Improvising over the changes: improvisation as intellectual and aesthetic practice in the transitional poems of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka.

Improvising over the changes: improvisation as intellectual and aesthetic practice in the transitional poems of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's "Tone Poem tone poem:see symphonic poem. " is dedicatedto Elvin Jones, one of the major drummers of jazz's post-bebop era,and Bob Thompson, the avant-garde painter whose visual works See VisualWorks. symbolizedthe emerging Black Aesthetic in the early 1960s. This poem appears inJones/Baraka's Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961-1967 (1968). Formany students of Jones/Baraka, the collection marks his full turn intothe Black Arts Movement The Black Arts Movement or BAM is the artistic branch of the Black Power movement. It was started in Harlem by writer and activist Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoy Jones). and a complete poetic statement of the BlackAesthetic. Jones/Baraka builds the poem around a hard abstraction thatmimics Jones's rhythmic techniques and the strange elegance ofThompson's powerful images--"An eagle hangs above themspinning. / Years and travelers / linger among the dead, no reports,gunshots white puffs / deciding the season and the mode ofcompromise" (Baraka/Jones 1995, 131). Jones/Baraka's lyricalso carries the weight of self-exposure. I leave it there, for them, full of hope, and hurt. All the poems are full of it. Shit and hope, and history. Read this line young colored or white and know I felt the twist of dividing memory.... (Baraka/ Jones 1995, 131) The speaker, "LeRoi," leaves the reader a mark of hisshifting being in the "twist" of his divided psychology. Asits title tells us, the poem is meant to be an extra-musical narrativeand lyrical illustration for Jones's pounding polysyllabic pol��y��syl��lab��ic?adj.1. Having more than two and usually more than three syllables.2. Characterized by words having more than three syllables. beatsand Thompson's multi-colored melting expressions. Though he claimslate in the poem to have "no points, or theories,"Jones/Baraka's "twist" is a turn away from history andhurt toward an abstract hope that lingers beyond the poem's"exit image," "the day growing old and sloppy through thewindow" (Baraka/Jones 1995, 131). The point or theory that isbehind Jones/Baraka's twist is his literary theorization the��o��rize?v. the��o��rized, the��o��riz��ing, the��o��riz��esv.intr.To formulate theories or a theory; speculate.v.tr.To propose a theory about. ofabstract expression and avant-garde jazz Avant-garde jazz (also known as avant-jazz) is a style of music and improvisation that combines elements of avant-garde art music and composition with elements of traditional jazz. improvisation. Just asinteresting, however, is the poet's call to both "youngcolored and white" readers to keep "the tone, and exitimage" of the poem in mind. The call to this interracial in��ter��ra��cial?adj.Relating to, involving, or representing different races: interracial fellowship; an interracial neighborhood. audiencesounds an ambiguous chord for a poet who claims in the introduction tohis collection of essays Home (1965) that his writing presents him inthe process of becoming psychologically "blacker." "TonePoem," begs us to question our standard approach toJones/Baraka--the readings that focus on him as the avatar of the BlackAesthetic, a radical militant and essentialist. How are we to understandJones/Baraka's use of free jazz improvisation This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the for details.This article has been tagged since September 2007.There are many different ways to go about describing Jazz improvisation. as a literary idealcombined with his theories of blackness and his calls to an (at least)interracial audience? In Tejumola Olaniyan's study of modern African American African AmericanMulticulture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.See Race. andAfro-Caribbean drama, Scars of Conquest, Masks of Resistance (1995), heexplains that a useful way to understand the force of change that blackwriters have engineered in American cultural life is to note the waythat playwrights such as Derek Walcott Derek Alton Walcott (born January 23, 1930) is a West-Indian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who writes mainly in English. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. , Ntozake Shange Ntozake Shange (pronounced En-toe-ZAHK-kay SHONG-gay) (born October 18 1948) is an African American playwright, performance artist, and writer who is best-known for her Obie Award winning play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. , and Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka (born October 7, 1934) is an American writer of poetry, drama, essays and music criticism. BiographyEarly lifeBaraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey. illustrate that "social relations have no essence, transhistoricalor axiomatic ax��i��o��mat��ic? also ax��i��o��mat��i��caladj.Of, relating to, or resembling an axiom; self-evident: "It's axiomatic in politics that voters won't throw out a presidential incumbent unless they think his challenger will , but are always paradigmatic See paradigm. , arbitrary, contextual--inshort, historical. If society has an essence, then it is its permanentopenness" (35). Olaniyan's idea suggests that the socialrelationships between individuals and the cultures they make, theirrelationships with the larger American cultural fabric, is notfoundational, not essential, but arbitrary, and open. Olaniyan explains that culture is made up of "diverse andmutually contradictory elements or parts," that its"composites of structures ... are never immutable IMMUTABLE. What cannot be removed, what is unchangeable. The laws of God being perfect, are immutable, but no human law can be so considered. ," and thatthose elements and the articulated identities born of that system do not"possess any natural, sacrosanct sac��ro��sanct?adj.Regarded as sacred and inviolable.[Latin sacrs character.... Cultural identitycould hence not be closed and positive but necessarily alterable: aconception of otherness in flux. The performative per��for��ma��tive?adj.Relating to or being an utterance that peforms an act or creates a state of affairs by the fact of its being uttered under appropriate or conventional circumstances, as a justice of the peace uttering is the principle of atransgressive and transitional truth" (35). Jones/Baraka'spoetry and jazz criticism reveal the turnings of a culturalidentification, the articulations of the self that are products of whatOlaniyan calls an "agonistic agonistic/ag��o��nis��tic/ (ag?o-nis��tik) pertaining to a struggle or competition; as an agonistic muscle, counteracted by an antagonistic muscle. process of arriving at the'choice' [of self-identification] from the diverse andcontradictory 'open set of options'"(35). And in thisprocess of choice and articulation the self is created. In the poemsthat express these dialectic movements, the swing between Anglo-Westernand Afro-Western cultures and the swing between self-identity and thesearch for a useful black identity, Jones/Baraka is attempting to makeart out of his cosmopolitan sensibility. Since the culture has no essential basis, neither do the identitiesthat develop from engagements with it. Just as the culture is rootlessand ever in flux, so too is the process of identification. InJones/Baraka's case the best way to articulate these cultural andpersonal revolutions, how to imply these changes, is by turning jazzimprovisation into a literary and cultural philosophy, into a way ofstating poetically the "transgressive and transitional truth"of black identity. Baraka draws poetry and jazz improvisation togetherso that he can simultaneously exercise the culture's "diverseand mutually contradictory elements" while presenting a performanceof the self-in-transition and flux. What Olaniyan, is calling"articulatory practice" can also be called"improvisational practice." Patrick Roney argues that critics who investigate the work ofJones/Baraka are forced to formulate an escape from his essentialism essentialismIn ontology, the view that some properties of objects are essential to them. The “essence” of a thing is conceived as the totality of its essential properties. while trying to retrieve the poetry and explain its significance topostmodern claims of identity's constructedness. (2) According to according toprep.1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians.2. In keeping with: according to instructions.3. Roney these critics exacerbate these faulty escapes from essentialism bydeveloping bordered maps of Western culture that work to reify reify - To regard (something abstract) as a material thing. the West(2003, 412). Rather than searching for an out, Roney's examinationof Jones/Baraka's poetics illustrates that the poems are mutuallyindebted to Anglo-Western and African American cultures. That is, pieceslike "Tone Poem" express Jones/Baraka's dialecticrelation to both systems. But since those poems belong to both culturalsystems but neither exclusively, Roney writes that Jones/Barakacommunicates a Negro attitude of "in-betweenness," arealization that African American identity resides in the"no-man's land" between the Anglo-Western and AfricanAmerican cultural systems (406, 412). Roney reads Jones/Baraka's theory of black identity as anextension of his movement between African American culture African American culture or Black culture, in the United States, includes the various cultural traditions of African American communities. It is both part of, and distinct from American culture. The U.S. and Westernculture, the poet's willingness to accept multiple culturalapproaches at once; however, I want to suggest that Jones/Baraka'spoetics are born of a second, more subtle and provocative, movement inthe dialectic process. In that second shift Jones/Baraka moves betweenthe hope to name the individual self while also searching for theessential basis of black group identity. These shifts are bestrepresented in the poems from Jones/Baraka's transitional period,his turn from Beat modernism to Black Aesthetics. The transitional poemsexpress the dialectic swing between Anglo-Western and Afro-Westerncultures, between the construction of self-identity and the foundationof blackness. In the transitional poems Jones/Baraka theorizes theconnections between African American identity and jazz improvisation. Itis my contention that what Jones/Baraka's transitional poemsillustrate is that the essential black self is improvisational, that theblack self is, in fact, not foundational because jazz improvisationactually interrogates and subverts the search for essence. Jones/Baraka's