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by Paul Rome

Ba-Bap. . .he hit the snare so hard and so clean-right with the bass player, and each of Elvin Jones's four extremities went into motion. The piano played one of those thick McCoy Tyner chords with that deep thoughtful jazz sound that makes my body twitch ever so slightly with momentary satisfaction and anticipation. A split-second descending right-handed run from the piano and Bshhh. . .Elvin let the symbol resonate and moved in with his deadly swinging crisp high hat cht, cht, cht, cht, just as the horns stated the melody in unison a fourth apart.

Then, with a punchy five-note line the sax player began his solo. After that phrase he stopped and waited-allowing a few bars to roll by as he felt the rhythm and absorbed the harmonies the piano player offered in response to his line. With his head bent down as if in prayer, he countered with a longer, smoother second phrase that elaborated on the first one but then confidently let his last unresolved note bang out over the audience. I felt my legs moving under me and my head bobbing slightly, and my jaw began to open and shut tightly as if to sing the next phrase. As the solo progressed, I felt I had to hold my breath, waiting for each of the horn player's thoughts to finish before I could take a full breath. The phrases began to get faster and closer together until he was rapidly firing notes out of his horn, and there was increasingly less space to breathe. The notes came in clusters and bursts of creative energy. His ideas seemed to flow from deep within the realms of the unconscious until he seemed no longer to be in control of his thoughts.

Yet, despite the speed of the notes and ideas, he was completely in control and fooled everyone by deftly taking his time-moving slowly 'out' of the scale so subtly that the audience didn't even notice until five minutes later with sweat pooling on his forehead, he had taken his solo all the way "outside" of the music and continued pushing his band further on and outer still. Elvin came crashing down on his kit playing fierce poly patterns that evolved into a rhythmic game of tag with the horn player that just got more and more intense until at last the horn player reached way up and seemed to pull a screeching note out of the ceiling and scream out into the club, before physically bending that note back into the music. Then, with a quiet phrase he stepped back and allowed the piano player to overlap delicately his phrase until the horn stopped altogether and the piano player began.

I saw this performance by the seventy-four year-old drumming legend, Elvin Jones, and his band three weeks ago. With this experience fresh in my mind I picked up Ralph Ellison's collection of essays,Living with Music, fully aware of the way my own life has become immersed in the power of music. Ellison, himself, a music lover, as well as a very racially conscious thinker, bemoans the fact that society does not bestow more attention, respect, and honor upon jazz music. For Ellison, although fully aware of the vast array of musical genres and periods, (he easily discusses the virtue of classical, opera, flamenco, and the blues,) admits that for him, jazz is the most powerful form or at least most enjoyable, because "perhaps the enjoyment of music is always suffused with past experience" ("Living" 13). In all of Ellison's essays on music, he constantly refers back to his own childhood in Oklahoma and looks back upon the jazz created during that era with a nostalgia and fondness: "It seems a long way and a long time from the glorious days of Oklahoma jazz dances, [and] the jam sessions at Halley Richardson's place on Deep Second" ("Living" 13). From his obvious love for the music of his youth, Ellison promotes the importance of studying it further, denounces the rigid way all music is taught, and comments on the false moves of contemporary music, including the music of Elvin Jones and the other music that I love so much. Ellison rejects developments in contemporary music because he is pained that modem jazz artists have tried to capture the white avant-garde by cutting themselves off from the wonderful heritage of the African-American jazz artists who preceded them. What binds all these seemingly disparate ideas of Ellison's is his nostalgia and racial awareness. The contradiction between those two prominent characteristics creates a perplexing and often painful tension throughout his writing and reveals Ellison to be a complex thinker-at once exuberant and joyful, and at other times conservative and critical.

