My New Essay on Race and American Music

[AllenLowe]

this will probably be in the liner notes to my next CD project: (the title of the essay may change)

The Caucasian Storms, or: Seeing Memory

I was re-reading Norman Mailer's The White Negro recently, and then a few essays in the Greg Tate-edited Collection Everything but the Burden. Tate's book is a very interesting collection of pieces on what whites have absorbed and taken (stolen?) from black culture. In a way weirdly complimentary to many of the ideas in the Tate book, Mailer's seminal essay posits the white hipster as a cross-racial personification of black existential being. White hipsterism, in Mailers essential description, represents a white way of adapting to black mores, and is driven by, among other things, a desire to challenge white (suburban?) sexual and cultural denial. Beyond this Mailer theorizes that white hipsters are, in essence, challenging their own imprisonment in the white race, in the process going for a thrill ride on that mystical yet viscerally effecting roller coaster we might, after the French, call Negritude.

I remember distinctly that I found Mailer's logic suspect even when I first read the essay in high school, at the suggestion of a classmate who thought Mailer's depiction of hipsterism was complimentary to we suburban white boys. After all, we were just starting to understand jazz, the blues, and other African American forms and take them to heart, both directly (through the recordings and the occasional concert in nearby New York City) and indirectly (through the emerging roots-consciousness of then-contemporary rock and roll ). Though I could not articulate it fully, even at that tender age (16) and in that year (1970) I thought Mailer was full of it, that his particular theory of white shadowing of black form was a misguided and even racist (particularly by way of its sexual stereotyping) recognition of what was an important fact: that African American culture is American culture, and part of a birthright for which one need not necessarily qualify buy virtue of race but for cause: with respect, recognition, and even, to some extent, reparations of a social and intellectual nature.

I was thinking back on this recently in light of various controversies that have raged of late in the jazz world, prompted by some of trumpeter Nicholas Payton's proclamations and then the guitarist Jacque Lesure's pithy little verbal essay on YouTube. Lesure tells us in this that, for whites, learning jazz is like him attempting Mariachi music; it can be learned by rote, but never really felt (and thus played) in a fundamentally authentic way, due to cultural limitations, a lack of initiation into "the life" (my phrase, not his, but clearly his meaning) and the kind of intellectual self-deception that leads we white folks to repeat, like a sad and desperate mantra, that it's all American music and it's all one music, part of the broader spectrum of good and bad art (as in that by-now old and tired saw, "there are only two kinds of music….").

Aside from Lesure's general problem of self deception (if he is talking about cultural limitations, well, than, the most culturally specific music I hear these days is hip hop, for which he and almost all African American jazz musicians are as culturally disadvantaged and under-qualified as I and my fellow white musicians), I feel he is dead wrong in most respects, especially as regards jazz and the cultural furies. The truth, as it has been for some time, is that jazz today operates on a cultural plane that is far different than that which it occupied in some of its older days. By now it is a cultural common denominator much more than it is a folk form, and has been so for a very long time (and of course I am far from the first person to say so). But the deeper truth is that Lesure and Payton are wrong for reasons that have a more complicated intellectual and emotional scope. Certainly American culture, with its constant tension of African American innovation and technical development succeeded by white response, has informed my work as much as it has informed his. But there is a lot more to it than that. Because as with some of the attitudes expressed in that book edited by Greg Tate, there are inherent contradictions embodied by various direct and peripheral forms of what is, by any other name, just a new form of Afro-Centricism.

One of the prevailing theories regarding white love of African American culture is related to the alleged Caucasian glorification, eroticization, and exotification of all things black, an essential fetishization of what might have been called, years ago (and see above) Negritude. I have seen these allegations made in a thousand essays on the relationship of white and black culture and cultural practices. And there is a certain logic to this point of view, especially as reflected in traditional white racial ambivalence: a fascination with, yet fear of, black bodies, as expressed, among other ways, through the lineage of politically and socially-motivated atrocities committed against African Americans: think, just for starters, of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and myriad other forms of domestic terrorism. Not to mention the condescending arc of Euro-critical images (particular during the jazz age) of the inherent, born-to-dance grace of early African American stage performers.

And yet…there are problems with this basic theory. The first is one of basic inner logic: while I have read more than one cultural critique by black writers of such white fetishization of black essences, the literature of African American cultural writing is filled which just such forms of mystification, with African American literary attempts to downgrade white efforts at American cultural expression by reason of physical, cultural, and racial distance. The same forms of eroticization, and exotification which have been vilified as attitudes of degradation when in the hands of whites, are useful clubs with which to beat white people over the head, to re-enforce certain cultural boundaries and distances (remember that Richard Prior routine in which, as a parody of Sixties political expression, he read a poem in which the only word was "Black" repeated over and over again with increasing intensity? ).

