Christopher
Powers
Johns Hopkins University
Why
Did Ralph Ellison Dislike Bebop?
Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man, with its jazz aesthetic, praise of Louis Armstrong and
inhabitation of the spirit of the blues is widely regarded as an exemplary
jazz novel. Published in 1952 but conceived in 1945, the novel's composition
overlaps with the heroic years of bebop. Yet in Ellison's many essays
about music he reveals a marked antipathy to the generation of musicians
that emerged out of the dissolution of swing. His recently published correspondence
with his close friend and fellow author Albert Murray confirms his skepticism
of the new sound. Is this merely a question of taste, or is Ellison's
critique grounded in a broader conception of the history and aesthetics
of jazz? The present intervention is concerned to show how Ellison's aversion
to bebop stems from a systematic understanding of the development and
potential of jazz, which is in turn grounded in an aesthetics and a corollary
conception of history. Because the question underlying that of the title
is: On which aesthetic criteria does Ellison base his judgments, my paper's
question becomes: What is Ellison's conception of a jazz aesthetic? How
does this allow for a critical historiography of jazz? How can it be thought
together with his literary aesthetics and with the artistry of his much
studied, widely taught and broadly influential novel? Moreover, the pursuit
of these questions flushes out, like the quail the young Ellison hunted,
keys to a jazz aesthetic from the underbrush of cluttered motifs and symbols
in Invisible Man. I therefore supplement my interpretation of Ellison's
jazz essays with readings of selected moments from the novel. As part
of my approach to these questions, I stage a peripheral but heuristically
valuable exchange with another figure who also develops a systematic aesthetics
as well as a reading of jazz, albeit one unrelentingly negative: T.W.
Adorno. I discuss, finally, some consequences of my rehearsal of Ellison's
conception of jazz in order to pose some questions about the relationship
between his aesthetics and his art.
Swinging the Blues
Ralph Ellison, born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, came of age in the 20s and
30s and had a childhood saturated with the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke
Ellington and the bluesy styles of his native town and Kansas City. Several
of his jazz essays, now anthologized in the volume Living With Music,
paint portraits of his musical background and of artists from the Southwest
like Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing. Ellison notes the importance
of this music for swing in a 1976 interview, recalling the "Southwestern
rhythm and that great freedom within discipline that you first heard in
Count Basie's band" and asserting that "we know that "swing"
was generated in the Southwest" and that "in it the presence
of the blues was more obvious, as were the kinds of improvisation"
(30-31). Ellison's attachment to this music is made clear in the essays,
but the real giant in his musical constellation is, of course, Louis Armstrong.
The centrality of Armstrong for Ellison's thinking that is so clearly
figured in Invisible Man is not, however, often mentioned in his essays,
nor does he devote an article to him. It is as if the influence is so
overwhelming that it should be taken for granted - and indeed his presence
is felt uncannily between every line. Armstong, famously, was the musician
who, as a young virtuoso in the 20s, established the twelve-bar blues
as the basis for the subsequent phase of jazz. Swing was the jazz that
Ellison learned to love, to which he danced and which inspired his writing:
but the power behind swing was the blues. For Ellison, however, the blues
were much more than simply a musical form: they were an attitude toward
life, an approach to the world that engendered a philosophy and an aesthetic.
All of Ellison's jazz writings circle around the blues: listing some of
his many pithy definitions in the essays can help situate his understanding
of the form:
their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the
agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness
of spirit (118).
The blues
is an art of ambiguity,
they are a corrective, an attempt to draw
a line upon man's own limitless assertion (47).
The blues
is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes alive in one's
aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it,
not by the consolations of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic,
near-comic lyricism (103).
Further,
one sees "
the mysterious potentiality of meaning which haunts
the blues
the meanings which shimmer just beyond the limits of the
lyrics" (47) enacted in Chapter 10 of Invisible Man, in which the
narrator, newly arrived in New York City, meets the jiving Harlem bluesman
Peter Wheatstraw who sings:
She's got feet like a monkey
Legs like a frog - Lawd Lawd!
But when she starts to loving me
I holler Whoooo, God-dog!
Cause I loves my baabay,
Better than I do myself
(173)
causing the
invisible man to wonder, after the encounter:
What does
it mean, I thought. I'd heard it all my life but suddenly the strangeness
of it came through to me. Was it about a woman or about some strange sphinxlike
animal? Certainly his woman, no woman, fitted that description. And why
describe anyone in such contradictory words? Was it a sphinx? Did old
Chaplin-pants, old dusty-butt, love her or hate her; or was he merely
singing?
