Dionne Brand

 . . . you could emerge from car wrecks as elegantly as from weddings . . .  - Dionne Brand

A Sentence to Rival All Others

"If you look into any face here you might fall into its particular need."

-Dionne Brand, Thirsty

Looking Back the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and the Works of Chico Hamilton.

Every now and again, I make it a point to revisit Jazz on a Summer's Day. It is a documentary about the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. It amazes me how many incredible performers were on the bill that particular year. The highlight for me is the impromptu jam at 13:20. Instant Chills. Also, the session at 50 minutes, with the Chico Hamilton Quintet is absolute perfection to my ears.

When Hamilton passed in late 2013, I thought about the first time I bought one of his records from Lokee around 2002. We were at his friend's house in DC, and I will never forget how struck I was by Hamilton's infectious rhythms. Since then, they have carried on and within me.

Even before my introduction to his work as both a drummer and bandleader, I had heard his music through by way of all the rap acts who had sampled his music. Below are some tunes that stand out for me, which I'd like to share with you.

 De La Soul Sampled Chico's 'A Rose for Booker'  (Sample appears at 0:24)

In addition to the more traditional chugging jazz rhythms he laid down, he always had a skill for incorporating latin and bossa nova rhythms into jazz, which only made me gravitate to him even more. After all, I have been a drummer for over twenty years, with a strong influence of Brazilian and Latin Jazz styles.

Remembering Frankie Knuckles: House as a Practice

Sound Check: Inheritance & Legacy

            This is a piece about legacy, but it is a purposely limited one. In it, I want to focus on one aspect of what Frankie Knuckles left us. I am interested, then, in how house serves as a practice. To be sure, house is many things: a genre, a community; a global phenomenon; a definite and particular form of music. My decision to not address these aspects is neither to deny nor diminish their importance. Rather, it is a recognition of house's impossible reach and scope. And so I have decided to limit my consideration to house as a practice both because it has been one of the more valuable aspects in my life and because it seems to have been lost in so many of the articles I have read over the last few days.  Consequently, this is a piece that spends too much time theorizing and too little grounding. And it is also one in which I spend too much time thinking about what Knuckles gave me and too little on what he gave the world.  For this self-centered approach, I apologize.  I know no other way.

Record One: As Architect of a Practice

            Tracking a musical form is difficult. Determining a song's place within those forms is impossible. Not the least of all because sound is promiscuous. Notes and arrangements seem to have an uncanny ability to make genres their own. What is R&B in one instance seems to effortlessly transmogrify into rock or pop or house in the next. And those concerned with tracking the historical import of a single form are left having to draw artificial--even arbitrary--lines.  Thus, while it may be convenient to proclaim that R&B is this, and House is that, allowing for a shorthand through which to identify a song's particular traits, the act leaves us with little more than vague pronouns, which bound more than define.  And the question to ask is what or who is being bounded when we endeavor to such a task.

           

            The short answer is that it depends. In my more fanciful moments of allegory and analogy, I imagine this binding serving as a sort of Borgesian nightmare in which those of us who seek rigid categories take on the role of a record collector. This collector compulsively and perpetually buys a single record over and over again, so to be able to file it within every category that it might fit.  In time, a million copies have been amassed, and the collector can name just as many categories but, tragically, only knows one song. And so the collector files the physical object, triumphant in his or her imagined scope and depth, all the while fooling the world into thinking that he or she has harnessed the notes therein. Sadly, the comfort doesn't hold. Even the most cursory interrogation shows how the act of filing merely situates each of us within a sort of bureaucratic maze or sonic territory, whose boundaries truncate--indeed, stunt--the ability to consider music from various perspectives. The comfort of order disguises the limitations wrought.  And, thus, we who attempt to bind become bounded, no longer able to hear the innumerable possibilities all sounds offer.  

           

            For house, however, the effort to determine a song's generic placement is not a matter of classification but contextualization. It is an effort interested in discovery and consideration. To contextualize is to open up the field, to, as it were, demand that genres can teach us how to listen to songs. To hear house is a way of knowing, a particular method of listening, which takes in innumerable notes and arrangements so to see if they have the potential to, as it were, beat the box. Approached in this way, house is not a matter of categorization but positioning. It is a function of entering into a specific conversation, both literally and figuratively. Who, what and how one chooses to engage becomes more important than whether or not the sonic response falls within the arbitrary bounds of a single generic space. That is, boundaries are dictated by the conversations at hand and by the interactions between DJ and crowd, not by a set of static rules. And each of us enters into these conversations knowing that our tone, words and politics are responsible to both ourselves and the community that we have chosen to engage.

