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session 5, cutting in on chat about the news of the day, late 2000...
A ...geographical and spatial significance is looking at the map of America and seeing which candidates won what. We talked about this in the car, the states Bush has won and the states Gore has won. For me, watching the television this week and reading the newspapers and seeing the various maps, I think what has most struck me about this is that you have 3/4ths of the land mass was won by Bush, and the areas that Gore won in terms of land mass is not even a quarter; California, Oregon, and Washington states combine into the biggest part, but otherwise…
M Didn't the states he won include the most populous and diverse?
A Which is why Gore is in the race. But what dawned on me in looking at the maps, is that, one, the African American community is stuffed in little quadrant spaces, whereas in the Western and Southern states you have all this area of landmass that makes for another kind of existence. What we call the urban areas are really compressed areas, with people in high rises, so you have greater population in these small areas…but the actual living experience and the psychology related to those experiences is much more claustrophobic, much less healthy, and it says a lot about demographics, and the kinds of existences available in America and what's resulted from it. George W. has his ranch in Texas; I don't begrudge him anything. I'm only realizing again all the different kinds of lives that are possible to have on the planet and in America.
As a young guy growing up on the South Side of Chicago, in the black community, I remember when I first went into Evanston, Illinois, and saw all of the trees, and walked through some of the neighborhoods, and I was totally struck by the amount of space, and the green grass. It was so alien to me. And later, when I joined the army and was stationed with the 5th Army Band in Highland Park, Illinois, thirty minutes or so outside Chicago, I was struck by how different the environment was, walking through Highland Park, and the realization of this reality and how close it was to the area space that I grew up in was always very far out to me. It was one of those kinds of epiphanies where it was like a realization that there were other realities happening.
M One thing that comes to mind to me about this in terms of the music history is that you see a lot of the innovations coming from the heartland--like Charlie Parker from Kansas, and you and the AACM from Chicago…even though Chicago is a big city, the AACM and the whole tradition seems to be more connected to the South, because everybody migrated from the South…
A And had a broader area space than say in New York and Manhattan or Brooklyn.
M Right. And even like Louis Armstrong coming up from New Orleans, you have this influx of the South up to the middle of the country; you have Ornette out of Texas; you have Count Basie with Lester Young. It's almost like the aesthetic is about wide-open spaces in the music.
A Thank you. This is what I was trying to move toward. For instance, I think one of the things that surprised me, which I was starting to intuit in Chicago, when seeking to understand the African American community in New York City, for instance, and the Black Power movement and the music itself that was evolving, the post-free jazz musics, how narrow this music was as compared to the great work of Roscoe Mitchell, and the broader concept space that these guys were working with; the great work of Julius Hemphill, out of St. Louis, and his connection with theater, and broader strategies. The New York platform and the jazz business complex would, in effect, be co-signing this reductionism that was taking place in New York. I think of Amiri Baraka and the Black Power movement, and the viewpoint of Africanisms that would evolve in that period. As a young guy, even in the middle '60s, I was very much aware that there was a reductionism taking place in their psychologies as well. More and more, I would come to look at this phenomenon as part of what for me, even in the 60s and 70s, was the strangeness of the East Coast and its politics, and how that strangeness would allow for a special reductionism in the black community and in their understanding of what they called free jazz and the political associations they attached to it. It was a kind of a pro-Garveyism.
By the way, last week I got the Sunday New York Times, and there was a review of a new book on W.E.B. DuBois; I'm going to buy this in the next couple of days, both volumes. Suddenly I crave more information about DuBois. In fact DuBois, in this book review, seemed to arrive at some of the concepts we've covered so far, about how the liberals and the conservatives are both irrelevant to the kind of healthy balance that he had hoped for, and later went to Africa and died in bitterness over. The article hinted at the Harlem Renaissance as a trade-off that DuBois backed away from in the same way that I find myself backing away, from the hip-hop culture and the new Third Millennial propositions of blackness that are forming in this period.
