Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe

15. Cultural Displacement, Cultural Creation: AFRICAN AMERICAN JAZZ MUSICIANS IN EUROPE FROM BECHET TO BRAXTON

250 A number of contemporary African American artists have spoken musically and extra-musically about how they both use “the tradition” and add to its further evolution. If tradition means the continuity of culture, then these artists deliberately muddy the definition. For example, they dislike the word jazz, a term they feel is ambiguous, a misnomer and, by some definitions, demeaning, to describe their work yet they insist they come from a black music tradition that informs them. Moreover, the vanguard have a heightened sense of aesthetics developed in various formats, including published treatises, essays, interviews, record liner notes, scores, poetry, painting, and dance, that are not often considered in black music criticism or jazz discourse. In fact,most jazz histories interpret the notion of avant-gardism as a culturally monolithic and politically militant musical style of the turbulent sixties rather than as an enduring ideological feature of black intellectual thought.2 African American artists who exist in this high rather than popular art category 15 AFRICAN AMERICAN JAZZ MUSICIANS IN EUROPE FROM BECHET TO BRAXTON1 —CHRISTOPHER G. BAKRIGES Cultural Displacement, Cultural Creation 251 AFRICAN AMERICAN JAZZ MUSICIANS IN EUROPE have created a variety of names for their work that veer away from the all-encompassing term jazz and include the following3 : • Yusef Lateef’s Autophysiopsychic Music • Anthony Braxton’s Tri-axium Writings • Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodic Theory • William “Butch” Morris’s Theory of Conduction • George Russell’s Chromatic Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization • Wadada Leo Smith’s theories of Ankhrasmation and A New World Music • Rachied Ali’s prima materia • Jack DeJohnette’s omnidirectional music • Oliver Lake’s expandable language • Joe McPhee’s lateral composition • Roscoe Mitchell’s Scissors Music • Bill Dixon’s, Leroy Jenkins’s, Marion Brown’s, Muhal Richard Abrams’s, George Lewis’s, Bobby Bradford’s, John Carter’s, Sam Rivers’s, and William Parker’s take on creative music • Cecil Taylor’s constructivism • Glenn Spearman’s alternative auditory architecture • Sun Ra’s transcendent aesthetics privately published as The Immeasurable Equation • Max Roach’s, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s, Art Ensemble of Chicago’s, Archie Shepp’s, Horace Tapscott’s, Randy Weston’s, and William Shadrack Cole’s Black Classical Music and Africacentric assessments Each one of these artists had close ties to blues and rhythm & blues groups in regions around the United States in their earlier careers. Many of these artists left their towns and moved to New York City, the site where previous generations of creative black artists, especially in jazz, had gone. The majority of these “free” artists, however, were denied full entrée into both the city and the jazz tradition because of the obdurate belief by those who broker musical “high” culture that avant-gardism is a private citadel of white privilege.4 The attempt to contain or narrowly limit artistic range and activity has forced scores of African American artists to move between two or more national spaces in order to continue to create and work as equals. This article considers three levels of cultural displacement that have affected 252 CHRISTOPHER G. BAKRIGES many African Americans operating in jazz throughout the twentieth century and into the present. The artists named here are among those critical thinkers who had, by necessity, to transform their cultural space as well as their range of experience beyond the borders of America in order to create art. These levels of displacement can be called 1) chosen exile, 2) expatriation, and 3) transculturation. Each of these terms, although they overlap, can be viewed separately not only as states of mind as to how people feel about what they do and where they do it but also as musical ideas, that is, the methods and materials they use to create. Chosen Exile Chosen exile is a state of self-imposed banishment for significant periods of time from one’s place of birth in order to accomplish a certain task or to complete a mission. For example, dozens of African American painters went to Paris during the interwar years in order to produce some of the most indelible images of the New Negro movement, such as Archibald Motley’s Blues ca. 1929, Elizabeth Prophet’s Congolais ca. 1931, and Palmer Hayden’s Fetiche et Fleurs ca. 1931–32. These and many other artists were able to study and create in France and in other countries, where they also won fellowships, grants, and awards.5 Study...