           

            Thus, house does not describe a set of traits that a song must possess in order for it to fit into the category. Rather, it describes a way of hearing; it is a practice in search of intersections. It is a practice that finds moments of sonic commonality not because it seeks to flatten the variety of differences it is capable of accommodating but, rather, because it recognizes the strength of difference itself. In this sense, all songs--no matter their generic traits--are potentially house, and a DJ is only limited by his or her ability to hear those intersections which allow for the sort of contextualization needed to place a song within its sonic space. When Teddy Douglass of the Basement Boys proclaims that "Where we come from the mix is more important than the selection. You'll have a real problem if your blend isn't smooth," he is not celebrating technique over sound.* Rather, his observation demonstrates the ways in which the mix serves as the method used by DJs to position a song--any song--into house. The mix, thus, becomes the moment through which two disparate songs are not only layered and sync'ed so to become one but, also, through which the DJ locates moments of sonic commonality so to be able to shift his or her crowd into new sounds. If the mix identifies those moments of intersection, the songs themselves, which stretch out and demand the crowd find ways to make sense of them, offers a sonic palette of innumerable differences. This ability to find the common so to accommodate and celebrate difference is what Knuckles--alongside other DJs and pioneers in both Chicago and New York--gave us.  Theirs is a practice that challenges us to find our place within a sonic space in which tradition, to paraphrase Jazz master Lester Bowie, is always a matter of innovation. 

            Indeed, Knuckles and house might be said to have offered us a new way to participate within the Black musical tradition. To say that tradition is innovation is to suggest that black art is always both a retaining of and departure from what has come before. The artist's goal is to create new techniques and practices accountable to both the values and history offered by the tradition but which are somehow also and simultaneously relevant and answerable to the moment at hand. In offering listeners house as a practice, Knuckles and his peers provided their respective communities with one such technique. House, thus, takes part of--indeed, is member of--what Amiri Baraka has called the changing same, a phrase used to describe those ever-transmogrifying forms that seek to accommodate the interests, values and aesthetics held by and created through the Black community. In this approach, sonic promiscuity is not an inconvenient fact that the collector must quarantine within a new category but, rather, evidence of the ongoing and innovative conversations occurring within the tradition's most durable technique, that of call and response. 



           As with the variety of musicians involved with black musical forms that precede house, the DJ offers the crowd a song, and the crowd, an equal partner in this ever democratic process of art, responds and responds in endlessly different ways. To riff off Ralph Ellison, House is. . . an' house ain't . . . at any particular moment, but then comes the next moment, the next response, the next song, the next crowd response and what ain't suddenly is and what is suddenly ain't. And that's its power. This, then, is not house as a collection of sonic traits or markers. This is house as epistemological practice. This is house as a method through which the sonic logic of genre is disallowed the convenient tendency to essentialize, to calcify and to deny any sound its due hearing. Under this direction, the DJ isn't god, as later dance forms have proclaimed; rather, he or she is one participant in the long tradition of innovation and expansion. A caller waiting for the crowd to respond so to know how to, then, call back again and again, endlessly and always with a difference. This is what Knuckles gave us. This is his legacy.

. . . Or part of it. . .

           

Record Two: The Personal

            The night comes in bursts. Memories are quartered by gaps.  Flashes of story and then long spaces of experiential miasma, where facts smear into others, and myths shift to truth, while truths get lost to myth, and where time is not so much postponed but in a constant state of quantum leap: from minute to hour in the course of a second. There are, then, as many ellipses as there is narrative. This is a history that defies its realization but, nevertheless, demands it telling. Gaps and all. Forgive what follows.