I strode along, hearing the cartman's song become a lonesome,
broad-toned whistle now that flowered at the end of each phrase into a
tremulous, blue-toned chord. And in its flutter and swoop I heard the
sound of a railroad train highballing it, lonely across the lonely night
(177).
The riddle
of the sphinx becomes, in the blues, the riddle of riddles, a cipher for
their speculative nature - how they "convey meanings which touch
upon the metaphysical" (47) - which Ellison wants to recuperate as
an African American philosophy for modern times.
While Ellison's attachment to the blues must be viewed within the framework
of his recovery and transfiguration of African American folk culture and
a consequence of a form of cultural nationalism, he clearly understands
them as more than the expression of an ancestral heritage whose currency
is superseded by avant-garde art. Indeed, the blues become the basis for
the modernism of African American expression. Ellison notes in "Richard
Wright's Blues" that the rural African American communities from
which the blues originated did "not exist in a vacuum, but in the
seething vortex of those tensions generated by the most highly industrialized
of Western nations" (113). Furthermore, like flamenco, the blues
are "an affirmative art, which draws its strengths and endurance
from a willingness to deal with the whole man
in a world which is
viewed as basically impersonal and violent" (97). Again in "Richard
Wright's Blues," he demonstrates how the blues "fall short of
tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but
the self" (118). Ellison thus sees the blues as arising from a modern
experience in which the individual, unaided by community or religion,
is confronted with an "impersonal and violent" world and, in
the face of utter uncertainty, must choose to act, drawing its strength
from "a willingness to deal with the whole man." This is what
Ellison means when he - creating a contrast to the gospel singing of Mahalia
Jackson - remarks "the secular existentialism of the blues"
(92). The blues are a philosophy for the modern individual (like European
existentialism), and adequate for the world in which it makes its uncertain
way. Ellison, then, in seeing the blues as the basis for that which makes
swing what it is, situates the modernism of jazz as a consequence of African
American experience, not the inherited style of European innovators. The
adequacy of jazz as an expression of African American experience for the
modern world, as a message to and for humanity, is based in the blues
and its "ontology" from which it derives not only its basic
formal musical structure, but an aesthetic gesture that grounds a speculative
moral and implied political approach to experience in the world.
Ellison arrived in New York just around the same time that the blues-infused
sounds of the Southwestern jazz musicians hit New York like a twister
and sent the swing scene spinning. Langston Hughes arranged the aspiring
young writer/musician's meeting with Richard Wright in May, 1937, a year
after Ellison left Tuskegee for Harlem. Count Basie and his Orchestra
(combining the Blue Devils and Bennie Moten's band) played ruling king
Chick Webb and his group to a dead heat at the famous cutting contest
at the Savoy on January 16th, 1938. Ellison, who was still in Dayton,
Ohio mourning his mother, (Jackson, 190-97) did not attend this epic showdown:
but we can fruitfully imagine it as the embodiment of what Ellison means
in his repeated invocations of jazz as an "institution" or jazz
as "experience" (LWM, 39). Aside from his appreciation for jazz
music as creative African American art, the significance of the jazz that
Ellison loved and that inspired his writing lay in its lending shape to
a ritual through a specific expressive language. Numerous moments in the
essays provide testimony for Ellison's understanding of jazz as a communal
experience, one made possible, in turn, through the relationships amongst
musicians and between musicians and audience. Ellison notes that "the
delicate balance struck between strong individual personality and the
group during those early jam sessions was a marvel of social organization"
and how the musicians "lived [an often harsh life] fully, and when
they expressed their attitude toward the world it was with a fluid style
that reduced the chaos of living to form" (6). Of his lifelong friend
and fellow Oklahoman Jimmy Rushing Ellison claims: "he expressed
a value, an attitude about the world" (44) and when he sang, the
music "achieved that feeling of communion which was the true meaning
of the public jazz dance" (47). Rushing - the singer who fronted
the Basie orchestra with his rafter-shaking bass voice - embodied the
process in which "the blues, the singer, the band and the dancers
formed the vital whole of jazz as an institutional form, and even today
neither part is quite complete without the rest" (47). Ellison further
defines the locus of this vital whole: "And in the beginning it was
in the Negro dance hall and night club that jazz was most completely a
part of a total cultural expression, and in which it was freest and most
satisfying, both for the musicians and for those in whose lives it played
a major role" (59). Finally, Ellison characterizes performance as
a sort of unity-in-diversity, claiming that "true jazz is an art
of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment
(as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from
a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest
as a member
of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition" (36).
