File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 366


Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 09:51:45 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: White Jazz


>Secondly, even black musicians with an attitude would hire whites if they
>liked their playing.  Bill Evans after all did work with Miles Davis.  This
>was before th militant period, of course, but I a not aware of Miles making
>an overly racial decision about the musicians he would work with.  

I'm really glad that Ralph is still on thaxis because I knew I could expect
some really intelligent feedback and criticism from another jazz-lover.

Miles Davis, in a certain sense, represents the purest synthesis of "white"
and "black" currents in Jazz, which--not to be too vulgar--are as important
to the overall esthetic as "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" were to classical
music in the Nietzschean framework.

We should remember that Miles Davis' closest collaborator for many years
was the white bandleader and arranger Gil Evans, who got started in the
1940 Claude Thornhill dance band, a hip version of the Dorsey brothers.
Alumni of the Thornhill band, including Jerry Mulligan, collaborated with
Miles in the seminal "Birth of the Cool" record of the early 1950s. It
spawned the West Coast style all on its own.

Davis stood apart from the whole black nationalist explosion in music. I
just dashed off the post last night, so I couldn't be as nuanced as I'd
like. To be completely accurate, you'd have to say that Archie Shepp
captured this tendency, more so than Coltrane or Sanders. In fact, I agree
with Ralph that Kofsky's book is second-rate. It would be fair to say that
there have merely been strong esthetic tendencies roughly identified with
race since the beginning of jazz. Class is also an important dimension.
Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday were from the poorest sectors of the
class, while Benny Goodman and Woody Herman never knew that kind of
oppression.

Louis Proyect





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