transitional work battled against Westerncultural ideals that denied his individuality and humanity as an AfricanAmerican; that system was arranged in manifold ways to render himinvisible. Interestingly, hoping to express the cultural and personalchanges afoot in post-World War II America, the poet had to choose fromamong the expressive forms of the very cultural system that refused himin order to produce his self-identifying articulations or even toproduce new forms of articulation. But those lyrical attempts,nevertheless, force more change upon both Jones/Baraka and the culture.As Olaniyan explains, the complex structure of a culture's (or anindividual's) identity is "always modified" as a resultof engaging in an "articulatory practice." The image of Jones/Baraka as a practicing improviser is rarely theprominent one. Actually, the picture of Jones/Baraka as a poet steepedin and wedded to blackness-as-essence has been promoted at the expenseof the scribe who also penned the less aesthetically and ideologicallyconstrained transitional poems. The result of the more prevalentreadings--Black Arts Baraka--has been that Jones/Baraka is more oftenread as a political figure rather than as a literary figure whose workhas fluctuated in kind and quality, certainly, but has been, at bottom,part of a struggle to expose the complexities of African Americanculture and identity, and of American history. (3) In his transitionalpoems Jones/Baraka, like Langston Hughes Noun 1. Langston Hughes - United States writer (1902-1967)James Langston Hughes, Hughes , turns to jazz improvisation asa literary resource for articulating the human complexity of AfricanAmerican life. (4) My reading of Jones/Baraka and improvisation turns away fromtheories of the blues and jazz like those of Houston Baker. Like jazzstudies scholars, I want to move beyond the tensions of the Black ArtsMovement (BAM Bam(bäm), town (1996 pop. 70,100), Kerman prov., SE Iran, on the intermittent Bam River. Located on the western edge of the Dasht-e Lut, Bam is a trade center in a henna-growing region. Dates and other fruits are also grown; camels are raised. ) while also eschewing models such as Baker's"blues matrix" and Henry Louis Gates's"signifyin(g)" (Edwards 2002, 6). While it appears thatRoney's "no-man's land," resembles Baker'sconcepts of the blues matrix and the black (w)hole, both notions locateAfrican American culture and identity at a centralized "new orderof [black] existence ... [that] draws all events and objects into itshorizon" (1987, 154-55). Roney's image of liminality gives usone step away from Baker's "strategic essentialism Strategic essentialism is a major concept in postcolonial theory. The term was coined by the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It refers to a strategy that nationalities, ethnic groups or minority groups can use to present themselves. ," butthe second step, as this essay will demonstrate, is to see thatJones/Baraka's attempts to find these "black (w)holes"are thwarted by his literary improvisations. Rather than readingJones/Baraka's poetics as the simple knowledge of "blacknessas essence," we see that his transitional poems articulateblackness as a process of othering the self. In Jones/Baraka'stransitional period the black self is presented as a product ofspontaneous and "continual alteration" (Jones 2003, 247). (5) Jones/Baraka's process of othering the self is illustrative ofthe poet's cosmopolitan attitude (Posnock 1998, 44-45). (6) Likethe pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, Jones/Baraka sees that"music is the highest of the arts, because it gives us not merelythe external objectifications of Will but also sets before us forcontemplation the very processes of Will" (Dewey 1934, 296). Deweysees that these processes of will expose the ways that experience in itsvariety shapes the self into a fluid, ever-shifting entity.Jones/Baraka's transitional poems present the "processes ofWill" as the improvisational performance of identity. Thetransitional poems do not communicate the essence of blackness; theypresent compelling models for performing identity, the self. What is at stake in reconsidering Jones/Baraka's transitionalmoment is that we can learn how Jones/Baraka folded his personalphilosophical changes and political desires into literary aesthetic. Thetransitional poems communicate an influential theorization of jazzimprovisation to an American audience that is, at least, biracial bi��ra��cial?adj.1. Of, for, or consisting of members of two races.2. Having parents of two different races.bi��ra , ifnot multicultural. While my reading places Jones/Baraka within thecomplex picture of modern and postmodern American poetry Postmodern American Poetry is a 1994 poetry anthology edited by Paul Hoover; it is a Norton anthology published by W. W. Norton and Co.. The introduction identifies the use of postmodern with its early mention by Charles Olson, and identifies the field chosen as experimental poetry , I maintainthat the concept of othering the self also changes our relationship toJones/Baraka's Black Arts poetry. Instead of seeing him primarilyas the militant black essentialist and nationalist, we can readJones/Baraka's multiple changes as part of a radical theorizationof literary-intellectual practice framed by a conception ofimprovisation as a metaphor for both intellectual work and AfricanAmerican identity. I think that Jones/Baraka's "continualalteration," his changing same-ness, is what has made his theory ofliterary improvisation an influential element of contemporary criticismof African American culture from avant-garde jazz to hip-hop. Framing the Changes The best way to define Jones/Baraka's transitional interregnum INTERREGNUM, polit. law. In an established government, the period which elapses between the death of a sovereign and the election of another is called interregnum. It is also understood for the vacancy created in the executive power, and for any vacancy which occurs when there is no government. is to alight on the work published between 1960 and 1967, specificallythe poetry and music criticism from these years. This period oftransition is framed by the quintessential essays of Jones/Baraka'soeuvre, "Cuba Libre For other meanings of 'Cuba Libre' see Cuba libre (disambiguation)The Cuba Libre (IPA /'kuβ̞a'liβ̞ɾe/ in Spanish, /kjuːbʌ liːbɹeɪ/ in English) is a cocktail made of Cola, lime, and rum. " (1960) and "The Changing Same"(written 1966, published 1967). "Cuba Libre" is Jones'smemoir of his visit to post-revolution Cuba in 1960. The piece is adocument of Jones's attraction to the militants and intellectualsof the new Communist regime in Havana. Although the full foment fo��ment?tr.v. fo��ment��ed, fo��ment��ing, fo��ments1. To promote the growth of; incite.2. To treat (the skin, for example) by fomentation. ofJones's Marxist leanings would not emerge until the middle 1970s,the essay is a record of Jones's initial attempt to situate sit��u��ate?tr.v. sit��u��at��ed, sit��u��at��ing, sit��u��ates1. To place in a certain spot or position; locate.2. To place under particular circumstances or in a given condition.adj. theAfrican American Civil Rights Movement within an international context.Jones's search for new theories of political change is largely aproduct of his cosmopolitan modernist attitudes. While Jones'swriting is a seminal tour de force expression of the burgeoningpolitical radicalism that would become the Black Power and Black ArtsMovements, he maintains a suspicion of essentialist political orphilosophical theories. Completely turned toward radical Black Nationalism black nationalismU.S. political and social movement aimed at developing economic power and community and ethnic pride among African Americans. It was proclaimed by Marcus Garvey in the early 20th century, when many U.S. ,Jones/Baraka's essay "The Changing Same" is also a tourde force theorization of black essentialism. Jones/Baraka mines themultiple styles and genres of black popular music to illustrate aunifying aesthetic of music making, and thus, black identity formation.Unlike the political ideologies that he was just forming in "CubaLibre," Jones/Baraka has fully formed his aesthetic-cum-politicalsensibility in "The Changing Same." For Jones/Baraka blackmusic is held together by long-standing African sensibilities thatsurvived the middle passage, slavery, and Reconstruction to form gospel,blues, ragtime ragtime:see jazz. ragtimeU.S. popular music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries distinguished by its heavily syncopated rhythm. Ragtime found its characteristic expression in formally structured piano compositions, the accented left-hand , jazz, bebop bebopor bopJazz characterized by harmonic complexity, convoluted melodic lines, and frequent shifting of rhythmic accent. In the mid-1940s, a group of musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker, rejected the conventions of , free jazz, soul, and rhythm and blues rhythm and blues (R&B)Any of several closely related musical styles developed by African American artists. The various styles were based on a mingling of European influences with jazz rhythms and tonal inflections, particularly syncopation and the flatted blues chords. . Evenas the music evolves into separate genre, with differing performanceideals, Jones/Baraka finds that all the music is driven byimprovisation. Jones/Baraka suggests that improvisation changes themusic while maintaining itself as the core of African Americanaesthetics. Thus, at the core of African Americanidentity--blackness--is a need to change and shift while remainingwedded to the foundation of African sensibilities. The poems and jazz criticism, not to mention the plays, fiction,and cultural criticism, that appear between these two essays aredisplays of Jones/Baraka's gradual, complex, and sometimescontradictory ideological and aesthetic shifts from Beat modernist toBlack Arts Nationalist. The poems of Jones/Baraka's transitionalperiod are provocative and compelling because many of them presentanti-essentialist conceptions of identity rather than a progressiontoward the theories of Black Nationalism. The same can be said aboutJones/Baraka's jazz criticism. Even as he was trying to move towarda metaphysical theory of black music, Jones/Baraka found the musicresisting this essentialization. Across his first three collections, Preface to a Twenty VolumeSuicide Note A suicide note is a message left by someone who later attempts or commits suicide. It is estimated that 12-20% of suicides are accompanied by a note.