The Eye's Shadow
SURREALISM & BLACK MUSIC
(originally published in Cultural Correspondence: surrealism and its popular accomplices. Fall 1979. Providence, Rhode Island. pp. 75-9.)
Like a Thief in the Night — By Way of an Introduction
"Every notion of black is too feeble to express the long wailing of black on black as it glows brilliantly."
— Cesar Moro
When the sun sinks its teeth into the red horizon, the black flag of night unfurls its shimmering colors over a landscape whose shadows are the molten lovebeds of a thousand chimeras, all attired in suits made of liana keyholes, exuding a scent which invites temptation, like the echo of a deathcry, bitten on the wing, and which pierces the honeydew serenity of the African jungle's " 'fore day chorus." This night landscape, open like a map of flaming tongues, now discloses itself to be the arena par excellence of magnetic embraces, the embraces within embraces of those who, with no exceptions, dare to risk their lives in the hope of perceiving, if only for a fleeting blue moment, "the light that will cease to fail." And at the heart of this landscape, with his feet firmly on the ground and his eyes anchored in the orbit of the heavens, is the shadow through the looking glass — like a thief in the night, The Black Man.
It is also this night, this hotbed of seething pos sibilities — this permanent rendezvous of repressed desires, where the wildest vicissitudes of our everyday life are acted out — where surrealism, from the start, set its sights, and where it recorded its first resounding victories on the seismograph of poetic vengeance. With its experiments in hypnotic and trance states, the recording of dreams, the practice of automatic writing, the exploration of objective, chance — that is, with a sensibility acutely attuned to the farthest reaches of human destiny — it could not be long before surrealism, armed with such a marvelous arsenal, should make contact, in accordance with Fourier's theory of passional attraction, with the life (and its mythopoetic expression) of the African peoples and their descendants, whose lives are characterized by a keen receptivity to, and fear of, the unknown, and whose mythology develops under the aegis of imaginative modes of apprehension, in contrast to the restrictions of logical modes plaguing the Western world.
References to black music by the early surrealists, as noted in derogatory tones by bourgeois hack critics, were indeed few, mainly surfacing in poetic texts and the like. But even these preliminary reverberations were extremely provocative — articulating, in the boldest terms, a correspondence still in the process of becoming, and even tacitly suggesting a disquieting influence of black music on surrealism from the very beginning. The hue and cry raised by critics over the early surrealists' attitude toward music was no doubt mainly due to the surrealists' refusal to reduce their interrogation of music (or of anything, for that matter!) to a mere voicing of esthetic affection.
"Not interested in music," said Giorgio de Chirico.
"The most confusing of all forms," wrote Breton on musical expression in Surrealism and Painting.
But most important, for surrealists, what is at stake (and this applied as much then as it does now) is not merely the elaboration of an esthetic attitude peculiar to music but also the elaboration of a revolutionary poetic conception of life: Asserting the primacy of imaginative modes of apprehension over the fixed forms of logic, and the primacy of inspiration over memory, this conception of life, in the eyes of surrealists, has been audaciously confirmed by the whole spectrum of black sensibility — from the body tattoos of the Nuba to the paintings of Wifredo Lam, from Yoruba trickster tales to the poetry of Aimé Césaire, from the "underground railroad" to the Moroccan War, from Haitian voodoo chants to the music of Thelonious Sphere Monk.
As expressed in the liner notes to the album Fanfare for the Warriors by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, "TRUTH SAYS: No culture or com munity of people has provided as much latitude for creativity and uplifted as many other cultures as the African experience and input into the field of so-called Art. Those contributions were not only original, rich and innovative but have continued through the ages to serve as a spiritual barometer of things to come! An indisputable fact of here, there and after ..." The object of the following discussion is to synthesize the evidence; rational and otherwise, of this intervention of the black sensibility in the evolution of poetic thought, and also to suggest certain reciprocal communications.
