Gettin' Around

Jazz, Script, Transnationalism

Jürgen E. Grandt

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780820354347
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi afroamericani

Gettin' Around examines how the global jazz aesthetic strives, in various ways, toward an imaginative reconfiguration of a humanity that transcends entrenched borders of ethnicity and nationhood, while at the same time remaining keenly aware of the exigencies of history. Jürgen E. Grandt deliberately refrains from a narrow, empirical definition of jazz or of transnationalism and, true to the jazz aesthetic itself, opts for a broader, more inclusive scope, even as he listens carefully and closely to jazz's variegated soundtrack. Such an approach seeks not only to avoid the museal whiff of a "golden age, time past" but also to broaden the appeal and the applicability of the overall critical argument.

For Grandt, "international" simply designates currents of people, ideas, and goods between distinct geopolitical entities or nation-states, whereas "transnational" refers to liminal dynamics that transcend preordained borderlines occurring above, below, beside, or along the outer contours of nation-states. Gettin' Around offers a long overdue consideration of the ways in which jazz music can inform critical practice in the field of transnational (American) studies and grounds these studies in specifically African American cultural contexts.

CHAPTER 1

The Afro-kinetic Passages of Madam Zajj

Driving Jazz “Home” with Manu
Dibango and Duke Ellington

One of the many conflicts raging in postcolonial Africa was the war between Libya and Chad. After Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s coup in 1967, Libya aspired to expand its influence in central Africa, and the military occupation in 1973 of the desolate but mineral-rich Aouzou Strip just beyond the border with its southern neighbor was a first move in escalating a long-simmering territorial dispute. Taking advantage of Chad’s intensifying civil war that pitted the predominantly Muslim North against the Christian South, Gaddafi established an airbase and extended citizenship to the area’s few inhabitants, resulting in the de facto annexation of the barren strip. Over the next few years, there were several attempts to expand the influence of the Gaddafi regime or to expel the Libyan garrisons from the Aouzou, prompting two military interventions by France, which succeeded only in consolidating the status quo, dissatisfactory to both sides. The last phase of the conflict began in January 1987, after most of Gaddafi’s Chadian allies in the North, fed up with the dictator’s meddling and suspicious of his motives, switched sides and joined the troops of president Hissène Habré. The Libyan units were heavily mechanized, but the defection of their allies deprived them of a nimble ground option. Perhaps the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the ragtag Chadian forces, on the other hand, was the Toyota pickup truck: its speed and dependability proved a decisive tactical advantage in the desert terrain of the Aouzou and helped deal the Libyans a series of humiliating defeats, culminating eventually in their expulsion and the restoration of the region to Chad. The sight of these technicals was so ubiquitous that the 1987 conflict was dubbed the Toyota War.¹

The somewhat flippant moniker also pointed to the strong presence of the Japanese car manufacturer in the global economy. A major supplier of trucks to the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, the company’s postwar resurgence was also fueled by expansion into third world markets. From its hub in apartheid South Africa, where the company had built its first assembly line in 1962, Toyota targeted the newly independent nations to the north. Toyota’s marketing juggernaut proclaimed, “La musique est un monde sans frontières. Toyota aussi.” Ironically, it managed to enlist even the voice of Mama Africa herself, Miriam Makeba, on the promotional single “Toyota Fantaisie / Can’t Stop Myself,” a bouncy bit of Afro-funk in which Makeba praises the cars’ unstoppable kinesis in French on the A-side, in English on the B-side. Toyota also approached the other superstar of Afropop, Manu Dibango, who delivered with “Toyota Makossa” another catchy promotional jingle. Toyota sponsored a tour through much of the continent, during which copies of the single were given away gratis by the thousands, making it a hugely popular song that everybody soon knew: Dibango remembers that through much of the 1980s, taxi drivers in Douala and Yaoundé would heckle him if they spotted him climbing into a different make of car. To maximize on Dibango’s stardom, the title referenced the biggest record of Dibango’s career, “Soul Makossa.” While the global megahit is actually much closer musically to James Brown than to Douala, the Toyota jingle is indeed a prime example of makossa, the dance music popularized at midcentury in the urban areas of Cameroon that is characterized by a prominent bass line and horn section: here, a punchy yet spry electric bass, bubbly percussion, and Bokilo “Jerry” Malekani’s filigreed guitar work create an irresistible groove over which both Dibango and the horns effusively approve of the female vocalists’ claim that “Ma Toyota Corolla est fantastique, oh oui!”² And like the genre to which it claims allegiance, “Toyota Makossa” is very much a musical hybrid, with its only overtly “jazzy” element Dibango’s extended solo on tenor saxophone. The jingle bears the fingerprints also of longtime musical director Malekani, who grew up with soukous, the Congo’s guitar-centric equivalent of makossa, but achieved success as leader of Rico Jazz, a band comprised of fellow West African expats that became a sensation in the French Antilles in the early 1970s. Finally, “Toyota Makossa” also prominently features the synthesized pinging sample that signaled Dibango’s growing involvement in electronica. And so, “Toyota Makossa” is a decidedly transnational affair resonating within a complex constellation of consumer capitalism and the global economy, technology, entertainment, and the bloody effects of postcolonialism from which black music was not exempt.³

