Jazz Poetry by David Treggiari

In ancient times, music and poetry were linked together, and poets were often accompanied by musicians, or they themselves played the lyre or another instrument in their performances.

In the Western world, after the development of the bourgeois ideology, the two arts were separated and detached from every day life, becoming more and more ethereal. This happened because of the development of an academic concept of both poetry and music.

Due to its immaterial being, music has long been considered as the maximum art, as a point of sublimation of society but never as a mirror of reality.

In Africa, instead, every sacred or profane human activity was and is still matched by some kind of rhythm, and music has remained linked to everyday life. Music in Africa is the art that best expresses every aspect of a man's life, and, if compared to Western Classical music, it seems to be much more dynamic than static.

Antiphony, repetition and improvisation are the main features of African music.

The antiphonal technique, known as the ‘call and response' method, establishes a fluidity of relationships between the conventional theme played by the leader (representing the tradition), and the answer of the community (representing the expression).

The very center of the meaning is in repetition, since, without a constant repetition of rhythm, it would be impossible to improvise with an instrument.

The African vocal improvisation, sung in the continuos repetition of the rhythm, equates the answer with the final creation, while all westerns musical compositions were fixed creations with fixed texts,.

For Africans, Music was the highest means of communication. They played percussion to communicate and, in their languages, they often changed the meaning of many words with a simple vocal alteration: in other words, they spoke musically.

Music was the main way for African people to express their spirituality, and they did so when they were deported as slaves. In America, African people lived for 250 years in slavery, being forced to convert to a new culture and a new religion without the possibility to cultivate their own habits. In these conditions, music remained the only spiritual expression where the Afro-American prisoner could recover his ancient aesthetic and metaphysical tradition.

So, more than Literature and other arts, Music has best represented the continuity of African tradition in America.

The development of the Afro-American poetic tradition paralleled the development of an elaborate oral tradition that encompassed every aspect and attitude of black life.

African American poetry began to flower because of a greater exploration of the black voice as it consciously recognized and found inspiration in black folklore.

The anonymous lyrics of spirituals and blues, old black voices and singers (from work-songs to the toastin' and dirty dozens patterns) are the first expressions of an American popular poetics, and, for this reason, they have been landmarks for Afro-American poets.

The image of the black musician has been mythicized and taken as a real example of life, because, as the great bluesman John Lee Hooker once said, "to play the blues, you must feel it".

Blues was born in the countryside, around the work fields, but it developed elsewhere. The slave, in his short free time, played his blues with his banjo, or guitar, or simply accompanied himself with his harmonica. He expressed his anger, delusions, hopes and joys, in other words, his emotions, in a ‘blue mood'.

The same emotions were converted in lyrics of hope and prayer by the work of black Church ministers who introduced the free chant in the Christian liturgy, giving life to Spirituals.

The history of Western colonialism has often shown that Christianity had a crucial and ambiguous role in people's colonization. Afro-Americans were the only ones forced to convert to another faith, to a religion full of promises and hopes about a future in a better world, in a state of a total slavery. This was the reason for the many comparisons they made with the destiny of the Jewish people, and the attribution of modern meanings to Old and New Testament verses. But many times, the High Sky, Heaven's Rivers and the Promised Land, were no more than images and metaphors containing an unexpressed wish for freedom and claims of a more earthly nature.

The wish for freedom, understood as the relation between the performer or the singer with life and pleasure, is furthermore, and not only metaphorically, fully expressed in the lyrics of the blues.

The blues comes directly from the storytelling art, and, although it is considered as a musical style, it is principally a vocal genre, in which the performer tells a story in lyrics, or more exactly, he expresses, using the singing technique, in acting and performing, his feelings about the story.

Paul Lawerence Dunbar and Sterling A. Brown have composed many ‘blue poems', linking themselves in this way to the storytelling art. They made use of the vernacular, Negro speech, and the pattern of ancient folk ballads.

In the 1920s, after the invention of the phonograph, black Music began to spread, and Afro-American intellectuals understood its cultural importance.

The first of them was Langston Hughes, who perceived the meaning of the continuity of the blues and the modernity of jazz. He recreated in poetry the main classical patterns of the blues, and understood that jazz was, first of all, a modus vivendi, the search for a black idiom and the retrieval of the true essence of Afro-Americans. His many blues and jazz poems, his collaborations with several musicians, and his essays about Afro-American culture and tradition, made him a kind of literary hero, comparable to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, or to an ideologist such as Malcolm X: in terms of ‘esemplarity', that has been a very important literary form for black people, since the first slaves narratives were published. Hughes was in literature the same that many jazzmen were in music.

All Afro-American poets and writers had to relate to their musical tradition: some of them, like Hughes, Amiri Baraka and Michael S. Harper, and others, were totally absorbed by it. There were others, Countee Cullen above all, that, though they were conscious of certain values and meanings of music, pondered with more universal terms, ‘refuting' to be involved and ‘constricted' to bring themes and patterns from black music in their poetics. When black Music, in a explicit way, began to express social and politic claims, the distance between music and poetry was no longer possible.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, with the ideal of a Black Nation, and under the slogan "Black is Beautiful", the Afro-American nationalist movement began to arise following the steps of the musical avant-garde of jazz, such as Be-Bop and Free Jazz. Black artists tried to make their art as black as possible, recovering ancestral sonorities and habits, no longer in a nostalgic, mythological and evocative way, as the Harlem Reinassance intellectuals did in the 1920s, but by imposing new meanings with the aim of revolutionizing reality.

Afro-Americans who, for different reasons, didn't subscribe to those more radical positions wich had arisen since the era of W.E.Dubois, were viewed with distain in their attempts to compromise with white authority, in to peacefullt seek ways of improving their social and economic conditions. The integrationists' peaceful attitude has often been interpreted as a kind of resignation and submission to the white man's will.

