SUN RA’S MUSIC | Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005)
Jazz and the Arts: Patterns for Liberation
By Lorenzo Thomas
Jazz, famously, eludes definition. But while some see it merely as the term for a style of music with a diminishing market niche, others understand it to be, in some way, the trademark of American culture.
Ken Burns’s Jazz, a mammoth 19-hour television documentary, demonstrated the rich history of the music and explained why many people have considered jazz to be, in the words of pianist Billy Taylor, “America’s classical music.” In the 1940s, just about the time that saxophonist Charles Parker and trumpet virtuoso John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie were alchemizing the skills they had mastered as danceband “Swing” musicians into the self-consciously artistic form called “Bebop,” John A. Kouwenhoven — a pioneer of what is now called Cultural Studies — argued that jazz and cinema were the quintessential American art forms.
Kouwenhoven explained that both jazz and cinema combined European high art concepts with ideas sprung from America’s democratic experience and populist “melting pot.” As popular arts, they were also influenced, often detrimentally, by commercialization. Perhaps that is why Henri Matisse, in his portfolio Jazz (1947), placed the daring Icarus amid knife-throwers and sword-swallowers in a circus of clichés. At its best, though, jazz is the flight of improvisation. It is the sinuously evocative and sensuous freedom that Matisse achieved in his magnificently bold scissors-drawings.
Jazz is also the specifically precise and poetic retelling of the history of African people in America — full of suffering, hope, and tentative victories — that artists such as Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington somehow contrived to present to the world as a soaringly spiritual celebration of the universal human condition.
As any true jazz fan from any era can tell you, jazz is not background muzak; it is a demanding music. What jazz demands, to use a marvelous phrase from Langston Hughes’s Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), is that we “listen fluently.” What jazz offers to the fluent listener is an astonishing set of patterns for liberation of the intellect and soul. That is why this music, originally designed for dancing, has powerfully influenced artists in other disciplines such as literature and the visual arts.
Among the brilliant young artists who have made exciting adaptations of the jazz aesthetic are Houston’s Tierney Malone and Atlanta’s Radcliffe Bailey. Painters and installation artists, both of them are in the vanguard of postmodern African American artistic expressions that are nevertheless grounded in an ancient but vital heritage.
Tierney Malone, a graduate of Dr. John T. Biggers’s rigorous program at Texas Southern University, has created numerous works directly focused on jazz — ranging from projects celebrating Houston musicians such as Horace Grigsby and the late Arnett Cobb, to a mural commission for the recently established jazz museum on Kansas City’s legendary Vine Street.
Radcliffe Bailey’s work, which first came to my attention with a marvelous installation at Project Row Houses in 1995, incorporates the rhythms of jazz (in a painterly manner that recalls both Piet Mondrian and Stuart Davis) with the cultural collage and images of kin that defines the black Southern experience. His new exhibit, The Magic City, is a richly complex tapestry of history and invention.
The exhibit’s title refers to Birmingham, Alabama — a site that has profound meaning(s) in 20th-century African American history. But the city is not only the site of racism and wartime boom, of the Civil Rights movement’s tragedies and triumphs, of integration and economic decline. Birmingham is emblematic also of the domestic dramas of real life that formed the deepest motivations of the Civil Rights struggle.
One of the boom towns of the New South, the steel mills and foundries of Birmingham provided hard jobs for good pay — even if racism meant that black workers got much less than their white counterparts. And there is genuine heroism in their stories.
In Leaving Pipe Shop, her touching memoir of childhood and adolescence, Deborah McDowell wonders about her father, who worked in the mills for 30 years. Was asbestos possibly a cause of his early death?
“All I know,”she writes, “was that it was heavily used in the industry that brought Birmingham its fabled distinction as ‘The Magic City,’ the mineral that had made U.S. Pipe and Foundry one of the largest pipe manufacturing plants in the state of Alabama, and according to Fortune magazine, one of the top industrial firms in the nation.”
Just as in Connie Porter’s wonderful novel All-Bright Court — about those Southern men who went North to work in the steel mills outside of Buffalo, New York — there is genuine heroism in their stories. Do not think for a moment that these hard-working and devoted family men did not know that making a living was killing them.
It is no coincidence that there is a jazz museum in Birmingham, too. It is in a renovated movie theatre not far from the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Civil Rights museum. One of the major figures celebrated in that museum is pianist Sun Ra.