Music Is Dangerous
.. Paul Nougé, the leading theorist of the surreal ist movement in Belgium , delivered in 1929 a lecture which was published in English under the title Music Is Dangerous. Beginning his essay with an elaboration of the different reasons advanced for a person's affection for music, he continued by discussing the relative roles of auditor and performer at musical performances, insisting that we suffer under a gross illusion if we believe that "in the presence of music, we retain our full independence while in the role of witness or spectator," and further that "we are not long in realizing that actually we are not judging something, but taking part in something." The jazz musician Leo Smith affirmed this position, stating that "a piece of improvisation is done, and after it's done there's nothing to be said about it because it affects your life whether you like it or not."
Whether you like it or not! And how many people recoil at the black musician's bold articulation of the drama of freedom, merely — or should I say especially? — because their ears have been reduced to nothing, pierced as they are each morning by the shrill cry of the alarm clock, signaling the end to the freedom of dreams, in which their very wishes are fulfilled; summoned to a daily grave where even the vestige of a memory of this momentary gratification of their desires is denied them? The black drummer Milford Graves, perhaps the most outspoken commentator on the relationship of music to the public, once said, "There's a different rhythm of the self that a lot of people are not aware of," and, it is this rhythm, a rhythm conceived as a violent antithesis to the miserable noise of our existence, which assures us that each of our encounters with music is, despite appearances, a serious adventure" (Nougé).
Another surrealist, Franklin Rosemont, has , suggested that "the entire evolution of jazz from the 1920s to the present reads like a line-by-line response to the challenge advanced by . . . Nougé," stressing Nougé's argument that the prosperity of music and musicians depends on "a deliberate will to act upon the world." Certainly one of the most outstanding characteristics of jazz, especially since bebop, has been its elaboration of protest, its impassioned resistance to all forms of repression. As Max Roach put it, "the artist must reflect the tempo of his times, he must try and bring about changes where possible."
And this is only the beginning!
(Victor Brauner: Portrait of Thelonius Monk)
"We cannot escape music"
Nougé also proposed that "the feelings provoked by music" could produce "the most surprising effects — sometimes , utterly unexpected by those responsible for them." In December of 1929 the fantastic writer H.P. Lovecraft said in a letter to J.F. Morton: "You cannot tell me that an Aeolian harp plays anything but jazzy blues. . . ." This line, surprisingly similar in content to Breton's phrase, "the mysterious wind of jazz," invoked in his Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality (1924) as well as the phrase by Nadja, "the blue and the wind; the blue wind," would seem to have come, as they say, out of the blue, if it were not for certain suggestive, albeit farfetched, evidence.
During the summer of 1926 Duke Ellington and his band, with the addition of Sydney Bechet, were playing regularly in New England. In his memoirs, Music Is My Mistress, Ellington recalls the peculiar quality of the music played at the time. "Call was very important in that kind of music. Today, the music has grown up and become quite scholastic, but this was au naturel, close to the primitive, where people send messages in what they play, calling some body . ." This elucidation of the dynamics of the mental processes conditioning the music played then veritably seethes with hidden implications when one considers that it was also "around New England" in 1926 that Lovecraft wrote The Call of Cthulhu. Frank Belknap Long, a friend of Lovecraft and a writer in his circle, wrote a story set in the distant future, featuring a character who takes great pride in his collection of antique Duke Ellington records.
The Blue and the Wind
"I can tell the wind is rising,
leaves trembling on the trees."
— Robert Johnson
Already when H.P. Lovecraft had invoked their presence in 1929, these "jazzy blues," carried on the wind, were reaching storm dimensions among the black working class in the rural regions in the South and later in the urban ghettoes of the North. Unknowingly fulfilling the challenge posed by Nougé for a form of musical expression established "according to the measure furnished by the feelings, desires and intentions of those who depend on musical means to act on the world," the blues, as the poetic voice of a people particularly victimized by the whole gamut of the repressive forces of bourgeois/ christian civilization, set its sights, at its very beginning, on that point in the mind "at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions" (Breton).
