On the Sound of Water Water flows and laps and pools, and in the flowing makes a sound--the of water. The sound--. Music. The of music is without language or the sense of language, yet is not without sense. In this way, there is also a form of language that is without linguistic sense--a form of language without sense that is not nonsense and thus carries sense--the sense of music, or the of water or of the songs of birds or the wind in tree tops. Or the sense of the of traffic, of the duration and staccato of human voices in the street, of the of hammering or of heavy machines. These sounds have meaning and sense, yet they are without linguistic sense. So there is an undercurrent in language of meaning and sense that is not linguistic sense. is the of water, falling. is the of language. Toward a Black Sound In his Blues People, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) argues that a confluence of African music and European instruments made jazz possible. Basing his work on histories of the formation of both blues and jazz in New Orleans, Baraka tells a story of how European instruments and African sounds were brought together. In New Orleans and across the country brass marching bands became very popular in the Napoleonic period. The popularization of the marching band made European instruments available to African Americans for the first time, at first primarily brass instruments. In New Orleans, two strains of marching bands playing two different musics came into being in African American communities: a downtown Creole music, very closely tied to European musical models, and an uptown darker music, based more closely on African musical traditions. Over time, these two strains of music became increasingly differentiated. As Baraka writes, The Creoles had received formal musical training, sometimes under the aegis of white French teachers. They had mastered the European instrumental techniques, and the music they played was European. The Uptown Negroes, who had usually learned their instruments by ear and never received formal and technical training, developed an instrumental technique and music of their own, a music that relied heavily on the non-European vocal tradition of blues. (Blues People 78) Baraka here is particularly interested in the differing timbres or tones that the two strains of music produced. The Creole musicians, according to Baraka, were trained to produce a clear, European tone on their instruments. This purity of tone was put aside by the [Uptown] Negro trumpeter for the more humanly expressive of the voice (79), for what was called a jass or dirty timbre. Thus, the uptown musician's instrumentation and timbre was heavily influenced by the vocal tradition of the work songs and spirituals of slavery, and, ultimately, by its African roots. After a legislative act in 1894 enforcing segregation, many of the downtown musicians lost their jobs and began to be barred from playing in white venues. In the resulting forced move uptown, downtown musicians began to sit in on uptown sessions. Baraka cites the violinist Paul Domingues explaining, See, us Downtown people, we didn't think so much of this rough Uptown jazz until we couldn't make a living otherwise.... I don't know how they do it. But goddam, they'll do it. Can't tell you what's there on the paper, but just play the hell out of it (qtd. in Blues People 79). It was an American sound Baraka writes (79), produced by the connections engendered by this forced merger (139). Yet, he argues, was also and perhaps primarily an adaptive sound. While for a short time after the Civil War Creoles in New Orleans had assimilationist options open to them--formal educations, music lessons, and downtown jobs and venues--for the most part, African American ex-slaves at the turn of the century could not simply assimilate. …