Free Jazz

Thoughts on Juneteenth: Jazz was born free, and everywhere is exchanged

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I have no new musical piece for today’s American celebration of freedom’s restoration, Juneteenth. I made moves toward one, but things didn’t move fast enough. In my wayward search I’ve been spending more time thinking about the Mid-20th century period 1940-65 that I wrote about a few posts back. During that period the Afro-American art form Jazz moved from being a predominant popular music style (though often performed by non-Afro-American musicians) to a multi-valent art music that intelligently reflected young Black artists, their concerns, and their adaptations.

That transformation is a complex thing, and this’ll be a short post. Early this century Ken Burns’ Jazz  made the simplified case that this was a tragic arc.  Art-music is something a smaller portion of people listen to, live with, care about. I don’t buy that singular tragic summary any more than I buy the companion theory held by others that the audience’s advancing stupidity is to be blamed instead. I suspect these theories are subject to the downhill-to-hell-in-a-handbasket generational syndrome that is ever repeated throughout time. Not that there aren’t things worth observing, worth reviving attention to, worth taking back out of the toolbox for reuse in these sorts of reverence for the past! After all, I’ve spent a good deal of time in this project drawing attention to and finding worth in early 20th century Modernist poetry. So, moldy figs, check.

I’ve spent a good deal of time this month listening to mid-century Black American Jazz, some of it from the end of that mid-century quarter when “free jazz” was the new thing. It’s not everyone’s cup of expresso-in-a-small-club. In Burns’ Jazz,  several of the talking critics had it that these were the vandals that sacked Rome. Last night at dinner I tried to explain Albert Ayler to my spouse, who loves me enough to forgive that.*  Want a simple blurb from me now on Ayler? Most people will be unable to listen to many of Ayler’s recordings with pleasure without significantly understanding something of its intent and context. There’s an argument to be made that art should never resort to that. My belief: sometimes one needs to be baffled, needs to ask questions on the parade from ear to heart. In the Jazz  documentary, Stanley Crouch (the initial G is silent) would say of a player like Ayler “the emperor has no clothes.”  I’d say he’s stripped naked.

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Mid-Century was also an era when LP liner notes could be saying something. Here’s a bit written by Steve Young on 1965’s Black Arts/Free Jazz live album “The New Wave In Jazz.” I’m unable to find anything about what happened to this Steve Young.

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So, it was Free Jazz in my ear as I approach this month’s American’s celebration of the restoration of freedom. Soon it’ll be American Independence Day. We Americans abundantly like the word freedom. Conceptually freedom is inherently a broad thing. People tore into the Capital crying freedom from votes they wished to disenfranchise. People were beaten on the Pettus bridge crying freedom to cast votes.

So, Freedom’s a broad thing. Freedom is like the meaning of life, self-evident and elusive. I think it’s to find your joy and to help others.

Here is today’s returning meeting of my original music and someone’s poetry, from one of the too-overlooked Afro-American artists of the last decade that was called The Twenties: Gwendolyn Bennett. She just called it “Song,”  as broad a title as freedom for a complex thing that is Black American music. You can play it with the player below if you see that, or with this highlighted link.

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*I told her I’d just spent the day reading LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and listening to free jazz from 1965. Poetry and 50-plus-years-ago free-jazz combined will interest a few people, less perhaps than even the small crowd for either of those things by themselves — that’s you folks reading this far — and she’d just spent her day helping sick people. Sing heavenly muses: that I clearly have a higher calling.

Tired

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I’m going to close out our investigation into the little-known early 20th Century Chicago Modernist poet Fenton Johnson with one of his most emotionally moving poems. James Weldon Johnson first included “Tired”  in his “Book of American Negro Poetry”  in 1922, and it has been anthologized several times since. “Tired”  remains the poem of Fenton Johnson’s that one finds most often shared on the Internet today.

You can see why. Only a few beats in, that powerful line is spoken: “I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization.” It may take no more than that line alone to have some tag Fenton Johnson as the first radical Afro-American poet.

I cannot categorically disagree there. I know little about Johnson’s political views, and though the two short-lived magazines he founded before 1920 are said to have included political philosophy, I know nothing of the particular stances he took or supported. At least at the time (the first two decades of the 20th Century) “Tired”  along with a few other of Johnson’s poems caused some Black cultural critics to remark that Johnson was too pessimistic, too given over to despair. You might find that strange, but in that moment, there was a feeling that educational and cultural uplift could soon raise the Afro-Americans along with the time’s large and wide immigrant demographics into a new, more accepting America. We know now that didn’t happen, that indeed 20th Century racism and poverty had some mighty blows to land on America and American Blacks with KKK branded racism, Great Depression poverty, and world-wide Fascism—but at the time, that uplift was what many Afro-American elites were pulling for.

However, just by going on what Fenton Johnson poetry I have available to me, I’m not entirely sure Johnson was, at this time, a political radical or a thorough pessimist.

Last Chance Saloon

“Somebody give me my gin.” Mike is out back serving warm gin to ladies.

After all, the speaker in “Tired”  is not Johnson himself, no more than the banjo player in our last post’s poem is Johnson, the middle-class raised, college educated man. Even the Last Chance Saloon, where the banjo player played for tips, returns in “Tired”.  Johnson didn’t live in a shanty, he wasn’t married to a laundress.

True, this is a character that Johnson wants us to hear, an important voice that maybe even the Black “Talented Tenth” wasn’t listening to then, much less White America. And though it’s free verse, this is a poem, not an incisive political analysis or program. It’s a dramatic speech with rhythm, repetition, and a rise in despair from gin-houses to the stars.

It’s not hard for me to see in “Tired”  the ancestor of August Wilson’s great play cycle, or the range of characters and voices in Walter Mosely’s detective fiction.

Musically I stepped at least as many decades into the future here, concluding this audio piece with a short burst of the kind of free jazz that allied itself with the Black Arts movement in the later part of the 20th Century. I’ll allow that this music is an acquired taste, but at its core is an ethic of allowing individual voices and modes of expression even in a group context. Free Jazz is not always as raucous as what I played for this, but it does not forbid it either. That’s consistent with what I try to do (within my limits as a musician) with the Parlando Project. When I say we combine words with various music, I mean it.

That does mean that you may not like all the writers’ words I present, or all the kinds of music I write and play to combine with those words, but it means that I’m also not going to stick with one thing and repeat it until we are both tired of it.

I’ve ordered these last four posts here on Fenton Johnson purposely, so to present the man more in full, and because, to be honest, I didn’t feel I could earn any license to speak these words without doing something more than just putting them in my mouth. To listen to Johnson’s “Tired”  as I performed it, you can use the player below where it appears, or this highlighted hyperlink.