M If you look at the history of New York in the music, you sort of get this picture of the grassroots of the country being like all roads that lead to Rome, and that there's a hierarchy such that you start out by developing your local idiom, but only to use it as a currency to get you into the game in the heights--whereas obviously, in the '60s, everybody was thinking about establishing and cultivating their own locales away from the heights and hierarchies and New York--record deals, that stuff--turning instead to "think global, act local," and start your own little labels. But there's always been this picture, from Louis Armstrong on, of getting your act together and taking it down the road to eventually come into your own in New York, and whatever trade-offs you have to make along the way in terms of record deals are just part of the game.
I read this really interesting German-language piece about the first records made by Kid Ory and the other players in the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions. These guys from New Orleans were talking about how what they put together for these studio dates was more like little orchestrations of what they used to experience in New Orleans…
A An encapsulation.
M Right. We always think of the hot players' recordings as the raw stuff from the real deal out from down South, but in fact they were very cosmopolitan guys putting together this little musical package that would be their ticket into the big time rather than anything else.
A I think you put your finger on something that's very real. Not only was it a re-enactment, but--I have to be very careful how I say this. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the great music and experience of Louis Armstrong; and yet at the same time, I think there are complexities in looking at Mr. Armstrong that will again have to come to the foreground on some level, or be included in our viewpoint of him.
For instance, I played this Gary Giddins movie, Satchmo, for my class. It's an interesting movie on a lot of different levels, both for giving a perspective of the great man's life, and for being insightful about the components they decided to include--like pictures of Louis Armstrong on the toilet. It was kind of a smoothing of the minstrel components of Mr. Armstrong, and an attempt to come to terms with them while in another way not coming to terms with them. What am I saying? That in seeking to understand the great man's experiences, I think it's very important to place that experience in terms of its geographical-psychological components, those being his experiences in New Orleans and the decision of King Oliver to bring him to Chicago; and the experience he had with Lil Hardin, who helped to shape him up to the components of the modern era in terms of reading ability, in his encounter with Fletcher Henderson and the northern musicians and their psychology, such as Earl Hines; the connection with the Chicago underworld and gangster community…
M Which kind of goes back to what you said about John Hammond and others presenting the African American identity in their framework, in the Joe Glaser form of it.
A Jo Glaser dying with multimillions, Armstrong without even a million when he died, but was content to say that Joe Glaser was the most honest man he ever met, this kind of thing. All of that fits in with what we talk about when we talk of the Southern strategy, which is dedicated to second place.
M This begs the question of what the Northern strategy is. When we talked about the Southern strategy, you said it came to New York, and was indeed prevailing, not only in America but abroad.
A Oh yes.
M It has relevance now to this hung-up presidential election, because we see how evenly divided the country is, and how closely contested, and how geographically blocked off between the red and the blue states; and yet your point was that the Southern strategy of those red states is in fact kind of dominating the tenor of the Northern states somehow.
A Oh yes. There was an article about the Confederate flag on the South Carolina state house I read recently. It was in the Times, and very important to me. He talked about the Southern strategy, how the South lost the war but won the fight. He talked about the flag being an anachronism that should be taken down, and people in the South know it, but, he says, if you really examine what has happened, the South has won--the food of the South has become the nation's most desired cuisine, it really sells.
M The tobacco industry…
A He talked about different aspects of this experience, and I felt that he had put his finger on something: that the South lost the war, but the value systems and political mechanisms of the South have come into prominence. And he mentioned jazz as one of the components, from New Orleans, right now permeating the scene, and drawing on the New Orleans period, and I felt he was right. The New Orleans strategy then, in this period, has culminated in the successful blockage of the restructural musics and the re-installation of the New Orleans psychologies: those being, of course, ethnic quadrants, idiomatic quadrants. The black man is back in place, in other words.
M Really, what you're saying was no secret during Armstrong's whole career; I mean he took a lot of flack from the younger generations for being an Uncle Tom, from Miles Davis on through to your generation, along with all the respect due to him. Still, it was conflicted.
A No one wants to talk about that in this time period. But in fact Mr. Armstrong, whose connection with the minstrel tradition, no matter how honorable it was--who was cited as his hero, Steppin Fetchit, or Bill Bojangles? I'm not sure, I'll check that--that connection is usually cited as the source of his interest in minstrelsy, and in the Satchmo film it's spoken of as a noble attraction, as indeed I have no reason to question. However, whatever his connection to the minstrel tradition, as we know, minstrel tradition meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For the political powers that control information dynamics and image logic manipulation, the minstrel tradition was a reductionism that was effective as a psychological manipulating component. So that has come back again in this time period as well.
