Dedicated To The Struggle: Black Music, Transculturation, and The Aural Making and Unmaking of The Third World

Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago
Dedicated to the Struggle: Black Music, Transculturation, and the Aural Making and Unmaking
of the Third World
Author(s): Njoroge Njoroge
Source: Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), pp. 85-104
Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of
Illinois Press
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Dedicated to the Struggle:
Black Music, Transculturation,
and the Aural Making and Unmaking
of the third world1
NjOROGE NjOROGE
But the black musician, he picks up his horn and starts blowing
some sounds that he never of before. He he
thought improvises,
creates, it comes from within. It's his soul, it's that soul music.
.. Well,
. likewise he can do the same thing if given intellectual
He can invent a a social an eco
independence.... society, system,
nomic a that is different from
system, political system anything
that exists on this earth. He will improvise, he will bring it from
within himself. And this is what you and Iwant.
?Malcolm X
On February 15,1961, Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.,Kennedy's new ambassador

to the United Nations, rose to defend the Security Council's of
handling
the crisis in the Congo, less than forty-eight hours after the news of Patrice
Lumumba's execution was made public. Since independence in i960, eth
nic strife, neocolonial machinations, and political turmoil had devastated
the former Belgian Congo. Lumumba appealed to the United Nations for
help; however, the world organization was unable to persuade the Belgian
forces to disarm and evacuate. Lumumba then turned to the Soviets for
assistance. Rebel forces, with the aid of the Central Intelligence Agency,
captured Lumumba and assassinated him in January of 1961 (his death was
kept secret until the following month). As Stevenson began his remarks,
1. This article is dedicated to Ngug? wa and Njeeri wa "the essence of art

Thiong'o Ng?g?:
ismovement.,,
Njoroge Njoroge is an assistant in the Department of History and a lecturer in the

professor
Department of American Studies at the University of Hawaii Manoa. He is currently working
on a book on the musics of the circum-Caribbean entitled Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Move
ment, Memory and History.
Black Music Research Journal Vol. 28, No. 2, Fall 2008