Swing, in Ellison's cultural politics, becomes a public and communal ritual
in which the fate of the individual alone in the world can be counteracted
through participation in a cultural event that combines music and dance
in dynamic interaction. Furthermore, it is the one aspect of American
culture that was thoroughly based in, motivated by and infused with the
contribution of African Americans, but that had proceeded to become the
popular music in America. If the blues individual is a lonely train in
the lonely night of the modern world, it is the communal ritual of jazz
as experience that holds the light of promise for some kind of deliverance
through integration. For Ellison's cultural imagination swing - in keeping
with Michelet's dictum that every age dreams its successor - is like the
cultural dream that would become realized in the next generation's political
struggle for civil rights and integration. Like Peter Wheatstraw's whistle
that "flowered at the end of each phrase into a tremulous, blue-toned
chord," the individual is trained in the sort of interracial harmony
necessary in a multi-ethnic democracy, which the civil rights movement
wanted to purge of its regressive antipluralism. The integrity of jazz
as an institution, the "feeling of communion" that is provided
for in the ritual of the swing dance, is a matter of political significance
that registers the historical effects of a cultural form. Swing was thus
seen by Ellison as a forward-looking cultural agent in political change,
not just the reflection of a social reality that segregated, discriminated,
lynched, deferred the dream and smashed the spirit. This is due, not in
the least measure, to the creative ingenuity of the jazz musician, whom
the young Ellison regarded as a sort of renaissance man (Jackson, 67).
It is his "strong individual personality" and "fluid style"
that creates through playful competition and individual assertion a polyphonic
unity that is dynamic, expansive, diverse and inclusive. As a mutually
determining and solidifying combination of the individual and whole, the
jazz combo or band was a "marvel of social organization," and,
Ellison implies, a model for society as well.
The situation of the African American performer, who must also survive
within the cutthroat competition of the entertainment industry and the
racist expectations of white audiences, was also theorized by Ellison.
He praises the creative "masking" by the black musician (exemplified
by Armstrong) that gives every performance a dual significance and that
allows him "to perform effectively through the magic of his art"
(70) and to "express an affirmative way of life through [his] musical
tradition [which] insisted that each artist achieve his creativity within
its frame" (6). Ellison makes clear the historical resonances of
masking with reference to Duke Ellington:
Ellington remarked "Fate is being kind to me, Fate doesn't want me
to be too famous too young," a quip as mocking of our double standards,
hypocrisies and pretensions as the dancing of those slaves who, looking
through the windows of a plantation manor house from the yard, imitated
the steps so gravely performed by the masters within and then added to
them their own special flair, burlesquing the white folks and then going
on to force the steps into a choreography uniquely their own. The whites,
looking at the activity in the yard, thought they were being flattered
by imitation and were amused by the incongruity of tattered blacks dancing
courtly steps, while missing completely the fact that before their eyes
a European cultural form was becoming Americanized, undergoing a metamorphosis
through the mocking activity of a people partially sprung from Africa
(84).
Thus for
Ellison the black musician presided over an event that was both negative
in the sense of the masked mocking of the "double standards, hypocrisies
and pretensions" of a social order disfigured through practices of
racial distinction and positive as the expression of an attitude of possibility
and transcendence through the ritual of communion and the exemplary relation
of individual and whole in the jazz combo. Swing's "tremulous blue-toned
chord" was, for Ellison, the modern and historically adequate form
of African American expression.
The Unbearable Bugginess of Bebop
Ellison's
comments about bebop appear in scattered references throughout his essays,
but the earliest comes near the end of his 1948 "Harlem is Nowhere,"
an essay that charts the effects of Harlem's urban environment on migrants
from the south:
Yet even his [the Negro's] art is transformed; the lyrical ritual elements
of folk jazz - that artistic projection of the only real individuality
possible for him in the south, that embodiment of a superior democracy
in which each individual cultivated his uniqueness and yet did not clash
with his neighbors - have given way to the near-themeless technical virtuosity
of bebop, a further triumph of technology over humanism ("Harlem
is Nowhere," CE 325).
