Baraka's bohemian blues

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

If the status and fate of this "Negro-ness"--where it comes from, who has it, who has lost it, who wants it, how it expresses itself in sound and attitude--is the central question of Blues People, the book always defines black music by its relationship to white culture. The full title of the book--Blues People: Negro Music in White America--provides an important clue: Baraka was interested in jazz's position at the seam between black and white culture, its status as a black-centered object of both white intellectual fascination and commercial commodification. While coming a perspective recognizably distinct from those of Hentoff, Williams, Ellison, Feather, Steams, Balliett, and Morgenstern, the Baraka of the early 1960s worked within the same general intellectual framework as these critics. Baraka sharply challenged the critical establishment, to be sure, but in doing so he embraced several of its fundamental purposes: establishing jazz's centrality in American national culture, honing tools of historical analysis and textual criticism, and guarding the music against the contaminating influence of mass culture. The challenge that Baraka took on in the early years of his jazz writing was to pull black music out of the triumphalist American ideology while still keeping it at the center of the national narrative.

There's not enough space here for a full exegesis of this complex, irksome, fascinating book, or of the famously surgical Ralph Ellison critique. But let me summarize the debate this way: Whereas Ellison affirmatively celebrates American culture as a triumph of miscegenation in which blacks and whites engage in a tussle of "antagonistic cooperation" that helps them bring out the best in each other, Baraka, by contrast, grimly sees the dynamic of American culture as black resistance against white corruption, a rearguard action made necessary by the American culture industry's seemingly inexhaustible capacity for appropriation and debasement. Ellison incisively underscores the pessimism inherent in Baraka's argument: If Baraka were right that black culture had been denuded of its authenticity, stripped of its essential properties, by its commodification in the American entertainment industry, then the "blues people" of twentieth-century urban America were trapped in a defensive, reactive posture, fatally consigned to having their cultural expression predetermined by forces beyond their control. The logic of this position, paradoxically, forces Baraka to acknowledge interracial contact as a defining feature of a music he wants desperately to claim as an emblem of racial authenticity.

Baraka's black high modernism and anti-mass-cult ideology leave him unable to deal with the popular: hence, the claim that big-band jazz "developed into a music that had almost nothing to do with the blues" and "had very little to do with black America"; the conspicuous absence of even a single mention of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, which at the time of Blues People's publication was on its way to becoming the best-selling jazz record of all time; and the summary dismissal of rhythm-and-blues and the funk/soul jazz movement as retrogressive forms with "no serious commitment to expression or emotional profundity." These critical positions, coupled with his deep immersion in the avant-garde scene, put Baraka at odds with many in the black community. As A. B. Spellman said at the time, "The man standing in line for the Otis Redding show at the Apollo almost certainly never heard of tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler, and wouldn't have the fuzziest idea of what he was doing if he did hear him" (167). When Baraka elaborated on his hard bop critique in a caustic review of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in Jazz magazine, a black reader from Philadelphia named Ben Page took him to task: