The Drum Is a Wild Woman

Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature

Patricia G. Lespinasse

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496836045
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria feminista

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse—jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album's cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum. The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women's writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject. This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs—cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment—in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.

Chapter 1

REUNITED

(Re)Claiming Gender in Jazz Narratives from Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” to Angelou’s “Reunion”

Maya Angelou’s jazz short story “The Reunion” consists of a revisionist narrative that attempts to reclaim a space for Black women in the jazz literary tradition. Angelou’s literary re-vision can be read as what scholar Cheryl Wall describes as “worrying the line.”¹ Wall notes that the popular blues trope, “worrying the line,” is a technique applied “for purposes of emphasis, clarification and subversion.” In appropriating the trope for critical purposes, she demonstrates that “black women’s writing work similar changes on literary traditions” (Wall 8). Wall’s compelling critical framework informs my reading of “The Reunion,” which indicates Angelou’s subversive attempts to “worry the line” of jazz literary tradition. “The Reunion” explores the bebop era, bereft of the presence of African American women improvisers, in order to provide a counternarrative that places the Black woman as central to the jazz literary tradition and jazz discourse more broadly.

“The Reunion” recalls the life of Philomena Jenkins, a virtuosic Black female piano player reminiscent of jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams. Through memories and ritualized dialogue, Philomena narrates the possibility and actuality of a reunion between herself and “Beth Ann Baker of the Baker Cotton Gin.” Through Philomena’s first-person narrative we discover that their contentious past is steeped in the racial politics of servitude and segregation. Set in 1958, during the tail end of the bebop era, the narrative is centered on Philomena Jenkins who ultimately learns how to channel the essence of bebop in a piano solo that results in her transformation from object of denigration to subject of improvisation. “The Reunion,” with its insertion of jazz music and improvisation, suggests not only a meeting between two women but also the confluence of race and gender, history and memory, and at its most fundamental level, jazz and literature.

Angelou’s narrative participates in what scholar Robert G. O’Meally terms “the jazz-literature correspondence.”² O’Meally defines the jazz-literature correspondence as “the continuing effort of writers to use what they hear in jazz to give their words a jazz like quality.” Based on the premise that jazz music is “styled to tell the story,” he notes: “The long-standing aspiration of writers in general to capture some of the power of music in poetry and prose is evident in the vocabulary of literary analysis, much of which is derived from music” (O’Meally 535). This chapter suggests that the jazz-literature correspondence is inherent in many of Angelou’s jazz texts that use music as a medium (literal, figurative, or spiritual) to allow characters to gain agency and/or subjectivity through improvisation.

From her autobiographical jazz text, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas,³ to her jazz short story “The Reunion,” the lyrical writings of Maya Angelou are a testament to her reverence for conjoining music and literature. Written in 1976, Singin’ and Swingin’ serves as a foundation for later writings that draw our attention to her own relationship with music and, more broadly, the influence of music on Black women. In the beginning of Singin’ and Swingin’, Angelou describes an intimate moment with music in the first few lines: “Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces of the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” This passage, which relates the influence of music on Angelou’s life, highlights her memory of the way music protected her, embracing both her emotional and psychological state of solitude. For Angelou, music serves as a barricade to a hostile world. Music provides comfort and protection that enables her access into a safe space/place within the notes.

Further, Angelou describes her affinity for the music as if it were a lover: “In my rented room, I would play a record, then put my arms around the shoulders of the song, As we danced, glued together, I would nuzzle into its neck, kissing the skin, and rubbing its cheek with my own” (Singin’ and Swingin’ 3). It is significant to note that music is personified. With music’s shoulders to wrap her arms around, legs to dance, body to be glued to, neck to kiss, and cheeks to rub against, music becomes the embodiment of desire. Although described with many characteristics of the human body, music lacks a mouth and therefore we are unable to literally and figuratively hear it. The narrator implies that although we can see the music, we cannot hear the song due to the literary medium. Thus, in this particular scenario the record becomes, like Philomena in “The Reunion,” the “song struggling to be heard.” Although ripe with some of the same musical venerations as Singin’ and Swingin’, “The Reunion” suggests the historical tension between unsung women and jazz music, specifically the bebop era.

Roughly spanning the mid-1940s through the 1950s, the bebop era produced a culture of resistance represented by the music, individual style, and language of African Americans. Bebop has been called both an evolution as well as a revolution of the jazz tradition. Indeed, it can be viewed as both, as it evolved from swing in a revolutionary way. Historically, the bebop revolution has been considered a reaction to white appropriation and an attempt to render jazz music inaccessible through a coded musical language that represents the interiority of African American life and culture. In Black Music, Amiri Baraka underscores the significance as well as the interrelationship between African Americans and the music born of their experiences: “The song and the people is the same” and “Bop was, at a certain level of consideration, a reaction by young musicians against the sterility and formality of Swing as it moved to become a formal part of the mainstream American culture.” Further, “People made Bebop” and there was a “psychological catalyst that made that music the exact registration of the social and cultural thinking of a whole generation of black Americans.”⁴ Yet, the social and cultural factors associated with the bebop era are usually accompanied by a masculine sensibility evidenced in the music, historical narratives, and images of the period.