            This much I know. It is December 31,1992. I am barely fifteen and on my way to Tracks, the legendary Washington, DC nightclub. Two women are taking me. They are sisters, well versed in the procedures of DC nightlife and, to one degree or another, my teachers in navigating underage entry. Indeed, it was Allison, the younger of the two sisters, who had taught me how to lick the top of my hand and then roll it over her own, so to transfer the club stamp needed for re-entry to Fifth Column, another of DC's dance clubs. Earlier in the evening, Cameron, Allison's older sister, had given me a tab of acid, and as we turned onto South Capitol Street, my belly began to churn. Part anticipation; part drug. I both welcomed and dreaded the feeling. To reorient myself, I looked for One-9's graffiti mural. Two blocks from Tracks and on the outside wall of a South Capitol playground, its letters had always offered a welcome comfort. They were a code that was legible only to a small group, and my ability to read them signaled a unique and uncommon literacy. On this night, however, the mural seemed to portend my entry into a world I no longer knew, that was far from legible. The painted hand, which held in its palm the Eye of Horus and served as the focal point of the piece, appeared to reach out beyond the wall in an attempt to pull me into its angular, neo-cubist world. When I finally found it, I closed my eyes, and a song from my first house mix moved to the fore. Then ellipsis.

            The line to get into the club was long, and not knowing any better, I stopped at its end and listened to the bass coming from inside the club. More felt than heard, it seemed to move through the concrete walls and rendered the club as more membrane than concrete.  As concentrator, not container. Here was a music capable of an inside and outside. A world unbounded. I reached out to touch the wall, and both Cameron and Allison grabbed my arm and dragged me toward the entrance.  When we arrived at the front of the line, they flashed Gold Tracks Club cards to the bouncers, evidence--to my young mind--of their expertise in this world, and we slid in ahead of the people waiting to be id'ed and patted down.

           

            Inside. A new kind of disorientation. The Tracks I knew--Friday nights--was not present. In its place was an entirely new terrain, population and camp. New superstars. Willie Africa. Kevin Aviance. Mama Vann. Sissy. New aesthetics.  Costumes. Jump Suits. Checkers. Shirtless men. Only Jay, the thin, older bartender, who poured heavy drinks just to the left of the dance floor every Friday, and the mix of spilled and stale liquor, cigarettes and various perfumes remained. I looked around and tried to focus on faces and spaces.  Both spiraled and twisted. A face would start to turn in one direction, only to halt and then twist in the opposite. Over and over. Roiling. Grimacing. I tried to un-dialate my eyes and thoughts, but it was no use. Both had begun to absorb more than I was ready to take-in. Ellipsis. 

As I settled into the trip, the roil and grimace dissolved. Faces stopped turning. Space cohered. The endless--indeed, exponential--dividing of moving bodies into faint traces of where they had been became joyous rather than disorienting, as echo rather than bombardment. And everyone was beautiful. I wondered if this status was a function of the red lights, which seemed to carve contours and cheekbones into even the limpest of faces, which seemed to paint pale faces like my own with a vibrancy otherwise unavailable, and which seemed to cast all of us into a more beautiful light. This was the first time that I admitted to myself that other men could be and, indeed, were beautiful. This was the first time that I admitted to myself that place shapes how we see the world. I gazed up at the disco ball--rumored to be the largest on the East Coast--and listened to the music. Both served as the points through which I began orient myself.

            Time shifts into an urgent and eternal present. Perhaps this is the acid. Perhaps it is memory assigning importance to what follows. Perhaps it's something more. Nevertheless, before I have finished staring at the ball, Cameron grabs my wrist and drags me toward the center of the room. On our way there, I trip over the lip of the dance floor and begin to laugh at myself for how I've allowed my discomfort at this new, gay community to erase my ability to navigate a terrain I had long known. Then ellipsis.

            Midnight arrives. And rather than continuing with the hard, driving house he has been playing since we arrived, Earic Patten, the club's resident DJ, plays Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You."  The crowd stalls. I stare at the undulating walls. On the stage, a man dressed as Little Bo Peep raises her white and pink shepherd's crook as if directing the crowd below. The crowd continues to stall. Patten holds steady. The song continues. I watch the crowd begin to give in to Houston's lyrics. I hold back. I can't make sense of what is going on. House, after all, is supposed to be underground. To my understanding, pop music has no place within spaces like these. Dancers begin to sway. I am further confused. A few people begin to sing along. Then Houston's signature long note plays, and by its end it seems as if every single person on the dance floor is singing with her, with each other. I stand there, in the middle of the dance floor, in the midst of a club cast in red, in the midst of a singer coming into her own power and am left without speech.  A man grabs my hands and lifts them above my head. His own are slippery from sweat, and I have to tighten my grip just to keep hold. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to. I smile and begin to sing. We sing to each other until the song finishes. Patten follows Houston with a house song, and it dawns on me that he has turned Houston's ballad into house, not because of its sonic particulars but because he located a moment, a place, an opening in which no other song would have been able to do what Houston's recording had done to the crowd. To me. Then ellipsis.

