File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9709, message 145


Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 21:38:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Pierre Dorge's New Jungle Orchestra


At 12:38 PM 9/20/97 -0400, Louis N Proyect wrote:
>Pierre Dorge's "New Jungle Orchestra" is inspired by Duke Ellington's
>original Jungle Orchestra that performed at the Cotton Club in Harlem in
>the late 1920s.

Excellent report, Louis!

>With the advent of the 1930s, Ellington no longer wrote "jungle" music. He
>had achieved considerable fame and could sell out Carnegie Hall. The idea
>of catering to a white audience's taste for Africana had become
>distasteful to the aristocratic Ellington. 

Aristocratic?  You don't have to be an aristocrat to give Uncle Tom the
boot, so there is unlikely to be a causal relationship there even if
Ellington was aristocratic.  BTW, Ellington did complain rather eloquently
about "Porgy and Bess".

>Ellington had
>already developed loose ties with the left by 1930, when he played at
>Communist Party fund-raisers in Harlem. In 1932 and 1935, he performed at
>benefits for the Scottsboro boys defense, according to Michael Denning in
>his superlative "The Cultural Front", a study of left culture of the 1930s
>and 40s.

Damn, I didn't know this.  I saw Denning's book, though, and it's a gold
mine for sure.

Before anyone heard of Ralph Ellison, Ellington made a great speech in late
1941, just before FDR joined the war, called "We, Too, Sing America!", a
very moving and aggressive statements about the centrality of Afro-Americans
to American culture and the democratic project.

>Ellington finally got the production together for "Jump for Joy" in 1940.
>Ironically, the musical borrowed from the skit structure of the old Cotton
>Club, but the content was altered radically.....

Didn't know all this.

>Years later, Ellington was pressured into disavowing his leftist ties
>before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. 

Didn't know this, either.  Knew that Langston got his butt kicked.

>In the 1960s, jazz was swept up by the black revolution and artists began
>to shun the idea of entertaining an audience entirely. The purpose of
>music was to galvanize people into struggle, not make their feet tap. Jazz
>had forsaken the minstrel roots of the 1920s, but something was lost in
>the process. If music was not entertaining, then what good was it?

Been reading too much Kofsky?  I think this is a one-sided view.  Of course,
even the music of the apolitical religious mystics like Coltrane was a
reflection of the expansive movement of the '60s, and yes, even he saw music
as a force for change, but I am skeptical of this characterization.  As for
giving up entertaining, I find this too loose a formulation.  Coltrane was a
very shy man, so all he did was play and not interact or clown it up with
the audience.  Did that make him less "entertaining" or
foot-tapping-inducing?  Don't want to dis, but it seems to me this image of
jazz is a part of your Trotskyist heritage you haven't yet overcome.

>Both Marsalis and Crouch are regarded in some circles 
>as neo-conservatives. 

Crouch is a big Coltrane freak, at least up to 1965.  I saw him some years
back say he couldn't relate to what Coltrane did the last two years of his
life.  This is when his music began to lose its still tightly constructed
structure, and became wilder and more seemingly random.  Well, I'm with
Coltrane through most of his last period, except that I've never been able
to bring myself to listen to "Om" more than five times in my life.

I don't know what Marsalis' overt politics are, but it is evident he's been
fed ideas, including some embarrassing ones, from Crouch, who is much more
suspect.  Though the Ellisonian democratic rhetoric of Marsalis can be very
attractive as a general, abstract stance, concretely, it seems too tailored
to the politics of American exceptionalism in conformance with the interests
of Marsalis' corporate sponsors.

It is no secret that there is a chain leading back from Marsalis to Crouch
to Albert Murray to Ralph Ellison.  Ellison's ambiguities lend themselves to
neo-liberal exploitation, but Ellison never really descended to the explicit
political chicanery of Murray or Crouch (unless you want to count Ellison's
favorable orientation toward LBJ, but that seems too thin to fret over for
somebody of his generation).  I once had some sympathy for Crouch because of
his hatred of scum like Spike Lee and Screwy Louis Farrakhan, but Crouch
really is a posturing clown of objectionable political orientation adhering
to the party line of what the Negro petty bourgeoisie believed in before the
black power movement came along, and extending it into the neoliberal
present, meaning that what was once progressively liberal up to a point is
now regressive and Clintonite (no welfare, more prisons, so grit your teeth
and face adversity without complaining even if you don't stand a chance).

>Marsalis has styled himself to some
>extent as a new Ellington and has written a orchestral suite about
>slavery. The problem with Marsalis's music, according to some critics, is
>that it is nothing but a museum-like recreation of earlier idioms and
>expresses no new creative energy.

Haven't heard this stuff and haven't heard Marsalis for years and years.  Is
this judgement true?  I've heard many people express this opinion.

>The atonal experiments of 1960s jazz are also dated, while Marsalis's efforts
>to put music back on the high road has only returned fitful results. It is
>safe to say that jazz lost something when it lost its ability to
>entertain, so the dedication of Dorge's band to this end is to be
>applauded.

I'm not sure if this is an accurate characterization.  The problem with some
of the avant-garde wasn't atonality per se, but random, unstructured and
technically inferior screaching.  Some of that was entertaining till it
became a cliche.  OK, some musicians might have been unentertainingly
atonal, but I wouldn't say the whole lot.  I'm thinking of Cecil Taylor.
Somebody sent me some of his classic recordings a few weeks ago and I've
been trying to be open-minded and listen to them repeatedly, but I still
can't stand them.  And Taylor is actually technically very competent.  At
least I could get off on Albert Ayler's sloppy but impassioned screaching,
'cause the truth is marching in, dadgum it.  What amazed me about 15 years
or so ago is that people could actually groove on James Blood Ulmer's noise,
while I, who used to listen regularly to Archie Shepp's "The Magic of Juju",
walked out on Ulmer.  BTW, from the tiny bit that gets through to me, there
is quite a bit of background dissonance in some of today's rap shit.  So I
think dissonance has had some cultural success.

Why must I always put my two cents in?



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