[1] However, incidence rates may depend on race, method of suicide, and cultural differences and may reach rates as high [Preface] (1961), The Dead Lecturer (1964), and Black Magicwe find the poet grappling with the problems of identity, transition,and blackness by turning to the representative heroes of his personalhistory and eventually shedding them in favor of presenting the self aslyrical invention--the poet becomes the heroic interrogator of Americanideals. As the titles of the collections suggest Jones/Baraka'stransitions are attempts to kill off the old selves in favor of newer,improvised selves. It is a progression, if you will, that moves toward a"blacker" American sensibility. As I will demonstrate, inthese poems not only is the poet on the verge On the Verge (or The Geography of Yearning) is a play written by Eric Overmyer. It makes extensive use of esoteric language and pop culture references from the late nineteenth century to 1955. of expiring, so is theculture. Jones/Baraka's avatars of revival are the avenging cowboys andmasked comic book comic bookBound collection of comic strips, usually in chronological sequence, typically telling a single story or a series of different stories. The first true comic books were marketed in 1933 as giveaway advertising premiums. heroes invoked in poems such as "In Memory ofRadio," "Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today,""Black Dada Nihilismus," and "Green Lantern'sSolo." But what the poet realizes is that his calls to the LoneRanger Lone Rangerarch foe of criminals in early west. [Radio: “The Lone Ranger” in Buxton, 143–144; Comics: Horn, 460; TV: Terrace, II, 34–35]See : Crime FightingLone Ranger , Tom Mix, or the Red Lantern to save the land and the culturefail him because they are meant to ultimately protect the culture fromhis entrance to it. The poet's strident self-consciousness, hisawareness of his own ambiguity and the culture's narrowness, isspoken over and again in the transitional poems. For instance, in someof the poems from Preface, such as "Look for You Yesterday, HereYou Come Today," the speaker bemoans the banalities of hisliterary/cultural world by calling on his personal heroes. It is acommunity more interested in describing "celibate parties / torntrousers: Great Poets dying / with their strophes on" (Baraka/Jones1995, 17). And yet, the speaker, in the face of obviously distractingvagaries, is incapable of communicating "a simple straightforward /anger (17). The speaker's anger is also a product of hisuncomfortable realization that being alive is "so diffuse" andthat awareness draws forward a jolt of painful truth: "nobodyreally gives a damn" (Baraka/Jones 1995, 17). The formalpresentation of the poem, Jones/Baraka's inconsistent meter andstanza arrangement, also evokes the speaker's search for the propermode to express his anger and describe a self against the"diffuse" and uncaring elements of his world. He is trying todo whatever he can to reverse a feeling that his "life / seems over& done with" (19). Cowboy heroes like Tom Mix, Dickie Dare Dickie Dare was a comic strip created for Associated Press Features by Milton Caniff. It was the first strip he created, and it first appeared on July, 31, 1933. , and the Lone Ranger areraised as shields against culture's decline; and superheroes suchas Captain Midnight and Superman are called forth as reinforcements.However, the speaker is clear about his disillusionment DisillusionmentAdams, Nickloses innocence through WWI experience. [Am. Lit.: “The Killers”]Angry Young Mendisillusioned postwar writers of Britain, such as Osborne and Amis. [Br. Lit. , his sentimentalhope for the heroes of his radio days to lift up the culture'swilting frame: these heroes meet unceremonious deaths--"Tom Mixdead in a Boston Nightclub"--or they are ultimatelyincomprehensible or inscrutable--"Where is my Captain Midnightdecoder? / I can't understand what Superman is saying!"(Baraka/Jones 1995, 19). All of this wishing for heroic intervention is"a maudlin maud��lin?adj.Effusively or tearfully sentimental: "displayed an almost maudlin concern for the welfare of animals"Aldous Huxley.See Synonyms at sentimental. nostalgia / that comes on / like terrible thoughts aboutdeath" (20). Ultimately, the poet is left to his own lyrical skillsto protect himself or to revive the culture from its near death. At the end of the poem, the speaker is left with his "silverbullets all gone" and his "black mask trampled in thedust" (Baraka/Jones 1995, 21). The lone cowboy riding to save theculture is finished as a useful model. And even Tonto has abandoned thespeaker in favor of the comfort of the blues and Bessie Smith Noun 1. Bessie Smith - United States blues singer (1894-1937)Smith . What thepoem does not explain is what kind of defibrillating instruments areavailable to the poet in order to speak his straightforward anger, toresuscitate re��sus��ci��tatev.To restore consciousness, vigor, or life to. the culture, once the heroes have been dispatched ordemythologized. Bessie Smith is a great sign in this case. As the poemspeaks of the decline of the overarching heroes of American popularculture, Jones/Baraka follows Tonto out to the territory, so to speak,to find restoration in the blues and jazz. The poet's blues impulsepropels what the speaker calls his "quest" for revival. Theblues is the prime impetus: the title comes from a common blues lyricand describes one of the poet's "charms." (7) The hope toarticulate the blues feeling forces the poet to improvise, thus thesearch through "an avalanche of words" for the propertraditional Western sources--in this case, both Federico Garcia Lorca Gar��c����a Lor��ca? , Federico 1898-1936.Spanish poet and playwright. Considered Spain's leading modern poet for works such as Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter (1935) and Poet in New York and Charles Baudelaire are invoked as possible poetic saviors. One hint about the direction of Jones/Baraka's turning is inthe epigraph ep��i��graph?n.1. An inscription, as on a statue or building.2. A motto or quotation, as at the beginning of a literary composition, setting forth a theme. to his poem "Hymn for Lanie Poo poo? Slangintr.v. pooed, poo��ing, poosTo defecate.n.1. Excrement.2. An act of defecating.[Probably from pooh.] ," ArthurRimbaud's line, Vous etes des faux Negres (Baraka/Jones 1995, 6).(8) Against this fake Negro-ness, Jones/Baraka, like the modernists EzraPound and William Carlos Williams, is trying to find a way of making newpoetic modes and remaking American culture but in this case by recyclingthe old parts of black American culture to do so. This can only happenby entering the spaces between the old cultural systems and the new onesbeing improvised--between the old selves and new identities.Jones/Baraka's innovation is to turn this aesthetic concern intoboth a philosophical and political focus. Turning away from faux Negres and himself at once leaves thespeaker in a liminal liminal/lim��i��nal/ (lim��i-n'l) barely perceptible; pertaining to a threshold. lim��i��naladj.Relating to a threshold.liminalbarely perceptible; pertaining to a threshold. space between both the old culture and old self.(9) This is an improvisational space where the poet can merge politicalhopes and aesthetic ideals. Jones/Baraka's rejection andimprovisation lead to new realities: a cultural critique with apolitical edge because the moral stand behind it is about creating a newAmerican culture, a culture where change and improvisation are theprivileged states of being. This is typified by transitional poems suchas "The Bridge," named after Sonny Rollins's classic hardbop Hard bop is a style of jazz that is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music. Hard bop incorporates influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. composition. There, the poet acknowledges that, "... thechanges are difficult, when / you hear them, & know they are all inyou, the chords / of your disorder meddle with your would bedisguises" (Baraka/Jones 1995, 31). This lyrical improvisationserves as self-invention. The voice acknowledges that recognizing thepossibilities of self-naming is a product of speaking them, articulatingthem so that they can be known. For Jones/Baraka the openness of culture (and its traditions)remains possible only when the structural incompleteness of the culturalfabric, its as yet unwoven Adj. 1. unwoven - not woven; "tapa cloth is an unwoven fabric made by pounding bark into a thin sheet"woven - made or constructed by interlacing threads or strips of material or other elements into a whole; "woven fabrics"; "woven baskets"; "the incidents woven threads are exploited through renewal adinfinitum ad in��fi��ni��tum?adv. & adj.To infinity; having no end.[Latin ad, to + . This cultural openness creates the space for the antagonisticbut cooperative transactions between the self and the culture. AsJones/Baraka illustrates in "The Bridge," the self becomesreal through its internal discourse and in dialogue with both AfricanAmerican traditions and Western culture. The antagonism stems from theefforts of the individual to overcome the daunting and enablinginfluence that the culture has on the self in order to make personalizedchoices about the process of self-identification--stepping away from"would be disguises." The self is performed through interplayor in counterpoint to those disguises, like jazz musicians working theharmonic and rhythmic angles of a musical composition to respond to eachother's ideas in order to improvise their internal compositions. Jazz improvisation is the elongation of two musical concepts: onone hand, the African and African American traditions of spontaneous butdisciplined creation in vocal or instrumental music and the Westernmusical idea, "obbligato." While ethnomusicologists such asPortia Maultsby and Paul Berliner have charted the routes of relationbetween African musical methods and African American musical styles,(10) I want to focus on obbligato because the term actually helps put usback in mind of Olaniyan's idea of articulation. In his bookDrifting on a Read: Jazz as a Model for Writing Michael Jarrett explainsthat obbligato is an instruction presented to the musician in thelead-notes of a piece of sheet music. The term usually refers to aparticular instrument (i.e., violino obbligato) and literally means"part that must not be omitted; the opposite is ad libitum ad libitumwithout restraint.ad libitum feedingfood available at all times with the quantity and frequency of consumption being the free choice of the animal. "(1998, 61). (11) Jarrett later writes that, "throughmisunderstanding or carelessness, [obbligato] has come to mean a mereaccompanying part that may be omitted if necessary. As a result, onemust decide in each individual case whether obbligato means'obbligato' or 'ad libitum'" (61). The decisionthat the musician makes is between the written part and the chance toimprovise an accompaniment to the charted melody. Improvisation evolvesout of obbligato but in jazz it is more than embellishment; jazzimprovisation makes the "optional" obligatory. "Theimproviser can't play only what's required" Jarrettwrites, because "[he or she is] bound to contribute a certainexcess" (64). And in that excess the line between scriptedcomposition and improvised composition is worried, any and alldistinctions between the composition and the improvisation become"socially constructed and ultimately incomplete" (64). LikeOlaniyan's description of articulation, Jarrett's explanationof the dialectic play between the musician's improvised ideas andthe composed text is the expression of a series of aesthetic choices.The improvised composition presents both the musician's andculture's fluctuations; improvisation is a way of articulating theagon between the individual artist, the musical setting, the compositionitself, and the larger social matrix that shapes the aesthetic. Improvisation, however, is also about revising or othering allthose parts of aesthetic statement. The construction of an improvisedsolo is designed to articulate the music's openness to renewal andrevision while also enabling the public expression of the self asperformative--both are othered in the play. When musicians improvisethey are detailing some elements of their individual and/or ensemblemusical educations and jazz performances, as well as creatingspontaneous new compositions. Improvisation is a useful name for theprocess of self-identification. In his socio-musicological history Blues People (1963), Barakaexplains African American musical tradition as the expression of AfricanAmerican experience. Even though "jazz and blues are Westernmusics, products of Afro-American culture," what makes those musicssignificant, Baraka writes, is that they belong to a people'shistory of oppression and marginality in the West and therefore theyalter the way Western history is narrated once those musics are invokedas a frame of reference (Jones/Baraka 1963, 70). So, embedded in themusical styles, especially something like bebop, is a "distinctelement of social protest, not only in the sense that it was music thatseemed antagonistically non conformist con��form��ist?n.A person who uncritically or habitually conforms to the customs, rules, or styles of a group.adj.Marked by conformity or convention: , but also that the musicians whoplayed it were loudly outspoken about who they thought they were"(23). Bebop is important here because it signifies a break between swingera big band and small combos, and late jazz--gospel-infused hard-bopand avant-garde free jazz--of the 1950s and 1960s. According to ScottDeVeaux's analysis in The Birth of Bebop (1996), bop must be takenas a singular music independent of the jazz that preceded it. While theharmonics, speed, technical skills, and rhythmic dexterity needed toplay bop separate it from the recordings and compositions of artistssuch as Jelly Roll Morton Noun 1. Jelly Roll Morton - United States jazz musician who moved from ragtime to New Orleans jazz (1885-1941)Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe Morton, Morton , Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington, it isthe style of improvisation that marks the music's emergence andbreak from the preceding jazz aesthetic. Bebop musicians, for instance, pianists like Thelonious Monk andBud Powell, proved, writes Jones/Baraka, that so called "changes," i.e., the repeated occurrences of certain chords basic to the melodic and harmonic structure of a tune, are almost arbitrary. That is, [the chords] need not be stated, and that since certain chords infer certain improvisatory uses of them, why not improvise on what the chords infer rather than playing the inference itself. (Jones/Baraka 1963, 77) While bebop refers to its own history, to the history of Americanmusic, it is always improvising away from its own generic composition,its structure as music. Jones/Baraka's analysis pulls togetherOlaniyan's reading of articulatory practice and Jarrett'sillustration of the obligations of improvisation. Bebop's style ofimprovisation obliged the musicians to compose intimate expressions ofwho they were. Performance and identity are intimately bound together. In his classic essay "Jazz and the White Critic" (1963),Jones/Baraka argues that the general misunderstanding of jazz and bebopsince the mid-1940s has shaped a critical status quo [Latin, The existing state of things at any given date.] Status quo ante bellum means the state of things before the war. The status quo to be preserved by a preliminary injunction is the last actual, peaceable, uncontested status which preceded the pending controversy. that hopes to makethe music middlebrow, institutionalizes it under a rubric RUBRIC, civil law. The title or inscription of any law or statute, because the copyists formerly drew and painted the title of laws and statutes rubro colore, in red letters. Ayl. Pand. B. 1, t. 8; Diet. do Juris. h.t. that deniesany notions of cultural change or the vitality of African Americanculture as a shaping force. In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently , according to Baraka, whitejazz critics ignore the music's evolution in order to ignore theways in which the music has begun to express the philosophical,political, and cultural desires of African Americans. However, the bestjazz criticism will illustrate that the music is as much the emotionalexpression of a culture as it is a technical style of music making. Focusing on emotional expression leads directly to seeing Negroculture at work within Western history. The critic then realizes that, Negro music, like the Negro himself, is strictly an American Phenomenon, and we have got to set up standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend on our native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and local cultural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical writing or commentary about it. (Jones/Baraka 1968, 20) This quotation shows what seems like a common sense criticalposition. But Jones/Baraka's subtly stated objective is to bringblack cultural tools to bear on the criticism of black music--if whitecritics are to continue writing about jazz or any other black music (andsurely Jones/Baraka knew that white criticism of "black"cultural production would continue), they must begin to learn aboutAfrican American history African American history is the portion of American history that specifically discusses the African American or Black American ethnic group in the United States. Most African Americans are the descendants of African slaves held in the United States from 1619 to 1865. and culture as well as incorporating thoseNegro cultural ideas into their critical vernaculars and theories.Ultimately those critics are forced to revise their conceptions of blacklife by refashioning their critical operating modes, by reconsidering,in fact, what about African American culture is "native" toAmerican culture. A third and interesting valence of this idea ariseswhen thinking of Jones/Baraka's poetry during his transitionalperiod. Jones/Baraka is also being self-reflexive; if improvisationbecomes the name for identification, then self-realization, even withreferences to its history, is always moving away from essence. And forcritics of his poems, rather than decontextualizing them from particularpolitical and cultural histories, reading them in relation to thecultural systems that he is negotiating will force critics of Americanliterature to expand their critical vernaculars as well as re-evaluatethe American literary tradition in relation to African American culturalhistory. The Transitional Poems Within the same collection, The Dead Lecturer, we find both a poetwho realizes improvisation's power in "The Bridge" andone tormented by the dangerous reality that spiritual focus creates in"An Agony. As Now"--"I am inside someone / who hatesme" (Baraka/Jones 1995, 60). There are multiple references to fleshand body in The Dead Lecturer that lead readers to see that thecollection signals a turning away from old physical and spiritual formsin order for new forms to develop: It is a human love, I live inside. A bony skeleton you recognize as words or simple feeling. But it has no feeling. As the metal, is hot, it is not, given to love. It burns the thing Inside it. And that thing screams. (Baraka/Jones 1995, 61) These articulations are also present in poems such as "Balboa,the Entertainer" and "Snake Eyes." These poems describeidentity as poetic experience; identity is a process rather than areification re��i��fy?tr.v. re��i��fied, re��i��fy��ing, re��i��fiesTo regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.[Latin r of static, stereotypical notions of blackness. "Let mypoems be a graph / of me," Jones/Baraka proclaims in "Balboa,The Entertainer"(54). The poet is asking us to see hisarticulations reshaping him. Thus, language becomes the poetic line,"where flesh / drops off," where love dies and "does not/ stretch to your body's / end," where, finally, "without/ preface, / music trails" (54-55) its death, is fleshy fleshy(flesh��e)1. pertaining to or resembling flesh.2. characterized by abundant flesh. andepidermal EpidermalReferring to the thin outermost layer of the skin, itself made up of several layers, that covers and protects the underlying dermis (skin).Mentioned in: Antiangiogenic Therapy, Histiocytosis Xepidermal , not spiritual or physical as such--once the flesh drops off,music lies in the ready, new identities can be improvised. (12) The skin only hides the chaotic action of self-identification--skinonly holds it in place or masks the spiritual propensity for change. Inthe poem "Snake Eyes" the "old brown thing," is theforcefully shed skin of the body, dropped off in favor of a newlinguistic beginning, a new music, and a new self. Baraka asks,"what is meat / to do, that is driven to its end / by words"(Baraka/Jones 1995, 109)? (13) The shedding of old skins and the maskingof identity is what allows for the poetics of self-creation. Forinstance, masking as Rinehart allows Ralph Ellison's narrator NARRATOR. A pleader who draws narrs serviens narrator, a sergeant at law. Fleta, 1. 