Relying on a mode of apprehension relatively free from repressive restrictions that act like a brake on the free play of the imagination, the blues singers passionately harvest the arena where these crippling contradictions define the extreme precariousness of man's individual and social existence, revealing to the light of day mental products usually relegated to the shadowy depths of the night, and doing so without hesitation or plagued by pangs of guilt. "Whoever worships the accomplished fact is incapable of preparing the future," wrote Leon Trotsky. And it is precisely because of its remarkable candor when it comes to communicating the incommunicable, to focusing on the terrifying vistas of the unknown, that the blues, in revealing something of man's original grandeur by exposing from the very heart of the night the limitless capacities of the mind, becomes an impassioned critique of miserabilism (the latest historical stage reached in this epoch of the decline of capitalism) in all its forms, and thus the preparation for a future vastly more livable. As an oft-sung lyric states: "The sun's gonna shine in my back door some day; the wind's gonna rise, blow my blues away."
References to blues by the early surrealists in Paris are virtually nonexistent (because of their indifference to music, and also because blues is sung in the English language). But just as jazz is "the continuation of blues by other means" (F. Rosemont), so the blues weaves an elegant web of erotic glances and disquieting encounters through a veritable orgy of poetic corners.
There is the possible — highly probable — blues influence on the works of Marcel Duchamp at the time of his momentous and key work, the large glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. This is poignantly suggested by one of the, constituent elements of this piece, The Chocolate Grinder (descendant of the "Coffee Mill" of 1911). Duchamp wrote in his notes to the glass, "The Bachelor grinds his chocolate himself" — i.e. grinding something black, an expression which in French (broie du noir) signifies having the blues. Particularly in view of the erotic implications of this key work by Duchamp, the analogy retains a certain desperate pertinence when one recalls all the coffee grinding and broken-down mills in pre-war blues.
"I can't get no grinding,
tell me what's the matter with the mill." — Memphis Minnie ("Can't Get No Grinding")
There are also suggestions that we could possibly see much more in Pablo Picasso's blue period than we first suspected. Aside from the fact that a painting from this period, "The Guitar Player," was used (by chance?) as the cover illustration to the anthology album, The Blues in Modern jazz (which, for the record, included works such as Thelonius Monk's "Blue Monk" and Charlie Mingus's "Haitian Fight Song"), we also have it noted that Picasso considered blues to be the most brilliant discovery, along with Polish vodka, in the 20th century— this from the man who was among the first to introduce African artistic expression to the European art world, and which he himself acknowledged as an ongoing influence in his own artistic evolution.
The Devil's Son-in-Law
`Thank you, thank you, honey!
`I got three shows tonight; we gonna have
some fun until five o'clock and heck if the police
are gonna stop us. 'Cause I don't care."
— Hound Dog Taylor
Understandably, it was only with the forma tion of an indigenous surrealist movement in the United States in 1966 that the full implications of the blues as an autonomous poetic current would be realized. As Franklin Rosemont wrote in Surrealist Insurrection, in 1968, "Surrealism will demonstrate why the blues singers Robert Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw are greater poets than T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost or Karl Shapiro or Allen Ginsberg.. .." One can add, without any trace of false modesty, that surreal ism has proved this point beyond question. Paul Garon, who is the most meticulous chronicler and defender of blues as poetry of revolt, and whose adherence to the surrealist movement was largely influenced by his profound awareness of all that blues comprehends and implies, has devoted a detailed study to the subject of Blues - and the Poetic Spirit. Combining psychoanalytic methodology with a surrealist critique, the book surveys the whole gamut of creative activity as it appears in the blues. His discussion is organized around the themes: Eros, Aggression, Humor, Travel, Alcohol and Drugs, Male Supremacy, Liberation of Women, Night, Animals, Work, the Police and the Church, Crime, Magic.
The author, himself, of violently humorous, humorously violent and violently erotic automatic texts, Garon has been able to appreciate the poetic qualities of the blues from the inside, as it were, permitting his critique to be substantiated by an understanding of his own internal evidence. Since the book is readily available (1), there is no need to discuss it at length here, within the limited capacities of this article, and so I shall content myself with quoting its concluding paragraph: "The blues, like the dream, continues to retain its rights — even if its future is uncertain. We can see in it an appeal to close the shutters on a withered concept of virtue and a harsh and oppressive civilization; we see in it a demand for non-repression, elaborated by the images of a capacity for fantasy that has not been crushed. We see in it one of the few modern American poetic voices through which humanity has fiercely fought for, and managed to regain, a semblance of its true dignity."
At the Rendezvous of Friends
The surrealists in Chicago also edited a supplement to the magazine Living Blues (Jan/Feb 1976) in which the blues is presented in its true revolutionary colors — the kaleidoscopic colors of an electric storm inside a lighthouse. The subject is approached from many different angles: as a revolutionary poetic tradition ("The outstanding characteristics of blues lyrics —materialism, eroticism, humor, atheism, a passion for freedom, a sense of adventure, an alertness to the Marvelous — are the outstanding characteristics of the works of the great Eliza bethan poets, of the great Romantics, of all poets worth their salt"); its relation to jazz ("Jazz always has been the continuation of blues by other means"); its attitude toward eros, particularly its tendency to sexualize the role of ma chines ("For blues-singers and surrealists, machinery, like everything else, exists to be used poetically for the realization of desire"); as a music of despair ("A music of despair, but not of self-pity; a music of sadness, but not of masochism; a music of night, but not of day"); in the light of millenarianism ("the black blues tradition vibrates to the same liberating currents as the Brethren of the Free Spirit"), etc.
In a statement introducing the supplement, the surrealists' attitude toward blues is expressed definitively: "In regard to the blues ... we cannot accept its restriction to the category of 'entertainment,' or even music. We find blues to be, rather, a magnificent dream implying the total transfor mation of reality — an ardent appeal for a new life from the other side of all travestied hopes."
The Mysterious Wind of Jazz, or The Blood of the Air
"A new myth?"
— André Breton
Early in the 1940s August Derleth, friend and collaborator of H.P. Lovecraft, wrote "Beyond the Threshold," a rigorously suggestive tale, written as a contribution to the "Cthulhu Mythos." This open-ended mythology is based on the belief "that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again" (Lovecraft). Derleth's tale chronicles an episode with the terrifying Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker. The coming of this Ancient One was heralded by the sound of the wind roaring and thundering, but without any movement, or physical disturbance, in the air whatsoever. "The wind's sound was now a terrible, demoniac howling, and it was accompanied by notes of music, which must have been audible for some time but were so perfectly blended with the wind's voice that I was not at first aware of them. The music was similar to that which had gone before, as of pipes and occasionally stringed in struments, but was now much wilder, sounding with a terrifying abandon, with a character of unmentionable evil about it."
In the eye of this fantasy, one is faced with a holocaust of associations farfetched but wildly umorous. What dark shadows in the wall mirrors of unsung abysses, where the external weds the temporal, where the latent weds the manifest, could have influenced, so decisively, the hand of Derleth as he recorded the terrifying spectacle, borne on the wind, which was being acted out in his mind's eye? One may well ask, for early in the 1940s — 1941 to be -exact — the Jay McShann Orchestra entered the Decca recording studios in Dallas, Texas, where six sides were recorded, introducing a black alto saxophonist, whose playing was characterized by a wild exuberance, a "terrifying abandon" ("If you come in loose, you'll get ideas and play good notes. If you act just a little foolish, good ideas will come to you") and an aggressively destructive approach (implicitly and explicitly evil) to the restrictions imposed on sound by traditional European modes of composition, and whose adopted nickname is suggestive enough to situate him perfectly as the glistening receptacle of a poetic sensibility — extremely far-reaching —which was very much "in the air" at the time. Like a rainbow with wings of mica: Charlie "Bird" Parker. (2)
Franklin Rosemont, who has done more than any other surrealist to turn back the tide of critical miscomprehension under which black music has suffered since it first let loose its fiery message on the ears of the world, succinctly dis cussed the implications of Parker's intervention in his essay "Black Music and the Surrealist Revolution" (1976): "Impossible to re-enter, as it were, the 'process' by which the original revelations of Charlie Parker and his collaborators were set loose on the world. But one thing at least is beyond dispute: the boppers effected a re markably explosive, lyrical crystallization of revolutionary sentiments shared to a great degree by the black proletariat as a whole . . . Charlie Parker's achievements in music are on the same plane as Rimbaud's in poetry, or Picasso's in painting, with this difference: Bird, unlike Rimbaud and Picasso, did not allow the last years of his life to detract from his earlier grandeur .