            On our car ride home the next morning, Allison, Cameron and I decide to eject my mix. In its place, we turn on the radio. I can't be sure why they want to do so. Perhaps, it's because my technical execution was atrocious. (It was.) But for me, the decision has to do with the nagging fact that I was no longer satisfied with merely playing those songs that were categorized as house. Instead, I wanted to begin the practice of house.  And for both better and worse, every mix that has followed has been an attempt to do just that.

The Blend: When Practice Shapes the Personal and becomes Political

            Tracking the importance of Knuckles' contribution to music and community is difficult. Determining his importance to my development as a better person is impossible. The former asks for a scope an article of this length can't possibly achieve. The latter demands I face some ugly truths about myself. This scope and these ugly truths are, however, related, so allow me to begin with the latter, so to arrive at one part of the former.

            If I were forced to identify the greatest gift given to me by house and, thus, Frankie Knuckles, it would--unquestionably--be perspective, a hard won, and always uncomfortable, always challenging perspective. As I imply above, it is house that thrust me out of the homophobic ideas I had inherited and then harbored--even if only casually--prior to 1992. By casually I mean that I don't think that I ever disdained gay men and women, but I certainly took on the behaviors of a homophobe. I certainly affected a posture of masculinity which needed homosexuality to exist as its opposite. And while I would like to think that I would have eventually, no matter the circumstance, come to realize just how hateful, how violent and how disgusting such affectations were, I cannot be sure that I would have without house. And I know that any potential change would not have occurred at fifteen. I am, then, richer for these perspectives; I am richer for the ways that house obliged me to consider the violence of affectation and casual prejudice.

           

            This demand that house makes upon its users is not, then, merely sonic. It is social, too. And this social element exceeds the anecdotal. Its reach is longer than my own history. The community and practice that Knuckles helped to shape emerges in an era that also sees the rise of a new, racially and socially directed conservatism. House comes to be in midst of rampant homophobia, in the midst of a newly emboldened campaign to vilify persons of color, and in the middle of a recession that further disenfranchised already struggling communities. It is born at the very moment Reagan's domestic policies not only ended social programs but also found ways to enact a new jim crow, to borrow from Michelle Alexander. And it, too, is born in a moment when HIV and AIDS were not seen as evidence of our need to embrace a common humanity, but, rather, as the justification for a collective, American bigotry, which had long attempted to thrust the LBGTQ communities into categories of deviance, abjection and threat. This is the social milieu into which house emerges. This is the violent, shameful American space upon which house constructs its own counter-community. And in its capacity to find intersections so to keep present and, indeed, celebrate difference, house emerged as a powerful, if limited, tonic through which subjugated populations were able to reclaim both body and joy. 



Looked at through this wider social and historical lens, to beat the box describes more than a DJ's ability to drive the club toward ecstatic release. Though it is that, it is also a call to arms and a collective refusal to be categorized. It describes a song, a mix, a dance step, an arm lifted into the air that beats--or outmaneuvers--those boxes which frame individuals and communities as something less than they are. To beat the box, then, is to cast off the generic and essentializing descriptions too often used to reduce these same communities. In a moment when rock, and R&B, and, I would venture, even the emerging rap form sought to reinforce notions of hetero-normativity and those race and gender boundaries that dictated one's ability to occupy space itself, house offered its practitioners--both in the booth and on the floor--a means through which they were able to celebrate the innumerable and ineffable differences of sound, body and community. To be sure, such celebrations were not inevitable, and various prejudices did and continued to occur in the midst of the house space. Nevertheless, it was and is a practice that offered and continues to offer its users a way through which intersection could be accountable to difference, should we--those of us who call ourselves house heads--choose to keep present the value of difference and, indeed, the value of friction, of both the body and the mind.

This, too, is Knuckles' legacy, and it is, perhaps, his most important.

* K, Wendy.  "The Basement Boys: Rising To The Top."  Soul Underground.  Issue 25, October 1989. 

Practices of Quiet: On the subject of mourning, mothers, and love. . .

Last night, I had dinner with a friend whose loved one had recently passed. We spent a good deal of the evening speaking about presence, and what it means to be there for another person. As is usual, I learned a great deal from her and spent much of the night stumbling through a variety of complaints and jokes. Each served as an attempt to outline the contours of a generalized, abstracted mourning.  It was my hope that in mapping these contours I would be able to enact the sort of presence I wanted when my loved ones passed. I failed. Every reflection, every joke, every complaint only further denied the precision of individual pain. Each elided what both she and her loved one meant to each other. 