2, c. 37. Obsolete. inInvisible Man to see around corners and behind the meanings of things.Jones/Baraka's poems perform the drama of a similar realization. IfBaraka's theory of identity has a foundation then it is in theironic, ambivalent, blissfully protean pro��te��anadj.Readily taking on varied shapes, forms, or meanings.proteanchanging form or assuming different shapes. essence. Shedding the skin of theBeat poet clears the bones and prepares the soul for the shape of a newvisage. But attached to this exuberant realization is an equallyambivalent realization of the dialectic play between the self and theculture, the self and the community. Take, for instance, "The Liar," also from The DeadLecturer, where the speaker articulates a self in transition while alsoillustrating the possibility of identification through self-naming. What I thought was Love in me, I find a thousand instances as fear. (Of the tree's shadow winding around the chair, a distant music of frozen birds rattling in the cold. Where ever I go to claim my flesh, there are entrances of spirit. And even its comforts are hideous uses I strain to understand. (Baraka/Jones 1995, 113) The speaker begins by calling attention to his own fears about thematter of self-realization. Love materializes as fear in line 3. By line10 the speaker's acceptance of his spiritual self subverts thecomforts of self-awareness. What is worth grasping onto in these earlylines is the speaker's claim of his "flesh." If we arereading this as an expression of the historical moment, that claim hastwo valences: on one hand this claim is an oppositional act ofself-assertion against a racist socio/political system. On the otherhand, we can read this as the speaker's effort to claim his Negrobody, an effort to push into blackness. This is part of the search forthe essence of blackness. The discomfort, the strain, and failure tounderstand the spiritual entrances reminds us of the dialect play ofarticulation--movement between two cultural zones in an effort to namethe self. That Baraka's poem is part of an on-going "articulatorypractice" is amplified by the series of ideas beginning in line 11that play the private "changes" of the soul publicly,antagonistically. Though I am a man who is loud on the birth of his ways. Publicly redefining each change in my soul, as if I had predicted them, and profited, biblically, even tho their chanting weight, erased familiarity from my face. A question I think, an answer, whatever sits counting the minutes till you die. (Baraka/Jones 1995, 113) The self is literally in transition during the public redefinitionand articulation of that self. Notice as well, that the structure of thepoem on the page is in the process of transition: it disintegrates as itflows down to the re-collected final thoughts. As the speaker changes,so does the form of the articulation; Jones/Baraka defamiliarizes theform of the poem. And when we reach the end of the lines we findourselves confronted again with an ambiguous speaker. When they say, "It is Roi who is dead?" I wonder who will they mean? (Baraka/Jones 1995, 113) Which Roi indeed--should we be concerned with the Howard flunky flun��kyalso flun��key ?n. pl. flun��kies also flun��keys1. A person of slavish or unquestioning obedience; a lackey.2. One who does menial or trivial work; a drudge.3. ,the dishonorably dis��hon��or��a��ble?adj.1. Characterized by or causing dishonor or discredit.2. Lacking integrity; unprincipled.dis��hon discharged Air Force enlistee, the Beat bohemian, theVillage scribe, or the Newark schoolboy? Rather than the announcement ofan essential Roi, Jones/Baraka's poem announces that skin does notcount outside of its contextualization Contextualization of language useContextualization is a word first used in sociolinguistics to refer to the use of language and discourse to signal relevant aspects of an interactional or communicative situation. , that the chaos of theself-realization, the improvisations of the soul do not end in a simpleself. The self is altered, othered continuously. We see "The Liar" is related to the avant-garde poeticsof New American Poetry marked by the efficient innovations of FrankO'Hara, the formal deconstructions of Charles Olsen, RobertCreeley, and the Black Mountain school, and the angel-headed Whitmanismsof Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." Like these middletwentieth-century American poets, Jones/Baraka replaces older standardforms--the refinement of high modernism--with an alternative,avant-garde, and revolutionary formal modernism. And yet, we rarely readof Jones/Baraka's influence on poets like Creeley and O'Haraboth of whom were edited by and published in Jones/Baraka'sliterary magazines Floating Bear and Yugen. (14) UnderstandingJones/Baraka's theorization of improvisation also helps usunderstand better the innovations of post-war American poetry. Thinking of Baraka's re-descriptive improvisations of blackidentity and the poetic tradition, Nathaniel Mackey calls Baraka'simprovisations acts of "artistic othering" (1999, 513). (15)As a way of overcoming his status as a social other, Mackey explains,Baraka invented forms and concepts that altered the poetic tradition.Like a good modernist poet Jones/Baraka's best work stands as theunion of critical activity with a personal poetics. The merger is whatT. S. Eliot calls "creation in the labour of the artist"(1975, 74). Mackey's reading suggests that Jones/Baraka'spoems in the 1960s turn jazz's assault on the self into thesurrealist practice of dereglement de sens (178, 124); in this caseimprovisation becomes an act of creative criticism or critical artistry.(16) The most significant proposition that emerges from artisticothering is that "the self" is presented as an action ratherthan as a static thing. (17) This turn away from status as "theother" to othering-the-self is encapsulated in the word forjazz's bedrock rhythmic movement-"swing." Riffing onBaraka's ideas in Blues People, Brent Hayes Edwards explains thatwhen swing becomes a noun, is turned into a genre rather than aexpressive musical movement, it becomes stationary, immobile, it losesthe "elusive and performative connotations of what is in its verbform a paradigmatic black cultural action or process" (1999, 590).Othering swings the self from noun to verb, from thing to action;Edwards calls this self in process a "verbal noun" (590). This is another moment where the poet's questioning (andquesting) voice echoes Ellison's protagonist. Both arise from theunderground of American culture to speak through a bebop-infusedimprovisational structure. The questions at the end of "TheLiar" point to Jones/Baraka's own disappearing act; they pointto the poet's recognition of his own powers of invisibility, if youwill. Paralleling Jones/Baraka's poem with Ellison's fictionalso draws Jones's public articulation of private philosophicalchanges alongside of Ellison's ironic bluesy final statement:"who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak foryou" (1995, 581). But unlike Ellison's line or his politicalstance in the 1960s, Jones's poem (like all his poems of thetransitional period) does not beg inference from the reader. Instead,the political gesture--the "public redefining" of blackidentity--is explicit. However, Jones/Baraka's transitional visionchallenged the possibility of separating private philosophical changesand public political desires in the context of African American lifewell before that discussion had become a worn out track in Americancriticism. His poems ask: how do Negroes develop and maintain theprivate structures of individual identities and personal philosophies ina cultural system that works to eradicate those private sensibilities,that works quite well at dehumanizing and essentializing them and theircultural particulars? The Negro's act of publicly asserting herindividuality or intellectual curiosity in the face of a historicallyracist social system is a political act. This is the significance ofJones/Baraka's poetics--he asserts his "will to change"as one part of the process of the transformative work of creating a newAfrican American sensibility, a new American culture. As we see in "Tone Poem" this process of verbalization isat work even in some of the poems contained in Black Magic. Thatcollection contains "Black Art," the poem that ostensibly os��ten��si��ble?adj.Represented or appearing as such; ostensive: His ostensible purpose was charity, but his real goal was popularity. crystallized the lyrical aesthetic of the Black Arts Movement. In thispoem Jones/Baraka, fully free of "Roi" (and finally turnedinto blackness), communicates both the desire for an essentializedworld--"We want a black poem. And a/ Black World"--and thatthe route to that world will be arranged by "Assassin poems, Poemsthat shoot/guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys" (Baraka/Jones1995, 142). Undoubtedly, in his turn toward achieving this black world,the poet has also turned to essentialize es��sen��tial��ize?tr.v. es��sen��tial��ized, es��sen��tial��iz��ing, es��sen��tial��izesTo express or extract the essential form of. every other racial, ethnic, andpolitical group, albeit negatively. Yet the poet of Black Magic can beread as one still in transition. Take the poem "Gatsby'sTheory of Aesthetics." The poem's title is telling:Gatsby's aesthetic (as described by his author, F. ScottFitzgerald) is shaped by a remarkable ability to shed old skins, to maskand unmask himself, and to improvise new possibilities for himself.Jones/Baraka understands that theory rather well. In fact, Jones/Barakawants to push that theory toward its lyrical and philosophical limits. Ifind the poet's reference to Fitzgerald both clever and mystifying mys��ti��fy?tr.v. mys��ti��fied, mys��ti��fy��ing, mys��ti��fies1. To confuse or puzzle mentally. See Synonyms at puzzle.2. To make obscure or mysterious. .On one hand, Fitzgerald sets Gatsby's own masking against thenovel's "jazz age" setting, Tom Buchannan's misnamedreference to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of ColorAgainst White World Supremacy (1920), and the infamous image of Negroesmasking as East Egg millionaires. On the other hand, Jones/Baraka'sopen borrowing suggests that he can perform outside of raciallydetermined cultural circumstances. Poetry's aim, Jones/Baraka writes, should be the exposition of"difficult meanings. Meanings not already catered to. Poetry/ aimsat reviving, say, a sense of meaning's possibility andubiq-/uitousness.