Free Jazz/Black Power

Philippe Carles, Jean-Louis Comolli, Grégory Pierrot

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626743397
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

In 1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli cowrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long-ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound's ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in the early 1970s. The two offered a political and cultural history of Black presence in the United States to shed more light on the dubious role played by jazz criticism in racial oppression. This analysis of jazz criticism and its production is astutely self-aware. It critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached radical conclusions—free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a musical style that demanded a similar political commitment. The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases, it changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. Free Jazz/Black Power remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists. This monumental critique caught the spirit of its time and realigned that zeitgeist.

Part 1. Not a Black Problem, But a white Problem

1. Jazz Today

We see jazz as one of the most meaningful social, aesthetic contributions to America. It is that certain people accept it for what it is, that it is a meaningful, profound contribution to America—it is anti-war, it is opposed to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, it is for Cuba; it is for the liberation of all people. That is the nature of jazz. That’s not far-fetched. Why is that so? Because jazz is a music itself born out of oppression, born out of the enslavement of my people.

—Archie Shepp, “Point of Contact: Discussion,” Downbeat Music ’66: The 11th Yearbook (1966), 20.

a) The “Free” Movement

In 1960, saxophonist Ornette Coleman, considered by all critics and by the great majority of jazz aficionados as an “avant-garde” musician and composer of difficult, unpleasant, “hermetic” music, recorded with a double quartet—an exceptional formation—a 36’ 23” piece entitled Free Jazz. This was collective improvisation music, deliberately played outside of the stylistic norms and structures of both “classic” jazz (1920–40) and what was then considered “modern” jazz (coming from bop, cool jazz, etc.). The piece was a scandal, at least musically speaking, and only in the very small world of jazz aficionados, musicians, and critics. Since Ornette Coleman was already known for scandal in this small world of jazz, this could have been just another one—if the radically novel character of his music had not immediately taken on meaning as a manifesto of sorts, and its title become a slogan, for those young black jazzmen outraged at the recent formal evolutions of their music. This “free jazz,” being itself a reaction to the dominant tendency of jazz at that time, could only respond to the expectations, and focus the experimentations, of musicians who, in isolation and with difficulty, were attempting to resist the freezing of jazz, its gradual weakening into increasingly precious styles (the Modern Jazz Quartet, Third Stream, cool), its stereotypes. It responded to this opposition—but it also revealed and centered it (see III).

Dubbed “free jazz,” “new music,” “the new thing,” or simply—in opposition to “jazz” as a music invented and played by blacks but culturally and economically colonized by whites—“black music,” a movement sprang onto the jazz scene that was more than another style or school, and which would create a rift among musicians, listeners, and critics, triggering the most violent controversies jazz had known since the birth of bop (1940–1947, see I. 3.e).

Ornette Coleman himself gives an idea of what these seemingly exclusively musical controversies hide: “Well, for myself, I’m a Negro and a jazz man. . . . And as a Negro and a jazz man, I just feel miserable.”¹ Much like bebop but even more clearly, free jazz not only challenges musically the forms and styles that precede it but acts beyond the strictly musical in the cultural and ideological fields. It quickly presented itself as an act of cultural resistance, the retaking—with the changes that necessitates—by black American musicians and listeners of a music that was originally theirs, that they had made in historical, social, and cultural conditions (deportation, slavery, poverty, and racism) that were exclusively theirs. Yet immediately, and for over half a century, under pressure from commercial, social, racial, cultural factors, this music was leeched and exploited precisely by that which had enslaved Africans, had given birth to racist ideology and used it against them, and which continues to exploit and oppress them today: white American capitalism, its ideology and value system. Not only did American society economically and culturally profit from jazz, but in exploiting it for profit, has incessantly controlled and influenced its stylistic development. It has imposed its aesthetic and commercial norms, forms, and a finality that were not only not those of the original black music, but, moreover could not, and would not, provide to black Americans what they were seeking in their music. Thus they aimed specifically at separating blacks from their music by performing cultural expropriation.

