In a recent interview published in American Heritage (reprinted
in the March 1996 issue of Utne Reader), trumpeter, educator,
and jazz spokesperson Wynton Marsalis commented on the connection
between jazz and democracy:
Jazz is a music of conversation, and that's what you need in a democracy. You have to be willing to hear another person's point of view and respond to it. Also, jazz requires that you have a lot of on-your-feet information, just like a democracy does. There are a lot of things you simply have to know.
In jazz you have the opportunity to establish your equality based on your ability. That's the chance you have in a democracy. It doesn't mean you're going to be even, but you do have an opportunity. And often things won't go your way; they'll go the way the majority takes them. So you'll have to go with them and make the best out of a situation you might not like.
The principle of American democracy is that you have freedom. The question is "How will you use it?" which is also the central question in jazz. In democracy, as in jazz, you have freedom with restraint. It's not absolute freedom, it's freedom within a structure.
The connection between jazz and the American experience is profound. Believe me, that's the heart and soul of what jazz is. That's why jazz is so important. And that's why the fact that it has not been addressed has resulted in our losing a large portion of our identity as Americans. Because the art form that really gives us a mythic representation of our society has not been taught to the public.2
Marsalis makes explicit in this statement the implicit connection between the organization of group improvisation and social/political conceptions of freedom.3 By their very natures, improvisatory groups are small societies collections of individuals reacting to each other, and the parameters of the improvisational context reflect conceptions of freedom, social organization, and democracy. This aspect is, in fact, far from hidden from the musicians, and many of them, as the quote above demonstrates, talk about it quite openly. The manifestations of the "mythic representations," however, vary tremendously, and provide a clue as to what is meant when their creators talk about them. For example, the neoclassical forms of jazz which Marsalis promotes have specific, and in my opinion rather narrow, parameters of expression, or "restraints" as he refers to them; certain types of discourse are not allowed, and therefore the music manifests a particular type of democracy, which allows a particular type of freedom.4
free jazz as a "mythic representation"
"Free" or "avant-garde" jazz (music which,
interestingly enough, Marsalis would exclude from the jazz canon)
are also "mythic representations of society," and were,
in some instances, created with the issues of socio/political
freedom particularly in mind. In an interview with with Len Lyons,
Cecil Taylor addresses this issue. Lyons had asked Cecil about
his piano technique:
You want me to talk about certain things, but I'm prepared to talk only about the things I think are important. I'm interested in the cultural importance of the life of the music. The instrument a man uses is only a tool with which he makes his comment on the structure of music. That's why the evaluation of what a cat says about how he plays music is not too far from the noninteresting things he does when he is playing. That person wouldn't have too profound an understanding of what has happened in the music and the culture. We have to define the procedures and examine the aesthetics that have shaped the history of the music. That's much more important than discussing finger dexterity. We might as well discuss basketball or tennis.
[Lyons] "Well, what does distinguish your approach to the music from the other approaches?
The history of the people, the culture, even the things they forget consciously. The way they cook, speak, the way they move, dress, how they relate to the pressures around them. What you experience in life informs (in-forms) you. If you work on One Hundred Forty-fifth street in Harlem and years later in Tokyo, where you are taken to see the sights, you experience . . . the environment, listen to the sounds, watch the movement.
You'll be able to see that there are not these separations between things. There are different aesthetic choices made. What happened in the latter part of the eighteenth century in Africa had a profound effect on painting. The concepts of musical organization now have to be broadened to accommodate the worldwide awareness of music.5
The "mythic representation" Taylor explores has broad
parameters there is an attempt to allow large-scale cultural influences
to exist in his work without attempting to subsume them under
a totalitarian structure; they are to emerge on their own, through
the individuality of the players. Most interesting here is his
comment on the relationship between musicians and musical structure;
musicians are "commenting" in it, struggling with the
tension between the "restraints" of structure and the
experiences which "in-form" the individual. Yet this
"mythic representation" Taylor postulates is not a form
of musical anarchy, as his music is often incorrectly presumed
to be. Structure does exist in Taylor's music, although it operates
in a way which may seem anarchistic from Marsalis's point of view.