// Identification can be one term of thatpossibility" (Baraka/Jones 1995, 132). While Fitzgerald'sfinal image of Gatsby in the novel explains the danger of unmediated Adj. 1. unmediated - having no intervening persons, agents, conditions; "in direct sunlight"; "in direct contact with the voters"; "direct exposure to the disease"; "a direct link"; "the direct cause of the accident"; "direct vote"direct self-invention, Jones/Baraka's notion of Jay Gatsby suggests thatidentity can be articulated through the linguistic exchange between theprivate self and the cultural network. The culture's openness iswhat gives rise to meaning's possibility and ubiquity. And in thatexchange, the self also becomes open ended and "othered." InJones/Baraka's improvisation, the danger of self-invention is thatit also others the culture through dialogue. The best example of this self-othering comes in "Numbers,Letters," a poem that examines the ambiguity of the self still inprocess, still an action. Baraka wrote this poem sometime in 1964, theyear he gave up his Jewish wife, his bi-ethnic family and left GreenwichVillage for the blacker environs of Harlem. The series of questions thatBaraka proposes in the opening stanza creates a crucial space forcritique. If you're not home, where are you? Where'd you go? What were you doing when gone? When you come back, better make it good. What was you doing down there, freakin' off with white women, hangin' out with Queens, say it straight to be understood straight, put it flat and real in the street where the sun comes and the moon comes and the cold wind in winter waters your eyes. Say what you mean, dig it out put it down, and be strong about it. I cant say who I am unless you agree I'm real I cant be anything I'm not Except these words pretend to life not yet explained, so here's some feeling for you see how you like it, what it reveals, and that's Me. (Baraka/Jones 1995, 136) Exactly who is the "you" being addressed here? PhilipBrian Harper has written that in Baraka's Black Arts poems thisaddress of the second person encompasses the group of Negroes stilluninitiated, unconvinced about the coming revolution of blackness. (18)However, notice the tonal change and perspective shift to first personin lines 14 and 15.That change forces a revaluation RevaluationA calculated adjustment to a country's official exchange rate relative to a chosen baseline. The baseline can be anything from wage rates to the price of gold to a foreign currency. In a fixed exchange rate regime, only a decision by a country's government (i.e. of the openingstanza. Take note of the way that Baraka builds into those lines anantiphonal an��tiph��o��nal?adj.1. Relating to or resembling an antiphon.2. Answering responsively, as in antiphony.3. connection between the speaker and the audience.Baraka's opening stanza may be self addressed--"Amiri, ifGreenwich Village isn't home, where are you; darken your aestheticso that it speaks a deep, strong blackness." But this paraphrasedoes not solve the mystery of the poem since lines 14 and 15 demandacknowledgment or agreement from both the speaker and his audience:"I can't say who I am/ unless you agree I'm real." The speaker's hope is for both self-actualization andacknowledgement. But notice the confusion that sets in for both of thesedesires. The speaker cannot be anything "except these words pretend/ to life not yet explained" in lines 16-18. However, the stanzaturns even further from firm ground when we see that while the wordsfunction metaphorically--they imagine a future not yet available--thefeeling the language enables in line 21 is "Me," the speaker.Very quickly though, we learn that whatever is real about the voice,speaking alone doesn't reveal identity. Unless you agree I'm real that I can feel whatever beats hardest at our black souls I am real, and I can't say who I am. Ask me if I know, I'll say yes, I might say no. Still, ask. I'm Everett LeRoi Jones, 30 yrs old. A black nigger in the universe. A long breath singer, wouldbe dancer, strong from years of fantasy and study. All this time then, for what's happening now. All that spilling of white ether, clocks in ghostheads lips drying and rewet, eyes opening and shut, mouths churning. I am a meditative man, And when I say something it's all of me saying, and all the things that make me, have formed me, colored me this brilliant reddish night. I will say nothing that I feel is lie, or unproven by the same ghostclocks, by the same riders always move so fast with the word slung over their backs or in saddlebags, charging down Chinese roads. I carry some words, some feeling, some life in me. My heart is large as my mind this is a messenger calling, over here, over here, open your eyes and your ears and your souls; today is the history we must learn to desire. There is no guilt in love. (Baraka/Jones 1995, 136-37) While Jones/Baraka invites us to acknowledge him as the speaker ofthese lines, he explains in lines 27 and 28 that he might not know howto respond to our call. The call and response implicit in Baraka'saddress of the second person makes this poem a blues poem like theballads in Sterling Brown's Southern Road (1932). However, like theavant-garde jazz being developed out of a revaluation to the jazztradition, Jones/Baraka is exercising an avant-garde improvisation ofold blues forms to mark the personal changes he's articulating inthis poem. When Jones/Baraka exclaims, "I'm Everett LeRoiJones," his "long breath" singing is an improvised riffon the performance styles of bluesmen like Jimmy Rushing and Big JoeTurner For the ice hockey player see Joe TurnerBig Joe Turner (born Joseph Vernon Turner Jr., May 18, 1911 – November 24, 1985)[1] was an American blues shouter from Kansas City, Missouri. . (19) Baraka's ecstatic announcement communicates all thethings that make him, form him, and color him. Just as we are left wondering which Roi is dead in "TheLiar," we must ask of "Numbers, Letters" who is thespeaker who eventually calls us to a blackness made in his likeness? Ishe or this blackness identifiable or knowable? Equally important to thisidea is Ralph Ellison's insightful critique of blues singers. Theblues singer's power, Ellison tells us, comes from her ability toillustrate through her song "some notion of our better selves"(1995, 214). If Jones/Baraka's poems tell us something about ourbetter selves, then what is compelling about his transitionalimprovisations is that they speak to the open and complex possibilitiesof identifying as an African American rather than reifying anyessentialist concepts of black identity. "This is a messengercalling," Jones/Baraka tells us; in the midst Adv. 1. in the midst - the middle or central part or point; "in the midst of the forest"; "could he walk out in the midst of his piece?"midmost of the social andpolitical revolution the poems are messages toward realizing our betterselves. When Jones/Baraka turned to jazz as an artistic and criticalresource he was searching for a way to escape boundaries between poetryand music, music criticism and philo-political theories, literary andpolitical statement. In the transitional poems Jones/Baraka expresses anotion of identity as artistic and improvisational. In his study ofaesthetics, Art as Experience Dewey explains that while works of artoften spring from or start experiences that are enjoyable in themselves,the experiences do not become artful until the individual self is"organically" implicated in the very purpose of the art. Deweywrites, "it is in the purposes he entertains and acts upon that anindividual most completely exhibits and realizes his intimateselfhood" (1934, 276-77). What Jones/Baraka found in jazzimprovisation was a way to articulate the self in battle with theculture, with history, and against the self. And like the soloist in themidst of composition, the poetic voice within the transitional poems isdrawing together both public and private cultural desires. When jazz musicians improvise, they are playing out their ownprivate individual jazz educations, their own jazz histories against themusical context in which they are performing. This usually means thatthey are improvising within the universe of the composed song and inexchange with their fellow performers whose personal styles andimprovisations explain their own trajectories of education and history.When a musician takes a solo she is in the process of communicating anaesthetic statement about herself as performer but also of theexistential self. She is making art. And, although the goals of theperformance ensemble carry their own weight, the most important goal isalways entertainment. But I would argue that part of what makes modernjazz and modern improvisation entertaining is that in the midst of jazzgroup performance we hear the musicians present private philosophicalideas about the music, the culture, and the self in a public context.Considering jazz improvisation in light of Dewey's concept ofartistic experience what we realize about improvisation is that thesoloist's esthetic es��thet��icadj.Variant of aesthetic. expresses both the shell and the kernel ofartistic expression: art as "enjoyable experience" and art as"intimate selfhood." Dewey explains further [I]n art as an experience actuality and the possibility of identity, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.... The significance of art as experience is, therefore, incomparable for the adventure of philosophic thought. (Dewey 1934, 297) It is important to explain here that I am not claiming that everysolo by every jazz musician equals a profound philosophical statement.Instead we should consider that improvisation (art) becomes experiencewhen it is superb, excellent music making. Rather than see eachimprovisation of a particular artist as an individual aestheticstatement, we should hear them as being part of a larger, on-goingaesthetic process of stylization styl��ize?tr.v. styl��ized, styl��iz��ing, styl��iz��es1. To restrict or make conform to a particular style.2. To represent conventionally; conventionalize. , self-identification. That is,Jones/Baraka's transitional poems suggest ways of re-imaginingAmerican identity as improvisational while also suggesting an alternateway of negotiating the poet's aesthetic and political changes.Ultimately, rereading the transitional poems will help us placeJones/Baraka at a crucial axis: his poems exemplify an African Americancultural attitude while also communicating a specifically Americanphilosophical perspective. Literary historian Cynthia Young writes that during the early 1960sJones/Baraka wanted his literary work to be more than self-revelation;he wanted the work to assert that "cultural production was centralto the forging of oppositional identities" (2001, 12). Young arguesfurther that at the heart of the work by radical black thinkers andrevolutionary African American organizations during the 1960s was ananti-essentialist conception of politics and identity. While people likeJones/Baraka were in the process of trying to develop new AfricanAmerican subjectivities they were not interested in fashioning"vehicles for a narrow identity politics" (13). Instead, Youngexplains, at its inception radical intellectual work likeJones/Baraka's sought to link local racial and ethnic oppression to global patterns of Western imperialism and economic exploitation. Often, this meant building coalitions across race, ethnicity, gender, generation and national lines. It meant crafting a new theoretical and political language and adapting the rhetoric and tactics of Third World anticolonial movements for First World. (Young 2001, 13) Jones/Baraka's key to revolution, to the opening up of newlinguistic systems and the cross-pollination of theoretical practices,turned on gathering black Americans around the cultural markers of their"black past" and "black present." Jones/Barakabelieved that by incorporating African American