? 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
86 BMR JOURNAL
a group of between
fifty and sixty African Americans, clad in all black in
testament to the slain leader, stood in the gallery in silent protest. A fight
("riot") ensued as security personnel attempted to suppress the protestors,
setting off "the most violent demonstration" in U.N. history (Walker and
G?sset 1961).
The demonstration at the United Nations a
represented significant shift in
black activism from passive nonviolence to amore aggressive militancy, an
ideological shift that demonstrated the increasing internationalization of the
black liberation movement. As John Henrik Clarke (1961,285) bluntly put
it, "Lumumba became Emmett Till." The composition of the demonstrators
was also significant. The protestors in the gallery included Daniel Watts,
activist and publisher of the Liberator (the publication of the Committee on
the Liberation of Africa),
Rosa Guy of the Harlem Writers Guild, writer/
poet Maya Angelou, poet, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), percussionist Max
Roach, and singer Abbey Lincoln: a configuration made up of activists,
artists and musicians that also revealed the broadening political front of
the black liberation movement of the 1960s. As James Baldwin (1961) put
it, "The negroes who rioted in the United Nations are but a very small echo
of the black discontent now abroad in the world."2 In the early 1960s, the
slackening pace of civil rights reform at home and the foreign policy fail
ures and misadventures abroad coincided with the spread of anticolonial
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and marked a decisive shift
struggles
in black liberation politics. Baldwin continued: "The power of the white
world to control [black] identities was crumbling as these young Negroes
were born; and by the time they were able to react to the world, Africa was
already on the stage of history."
It was not a matter of chance that the Negro movement fire in
just caught
America at that moment when the nations of Africa were their
just gaining
freedom. Nor is itmerely incidental that the world should have fastened its
attention on events in theUnited States at a time when the possibility that the
nations of the world will divide along color lines seems suddenly not only
but even imminent.... It is clear that what in America is
possible, happens
taken as a of what can, or must, in the world at The
being sign happen large.
course of world events will be profoundly affected by the success or failure of
the Negro American Revolution in seeking the peaceful assimilation of races
in the United States.
The Moynihan Report
2. Clarke (1961, 285) came to much the same conclusion: "The plight of the Africans still
to throw off the yoke of colonialism and the plight of the Afro-Americans, still wait
fighting
a rich, strong and boastful nation to redeem the promise of freedom and citizenship
ing for
became one and the same/'
Njoroge Dedicated to the Struggle 87
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, musicians strove to realize the artistic
and creative possibilities that were emerging in tandem with
potential
anti-colonial efforts and the civil rights movement. The desire for freedom
in the political context of decolonization paralleled searches for spiritual
and aesthetic freedom inmusic. Both movements challenged conventions
(political and musical) to visualize, theorize, and "sound" the possibili
ties of unity and postcolonial liberation. The musicians drew upon the
rich resources of the African diasporic musical matrix and inflected the
skills and aesthetics of the tradition with contemporary meanings and sig
nificances, syncopating the music with the freedom struggle at home and
abroad. Compressing miles of diaspora, the music of this period reflected
and engendered both a vision of the "Third World" and new diasporic
sensibilities. The music of the Bandung era is instructive in interrogating
some of the intersections of aesthetics, and in the African
politics, history
diaspora. The confluence of Cold War international and domestic devel
opments was counter-pointed and elaborated in African-American music
and creative expression. This period of musical creativity made audible
and visible an oppositional aesthetics and politics, articulated a critical
musical vocabulary of resistance, and embodied an alternative archive of
the history of decolonization.
This article attempts to re-present the intricate cultural matrix of black
creative music during the era of nascent Third World decolonization and
explore the processes and expressions continuously innovated, renovated,
suspended, reconstructed, and reaffirmed in the productions and perfor
mances of black culture at the height of anticolonial struggle. The music,
then, can be read as a cartography of locations, re-collections, histories, trajec
tories, and changing configurations, condensed and crystallized in sound,
absorbing and articulating cultural frames of reference, shared semiotic
focus, and performative orientation in the "core stability" of the chang
ing same. Its developments outline an interesting, elaborate, and ongoing
conversation among the musicians themselves, the black communities from
which they emerge and with whom they speak, and the larger social body.
It is necessarily a dialogue of creative visions and historical retentions, of
political ideologies and historical aspirations.
By the early 1950s, itwas becoming increasingly clear to the U.S. govern
ment that images of racial segregation in the United States were provid
ing "grist for communist propaganda mills." In 1954 the Supreme Court
handed down a unanimous verdict in the case of Brown v. The Board
of
Education, overturning the legal justification of the "separate but equal"
principle and (inMay of 1955) ordering school boards to draw up deseg
regation plans "with all deliberate speed." That same May in Bandung,
88 BMR JOURNAL
Indonesia, Asian, Middle Eastern, and African leaders, thinkers, and poli
ticians gathered for an Afro-Asian conference of nonaligned nations. The
conference marked the emergence of the Third World3 as a political force
and entity on the global ideoscape and ethnoscape.4 By refusing (at least
in theory) to succumb to the Cold War pressures of treaty obligations, the
emerging nations (re)created themselves as a "third force" on the political
economic scene and revealed some of the possibilities and potentialities of
a post-colonial world. A new theoretical configuration of national libera
tion struggles and international solidarity was emergent, and Afro-Asian
and African-American struggles intertwined and intersected in the "col
ored counter-public spheres" of the so-called Third World. As Penny Von
Eschen has said: "A new constellation emerged as anticolonial
political
issues acquired a new prominence and stood side by side with domestic
demands in the political agendas of leading African American protest
organizations" (1997, 7).
This was a remarkable time period for African Americans, who were si
multaneously looking inward towards domestic events like theMontgomery
bus boycott and the brutal beating and lynching of 14-year old Emmet Till,
and, at the same time, facing outward towards the Korean War and the na
scent decolonization struggles inAsia, Africa, and the Third World generally.
As racial domination came to be viewed increasingly from an international
perspective, the colonial question began to intersect with Cold War impera
tives, and the growing interrelation between foreign and domestic affairs
became increasingly evident to black Americans. However, the heightened
awareness of Africa and the ideological import and impact of the geopoliti
cal meanings and resonances of anti-colonial (and diasporic) racial identities
the term Third World remains a contested one, I believe it can maintain a
3- Although
heuristic valence in the interrogation of the post-Bandung era as as it is viewed as con
long
stituted in process, and the specificities of multiple anti- and postcolonialisms are acknowl
"whenever there is imperial domination in any form
edged. As San Juan (2000, 81) has said,
or in our 'postcolonial' transculturalized planet, there will always be a 'Third World7
disguise
for national liberation." Indeed as Shohat (1992) notes: "'Third
protagonist fighting popular
World' usefully evokes structural commonalities of struggles. The invocation of the 'Third
World' a belief that the shared history of neocolonialism and internal racism form
implies
sufficient common for alliances ... diverse If one does not believe or
ground among peoples.
envision such commonalities, then indeed the term 'Third World' should be discarded"
(111). See also Chaliand (1989);Ahmad (1995);and Dirlik (1997).