M Now that we talk about these things, it gets back to what we were talking about before, about minstrelsy in a problematic way, but also in a healthy way, when you were talking about Abner Jay. Can we at this point resume the discussion of the African American identity experience in the way that we discussed Wagner and all the Europeans who were also problematic because of racial-ethnic aspects? These were people that you nonetheless incorporate into your music system because of their aesthetic value and their power as artists. How do you relate to the African American tradition past its problems as well?
A Okay, but before going there I want to go back to talking about what we talked about in the car, this trade-off that happened in the late 1800s, that resulted in the Congress electing a president who agreed to serve only one term, and part of the axiomatic tenets involved the lifting of federal supervision in the South after the Emancipation Proclamation. I think that's important. Federal enforcement of what we would now call Civil Rights guarantees for African Americans after Emancipation would come to an end with this new political gambit. I think it's important because here we find ourselves coming into the Third Millennium with a cosmic series of coincidences which have resulted in this close election. Whoever wins is in a compromised position. And all of this is eerily reminiscent of a hundred years ago. We've been talking about this hundred-year cycle, of entering into the modern era between 1880 and 1920, when everything started to happen.
M Now that you mention it, I read some articles in the Times about the parallels between the late 1800s and the late 1900s in terms of technology and industry changing in such a way that there was rampant capitalism as a result of new technologies and industries opening up. Of course we had this brief period after the Civil War, when African Americans were involved in the political process for awhile, and that's parallel to the 1960s, when African Americans, including the movements you were involved with musically, generated a new assertion of identity that got squelched just in kind of the same way, didn't it?
A Mike Heffley, this is a comparison that is serious. We're talking about our entrée into new eras, and we're talking about cyclic qualities that are eerie. So once again we see African Americans in the political process. Suddenly we're hearing about the close call in Florida, and Haitian and African Americans being shaken down. Things can change very quickly. We've gone in the last 30 years from the emergence of a composite aesthetic music and intellectualism in the black community that suddenly has been squelched, and in its place idiomatic, ethnocentric psychologies and successes have been allowed to dominate. Hip-hop is celebrating vulgarity…but 50 years from now the scholars will maintain that hip-hop was the music of African Americans and represented its intellectual ideals and conceptual input. That is to say, IRRELEVANT--and that is the word that came out in the Du Bois book review, that Du Bois found himself looking at the liberals and conservatives and understanding that, at best, the input of African American experiences, intellectually, creatively, scientifically, would always be viewed as irrelevant. Not we like this or we don't like this, but irrelevant, in a corridor where it's not integrated into composite information. It was with that understanding that DuBois lost it and decided to get out of America. That's why I need to go back and study this guy all over again.
So these comparisons are frightening to me.
M In terms of our earlier talks, I really do see a parallel between the designation of African American musical activity to a problematic zone in the same way that we talked about Schoenberg and Wagner being so relegated: Wagner because of his racism and Schoenberg because of his work's place in the bourgeois elite culture of the ivory tower. We might add even the white European American jazz musicians as being sort of second-rate black musicians who never get past that…I mean we're talking about clouds over every single component, and yet we're looking at the ray of sunshine we want to get to, right?
A I disagree. Schoenberg has his enemies and his allies; his music is a part of the modern music debate. The New York Times hates him, but not everybody hates him. Wagner: the New York Times loves to corrupt Wagner's music, but Wagner's music is part of the debate of modern music, in the universities, but, more importantly, in the trans-Western intellectual domain. Wagner's music is a component that is loved or hated, but it is a part of the quadrant circle of vibrant intellectualism of trans-European discussion. As far as the European improvisers, they have been the "Other" in Europe, that's for sure, but we're seeing in America that the European improviser is being used to crush out the Sixth Restructual cycle (AACM, St. Louis) musics, and THEN they will be discarded.
M As irrelevant. As irrelevant in what sense?