The Social/Political Environment of Taylor's Early Music
While it is literally impossible to describe the multiplicity
of forces that influence and shape an artistic movement, there
are three interwoven cultural forces which I will discuss as being
central to the development of Taylor's music. These are the incorporation
of bop into the "mainstream" conception of jazz, the
civil-rights movement and the accompanying focus on black consciousness
and aesthetics, and finally the musical focus on spirituality.
My approach has been greatly influenced by the work of Ronald
M. Radano, particularly his book New Musical Figurations:.6
His view is summed up in this paragraph from the introduction:
Today, the nebulous categories of popular and art blur into a complex and encompassing web of subverted binaries, perpetuating Marshal McLuhan's vision of an "all-inclusive nowness," a world in which "fragmentation is the essence." The previously stratified categories of culture . . . have begun to look like outmoded constructs. Urban music in the postwar United States has come to resemble an extended series of fusions and oppositions existing in the matrix of mass culture. The patterns of interaction and conflict, too complex and intertwined to be sorted out systematically. . .relate inextricably to former hierarchical divisions as well as to the new institutional formations that affect the contours of American life as a whole. These have not only encouraged stylistic intersection, but have challenged the effectiveness of the standard categories by which we define musical practice. Former classifications of musical genre, while perhaps still somewhat useful as means of distinguishing aspects of style, appear less and less helpful in providing an accurate appraisal of the complexities of contemporary artistic life.7
bebop and the "mainstream"
The history of jazz music itself is an "extended series of
fusions and oppositions." One of the most pronounced was
the "bebop revolution" of the late forties, with Dizzy
Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonius Monk as the progenitors.
This radical music rose up in opposition to "mainstream"
jazz, a term first applied to small group, swing oriented jazz,
mostly dance music. Bop was aggressive and intellectual compared
to swing, and received hostile reaction and dismissal by many
critics (though certainly not all) who denounced it as "cold,
unemotional, and harmful to the future of jazz."8 Charlie
Parker himself had distanced his music from the "mainstream,"
stating "Bop is no love child of jazz. . . [it] is something
entirely separate and apart."9 There were inevitable
comparisons between this black "art" music and the European
canon, and Parker commented in 1953: "They're different ways
of saying things musically, and, don't forget, classical music
has a long tradition. But in 50 or 75 years, the contributions
of present-day jazz will be taken as seriously as classical music."10 But
by the mid fifties, there was a deliberate, and evidently quite
successful, attempt to formulate jazz history along the lines
of the European canonical model. Critical approaches had been
broadened to not only incorporate bebop into the "mainstream"
aesthetic, but to describe it as a historical inevitability. While
many American critics pushed for this, such as Ross Russell and
Leonard Feather, the most extensive work was André Hodeir's
book Jazz: It's Evolution and Essence. The clearest example
of this type thinking appears in the chart in chapter two "The
Evolution of Jazz and the Idea of Classicism" which lays
out the various "Ages" or "Periods" of jazz:
Primitive (c. 1900(?) - 1917), Old time (1917 - 1926), Pre-Classical
(1927 - 1934), Classical (1935 - 1945), Modern (1945 - ).11
This attempt to create in jazz an analog to the European canon
of music fell prey to the same exclusionary and homogenizing principles
as the model which it sought (and continues to seek) to emulate.