Christened Herman Blount in 1914, Sun Ra acknowledged his childhood in Birmingham but claimed to be a native of the planet Saturn. He never contemplated a career in the foundries. A quick study musically, by the time he graduated from high school he was proficient in many styles of music. He was also a voracious reader and an aspiring poet. By the late 1940s, in Chicago, he was playing in Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, a spot that won him a five-year gig at the Club DeLisa.
By 1954 he had put together his own big band, the Arkestra, that could literally play anything in the history of jazz — from Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp” to Sun Ra’s own futuristic compositions. The aim of his music, he said, was “to depict happiness combined with beauty in a free manner.” As might be expected, this meant breaking the conventional rules, including even the conventions of jazz. With bandsmen dressed in flowing neo-African robes, a Sun Ra concert was a mesmerizing nonstop 2-hour medley of haunting ballads, hard Bop, freeform Blues blowing, the gorgeous movements of dancer June Tyson, flashing lights, and songs about intergalactic travel.
His earliest recordings were solidly based in the Kansas City big band style of Count Basie but his orchestrations also reflect an interest in the classics and in other idiosyncratic composers such as Raymond Scott. While he may not have achieved much public notice at first, I have evidence that what he was doing intrigued other musicians. Eric Dolphy loaned me his own copy of Sun Ra’s first album Super-Sonic Jazz (1956). The grooves were almost worn smooth.
I met Sun Ra when he moved his mission control to New York’s lower East Side in the early 1960s. My friend Steve Kent introduced us and one afternoon I got Sun Ra to agree to listen to some of my poetry.
I cleared my throat and recited my new poem. Thinking about it now, it was overlong and vaguely about Vietnam, which was the spur of our anxiety at the time. Steve would later avoid going overseas by falling off a ladder at Ft. Dix. I was one of those who got to go. But my poem did have some good images, I think, and some striking turns of phrase. When I had finished, Sunny sat in quiet thought as I awaited his praise.
“Well,” he said, “that’s nice.”
The note trembled in the air, unresolved.
“The only thing wrong with it is you’re writing about people.”
Huh?
“You’re a college man,” he said. “Don’t you remember what the great ancient poets wrote about?”
I began to understand what he meant. Is the Iliad about the ignorant strife of mortals, or about the jealousies of the gods? Is Oedipus about a man or about fate? How could one achieve the efflorescent grandeur, the boundless elevation of spirit expected from art if one’s vision was limited to the immediate and mundane?
Sun Ra often said that he really wasn’t interested in playing the piano — but he didn’t mean to elicit the remark often made about bandleaders such as Basie or Ellington, that the orchestra was really their true instrument.
“I’m only learning to play the piano,” Sunny said, “so that I’ll have the skill to play the instruments of the future.”
And skill — which is what the word art really means — was important to him. As an artist who built elaborately chaotic and minutely controlled structures on the foundation of the Blues, it is not surprising that in Sun Ra’s view of art, inspiration was not the inception but the goal. Musicians practice to achieve a level of proficiency that will eventually take them to a level where their performance is not consciously willed but entirely inspired.
For Sun Ra — and for the many artists he continues to influence — the practice of art (in any medium) involves a strenuous attempt to move beyond one’s known abilities and usual perceptions — that is to say, one’s limitations. Art is a bold attempt to capture the impossible.
Was this business about dealing in the realm of impossibility merely another of the Socratic conundrums Sun Ra liked to put into his conversation?
“It’s really very easy,” he used to tell us. “All you’ve got to do is get the first impossible. Then the others will come to be with their brother.”
In 1968, Umbra (a literary magazine edited by David Henderson) published several of Sun Ra’s poems. In “Precision Fate,” he wrote:
A notion is an idea
Every nation is really an idea
Every apparent thing is a living idea
Nature is an idea
and, therefore, “the nature of a person is the vibration-idea” the person projects.
It is no secret, then, why Sun Ra’s music is beautiful and why it projects ideas that continue to intrigue and motivate other artists. In his poem “The Myth of Me,” Sun Ra succinctly defined what all creative activity — whether painting, performing music, tending a garden, or shaping clay — really is. Each of us, when we put our imaginations to work in the service of beauty, are involved in the business of liberating “The thought of the me I wish to be.”
New York City
16 May 2001
Pana-born Lorenzo Thomas was Professor of English at University of Houston–Downtown and author of Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th Century American Poetry (University of Alabama Press). This article appeared in the Summer/Fall 2001 edition of Blaffer Gallery’s Newsline.