Certainly there is a deep sense of cultural mystery (and mystique) in all of this white recognition (going back at least 300 years) of black accomplishment, a constant feeling of wonder, expressed by whites, at certain paradoxically and indigenously brilliant African retentions. There is an understanding inherent in such critical response of the genius of the musical and language systems devised by African Americans in the New World. There is a recognition, as well, of the constant invention and reinvention of new forms in this essentially (but not solely) musically modernist, African American system of expression. But white recognition and high praise for such is not necessarily the same thing as fetishization and eroticization of the intellectual object. Certainly the whites whom I know and respect and who either admire or write about or perform these art forms (or who do any combination thereof) are aware that creativity is as much a matter of instinct as direct consciousness. But conflating emotion and intellect is far different than confusing mystical gobbledygook with the concrete and core intellectual requirements of creation and performance. And truth be told, a lot of African American writing, in trying to create a poetic dimension to fill that same gap between thought and creation, dances the dance of racial exclusivity. Argue for this if you will; but then, don't complain about whites who see this as an exotic, deeply spiritual, and therefore mystical cultural leap.

Certainly Mailer was, of course, also, guilty, of such mystification. In a way he was ahead of his time: right for the wrong reasons? Or wrong for the right reasons?

The real truth is that I have known thousands of great musicians, black and white – and that NONE fit the cultural conditions set by so many black AND white writers. Not a one of them is or was, by any stretch of the imagination, a hipster (though most were "hip" by any standard) – they were serious, studios, deeply intellectual men and women, for whom jazz and its performance was as much an intellectual as emotional exercise. Which is not to say that they had little or no understanding of the weighty racial and cultural issues involved. I had, for example, a few long talks with the black bassist Jamil Nasser, who worked with and had a deep personal attachment to the great white bebop pianist Al Haig, in which Jamil said he felt that Haig had very profoundly committed himself to what has been called by others 'the jazz life,' a way of life which, to Jamil's way of thinking, came at no little personal expense. To him Haig had, indeed, paid the kind of dues, both life and otherwise, that jazz required. Jamil felt that Haig could have taken certain kinds of cultural and financial advantage of his whiteness, but that he had neither the temperament or desire to do so (and of course, Bud Powell, the epitome of great African American jazz pianism, called Haig "a perfect pianist").

Take a roll call of all of the musicians I've known especially well, from Haig to Barry Harris, Joe Albany, Bob Neloms, Tommy Potter, Bill Triglia, Jaki Byard, Curley Russell, Dick Katz, Dickey Meyers, Dave Schildkraut. All were truly working musicians, and each had his own deep knowledge and understanding of jazz. I won't tell you which were black and which were white, though of course it would not be difficult to find out who was what. But Dizzy Gillespie (certainly the hippest of the hip and essentially a teacher, as each told me, to both Haig and Katz) said to me that the greatest alto saxophonist he heard after Charlie Parker was Schildkraut – and Schildkraut was a white Jew who told me he'd flown in alien space ships and who became, in his last years, more and more Orthodox in his studious application of his native Judaism. And it was the African American Jaki Byard who told me one night, in a confiding if near-off handed manner that was meant to mask the deep seriousness of his remark, that the reason the trumpeter Don Ellis was not more widely recognized by the jazz press was "because he was white." I was a very impressionable 22 or 23 at the time, and it took me some time to truly understand the complexity of Jaki's belief in this particular fact. But he meant exactly what he said, and he said it in the way he said it because he was not only deeply pained by his friend's lack of acceptance, but because he knew that acknowledging the reason for such went very much against the grain of certain and very basic social and political tenets.

Ironically or not, I write all of the above on the same day that an article in the New York Times, on the neurological importance of reading fiction, tells us that "the brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life." Might the same apply to the learning of music by listening to it on records as so many of we white (and, truth be told, black) folks did, at least initially? And if so, what does this tell us about certain claims of racial exclusivity? Because if the brain converts things on the written page from observation to experience, what does listening to thousands of hours of music, particularly that made by long-dead (and usually African American) musicians in the years before World War II, do? On a personal level this has made me wonder about the potential skewing of various cultural theories of both micro and macro determination, from the big-picture questions of "realness" and authenticity of Zora Neale Hurston, to the more localized and indigenous habits of language and inflection as described by Alan Lomax. Is simply listening another form of socialization and acculturation, a means of psychological accumulation that is intellectually, emotionally, and anthropologically correct?

In all of this, by the way, I was reminded of some of the criticisms that have been leveled against the white blues advocates who promoted and essentially instigated the 1960s blues revival. I've gotten to know a few of these people, who have been subjected to these same general charges, of over-romanticizing the African American music and musicians that they helped to bring into the mainstream by, as the allegation goes, pushing artificial, racialist, romantic ideas of historicity and authenticity. Nonsense, because once again this ignores the real and less sensational reasons they admired and advocated for this music: as with my own emerging love of jazz as a teenager, the real truth is less interesting: they did not like the music because they thought it was authentic – they thought it was authentic because they liked it. A common (and very) human response. Also, I would say, a crucial and major distinction, and one which points in the opposite direction of racialized, condescending praise.