Free jazz resists this expropriation, rejects the musical and extra-musical values of dominant ideology—which in the United States is capitalist and white—and attempts to achieve cultural freedom, echoing the struggles of black Americans for their political and economic freedom. It endeavors to regain and build a specifically Afro-American culture. “Free” in free jazz does not simply indicate the rejection and/or sublimation of certain musical norms that once were jazz’s; it also confronts a colonized music with a music and a culture involved in, and produced by, anti-imperialist and revolutionary culture. This situation, at the crossroads of the cultural and the political, is well explained by Archie Shepp: “New jazz is old jazz. Nothing really new here, except a message that could never be expressed until now. . . . For a long time a point of view that was not theirs was imposed on black Americans.”² What purely musical innovations happen in free jazz are first and foremost effects and symptoms of a more general change in the relation of black Americans to their culture and in the role culture plays in their political struggles. Analyzing and assessing only the musical transformations performed by free jazz would amount to obfuscating what determined them at the political level, and thus ultimately obfuscating the political itself.

b) The Black Power Stage

The political history of black Americans is as rich and long as it is poorly known—and this is no accident: the ideological apparatuses of American society (school, the press, cultural networks, etc.) have systematically obfuscated and interfered with it. We study its different stages further in relation to the evolution of jazz (see II). Let us for now note that the birth of the “free jazz” slogan and the development of the free movement were contemporaneous with a clear radicalization of the political struggles of American Negroes (1960–1970). This radicalization operates on three levels.

1) Organizations

The famous boycott led by the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, which forced the transportation company to desegregate its buses in 1956, marked the beginning of a new kind of protest movement: the civil rights movement. Its aim—the recognition of black Americans’ constitutional rights—was similar to that of the traditional black organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded by W. E. B. Du Bois, yet it privileged direct action at the local level (through demonstrations, sit-ins, boycotts, etc.) over judicial and administrative recourse such as lawsuits and petitions to centralized authorities. The NAACP and black church militants performed these local and completely nonviolent—if not excessively gentle—actions. But their increasing number and relative success in the racist South triggered on the part of the local white authorities and population an extremely violent repression that in turn contributed to toughening the movement. The necessity of coordinating these varied anti-segregationist demonstrations led to the birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, a group that would notably lead a significant battle to register blacks on electoral lists in the southern states. This extremely rough campaign had rather disappointing results. In 1963, SNCC refused to agree to an electoral compromise with the Democratic Party, the terms of which would necessarily have been unfavorable to blacks. White liberals and the traditional integrationist organizations they support disavowed SNCC, and finally the call for insubordination by black conscripts ordered to Vietnam (1966) forced SNCC to go beyond its initial “apolitical” stance. In 1966, SNCC’s president Stokely Carmichael introduced the slogan Black Power. It drew a firestorm from whites—liberals included—and led some to call racists the very victims of racism. It further widened the rift between SNCC and integrationists and black bourgeois elites.

2) Ideology

With his speeches and articles, Malcolm X played a considerable role in the political radicalization of blacks, first as a member of the mystical sect the Black Muslims (headed from 1932 by the “prophet” Elijah Muhammad, and influential in the black ghettoes of big cities), which preaches the rejection of all things white and the glorification of the Negro at all levels (religion, culture, history), and then, beginning in 1964, outside of the sect. Malcolm X’s action was twofold: at the ideological level he strove to “decondition” black Americans, to make them critical and suspicious of their own ideas insofar as they were undergirded by the dominant ideology and manufactured by white society:

You know why they always say Negroes are lazy? Because they want Negroes to be lazy. They always say Negroes can’t unite, because they don’t want Negroes to unite. And once they put this thing in the Negro’s mind, they feel that he tries to fulfill their image. If they say you can’t unite black people, and then you come to them to unite them, they won’t unite, because it’s been said that they’re not supposed to unite. It’s a psycho that they work, and it’s the same way with these statistics.³

This leads him to underline black history and culture as signs of the worth of black Americans:

One of the things that made the Black Muslim movement grow was its emphasis upon things African. This was the secret to the growth of the Black Muslim movement. African blood, African origin, African culture, African ties. And you’d be surprised, we discovered that deep within the subconscious of the Black man in this country, he’s still more African than he is American. He thinks that he’s more American than African, because the man⁴ is jiving him, the man is brainwashing him every day.⁵

Overall, through him the black struggle took an important political step (joining W. E. B. Du Bois’s Marxist conclusions) by subordinating the entirety of racial, legal, social, and cultural demands to a more directly political demand: the struggle against American capitalism, which became the main enemy.

3) Action

As if synchronized with the radicalization of militant organizations and the politicization of their agendas, in 1964 and 1965 bloody urban riots exploded in several black ghettoes (Harlem, Detroit, Watts, etc.), terrifying white America and accelerating the transformation of protest into a pre-revolutionary struggle characterized by illegal activity, armed resistance, and the formation of revolutionary movements such as the Black Panther Party. This demonstrated that a part of the black masses refused integration, no longer followed the old leaders, and was becoming aware of the fact that it had “nothing to lose.”