Navigating this musical mélange—not to mention the sociopolitical and economic one—has not always been easy for Dibango. As he has recounted more than once, “There were two aspects to my fight. The first was in Europe, where people knew I played saxophone and piano but would say, That’s not an African instrument. To be a musician you must play balafon or tom-tom. The other was in Africa, where you could not be a professional musician. Musicians were folk artists: People invited you to play and gave you food and drink. Not money. In between Europe and Africa was Manu Dibango.” As allergic to categorization as his idol Ellington, the Cameroonian expat explains that “At first people in Africa said that I made Western music, that I was black-white. I carried that label around for a long time. In France people often told me that I made American music. And when I went to the United States, the Americans thought that I made African music. It’s impossible to be more of a traitor than that!”⁴

This sense of “in-betweenness” is what Afropolitanism turns into sound. With the Afropolitan’s quintessential background, it was jazz—African American jazz—that filled the musical interstices in Dibango’s Black Atlantic identity. Still dividing his time between his saxophone and his studies when he got his start in Congolese Joseph “Le Grand Kallé” Kabasele’s appropriately named outfit African Jazz, Dibango was part of the first generation of self-defined jazz musicians from sub-Saharan Africa. Guided through the music by a fellow student also from Cameroon, Francis Bébey, who in turn would go on to become one of the continent’s premier ethnomusicologists, Dibango cites Duke Ellington’s “Morning Glory” as the first jazz record he purchased.⁵ And via the Duke, he discovered Count Basie, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and especially Sidney Bechet, to whom the Lion of Africa would devote an entire tribute album. These discoveries in turn would allow him to understand how he could negotiate the musical heritage of his native Cameroon in novel ways: “Take makossa: I treat makossa like people treat the blues here, or in Brazil samba. These kinds of differences are necessary. I’m not a Mississippi man. I don’t drink Coca-Cola; I drink beaujolais. But in the total realm of jazz, you can bring something to it: You can be yourself. Jazz is also free, so you can do your thing with it. It’s big enough to take a lot of ingredients. Bring your differences. Within jazz, everything is equal, but not the same.”⁶ Jazz is the stickum in this Afropolitan musical pastiche.

Over the course of his career, more and more influences accumulated in the trunk of Dibango’s far-ranging musical Toyota Corolla. The saxophonist began to experiment increasingly with electronica; on his 1984 album Surtension, for example, the drum parts are all courtesy of a newfangled LinnDrum digital drum machine of the first generation, with only sporadic support lent by two human percussionists, an experiment that promptly got him branded as “a traitor.”⁷ Clearly, the Cameroonian expat headquartered in Paris has never had the intention of delivering traditional, somehow “authentic” makossa—especially not since the genre itself is a hybrid, of course. Just as clearly, if not always audible in prominent ways, the Afro-kinesis of American jazz continued to furnish the sonic protocols of Dibango’s Afropolitan soundscapes. It is therefore no coincidence that when Duke Ellington’s French protégé, bandleader Claude Bolling, planned a commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of his mentor’s allegorical suite A Drum Is a Woman, he tapped the Afropolitan Dibango to narrate the saga of jazz and the passages of Madam Zajj, the music’s mythical personification. Shortly before his death, Ellington himself had made plans with Bolling to revive the suite for a French-German television coproduction, but the project never came to fruition due to Ellington’s precarious health. His “spiritual son,” however, didn’t forget his mentor’s intentions, and when fragments of the original score of A Drum Is a Woman were discovered among the holdings of the Smithsonian Institute, the Frenchman revived the project to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the suite’s debut. Bolling’s version is not an update of the original, but rather a faithful reproduction. Bolling and his associates painstakingly reconstructed the score from the original recording as well as from the newly rediscovered fragments. They even went so far as to transcribe the original solos—therefore, there was next to no instant improvisation to be heard when the suite was staged at the Théâtre national de Chaillot in the spring of 1996. The only marked deviation from the original was that Manu Dibango, the Lion of Africa, took on the role of the Duke of big band swing to narrate the adventures of Madam Zajj—in French.⁸ Exact copy that Bolling’s performance aspired to be, it ironically confined the Afro-kinesis of the original to a detailed script, somewhat akin to steering a souped-up Toyota Corolla through the turns of a closed race course instead of the off-road racing of the Paris—Dakar Rally. Dibango’s French narration is the only element that amplifies the polyglot Afropolitanism of Madam Zajj and the Lion of Africa both. Since “Rhythm came to Africa from way back,” we have to trace the passages of A Drum Is a Woman’s heroine further back than that spring evening in Paris when Claude Bolling and Manu Dibango retold her story, and further back even than the first time Ellington accompanied her appearance onstage four decades before.⁹