Thankfully, my friend is generous to a degree that exceeds most others, and, rather than refuse my folly, she simply and gracefully accepted my intentions. I watched her prepare dinner. Onions, tomatoes, garlic and ginger were first chopped and then gathered by dragging the blade across the cutting board. It was a violence that portended the tension present and more satisfyingly explained the pinkish tint that stained the board's surface. I sat next to her stove and struggled to find songs that were neither sad nor elated, neither quiet nor loud and that would leave no residue, pink or otherwise. 



Cymande "Genevieve"

Melodies blended like spice to oil and into the hissing and popping of frying onions, ginger and garlic. Our conversation moved across a wide variety of topics, each arrived with an ease that belied my friend's generosity. At some point, the conversation shifted to mothers, and, in particular, the wonder of ours. And it was then that she gently nudged me toward a better way to be present. 

She told me that her mother's way of grieving was to abstract pain. Pain was not to be felt but known, not experienced and shared but explained and talked through. This practice of abstraction, she told me, gave her mother the necessary distance through which to understand the passing. It was her mother's way to heal. But for my friend, the abstraction merely cleaved her from the hurt and denied her the right feel sad. By intellectualizing feeling, death was no longer an immediate and enduring loss, but, rather, something more distant--that, even if no less real, was made unavailable to her. 

After hearing her describe her mother's process, I could not help but wonder if my own attempts at comforting her had created a similar sort of abstraction. Had I rendered her pain abstract? I think that the answer to such a question is--most likely--yes. And so in lieu of an attempt to remedy the mistake, which would inevitably reproduce it, I offer a cobbled mess of quotes and songs and words below. They are, perhaps, as abstract and imprecise and searching as anything said last night, but I hope that they also shed some of the earlier pretense and document the lesson that she, as is her wont, so generously gave to me.  

From Susan Sontag's Journals:  

"But if I'm afraid of my mother, she is also afraid of me. On a more specific level, afraid of my judgment. Afraid I will find her stupid, uncultivated (hiding Redbook under the bedcovers when I came to kiss her goodnight), glamorous, morally deficient.  

And I, obligingly, do my best not to look, not to record in consciousness or ever consciously use against her what I see, or (at least) not to let her become [aware of] that + when I see.

But there's something more. Hard to describe. Like magical powers which my mother ascribed to me--with the understanding that if I withdrew them, she'd die.  I must hang on, feeding her, pumping her up. " 

I don't know if my mother and I share the sort of relationship Sontag describes. Frankly, I doubt that she fears my ability to see her beyond that which she chooses to show--either to herself or to me.  Nevertheless, Sontag's appraisal of her mother's dependence gets at something larger than the immediate circumstances described in the passage. I would venture that it describes how love is always a state too intense to linger upon, and so we glimpse it--this state, this feeling, this yearning for--not because love, as the cliché goes, is fleeting, but, rather, because we know that to stare, to linger, to gaze is to undo the person upon whom our love is directed. To stare is to render the individual into parts, to, as it were, abstract the person, replacing the subject with object of our affection. It is not, then, that it is impolite to stare (as momma's across the country tell us); it's that embedded within the courtesy lies an existential mandate, an obligation to always be aware that desire of all sorts (motherly, sisterly, friendly, sexual) is the space of construction and vulnerability. To stare is, of course, to build, but it's also always and simultaneously to destroy. 

Darando  "Didn't I"

And, yet, to not stare feels a bit like a lie, too, if only because it is a non-act that acts,  one that demurs and preens, and so pretends that desire isn't greedy, isn't desperate, doesn't want to take in all of another. Continually. Perpetually. Until all energy is depleted. Until both people arrive at relational entropy. The glimpse is no more than a gesture, an affect performed, moving us back to the space of clichés, of sitcoms and sentimentality, of myths that dissatisfy and exact a distance in the midst of presence. The impossibly close becomes the infinitesimally unavailable. And there, caught in gestures of looking away, we are left alone, isolated in a space that offers proximity without propinquity. There, caught in some perverted and vertiginous dance, we enact an absence under the guise of presence, as strangers casting glances across a subway train, all while pretending that glance and glimpse are enough.  They're not. They never were.  They never will be. 