I'm drawing on Appadurai the rhetoric of "-scapes" seems increas
4. Here (1990). Although
overused in recent times, I believe it can still function as a means of mapping
ingly effectively
the interactions of the local and the global. What is also useful for our purposes here is Ap
discussion of the creation of "new diasporic that correspond to new
padurai's public spheres"
ethnic and political subjectivities (3).
and solidarities on local struggles in the United States were not entirely new
in the contexts of the lives of black people.5
Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru, Sukarno, and Toure were the new faces of the
nonaligned movement and the anticolonial struggle. Malcolm X, Stokely
Carmichael, and Martin Luther King Jr.were the faces of the struggle
at home. Widely covered in the African-American press at the time, the
Bandung conference helped to extend and expand the register of African
American demands and strategies beyond the dichotomous prism of Cold
War politics. The symbolic accomplishments of the Afro-Asian conference
(most of the attendees were from nations heavily subsidized and support
ed by U.S. and foreign aid) and the Brown desegregation decision (a ruling
that would result in a lot more "deliberation" than "speed") set the tenor
for the next decade of anticolonial struggle, and the two events marked
a turning point in the psychological awareness of colonized on a
peoples
global scale. The decline of formal empire, the intensification of challenges
to European hegemony, the inflexibility of U.S. capital in the conduct of
foreign relations, the unflagging racism of American society, a renewed
sense of international solidarity and vocabulary of political dissent all
added fuel to the fires of racial identification and visions of Third World
unity. Admittedly, invocations and evocations of the Third World were
more an intellectual and ideological than a practical
response guide for
action.
Ghana became independent in 1957, and the Cuban Revolution brought

the Cold War to the Caribbean and Latin America in 1959. Between 1945
and i960, forty nations achieved independence; seventeen nations (twelve
of them African) won independence in i960 alone, and the "political as
well as epidermal complexion of the UN General Assembly appeared
permanently altered" (Plummer 1996, 289). On the home front, discus
sion regarding the efficacy of the tactics of what had come to be called the
"freedom movement," was continuing, particularly in light of the dynamic
events abroad. Black nationalist rhetoric and ideas were in increasing
circulation among African Americans, as the gradualist and reform ap
proaches of groups like the NAACP and Urban League revealed their
(bourgeois) impotence. Serious debate regarding the tactics and strategy
5- The history, conditions, and survival strategies of the Africans in this hemisphere (from
Vesey's revolt to David Walker's Appeal, Garvey's UNIA and African-American responses to
the invasion of Ethiopia, etc.) provide ample evidence that diasporic and internationalist con
sciousness has a long, complex
history, has made lasting and significant impacts upon black
socio-political organization, and reveals itself as a recurrent strain of black nationalist theory.
See James ([1969] 1995); Gomez (1998); and James (1998).
90 BMR JOURNAL
of the civil rights movement coincided with and counter-pointed decolo

nization struggles and Third World movements. As Houston Baker (1994,
12) has said, "The black civil rights struggle, and particularly during the
decade from 1955-1965, exemplifies the active working of the imagina
tion of a subaltern, black American counter public." The reconsiderations
taking place among the activists in the black liberation movement found
intersecting variants within the black creative music of the late 1950s and
early 1960s.
"The Hard Blues"
"People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them."