"Harlem
is Nowhere" begins as a discussion of the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic
in Harlem and is an attempt to account for the "complex forces of
America" affecting its patients, Harlemites, who as "modern"
individuals make choices "in the here and now at the expense of hope,
pain and fear" and have along the way become "confused"
(321). Ellison discusses the psychological situation of the African American
individual in Harlem - "the scene and symbol of the Negro's perpetual
alienation in the land of his birth" - and identifies the "clash
of cultural factors" arising from the "impact between urban
slum conditions and folk sensibilities" as the source of the "confusion"
of the Harlemite. But this clash is also seen as the means of exceeding
and negating it: "For if Harlem is the scene of the folk-Negro's
death agony, it is also the setting of his transcendence," (322)
one facilitated by the "techniques of survival
the ease of movement
within explosive situations" that the "folk-Negro" has
brought from the "relatively static order" (323) of the South.
It is not that a static order has been simply transplanted to a different
locus, a village in the metropolis, but it is a wrenching contrast that
causes both the confusion engendered by Harlem - variously described as
a "chasm of mazelike passages" (323), a "capricious reality,"
a "ghetto maze" (325), "slum-shocked institutions"
(325) - as well as new and inventive strategies for survival, which amount
to a revolution in speech, thought and artistic production. This is the
Harlemite's response to an absurd "world so fluid and shifting that
often within the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the marvelous
beckons from behind the same sordid reality that denies its existence"
(322). The novel Invisible Man answers that beckoning, presenting the
marvelous with the sordid and remaining true, in the end, despite its
surrealistic effects, to a type of realism by representing the surreal
within the real. Life really is that strange: and to rise to the occasion
requires the development of strange capacities. The confusion of the Harlemite
is, in the end, not only, or not simply, a bad thing. The new forms of
speech and expression created by leaving the South - with its "semblance
of metaphysical wholeness" provided by religion, its "family
structure," its "body of folklore," and "the sense
of being at home in the world gained from confronting and accepting
the obscene absurdity of his [the Negro's] predicament" (324), and
landing in the "ghetto maze" (325) of Harlem - correspond to
the twin options of genius and madness. And for Ellison, bebop embodies
both.
Langston Hughes's motto to "Montage of Dream Deferred" (written
in the same year as "Harlem is Nowhere" but not published until
1951) provides his famously trenchant description of bebop - like it,
his brilliant Harlem poem cycle is
marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent
interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of
the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs,
runs, breaks and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition
(387).
In a remarkably
parallel gesture, Hughes and his younger friend both equate the reflection
of the changes in the experience of life in Harlem with the technical
changes in bebop. But while Hughes expresses uninhibited enthusiasm for
the new sounds and inhabits their idiom to create his poetic essay on
Harlem, Ellison laments the new music's installation of "technology
over "humanity." This critique is repeated in different ways
throughout the many jazz essays that Ellison wrote over the subsequent
twenty years. The most sustained discussion of bebop as a movement is
in his recollective essay on Minton's Playhouse, "Golden Age, Time
Past" published in Esquire in 1959. The critical perspective on bebop
expressed in this dense passage reads like a counterpoint to the Hughes
quote:
It was itself a texture of fragments, repetitive, nervous, not fully formed;
its melodic lines underground, secret and taunting; its riffs jeering
- "Salt peanuts! Salt peanuts" - its timbres flat or shrill,
with a minimum of thrilling vibrato. Its rhythms were out of stride and
seemingly arbitrary, its drummers frozen-faced introverts dedicated to
chaos. And in it the steady flow of memory, desire and defined experience
summed up by the traditional jazz beat and blues mood seemed swept like
a great river from its old, deep bed (55).
Bebop's revolutionary
changes to the basic structure of swing were something profoundly upsetting
to Ellison's entire aesthetics and philosophy. If swing was a twister
from the Midwest, bebop was a tsunami of sound from Harlem that not only
lifted the steamboat of music from the "steady flow of memory, desire
and defined experience" but that "great river" itself from
its bed in modern culture. Ellison was a longtime resident of Harlem by
the time Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others,
in revolt against the commercialized, white-dominated form to which swing
had been reduced, were experimenting at Minton's in the early forties,
and was a regular attendant at the club. But the changes in bebop - basing
the melodic line on chord changes, the paring-down of expressive flourishes
like glissandi and the "thrilling" vibrato tones, the sheer
velocity of the solos - must have sounded harsh and ascetic yet and the
same time empty and gray for Ellison. The moment of the thrill of anticipation,
like the sound of music approaching, is lost in the leveling-out in bebop
of the rhythmic and melodic tension that made swing swinging, danceable,
and expressive in a blues idiom. Whereas in swing the aesthetic categories
of technique and expression existed in an harmonious and integral whole,
in bebop technique came to dominate expression - or more precisely, technique
becomes expression itself.
