Black creative genius matters: Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the Jazz and People’s Movement, and the politics of “black classical music.”

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Jazz and People’s Movement, led by multi-instrumentalist and Atlantic Records recording star Rahsaan Roland Kirk, began disrupting network television talk shows in 1970. The movement aimed to stop the erasure of “black creative genius” not only from the nation’s television airwaves, but from its collective history and memory – to make that which was practically invisible visible once again. But Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the Jazz and People’s Movement do not fit neatly into the usual categories historians use to describe the politics of the “long Sixties.” Kirk occupied a hybrid position – equal parts radical, reformist, and countercultural – and fashioned himself as what scholars such as Elizabeth Jelin and Lorena Oropeza have called “memory entrepreneurs”- men and women who give voice to those disappeared or otherwise silenced by the state. Rahsaan Roland Kirk acted as jazz’s foremost memory entrepreneur not to expose state violence, exactly, but to reveal the whitewashing – the disappearing – of black creative genius out of American popular memory. That whitewashing falls into another category of violence – cultural violence – executed in service of the maintenance of American racial hierarchies. This essay restores both Kirk’s and the Jazz and People’s Movement’s places in the respective histories of the long civil rights movement, Black Power, and the counterculture. It shows how easily the cultural politics of the three – so often treated separately by historians – overlapped and were intertwined. As such, the essay argues for Kirk as a prominent black political artist who illuminated the intersection of popular music and civil rights politics over the long Sixties.