By codifying certain aspects of the music, a formulation as to
"what jazz was" was created, a formulation which pronounced
a new stability which undid the "harmful" effects of
bop. However , the conceptual framework which gave rise to this
construct was, in many respects, antithetical to the African-American
aesthetics it sought to institutionalize. Radano comments:
Yet the mainstream ultimately worked against itself, its visibility coming at a price: appropriated and depoliticized, this monumental recasting of jazz stood in direct conflict with values and perspectives grounded in the African-American vernacular. By revising the nature of black music to fit the tastes and attitudes of a white consensus, the construct denatured the "blues" character of an artistic heritage built upon the necessity of culturally affirmative, creative resistance. Further, by encouraging the growth of a rountinized style as a basis for "serious" artistic progress, it went against the grain of a black ethos that had historically challenged codified common practice and the analytic frames of a European musical tradition. By removing the music from the social and ideological categories that had previously given it meaning, the mainstream of jazz would stand or fall according to the measures of "all fine music," becoming, in the favored phrase, "America's classical art form."12
the political implications of the "mainstream"
Clearly, the appropriation of jazz history by white mainstream
culture produced a "mythic representation" which was
at odds with the experience of many black musicians, and white
musicians sympathetic with black aesthetics. Whereas as jazz,
and particularly bop, had previously been a voice of challenge
and resistance, it was depoliticized and stripped of it's context.
Jazz had now even become an exponent of cold-war ideology which
proclaimed a homogenized, classless and raceless society without
conflict; a 1955 New York Times article stated that jazz
was "America's secret weapon. . . Right now its most effective
ambassador is Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong. A telling propaganda
line is the hopped up tempo of a Dixieland
band . . ."13 The State Department sponsored tours by Dizzy
Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, and many others. Despite
the inclusion of black musicians like Gillespie, most artists
sent on tour were white. Critic Leonard Feather was even hired
to host "Jazz Club U.S.A," which was broadcast on Voice
of America behind the iron curtain.14
jazz and the civil rights movement
One must consider this depoliticization of jazz against the rise
of black awareness and attempts at cultural redefinition (or self-definition)
energized by the civil rights movement and black nationalism of
the fifties and sixties. The history and circumstances of this
time are well known and require no restatement here; the crucial
element is that it had a significant effect the reaction to the
"mainstream" co-option of jazz music. For many, the
struggle against the mainstream was a struggle to assume control
of their own history. In his 1963 essay "The White Jazz Critic,"
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) writes:
There were few "jazz critics" in America at all until
the 30's and then they were influenced to a large extent by what
Richard Hadlock has called " the carefully documented gee-whiz
attitude" of the first serious European jazz critics. They
were also, as a matter of course, influenced more deeply by the
social and cultural mores of their own society. And it is only
natural that their criticism, whatever its intention, should be
a product of that society, even if not directly related to the
subject they were writing about, Negro music.
We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As Western people, the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a historical legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as as continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any critical speculation about the music that came out of it.15
free jazz and jazz history
The fifties saw a multitude of new forms of jazz; modal, "cool,"
hard bop, etc. There was also an attempt by Gunther Schuller and
others at "Third-Stream," a self-conscious fusion of
jazz and classical. While these forms expanded and explored the
language which had now been accepted as "jazz" in extremely
inventive, artistic, and individualistic ways, nothing challenged
the dominant paradigm so deeply as the the music variously called
"free-jazz," "avant-garde jazz," "the
new thing," or most tellingly "anti-jazz." New
harmonic and sonic materials invoked twentieth-century developments
in "classical" music. Yet these materials were not self-consciously
appropriated as they had been in "Third-Stream" music,
