Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

Abstract

In the introduction to this compelling account of 1960s African American jazz poetry, Jean-Philippe Marcoux quotes the poet Lorenzo Thomas on the figure of the African griot during the Black Arts Movement. Explaining how avant-garde jazz musicians are portrayed as griots in the New Black Poetry, Thomas writes: “Between 1960 and 1970 an outpouring of poems focused on musicians in the role of griots. … All these poems issued from the idea that the blues singer or jazz saxophone player is … the contemporary griot—a role that the poets, of course, already accepted for themselves” (9). While the role of the griot is often noted in studies of Black Arts poetry, no book has concentrated so intensively and persuasively on the importance of this role for African American poetry as Jazz Griots.Jazz Griots does not propose a comprehensive account of the Black Arts Movement, although Marcoux acknowledges the work of such influential scholars as James Smethurst, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, William J. Harris, and Kimberly W. Benston, whose research informs his conceptualization of 1960s African American poetry. He cites as well the recent research of Meta DuEwa Jones (2011) and Amy Abugo Ongiri (2010) that coincides with his study. Concentrating on four exemplary figures, Langston Hughes, David Henderson, Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka, Jazz Griots nonetheless succeeds in developing a new literary and cultural history of African American jazz poetry. As Marcoux argues, each of these poets adapts the tradition of the griot into a jazz testimony of African American history and cultural legacies. As fluent in jazz history and theory as he is in the vernacular traditions of African American poetry, Marcoux elucidates the innovative formal practices of these challenging poets.Marcoux’s introductory definition of the griot is at once precise and flexible enough to accommodate the various adaptations that occur in the poetry he studies. There is considerable continuity among these poets in their understanding and enactment of the griot’s role. Generally, this role is implied in the ways that African American poetry invokes jazz as a means for passing on cultural traditions and raising awareness of black culture. Griotism is a mode of political engagement for these poets, then, a means for developing “a black aesthetic based on jazz performativity” (5). As an “intravernacular” mode that enacts jazz performance, African American jazz poetry fulfills three criteria: “it maps the functionality of the vernacular, it comments on the political struggles and need for social action, and it performs historiography in a way that evokes grioticism” (7). In formulating this inclusive definition of the griot, Marcoux turns especially to the scholarship of Thomas A. Hale in Griots and Griottes (1998). The griot’s traditional roles include those of genealogist, historian, adviser, interpreter and translator, musician, exhorter, witness, and praise singer. For jazz poets who adapt these roles, jazz functions as “the griot’s meta-language,” as “an aesthetic corollary to the revolutionary politics that informed their poems” (19). This is especially true with the invocation of free jazz in Umbra and Black Arts poetry as a music of black resistance and liberation, an implicitly black nationalist music because white listeners could not fully comprehend its vernacular resonances.Jazz Griots posits Hughes’s late and underappreciated long poem, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), as a pivotal example of how 1960s African American jazz poetry performs historiography. Hughes’s long poem initiates the blend of cultural, political, and musical histories that recur in later Umbra and Black Arts poetry. Its “tapestry of cultural heroes” furthermore underscores the importance of rethinking black history in order to develop “new nationalist paradigms” (6). In emphasizing how Ask Your Mama inspires the experimentation of jazz poets such as Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka, Marcoux recovers an intertextual history that has been obscured, partly because Ask Your Mama has been largely ignored by scholars until recently, and partly because of the generational and political divides that have presumably differentiated Hughes’s poetry from Black Arts writing. While more could be said about Hughes’s conflicted reception among younger black poets, Marcoux’s evidence of Hughes’s impact on 1960s African American poetry, including the interviews he conducted with David Henderson, is revealing. Ask Your Mama is most influential, of course, as a complex enactment of Stephen Henderson’s theory of black music as poetic reference. But it also features the role of the griot, whom Hughes figures as a “jazz soloist, whose performativity is a series of cultural reiterations dialogically linked with ‘the