The substance of Parker's courage and lucidity permits us to define the quest of bop as a heroic and victorious effort to expand the field of im provisation — that is, to expand the prerogatives of imagination over memory's fixed forms."
Things, as they say, have never been the same since.
(Rabbit Foot Blues, by Blind Lemon Jefferson)
Silence is Golden
Soon to follow the audacious example of Charlie Parker were such black geniuses as Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and others, consolidating the advances made by Parker in the area of improvisation and creating a volatile atmosphere of collective experimentation, producing a majestic river of fertile discoveries. At the same time that these new developments were creating a storm in the musical atmosphere, Breton, in exile in the U.S. owing to the Second World War, wrote an article, originally published in the American magazine Modern Music, entitled "Silence is Golden," in which, for the first time, he tackled in detail the problem posed by "that most confusing of all forms" — musical expression. This essay has been of pivotal importance to the whole future generation of surrealists, greatly influencing the evolution of the movement, particularly its intrusion into the domain of black music.
Acknowledging his own indifference to music, Breton recalled the selfsame prevailing attitude among most of the poets, worthy of the name, of the 19th century. He continued: "In spite of my diametrically opposed attitudes toward poetry and music, due to my individual make-up, I have not renounced all objective judgement concerning them. Should I hold to the hierarchy proposed by Hegel, music, by virtue of its ability to express ideas and emotions, would come immediately after poetry and would precede the plastic arts. But above all I am convinced that the antagonism that exists between poetry and music (apparently affecting poets much more than it does musicians), and which for some ears seems to have now reached its height, should not be fruitlessly deplored but, on the contrary, should be interpreted as an indication of the necessity for a recasting of certain principles of the two arts."
Returning to one of his "favorite themes" Breton again expressed the need, on the plastic plane, to overcome the antinomy between physical representation and mental representation, further projecting these feelings onto the auditive plane. "The painter will fail in his human mission if he continues to widen the gulf separating representation and perception instead of working toward their reconciliation, their synthesis. In the same way, on the auditive plane, I believe that music and poetry have everything to lose by not recognizing a common origin and a common end in song; . . . Poet and musician will degenerate if they persist in acting as though these two forces were never to be brought together again." Further, Breton insists that "now only the most radical methods could hope for success," affirming "that we must determine to unify, reunify hearing to the same degree that we must determine to unify, reunify sight." Suggesting that the synthesis of music and poetry "could only be accomplished at a very high emotional temperature," Breton states that "it is in the expression of the passion of love that both music and poetry are most likely to reach this supreme point of incandescence."
The Blue Wind
After the publication of this essay and the return to Paris of many of the surrealists from their wartime exile in the United States , the number of references to black music, direct and indirect, increases markedly. This was coupled with an increased predilection for the culture and lives of so-called primitive peoples, greatly influenced by the firsthand contact many of the exiled surrealists experienced with them; for example, Breton's visit to Haiti and Martinique. Breton also made a point of attending jazz performances while in New York . The surrealist painter, Roberto Matta, introduced the younger adherents of the surrealist movement to the bop recordings of Parker, Monk, Powell, Gillespie and others, all of which were received with the utmost enthusiasm. The veteran surrealist painter Victor Brauner did an exalted symbolic portrait of Thelonius Monk. Several poetic works by surrealists, notably Claude Tarnaud and Gérard Legrand, were inspired by and/or dedicated to jazz musicians. Legrand also wrote a book entitled Powers of Jazz (Puissances du Jazz, 1953).
Despite this evident affection and admiration for the accomplishments of the black warriors of the new sensibility, these two currents — surrealism and black music — remained pretty much mutually exclusive, in keeping with the stage of development reached by both parties. This would remain so until vital new discoveries in both fields reached the light of day. I am speaking here of the birth of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago in 1965, followed a year later, with the publication of the tract The Forecast Is Hot!, by the formation of the original nucleus of the surrealist movement in the U.S., likewise centered in Chicago —the Windy City.