but rather were incorporated according to a self-proclaimed "black"
aesthetic. These musics cast doubt on the assumptions formulated
in the fifties as to what jazz was. Yet they did not reject the
history which they brought into question, as perhaps Parker did,
rather they embraced it. In an interview with Nat Hentoff, Cecil
Taylor stated "The greatness of jazz occurs because it includes
all the mores and folkways of Negroes during the last fifty
years."16 In particular, the intellectual and revolutionary
character of bop was seen as a foundation for this music: "[F]or
jazzmen now to have come to the beautiful and logical conclusion
that bebop was perhaps the most legitimately complex, emotionally
rich music to come out of this country, is . . . a brilliant beginning
for a `new' music."17 The revolutionary character of this music, therefore,
functioned through simultaneous acceptance and rejection the constructs
of jazz history. It was the mainstream conceptions of black music
history, not the history itself, which "anti-jazz" artists
sought to debunk. In "An Artist Speaks Bluntly," saxophonist
and playwright Archie Shepp wrote:
'Jass' is an ofay's word for a nigger's music . . . Give me leave to state this unequivocal fact: jazz is the product of the whites- the ofays- too often my enemy. It is the progeny of the blacks, my kinsmen.18
In short, "the new music" presented a radically new
and revolutionary "mythic representation of society";
a representation which was itself simultaneously a "fusion
and opposition" of social and musical developments.19 For many, of which Archie Shepp was perhaps the
most vociferous, the music itself was a revolutionary statement
against the white power structure:
My music is functional. I play about the death of me by you. I exult in the life of me in spite of you . . . My music is for the people. If you are a bourgeois, then you must listen to it on my terms. I will not let you misconstrue me. That era is over . . . I will say to you. . ."Strike the Ghetto. Let my people go."20
socioeconomic struggles in free jazz
Needless to say, critical reaction to "the new thing"
was often hostile, and most musicians had difficulty in booking
gigs and getting record companies to take interest in their music.
One of the main problems was that the only existing venues were
ones that were historically created for "mainstream"
jazz, and the traditional economic functioning of jazz clubs was
somewhat antithetical to the demands made by the new music. Bassist
Buell Neidlinger, who played with Cecil for several years, portrayed
the situation accurately:
[T]here is no economic advantage to playing music like that. It's completely unsalable in the nightclubs because of the fact that each composition lasts, or could last, an hour and a half. Bar owners aren't interested in this, because if there's one thing they hate to see it's a bunch of people sitting around openmouthed with their brains absolutely paralyzed by the music, unable to call for the waiter. They want to sell drinks. But when Cecil's playing, people are likely to tell the waiter to shut up and be still.21
The political aspects of the music were highly controversial as
well, and were often discounted or seen as "a million light
years away from the actual notes and chords and modes and rhythms
of jazz."22 The musicians and their supporters were not silent
to these reactions, and often openly criticized the critics, such
as LeRoi Jones' essay "The White Jazz Critic" quoted
earlier, Archie Shepp's article quoted above, and Taylor's 1963
Village Voice article, which stated "Critics are sustained
by our vitality. From afar, the uninformed egos ever growing arbitrarily
attempt to give absolutes."
Even when places to play and record were found, exploitation by
club owners and record companies was often profligate.23
Despite a
certain amount of recognition, in America but especially in Europe,
many of the musicians lived in poverty.24 Some,
like Sonny Murray, didn't even own their own instruments. The
experience of these musicians was compounded by the public exposition
of corruption in the music industry when, in 1960, the Federal
Trade Commission reported that bribes had been taken by 225 disc
jockeys and other broadcasting personnel in order to play certain
records. Dick Clark of ABC's Broadcast U.S.A. television
show admitted that he had a financial stake in the songs he played.
attempts at collective organization
The reaction of the "avant-garde" musicians to what
Archie Shepp described as "the crude stables (clubs) where
black men are groomed and paced like thoroughbreds to run until
they bleed or else are hacked up outright for Lepage's glue"25 was
self-organization. In 1960 Charles Mingus and Max Roach organized
"The Rump Festival" to counter the Newport Festival.