In "The Golden Age, Time Past" he writes, "It has been a long time now, and not many remember how it was in the old days, not really. Not even those who were there to see and hear it happen" (51). Ellison is critical of people's selective memories that make it seem as if the "be bop" period of the late thirties and early forties is the Golden Age of jazz, when, in his view, the golden age was much earlier, when he was a boy growing up in the opening decades of the twentieth century. He writes warmly about one of his early heroes, big band singer Jimmy Rushing: "In the old days the voice was high and clear and poignantly lyrical" ("Remembering" 44). He loves the clarity and directness of emotions and the rawness of the blues as expressed by Rushing or Charlie Christian, Louis Armstrong, and the Duke Ellington band. Ellison desires the pure connection that these musicians have to the soul of people. He concludes his essay "The Charlie Christian Story" with these words: "This album of his work-so irresistible and danceable in its swing, so intellectually stimulating in its ideas-is important not only for its contributions to our knowledge of the evolution of contemporary jazz style; it also offers some of the best arguments for bringing more serious critical intelligence to this branch of our national culture" (42).

Ellison's interest in the analytical value of studying artists such as Christian and Ellington stems from his past history with music in school and his formal classical training at the Tuskegee Music Conservatory. It is an important step toward institutional equality that African American music be studied alongside European music. Ellison notes that "while it might sound incongruous at first, the step from spirituality of the spirituals to that of the Beethoven of the symphonies or the Bach of the chorales is not as vast as it seems. Nor is the romanticism of a Brahms or Chopin completely unrelated to that of Louis Armstrong" ("Living"14). Ellison is justifiably bitter about the lack of respect for jazz musicians when he writes that the teachers at his conservatory "would have destroyed them and scattered them to pieces" ("Living" 14). But, he is conflicted, because while he wants jazz and spirituals to become engrained into the curriculum of music education, he also has problems with the way even classical music is presented. He cites as an example the time when his third grade classmate was whipped for "insisting that it was a large green snake he saw swimming down a quiet brook instead of the snowy bird the teacher felt that Saint-Saens'sCarnival of the Animals should evoke" ("Living" 7). Ellison objects to the notion that when learning classical music there is a specific way one "is supposed to feel" ("Living" 7).

Ellison would cringe to see jazz confined to this sort of textbook analysis, because "we are now aware of a fully developed and endlessly flexible technique of jazz expression" ("Christian" 41). Criticisms of convention and comments such as these suggest Ellison's progressive view of music and jazz, making his criticism of bebop acute and at first glance, extremely surprising. Charlie Parker, who is still considered by many to be the most important innovator in the bebop and modern jazz movement, takes the brunt of Ellison's criticism. Ellison describes Parker's music this way: "For all its velocity, brilliance and imagination there is in it a great deal of loneliness, self-depreciation and self-pity. With this there is a quality which seems to issue from its vibratoless tone: a sound of amateurish ineffectuality, as though he could never quite make it" ("Bird" 74). Ellison finds some value in Parker when he concedes that "nevertheless he captured something of the discordances, the yearning, romance and cunning of the age and ordered it into a haunting art" ("Bird" 75). The "yearning" aspect is a particularly pivotal emotion in the way many future musicians and icons and my personal favorite musicians, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, adapted and shaped their style, yet Ellison seems largely unimpressed by this emotion, and it is the only time he mentions it in his writing. Ironically, Ellison's criticism that Parker's playing "never quite make[s] it," is precisely what I enjoy-the struggle and toil that capture a universal part of life experience. Miles Davis, a disciple of Parker (and influenced by Louis Armstrong), expands the vocabulary of jazz by capturing pain, often in the romantic song. By valuing the dance bands over the more experimental music of bebop, Ellison seems to be contradicting his notion of jazz as "endlessly flexible." To me, Davis or Elvin Jones's band does more to capture and retell the racial suffering endured by African Americans than any of the dance bands. Confining Davis or Jones to shorter, tighter formats would stifle their ideas.

Ellison acknowledges that the bebop era brought on a more complicated and technical style of music and observes how elements of classical music began to seep into jazz, but he believes this "desire to master the classical technique was linked with the struggle for recognition in the larger society, and with a desire to throw off those nonmusical features which came into jazz from the minstrel tradition" ("Christian" 41). In Ellison's mind, the music is in some ways "selling out" to the white audience. But, it is hard for me to believe that because jazz musicians wanted to create a more technically complex music, they were selling out. Technique would seem pivotal for a musician to reach maximum self-expression. Trumpeter Louis Armstrong, Ellison's clear favorite and hero, is connected to the minstrel tradition, and his technically simpler music would seem easier to follow and thus more universal or closer to popular music than bebop. But Ellison seems personally insulted by bebop because he hears in it a rejection of Armstrong and a false attempt by the new generation of musicians to avoid the inevitable role of entertainer. "By rejecting Armstrong they thought to rid themselves of the entertainer's role. And by getting rid of the role, they demanded, in the name of their racial identity, a purity of status which by definition is impossible for the performing artist" ("Bird" 69). Ellison believes that the rudeness the bebop generation inflicts upon its audience is reverse racism and simultaneously a new form of entertainment of which the musicians aren't even aware. Ellison writes, "Certain older jazzmen possessed a clearer idea of the division between their identities as performers and as private individuals" ("Bird" 70). There may be some truth to Ellison's point, but by placing the new generation's disregard for entertainment at the forefront, instead of the new music, demonstrates Ellison's conservatism.