folk culture intocritical and political theories, black people would have better accessto the discourse of political revolution because they would already beliterate in that cultural sign system. This literacy is more strikingwhen one considers that Jones/Baraka was interested in using revolutionnot only to forward a new African American ethos but in so doing toshift American life and culture along with black philosophical change.During this transitional period, when he was in search of a culturalform that would draw the whole of African America and its multiplecultural practices together, jazz improvisation stood out as the mostpowerful aesthetic and philosophical option for Jones/Baraka. Unfortunately, instead of maintaining his deep commitment toambiguity and improvisation, in the late 1960s and 1970s Baraka'spoetics turned full speed into the blackness of "Black Art";the poet's nationalist ideology ultimately fostered an imprisonment ImprisonmentSee also Isolation.Alcatraz Islandformer federal maximum security penitentiary, near San Francisco; “escapeproof.” [Am. Hist.: Flexner, 218]Altmark, theGerman prison ship in World War II. [Br. Hist. within a rhetorical system that was essentialist, politically andphilosophically. As Philip Brian Harper has explained this turn began topose immediate difficulties for Baraka and other Black Arts writersbecause the desire for a concrete black cultural foundation rather thanan acceptance of the myriad possibilities for performing blacknessforced those artists to divide themselves further from the unconvertedpopulace they hoped to turn toward black political solidarity. Harper writes that the "[BAM's] primary objective andcontinual challenge [was not the identification of] the external entityagainst which the black masses are distinguished--this is easy enough todo--but rather [the negotiation of] the division within the blackpopulation itself" (1993, 239). As Harper describes, thenegotiations of Black Arts nationalist poets like Sonia Sanchez, JuneJordan, and Baraka were not attempts to "overcome [the social andpolitical division] but rather repeatedly to articulate it in the nameof [achieving] black consciousness" (239). That hope forunification, while politically expedient at that historical moment,eventually proved to be philosophically and politically empty--thatmixture of expediency and emptiness ultimately led to implosion implosion/im��plo��sion/ (im-plo��zhun) see flooding. im��plo��sionn.1. of theBAM and, for Baraka, an eventual turn to the theories of Third WorldMarxism. Regardless of this Marxist turn, Baraka continues to be read inrelationship to the black essentialism and the untenable reductive re��duc��tive?adj.1. Of or relating to reduction.2. Relating to, being an instance of, or exhibiting reductionism.3. Relating to or being an instance of reductivism. andracist positions he held during the heights of BAM. Even though Barakahas publicly repudiated those positions, he remains a fractious frac��tious?adj.1. Inclined to make trouble; unruly.2. Having a peevish nature; cranky.[From fraction, discord (obsolete). figurein American culture not because of his poetics but in spite of them.While Baraka has produced elegant and powerful poems since hisreincarnation as a Marxist, his national literary reputation has beensnuffed largely because of his earlier efforts to articulate thecriteria for achieving a unified black consciousness. However, Baraka has spent a lot of time during the last thirtyyears describing his core personal philosophy, a critical attitude thatprivileges improvisational performance: "I have changed over theyears because I have struggled to understand [the] world.... People whoquestion change cannot really be trying to do this. How can you be inthe world and your ideas over the years remain the same. Those whoquestion change are intellectually lazy, or suffer from the passivity ofthe overstuffed or cryptically satisfied" (Fleming 2003, 25). Butunderstand, playing the changes is not enough. Baraka's career is astudy in playing his own intellectual changes, and he hasn't alwaysimprovised very well. Even so, younger critics have illustrated that thecritical concepts about the intersection of black music and thephilosophical concerns of African American lifethat Jones/Barakagenerated during his transitional period continue to be crucial. In the work of critics such as Tricia Rose and Mark Anthony Neal Mark Anthony Neal is an Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Program in African and African American Studies and Director of the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies (ICUSS) at Duke University. Neal will be co-convening with Neil De Marchi and Annabel J. wecan find the extensions of Jones/Baraka's theories of improvisationpresented as a way into the contemporary African American music African American music (also called black music, formerly known as race music) is an umbrella term given to a range of music and musical genres emerging from or influenced by the culture of African Americans, who have long constituted a large ethnic minority of the of thepost-soul era. Rose's crucial study Black Noise: Rap Music andBlack Culture in Contemporary America (1994) provides the best firststep toward the concentrated interrogation interrogationIn criminal law, process of formally and systematically questioning a suspect in order to elicit incriminating responses. The process is largely outside the governance of law, though in the U.S. of hip-hop culture.Especially significant is Rose's illustration that constructingsampled music into significant sonic backdrops for hip-hop performancerequires musical knowledge as rigorous as that required for intelligentjazz improvisation. As well, Neal's criticism in What the MusicSaid (1999) and Soul Babies (2002) pushes beyond the ideas ofJones/Baraka's Blues People to discuss the way that black music inthe popular frame of soul music and hip-hop carries the narratives ofcontemporary black life. Neal, like Rose, is interested in fusing elements of jazz and R& B history with hip-hop culture in order to communicate criticallythe material political concerns of African American life. Interestingly,both of these writers refuse to couch their critiques in the rhetoric ofBlack Arts essentialism or retrograde nationalist ideas about a rigidblack community or the foundation of black consciousness. Instead theyboth see that contemporary black culture and music, hip-hopspecifically, are "inextricably in��ex��tri��ca��ble?adj.1. a. So intricate or entangled as to make escape impossible: an inextricable maze; an inextricable web of deceit.b. tied to concrete historical andtechnological developments," yet black music continues to"unnerve and simultaneously revitalize American culture" (Rose1994, 185). That revitalization, like Jones/Baraka's notions ofcultural revitalization and improvisation during his transitionalperiod, is triggered through black musical narratives "whichtransmit, via a process of critique, the core values and sensibilitiesof the African American diaspora" (Neal 1999, 172). That continuedprocess of critique helps to articulate the dialectical play betweenAfrican American and Western culture, between the self and the ways ofbeing African American; both dialectics keep the music and its makersvital to our cultural churnings and self-realizations. Notes (1) The author would like to thank his colleague at the Universityof North Texas, Stephanie Hawkins, and the Dallas Area Social Historyseminars at Southern Methodist University for their insightful critiquesof these ideas and their support in the completion of this article. (2) Roney details usefully Houston Baker's argument that theBlack Arts Movement ultimately succumbed to its roots in essentialistmetaphysical thought. In this case, an investment in Blackness as afoundation to African American cultural practices--a way of returning toorigins in Africa--backfired because it replicated the racist systemthat it meant to displace. Roney draws specific attention to the work ofWilliam Harris and Kimberly Benston as examples of the criticalgymnastics involved in these escape and retrieval missions. In bothHarris's study of Jones/Baraka (1985), and Benston's essay,"Late Coltrane: A Re-membering of Orpheus" (1978b), jazzimprovisation is read as a theory for overcoming the metaphysical trapsbuilt into the Black Aesthetic. However, Roney points out correctly thatboth critics actually read Jones/Baraka's use of improvisation asan access port into a particular black idiom, toward a specific"black" origin that is post-Western or outside of Westernaesthetics and philosophy. Roney's ultimate critique suggests thateven in light of Jones/Baraka's turn to nationalist and Marxistideologies what we are supposed to "get" is that the poetpresents black identity as "rootless." (3) Even though two significant studies of Baraka have appearedsince 1999, notice that the critiques of Baraka that drove the 2002imbroglio im��bro��glio?n. pl. im��bro��glios1. a. A difficult or intricate situation; an entanglement.b. A confused or complicated disagreement.2. A confused heap; a tangle. surrounding his New Jersey poet laureate post and his poem"Somebody Blew Up America," were fueled by voices who had verylittle ability to thoroughly critique the changes in Baraka'spolitical career, let alone contextualize con��tex��tu��al��ize?tr.v. con��tex��tu��al��ized, con��tex��tu��al��iz��ing, con��tex��tu��al��iz��esTo place (a word or idea, for example) in a particular context. "Somebody Blew UpAmerica" within the varied body of his poetry. Justin Driverillustrates in his review of Watts' Amiri Baraka (2001) thatBaraka's politics have eroded the possibility of examining hispoetry without being overcome by poor misreadings. See Driver(2004,33-37). As well, see the anonymously written "Notebook"in The New Republic 14 October 2002: 8. For further contextualization ofand response to Baraka and "Somebody Blew Up America" see thefollowing articles: Harris and Neilsen, (2003, 183-87), Cravatts (n.d.),Fleming (2003: 22-27), and Kelly (2003: 25, 28). (4) See Jones (2002, 1145-176). As well, scholars have begun torevaluate re��val��u��ate?tr.v. re��val��u��at��ed, re��val��u��at��ing, re��val��u��ates1. To make a new valuation of.2. To increase the exchange value of (a nation's currency). Jones/Baraka as an improvising poet. See both Harris (2004)and Jackson (2004). See also Jones (2003). (5) See also Werner (1995). Drawing from the African Americanvernacular culture, American poetic tradition, the jazz tradition,Jones/Baraka's aesthetic is already center-less,"rootless." But, as Werner has written, the limits of theblues matrix are exposed by jazz improvisation's "syntheticmulticulturalism." While black musicians have been the signatureinnovators of jazz and jazz improvisation, the