"Classical Jazz" and the Black Arts Movement

Abstract

period between 1960 and 1970 represents an era of important and extraordinary cultural change in United States. Longstanding issues of relationship of ethnic vernacular to mainstream, and that of American mainstream to European high art, came into focus in these years in a particularly contentious yet artistically fruitful manner. If one recalls artists such as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy, it is clear that jazz musicians were never before so technically proficient on their instruments or in their mastery of European traditions. On other hand, these artists consciously intended to foreground non-European musical influences as well as Afrocentric and folkloristic elements of jazz. At same time, poets and theorists of Black Arts Movement (including Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Askia Muhammad Toure) were making a very popular case for an aesthetic conceived as openly oppositional to both European and white American culture. roots of Black Arts Movement are easily traced to Harlem Renaissance of 1920s. That earlier movement first attempt by American artists to produce work consciously grounded in their folk heritage and to utilize that work for social advancement of race. For Larry Neal, Harlem Renaissance was essentially a failure. It did not address itself to mythology and lifestyles of black community (78). This statement seems puzzling today, but its meaning crystal clear in 1968 and pointed to a political philosophy underlying aesthetic discriminations. Whereas leaders of Harlem Renaissance hoped to prove cultural worthiness of Americans byy demonstrating their aptitude for cultivation, development, and progress in terms understood by white American society, leaders of Black Arts Movement hoped to celebrate a kind of proletarian and vaguely African culture. Like Zora Neale Hurston's appreciation of folk, Black Arts Movement sought to identify a certain intrinsic beauty and vitality in American authenticity. This view particularly affected way that Black Arts Movement writers dealt with jazz. In an important essay titled Jazz and White Critic (1963), Amiri Baraka declared: In jazz criticism, no reliance on European tradition or theory will help at all. Negro music, like Negro himself, is strictly an American phenomenon, and we have got to set up standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend on our native knowledge and understanding of underlying philosophies and local cultural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical writing or commentary about it. (186) By 1966, Baraka had framed message much more concisely: The music you hear (?) is an invention of Black lives (Black Music 176). What at stake, of course, a cultural hierarchy explicit in American society. As a visiting student once expressed it, They love your music - but they don't love you. Black Arts Movement asked, basically, what's love got to do with it? In area of music, prevailing cultural hierarchy assigns value to European symphonic tradition at expense of indigenous American musical conventions. Compared to jazz, classical music has been assigned a higher cultural value which - of course - has very little to do with music per se. In 1948 Sidney Finkelstein noted that the man who listens to jazz, whether New Orleans or bebop, is hearing as unstandardized a set of musical scales and combinations of scales as is he who listens to Copeland or Ives. Finkelstein logically concluded that the artificial distinction between 'classical' and 'popular' has been forced upon our times by circumstance that production of both ... has become a matter for financial investment instead of art (9). There is, however, a definite political rationale involved that touches on aesthetic questions. …