Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America

Jazz States Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Major Chords

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. . . . Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. —Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) Jazz Country discusses Ralph Ellison’s working assumptions about American culture, jazz, and what he calls “the drama of democracy.” It addresses Ellison’s jazz background, including his essays and comments about jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Christian , Duke Ellington, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, and examines the influence of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong upon the writer’s personal and artistic inspiration. It highlights the significance of the camaraderie between Ellison and two African American friends and fellow jazz fans — the writer Albert Murray and the painter Romare Bearden. Ellison’s relationship to jazz is the book’s central theme, but it also touches upon the blues. While learning to play the trumpet, he listened to and imitated the blues singers Ida Cox and Ma Rainey. He writes about various blues and jazz influences upon Mahalia Jackson’s gospel singing, and he captures the evocative power of Jimmy Rushing’s blues voice. These singers deeply influenced the writer’s developing artistic sensibility. Furthermore, Ellison ’s own study of music taught him something about the art of fiction as he began his transformation from aspiring classical composer to novelist. Jazz Country also shows how Ellison appropriated jazz techniques in Invisible Man (1952) and in his posthumously published second novel, Juneteenth (1999). The book’s concluding chapter discusses Jazz States Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Major Chords Ellison and his critics, including Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Norman Podhoretz, Addison Gayle, Amiri Baraka, and Jerry Watts. Richard Wright and James Baldwin also figure in Ellison’s famous exchange with Howe concerning the appropriate role and subjects of African American writers. Using jazz as the key metaphor, Jazz Country refocuses older interpretations of Ellison by placing jazz in the foreground and by emphasizing , especially as revealed in his essays, the power of Ellison’s thought and cultural perceptions. The failure to perceive and to define accurately the subtleties of Ellison’s thought and the complex nature of his artistic ambition constitute a significant limitation of previous criticism on him. Few critics, for instance, have thoroughly discussed his essays. Since Ellison was a self-described “custodian of American culture,” his major essays, originally published in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) — all anthologized in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995) — are significant artifacts in their own right. His essays on various aspects of American culture constitute a gallery of American portraits, including ones on jazz musicians such as Charlie Christian and Charlie Parker, the writers Stephen Crane and Henry James, the artist Romare Bearden, and President Lyndon Johnson. In his autobiographical essays, Ellison paints a complex self-portrait. He writes of himself as a black boy in Oklahoma City, an aspiring musician in Tuskegee, Alabama, a struggling young writer in New York City, then a prizewinning first novelist . We finally see him as an embattled cultural icon and a dedicated writer struggling to complete his second novel, in part the story of Rev. A. Z. Hickman, a jazz trombonist turned preacher. Perhaps Ellison drew the inspiration for Rev. Hickman from jazzmen he had known. He admired the jazz musicians he knew during his boyhood in Oklahoma City — the guitarist Charlie Christian, the singer Jimmy Rushing, and the many other celebrated musicians who passed through. Asked by Ron Welburn in 1976 about the time when he had first “become conscious of ‘improvised music,’” Ellison described people in Oklahoma City “who amused themselves by playing guitars, Jew’s harps, kazoos, yukes, mandolins, C Melody saxophones, or performed on combs by vibrating a piece of tissue paper placed against the comb’s teeth.” He referred to “territorial orchestras” that were “constantly in and out of Oklahoma City.” He 2 ||| j a z z s t at e s mentioned Benny Moten, George E. Lee, T. Holder, and Andy Kirk. The bands played the marches of Sousa and others, arrangements of classics, and “novelty numbers” like the “laughing trombone” with its elements of ragtime and jazz. “There was not,” Ellison pointed out, “too definite a line drawn between the types of music, at least not in...