When PBS first aired Ken Burns'
Jazz, it was clear that the form's place in the American canon was
no longer a matter when or if but, rather, what. What, the documentary seemed to ask, made the form an
American original. And what were the particulars that proved it capable of shaping both time and place? Over the
course of 19 hours and covering, in theory, an entire century of permutations
and conversations,
Jazz's question helped
dismantle the long maligned image of the genre. Gone was the image of a raucous, disorganized collection of heroin addicts expressing an unmediated,
thoughtless pain. In the
stereotype's place stood "a musical language . . . developed steadily from
a single expression of the consciousness of African Americans to a national
music which expresses Americana to Americans . . . "
This, the sheer scope of the film
seemed to imply, was beyond question. Only the form's masters remained to be determined.
To
this task, Burns recruited a variety of critics and musicians, but despite
the undisputed pedigree and insight present, none seemed up to the challenge, and
for many viewers the documentary buckled. Much of the criticism focused on Burns'
decision to allow three men--giants of the field, no doubt--to dominate the
narrative. Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis took command of
the discussion at the start and dominated from then on. For ten days, they traded
stories, explained nuances and unpacked cadences, each with the passion and
knowledge needed to help stave the stereotype. In short, they taught the
language of jazz. Nevertheless, their enthusiasm also took on tinges of a sort
of fevered nationalism, and under their direction, jazz became more propganda than language, more politics than expression. Their desire to preserve the form was not of kind
with the revolutionary artists they celebrated. Instead, their politics were
seen to be distinctly reactionary. Jazz did not present the form as an ongoing, evolving language
answerable to the contemporary moment; rather, it demonstrated a
prescriptive form, replete with the sort of limiting politics inherent to all
prescriptive grammars. Thus, the documentary felt like a eulogy--an often
times moving and always insightful eulogy, but a eulogy no less. What it was
not was an index by which future generations could learn how to speak
jazz.
It
was in the midst of this battle that I, late as ever, first encountered Albert
Murray. He was thin and handsome,
impeccably dressed and in possession of the world's
most well-shaped mustache. Cut
close and narrowing as it spread across his upper lip, it drew attention to the
joy that pulled his face into an otherwise imperceptible smile each time he spoke
about one song or another. I began
to think of it as kin to my sloppy, excited attempts at underlining in bed.
Both hovered over words rather than under and presented a sort
of secret urgency and passion for what they roofed. But where my shaky lines
belied a frantic imprecision, his mustache--tailored and sharp and cut with patience and precision--matched the careful, raspy words that moved out from under it. And by the documentary's end, he seemed more avatar than man, more
conscience than opinion, even as I, ever the contrarian, bucked at the prospect
and described his ideas as limiting and divisive. Lines had, of course, been
drawn, but what I could not see at the time was that they were not drawn by
Murray.
There
is a sort of cognitive dissonance required of young, white American men who superficially
identify with Black Nationalism. There is a stubborn, willed ignorance needed
to occupy a space that demands clear lines of racial demarcation all while assuming
that they, these young men of privilege, are the exceptions to those lines, that
their ability to transcend these borders sources in insight rather than
privilege. And there is a tragic irony in their not being able to see that such
lines take up arms with the very racists among whom they believe themselves to
be excepted. These ironies,
whether willed or ignored or unconsciously produced, are the mortar that builds
borders. And I, if it is not already clear, was one such builder. I delivered stale
cries in support of the red, the black
and the green (you sissy!). I watched the door of our club night while skimming
Black Skin, White Masks. I celebrated
Marion Brown over Duke Ellington. I dismissed the idea that any artist as
well-loved as Louis Armstrong could be seen as one of jazz's greatest
architects. And I labeled Murray a relic.
