Abstract
On his 1973 album Geechee Recollections, free jazzer Marion Brown tackles one of the most musical African American narratives, “Karintha” from Jean Toomer’s Cane. The velocity of sound Toomer’s text seeks to transcribe in literary form Brown trans-scribes back into music propelled by what I term Afro-kinesis. Afro-kinesis is a form of motion — a Benjaminian eddy rather than a Derridean trace — that improvises modalities of transaction with and in new-old sonic topographies, and in the process limns an aural modernity that constantly reinvents itself. This kinetic ecology of sound goes beyond acoustic transposition and instead aspires to effect a signifying exchange between the mercurial improvisation of free jazz’s “new thing” and the scripted stasis of literary text, a transaction of meaning across cultural time and physical space.
Highlights
On his 1973 album Geechee Recollections, free jazzer Marion Brown tackles one of the most musical African American narratives, “Karintha” from Jean Toomer’s Cane
Coleman’s own notoriously enigmatic expressions — both musical and verbal — and the breakdown of communication they produced in his conversation and performance with Derrida are anticipated by one of the most musical narratives in the African American literary tradition, Jean Toomer’s Cane (Grandt 2009, 36–54)
The novel is set in land- and cityscapes that are awash in sounds, and central Georgia in particular resonates with Du Boisian sorrow songs
Summary
On his 1973 album Geechee Recollections, free jazzer Marion Brown tackles one of the most musical African American narratives, “Karintha” from Jean Toomer’s Cane. On 1973’s Geechee Recollections, Brown for the first time commingled free musical improvisation with literary text, and for that, he chose the book that had preoccupied him for years, Toomer’s Cane, the opening vignette of the triptych, “Karintha”.
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