Bebop also fundamentally changed the form of jazz as an experience. Despite
later efforts by Gillespie to inspire a dance culture around bebop, swingers
could not find the beat. Dancing in swing allowed for "the interchange
between the orchestra and a moving audience" making it a "communal
experience," but "after bop entered the picture the dancing
went out," (275) because "
most people couldn't dance to
bop. Very often Dizzy and Bird were so engrossed with their experiments
that they didn't provide enough music for the supportive rite of dancing"
(28). This phrase not only reaffirms Ellison's understanding of the ritualistic
aspect of dance as part of the institution of jazz, but signals another
moment of Ellison's critique of bop: the elitism of the bebop performer,
who, Ellison believes, "must act exactly the opposite of what white
people might believe" and wants to be "absolutely free of the
obligations of the entertainer" leading him to "treat the audience
with aggressive contempt" (63). Ellison is dismayed by the bebop
musician's presumed belief that "to be in control, artistically and
personally, one must be so cool as to quench one's own human fire"
(63) and contrasts this with "the exuberant and outgoing lyricism
of the older men" (63). He understands this to be result of the "thrust
toward respectability exhibited by the Negro jazzmen of Parker's generation,"
but goes ballistic when beboppers call his hero Armstrong an "Uncle
Tom," charging that "they confused artistic quality with questions
of personal conduct, a confusion which would ultimately reduce their own
music to the mere matter of race" (69). The beboppers were caught
in a vain attempt to break out of the entertainer's role, in the process
discarding the humorous masking through which the older musicians expressed
a duplicitous genius. This descended to the level of the "funereal
posturing of the Modern Jazz Quartet" (70) and the "loneliness,
self-depreciation and self-pity" of Parker's playing, from whose
"vibratoless tone" issued "a sound of amateurish ineffectuality,
as though he could never quite make it" (75).
But while Ellison connects the flat sound of bebop to the lack of exuberance
and lyricism in the bebopper, going so far as to suggest that "many
were even of a different physical build," (63) he also sees bebop
and the bebopper as marked by a hyperactivity that stems from the newer
musicians' inability to maintain that "fluid style" that allowed
the earlier jazzman to lend form to the chaos of life. Ellison's letters
to Murray contain references to the excessive ebullience of beboppers,
such as that of a drummer (Jo Jones), whom Ellison meets and characterizes
as "stepping around like he had springs in his legs and a bunch of
frantic jumping beans in his butt." He continues: " Man, they
tell a lot of wild stories about boppers but this stud is truly apt to
take off like a jet anytime he takes the notion. He probably has to play
his bass with a twenty pound weight on his trap foot." (LWM 237 [Letter
to Murray, Oct. 22, 1955]) Here the echoes of "Harlem is Nowhere"
can be heard, which gives the sociological reasons why
for a long time now - despite songs like the "Blow Top Blues"
and the eruption of expressions like frantic, buggy, and mad into Harlem's
popular speech, doubtless a word-magic against the states they name -
calm in the face of the unreality of Negro life has become increasingly
difficult" (CE 323)
As Lawrence
Jackson notes in his excellent new biography of Ellison, bebop was described
as ""frantic" and "hectic" and "mad"
in the argot of 1940s Harlem" (277). In "Richard Wright's Blues'
(an essay written in close temporal and theoretical proximity to "Harlem
is Nowhere") Ellison remarks "
all those blasting pressures
which
have shattered the wholeness of its [the Negro people's] folk
consciousness into a thousand writhing pieces" (105) and how "the
movement north affects
his [the Negro's] entire psychosomatic structure"
and that "what is called hysteria is suppressed intellectual energy
expressed physically" (112). For Ellison, there was something of
this hysterical energy, this hectic bugginess of the migrant to Harlem
expressed in bebop, which, translating Ellison's metaphors, would be a
form of music-magic against the frantic state of mind that the ghetto
maze of Harlem engendered and which bebop named in sound. It registered
the fear born from the destruction of the folk consciousness and the loss
of the ability for grace under pressure, which results both in the stiff
reserve and the frenetic edginess of the bebopper. A similar duality in
the music undermines the expressiveness that swing inherits from the blues
and that accounts for its modernism: while the leveling-out of rhythm