musical elements theydraw together to create the performance palette have not come fromexclusively Negro contexts. Musicologists such as Paul Berliner andIngrid Monson have studied the ethnically and racially diverse artscommunities that jazz artists live and work in. Those performancemilieus, while steadily fed by African American cultural history andtradition, are always informed by multiple cultural concepts.Werner's concept of "synthetic multiculturalism" helpsexplain why, as Brent Edwards writes, students of jazz poetics areworking to erect new critical models rather than fix jazz and/or AfricanAmerican writing as referents of "what black people 'simplyknow'" (2002, 6). (6) In Posnock's framing, the term black intellectual becomesa useful name for the internal conflicts and ambivalences that AfricanAmerican writers combat in their efforts to create art, determine theirpersonal identities, and forward the political hopes of the mass ofblack Americans. Posnock's overall project in naming this agon isto connect major twentieth century black writers, includingJones/Baraka, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. and Ralph Ellison toa tradition of pragmatist cosmopolitanism. (7) For example listen to the Count Basie Orchestra/Jimmy Rushingrecording "Sent For You Yesterday" (1938). (8) See Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Mauvais Sang" fromUne Saison en Enfer This article is about the poetic work by Arthur Rimbaud. For other uses, see A Season in Hell (disambiguation). French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer . The edition used as reference is Rimbaud Completeedited by Wyatt Mason, (New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Modern Library, 2002), 196-201. (9) See Davidson (2003, 399-406) and Lee (2003, 371-87). BothDavidson and Lee explore the way that Jones/Baraka's aesthetic isborn and most effectively performed in the liminal zones betweencultural systems and practices. (10) See studies such as Jones/Baraka's Blues People (1963),Eileen Southern's Readings in Black American Music (1971),Berliner's The Soul of Mbira mbiraor thumb pianoAfrican musical instrument consisting of a set of tuned metal or bamboo tongues attached to a board or resonator. The tongues are depressed and released with the thumbs and fingers to produce melodies and song accompaniments. : Music and Traditions of the ShonaPeople of Zimbabwe (1993), and Burnim and Multsby'sAfrican-American Music: An Introduction (2004). (11) This is the definition that Jarett provides in his text. Theparticular version has been culled from the Harvard Concise Dictionaryof Music. The italicized emphasis is Jarett's. (12) The death that Jones/Baraka suggests in this context strikesme as wholly different from the suicidal impulses of some of hispost-war contemporaries, confessional poets like Anne Sexton, SylviaPlath, or Robert Lowell. While Lowell's poems sometimes emergedfrom his Brahmin, Bostonian liberalism and Plath is most often read as aparagon of righteous feminist poetics, Jones/Baraka's poems admit apsychological awareness, a confessional sensibility that expressed thecomplexities of African American freedom. (13) The implied answer to the poet's interrogative connectskeenly to the protagonist's proclamation at the end of RalphEllison's Invisible Man. Ellison's narrator explains that heis "shaking off the old skin" in favor of a new sensibility;he is donning a new mask that disguises his chaotic, malleable self(1995, 580-81). (14) The impulse is to see the move from old to avant garde as amove from white, European forms to black diasporic ones. However,Jones/Baraka is heavily indebted to European Surrealists and theirideological stance against Western rationality. So, even as he is tryingto create a particularly black sound--poetry devoid of white influence,Jones/Baraka cannot expunge To destroy; blot out; obliterate; erase; efface designedly; strike out wholly. The act of physically destroying information—including criminal records—in files, computers, or other depositories. his sources from his improvisations. See Kim(2003, 345-64). See also Magee (2001, 694-727). Magee's article isone of the few places to see Jones/Baraka contextualized as an influenceof New American poetry. Magee uses O'Hara's poetry to describean aesthetic practice that ties jazz improvisation to pragmatistphilosophical ideas. I do some writing toward this end in the finalsections of this essay. (15) Mackey's essay describes the confluence of jazz andpoetry as an illustration of the "other" in the process ofidentification. Mackey's title is meant to recallJones/Baraka's chapter in Blues People, "Swing: from Verb toNoun." That chapter describes the appropriation of black musicalstyles, forms and ideas by white musicians and entrepreneurs. SeeJones/Baraka (1963, Chapter 10). Because of his analysis of thecommodification Commodification (or commoditization) is the transformation of what is normally a non-commodity into a commodity, or, in other words, to assign value. As the word commodity has distinct meanings in business and in Marxist theory, commodification of jazz and black dance music within the context ofAmerican social history Jones/Baraka's seminal effort continues toinfluence the still-evolving reevaluation of African American musicaland cultural history. To understand Jones/Baraka's continuedinfluence and importance to jazz studies see, for instance, DeVeaux(1996) and Porter (2002). (16) We should read the poems of Jones/Baraka's transitionalperiod as part of a larger ironic critical project in the same way thatwe read for the contingencies between Eliot's poetic oeuvre and hiscriticism. This strikes me as the core of Jones/Baraka's effortsduring his transitional phase: developing critical analyses in the actof poetic creation whether that creation is focused for individualexpression (that of the literary artist/jazz critic) or groupperformance (think for instance of Jones/Baraka's plays Dutchmanand The Slave). As with Eliot's search for a new moral order in TheWaste Land, Jones/Baraka's transitional efforts are the poetics ofaction and the hope for cultural revival. Like Eliot, Jones/Baraka wantsa figure to navigate the ruined land and revive its reproductive power,the land's power to propel the self and the culture towardrevolution, change. As we know though, at the end of The Waste LandEliot's questing knight cannot find any language that can restoreorder to the culture or revive the landscape. Jones/Baraka's onlyrecourse is to create a model for himself to follow: the poet asspiritual force or critical improviser becomes the representative figurein the ruined land. So, in exuberant modernist fashion, both poetsbecome questing savants-they become the new heroes-searching for Gods,hoping to establish new moral codes. This may not be that different fromEliot's recourse to a new God, a new religion, Anglo-Catholicism,and a new self. (17) Jones/Baraka's musical influence for this action isprobably John Coltrane. Listen, for instance, to Coltrane's soloson quintessential recordings of American "standards" such asThelonious Monk's composition, the deconstruction of "Twinkle,Twinkle Little Star," "Trinkle, Tinkle tin��kle?v. tin��kled, tin��kling, tin��klesv.intr.1. To make light metallic sounds, as those of a small bell.2. Informal To urinate.v.tr.1. " (1957) or on theColtrane Quartet's classic recording of Rodgers andHammerstein's "My Favorite Things" (1960). The two solos,performed on tenor and soprano saxophones respectively, point to theburgeoning avant-garde jazz being developed by many post-bebop musiciansof Coltrane's generation. His solos are as much about delineatingall the possible angles of the stated melodic line as they are aboutestablishing secondary or tertiary rhythmic lines. In many ways,Coltrane's muscular performances are an assertion of a new AfricanAmerican sensibility that was certainly a product of the new anddangerous political times in post World War II America during the 1950sand 1960s. As Jones/Baraka explains in Black Music, rather than blowinghis ideas into the air like the spores of a dandelion dandelion[Eng. form of Fr.,=lion's tooth], any plant of the genus Taraxacum of the family Asteraceae (aster family), perennial herbs of wide distribution in temperate regions. , Coltrane'simprovisations with his own quartet speak of both his new musical ideasand the "tutorials" he had with Monk. Coltrane's latestyle on the soprano sax, writes Baraka, is concentrated around hisinterest in melody, "... i.e., he is turning his attention to thatold problem in jazz of improvising on a simple and terribly strictmelodic line" (Jones/Baraka 1968,61). In other words,Coltrane's lessons from Monk pay off because he can use them on anew instrument, create new personal ideas, and still refer to "oldproblems" of jazz. (18) Harper suggests that poems of the Black Arts Movementdon't really promote a particular agenda in terms of their calls toarms. Harper explains that "while Black Arts poetry very likelydoes depend for its effects on the division of its audience along raciallines, it also achieves its maximum impact in a context in which it isunderstood as being heard directly by whites and overheard byblacks" (1993, 247). See Harper (1993, 234-55). (19) Rushing is particularly emblematic as a reference toJones/Baraka's work. Rushing toured with big dance orchestras,singing the blues in front of bands like the Oklahoma City Blue Devilsand Count Basie's Kansas City-based outfit. As Ellison notes in theintroduction to Shadow and Act, Rushing was known for his ability tobellow bellowone of the voices of cattle. Usually refers to the arrogant call of the bull used to announce territorial rights. Abnormalities of the voice include hoarseness as in rabies, or continuous repetition as in nervous acetonemia. See also low, moo. songs over the top of the horn players without the aid ofmicrophones. Works Cited Anonymous. 2002. "Notebook." 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Champagne: University of Illinois Press The University of Illinois Press (UIP), is a major American university press and part of the University of Illinois. OverviewAccording to the UIP's website: . Young, Cynthia. 2001. "Havana Up in Harlem: LeRoi Jones,Harold Cruse and the Making of a Cultural Revolution." Science& Society 65.1, Spring: 12-38. Walton Muyumba is an assistant professor of African American andAmerican Studies in the English Department at the University of NorthTexas. His work has appeared in The Literary Griot griotAfrican tribal storyteller. The griot's role was to preserve the genealogies and oral traditions of the tribe. Griots were usually among the oldest men. In places where written language is the prerogative of the few, the place of the griot as cultural guardian is still and The WashingtonPost.