A Let me put it a different way. In fact, I'm not sure if the position I've stated is correct, in terms of what I believe. The European improviser's continuum has a position that is very similar to 100 years ago, and that position is what distinguishes me again from Wagner and Hildegard and Schoenberg. It's a composite aesthetic in the house of the rectangle--that being the unified, notated music--and putting the triangle inside of the rectangle, in the case of Wagner, with mythology. But there was no attempt to deal with improvisation. A hundred years from the first of the so-called "modern era" sequences, we see a European continuum that says it's only about improvisation, and you can't have any notation. That's the same position as 100 years ago too, only in the house of the circle [free improvisation--MH].
M When we talk in terms of the Southern strategy being interested in making idiomatic boxes as the strategic move politically in terms of power and so on, what are we going to talk of in Europe? What kind of strategy is it in European culture that first reifies composition, and then reifies improvisation as it came down to them through the legacy of jazz?
A I think we're dealing with a different set of parameters, if we're trying to understand the profound dimensions of trans-European progressionalism. I don't know what that means, but I imagine whatever it means it has something to do with the balance of European tendencies--and I'm thinking, inside of that, fear and awe at the same time, of Germany; the competitive state between the various nations in Europe; European mysticism and what that has posed in respect to the Ralph Nader position of American politics, where you have Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Gnostic position of trans-mysticism separate from the controls of Rome, or of the Protestants. So however the composite European theater is viewed, it would be different than what we have in America, where however the Europeans separated themselves in terms of the struggles in Europe, in America, the African Americans would become a convenient "Other," and would serve to unify the Europeans here.
M When I interviewed [manager of Berlin-based Free Music Production (FMP) label] Jost Gebers, who's got his own idiosyncratic relationship with African American music, he expressed hostility toward European American culture because for him it was nothing more than a transplant of Southern German culture, which is generally true in terms of the emigration of Germans to America--and German Americans make up about a third of the ethnic white components here. His point was that they all came from Bavaria, this fascist part of Germany where all the redneck-type fascists live and come from…
A Very interesting.
M And, you know, he's a cosmopolitan northerner in Berlin, who looks with disdain on the Bavarians and the southern Germans who came here--and his one visit to America brought home to him that historical trend in a way he intuited personally.
A Very interesting. I tend to, when I think of Germany, think of the great mystic tradition that produced Bach, Beethoven, all of that incredible information, and somehow I never put it together with the racism of Bavaria, which in my experiences in the '70s I came to know as real, that the southern German states have a different vibrational complexity. So I think we're tapping into something that goes outside of what I understand, but this is interesting, because we're talking about the meta-reality of the trans-European mystic experience, and that of the trans-American mystic experience…and I have a feeling something's happening there. I mean Germany re-unified, but in fact it hasn't; there's still this profound difference that hasn't been able to work itself out. We tend in this time period to look on the racist attacks on non-Germans in the Eastern sector as indicative of the ingrown racism kept in check by the communist regimes. But historically, that doesn't gibe with the real picture; so maybe communism was obscuring the fact that the mystic German component was in the East.
M That's true even now, because they weren't Westernized, and they weren't all that influenced by Russia; Russia occupied and oversaw them, but didn't impose their culture in the way American culture took over in the West. In good and bad ways, because all the West German musicians I talked to were most influenced by American GIs, who were mostly black. That's how they got into their jazz and all their formative-years hero worship. But I don't want to get too far into that direction, because we've kind of covered that in terms of your work. But one thing I would add is that after the Civil War, one of the most dominant European influences on African American music culture was the Germans, due to the influx of '48ers fleeing from the repression going on over there then. A lot of itinerant German music teachers were teaching newly emancipated slaves on the German instruments left over from Civil War bands, out of German music books.
A So it's interesting in the Satchmo film that much is made of Louis Armstrong's Jewish music teachers in New Orleans. I'm just trying to understand America's racial political decisions, because Louis Armstrong, for me, was like a summation master whose work took the language of the region, of King Oliver, and just did it better, fast, higher. It wasn't like he put together a new language. Plus, coming to the north, it would be in the northern regions where Mr. Armstrong as a soloist started to evolve, and the concept of the soloist in the music has always involved the concept of self-realization and extension--and in the North, that phenomenon cannot be separated from the vibrational psychologies that evolved in the North. And African-American middle class and upper class in Chicago, in the early period, was not on a second plane to the European American community; there was a healthier interaction.