and melody flatten out expression, the velocity, the "conflicting
changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms"
simultaneously insert an agitated nervousness and crazed jerkiness. While
style and expression exist in a harmoniously swinging dynamism in music
like that of Ellington, the two go separate and contradictory paths in
bebop, a process which, for Ellison, gets even worse in the next generation
of bebop-inspired musicians in the fifties. This can be seen in this passage
from letter to Murray describing the 1958 Newport Festival:
I finally saw that Chico Hamilton with his mannerisms and that poor, evil,
lost little Miles Davis, who on this occasion sounded like he just couldn't
get it together. Nor did Coltrane help with his badly executed velocity
exercises. These cats have gotten lost, man. They're trying to get hold
to something by fucking up the blues, but some of them don't even know
the difference between a blues and a spiritual. (LWM 245 [Letter to Murray,
10/28/58])
If the power
of swing was firmly based in the blues, it is not surprising that the
loss of expressiveness in bebop is due to the bebop musician's "fucking"
them up.
The contrasts Ellison draws between swing and bebop present themselves
clearly after this my rehearsal of his characterizations of the two forms.
Whereas in swing technique is subordinated to the primacy of an expressiveness
achieved through a blues tonality, expansive color, flourishes etc., bebop
subordinates expression to the primacy of technical virtuosity. In swing,
the involvement of the public through dance makes the jazz performance
a participatory and communal ritual, whereas in bebop the involvement
of the public is reduced to finger snapping, toe tapping and the sycophantic
emulation of modes of fashion and speech. The active dynamism of the interaction
between dancing public and performing musician is replaced by a one-directional,
passive appreciation of the isolated consumer. The swing performance provided
a ritual of communion for the lone individual facing a harsh world without
the binding supportive rites of religion and community, while bebop merely
reflected the egoism of the competitive individual and the disintegration
of community. While swing, like the blues, promoted values of strength
of character and perseverance, bebop reflected the fragmentation, chaos
and sense of despair of post-war America. The communal nature of the swing
dance, made dynamic by the interaction of participants on the stage and
the dance floor, and the "freedom within discipline" in the
jazz ensemble countered the alienation of the individual in the modern
world and represented a "superior democracy," a model of a plurality
operating in harmony. In bebop, however, the relations between the individual
and the group are alienated. Individual expression and improvisation are
discrete elements that taken together do not harmonize into an integral
whole. There is a disjunction between the assertions of the freedom of
the individual and the integrity of the community of musicians and the
public, dancers and listeners alike. Bebop's emphasis on virtuosity undermined
the dynamic unity-in-diversity of swing. While in swing the musician was
able to creatively exist within the constraints of the entertainment industry
through masking and humor and to express himself through a gesture of
openness and tolerance, in bebop the artist is self-obsessed, funereally
serious, disdainful to the audience, and elitist. The humanistic values
that Ellison sees represented most thoroughly in the jazz band are undermined
by the predominance of "technology" - by which Ellison means
not only the emphasis on virtuoso playing, but more broadly the music's
reflection of an advanced stage of industrial capitalism ruled by technocrats
and organized around the demand for new machines and faster cars. If the
blues/jazz musician, finally, reduced to the "chaos of living to
form," with a "fluid style," the bebop musician deformed
the music with a style that was jerky, nervous, ruptured, broken-up, "dis-integral."
For Ellison this was a breach of trust in a realm that he held sacred.
Swing Aesthetics
and Bebop Art
Ellison's
characterization of the progression from swing to bebop, read strongly,
can reveal the outlines of an historical aesthetic that I would like to
illuminate by sounding a brief counterpoint to an aspect of Theodor Adorno's
dialectic of modern music. I will not discuss (in this paper) Adorno's
writings on jazz, which were often grossly misinformed, in some respects
ignorant of cultural contexts and theoretically arrogant, imposing his
conceptual scheme on a presumably undifferentiated genre with crass insensitivity.