In the bebop anthem “In Walked Bud,” the lyrical depiction of the creation of bebop, women are absent. When reading the jazz history surrounding the bebop era, we are most likely to encounter the narratives of notable male musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, to name a few. The images of the bebop era depict a masculine sense of style, which included the fashionable berets, horn-rim glasses, and the goatee.⁵ In Life magazine, a popular photographic image of the bebop movement provides further evidence of a male-dominated era. The image is filled with private rituals, such as the depiction of a fictitious “secret handshake” between Gillespie and Benny Goodman and the coded language of Chano Pozo as he shouts “incoherently” in a “Bebop transport.”⁶ Culturally and socially, bebop exuded a “cool” masculinity supported by masculine images that portrayed the uber-masculine style, language, and culture of the era.

Unsurprisingly, most narratives that concern the birth of bebop exclude a female presence. The most common myth identifies the club Minton’s as the place where bebop was born through the virtuosic performances of Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, among other male musicians. This particular narrative outlining the genesis of the music, like most narratives about bebop, silences the role of Black women within this era and the influence women had on the music as well as the way in which the music affected their lives. If there was indeed a “psychological catalyst,” as Baraka notes, for the creation of bebop, a music that precisely reflected the social and cultural ideology of an entire generation, then the questions that beg answers are: Was the psychological catalyst exclusive to the African American male experience? What is the relationship between this revolutionary modern jazz sound and the Black female experience? If “the song and the people is the same” and modern jazz was procreated by the people, what role did the Black woman play? Who really gave birth to modern jazz?

Significantly, a few historical counternarratives recognize Black women as co-founders of the music. The first narrative has been recounted by musician Lillian Carter (Wilson) who brings forth Josephine Boyd, a saxophonist in the all-girl band the Darlings, as a co-creator of the new sound that would eventually be known as bebop. According to Sherrie Tucker’s interviews, Wilson remained adamant about the fact that Boyd “set the egg for Bebop.”⁷ Despite Dizzy Gillespie’s inability to remember Boyd, Wilson “insisted that Boyd helped Dizzy Gillespie invent Bebop” (Tucker 206). Another counternarrative uncovers the presence of a “Mother” figure, Mary Lou Williams, as a major contributor to the construction and formation of modern jazz.

In Tammy Kernodle’s Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, Williams is not only a female presence at the site of bebop’s conception, but according to her own account, she helped mold and shape the sound of the music by serving as a mentor to many bebop musicians, including Charlie Christian, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk. Kernodle writes:

After her nightly performances at Café Society, Mary would head uptown to a club called Minton’s Playhouse on West 118th Street. It was there that this new jazz was being conceived, through the experimentations of the pianist Thelonious Monk, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, the drummers Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, the trombonist J.J. Johnson, and others…. Thelonious Monk was one of the first Beboppers to be associated with Minton’s, while the other musicians, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach supported themselves with work for swing bands. Monk set the stage for Bebop with his complex chord changes, which few could play with him. But those who could follow Monk, such as the guitarist Charlie Christian, fed this experimentation. Mary, who had befriended Christian in the late 1930s … would spend countless nights with the guitarist working on compositions that explored these new approaches to jazz…. Of the Boppers Mary was closest to Monk, Powell, and Gillespie. But Monk, more than the others, frequently asked Mary for her musical opinion. (Kernodle 112–14)⁸

More than a female presence at the club, Williams became the “matriarch of the modern jazz movement when she opened her apartment and ears to the musical and personal concerns of the Bebop musicians” (Kernodle 114). Despite the fact that Williams played a significant role in the bebop movement, and even produced her own compositions, “she would never be viewed as an innovator in the style” (Kernodle 116). As a Black female musician within the male-dominated discourse of jazz, her dissonant narrative becomes a footnote in the historical trajectory of the revolutionary sound of bebop.⁹ As a Black female musician and an innovative improviser, Williams’s story becomes, like the story of her fictional equivalent Philomena Jenkins (and to a larger extent many Black female improvisers), “the song struggling to be heard.” However, as a short story, “The Reunion” highlights jazz as the catalyst that enables Philomena to improvise and push the boundaries of the song to gain agency and ultimately find her voice.

Throughout “The Reunion,” jazz figures prominently. Angelou underscores jazz standards from 1931 to 1958 and there seems to be a distinctive interplay between swing and bebop. “DB Blues,” originally composed by Lester Young, sets the tone for the reunion that will take place between Philomena and Beth Ann. The narrative portrays how the sound of Lester Young envelops the club atmosphere as Philomena and the Cab Callen Band begin to play and “[take] off on that tune like [they] were headed for Birdland in NYC” (“The Reunion” 222). In Being Prez: The Life and Music of Lester Young, biographer Dave Gelly describes “DB Blues” as “secure and purposeful and packed with the surprising twists and turns that mark all of [Young’s] best work. It summed up, in its quiet way a spirit of ease and freedom, of getting mellow in some little dive, of not having to wear uniform or jump out of bed at the crack of dawn” (Gelly 106).¹⁰ With its “spirit of ease and freedom,” “DB Blues” bookends the narrative. The majority of the narrative, which presents the reunion between Philomena and Beth Ann Baker, is recounted in between the “DB Blues’s” “kickoff” and “release.” Although the reunion is couched in between freedom and ease, it is wrought with tension. Lester Young’s famous “detention barrack blues,” inspired by his imprisonment in 1944, forebodes the tension that exists between the two women. Like the “ironic edge”¹¹ of “DB Blues,” the irony of the reunion between Philomena and Beth Ann is that it occurs in the moments of disjuncture or in the breaks found throughout the narrative.

