Black Arts Survivals in the New New Jazz Studies

The least controversial feature of the Black Arts movement, likely the most controversial chapter in African-American cultural history, once seemed its birth on the uptown “A” train. All agreed that author-provocateur Amiri Baraka founded the movement with a 1965 subway ride to Harlem, an underground exodus from downtown New York bohemianism to practical racial commitment. In recent visits to the crossroads of jazz music and African-American literature, however, the Black Arts era appears to begin with another, collective excursion. The first public action of Baraka’s flagship Black Arts institution, the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), was a May Day parade down 125th Street, a spectacular Garvey-style overture to an initially skeptical Harlem community. As Baraka himself replayed the scene in his 1984 memoir, two theatrical pacesetters marched at the parade’s head. Playwright LeRoi Jones-not-yet-Baraka waved a black and gold flag emblazoned with Africanized masks of comedy and tragedy. Would-be-extraterrestrial bandleader Sun Ra conducted a pick-up edition of his Myth-Science Arkestra. For the Baraka of the Autobiography, writing from the sour remove of Morning in America, BARTS’s procession flaunted the bravado of an inspiring but half-deluded action-faction, “a small group of sometimes comically arrogant black people daring to raise the question of art and politics and revolution, black revolution!” (299). For present-day students of jazz culture, the same display promises sober insights into live questions of black aesthetics, among them proper stances to populism and modernism, to the cross-translation of musical and literary vernaculars. Now viewed as an inspiring wedding march, the parade marks the once-again-resonant bond between Sun Ra’s challenging free jazz and Baraka’s performative Black Arts literature, the Harlem sidewalk acting as approving witness.

In and out of the books under review, this is to say, many of the best recent examples of the New Jazz Studies honor the symbolic marriage of free jazz music and Black Arts writing sealed with BARTS’s first steps. Since the mid-1990s, the prime movers of the “NJS,” scholars making noise from outside the music schools, have been testifying that jazz belongs near the heart of the liberal arts curriculum. If one of the riper ironies of contemporary American music is that aspiring jazz players are better off enrolling at Berklee or Julliard than sitting in at New York night clubs (O’Meally, Edwards, and Griffin 1), another is that many of the most creative jazz apologists currently promote the music’s interdisciplinary significance from tenured seats in English departments. As a result, to train in modern African-American literature is now fairly often to train in the history of jazz reconceived as a lush matrix of sounds, signs, and texts. More and more frequently, it is also to receive instruction in the musicological reaches of the Baraka canon. One defining trait of what I call the New New Jazz Studies—the NJS, that is, revised in the teeth of the new millennium—is the will to elaborate Baraka’s black nationalist-free improvisational music writing of the 1960s, no longer judged an overdose of depressive sociology fit “to give even the blues the blues” (Ellison 279). Baraka’s Blues People (1963), Langston Hughes’s nominee for the first serious book on jazz by an African American, graces more than a few state-of-the-art pages devoted to methodological touchstones. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (2007), the latest by Ingrid Monson, the holder of the hippest chair in US academia, the Quincy Jones Professorship in African American Music at Harvard, praises Blues People’s double-barreled theoretical syntheses, forged by merging “anthropological understandings of syncretism with a Marxist conception of the dialectic” (22). Yet more common...