The Road to Don Cornelius is Paved with Good Intentions: The Crisis of Negro Nationalism in Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Criticism

This modern music’s got me confused, To tell you friends, I’m quite unenthused . . .

In conclusion, I must now say, The bebop boys they know how to play. But that music is not for me, So take it back Mr. Gillespie. You’d better take it back to 52nd Street, With your high-speed riffs and staccato beats.

—Young Tiger (George Browne), “Calypso Be”²

And yet who knows very much of what jazz is really about? Or how shall we ever know until we are willing to confront anything and everything which it sweeps across our path?

—Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz”

Much in Negro life remains a mystery; perhaps the zoot suit conceals profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power . . .

—Ralph Ellison, “Editorial Comment”

Suppose we had produced things as human beings: in his production each of us would have twice affirmed himself and the other. (1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality and its particularity, and in the course of the activity I would have enjoyed an individual life; in viewing the object I would have experienced the individual joy of knowing my personality as an objective, sensuously perceptible, and indubitable power. (2) In your satisfaction and your use of my product I would have had the direct and conscious satisfaction that my work satisfied a human need, that it objectified human nature, and that it created an object appropriate to the need of another human being . . . Our productions would be so many mirrors reflecting our nature . . . My labor would be a free manifestation of life and an enjoyment of life.

—Karl Marx, “Excerpt Notes of 1844”

Because whatever else it was used for it was always mostly dance music.

—Albert Murray on the blues

I

Ralph Ellison’s antipathy to bebop is by now well-known, if only among students of jazz and Ellison scholars. In fact, Ellison, who cherished the institution of the public jazz dance³ and favored the propulsive style of jazz known as “stomp,” could be sharply dismissive of bop.⁴ “These cats have gotten lost, man,” Ellison complained to Albert Murray in 1958. “They’re trying to get hold to something by fucking up the blues, but some of them don’t even know the difference between the blues and a spiritual.”⁵ In a 1976 interview with Ron Welburn, a more diplomatic Ellison answered Welburn’s question, “What was the reaction of New Yorkers to [bebop musicians, Dizzy] Gillespie and [Charlie] Parker,” by noting: “It was mixed because most people couldn’t dance to bop. Very often Dizzy and Bird [Parker] were so engrossed with their experiments that they didn’t provide enough music for the supportive rite of dancing. That bothered me” (“Ralph Ellison’s Territorial Vantage” 27). Bothered him indeed. Beginning with his jazz criticism in the late 1950s and continuing throughout the remainder of his career, this was a theme to which Ellison would return time and time again in his discussions of jazz.⁶ And yet, despite an impressive secondary literature on the role of music in his thinking, the sources and implications of Ellison’s hostility to bebop have yet to attract the scrutiny their salience would seem to invite.⁷ Indeed, why did it matter so much to Ralph Ellison that you couldn’t dance to bebop?⁸

II

The pages that follow represent one possible answer to that question. Structurally, this article is organized as a response to three declensions of my original question, namely: As Ellison understood it, what role did the public jazz dance play within African American communities? How exactly did bebop threaten to disrupt that role? And why did what was at stake in that disruption matter so intensely to him?

In order to answer these questions, I have found it helpful to draw—sometimes implicitly, other times more directly—on four lines of thought that largely derive from Marxist and...