All of the above is written as a way of approaching my new musical project, in which once more I flail against the growing depths of my own anonymity (because for what other reason would I have to keep writing and recording music?).

In the early stages of this (essentially American Song) project and in its rationales, I toyed, as I often do, with the racial questions invariably raised by the sources of the music I find most interesting – jazz, gospel music, ragtime, 1920s and 1930s pop standards, the blues, black and white hillbilly song, and what I will call, for want of a better term, Minstrel Pop (early song forms characterized, in some cases, by certain ideas of vernacular lyrics as crossed with minstrel conventions and by relatively simple folk-derived harmonic schemes, with diatonic or even near-modal melodies). I also toyed for some time – and am still toying – with a theme related to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel for which I was especially enthused after reading the actual text and then the praises heaped upon it by black intellectuals like W.E.B. Dubois. Imagine my liberal surprise when some of the African American musicians I contacted to perform on the recording were, shall we say, less than enthused by the idea of participating in something named for this servile-by-image token of American literary history.

I quickly found out that my original project title, Visions of Uncle Tom (which I did indeed intend with multiple cultural and racial and political associations and ironies) was fraught with sociological and political dangers. I though at the time that it was a good title (and still do, along with the original subtitles which were: "in the time of Abolitionist Minstrels or: The Condescension of the Abolitionists." The latter was taken from the novelist and poet Paul Beatty's cynical take on the ways in which whites have always told blacks how and what they should be feeling from a personal and sociological viewpoint). So, though I did not reject the title outright (and am still internally debating ways in which I might make use of it) I found myself re-thinking, not the project itself (the music has progressed in a steady stream of composition since last summer) but the basic way in which it will be presented.

I soon realized several things. Unlike with, say, Julius Hemphill, who wrote a piece for the dancer Bill T. Jones called Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin, my options were potentially limited in racially defined ways – obviously, it is much different for a white guy to throw the name Uncle Tom around than it is for an African American. No big surprise there, as with other forms of either negative or what is perceived as negative terminology. As I contemplated how to proceed, and started gathering a large cast of musicians to record the music, several important things occurred to me.

1) For white people, racism is like original sin; no, it's not LIKE original sin, it IS original sin. Just as the theological concept of same says that you are born with the sin of the ancients, so are all white people brought into the world with the history of American racism as something to be borne, not so much as burden but as reality, as a constant that involves privilege, actions, assumptions and language. Is this a truly post-racial society? Not now and not, I am convinced, in my lifetime (I am 58 years old). Whites still regularly do and say things which carry the assumption of privilege and superiority, and I am making no exceptions here. It is something a lot of people struggle with, but the key world is struggle. Things have gotten a lot better, but in a truly post-racial world, there would be no NEED to struggle.

2) One of the reasons (or really a prime motivation) for the rise of various Black Arts Movements of the last 50 years or so is a sense that African Americans have spent too much time allowing themselves to be defined by whites, and in white terms. This has happened socially (concepts of looks and beauty, for example) and behaviorally (part of the mystification of black culture, from the 1600s on, is related to white wonderment at the apparent lack of expressive inhibition in the practices of black music, dance and language), the freedom therein being constantly measured against certain Western (read: white) standards of sound, form, and decorum. But the key term here is Western – because much critical theory, or at the least critical response to black art, is couched in terms that are inevitably related to the background of the writer who, in probably the majority of cases (though thankfully this has changed significantly over the years) has been white. So although one might argue that we don't really need to pick between Western and Non-Western theory (an area in which, anyway, I am way out my depth) and that the important thing is simply strong and educated critical standards, the result is the same: self-determination, as a cultural response to either poor or non-comprehension, has animated the creation of African American improvised music for many years, from the AACM to the St. Louis collectives to the Loft Movement of the 1970s to the mushrooming of independent labels in the 1970s and 1980s. The best (and even many lesser) white critics have come to understand and adapt to this, to realize that they need a deeper and broader intellectual range in order to properly deal with the full scope of the music, both black and white, of the post-modernist 20^th and 21^st century (though certainly, and this is related to where I am going with all of this, some African American performers of a more nationalist bent might argue that just as someone on trial is entitled to a jury of his peers, the African American artist requires an African American critic to accurately understand the sources of his or her art. Though I don't think this is really a prevalent or dominant opinion).

So basically one important and relevant problem is and was a frustration, on the part of African American artists in all forms, at having their lives mediated through the experiences of white people. And I certain agree that, while this is a hugely complicated subject, it is also a legitimate concern, born out by the millions and millions of words of poorly composed criticism that have poured out of various on and off-line publications through the years (and though I would argue that under-qualification is not exclusively a racial problem, I do recall reading some of the older record reviews in Downbeat, from the 1950s in particular, and cringing at certain almost bizarrely self-righteous white critics who seemed regularly to be saying in essence, in response to new music:"why didn't these guys ask me first? I know where the future of jazz is and how to get there!")