larger tradition’” (26). Enacting a conversation among musicians, activists, historical figures, and cultural heroes, Ask Your Mama demands the active participation of readers in interpreting and negotiating multiple realms of black experience. It does so also through the way jazz functions in its structure, which juxtaposes musical cues with the poetic stanzas.The structure of Ask Your Mama does not resemble the free jazz that subsequently informs Black Arts poetry, however. It instead resembles the more traditional improvisational dynamic of jazz jam sessions, in which musicians’ solos respond to both the theme and to other musicians’ solos: “Hughes constructs each ‘mood’ in relation to the theme—both musical and literary—of the larger project, the ‘Hesitation Blues.’ By repeating the theme through stanzaic developments, which, themselves, riff upon both poetry and musical cue, Hughes reproduces the structure of jazz composition” (40). Marcoux underscores the continuity of Hughes’s poetics as much as the historical specificity of Ask Your Mama, and he explains how the genealogical function of the poem evokes Hughes’s earlier vernacular poetry as well as earlier musical analogues, such as Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige, that figure vernacular music as a form of resistance to racial oppression. In its learned articulation of jazz form, and especially of jazz improvisation, this chapter is remarkably astute in defining the influential role of the “griot-musicologist” in Ask Your Mama (32).Jazz Griots suggests a lineage that exceeds most literary historical parameters of the Black Arts Movement, boldly beginning with Hughes’s Ask Your Mama, and then proceeding to poetry that is more familiarly associated with the Black Arts generation: Henderson’s Umbra poetry; Sanchez’s “womanist” jazz poetry; and Baraka’s revolutionary jazz poems, beginning with Black Magic but including more recent long poems such as “In the Tradition” and Wise Why’s Y ’s. Of the four poets studied in Jazz Griots, David Henderson is the least well known. He was, however, a prominent figure in the Umbra group of African American poets, which makes Marcoux’s attention to his 1960s poetry in De Mayor of Harlem (1970) especially significant. The Umbra poets, associated with Umbra magazine and the Umbra Workshop in the early 1960s, included such writers as Ishmael Reed, Tom Dent, Calvin C. Hernton, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Lorenzo Thomas. As Thomas (2008), Nielsen (1997), and Fahamisha Patricia Brown (1999) have suggested, Umbra was an important prototype for Black Arts poetry, with the development of a new “black aesthetic” based on vernacular speech and musical improvisation. Marcoux also emphasizes the importance of Ask Your Mama for the Umbra poets as a model for enacting a historical consciousness of the African diaspora. Hughes’s blending of jazz and spoken language likewise influenced the Umbra poets, who represent African American vernaculars as “a complex of meaningful sounds and tonalities,” asserting a connection with African cultural roots while enacting social commentary on contemporaneous civil rights struggles (72). Marcoux underscores how Henderson extends Hughes’s example through his verbal translation of free jazz, in poems such as “Walk with De Mayor of Harlem” and “Elvin Jones Gretsch Freak,” adapting jazz improvisation into poetic form. This chapter also considers how Henderson’s poetry incorporates the new black protest music of the 1960s, including rhythm and blues as well as jazz. This is most pronounced in De Mayor, which invokes rhythm and blues as a dramatic mode of social commentary on the significance of the 1964 Harlem Riot. “So We Went to Harlem” powerfully exemplifies how Henderson assumes the role of a griot who enacts the history of Harlem, appealing to black pride and self-determination through his poetic invocation of black music, and appealing nationally to the idea of Harlem as a black “home.”Like Henderson, Sonia Sanchez is as identifiable by the unusual lineation and spatial organization of her poems as by the rhetorical intensity of her radical social criticism. She too invokes the revolutionary aesthetics of free jazz as a metaphor for black liberation by “transposing sonic and vocal intentionality into words” (107). Her poem “on seeing pharaoh sanders blowing” exemplifies how the spacing of words on the page correlates with the free jazz musician’s performance: this reinscription of his sound enacts her interpretation of his music as a mode of black resistance and liberation. In exploring the revolutionary poetics of We a BaddDDD People (1969) and Home Coming (1971), Marcoux also accentuates what is distinctive about Sanchez’s womanist jazz poetics. She takes on the role of the griotte in invoking an African cultural heritage, through chanting, recalling cultural heroes, and asserting a radical Afrocentric cultural memory. The