Nevertheless, his philosophy is unique as a comprehensive aesthetic philosophy
of modern art and an understanding of historical development in music.
As such it provides a useful point of comparison for understanding Ellison;
to this end I will briefly summarize an aesthetic movement that Adorno
theorizes in his Philosophy of Modern Music and in his article the "Aging
of the New Music" and bring it into dialogue with Ellison's thinking.
Philosophy of Modern Music is an exposition of the dialectic of the New
Music, that is, the compositions by Viennese composers Arnold Schoenberg
and his students Anton Webern and Alban Berg that pushed the styles of
late romanticism to the point where the tonal system was superseded. These
atonal compositions, in Adorno's reading, were the pinnacle of modern
music: in their rebellion against the rules of tonality they figure a
freedom of expression that gave voice to a dynamic subjectivity. He develops,
in his version of historical materialism applied to aesthetics, the concept
of musical material, which is not just sound as notes and chords, but
the music-historically determined state of their meaning or lack of meaning:
this is the raw material to which the composer applies his style, lending
it form. Late romanticism had exhausted the possibilities for expression
within the tonal system. In atonality, the relation between material and
form was such that the greatest freedom of expression was guaranteed -
through dissonance, which was "freed" or released from the constraints
of tonality. However, in the article "Aging of the New Music,"
Adorno carries his thesis further, criticizing the techniques of musical
organization like twelve-tone composition that emerged after atonality.
He laments the replacement of the freely composed work by a schematic
formula and the abandonment, once again, of the expressivity that had
gotten lost from tonality and restored in the atonal compositions. The
new music had, through progression from within the tonal system, given
birth to a new form, carrying through an immanent and necessary development
from one phase of the relation between form and material to the only possible
next phase. (This is analogous, in historical materialism, to the emergence
of one mode of production with its historically adequate relations of
production from within the previous mode of production, e.g. capitalism
out of feudalism). But just as tonality exhausted its historically possible
forms of expression, so did atonality, forcing the composers to search
for new methods of organizing the musical material. While twelve-tone
worked for a while, it lacked all expressivity, had, in effect, substituted
technique for expression, or even for the work of art itself.
A similar consciousness of the historical development of jazz can be read
in Ellison. The movement from a form in which the expressive potential
was realized with the greatest amount of historical adequacy, to a form
in which expression has become subordinated to technique, to the mathematically
schematic, is present in both. In both a subjective expressive capacity
that creates a mutually liberating relationship between form and material
is replaced by one in which society weighs too heavily, such that the
preponderance of the objective, social alienation of the subject undermines
the balance between composition and material. And like Adorno who sees
the progression from atonality to twelve-tone as an ineluctable process,
Ellison also locates the origins of the need for something new in the
moribund state to which swing had degenerated under the pressures of the
entertainment industry. This is how he characterizes it in "Golden
Age, Times Past":
Part of this [the bebop revolution at Minton's] was arbitrary, a revolt
of the younger against the established stylists; part of it was inevitable.
For jazz had reached a crisis, and new paths were certain to be searched
for and found. An increasing number of the younger men were formally trained,
and the post-Depression developments in the country had made for quite
a break between their experience and that of the older men (63).
The difference
in the understanding of the development expressed here lies in the ambivalent
gesture with which Ellison cites the two and presumably equally valid
aspects of the progression from swing to bebop. While for Adorno the progression
from late romanticism to atonality to twelve-tone is only necessary and
unavoidable, Ellison cites both the objective ineluctability of the creation
of the new form that is due to the "crisis" in swing, as well
as the moment of subjective will and "revolt." Ellison, thus,
by asserting the possibility for this subjective will, is suggesting an
anti-teleological moment in the historical development of new art forms.
It needn't have been so: something besides bebop, for example, could have
replaced swing, a maneuver which allows Ellison to both hold the beboppers
responsible for messing with the jazz he loved and to hold out the possibility
for alternatives. His critiques of bebop thus combine a sense of the necessity
of its historical origin and trajectory while maintaining the ability
for the agency of the creative artist to chart alternative pathways: I
want to submit this as the mandate that Ellison sees his own art as fulfilling,
as the task by which the young author of Invisible Man felt most urgently
motivated.