And yet, this form of mediation, of lives as seen through the eyes of others, contains more than the germ of something potentially more interesting, of a possible basis for something, maybe, a little bit new. So I got to thinking, one day – well, if this (black life as mediated through white experience) has been prevalent, to the point of being racially oppressive and of provoking hostility, is there a way I turn the concept around and use it in a more creative and constructive (and personal) way? And then I realized, that, in my life, at least, such a thing has already been going on for many years. While I can honestly say that I have never fetishized blackness in the sense in which the term has commonly been used, I have, from the age of 14, at the very least, idolized hundreds, maybe thousands of black musicians – but not for their blackness, or by reason of racial or sexual envy, or even from a sense of white-suburban alienation, as the theorists of fetishization might posit. I admired them for the most innocent of reasons, for the ideas they expressed, the sounds they were able to produce through physical performance and composition. I mean, give me break. Bird wasn't a junkie stud to me when I was 14 and just beginning to listening to him, Sonny Rollins was no stereotypical, omniscient, all-powerful black man, Bud Powell was, and always has been for me, much, much more than a symbol of racial torment, Monk was no carnival freak, and Louis Armstrong was anything but a shell/minstrel man. These people were to me (as with many others I would meet and listen to over the years) simply the great artists of our time, the people I admired and then, as I got into music more deeply, analyzed.

But there was something else I suddenly realized, and which speaks ironically to some of the things I have felt the need to worry about with my new project and its Uncle Tom implications – if black musicians fretted at having their lives seen through white eyes, as having their ways mediated through white experience, what was there to say for the prime cultural influences on my own life? Who were James Reese Europe? Lester Young? Son House? Ellington? Rollins? Parker? Jelly Roll Morton? Dickey Wells? Rosetta Tharpe? Sister Mamie Forehand? Arizona Dranes? Jimi Hendrix? Bessie Johnson? Bud Powell? Lil Green? Anthony Braxton? Mamie Smith? Sonny Clay? Utah Smith? Julius Hemphill? Ironically or not, these were black men and women through whom my life was mediated, great artists who not only changed my entire outlook but governed a great deal of my personal actions and attitudes, who effected my work, altered my whole personal orientation, and who refocused my entire life in ways that were not only personally demanding but technically and intellectually unforgiving. All of which attracted, no, consumed me, not, once more, by reason of their so-called "blackness" but by way of the things they were able to create, by their monumental personal achievements. Which was, however and of course, paradoxically, as we so well know, closely and maybe irretrievable related to their blackness, depending on how we define the term (and if this were an internet post, here I would place one of those little smiley symbols).

What, I thought, if I tried organizing a musical project in which I reversed the charges? What if I tried to show how my life has and would and will look as seen through the mediation of African American musicians and other African American cultural figures (with maybe a stray white person dropped here and there, as long as it was thematically consistent)? The result is what you may soon hear, compositions that are essentially my own re-working of other texts, in the best (I hope) Brechtian sense. They are re-creations, but not like those kind you see on cheap documentaries. They are more like new paintings done over the originals, not tributes, and not merely references, but attempts to re-do things in my own image, to manage my own life as it has emerged in the shadow of American music.

(Though of course I retain the right to detach my personal self from the results as necessary, to create myself, to paraphrase Rimbaud, as the other, to define a new persona for myself that might be called, after the trends of certain kinds of literature, from Handke to Robbe Grillet to Beckett, "the impersonal I." But that is another matter).

So herein we see all that is me, through minstrelsy's complicated contradictions; through the "corruption" (all of my own doing) of ragtime; through the unpredictable flow of Sun Ra, the stop-start melodicism of Anthony Braxton, the dark/light harmony of Duke Ellington, the melodic density of Charlie Parker, the folk sophistication of Blind Boone, the constantly resolving and then re-built tensions in the music of Bud Powell; the determined if somewhat indeterminate modernism of Paul Whiteman (who, not-so-incidentally, employed and paid well the African Americans William Grant Still and Don Redman and who, anyway, had a great and lasting orchestra); through Varese (who encountered Charlie Parker in Greenwich Village in Bird's last days and whose composition Ionisation debuted the same night as works of William Russell, who was the man who re-discovered Bunk Johnson), Bix and Trumbauer (who both followed and effected the great black jazz players of their day), the cultural night vision of Ma Rainey and her travelling shows, the showbiz soul/subtlety of Joe Jordan, the tents and circuses of early black music, the flailing delta blues of Son House and Charley Patton, the hillbilly songs of the great white/black Diaspora of the South, through Jelly Roll Morton as filtered through Julius Hemphill's conscious extension of certain Southwestern harmonic and melodic traditions; by way of the great black minstrel Ernest Hogan, through the ides of storefront gospel as heard through the shrill moans of Bessie Johnson and Arizona Dranes – and then a few odds and ends of less determinate (if sometimes paler) origin, the gently zig zagging songs of Arthur Russell, Yoko Ono's accidental artistry, Iggy and the Stooges' post-blue and neo-punk, pseudo-artsy narcissism, Paul Goodman's delicately oppositional poetry, and, of course, my hoodoo gal, Zora Neal Hurston.