So this is another aspect of that first wave of migration of African Americans, and Louis Armstrong's music would be a part of that; his travels to come up and play with King Oliver would be a part of that. This is another aspect of creative music progressionalism that I'm seeking to understand.
M Let me ask you this: as a Chicago guy, did you come up with an awareness of this whole Chicago school of white musicians like Bix Beiderbecke and Eddie Condon?…
A No, but I came up with a concept that I could do anything I wanted to do, that I was equal to anybody, that Julian Dawson, the young man who lived about two blocks away from me, was probably going to be president, that we were not inferior to anybody, Howard Freeman and I; we'd have our dreams, build our clubhouses, do our soapbox derby cars. We never had an innate feeling that we were inferior to anything.
M You attribute this to the Chicago culture?
A Well, to Betsy Ross Grammar School; the teachers we had made us feel that we could compete with anybody. We never thought of ourselves as being programmed to be in second place. I think that's important: the psychology of thinking we could change the world was a psychology that was bathed inside of the vibrational quadrant of the northern geographical experiences in a way that was the norm for me. Only later would I start to see the different psychologies, the different geographical realities, and have a greater sense of what that was.
For instance, it was always clear to me that in a crunch, the southern experience would trump the northern experience, and that has been what has happened. And by trump, I mean when times get tough, the southern guys can say, "you know, the experience of slavery was a real experience, and people really suffered, and if you don't go for our agenda, it means that you're not black. If you don't play the blues, if you don't have allegiance to the southern experience, you're a traitor." And by positing that viewpoint, it would always trump a guy like me, because I could be held in suspicion of not being black enough.
M But it sounds like you were shaped by your Chicago environment in a way that maybe you also wouldn't have been had you been brought up in, say, New York?
A Yes. I'm saying that the experience in Chicago, in my opinion, was much more healthy than the experience in New York. And that the experiences in Chicago and New York were both much healthier, in some respects, than the experiences in the South. But then it gets complex. Because one component of our conversations have been inside what I have called the Southern experience. In many ways, the Southern experience has been a more honest experience, to gain insight into the composite American psychology, than the Northern experience. Because the Southern experience, as we're seeing now--if you function within the Southern parameters of their concept and quadrant of what is ethnically correct, you can be appreciated and you can be advanced. The Northern experience, where everybody talks about how they're "liberal," has always been more complex, and more insidious. And in the northern geographical centers, I have come to feel that the concepts of liberal and conservative--and this is why I want to go back to DuBois--in the end, the African American experience is marginalized, and whatever happens in the African American experience, at best it's irrelevant to determining the real information dynamics of the culture, the real documentation of the culture. Because in the north, they don't even respect you second place or third place, not to mention first place; they can't even relate to an African American as equal. The South can relate to an African American not as equal, but as a second-place good boy.
M When you talk about your healthy childhood, and your feeling that you could do anything, are you attributing that to being anchored in the Southern or the Northern paradigm more?
A The Northern. But I grew up in a black community, it wasn't an integrated community, it was the South Side of Chicago. I did not know any European Americans when I was growing up, so it was me, Howard Freeman and Michael Carter, and a handful of other guys. We did our little projects, had our little baseball games, watched the television. We didn't even know about anything outside our neighborhood, but we had all the dreams of every other American. Having a TV set, one of my heroes would be Roy Rogers. Not only did he have two guns, unlike Gene Autrey, but even in a fight his hat wouldn't fall off, and he wouldn't even get dirty. This was the kind of guy I could use. My hero was Werner von Braun, the V2 rocket scientist, and I had all kinds of charts in my room of different stages of the V-1, and finally the V-2, the White Sands testing grounds and all this kind of stuff. By not having any contact with European Americans while I was growing up, I did not experience any kind of hurt feelings or rejections; instead, I just kind of felt like I could take over the planet, as did my friends.