Judging from the preoccupation with atmospheric disturbances in the preceding discussion, the title of the US . surrealist's first tract and the nickname of Chicago certainly appear in a new light — a light which exudes from the oneiric solitude in the eye of a crystal ball, endlessly and indefatigably exploring the possibilities of a desirable future of desire supreme — a veritable weather forecast of the Pleasure Principle. This portent of what was to come, this wholesale trust in the future, was admirably expressed by trumpeter Leo Smith: "I only play when there is an opportunity for you to really explore yourself, when each occasion would bring to those people and myself a complete challenge. And when I say `challenge,' I don't mean some reference in the back past, but like challenge right now, where we're at right now — because it is the future,"
The surrealists in the U.S. have from the very beginning stressed the vitality and importance of the black musical evidence, and its growing influence on the evolution of the movement is reaffirmed at every turn of its thought. Penelope Rosemont, in an article published in Arsenal/ Surrealist Subversion No. 2, in 1973, in which she explores the "absolutely modern" implications of totemism — a discussion situated in the revelations set loose by the majestic destiny of objective chance — wrote of her fortunate discovery of "the enchanting music, dance and myths around which Sun Ra has created his own cosmology, combining ancient Egypt and outer space." And it was also while plumbing the depths of the labyrinth of broken mirrors through which the unforeseen draws a revolver, pointblank, between our eyes, that jazz was first assigned its proper and exalted place among the major poetic advances of our century. Franklin Rosemont, in his treatise The New Argonautica (3), by breaking with a whole tradition of white commentators of jazz, whose critical meanderings only served to betray their own impotence when faced by the somnambulist's onslaught of the waking dreamers of jazz, Was the first to situate black music under the triple cause of love, poetry and freedom: "Jazz may be regarded, in fact, as an independent manifestation and reinforcement of that specific all-pervasive climate of readiness for the actualization of the Marvelous that defines the revolutionary poetic spirit today . . . The poetic cause today would be defeated at the very onset if it failed to recognize in jazz a fraternal movement, a powerful ally, above all a complementary adventure. One must admit at the very least that jazz has covered inestimable ground entirely on its own and that its most ardent adepts show every sign of their willingness to go all the way." And further, "Let us proclaim ... that the quest to remove the obstacles to the free development of the imagination ... is advanced inexorably not only by a long and continuing revolutionary current of poetry and painting . . . but also by the long and continuing revolutionary current of jazz . . . The torches with which we proceed into the abyss of the unknown may vary, but they are lighted from a single flame."
This will seem capricious only to those suffering from an incurable myopia, those who cannot see the forest for the trees. The fact is the question of the hierarchy of artistic expression formulated by Hegel — where music comes after poetry, "the universal art," but before the plastic arts — is still to be settled. What is beyond doubt is that the most audacious solutions to this problem will come from those who have made of music their means to act on the world. In this regard we look forward to the publication, hopefully in the near future, of a book which promises to discuss methodological concepts of black music: Mysteries by Cecil Taylor — a black pianist whose playing evokes the penetrating scream of a midnight chorus of panther eyes, and a writer of poems of an exalting hermetic resonance. As Franklin Rosemont has written elsewhere: "The decisive lessons of Taylor's work seem to me as follows: that the emancipation of what has been known as jazz could be achieved only by rigorously following through the profoundest essence of this music; that Salvation could not be found in any compromise or eclecticism; that the victory of the 'jazz revolution' required absolute fidelity to its own means — namely, the definitive triumph of improvisation, pursued (as it could only be pursued) in conditions of moral asepsis."
An excerpt from Taylor 's book which appeared as the liner notes to his album Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) (Inner City 3021) is written in poem form and contains this lucid definition of improvisation from the inside:
"Improvisation is a tool of refinement an attempt to capture 'dark' instinct cultivation of the acculturated to learn one's nature in response to group (society) first hearing 'beat' as it exists in each living organism"
This alone would be enough to affirm that not only are surrealists and black musicians speaking the same language, albeit in two distinct forms, but that on the foreseeable horizon Imagination is readying itself for a complete vindication of its rights.