In “Improvisation and the Creative Process,” music critic Albert Murray defines the break as a “disruption of the normal cadence of a piece of music.” He claims that it is on the break that a musician does his/her thing. This “disjuncture” that Murray calls the moment of truth is similar to what Ralph Ellison describes as the jazz moment. It is within the jazz moment that identity is achieved and notions of individual freedom and agency are asserted. Throughout the narrative, there are multiple breaks: linguistic breaks in language indicated by the ellipses; musical breaks characterized as an interlude and jazz moment/solo; literal breaks marked by the term “intermission.” It is in the break that Philomena recognizes Beth Ann; experiences her “jazz moment”; confronts Beth Ann; and finally, at the end of the short story, reaches a breakthrough. Further, the title “The Reunion” implies that there was a “break” prior to the reunification of Philomena and Beth Ann. Philomena describes her break with the Bakers: “I had lived with my parents until I was thirteen, the servants’ quarters. A house behind the Baker main house. Daddy was the butler, my mother was the cook, and I went to a segregated school on the other side of town where the other kids called me the Baker Nigger” (“The Reunion” 225). Years later, when she finally sees Beth Ann with a Black man in 1958 at the Blue Palm Café, she feels incredulous.

The first line of “The Reunion” states, “Nobody could have told me that she’d be out with a black man, out, like going out” (“The Reunion” 222). During the interlude, Philomena has doubts that the young blond woman is indeed “Beth Ann Baker of the Baker Cotton Gin” but takes a second look and recalls her features: “I remember too well the turn of her cheek. The sliding way her jaw goes up to her hair. That was her” (223). The interlude allows for Philomena to gain awareness and recognition of Beth Ann and in turn, Beth Ann becomes aware of Philomena’s presence through the bandleader’s introduction: “Our Piano man is a lady and what a lady. A cooker and a looker. Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce to you Miss Philomena Jenkins. Folks call her Meanie” (223).

Indeed, it is by no coincidence that Philomena is a piano player. Angelou attempts to posit Philomena as the architect of a new sound by modeling her presence on Mary Lou Williams and channeling the music of Thelonious Monk in her solo. If Williams was known to “play like a man,” Philomena stands as a descendant of that tradition. Although Philomena can be read as a distinguished member of the jazz era, like Williams she is in the precarious position of being a woman in a man’s world. Cal’s disparaging language describes Philomena as an interloper of the jazz tradition of male piano players. Furthermore, he denigrates her on the bandstand by relegating her body to the domestic sphere, “a cooker,” and reducing her to an object of the gaze, “and a looker.”

It is significant that the interlude creates a space for recognition between Philomena and Beth Ann. Philomena states: “she heard my name and she looked right into my eyes. Her blue ones got as big as my black ones. She recognized me, in fact in a second we tipped eyelids at each other. Not winking. Just squinting to see better” (254). We can read this moment of recognition as the actual reunion between Philomena and Beth Ann, rather than the imagined reunion that much of the narrative explores. The reunion between jazz and women in Cal’s introduction relates to the reunion between Beth Ann and Philomena. Both of these reunions allow for the confluence of history and memory. Sitting on the bandstand, Philomena remains preoccupied with the physical presence of Beth Ann until the next song, “Round ’Bout Midnight,” compels her to remember her own subjectivity:

[“Round ’Bout Midnight”] used to be my song, for so many reasons. In Baker, the only time I could practice jazz, in the church, was round ’bout midnight. When the best chord changes came to me it was generally round ’bout midnight. When my first lover held me in his arms, it was round ’bout midnight. Usually when its time to play that tune I dig right in it. But this time I was too busy thinking about Beth and her family … and what she was doing in Chicago, on the South Side, escorted by the grooviest looking cat I’d seen in a long time. I was really trying to figure it out, then Cal’s saxophone pushed its way into my figurings. Forced me to remember “Round ’Bout Midnight.” (“The Reunion” 224)

It is the music that moves Philomena to remember her past. As Cheryl Wall notes, “music is at once the container and transmitter of memory” (Wall 10). It is noteworthy that the title of the song is mentioned three times and used literally, which suggests Angelou’s play on language. The repetition of “Round ’Bout Midnight” can seemingly allude to two musical references and one personal. Musically, it can be read as referring to the song “ ’Round Midnight,” a jazz standard popularized by Thelonious Monk in 1944. Alternatively, one can read it as a play on Miles Davis’s debut hard bop album, released in 1957. Lastly, its personal reference indicates the narrator’s own revision of not only the title but also the way in which she improvises on the tune.

Philomena’s jazz moment takes place withi...