At the same time, after the end of the war in Algeria decolonization accelerated in Africa, at the cost of violent struggles in which colonizers lost, on top of everything else, the heroic role that was theirs in colonial myths. Third world resistance to American imperialism in Cuba, Vietnam, and South America was of direct concern to black Americans; it put an end to their feeling of isolation, and by shattering America’s trademark image as all-powerful and liberal, it lifted their spirits:

In my estimation, [the United States] is one of the most vicious, racist social systems in the world—with the possible exception of Northern Rhodesia, South Africa and South Vietnam. I am, for the moment, a helpless witness to the bloody massacre of my people on streets that run from Hayneville through Harlem. . . . I ask only: don’t you ever wonder just what my collective rage will—as it surely must—be like, when it is—as it inevitably will be—unleashed? Our vindication will be black as the color of suffering is black, as Fidel is black, as Ho Chi Minh is black.⁶

c) Black Beauty

Under the pressure of these converging forces, the political maturation of black militants and black masses was accompanied by important changes at the ideological level and in the cultural field: the ideological hierarchy was upended; the black man and Africa were valorized against the white man and the West, against the “Tom” who imitates them. The Black Muslims adopted Islam and renounced their “slave names,” replacing them with an emblematic X. After Islam, African religions and civilizations were called upon; many musicians took on Arabic or African names. Black universities created Black Studies departments, and in the ghettoes militants such as LeRoi Jones taught black youths a different history, a different culture, and different myths from those presented as “universal” in white schools:

History has been so “whitened” by the white man that even the black professors have known little more than the most ignorant black man about the talents and rich civilizations and cultures of the black man of milleniums ago. I have lectured in Negro colleges and some of these brainwashed black Ph.D.’s, with their suspenders dragging the ground with degrees, have run to the white man’s newspapers calling me a “black fanatic.” Why, a lot of them are fifty years behind the times. If I were president of one of these black colleges, I’d hock the campus if I had to, to send a bunch of black students off digging in Africa for more, more and more proof of the black race’s historical greatness. The white man now is in Africa digging and searching. An African elephant can’t stumble without falling on some white man with a shovel. Practically every week, we read about some great new find from Africa’s lost civilizations, all that’s new is white science’s attitude. The ancient civilizations of the black man have been buried on the Black Continent all the time.⁷

It is interesting to note how Malcolm X does not mind couching the value of African civilizations in a reference to the kind of interest “white archaeologists” have in them. The struggle for black history and culture is waged at the ideological level, against the teachings and prejudices the white system inculcates in blacks. To manifest “black beauty” is not simply to value one’s race and culture; it is also to forcibly extricate oneself from a mode of thinking and a scale of values that systematically devalue all that is black. It is to reject the dominant ideology in oneself, to renounce one’s very self-image. Rap Brown also discusses this topic:

Negroes have a hard time accepting anything Black unless it’s been legitimized by white people. . . . If the white man was to package horseshit, put a name on it and advertise it on t.v., “Barbecued Horseshit,” negroes would go buy it, because the white man said it was good. But that’s the way it’s going to be as long as white people have the power. Anything you don’t control is a weapon against you. . . . The Black college student, if he is revolutionary, can help Black people to purge themselves of the misinformation that they’ve been fed all their lives. White nationalism has been instilled into us whether we know it or not. . . . America has negroes in the dilemma of thinking that everything Black is bad. Black cows don’t give good milk; black hens don’t lay eggs; black mail is bad; you wear black to funerals, white to weddings; angel food cake is white, devil’s food cake is black. And all good guys wear white hats. And Black people fall for it. Everything Black is bad. That’s white nationalism. And they tell you, you can’t talk about Black nationalism.⁸

Black nationalism therefore appears as a necessary stage in the development of the black struggle in America, the moment of battle on the ideological field, against all the white myths that befuddle the consciousness of the black masses, from those directly linked to capitalism (“make a fortune,” “work in order to be integrated”) to those that indirectly support and justify it: “American democracy,” “equality,” “freedom,” etc. Indeed, in order to survive or live better, a non-negligible portion of black Americans strive to adapt to the ideological conditions of white capitalism (and its black replicas). This fringe of the population slows down the politicization of the black masses by duplicating white ideology, and its class-race collaboration must therefore be denounced.

Yet the influence of dominant ideology is not confined to the black middle and upper- mid...