Although we also noticed that there was a sector of African Americans that we could not relate to. This was the gang sector, toughie-tough guys, who weren't interested in any intellectual anything, they were just tough guys, athletic guys; I liked them, but at some point I would have to back away from that community, because we were interested in the world of ideas. But what was far out was that there was a beautiful kind of synergy where all of the qualities of the community could work. For instance, it was taken for granted that the girls were the smartest; I mean there was no doubt, we all knew these young girls could run us into the ground intellectually. They were the ones who did the homework, they were the ones who got the good grades, they were the ones we had to go to for help…
M Even the idea guys like you, huh?
A Oh, it wasn't even close, there was no question but that the girls were the smartest.
M Why do you think that is?
A I don't know, they just were.
M That kind of goes back to Lil Hardin's role with Louis Armstrong, Mamie Smith with Coleman Hawkins. What the hell is that about? [much laughter throughout all this]
A My suspicion is that part of the complexity that women have been dealing with has been because of having qualities of superiority in a lot of different spaces that the guys have not been able to reconcile themselves to. But growing up in the South Side of Chicago, I was fortunate to have had the experience through the 1950s up to 1962 or 3, somewhere around there--'63 I joined the army--but that period of growing up, I didn't realize then that it would be the last time period where I would have the chance to experience a dynamic African American community that had a very vibrant synergy, where the toughy-tough guys, and even the gang guys, there was a synergy and an ability to flow together and to separate that is very different than what we have now.
M In other words, you felt a connection, even being who you are?
A A deep connection, even being who I am. I was accepted. For instance, in Washington Square Park, when I was growing up, there were debates every weekend, guys on their boxes having a lecture, whether it was Nation of Islam or some guy who had a theory; there was an intellectual vibrancy that it's hard to talk to the young people about in this time period, because they don't know anything about this.
When I had the chance to read John Szwed's book on Sun Ra, it started to reawaken in me the exciting intellectual spectrum that I grew up in that, that I had kind of forgotten about. Even Howard Freeman and I, we had our own little publication, called The Joke Book. Every week we'd publish around 50 of these books, sell about three of them, throw the rest away, then start the next press run. So actually, I'm used to not making money from my projects; I didn't even realize the connection!
And there's another thing. In Washington Square Park, which was like in the heart of the South Side, stretching from 33rd Street in Hyde Park and going all the way to 59th St. You could go to sleep in the park without worrying that somebody was going to rob you or harm you. Now that's a very different dynamic than what we have as we get ready to move into the third millennium. What am I saying? There was not a natural built-in fear of one another between African Americans when I was growing up. And there was a synergy in the community, with its radical factions, that at the same time was vibrant in a dynamic intellectual tradition.
So when I grew up, I kind of felt like I could be whatever I was able to work toward, and that if I applied myself, I could do my best. Later when I fell in love with Karlheinz Stockhausen, it never occurred to me that I couldn't want to build on Stockhausen, and do my operas and my pieces for four orchestras; Stockhausen did it, I wanted to be able to do it. He's one of my heroes. I didn't know I was crossing into quadrant spaces that were outside what was acceptable for me, not only by the European American community, but by the newly modulated African American community of the '60s. Black Power, which in the beginning started with a broader agenda, would in fact by 1966 be exhibiting a reductionism that more and more would form along the lines of Garvey versus DuBois.
M DuBois representing an international cosmopolitanism and Garvey an ethnocentric kind of reaction against white oppression?…
A Starting with Stokely Carmichael, moving into H. Rap Brown, moving into Amiri Baraka, and then the Black Panthers. More and more, an intellectual position would be advanced, but rather than butttressed with intellectual arguments, it would be instead buttressed by "if you don't accept this, your butt's going to be kicked:" toughie-tough arguments. And that toughy-tough psychology would parlay through Gil-Scott Heron's beautifully intellectual dynamic, creative work, into the Last Poets, whose hopeful inspired work would translate finally into Niggaz with Attitude, toughy-tough psychologies that would merge into post-Baraka Black Panther psychological experiences, and Huey Newton--two positions that could be expressed more or less as "Either/Or:" either you're with me or against me, everything is politics, everything is everything…no more room for gradations; follow my agenda or you're the enemy.
