “second sight.” Issuing from African American culture, this consciousness enriches all folks “in this American world,”³³ as well as around the planet.

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