Baraka's bohemian blues

African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by John Gennari

In a letter to Down Beat in 1964, the avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon complained that LeRoi Jones's jazz writing "too obviously smacks of a kind of "in-group' superiority generally and rightly associated with pseudo-intellectuals." Dixon questioned whether Jones wrote on jazz "because he loves the music and wants to help it and its practitioners, knows the music and feels he has something to say, or if he feels that by stirring up 'controversies' his name will become synonymous with those he constantly champions, thereby creating a niche in the world of jazz for himself" (24). Many years later, in The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Baraka recounts the soul-searching that went on during the period when he established his reputation as scribe of the 1960s' avant-garde. Albert Ayler has showed up at his house and is asking Baraka about his writing on "the Music":

   He asked me did I think it was about me? He said, "You think it's
   about you?" I did and didn't know what he meant. In some ways, I
   guess, I did think it was about me. Albert meant it was really
   about Spirit and Energy.

When Baraka goes on to describe Ayler's playing, you can feel him straining for a vernacular linguistic effect that matches the visceral, physical power of the music:

   Albert, we found out quickly, could play his ass off. He had a
   sound, alone, unlike anyone else's. It tore through you, broad,
   jagged like something out of nature. Some critics said his sound
   was primitive. Shit, it was before that! It was a big massive
   sound and wail. The crying, shouting moan of black spirituals and
   God music.... Albert was mad. His playing was like some primordial
   frenzy that the world secretly used for energy. (194-95)

By this time, Baraka had thrown himself headlong into the work of building networks and institutions in the black community that would, as Larry Neal described the purpose of the Black Arts Movement, "speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of black people" (62). Not incidentally, this cultural work signaled a key shift in Baraka's relationship to jazz and in his approach to writing about the music. Whereas earlier--even in his sharp critiques of white critics--Baraka had engaged "my more serious colleagues" in analytical debates about Western concepts of art and criticism, now he was a people's intellectual, a revolutionary voice heralding a new expressive mode for a new black identity. As Baraka aligned himself with the community-oriented goals and methods of the Black Power Movement, drenched his writing and public performances in the rhythms and tonalities of the black urban vernacular, and hoisted himself up as an arbiter of black authenticity, his quest for what Werner Sollors has called a "populist modernism" involved a tricky effort to reconcile collective political imperatives with the individual aesthetic freedom he prized as both a poet and a champion of the jazz avant-garde.

By and large, the Amiri Baraka who has been both memorialized and scorned is the black nationalist of the mid-to-late 1960s, the firebrand proselytizer of the black aesthetic, the dazzling "geniu[s] of performance and chameleon register-shifting," as Houston Baker, Jr., has remembered him (xv). In this period Baraka joined such political figures as Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton in giving Black Power a distinctive masculinist intonation. Like Norman Mailer and other celebrity/intellectual outlaws, Baraka embodied the convulsive, spontaneous, and violent impulses of the 1960s. Obscured in this telescoping of Baraka's image, however, is the crucial point that Baraka, as Gerald Early has perceptively noted, was not a product of the 1960s, but "an intellectual child of the fifties" (200).

As he recounts in his autobiography, Baraka's self-tutorial during his mid-1950s' Air Force years led him "into the world of Quattrocento, vers libre, avant-garde, surrealism and dada, New Criticism, cubism, art nouveau, objectivism, 'Prufrock,' ambiguity, art music, rococo, shoe and non-shoe, [and] Highbrow vs. Middlebrow" (121). Werner Sollors has written that the Greenwich Village bohemian Baraka's "first form of protest against the middle class was at aesthetic rebellion, formulated as an indictment, not of racism, capitalism, or the Cold War, but of middle-brow taste" (14). Baraka's poems and social essays in this period were startling: Spring-loaded, razor-sharp, humorous lacerating, prophetic, they called out the trite, the false, the philistine, and the hypocritical in American culture. His main target was the middle class, the white one that dominated American politics and culture, and the black one from which he had emerged and never tired of savaging for what he regarded as a feeble grasping for respectability through slavish mimicry of the decadent white mainstream.

From The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones and Hettie Jones's memoir How I Became Hettie Jones, we glean contrasting but mutually illuminating portraits of the Village years, years in which the Jones household served as a key venue of downtown bohemia: a work space for their magazine Yugen: a new consciousness in arts and letters, a play space for such vivid illustrations of the new consciousness as a nude, lotus-positioned, mantra-chanting Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg, in a 1988 interview, recalled the heady, multi-arts, intergenerational spirit of that time and place: