RE: Living Music

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

You write like a very young person, so now I'm going to help you along in
your maturation process.

I have no use for Marilyn Manson or Alice Cooper; they are not in the same
conceptual universe as Charlie Parker or John Coltrane.  I've never heard
of Ani Difranco, so I'm unable to comment.

What I can comment on is mythology.  I don't have a Romantic notion of
either Coltrane or Parker, especially a viewpoint that romanticizes
lowlife.  I'll reiterate something I said a couple of times a while back.
What these people meant to themselves should not be equated or overshadowed
with what white people who go in for slumming think of them or anyone else,
not to suggest that most white fans are so base.  Indulging in the romance
of low-life is just another way of keeping people down.

Parker had a cynical streak and of course exploited at times his own
mystique as a street-wise person would.  I've known some black jazz artists
who've expressed shame and indignation at Parker's behavior: this is
because they don't like to wallow in sleaze and shit like so many whites
do, the fans of Cooper and Manson among them.  The reductionist Romanticism
of squalor belongs to Jack Kerouac's crowd; as Ralph Ellison would have
said, it is un-Negro-American.  Parker's drug-addiction is in direct
contradiction to his musical talent.  One would never know from the stories
of his life on film whatever made him a creative musician: all we see is
the junkie, and Parker denied that being a junkie was an asset in the
slightest in being a musician.

Parker's remark about his life and his horn is not anti-intellectual.  It's
not the mystical cult of mindless instinct so beloved of Caucasian
intellectuals.  It's about will.  To develop technique, to develop concepts
of music, to create an individual style expressing your own personality and
to summon the energy needed to master demanding forms and to be able to
sustain it no matter who is around you is a mental and a physical
discipline that requires strength and will, not to mention everything else
that surrounds the hard life of a musician in certain social circumstances.
 Have you ever seen Dizzy Gillespie conducting an orchestra?  It takes
tremendous character to pull off what he did.  It's about inner strength as
much as it is about musical knowledge.

I wish I could find my excerpts from a fantastic letter Coltrane wrote to a
fan on the affirmative quality of black music, what it's about and where it
comes from.  He writes that there's no question that the artist must
express an affirmative view of life, responding to the query addressed to
him.  Elsewhere, Coltrane said he wanted to be a force that was truly for
good.  Is this Breton, is it that asshole who wrote about the gratuitous
act, is it Manson?  Is it punk?

Coltrane was criticized as angry because of the grittiness that was one
aspect of his style: he was not smooth and melodious in the manner of white
saxophonists like Paul Desmond, who also expressed resentment at the
"angry" sound that was displacing him.  Well, I knew a woman who claims to
have met "Johnny" who told me he was a very frustrated man, which is easy
to believe, but I've never heard a report about overt anger, though of
course frustrated black men are likely to have some internalized anger as
any normal human being would have who doesn't live the luxurious life of
Riley.  In response to a question about anger, Coltrane replied: the only
person I'm angry at is myself when I don't live up to my own standards of
perfection.

It has been impossible for me to take Kofsky seriously for more years than
I can count.  He was an idealistic, nice Jewish boy, but he didn't know who
he was dealing with.  He did tap into the value system and life-affirming
character of the spirit of black music, but beyond that he was naive.
Trying to argue with Elvin Jones about socialism, indeed.  This romance
with Malcolm X is rather naive as well.  Malcolm, having learned to
understand his own limitations through painful self-examination, was the
last to romanticize himself, knowing full well the limitations of the
mentality of the lumpenproletariat.  This was perhaps Malcolm's most
impressive trait.  But Kofsky's wide-eyed, rah-rah revolutionary zeal is
sickening.  Perhaps it's another measure of the uselessness of Trotskyists.

As for the black power movement, the manipulative politicization of art
fills me with revulsion.  Even bewildered Coltrane came up with a
reasonably nuanced account of the indirect connections between art and
society, which was not a politicization of jazz.  With his nonsense Kofsky
should have spent more time with a blowhard like Archie Shepp, if he were
willing to talk to Jews at the time.

Your issue apparently is the mystification of the unity of life and art.
Very well, but where are you going with this?  I'm not promoting such
mystification, and when it came to be serious about what their music meant
to them, neither were Parker or Coltrane.  Now what's your point about
bogus sax-toting spiritualists in the wake of Trane?  You go nowhere with
this remark.

BTW, I'm not into naive adulation and boosterism.  I can't say everything
at once, so I have to focus on the aspect of a particular subject matter at
hand.  So I'm emphasizing the positive aspects of the black cultural
experience.  Leaving song lyrics aside, the real issue with black culture,
at least before the current monstrous generation appeared on the scene, is
not in the _music_.  The music is one of the greatest triumphs in human
history.  It hasn't just diverted or entertained; it has moved millions of
people the world over and elevated their thoughts as well.  The music has
saved lives.  It is the exemplary vehicle embodying the essence of the
unique methodology of African-American cultural expression.  The question
is not a failure of what _music_ could achieve as music; the question is
what other areas of endeavor have not been as well-developed and why not.
And one place to start is by looking at the extra-musical belief systems of
musicians themselves.  Sun Ra as philosopher is a particularly tragic
example of an ideology failing to do justice to the cultural expression it
ornaments.  Here is a subject for critique which nobody but me and my
Australian buddy (a blues guitarist who became a grad student and
grudgingly endured the horrific machinery of hackademia) has even started.

I'm serious about this stuff; I'm not just jerking off.

At 10:11 AM 6/2/99 -0500, shandley wrote:
>Then the question of interpretation of one's "lived expression"
>becomes an issue: case-in-point John Coltrane, inspirer of legions
>of (likely) bogus saxophone-toting spiritualists, very much
>(socially) a product of his historical situation.  The "late"
>Coltrane (1964-7) seemed utterly baffled
>when asked about why his music was "angry," and equally bewildered
>by the Marxist jazz critic Frank Kofsky's attempts to situate him
>in the Black Power movement.  Was anyone "right"?
>
>....  Did Charlie Parker play "like" an alcoholic and heroin
>addict?  For that matter, did John Coltrane play "like" a
>vegetarian and clean-and-sober individual, or "like" a
>spiritualist, or "like" a revolutionary?
>
>I think it's clear that life experience can have tremendous,
>encompassing effects on an artist's work, but I also think Parker
>and Manson and DiFranco are perfectly willing to mystify their
>professions and pull us into a weird formalism with statements
>like that, implying that there is no separation
>between the artist and art, and that studying one is incomplete
>w/o studying the other.