The demise of the swing era in the postwar years, hastened by the ascendancy of bebop and rhythm and blues, found the Duke Ellington Orchestra in dire straits. Though one of the very few large jazz aggregations to survive the changing economic and musical landscape, it was rattled by the exit of several key members, perhaps most crucial that of Johnny Hodges, whose creamy alto saxophone had been a signature sound of the orchestra since its Cotton Club days, and the extended leaves of absence Billy Strayhorn was taking from his arranging and composing duties. Strayhorn in particular was missed dearly by the Duke: “He was not, as often referred to by many, my alter ego,” Ellington would later write. “Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.”¹⁰ But in the mid-1950s, two events signaled the sudden resurgence of Duke Ellington. First, both Strayhorn and Hodges returned to the organization after finding the going economically unfeasible and artistically unsatisfying. Strayhorn, who rarely performed in public anyway, realized that it was ill-advised to sever his ties to Ellington; and Hodges’s only hit in the four years away from Ellington was “Castle Rock,” which, ironically, featured fellow Ellington alumnus Al Sears’s tenor saxophone instead of the bandleader’s alto.

Second, Ellington’s appearance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival instantly became one of the most legendary moments in jazz. It began inauspiciously enough when several members of the band were not yet present for the first set (the Ellington orchestra was notorious for its lack of discipline, and it was a common sight to see musicians casually stroll onstage well after a concert had already commenced). Beginning shortly before midnight, the second set finally had the full band assembled. Things took a sudden and entirely unexpected turn with “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” two blues Ellington had first recorded separately back in the 1930s and rarely revisited since. At Newport, the two sections were bridged by Paul Gonsalves’s tenor sax solo, a marathon performance of twenty-seven choruses of volcanic energy. The savvy bandleader recognized the rare magic in the air that night, for he kept spurring his lead tenorist on by shouting—“Don’t stop now! Don’t stop!”—and pumping his fist. Before long, Jo Jones, Count Basie’s drummer, who was standing in the wings, became infected with the galvanic Afro-kinesis and began pounding out the beat energetically with a rolled newspaper in his fist. Next, a striking, platinum-blonde woman in a black cocktail dress leaped from her chair and started to dance, prompting many others in the audience to do the same. With festivalgoers in a frenzy and angrily refusing to let the band end the concert, organizers feared that a riot would ensue and tried, unsuccessfully, to put an early stop to the show. On the unedited tapes, impresario George Wein can be heard arguing vociferously with Ellington in between numbers, who, following Gonsalves’s explosive solo, attempted to placate the crowd’s fervor with a couple of slower tunes showcasing Hodges’s soothing alto. The national press reported widely on Ellington’s and Gonsalves’s exploits, and a gushing six-page cover story in Time magazine capped the media’s heralding that the Duke was back indeed. It was simply “jazz at its jazziest,” effused one who witnessed it all and would have known—Langston Hughes.¹¹

The flurry of activity immediately following the historic night at Newport included a suite commissioned by Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario based on the Bard’s plays and characters and taking its title, Such Sweet Thunder, from Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a new contract with Columbia Records, and plans for an extended European tour. Closest to Duke’s heart, though, was an ongoing project he had tried to put onstage before. The idea had actually arisen with “Creole Rhapsody” in 1931; ever since then, an even larger historiography in sound had been on Ellington’s mind: “I have gone back to the history of my people and tried to express it in rhythm. We used to have it in Africa, a something we have lost. One day we shall get it back again. I am expressing in sound the old days in the jungle, the cruel journey across the sea, and the despair of the landing. And then the days in Harlem and the cities of the States. Then I try to go forward a thousand years, when, emancipated and transformed, the Negro takes his place, a free being, among peoples of the world.”¹² In 1943, finally, he premiered Black, Brown, and Beige at New York City’s venerable Carnegie Hall, an extended work subtitled “A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America.” The “tone parallel” attempted to tell, in jazz, the history of black people in the New World, but its scope was so ambitious that the forty-plus minutes at Carnegie Hall presented only a truncated version of Ellington’s elaborate, carefully researched scenario, and the comp...