The truly seminal event, however, was the 1964 "October Revolution
in Jazz,"26
a festival of "the new music"
organized by Bill Dixon. This festival, which included Cecil Taylor,
Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, Sunny Murray, Milford Graves,
Guiseppi Logan, and many others. For a number of the young musicians,
this was their first exposure. This and the next festival, "Four
Days in December," prompted Dixon, in consultation with Taylor
to form the collective organization, the Jazz Composers Guild
under the philosophy that "You can't kill an organization,
but you can kill an individual."27 Members
of the Guild included Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Rosewell
Rudd, Jon Winter, John Tchicai, Carla and Paul Bley, and several
others. The racial makeup of the Guild demonstrates clearly the
inclusive nature of the philosophies of many members of the avant-garde.
Bill Dixon explained "[White jazz musicians] are treated
significantly better, but not much betterthat's why they're in
the Guildthan Black musicians, and that is simply because they
play jazz, which is looked on as something `primitive.'"28
Weekly
concerts were organized, and it was planned that recording and
nightclub contracts would be negotiated through the Guild rather
than by individual members. The Guild fell apart when Archie Shepp
began individual contract negotiations with Impulse records.29
The Guild was really the first attempt a collective organization,
and several others followed, including the Black Arts group (organized
by LeRoi Jones), the Jazz Composer's Orchestra, and in Chicago
the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM).
While organizations like the Guild, the Orchestra, and many other
included white musicians, some, like the Collective Black Artists
and the Black Order of Revolutionary Enterprise, espoused exclusionist
ideology. It should be pointed out that there was a musicians
union, the American Federation of Musicians, Local 802, and the
musicians were required to belong to the union in order to work.
Most of the artists, however, felt that the union was uninterested
in them, except at dues paying time. Cecil himself called for
"a boycott by Negro musicians of all jazz clubs in the United
States. I also propose that there should be a boycott by Negro
jazz musicians of all record companies . . . all trade papers
dealing with music . . . and that all Negro musicians resign from
every federated union in this county. Let's take away the music
from the people who control it."30
the place of the artist in society
Behind this self-empowered vision lay a rather romantic notion
of the place of the jazz musician in the ghetto. If jazz musicians
were freed of their poverty and allowed to pursue their artistic
goals unfettered, they would "operate at a maximum capacity
on all levels." Because an artist is "so close to reality,
he would be able to spell out in a language the community could
understand exactly what his work is about and how it has relation
to them- how it comes out of perhaps the same problems they're
struggling with."31
The difficulty
the musicians were having, both economically and the perceived
lack of attention in the media, was seen as a form of active oppression,
not just "economic inconvenience." The large attendance
at certain performances, and especially the reception in Europe,
were cited as evidence for public acceptance, both actual and
potential, of "the new music."
spirituality in free jazz
Co-mingled with the collective social and political movements
of the late fifties and the sixties was the religious revival,
the most visible examples of which were The Nation of Islam, Malcolm
X's Afro-American Unity group, and Martin Luther King Jr. As theses
movements fused religion and spirituality with political discourse,
so too "The New Music" was often considered a spiritual
as well as political voice. Some of the musicians made the connection
explicit; for example in December of 1964 John Coltrane recorded
the album "A Love Supreme."32
Coltrane
was a practicing Christian, and the supreme love referred to is
the love of Christ. Yet Coltrane's spirituality, like the spiritual
musics of others of the movement, was inclusive rather than exclusivefor
example McCoy Tyner, the pianist for his quartet at the time,
is a Muslim. Sun-Ra was a mystic and practiced astral projection.
Perhaps the most pronounced spiritual orientation was in the music
of Albert Ayler, who based much of his music on "Negro"
spirituals. His album titles included Angels, Spirits,
and Spiritual Unity.