What Ellison wants from music is to be transported "into an ecstasy of rhythm and memory and brassy affirmation of the goodness of being alive and part of the community" ("Living" 9). This is where my taste clashes with Ellison's. While I too love the transient nature of music and desire "ecstasy of rhythm," I'm more involved with my own and the artists' own personal journey than "being part of the community." I feel that if the band is working together to reach maximum self- expression, then the same communal happiness will occur as a result of the artists' personal approach. For me, the saxophone player who barely looked up the entire show and never smiled until it was over, does more to capture the struggle for identity in music, than the more conventional audience-friendly big bands. I understand and agree with Ellison's point that this newer way of treating (or disrespecting according to Ellison) the audience is indeed a perverse form of entertainment, but I don't take this statement personally because I can not find any fault in Miles Davis turning his back to the audience in a symbolic gesture of defiance. His music still embraces me even if he personally does not.

It is the ultimate irony that Ellison criticizes new musicians for wanting recognition and attention, when Ellison himself is understandably obsessed with the same goal for older musicians, such as Duke Ellington. He has a deep anger that it has taken so long (1969) for Ellington to be invited to the White House to be acknowledged as one of America's finest composers. Ellison is correct that "our institutions dedicated to the recognition of artistic achievement have been too prejudiced, negligent, or concerned with European models and styles" to honor Ellington ("Ellington" 78). But the real tragedy of Ellington and other African American musicians of the early jazz years are the deplorable conditions under which they were forced to make music: segregated night clubs, lower salaries; the list of injustices are innumerable. Ellison is preoccupied with the fact that Ellington was denied the title "King of Jazz" ("Ellington" 83), but I find this to be much less significant, because I accept the historical pattern that all true innovators suffer from people's conservative taste. Unfortunately for Ellington, he had to deal with being an innovator and bear the brunt of a racist country. Although I can only speculate, I can't imagine Ellington being ecstatic that the conservative president Richard Nixon was asking him to dinner, because the whole idea reeks of politically driven motives. I think when Miles turned his back on the audience at the height of his popularity, he was making the statement to the establishment: "You're too late in recognizing my greatness. I don't want your praise. If you like my music, fine, but if not, don't pretend to."

The public has always struggled to accept a new (although not necessarily better) way of achieving artistic expression, one that expands the genre. I believe Ellison's inability to fully enjoy modern jazz is no different, in this regard, from the people who couldn't understand Ellington. Ellison's theory that the emergence of bebop sprang from a "desire to create a jazz which could not be so easily imitated and exploited by white musicians" ("Golden Age" 64) may be partially true, but it makes him come off sounding narrow-minded and cynical because it insults and sells short the great musical accomplishments of the bebop musicians.

It is Ellison himself who wrote that in order for a jazz musician to escape the fate of historical obscurity, "the artist must be very talented, very individual, [and] as restlessly inventive as Picasso" ("Christian" 36). If Picasso's "restless inventiveness" made it necessary for him to reexamine constantly and then alter his style into unrecognizable new forms, then it is certainly the jazz musician's right and obligation to always challenge himself and look to reinvent the very nature and possibilities that music has to offer.

Works Cited

Ellison, Ralph. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings. Ed. Robert G. O'Meally. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.

--. "Living with Music." 3-14.

--. "The Charlie Christian Story." 34-42.

--. "Remembering Jimmy." 43-49.

--. "The Golden Age, Time Past." 50-64.

--. "On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz." 65-76.

--. "Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday." 77-86.

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