The Embrace of Entropy: Ralph Ellison and the Freedom Principle of Jazz Invisible

For Lee Morgan and John Gilmore

1. Space Music

Thinking within what the late avant-garde trumpeter Lester Bowie once termed an "outlaw" or "daredevil" musical logic that weaves into its own written body the incessant risk, indeed the promise, of its own structural devastation, the sonorous explorations of twentieth-century composer and tone scientist Sun Ra articulate a fiercely hygienic defense system against the contaminant orthodoxies of something still calling itself American "jazz." ¹ This aesthetic risk, a symphonic formalizing of abyss, an arranging of tonally incongruous information and harmonic discontinuity that courses through Ra's music in the material shapes of dissonant chordal voicings, stumbling or absent time signatures, and syncopated notational accents, is a reverberation of contingency and finitude inherited from elsewhere.

The structural abyss that distinguishes the work of Ra—and many others whose musical articulations get placed within the American musical districts ironically zoned as "free"—functions paradoxically as both an aesthetic signature of conceptual/performative singularity and as a disorienting repetition of philosophical/improvisatory intensities. ² The paradox lies in the tension between the imperative to repeat antecedent structures and the necessity to do so in a way that expresses originality. It is a tension that cannot be adequately accounted for in terms of an anxiety of influence or Oedipal struggle, as it is so often described by a reductively smug American jazz journalism. The abyssal repetition materialized by such artists as Ra, Anthony Braxton, or Lester Bowie is only another movement in a chain that extends backward and forward at once, connecting the experimentations of Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker to the very future of Louis Armstrong in a relation of adjacency. It is not foreign to, or disconnected from, the stronger practices of something that certain ancestors such as Ellington and Parker were always hesitant to reductively designate or to arrest conceptually as "jazz." ³ This critical hesitation, in the face of cultural/linguistic imperatives toward designation and transparency, is itself a form of testimony. It is a silence that enunciates for each figure a resistance to his own obsolescence, an obsolescence that would be enacted in the moment of a self-ontologizing claim to creative agency or sovereignty. A claim that would constitute a humanizing counterviolence to the improvisation of improvisation, subordinating the aggression, movement, and color of the improvisational cut to the legitimating authority of the authorial subject and the empires of category and capital embodied in its naming.

Inverting the critical obsession with the "personality" and with the name, with the "schools" and categories of improvisational music that most improvisational musicians themselves abjure, this essay investigates the theoretical challenges of the "free," sometimes called "avant-garde," and perhaps most resonantly, the "out" or "outside" movements of American jazz. For these movements, not unlike their historical idiomatic precursors, especially bebop, think and aspire toward a certain conceptual and performative freedom that is at philosophical variance with significant Enlightenment meditations on freedom. This critical swerve sounds itself perhaps most sharply in its performance of the abandonment of mandates of "proper" musical classification and indeed of "proper" performance itself. It is born in the relinquishing of an abstracted and idealized musical "subject" always already displaced by an irruptive and fluid sound of a new questioning, a new fascination. This sound is the abandonment of every perfected musical referent, positing, or "message" that would imply the logos of a transmitting maestro. In free jazz, such implication is jettisoned in favor of the contradictory and dissonant work of sonic research pursued by musical thinkers freeing themselves of premodern imperatives of meaning, valuation, and de-notation. In so doing, they also tend to free themselves of all critical and commercial visibility. They find their work, instead, within the textural materiality and color of thought, performance, and absolute risk in sound. Fashioning a new and improvisatory agency within the voided margins outside the framing confines...