The nature of the spiritual characteristics of this music are
addressed LeRoi Jones' (Amiri Baraka) 1966 essay "The Changing
Same (R&B and New Black Music):
The new jazz people . . . seek the mystical God both emotionally and intellectually . . . John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Sun-Ra, Pharaoh Sanders, come to mind immediately as God-seekers. In the name of energy sometimes, as with Ayler and drummer Sonny Murray. Since God is, indeed, energy. To play strong and forever would be the cry and the worshipful purpose of life . . . The music is a way into God. The absolute open expression of everything.33
The religious character of the music, then, is not devotional
but rather an invocation of divine energies, a trait not unlike
some African religious music. Coltrane claimed to have a "vision
of God" before composing A Love Supreme, and had "visions
of God a lot of times when he was playing."34
Of course, not all of the musicians involved in "The New
Thing" were attached to a religious tradition, but the lack
of an institutional base did not nullify the spiritual characteristics
of their music. While Archie Shepp (a Marxist), Cecil Taylor,
and Ornette Coleman were "three versions of a contemporary
Black Secularism,"35 the spiritual aspects of their music emerged
"in the spiritual precincts of its emotional telling."36 As
Jones described it, collective improvisation is an "all-force
put together, and is what is wanted . . . pushed by an emotionalism
that seeks freedom."37 The freedom sought is a personal quest for individuality,
the "freedom to want your own particular hip self."
The investigation of the self through improvisation is at the
basis of Taylor's music in particular: "The investigation
of oneself means the attempt to hear the calling of those great
black minds that have preceded one, and to understand the responsibility,
through the investigation of the orders that they maintain, to
define what the essential and aesthetic perimeters are that make
this music."38 Spirituality, then, derives from the "free"
sonic interplay between the individual and the collective: The
music "once free, it is spiritual." Specifically, through
the invocation of the "mores and folkways of Negroes"
the music becomes an "actuality, [a] summoner of Black Spirit,
the evolved music of the then evolved people."39 The
music is not about spirituality, rather it is spirituality
manifestthe making of the music is itself a religious event:
[The] first order to be recognized in the rhythmical celebration is indeed the homage that the musicians pay to the continuance of life, and that is not only the life of people, but the life of all things that move.
It means the magical lifting of one's spirits to a state of trance. It means the most heightened perception of one's self, but one's self in a relationship to other forms of life, you know, which people talk about as the universe. It means experiencing oneself as another kind of living organism much in the way of a plant, a tree- growth, you see, that's what it is. And, at the same time, when one attains that, one also genuflects to whatever omnipotent force that make you, made it, possible. I'm hopefully accurate in saying that's what happens when we play. It's not to do with "energy." It has to do with religious forces.40
2 Tony Sherman,
"The Music of Democracy: Wynton Marsalis Puts Jazz In Its
Place" Utne Reader no. 74 (March-April 1996): 29. back
3 Musical interactions
based on social/political ideology are by no means the sole purview
of African-American musical traditions, although it can be argued
that African-American musical structures have profoundly influenced
most other American and European improvisational constructs in
the latter half of the twentieth century. back
4 For example, Marsalis
says "Jazz means learning to respect individuality. You don't
have to agree with me, I don't have to agree with you. . . . it's
learning how to reconcile differences, even when they're opposites."
In a couple of paragraphs, he states "You have to want to
make somebody feel good with what you play." Later in the
interview he opines ,"It was with the type of things that
that late-period Coltrane did that destroyed its relationship
with the public. That avant-garde conception of music that's loud
and self-absorbed nobody's interested in hearing that on a regular
basis. I don't care how much publicity it gets. The public is
not going to want to hear people play like that." Clearly,
certain individuals' voices, influences, and lines of thought
are excluded in Marsalis' democracy, where all communication seems,
ultimately, determined by what he thinks "the public wants
to hear." (As of present, I have been unable to find a definition
of democracy which takes as it's basis that all communication
should "make somebody feel good.") back
5 Len Lyons, The Great
Jazz Pianists (New York: W. Morrow, 1983), 304. back
6 Ronald M. Radano, New
Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993). back
7 Radano, 12. back
8 Leonard Feather's description
of Nat Hentoff's denunciations in "A Plea for Less Critical
Infighting, More Attention To The Music Itself" Downbeat
(Dec. 16, 1965): 13. back
9 Downbeat (September
9, 1949): 20. Reprinted in December 1990. back
10 Downbeat (July
2, 1964): 40. back
11 André Hodier,
Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (New York: Grove Press
1956), 24. back
12 Radano , 17. back
13 The New York Times
(November 6, 1955): 38. back
14 It should be noted,
of course, that this propagandistic unity was not all it seemed,
of course. Gillespie commented at one point: "The black people
are becoming more and more dissatisfied. And if changes don't
take place within the next ten years, there'll be a revolution."
