Ralph Ellison on Lyricism and Swing

Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music.... Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis's music.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Within the first pages of the 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's narrator relates Louis Armstrong's music to his own desires and self-conceptions. "I'd like," the narrator writes, "to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing 'What Did IDo to be so Black and Blue'—all at the same time" (8). When Armstrong recorded the show tune by Andy Razaf and Fats Waller from the Broadway revue Hot Chocolates in 1929, he edited the lyrics to shift a dark-skinned female lover's lament over intraracial color discrimination (the song's place within the plot of the 1924 musical Chocolate Dandies) toward a more general lament about racism. Ellison's narrator considers the lyrics but focuses more intently on the specifics of Armstrong's tone and phrasing. Ellison's seemingly central metaphor of invisibility takes on an aural dimension when he attends to Armstrong's "lyrical beam" and rhythmic mastery at creating a "slightly different sense of time" (8). The literary translation and transposition of Armstrong's mastery of swing rhythm opens a window onto the intellectual landscape where the author intertwined his musical and social thought.

Ralph Waldo Ellison was a student at the segregated Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Oklahoma City when Armstrong recorded the landmark Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions for the Okeh label from 1925–28. The young Oklahoman witnessed his first Armstrong performance in 1929 but later recalled that he "had been listening to his recordings and admiring the sound of his trumpet for years" while also following the local African-American jazz scene (Welburn 311). When these players "expressed their attitude toward the world," Ellison rhapsodized, "it was with a fluid style that reduced the chaos of living to form" ("Living" 229). More than a nostalgic idyll from his youth, the scene operated as a regulative norm for the mature Ellison. "The delicate balance struck between strong individual personality and the group during those early jam sessions," he specified about Oklahoma City's burgeoning jazz scene, "was a marvel of social organization" ("Living" 229).

Ellison's literary portraits of Armstrong and Charlie Parker (two figures who might be said to exemplify the idiomatic distance between early "swing" and "bop") illuminate the pivotal terms of a "delicate balance" in the author's thought. To pursue the contrasting portraits of Armstrong and Parker is thus also to reconsider the "delicate balance" between Ellison's stated commitments to individuality through masterful self-invention and "a slightly different sense of time," on the one hand, and his idealizations of the "marvel of social organization," on the other. A closer look at his skeptical commentaries on Parker's prominent role in the stylistic innovations of the 1940s jazz modernists reveals Ellison's fascinating and rarely analyzed inhabitation of the posture of a musical revanchist committed to the musical superiority of certain pre–World War II idioms. His tendency toward commemoration in music moves in striking counterpoint to Ellison's prospective tendency toward what he labeled "the futuristic effort of fulfilling the democratic ideal" ("Presentation" 466). One might consider these two tendencies as thematic reservoirs from which Ellison drew to fuel his apparently contradictory literary flights. The gaps and points of slippage and irresolution between these seemingly distinct visionary...