Of course, even this detailed description is an oversimplification, because the band assembled to perform all this is neither black nor white but, like the ultimate objects of my musical admiration, mixed. Because my own work, beyond the accomplishments of my forebears, is as a result of the work of living and contemporary musicians through whom, as I write new music, my life is directed. So the mediation of myself through others continues in this way – with Randy Sandke, old friend and brilliant trumpeter whose musical mind moves in directions I can only wonder at; Darius Jones, who plays things I wish I could play myself; Matthew Shipp, whose intensity of thought and performance is a constant in my own development of new materials; Steven Bernstein, hyper aware of music and its possibilities in ways I can only begin to tap; Ursula Oppens, whose world of post-classical halls is so much different than mine as to force me to stretch myself in ways to which I am entirely unaccustomed; Jon-Erik Kelso, extraordinary bearer of a tradition that I hear regularly in my head but which, by myself, I can barely reproduce; Lewis Porter, literal transcriber of certain traditions at the same time that his own way is to keep moving forward; Noah Preminger, who knows, to re-work a phrase originating in another medium entirely, that the song is the thing; Ras Moshe, who has a knack for reliving the intensities of a previous era without ever abandoning the future.

One of the names I used to call my old band was Hubert's Museum, after a freak show that Lenny Bruce famously described his mother as taking him to, in Times Square, when he was a young boy. I think my idea was to express the feeling that American song has, though its relatively brief history, re-defined the idea of high art in increasingly freakish ways – with expressions of deep and profound "amateurism" (vocationalism?), primitive wails, oddball sounds, powerful dissonances masquerading as their opposite, and sometimes very consonant and straightforward melodic and harmonic designs, all as appended to forms both complex and alarmingly simple. I hope in saying this that I am not reaffirming some of the very same notions of exoticism that I just denied possessing. Because for me these things are "freakish" only in the middle class sense, in their relation to the xenophobic scheme of American attitudes. What I like about even the strangest and most intense of American musics is their workaday inscrutability, the unassuming directness and lack of self consciousness of even the most intense yelpings and hard-scrabble (and even soft-scrabble) sounds. (And one thing I dislike about so much contemporary music of all spectrums, from roots-folk groups like the Chocolate Drops to the occasional punk-jazz band to the post-folkie folkies, is the absolute blandness of so much performance and recording. Isolation and multi-tracking have deadened the deep harmonic overtones of so much music we hear, and certain digital techniques of producing sound have smoothed out the wrinkles of the classic sound wave to the point of boring consistency. The whole drone movement has turned into a post-Fahey nightmare of new age consistency, world music has become the self-captive of smaller and smaller musical worlds and a thorough misunderstanding of the uses of modality and repetition; hip hop should be the future, but it has little real edge left and has used itself up with alarming speed; the folkies and new rootsers like even Neko Case have just flattened everything out, from old-time accents and vowels to instrumental inflection; and even "live" performance in general has turned into a strangely consistent form of amateur night, though not in the good sense referenced above).

To me the overriding standard by which I measure music (my own and others) is that of newness, novelty, edge, technical control, organization, and surprise. Certainly, through the ages, the sources that have met this standard for me have consistently, but not solely, been African American. There is/was also: Elvis, Roy Head, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, John Lennon, Al Haig, Paul Bley, Dave Schildkraut, Gil Evans, Roswell Rudd, Frank Hutchisen, Ray Suhy, Loren Schoenberg, Bill Triglia, the Band, Harmonica Frank, Ruby Smith, Randy Sandke, Janis Joplin, The Hampton Grease Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and others whose names only (I hope) temporarily escape me. I don't envy anyone their skin color, though I do recognize the cultural advantages that some have over others in the understanding of certain forms and ideas. I wish, for example, that I had half the intellectual depth of critics like Richard Gilman, Eric Bentley, Stanley Kaufman, and Larry Kart, but I have only a certain level of failed intellectualism to show for the many years I have spent pouring over various (non-musical) texts.