Both Adorno and Ellison were schooled in historical materialist thinking
at a young age, and both present revisions of the orthodox version. But
while Adorno synthesizes a neo-Hegelianism and a perspective informed
by modernist European art with his Marxism, his own aesthetic theory begins
to take on necessitarian, deterministic traits in its understanding of
the dialectic of musical material. Ellison revises the idea of history
in reaction to the Communist movement of the 1930s. The economistic "diamat"
he encountered in the party, according to which practices of racial distinction
were understood to be superstructural epiphenomena of the material dialectic,
could not account for the consequences of African American experience
for the concept of humanity that Ellison was concerned to recover. In
Invisible Man Ellison performs the breaking-out of the constraints of
a necessitarian conception of historical development. In the prologue
the narrator warns us to beware of those who discuss a "spiral of
history" because they are really preparing a boomerang (6). The spiral
is the image Hegel uses for the idea of progress that his historical idealism
proposed and that Marx refashioned into historical materialism. But the
boomerang is the more apt image for an African American experience of
a history of betrayals and deceits, giving rise to an attitude of extreme
caution in accepting any models for history. Key moments of the novel
- the grandfather scene (16), the Wheatstraw episode (173-179), the eviction
scene (270-280), the conversation with Jack (291), Brother Tarp (378),
the Tod Clifton affair (Ch. 19), Hambro (503), the riot (Ch. 25), the
dream (569) and finally the Epilogue - are signal episodes in the developing
historical consciousness of the young protagonist, who leaves the timelessness
of the South to a confront the Brotherhood's idea of history and finally
to make his home underneath a border area in Harlem. Here he composes
our story as a way to make sense of his own history, going underground
and writing until he has "whipped it all" (580). But along the
way he softens the harsh sounds of the music of history and sounds other
notes from the lower frequencies. The novel's inhabitation of ambivalence
is enacted in the end, in which the narrator leaves us with possibilities
but no certainties: "having tried to give pattern to the chaos which
lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must
emerge. And there's still a conflict within me" (580). The ending
of the book neither presents a culmination in the origins à la
Hegel nor mandates a correct political practice à la Marx. What
we are left with is the ambivalence of the blues, which give shape to
chaos but prescribe no solutions.
My exposition of Ellison's relation to jazz has situated his rejection
of bebop within an anti-teleological historical aesthetics that posits
a relationship between technique and material, which can, in turn, be
brought to bear on the novel itself. The question then presents itself:
Does the artistry Ellison practices in Invisible Man itself correspond
to the aesthetic judgments he makes in his essays and the philosophy upon
which they are implicitly based? My preliminary answer in this limited
paper is: not exactly. Despite the novel's nearly obsessive recycling
of the figure of tragicomic masking; despite its inhabitation of a blues
idiom; despite his narrator's reefer-induced, quasi-mystical descent into
the lower frequencies with Armstrong as his Beatrice; despite the transfigurations
of folk culture that the novel stages; and despite the effusiveness of
imagery and symbolism that hark back to the polyphony of the New Orleans
style, Invisible Man is, in many ways, a bebop novel. In the fast pace
of events "sheerly happening" (Ellison, 1963, 243) throughout
the novel one may hear the virtuoso speed exercises of Parker; in its
hallucinatory flights of absurdity it recalls the intense creativity of
soloistic improvisation in the bebop combo; in the montage of images and
events that erupt into a dissonant lyricism at key points of the novel,
e.g. in the eviction scene or the riot, are echoed "the broken rhythms
and impudent insertions" of bebop; and in the withdrawal from society
of the narrator to his underground den for hibernation, we sense the reserve
and seeming despair of the bebopper. Thus does Ellison practice that against
which he preaches. The author is, after all, always something of a trickster,
and Ellison especially loved that role for himself. I have been one too,
in casting Ellison's rejection of bebop in monolithic terms. There was
something in the new sound that also moved Ellison and that found its
way into his own novel. His reaction to bebop is, in the end, not just
one of dislike, but one of ambivalence. This is best expressed in the
penultimate paragraph of Invisible Man, which adjoins the quote from the
epilogue above:
And there's still a conflict within me: With Louis Armstrong one half
of me says, Open the window and let the foul air out," while the
other says, "It was good green corn before the harvest." Of
course Louis was kidding, he wouldn't have thrown old bad air out, because
it would have broken up the music and the dance, when it was the good
music that came from the bell of old Bad Air's horn that counted. Old
Bad Air is still around with his music and his dancing and his diversity,
and I'll be up and around with mine (581).
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