"To Play what one hears
is our objective
Downward and inward
are the forces bent
to live as recognition
of the invisible: spirit"
—Cecil Taylor
Out of the air into the wind, and in 1976 with the publication of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion No. 3 and the presentation of the World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago, the collaboration of black musicians and surrealists became definitive and beyond question. Not only did Arsenal contain the most complete synthesis of the surrealist evidence in support of black music, Black Music and the Surrealist Revolution by Franklin Rosemont and an essay on Joseph Jarman by the same author ("All of Jarman's recordings, and above all his live performances, are nothing less than a majestic and fertile revenge of the wisdom of Africa on the unhappy conscience of Europe: which is to say, as well, the triumph of poetic truth over prosaic lies . . .") — this issue of Arsenal also included "The Musician," a poem by Cecil Taylor, and the myth-poem "Odawalla" by Jarman. That this collaboration of poets and musicians was actually a portent of the things to come, rather than an isolated instance based on misplaced enthusiasm, is admirably shown by the fact that on an increasing number of recently released jazz albums, poetry by the musicians themselves and by others replaces the usual liner notes — notes usually written by paid white lackeys, which seldom add anything except maybe a gray haze, to the appreciation of what exudes from the shimmering black disc inside the sleeve.
Furthermore, the World Surrealist Exhibition gave the affinities between surrealism and black music an even more burning actuality. In cooperation with Living Blues magazine, a special World Surrealist Exhibition Blues Show was organized on June 5, featuring Eddie Shaw and the Wolf Gang as well as Honeyboy Edwards. And on the nights of June 19 and 20, in conjunction with the AACM, the surrealist international presented two performances by the "Sun Song" Ensemble (Gloria Brooks, vocalist; Hank Drake, percussion; Douglas Ewart, reeds; James Johnson, bassoon; Rrata Christine Jones, dancer; George Lewis, trombone; and Reggie Willis, bass). From the surrealist point of view, this admirably unholy collusion of forces was in a sense a confirmation, reinforcement and extension of many of our wildest hopes, a sure sign that in spite of unceasing efforts on the part of all repressive agencies to "keep the lid on," the revolutionary tempest was gathering momentum and finding its indispensable poetic accomplices.
(Georges Gronier: Waiting for Bird — Homage to Charlie Parker)
Lighthouse of the Future
Rastafari — ever living, ever faithful, ever sure,
Selassie — I, the First .. .
Yeah, yeah
Rastafari, ever living .. .
RASTAMAN VIBRATION, positive . . ." — Bob Marley
In 1976, in his article "Blues, Dream and the Millennial Vision," Joseph Jablonski wrote: "Characteristically, the great wish that animates a vast body of blues, jazz, as well as the older spirit-invoking black music, is the transformation of the world — the Millennium." And it is precisely at this fork in the road of the crisis of human consciousness where the reggae musician "digs in," waging a protracted war against all forms of oppression and alienation — a veritable tropical resort of carnivorous mirrors, ready for anything and everything. "The impossible has a habit of happening," sings the band, Steel Pulse. Reggae, as the poetic voice of the black proletariat of Jamaica, and of the Jamaican working-class migrants in England, can best be viewed from the historical perspective as being the "absolutely modern" defender of the millennial vision.
In the introduction to his book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn summarizes the basic premises of millenarian movements, which are equally applicable as an outline of the reggae musicians' program of action. "Millenarian sects or movements," says Cohn, "always picture salvation as
- collective, in the sense that it is to be enjoyed by the faithful as a collectivity;
- terrestrial, in the sense that it is to be realized on this earth and not in some otherworldly heaven;
"But if you know what life is worth, You will look for yours on earth"
— Bob Marley, Peter Tosh
- Imminent, in the sense that it is to come both soon and suddenly;
"Redemption stands within the scheme of things"
— Bunny Wailer
- total, in the sense that it is utterly to transform life on earth, so that the new dispensation will be no more improvement on the present but will be perfection itself;
"So long we've been as slaves and no more will we roam.