I try to keep up with everything I can keep up with, but even as I write these words I sense how out of touch I am with so much of the world, for better and, yes, for much worse. The sense of permanent outsider, which started when I was in my teens (and which certainly may have been one reason for my finding so much unusual music attractive) was, and remains, more result than cause. Contrary to the way things may appear, I say and act in certain ways because these ways appear – to me - to be necessary and correct, though I am also quite capable of (at least what feels like) indefinite sublimation. But ultimately I have made no real effort at failure. It just, as far as I can determine, comes naturally, as the price to be paid for certain attitudes and habits and modes of behavior. And so it is with my admiration and dedication to certain kinds of music and the musicians which produce it: it is as natural and necessary as breathing, and has nothing to do with cultural or sexual or social or philosophical, or any other kind of envy. Of that, if little else, I am certain.

- Allen Lowe

Edited March 23, 2012 by AllenLowe

[Big Beat Steve]

A very interesting piece, though I would not claim I've fully grasped all of it upon a first reading.

I guess I will print it out for more focused reading later on.

Just a few remarks - form an outsider (Non-American) looking in, in a way .. :

In a way weirdly complimentary to many of the ideas in the Tate book, Mailer's seminal essay posits the white hipster as a cross-racial personification of black existential being. White hipsterism, in Mailers essential description, represents a white way of adapting to black mores, and is driven by, among other things, a desire to challenge white (suburban?) sexual and cultural denial. Beyond this Mailer theorizes that white hipsters are, in essence, challenging their own imprisonment in the white race, in the process going for a thrill ride on that mystical yet viscerally effecting roller coaster we might, after the French, call Negritude. I remember distinctly that I found Mailer's logic suspect even when I first read the essay in high school, at the suggestion of a classmate who thought Mailer's depiction of hipsterism was complimentary to we suburban white boys.

Could it not be that Norman Mailer's statement has to be seen in the context of its times? Isn't there some truth to the statement that white "hipsters" (even after the 1940s when they usually were no longer called hipsters) indeed tried to escape the confines of relatively rigid and anarrow-minded moral corset of White America of those times and felt they found more freedom in what they perceived to be the way of life of Black America, regardless of whether this was an oversimplification or not?

To me the overriding standard by which I measure music (my own and others) is that of newness, novelty, edge, technical control, organization, and surprise. Certainly, through the ages, the sources that have met this standard for me have consistently, but not solely, been African American. There is/was also: ELvis, Roy Head, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, John Lennon, Al Haig, Paul Bley, Dave Schildkraut, Gil Evans, Roswell Rudd, Frank Hutchisen, Ray Suhy, Loren Schoenberg, Bill Triglia, the Band, Harmonica Frank, Ruby Smith, Randy Sandke, Janis Joplin, The Hampton Grease Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and others whose names only (I hope) temporarily escape me.

Wow ... lumping Roy Head, AL Haig, Frank Hutchison, Dave Schildkraut, Harmonica Frank Floyd and Janis Joplin (and all the others) together in one go sure is an eclectic array of musicians. I see and understand what you are getting at but can only wish everybody who reads the final version of this in your liner notes will be able to follow you.

[AllenLowe]

Re: Mailer, I don't disagree that he was pointing at certain forms of liberation that were observable; it was, as I indicated, the way in which he transformed this perception into a stereotypical view of African Americans as sexually and pyschologically uninhibited that distrubs. The way he did it amounts, to my way of thinking, to another depiction of the "noble savage."

[Big Beat Steve]

Re: Mailer, I don't disagree that he was pointing at certain forms of liberation that were observable; it was, as I indicated, the way in which he transformed this perception into a stereotypical view of African Americans as sexually and pyschologically uninhibited that distrubs. The way he did it amounts, to my way of thinking, to another depiction of the "noble savage."

I guess this is what I tried to hint at when I spoke of oversimplifications. His perception may parallel the fact that many white kids probably picked those parts of Black Culture that they found appealing and that suited their requirements but did not care as much about the overall picture (where, in a way, you can't have one - desirable - thing without having to accept the other - less desirable - too).

[AllenLowe]

agreed - though I'm sorry this isn't as fascinating to members of the forum as The Girls of Singlesnet.

[David Ayers]

agreed - though I'm sorry this isn't as fascinating to members of the forum as The Girls of Singlesnet.

Give us a chance! Enjoyed reading this and have some considerations of my own which it would take me some time to set out, so I'll be waiting for a spare moment.

Meanwhile here's my latest book... darn, cut-and-paste doesn't seem to be working...

[AllenLowe]

just joking around, David - personally I prefer looking at those babes -maybe I'll add a little cheesecake to the thread

Edited March 23, 2012 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

just joking around, David - personally I prefer looking at those babes -maybe I'll add a little cheesecake to the thread

Allow me!

[AllenLowe]

mmmmm......cheescake.............

[JSngry]

Gobble gobble!

Or, if you like...

[papsrus]

Yes, this will no doubt take a few times through to digest. Some fairly detailed thoughts. I read it through once earlier today (yesterday, actually) and want to give it a fresh read.