?James Baldwin
"Jazz is not what it 'is'... it is what it is used for."
?Theodor Adorno
The musical tradition that has come to be called "jazz"6 was created by Afri
can Americans in a primarily (though not exclusively) U.S.-based context of
transforming social and political structures amid the cyclical developments
and underdevelopments of the twentieth-century capitalist economy, the
centrifugal pressures of subjection and domination, and the centripetal forces
of indignities and solidarities that characterize the political and economic
milieu of black America and the diaspora generally. The developments of
this "black creative music" from the period from 1955 to 1965 shed light
on the geopolitical transformations and exigencies of the post-Bandung
period, and the "practice of Diaspora" (Edwards 2003). The music provides
amodel for theorizing the Third World as a political and ideological entity,
an imagined nation apart from the state.7
Black music during this era reveals an intimate and persistent syncretism
and symbiosis between musical-aesthetic expression and the communities
out of which itwas being continually created and the larger socio-cultural
milieu. I do not wish to reduce the music to a mere epiphenomenon of so
economic or
ciological effects, historical imperatives, exigencies, ideological
a term
6. Like many musicians and authors I find the word jazz to be misleading catch-all
for complex of widely different yet stylistically interrelated creative expres
configurations
sions of musicians, dancers, and artists in the twentieth a term that often carries
century,
and/or connotations. As such Iwill use "jazz" interchangeably with "im
vague pejorative
music," "the music," and "black creative throughout. For differ
provisational expression"
ent views on the use and misuse of the word "jazz" see LeRoi Jones (1963); Dizzy Gillespie
Russell (1996), and especially Peretti
(1979); Art Taylor (1977); Valerie Wilmer (1977), George
Yusef Lateef (2006) the term audiophysiopsychic music.
(1992). prefers
7. See James Blaut (1987,165-167).
agendas; it (of course) responds to, contains, and models all of these. Ihope
instead to locate the music and its development within complex and shifting
structures of historical particularity, to understand the "stories music tells"
(Baraka 1968)?the multiplicity of places, spaces, meanings, resonances, and
rhythms available, invoked and evoked in the music.8 Following Bakhtin,
we can think of the jazz tradition as an ongoing stream of musical discourse
composed of musical signs understood through responding with other signs
and dialogic expressions. LeRoi Jones called this phenomenon the "Chang
ing Same," which is to say that the music is "saying something" (Monson
1996), feelingfully speaking to both location and direction (Feld 1994).
The history of the music is often described as a neat historical and ideo
from the recesses of the Delta," paus
logical progression, emerging "deep
ing briefly to change outfits inNew Orleans, and continuing north to Kan
sas City, Chicago, and other urban areas, and finally uptown, to Harlem,
where itmatured ("jes grew")9 into its "modern" form. Like most myths,
this tale contains a grain of truth; however, this causal and facile explana
tion tends to obscure much more than it reveals. This evolutionary (and
model serves to reify systems apart from their circumstances,
teleological)
disguising the multi-valent and truly polyrhythmic and polyphonic nature
of cultural exchange and production,
the recursiveness, continuities and
"retentions" endemic as well as the ways
to the tradition, inwhich culture
simultaneously anticipates and responds to historical transformations: "In
Black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is 'there for you to
pick it up when you come back to get it'" (Snead 1981,150). The music is
rooted in the constant revitalization and critical interrogation of the tradi
tion; forms, and ideas are reexamined,
figures, rhythms constantly recycled,
and reconstructed (rootwork).10 This continuous musical dialogue plays at
the interstices, at the margins, where ideological debates, historical vectors,
demographic shifts, material conditions, and theories of identity, differ
ence, and diaspora overlap, intersect, coalesce, and come into conflict and
resolution.
temporary
The music, then, offers us a crucial site of investigation into histories
of black struggle placed against the backdrop of American society and
8. "The power of great music, of a compelling tradition ... is the of concentrating

power
and pre-empting, organizing, orchestrating and distilling the significance that serves us in
our ordinary of reality"
apprehension (Wagner 1986, 27).
9. This phrase comes from Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972).
10.1 use the concept of rootwork to re-present both theory and practice, subaltern strate
gy and cultural action (poiesis and praxis). Refracted through the lens of the African diaspo
ra, this notion alludes to conjurational (Hoodoo, Vodun, Obeah, Palo Mayombe,
practices
Candomble, etc.), as well as the material
operations, philosophical transformations, histori
cal meditations, aesthetic mediations, and invocations that, I argue, and em
spiritual shape
body the musical traditions.
92 BMR JOURNAL
institutions, in a developing global context. Black music and culture have