The division between integrationists and separatists has marked Afro-Americans' political thought for a century. It is still reverberating with redundant echoes in black music and, consequently, in the ‘black chant' (as a ‘soloist' musician part), and in the idea of a performance that contains the main and positive aspects of a black life attitude.

With Be-Bop, the new jazz form that reduced the big orchestras to little bands of four or five elements, the soloist began to assume a major importance, until he became a sort of guru who expressed, through the sound of his instrument, experiences of a personal life for his group and his public.

Jazzmen's performances and their Bohemian attitudes fascinated some white American intellectuals: Beat Generation poets were the first to present jazz poetry to the public. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac often went to jazz cafes: they admired boppers' lifestyle, taking their music patterns and structures rather than concepts and meanings, since the latter belonged exclusively to Afro-American people's history and, effectively, no white man, nor poet or musician, could ever really appropriate it.

Beat poets took unusual structural patterns from jazz, such as the dispassionate use of free verse and the concrete appareance of the printed page, the effort to recreate lines automatically, leaving the reader just the time to take breath, like the soloist does, or Kerouac's attempts to write "spontaneous prose". Such elements were directly taken from black music and made jazz poetry a stream inside the poetic river of XX century Modernism.

Far from being a simple aesthetic contrivance, jazz brought deep cultural meanings to American literature. It was not by mere chance that beat poets went against the traditional academic American culture, since they used the modernist jazz techniques to give voice to complaints and strong criticisms to the American system.

Poets and writers that followed the intuitions black music gave them, inevitably filled their works with racial meanings.

Leroy Jones, who changed his name in Amiri Baraka, was one of the most important members of the Black Arts Movement. He found in this movement a totally Jazz Aesthetic more than a simple jazz poetics. He himself took from black music those features that were closer to the African tradition, trying, in this way, to oppose Afro-American tradition to Western cultural supremacy and to its "illicit appropriating" of the most intimate African features of Afro-American music and culture. His Blues People (1968), that inspired this research, is not merely a deep reflection about Afro-American musical history, but it is a necessary reference point for everyone who wants to know the real meaning of Afro-American expressions, concepts, figures and images. You can't study Jazz without knowing that crucial points of its evolution respond with crucial points of Afro-American history, such as liberation, emancipation and adaptation to Western society. At the same time nobody could study Afro-American culture, habits, traditions, language, and heroes, without considering the music of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Coltrane, Shepp, Davis, or by the voices of Lightin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Stevie Wonder and James Brown. In the same manner, it would be hard to understand Afro-American poetics without understanding the meaning of a solo performance against a background of rhythms and sounds provided by the tradirion of black people, as expression of the Black Soul, or, at least, without reading some blues or spiritual text.

Social differentiation, slavery, segregation, are all elements that have kept the spirit of the tradition alive and the continuity of the idea of Black Beauty, and have given new meanings to certain linguistic expressions and social habits.

What Henry Louis Gates Jr. called "Signifyin(g)"' is a basic element of Afro-American literary history: certain aspects and contents of the African and Afro-American tradition assume different meanings every time they reappear in a new social context and in a different historical moment.

The spirit of the blues, unifying and irrepressible, emergeing from hidden streams, modeling itself to the present trend, that enriches itself with more and new meanings, and that makes reality visible through the eyes of tradition.

Analyzing some of the works among the primary fonts that we mentioned and saw in the previous chapters of this research, works by Frederick Douglass, W.e.dubois, P.l.dunbar, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Gwendoliyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Jayne Phillips, Alice Walker, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Michael S. Harper, Jayne Cortez, Al Young, Angela Jackson, Albert Murray, Gil Scott-heron, Nikki Giovanni, and, comparing these poets' experiences and their works with those of contemporary black musicians, it soon becomes clear that, in the intense exchange of sensibility, feelings, ideas, concepts, harmonies, beats, rhythms, poets and musicians have formed a thought, a poetics and an aesthetics that are expressions of their own community, the natural evolution of attitudes and habits descending directly from Africa.

From the 1980s until today, contemporaneously with the birth and the spread of Rap Music, the most recent stage of evolution in black music, the idea of a poetry that could be lyrics and music at the same time as grown, in both choral and improvisational solo expression, and that would not limit its material to the printed paper, but could extend from books to records, video clips and live performances. The aim of poets that belongs to the world of Spoken Poetry is to reconcile poetry with music, so that attitudes and expression fully coincide.

The Afro-American poet's performance seems to have the same social and cultural values of the performance of the musician; is the value of being the living manifestation of a guide-spirit that communicates a common feeling through the musicality of the language, as a form of expression that projects itself into the intimacy of a people who, since ancient times, have always recognized in rhythm and in music a common codex and an effective means of communication.

The tale of the life and death of Orpheus, the Greek mythological hero that communicated and fought armed only with his voice and his lyre, and with whom we conclude this research, almost seems to indicate the path taken by Afro-American poets and musicians, as "mediators of sensibility": just as the ancient Greek hero, the Afro-American hero, musician or poet, had to win many battles, interior ones too, armed only with his sound. Orpheus' defeat, that according to legend was killed by the Maenads who tore him to pieces, seems significative too: only his head and his lyre were saved, and, carried away by the Hebrus river, were transported to the sea, to finally arrive on the isle of Lesbos, the land where poetry was born.

Jazz Improvisation and the Written Word Performance and discussion with Jane Ira Bloom, Jay Clayton, Jerry Granelli, and David Tronzo.... inserito il 07/07/2008  da philoctetesctr - visualizzazioni: 4347

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