I hope you've put this here in order to generate some feedback. In that spirit, Allen, do you feel that some of these issues are part of a particularly American experience? Or do you think that these cultural/racial tensions more universally understood? Does the improvising musician in New Zealand get all this business about fetishization of Negritude?

I can't help but wonder, if these conflicts are largely, if not entirely, the product of an American experience, do they even resonate in places with other perhaps different and more dominant cultural moorings.

Not that any of that would diminish the importance of what you're saying, but perhaps there are other lenses through which to view all this. I'm sure there are.

... in other words, how would you explain all this to a Martian?

[Noj]

It's a beautiful essay. Thank you for creating and sharing it, Allen.

Somewhere in this there's the simple truth that art is created by individuals, and while the culture of each individual is sure to shine through in each creation, it's never as important as the identity of the individual. Cultures encompass all the good and bad of which a whole group of people are capable. An artist, while of course also capable of good and bad, in his or her greatest creative achievements makes something which is wholly good and wholly memorable. While great art can be associated with a culture, its first and most important association is with the individual intellect(s) responsible for its existence.

The artwork speaks above and beyond its cultural category. The individual is more specific than the culture. The individual artist is more intelligent/more interesting/more creative/more in tune than the vast majority of those he/she is associated with in said culture. It's not that the painting is French, it's that it's a Matisse. It's not that the artist was white, it's that he was a really cool cat who saw things differently and was able to express them in this amazing way. Any clown with a few lessons can tinkle around on the ivories. That doesn't make him Duke Ellington.

What is most interesting about, say, Michaelangelo? His culture, or the sheer scope of what he accomplished as an individual? True, the two are inseparable. But it is the individual talent which is most fascinating. It's what he did with his time on earth as one man which made him who he was. The culture part is this unchosen happenstance which was lucky to have spawned Michealangelo's genius.

As a white man who grew up playing basketball, I can say without question that the best players I ever played against were black. And that's an entirely objective opinion. I have also played against white players who were great. And Mexicans. And Armenians. And Asians. I have played against players of all sorts of backgrounds (even black) who I was better than. Yet there's a certain level of athletic ability which more black players are able to attain than those of any other descent. Those of other descents can get there, but such individuals don't happen nearly as often. I can imagine musical and dancing ability being the same way. It's just that it comes more naturally to those of a certain genetic background. It's not racist, it's just the way it is. And just because they were black and good by my standards doesn't mean they were Michael freaking Jordan. Jordan was an individual great--and it had more to do with his individual genetics and his individual experiences which molded him into the exceptional individual he was. His race wasn't nearly as important as his experiences and his identity as a man. It's not that he's black, it's that he was extra clutch and did things most people don't have the fortitude to accomplish on such a stage. Culture and race didn't hit the big shots, one man did. It was much more a matter of personality than a matter of being black. I think the same thing goes for talented musicians. It's more about the intellect and personality of each than it is about the culture or race of each. This attempt by race and culture to claim what any one man accomplishes is the territory of people who want credit for shit they didn't do.

Know what I mean? This race and culture thing is a great big expanding folder full of mostly useless crap and all the best stuff is buried in individual sub-folders like needles in a haystack. If we're going to credit race or culture for the great accomplishments of individuals who dedicate themselves to an art, then we're going to have to blame race and culture for the great failings of the worst criminals and horrible people associated with each. Once all the positive is completely outweighed by all the negative and worthless, you gotta wonder what the fuck we were keeping score for.

Edited March 24, 2012 by Noj

[John L]

There are a lot of interesting and thoughtful comments here. Thanks for the essay, Allen.

One basic point that I agree with 100% is that, while the "white hipster" theory may have a degree of truth for quite a number people, there are also quite a number of white people who love or play music with black roots for which it makes no sense at all. The point is that much of black American music in the 20th century was exceptionally deep and compelling to the point that hardly anyone who grew up surrounded by it can feel indifferent to it. Myself, I am white, grew up surrounded by it, and feel it deeply inside of me. That doesn't mean that I have any claim to authenticity when I play or sing it, and I really don't care about that. (Right now, as a hobby, I am performing mostly black American music on weekends to all black audiences in Nigeria, and they don't know quite what to make of me. ) If I tried purge all of that inside of me deliberately, the music would end up being fake. The only thing that I know is that what I am doing is not fake from the point of view of what is inside of me.

[Pete C]

John, did you sing black music in Russia? There is this African-American singer named Ian Starr, who looks like a cross between Barry White and Tom Jones, who sings at Russian restaurants in Brooklyn, both in English and Russian. They love him in Brighton Beach.