always occupied a curious position of lure and within the domi
loathing
nant imaginary, and jazz provides us with a into the
fascinating glimpse
conflicting and contradictory spaces created for blackness. Few expressive
forms in the musical traditions of the African diaspora have generated
as much worldwide attention, critical acclaim, intellectual scrutiny, and
institutional legitimacy as so-called jazz. The genre is one of the better
documented cultural spaces in which the glaring paradox of simultane
ous exaltation and exploitation of music and musicians becomes readily
apparent. Merod suggests that it is the peculiar position of black musical
traditions that create a situation of "double reification," one internal and
the other external?"cultural warfare" on the one hand, and "commercial
(albeit tepid) success" on the other (1995,13).
Black musicians have quite logically observed and theorized their own
and economic as African Americans within the music
political positions
industry in relation to the larger emancipatory struggles of the community
in general, and this knowledge finds its expression in awide variety of ways
and modes.11 There is an iconicity between the new music and the social
movements of the post-World War II period; the music and the movements
il. The discourse of black liberation has historically been a masculinist one, and jazz musi
cians were not
exempt from this endeavor. not the subject of this paper, in order to
Though
analyze the inter-connections between music and politics, we must resituate gender (which
gets consistently erased in discussions of the music) within the political economic imperatives
and social factors that shape and inform the modes and meanings of the music. We must read
the absence of a female presence in many of the discourses and narratives around the music
a and scholars alike, but
not only as sign of the devaluation and gendered bias of musicians
also as a work of historical revisionism that privileges certain figures and narratives, and loses
in the exaltation of heroic figures. This hagiographie tradition
sight of the larger conversation
of writing jazz history has led to numerous intellectual engagements with the "Great Men"
of music (in Lawrence Levine's [1977] phrase "we know more about the priests than their
which lose of the conversation between musicians
parishioners"), conspicuously sight larger
women in the industry, the
themselves and the worlds inwhich they live. For black involved
matrix of domination is decidedly more complex. The jazz world is predominantly (over
masculine and homosocial, and the all-too-easy conflation of black liberation,
dominantly)
black creativity, and black manhood served to triply marginalize the crucial contributions of
women as artists, participants, and supporters of the music. Despite the many contributions
as dancers, writers, and vocalists, their centrality
by women arrangers, players, organizers,
to the larger story of jazz is often overlooked. The absence of women in conventional jazz his
of inadequately theorized notions of the nature of cultural production and
tory is symptomatic
the larger dialogues from which the music get erased in
reproduction. Again, actually emerges
the (w)riting of history. As trumpeter/trombonist Clifford Thorton has said: "As far as Black
women are concerned, I think we're all waiting for some kind of exposition detailing the role
and function of women in music. And not only as musicians but as grandmothers, moth
ers, sisters, wives, managers, of strength and encouragement?whatever! Women have
pillars
been to the preservation and furtherance of this culture. We know there have been
important
inWilmer 1977,191; emphasis added).
many" (quoted
Dedicated to the Struggle 93
Njoroge
were both intra- and international, responding to new desires, political and
aesthetic aspirations, changing relations of global forces, geopolitical shifts
of capitalist production, and the ideological transformations of anti-racist
and anti-imperialist movements. "The Music changed, because the musi
cians changed" (Jones 1963, 66).
As images of African Americans being beaten and tortured were circu
lating in worldwide media outlets, the U.S. State Department sought to
own am
counter these negative portrayals with their Negro "goodwill
bassadors." In 1956 the U.S. government began to take notice of jazz, and
realized that its popularity and global influence could be used to "patriotic
advantage" (Feather i960, 49). The State Department began organizing
tours of jazz musicians as "?ambassadors" through Africa, Latin America,
the Middle East and the Soviet Union. As jazz was gaining mainstream
and beginning to be legitimized in concert halls and on col
respectability
campuses in the United States, it was also being marketed abroad
lege
as a symbol of American and freedom. The music became a
democracy
multiply-contested site of black creative expression, black social aspirations
and political protest, and government and corporate co-optation.
"Before the Music Got Separated"

We must cleanse our minds of the false which are not
categories
basic to us, and which divide us rather than unite us.
Regard
less of what are called, are various
they [jazz, R&B, blues, etc.]
of black music, black culture itself, the expressions of
expressions
Africans in the Diaspora. Yet black musicians are in these
placed
. . . and face success or failure
categories they depending upon
the popularity of their classification at a time.
given
?Max Roach
Before the music got separated [I could] sneak up on a gig with

or back
Gene Ammons, play accordion, up some rhythm and
blues like the Flamingoes. Then a musician was
singers really
his music across because there were bars on corner
getting every
and you couldn't go without music.
anywhere hearing
?Andrew Hill
By the mid 1950s, the burgeoning black nationalist renaissance and the
civil rights movement, emerging largely out of the church in the United
States, had found eloquent musical expression. Three musical events can
serve to mark the of this new the 1954
symbolically beginning period:
recording of "Walkin"' by Miles Davis, the release of the album Afro by
Dizzy Gillespie (1954), and the death of Charlie Parker in 1955. Parker
94 BMR JOURNAL
was the bebop icon, whose musical transformed all of the music
virtuosity
that followed. Afro continued Gillespie's experimentations with the Afro
Cuban and African-American musical fusions, well-illustrated in tunes
like "Con Alma" and the "Manteca Suite," and his explorations were aided
by such Cuban percussive luminaries as Ubaldo Nieto, Candido Cameron,
and Ramon "Mongo" Santamar?a. The "vernacular" title and musical form
of Davis's "Walkin'" anticipated the political culture and strategies of the
civil rights movement that would (literally) "take it to the streets" in the
1950s. The title track's twelve-bar blues structure indicated both a return
to the source and revealed the shape of things to come, in the return to and
revitalization of the core black blues matrix. Bird returned to the ancestors,
songs like "Con Alma" metonymically realized and valorized the "roots
and routes" (Gilroy 1993) of the African diaspora, while "Walkin"' sym
bolically took the music back to its southern blues heritage via "modern"
modal progressions and became a signifier for and an early indication of
the musical reunification that would be called hard bop.
Hard bop was (ahistorical) industry short-hand for amuch more complex
moment in jazz, inwhich a bewildering diversity of sounds and styles burst
out of the black musical continuum of the late 1950s.12 The desire to "black
enize" the sound and return the music to the people reflected economic and
social imperatives and the external challenges to the bebop movement. In
the early 1950s, as swing began to sound anachronistic and bebop became
codified and sterile, "the jazz industry as awhole faced economic crisis from
post-war recession and competition from other musical forms such as popular
vocal music, country and western, urban blues, and R&B" (Porter 1997,81).
Many historians and critics cited the beginning of bebop as the end of jazz
as a popular form in black communities; at the same time, many of those
same critics attacked the new music. However, Rosenthal (1988b) argues
that in fact hard bop was not only popular but in fact maintained the viabil
ity of jazz in African-American communities. He states, "[t]he years from
1955-1965 represent the last period in which jazz effortlessly attracted the
hippest young black musicians... and hard bop was the dominant jazz style
in the neighborhoods where such youngsters live" (24).
Hard bop reflected the struggles of black musicians to revitalize their
music and find their own voice, and reveals an attempt to reach out to
and reestablish a connection with black audiences who were leaving jazz
(most notably for the incredible rhythm and blues revolution spearheaded
by Ray Charles and James Brown). Many musicians shared saxophonist
Johnny Griffin's belief that jazz had been "taken out of the community and
12. Hard bop itself was a contested term among musicians, many of whom viewed it as an
industry ploy. Cecil Taylor