The
accusation seemed easy enough to support. In both the documentary and his writing, Murray's opinions
move from one of two places: devotion or dismissal. And from an aesthetic standpoint, he and I were very much at
odds. Where I had spent a decade listening to and searching for the most obscure soul songs, he proclaimed the genre too sentimental to be
taken seriously. Where my entire
worldview was shaped by rap, he asserted that it was square. "The beat," he claimed, "is
square, the words are square. I mean it's amazing. You expect progress, but
this is not progress. These guys sound like they're two years away from slavery." He was not without examples, of course,
but even these were maddening. In his dismissal of rap, he asks the
interviewer, "Like 'Knockin' the Bones'--you know that song?" And of
course she could not, because Murray gets the title wrong.
Yet,
for all of Murray's maddening claims, of which I still believe there are many,
my critiques were equally shortsighted. Each failed to distinguish the particulars of his opinion from
the system of inquiry he utilized. This system is often framed as integrationalist, but, if we
are to accept such a claim, it is important to note that it is of a radical
kind. As Henry Louis Gates points out in his 1996 profile of Murray for
The New
Yorker, "integration wasn't an act of accommodation but an act of
introjection."
Murray was not interested in metaphors like
coalescence and melting pots, which too often served as the euphemisms through
which assimilation and racial elision were smuggled into one-sided
conversations. Integration of the radical sort acknowledged the reciprocal
nature of different voices sharing a single location. That is to say that he did not
understand the particulars of both place and culture as discreet territories. They
were, instead, locations answerable to a variety of influences and needs, where
the "condition of man is always a matter of the specific texture of existence
in a given place, time and circumstance."
Beginning
with his 1970 collection, The Omni
Americans, he pushed against popular Nationalist rhetoric and conceived the
white and black communities of America as wholly intertwined even if neither
group choose to acknowledge its influence on and debt to the other. This
concept, for Murray, exceeded the desire to colonize more and more ideological
and physical territory and reached into the very methods and artifacts
produced. The result of such a system was not so much a carefully guarded
territory, whose strength depended upon its ability to prove itself unoccupied
by its other, but, rather, it was a place capable of accommodating a variety of
opinions precisely because it understood difference as both inevitable and
profitable. To figuratively yell in Murray's place did not deny an opposing
voice its membership. It merely represented one particular way of
communicating. His "omni" system, then, constructed an ideological
location not unlike the trope of the barbershop. Both were places of hearing precisely
because of their willingness to consider and engage all comers.
This
is not to say that there were no rules governing the means of engagement
between opposing voices. Much like the barbershop, Murray's place obliged its
members to learn the particular behaviors and values associated with
place. To engage, then, was not
merely a matter of speaking loud enough to be heard above the figurative room;
it also required its members to take up what he called "very specific
idiomatic devises." Nowhere
is this obligation more exquisitely explained than in his 1983 lecture on
improvisation and the blues idiom.
In it, he asserts that improvisation is a matter of choosing to respond
with either “yes and also” or "no. . . on the other hand." Both the
acknowledgement of form (yes/no) and the interpretation (also/on the other
hand) are necessary for blues improvisation, and the practitioner must be in
possession of "a very rich apperceptive mass or base, a very rich
storehouse of tunes, phrases, ditties which he uses as a painter uses his
awareness of other paintings, a writer employs his literary background to give
statements richer resonances."
Engaging the radically integrated space, thus, required its members to
learn its rules, to seek out its histories, to negotiate its structure and,
even in the midst of profound disagreement, to recognize that any departure
from its foundation begins by first pushing off from the very thing that is
opposed.
Looking
back at Jazz--and, in particular, at
Murray's role in it--what viewers witness is not a relic desperately defending
a irrelevant past, as I had so profoundly mistaken him for. The Murray we
witness in the documentary is an individual who had already built his shop and
was, in that moment, cutting hair and heads. That I hadn't found my way to his place just
yet was on me, but that his opinions forced me to do just that, to go back and
learn the specifics of jazz, and to learn how to construct my own shop, for
that, I am eternally indebted.