David Ruffin "Let Somebody Love Me"

If we take Sontag's observation to heart, as I think we should, how do we apprehend those whom we most want to be present for and with? How do we take in those whom we seek to celebrate? How do we avoid depletion and abstraction? To be sure, Sontag doesn't offer us much by way of direct answer, but I would suggest that she leaves us an answer all same. It lies in the words themselves, and in how they explicitly deny us the ability to gaze upon her mother. We don't see her mother hiding a magazine under the covers; we see Sontag remembering the act. We see, then, Sontag. Bare. Alone. Trying to wrest meaning from fragments. They--these words, these fragments, as rambling and searching as my own right now--make Sontag vulnerable to the atomizing gaze and, thus, demonstrate that it is not that we apprehend our loved ones by being strong for them. Nor do we apprehend them by abstracting their vulnerability or hurt, nor in solving nor in articulating nor in explaining them. The passage, instead, makes clear that any desire to bridge the infinitesimal divide obliges us to drop our words. It demands that we abandon our abstractions and allow ourselves to be glimpsed, to ceaselessly make ourselves available for inspection and, thus, to always risk being seen without the protective myths we wear. In becoming less than precise words, in leaving behind abstractions, in allowing another--a trusted other--to glimpse us, or, if it be his or her want, to destroy us, we, in that moment, reach across the divide, fingers grazing fingers in an electric shock, and apprehend what it means not only to be loved but, in fact, to love--whether as mother or daughter, as brother or sister, as friend or lover. In refusing the urge to hide behind abstraction, in having no answer, no recourse, we conjure a moment in which we are finally present to and for others.

And so we listen and, more crucially, admit that there is no answer, no saying, no joke, no complaint that solves or explains away the sorrow born from death. To be present in such moments is to admit defeat, to give into the totalizing fact of sorrow, to accept, as another friend has taught me, that it never goes away completely, and to learn how to be ok with the sorts of discomfort borne by such an admission. 

Valerie June "Somebody To Love"

Spiders on Mescaline

When I offered to do a mix for a friend's gallery opening, I decided to play with the idea of focus. Focus not merely as that which sharpens an image, but also as a concept that in its capacity to manipulate time draws attention to particular moments otherwise taken for granted. Just as the photographer frames the world, making permanent that which would otherwise be fleeting, I wanted the mix to locate and then riff on common moments in otherwise discrete--even disparate-- compositions. Were there, for example, sonic intersections between Fleetwood Mac and Dead Prez? And if there were, how would we be able to identify them? I was interested, then, in the ways one would have to listen so to be able to identify such intersections. I was interested in what methods would be needed to make these intersections knowable to the listener. This was my start.

Somewhere along the way, the mix got away from me. Time and its unsympathetic adherence to movement took control, and my plan for a quick 30 minute CD, meant to be given out at Alex's opening, became an almost 7 hour monster, mixed live and in a single take. In short, I—unlike my man’s photography—lost focus.

My friend and I have a phrase we use any time we hear a DJ lose focus in this way. The phrase: spiders on mescaline. It refers to the chaotic webs produced by spiders injected with the drug. In both webbing and mixing, disorder exists where structure should. Specific to the mix, the phrase refers to sets that lack the context needed to maintain momentum. Songs follow each other with no discernible pattern, seeming to start and stop with all the force of a collision. These collisions are not due to technical mistakes, but, rather, with the DJ’s inability to make sense of time. Energy, song length, key and phrasing muddle, and every song seems to be at odds with what has come before and after. Fearing that I had created a mix that warranted the phrase, I quickly shelved it.

Somewhere around January, however, I came across the mix in my files and decided to put it on. After I finished,it  still felt too long, too bloated, perhaps even a little desperate, as if this were my last mix, and I wanted to show the world all that I had. But it also, in parts, made more sense than I remembered. Even my disregard for song length seemed to mark the moment in a way that felt right. So I started playing it for friends here and there, and, surprisingly, they seemed to like it, too.

I decided to put out the first 3 hours and name it for those moments where even I can’t make sense of what comes next.

… and with that, enjoy the mix:  http://www.sendspace.com/file/a7lcic

Murray's Barbershop

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 . . . "[1]  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.[2] 
         

            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." [3]   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."[4]

           

            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.

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[1] http://www.billytaylorjazz.com/Jazz.pdf

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Albert-Murray-Roberta-Maguire/dp/1604738944

[3] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/04/08/1996_04_08_070_TNY_CARDS_000373241

[4] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2931130?uid=3739600&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102576161747