M Let's look at it this way. We have to realize too that Anthony Braxton has established himself as a presence and a voice, and has not been totally a cry in the wilderness. I mean, you're one of the people who've been written about the most--maybe you think written about in a distorted way--but also you're one of the people who have been paid most attention to along the way, even though your viewpoint hasn't represented the larger cultural agenda or anything.
A And my position is a position of impotence. I control nothing.
M But since we're focusing on your story and your work, maybe this would be the entry point into how you did relate as a composer and musician and even musical philosopher, system-builder and so on, to that African American component.
A Okay, so we go back to 1880 again. Because to better understand my position in trans-African progressionalism, we again have to pick up what was sacrificed in the modern era. What was sacrificed was Will Marion Cook, Frank Johnson, Jim Europe, Florence Price, William Grant Still: the intellectual component of the music as made real through the experiences of…James Europe was conceiving of musical concepts and logics that integrated notation and improvisation. Now remember, earlier you asked me what my connection with Hildegard von Bingen, Wagner, and Schoenberg was, and I talked about the fact that they evolved holistic composite strategies; but their strategies were solidifications within one quadrant, because of the dynamic implications of the decisions that would underlie Christianity, and the whole idea of the holy man who doesn't have sex.
M And woman…
A Yes, and the separation and non-recognition of the mystic Goddess; those were important sacrifices that the Christians made, and they're still dealing with them in this time period.
M Does this tie into your reaction to the figure of Marie Laveau as a mixed-race voodoo priestess in New Orleans who was so important in that culture in terms of the Goddess?
A Yes, but I would also say that it has become fashionable to talk of Congo Square as an experience where the transplanted Africans who became African Americans would have a free space moment of information dynamics. Those experiences were important, to be sure, but I would only add that the first and second Great Awakenings, in the Northern states, would also be a component that would contain the same kinds of experiences. Remember, the European transplanted settlers were always frightened whenever the slaves got together without supervision, especially if they had a drum, especially if they had the opportunity to start making their music. It was because of that fear that finally they started trying to bring the slaves into the church, under the banner of civilizing the heathens, in hopes of reducing the intensity of their experiences, because to the European settlers, these guys looked like wild savages, and they could not be trusted after having these quadrant-communal cycles; so it would be at that point that the first Great Awakening would come together, not just for African Americans, but as a point of definition for the Pentecostal American Protestant groupings that would emphasize self-realization and emotion. Before that, in Europe, if you were in church and started shaking your butt to Wagner, they would kick your ass. And the Pilgrims and the Puritans, they were some toughy-tough guys: enjoy the music, but don't have a mind-body connection, they could not handle that. And that of course is all they were seeing with the African slaves. So the First Awakening--which, by the way, if it's on target, it should be coming back in the next 10 or 20 years to America [laughs].
M Yeah, because I'm thinking of the First and Second Great Awakenings as being in large part really influenced by the emotionalism of non-Christian peoples.
A Thank you. The Africans, and the Native Americans.
M Yeah, both were very important. Richard Allen was the founder of the first Pentecostal church, a black guy in Los Angeles, and poor whites were in on it from the beginning. It was the poor whites, not the others…
A Yes, yes.
M And when you talk about the Southern strategy, you're talking about a culture that is two or three generations down the road from this poor white experience that got Africanized in a real way.
A In the same way that we talk of this connection, which your work has advanced on the deepest possible level, between Africa and Germany. Again, we're talking about peoples who are not contained by modern-era psychologies. We tend to use that term "modern era" in referring to America; when I say modern era psychology in this context, I'm talking about after the reaction to Christianity, moving into continental European experiences, with the German people having a profound reaction to Christianity and the Roman Empire, because they were dealing with a more composite experience than what Christianity would usher in. So there are conjunctions here as far as the preceding steps into what I'll call for America the modern era, and what I'll call for Europe the Middle Ages, and Enlightenment periods.
So we're coming back to the composer's tradition, which is interesting. Frank Johnson, unifying abstract and physicalness, music and dance.
M Let me ask you this: when exactly did you get exposed to these African American composers?