was once quoted as saying "the term 'hard bop' was created by
white critics to make it easier for Stan Getz to get by" (Russell 1964, 6).
put in Carnegie Hall" (in Russell 1964, 5). There was a popular demand
for "blacker" sounds and a music that spoke more directly to the blues
aesthetic, with stronger rhythmic drive, more pronounced bottom end and
bass, and more roots (blues and gospel) inflections in the melodic lines.
The music's return to the church and the hard blues finds parallels in the
politicization of traditional black institutions by the civil rights movement,
and in the reclamation and reinscription of public space by black political
protest. At the same time, it is important to remember that "before the
music got separated" many jazz musicians paid their dues in R&B bands.
Relying fundamentally on the bebop vocabulary?without sacrificing any
of the virtuosic heights scaled by the beboppers?the musicians of the hard
bop era took the music simultaneously backward and forward, exploring
the extensions and the dimensions of the black musicking tradition while
innovating, experimenting, and refining the "shape of jazz to come."
During the late 1950s and early 1960s hard bop and soul jazz reflected
the nature of African-American aesthetics in the civil rights era. People
wanted funky, danceable music, and the hard bop musicians simultane
ously returned jazz to itsmusical roots while popularizing the music with a
new generation of listeners. In a sense, by venturing into R&B and groove
oriented numbers the music was able to "cross-back-over" into the com
munity. There were three independent labels that specialized in hard bop:
Prestige, Riverside, and Blue Note. During this period, jazz record sales
were higher than ever. Easier to sell than jazz LPs and distributed to black
radio and jukeboxes
stations throughout black communities, the 45 rpm
single enabled the widespread dissemination of the new, funky sounds. The
fact that the primary vehicle for hard bop was the 45 rpm single indicates
that the music was reaching a wider audience. As Clifford Jordan has said,
"Yeah, all the jukeboxes, they had jazz, but nobody called it 'jazz' then. It
was just music. It was just our music, folk music"
(quoted in Rosenthal 1992,
69; emphasis added).
Blurring the line between jazz and R&B with vernacular titles like "Dis
Here," "Dat Dere," "Moanin'," and "The Preacher," hard became the
bop
basic jazz idiom. The (re)turn to "funky" or "soul" jazz was also a practical
response to difficulties a a jazz musician
economic of making living as and
to the popularity of "cool jazz" (performed primarily, but not
entirely, by
white musicians) and its commercial success among the white middle-class
and on college campuses. The musicians of the 1950s were "highly literate
both politically and musically," and the responses toAfrican-American urg
ings for "down home" as well as "way out" music were many and varied;
the blues/soul/funk stylistic trend (primarily identified with hard bop)
was but one in the stream of black musical discourse.
tributary
The infusion of the music with new and revitalized political meanings
96 BMR JOURNAL
was part of the broadening awareness of the 1950s, as the musi