Quoted in Frank Kofsky's essay "Black Music: Cold War Secret
Weapon," Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music
(New York, Pathfinder Press 1970, 20. back
15 Leroi Jones, "The
White Jazz Critic,"Black Music (New York, William
Morrow & Co. 1968), 12-14. back
16 Kofsky,140. back
17 Jones, "The
Jazz Avant-Garde"Black Music , 69. back
18 Archie Shepp,"An
Artist Speaks Bluntly," Downbeat (Dec. 16, 1965):
11. Many other musicians rejected the term "jazz." In
1971 Miles Davis said the label "jazz" was equivalent
to calling someone a "nigger." back
19 The forms this new
music took were as highly individualistic as the artists who created
them. Most well known, other than Taylor, were Sun Ra, Ornette
Coleman, and at the end of his life, John Coltrane. Coltrane is
a particularly remarkable case. One of the most highly influential
jazz musicians since the forties, he pioneered a variety of styles;
"cool" with Miles Davis' band; as a leader; hard-bop,
modal jazz, and then finally, in the last two years of his life,
the "avant-garde". As attested to by the earlier comment
from Marsalis, many musicians reject his late music, but his music
developed in a clearly organic progression. back
20 Shepp, 42. back
21 A.B. Spellman, Four
Lives in the Bebop Business (New York: Limelight Edition 1966,
1992), 8. back
22 Leonard Feather,
"A Plea For Less Critical Infighting, More Attention To The
Music" Downbeat (Dec. 16, 1966): 13. Ironically, Shepp's
article quoted above appears two pages earlier in this same issue.
back
23 Frank Kofsky provides
an economic analysis of an evening at the Five Spot in
Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, 148. His
"evidence" is not documented, however. back
24 I was informed by
Marilyn Crispell that Cecil didn't make money enough to pay taxes
until he was fifty years old in 1983. back
25 Shepp, 42. back
26 Named, of course,
after the Russian October Revolution of 1917; a good indication
as to the ideological leanings of the musicians and the political
nature of the music. back
27 Valerie Wilmer, As
Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (New York:
Serpent's Tail 1977), 214. back
28 Ibid. back
29 This footnote has
been deleted. An explanation and link to further information on
the Guild will soon appear here. back
30 Kofsky, 144. It should
also be noted that, while Cecil musical and political focus is
on racial equality and "African methodology," he was
always inclusive of white musicians. back
31 Ibid., 144. back
32 Interestingly enough,
this album was the last of his "middle-period albums",
and thrust Coltrane into his final period which was undoubtably
"avant garde". Soon after "A Love Supreme,"
he recorded "Ascension" (recorded July 28, 1965), a
lengthy collective improvisation featuring many of the well known
avant-garde players, including Archie Shepp, John Tchicai, Pharaoh
Sanders and Marion Brown. back
33 Jones,"The Changing
Same (R&B and New Black Music),"Black Music, 193.
back
34 from a quote by Bobby
Timmons, J.C. Thomas Chasin' the Trane (New York: Da Capo,
1975) 187. back
35 Jones, "The
Changing Same," 197. back
36 Ibid., 186. back
37 Ibid., 195. back
38 Cecil Taylor interview.
J. B.Figi, "Cecil Taylor: African Code, Black Methodology"
Down Beat (July, 1975): 13. back
39 Jones, "The
Changing Same, " 189. back
40 Figi, 14. back