traditional griotte functions as a “transmitter of a shared past,” narrating family genealogies more than the epic genealogies associated with the griot (117). This role is most notable in the preface to We a BaddDDD People, where Sanchez celebrates the heroism of black women and their role of sustaining black cultural memory. While the distinction between the functions of the griotte and griot might have been developed further, Marcoux emphasizes poems that dramatically exemplify Sanchez’s womanist poetics. The sonic complexity of her revolutionary jazz poetics is most evident, though, in Marcoux’s extensive reading of “a / Coltrane / poem,” in which Sanchez translates Coltrane’s spiritual conversion in A Love Supreme into a black-nationalist conversion. In enacting the musical power of A Love Supreme through her precise vocalization of Coltrane’s performance, Sanchez asserts “the conversational trope of creative exchange between musicians … as a proscriptive framework for social organization” (141).Amiri Baraka is omnipresent in Jazz Griots as a critic and theorist of jazz. His jazz criticism in Blues People and in his black nationalist essays was crucial for the poetic translation of black music into radical social commentary. This social criticism evokes the griot’s role of affirming black culture and its history of resistance. In the chapter dedicated to Baraka’s poetry, Marcoux revisits his critical role in the Black Arts Movement but also extends the trajectory of Baraka’s impact as a jazz poet into the later decades of the twentieth century. Baraka’s poetry invokes free jazz as a revolutionary mode of social criticism as early as Black Magic: Poetry 1961–1967 (1969). Poems such as “Form Is Emptiness” or “Black Art” render free jazz as both a continuation of black vernacular tradition and a subversion of European aesthetic traditions. Baraka understands free jazz as a syncretic form of black music that incorporates the sounds of the blues, gospel, and bebop through improvisation. And he emphasizes the importance of free improvisation in his poetics: the collective “we” of his black nationalist poems is based on the mix of voices interacting with each other. Like Henderson and Sanchez, Baraka asserts the trope of freedom formally as well as thematically, through typographic and spatial variation and through fragmented phrasing. Baraka likewise manipulates pitch and tonality, exemplifying his knowledge of African music. Marcoux lucidly explains how Baraka’s “ideophonic performance,” from Black Art through The Music (1987), is distinguished by his consciousness of African aesthetics as well as his adaptation of free jazz improvisation (164).Baraka’s most extensive, and most ambitious, synthesis of the blues and free jazz occurs in later poems that have been read less frequently than his earlier nationalist poems, including “In the Tradition” (1982) and Wise Why’s Y’s (1995). Like Henderson and Sanchez, Baraka looks to Coltrane as a model, to the musician’s “investigative mind and the desire to draw from his own cultural traditions elements to fashion new forms of artistic expression” (168–69). But Ask Your Mama is the most significant prototype for “In the Tradition,” with its leitmotif from Arthur Blythe’s composition and its movement throughout jazz history. As in Ask Your Mama, the blues function as a form of cultural memory that is reinscribed throughout jazz history in Baraka’s poem. And also like Hughes, Baraka “employs the tradition of naming in order to reproduce the image of polyphonic improvisation inherent in jazz.” The black tradition of Baraka’s poem is “polycentric,” with its mix of names, stories, and sites (171). “In the Tradition,” like the subsequent Wise Why’s Y’s, suggests the precedent of Ask Your Mama as an act of “historical reclamation” that fosters an African diasporic consciousnesss, an act that Baraka extends to vernacular poetry as well as music (175). Performing the role of the griot, Baraka conceptualizes black vernacular expression through “didactic performances of a shared ethos, as history ritualized and performed” (180).In conducting this dialogue of Umbra and Black Arts poetry with Ask Your Mama, Jazz Griots itself becomes a timely act of “historical reclamation” that asserts a more expansive literary history of radical African American jazz poetry than is usually assumed in studies of the “black aesthetic” or “the 1960s.” By articulating a continuity of how “jazz performs historiography” from Ask Your Mama to Wise Why’s Y’s, Marcoux reveals the limitations of generational constructs of African American poetry. If Marcoux’s musicological and historical expertise in jazz studies makes this study of Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka so rewarding, the intergenerational dialogue that he accentuates is also suggestive for reconsidering the significance of jazz in African American—and African diasporic—literature beyond the 1960s.