political
cians drew upon the roots?Afro-diasporic history, culture, and conscious
ness?to create and express new musical meanings in changing contexts,
influenced by the civil rights struggle in the United States and anticolonial
struggles abroad. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were three over
lapping and interpenetrated styles along the jazz continuum that require
our attention: (1) the emergence of soul and funk marked a to
returning
blues and gospel, decidedly African-American traditional musical proclivi
ties; (2) the ascendance of the composers,13 their militant demand for and
challenge to black musicking on its own; and (3) the Pan-African
diaspora
re-collections, black-Asiatic collaborations, and Third World explorations.
At this point, some purely pragmatic delineations can be made. The hard
blues + gospel = soul aggregations are
exemplified in the various incarna
tions of Horace Silver and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers,14 the Golson
Farmer-Fuller Jazztet(s), and the Gryce-Byrd Jazz Lab. Of the composers,
some exemplars are Thelonious Monk, Charles
Mingus, George Lewis, Sun
13. A point of clarification is in order here. The aim is not to rewrite jazz history as the
march of the great men of history or as individualist adventure stories in the manner of
(bourgeois) but rather to highlight some of those voices that emerge from
historiography
the conversation that
crystallize and exemplify in a and unself
particularly heightened
conscious way the total aesthetic and emotional placement and pattern of the jazz tradi
tion. "Works of rare genius in the arts are 'parts' of culture, culture made out of culture,
that miniaturize it, under determine the whole sense and purpose of the cultural so
acutely
that future generations are themselves imitations of the style in which they do so" (Wagner
2001,171). The composers, then, are significant in that, while
they themselves relied heav
on the and exten
ily (and inevitably) bebop vocabulary, they made significant expansions
sions of the idiom, in such a way as to underdetermine the entirety of the musical "sound
way" and distill it into new configurations. "The work of the genius consists in bringing
his mind, through years of practice, so into harmony with that things can express
things
their laws through him. . . . is, in its way rather a discovery
Every great musical thought
than an invention" (Zuckerkandl 1956, 223). Their works in this period were to reshape
all the jazz that was to follow and introduced whole new
conceptual grammars into the
music. The rise of the composers is certainly also tied to the advent of the twelve-inch-long
record, in 1954-55, which enabled extended compositions record
playing by lengthening
ing time.
14. Art Blakey's attempts at musical expositions of black unity date back to 1947, when
he took his first trip to Africa, and are worthy of an extended treatment. Along with lead
ing
one of the seminal hard
bop/funk units in the history of the music, Blakey was an early
pioneer in attempting to fuse the music of the diaspora. His 1957-58 output beyond his
classic Blue Note albums At the Caf? Bohemia and the apocalyptic "Moanin"' LP was diverse
both rhythmically and musically. His catalogue includes records like Drum Suite, Cu-Bop,
1 and 2, and Orgy In 1 and 2. All of these
Ritual, Holiday for Skins Volumes Rhythm Volumes
records used master musicians from the Afro-diaspora: Sabu, Candido, "Chihuahua" Mar
tinez, and others. See Monson (2000) for an excellent discussion of Art Blakey's diasporic
experimentations.
Blakey's African Beat, released in 1961, is an interesting outing, particularly the high life
Ra, and Omette Coleman. Lastly, the Pan-Afro diasporic vein found its
most consistent elaborations in the works of Yusef Lateef, Ahmed Abdul
Malik, and Randy Weston. Of course, it bears repeating that these delinea
tions are purely heuristic and a matter of convenience, as the realities of
historical musical creation, and stylistic innovation are decidedly
change,
more
complex.15
Blues toAfrica
It is my the purpose of an artist to mirror his times and its
duty,
on his man. of African
effects fellow We American jazz musicians
descent have proven all doubt that we're master musi
beyond
cians on our instruments. Now, what we have to do is
employ
our skill to tell the dramatic story of our and what we've
people
been through.
?Max Roach
When Max Roach entered the studio in the fall of i960 to record We Insist?
Freedom Now Suite, the nation and the world had witnessed some startling
events. The Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa and the gruesome pictures
of unarmed children, women, and men being shot down shocked and horri
fied people the world over. In February in North Carolina, the sit-in move
ment was officially born and rapidly spread across the United States. The
calm dedication, endurance, and perseverance of the nonviolent protesters
moved the nation and the world. The following year, Randy Weston took a
influenced track "Ayiko Ayiko." That this tune is in the high life idiom is significant in itself,
as high life music and metaphorically marks the slaves' return home. The
symbolically
music form arose on the western coast of Africa (Ghana and Nigeria primarily) after World
War II as the sounds of the Cuban Rumba and its all-important clave and Afro-Latin synco
pation of Trinidadian Calypso (both popular fads in Europe and America) made their way
back across the ocean on radio broadcasts, 78 rpm records, and LPs, and were fused with
indigenous guitar, horn, and percussion styles. The colonized (and decolonizing) Africans
were the styles of their (formerly enslaved) sistren and brethren on the other side of
innovating
the black Atlantic.
15. David Rosenthal (1992) gives an breakdown, he categorizes them as: the
analogous
"hip," the "tortured," the "lyricists," and the "experimentalist" (44-45). these de
Again,
lineations are and heuristic as all of these musicians in all of these vari
pragmatic played
ous contexts. For example, Art Blakey, the hard bopper par excellence, was also the first
jazz musician to begin seriously exploring and recording Afro-diasporic collaborations
(as mentioned while
above), the compositions of soul jazz musicians like Benny Golson
and Gigi Gryce were and recorded a of ensembles.
widely performed by variety Similarly
Golson appears on Ahmed Abdul-Malik's North East Meets West, while
African-inspired
on
Gryce appears Randy Weston's Uhuru Afrika. The examples proliferate.
98 BMR JOURNAL
big band (some twenty pieces) into the studio to record a tribute to the newly
emerging African nations entitled Uhuru, Afrika. These two records graphi
cally reveal the counterpoint and dialogue among musicians themselves, as
well as the larger issues black all over the
confronting peoples globe, and,
I think, emblematize some of the
politics and aspirations of the Bandung
era.16 They also effectively demonstrate the call-and-response (antiphonal
practices) between tradition and innovation among different traditions and
generations of musicians, and between the music and black communities
writ large. Musicians consciously and frequently expressed their experiences
as Africans inAmerica and the American music in linked to
industry ways
larger social themes of liberation. "As these musicians in activist
participated
progress and/or educated themselves about Black history and culture they
developed ideas that reflected issues particular to the jazz community as
well as larger concerns facing black artists [and this
people] during period"
(Porter 1997,166). The music was (and is) a vehicle and an icon for theorizing
and articulating visions of black freedom and
collectivity.
In i960, Max Roach began to record a portion of awork in progress co-writ