So I will hope and pray that the day will come When we will see the rising sun.
When no more crying, no victimizing,
No more starvation, no more,
No more killing."
— The Mighty Diamonds
- Miraculous, in the sense that it is to be ac complished by, or with the help of, supernatural agencies.
"Guide us,Jah"
— The Matumbi
Consider the names of the adepts of reggae, and it will become quite clear that the revolution which they are helping to prepare will not be only a reshuffling of property relations; what is in store is a complete vindication of man's innermost desires, a desirable dictatorship of the Pleasure Principle. They call themselves Burning Spear, Tapper Zukie, The Mighty Diamonds, Jah Lloyd — the Black Lion, King Tubby, Prince Hammer, the Abyssinians, Max Romeo and the Upsetters, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Big Youth, and Peter Tosh — self-proclaimed "Minister of Herb!"
The fundamental means adopted by these black alchemists from the "Isle of Springs" to act on the world differ very little from those of their black brothers in the United States — the key similarity being the primacy of automatic modes of apprehension and representation. Says Tapper Zukie: "Bunny Lee ... give me eight rhythms, six of them was on 'MPLA' album. And he give me one hour in the studio and I use that hour and voice eight rhythms then . . . We line them up on the tape and as one finish I start on the next, and that finish I start on the other one."
The unity of aspirations of the jazz musician and the reggae musician, suffused with the tropical snow of a zebra's dream, has long been af firmed by individuals from both sides. Big Youth considers John Coltrane a master musician and wrote a song about him titled "Jim Squashy" — "John Coltrane died in vain of a Love Supreme." Oliver Lake , on his album Life Dance of Is, in cludes Big Youth in his list of "inspiration/dedication to's," and the album includes a song, "Change One," where the reggae influence is marked, to say the least; throughout the song the guitarist Michael Gregory Jackson continually shouts, "Reggae!". "Reggae power!" Dudu Pukwana, South African jazz saxophonist, played as a session musician on a song by Toots and the Maytals. This will surprise none but pigs and downright cretins. The fact is that what appears as two vastly disparate movements are but two tongues of the same flame, two eyes of the same iceberg. As Paul Nouge has written, "Nevertheless the certitude persists that spirit lives only through an illimitable adventure with movements and perspectives that must be unflaggingly renewed (emphasis added: M.V.); in which the dangers that we discover and, at every moment, threaten to cut short its progress, are also — if we but refuse to bow before them — the surest guarantee of the only victories that can still tempt us. Hence . . . whether we deal with music or some other human event, spirit is at our mercy and we are, in reality, accountable for it."
* * *
With the desperation of "hot" merchandise on a flotilla of swordfish, Black Music — from the ancient to the future — shuttles its invaluable cargo into the artery of hermetic solutions: the alchemical process by which the base metal of quotidian misery is transformed into the pure gold of eternal freedom.
Philip Lamantia has written: "I continue to lure the wind's eye I am one with the wind. There are no other friends. The avalanche begins."
Today, the mysterious wind of jazz opens its legs onto tomorrow's liberty.
NOTES
- Originally published in cloth edition only by Eddison Press in London , 1976, Blues and the Poetic Spirit has recently appeared in the U.S. as a DaCapo Press paperback.
- Perhaps someone in the future will devote a detailed study to the history of the wind as a ve hicle for revelation and its ramifications on the poetic consciousness as suggested by a poem by Nancy Joyce Peters, "Seeing and not Seeing," which appears in her monograph, It's in the Wind —
So it will begin again, and eloquent as the lips of a jackknife
the winds will continue divulging riches of a mad prescience
— implying, as it does, the presence of a continuing tradition concerning the intervention of the wind in the poetic atmosphere.
See the special section devoted to, and edited by, the Surrealist Movement in the United States in the City Lights Anthology (City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1974). Reproduced on the cover of this anthology is Victor Brauner's portrait of Thelonius Monk.
