Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America

3Jazz Trio Ralph Ellison, Romare Bearden, and Albert Murray

It is the elegance of ritual: Bearden, Ellison and Murray cutting the jagged grains: patchwork figures in silhouette, blue notes in calico and quilting under glass. What did I do to be so black and blue? Electric blue, fire and fuchsia in the sky. Lightning, lonesome blue. Cut out legs, fingers and bebop eyes shape the uncreated features of face and race. Found objects of the territory: Mecklenberg County to Harlem and back. Cloth and color in piano stride What did I do? You lived, you lived. And the jagged grains so black and blue open like lips about to sing. — Melvin Dixon, “Fingering the Jagged Grains,” from Change of Territory Renaissance Men: Ralph Ellison, Romare Bearden, and Albert Murray In 1972, in an interview with Ralph Ellison conducted by the novelist Leon Forrest in Ellison’s Harlem apartment, Forrest calls attention to “many fine pieces of African sculpture and Romare Bearden paintings.”1 Several years later, when novelist Steve Cannon inquired 3Jazz Trio Ralph Ellison, Romare Bearden, and Albert Murray about Bearden’s influence on his work, Ellison said that he and Bearden had met during the 1930s when they were both starting out in New York City. Their mutual interests in art, literature, jazz, sculpture , and photography led to friendship. Each mirrored the other’s artistic ambitions. Yet Ellison says he never consciously tried to create the verbal equivalent of Bearden’s artistic style in his writing. Bearden’s influence had come primarily from his exemplary dedication to his craft: “The influence of one artist upon another . . . frequently takes other forms than that of copying or trying to do what another artist or writer does in a precise manner. . . . He [Bearden] had faith in the importance of artistic creation, and I learned something about the nature of painting from listening to his discussion of craft.”2 New York City is the place where Romare Bearden, Ralph Ellison, and, later, Albert Murray became good friends and intellectual sparring partners. Each somehow helped hone the others’ artistic and intellectual gifts. They had similar interests and experience. Murray and Bearden had served in the military — Murray in the Air Force, Bearden in the Army. And Ellison has written of his duty as a Merchant Marine. They were athletes when they were young. Ellison was a running back during his high school days. And Murray — a Tuskegee Tiger!— played football during the 1930s at that black Alabama college. Murray also played basketball while at Tuskegee. Bearden was a baseball player at Boston University. Ellison, Bearden, and Murray shared a deep appreciation for books, art, and jazz. They were, for example, deeply inspired by Duke Ellington and his music. Bearden, like Ellison, heard him as a boy in Harlem. In “Putting Something Over Something Else,” his profile of Bearden, Calvin Tomkins writes: “Growing up in Harlem of the twenties , Bearden lived and breathed the music and came to know most of the great performers. Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton were his early masters (to be joined later by Duccio, Vermeer, Delacroix, and Mondrian).”3 Tomkins also says: “Duke Ellington was a friend of the family and bought an oil from Bearden’s first formal exhibition.” However, Ellington was not the immediate inspiration for Bearden ’s start as a painter. In 1926, after Bearden had moved to Pittsburgh to live with his grandmother, he met Eugene, a boy who had been left crippled by infantile paralysis. Eugene and Bearden became 50 ||| j a z z t r i o playmates, and Eugene was always around Bearden’s grandmother’s house. One day Eugene showed Bearden some breathtaking pictures he had drawn on sheets of brown paper: “He’d done one drawing of a house of prostitution not far from where we lived, run by a woman named Sadie. . . . Eugene had drawn Sadie’s house with the façade cut off, so you could see in all the rooms. And somebody had shot off a pistol, and the bullet was going all through the house. Women were on top of men and the bullet was going through them, into the next room and the next until it came down through the ceiling into the front parlor, and Sadie had her pocketbook open, and the bullet had turned into coins and was dropping into her pocketbook.” Bearden asked Eugene to teach him to...