[AllenLowe]

thanks guys - Paps, I'll need a little time to respond, woke up with a major-sized headache this morning -

Noj - as for African American accomplishments athletically and in terms of movement/dance - I would argue less for genetics than culture - a culture (which can likely be traced to Africa) in which there is less self consciousness about physical movement, less fear of responding in a public way to music and sound (think of the old call and response, and the significant difference between white and black audiences in how they interact with performers; listen to old "live" gospel recordings). I think that this ability to express one's self through the body carries over, as well, to athletics. And it starts early; I have seen some very amusing things of white and black pre-schoolers in which these different responses to music are already clear and obvious. But once again I think this can be traced to a culture in which such means of expression are more regularly and less self-consciously expressed.

And of course there are musical consequences to this as well; listen to white bands from, say, before 1930. Though of course this is all assimilable by white people; though some assimilations take longer than others.

Edited March 24, 2012 by AllenLowe

[Pete C]

I'd agree with Allen that social styles and behaviors are culturally defined rather than a function of genetics. The things that we can grant to genetics are certain physical attributes and propensities to disease (e.g., sickle cell, Tay Sachs). I don't know if there are any athletic accomplishments that can be attributed directly to a sub-Saharan body type. I do know that for many years the gatekeepers of the ballet world insisted that the African-American body type was unsuited to the art, a clearly unsupportable position based purely on a racially skewed notion of anatomical aesthetics. Perhaps even more egregious was a prevailing view, at least when I was younger, that black people didn't make good quarterbacks because while they had certain attributes that made them suitable for other positions they lacked the strategic acumen for quarterbacking (a canard that racists in my own family parroted). I don't follow sports, but I hope this POV is long dead. Views like this were promulgated by generations of anthropologists, eugenicists and all sorts of political baddies.

[Noj]

thanks guys - Paps, I'll need a little time to respond, woke up with a major-sized headache this morning -

Noj - as for African American accomplishments athletically and in terms of movement/dance - I would argue less for genetics than culture - a culture (which can likely be traced to Africa) in which there is less self consciousness about physical movement, less fear of responding in a public way to music and sound (think of the old call and response, and the significant difference between white and black audiences in how they interact with performers; listen to old "live" gospel recordings). I think that this ability to express one's self through the body carries over, as well, to athletics. And it starts early; I have seen some very amusing things of white and black pre-schoolers in which these different responses to music are already clear and obvious. But once again I think this can be traced to a culture in which such means of expression are more regularly and less self-consciously expressed.

And of course there are musical consequences to this as well; listen to white bands from, say, before 1930. Though of course this is all assimilable by white people; though some assimilations take longer than others.

I can't say I disagree, and I'd wager it's so organic that genetics are actually influenced by cultural tendencies. However, it's up to each artist to run with the individual talents as far as those talents can possibly go. By this, a culture can at most claim a certain under-riding element evident in the artist's creation. Yet art is an intellectual territory, and there's nothing which prevents any intellect from properly appreciating any given art. This is because even though culture is a part of the artwork, ultimately its expression is human. And, it's more likely to be fully appreciated by a properly-tuned intellect than anything inherent in every member of an ethnicity.

Cultures are also far more specific than the blanket of race. Cultures are far more diverse. There's jazz cultures of various cities. There's basketball cultures of various areas. There's dance cultures, specific art genre cultures, skateboarding cultures, etc. etc. And while any one might be predominantly people of a specific skin tone none are exclusively so. And within any one of those cultures there are leaders and talented individuals who set the standards who are of diverse backgrounds. There are participants and fans of each who belong to a variety of other cultures. A person can belong to more than one culture. The assertion of a hard divide along an ethnic line in any one of them is sloppy, inaccurate, not inclusive enough, and doesn't tell us much about anything. All the meat is ultimately in who each person is, not in what most of the people are.

Edited March 24, 2012 by Noj

[AllenLowe]

one of the more interesting ways of looking at these things is Alan Lomax's study of language and movement and the way in which it is culturally bound. John Szwed has written very memorably about this.

[Noj]

I'm not well-read on this topic and should probably just hush up. I don't even entirely agree with myself here, I just started arguing an angle and kept going. My bad.

[AllenLowe]

that's not a problem; that's how I figure out stuff. Writing is a process of discovery.

[John L]

John, did you sing black music in Russia? There is this African-American singer named Ian Starr, who looks like a cross between Barry White and Tom Jones, who sings at Russian restaurants in Brooklyn, both in English and Russian. They love him in Brighton Beach.

I did have a blues/R&B band for a while in Russia. I don't know Ian Starr. But I guess that he sings in Brooklyn, not Russia. I have heard a bit of Russian dinner music at Brighton Beach, but not Mr. Starr

[Pete C]

[John L]

Not bad, although the name of the song is ocharovena.

[Face of the Bass]

American discussions of race sometimes feel very claustrophobic, or rather, like we are all working with a kind of generally accepted shorthand that probably should not be accepted at all.

[Chuck Nessa]

Not to shit on the topic; I have lived with this all my life and have survived. My friends have survived as well. Each of us are on our own trajectory and will deal with stuff as it comes.

Insecurities are nothing to sneeze at but this is not one of mine.