A Frank Johnson only once I got into academia, at Mills College [mid-1980s]. Will Marion Cook, William Grant Still, I was aware of them in the '60s.
M So you kind of started out with an exposure, first, to cool white jazz, Paul Desmond and all that; you got into bebop a little later…
A I started out with doo-wop; in my neighborhood, everybody had their own doo-wop group. Frankie Lymon, the Dell Vikings, the Dells, the Coasters, moving to Smokey Robinson; Bill Haley and the Comets were very important to me; Ahmad Jamal, and then moving into Dave Brubeck, when I became very interested in what was called cool jazz. I had heard Charlie Parker's music at the same time, but it frightened me; it was rawer. Desmond and Brubeck were more restrained, vibrationally, in a way that I could hear; it was closer to Ahmad Jamal's structure space initiatives.
M Does this have something to do with your growing up apart from the black psychology of…I mean, why would Charlie Parker seem so raw, because he was like the New York kind of expression or something?
A No, it was just more than what I could handle. Desmond was more melodic…
M Does this also go for people like Thelonious Monk and everyone else connected with the New York bebop scene?
A My stepfather brought home Miles Davis with John Coltrane, "Round 'Bout Midnight," and "Cookin'", with the Miles Davis Quintet. I would hear that music at about the same time I heard Brubeck. I remember saying very clearly, "this John Coltrane fellow, he's not playing the music. This is not jazz, it doesn't swing!" [laughs] I was convinced! Why can't he play more like Desmond? I don't get it…
M So you grew up in the South Side, with no white people around you; but you also had icons on the TV set…
A Plus, my father and my stepfather were both light-complexioned African Americans, and I did have an inferiority complex as a young man, being the darkest in my family; and African Americans are most cruel, just in their own quadrant with each other, when the question of skin complexion comes up.
M So this was maybe a young boy and teenager's reach for something that seemed more refined?…
A Yes, but it was all subconscious. Consciously, I related then as now to Desmond's sound; I like Johnny Hodges' sound too; I like the more melodic players. And there was just something about the Brubeck quartet that just pushed my buttons; I loved them, I had every record they ever did.
M Of course, there's a real intellectualism there that kind of goes beyond, is more detached, than what you hear in Coltrane, or even Monk.
A And it appealed to me; it connected to me.
M That sounds like something that's just sort of beyond race and into the realm of personality types.
A Yes. But whatever it was, I connected deeply with their music, and then later, Tristano; I would connect very deeply with Tristano and Konitz and Marsh.
M So when you moved through this white expression in the jazz milieu into Charlie Parker and Coltrane and Ornette, maybe…I mean I remember when you first came out, the feeling about what you were doing among my jazz-buff circles in San Francisco, and I think in general, was that "man, this guy is really pushing blackness out there all the way."
A Yes! [we laugh]
M That's how I remember you in the '60s.
A Well, the '60s was a profound period for me, where my proclivities would change, where finally I was able to connect with the composite partials of trans-Africanisms, in a way I was not able to as a young man. For instance, Brubeck: I went through all the European American saxophonists, Bud Shank, Konitz, Marsh; Hal McCusak, I'm the only guy on the planet who has all of Hal McCusak's records. Dave Pell's octet. My teacher, Jack Gell, was a European American at the Chicago Musical College, who was a racist--yes, he was a racist who wasn't always aware of his racism; it was a northern kind of a racism. He didn't even like Desmond; he was a complex guy. When he talked of Desmond, he would say, "what do you want, sugar in your coffee, or coffee in your sugar?" That's how he dismissed Desmond, very quickly. Then I discovered Gigi Gryce, in the jazz lab quintet; I was taken aback by Gigi Gryce and his compositional abilities, with Donald Byrd, and Cedar Walton, I think. It was presented as kind of an intellectual hard bop music. It appealed to me, so I became a Gigi Gryce guy.
M Do you remember a time in your development when you actually felt a big surge of liberation into this kind of idea of black identity as a reaction against all this whiteness that you had steeped yourself in?
A It was coming into the '60s, when the music started to change. First I heard Eric Dolphy; well actually no, I heard Ornette Coleman…