ten with Oscar Brown Jr., the singer-lyricist. The result of this collaboration
was the record We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. The five tracks
they recorded
were part of a choral-dance drama (which was
larger actually performed,
interestingly, at the NAACP convention in Philadelphia in 1961). The album
brought together a diverse group of musicians and performers. Brown was
known for his compositions (he wrote "Strong Man" for Abbey Lincoln in
1957) and for his work as a soulful, pop vocalist with socially conscious
lyrics. As a young vocalist, Abbey Lincoln already had three albums to her
credit, for the most part in the straight-ahead jazz idiom (with the exception
of her version of Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue").17
i6. The album covers themselves present an interesting juxtaposition. Roach's LP cover fea
tures a black-and-white still photograph of three (college-aged) African Americans seated at
an hostile lunch counter, the sit-in movement that had begun in
obviously clearly invoking
North Carolina that same year. The lettering is bold and black across the top of the album
cover, resembling the front page of a newspaper, suggesting both a pragmatic immediacy and
action. Weston's cover is more subtle and subdued. The composer
militancy?direct political
in photographic on the left quarter of the album cover, and his
appears negative image is fore
grounded by banners /stripes of black and white. The title of the LP appears italicized in
the upper-right corner, almost as a thought bubble emerging from the composer's head. This
a more idealistic and visionary
perhaps suggests (quixotic?) approach.
17. "Afro-Blue" is often mistakenly attributed to John Coltrane, due to the latter's de
finitive version. On Coltrane's 1963 release, Live At Birdland, he is given composer's credit.
On Lincoln's recording of the tune, from Abbey Is Blue (1959), the song is attributed to Herbie
Mann and Oscar Brown Jr.
Roach was accompanied on percussion by Afro-Cubans, Ray Mantilla, and

Tomas Du Vail, and Babatunde Olatunji from Nigeria. Also on the date were
Coleman Hawkins (saxophone), Booker Little (trumpet), Julian Priester
(trombone), Walter Benton (tenor), and James Schenck (bass).
Roach's previous LP, Deeds Not Words, at least in name evoked the civil
rights struggle, though the content of the album itself ismore or less standard
hard bop fare. However, We Insist was something altogether different. The
first side of the LP reviews some of the significant points and periods in black
American history, musically tracing the long road from slavery to freedom,
and setting the stage for the contemporary struggle. The record opens with
the haunting "Driva' Man," an intensely expressive evocation of forced labor,
brutality, physical abuse, slave catching, and rape: "Only two things on my
mind / Driva' man and quittin' time." Lincoln's voice weaves fluidly and
accents the steady fall of the rhythmic hammer, evoked by her tambourine.
"Freedom Day" recalls the great day of emancipation, the rumors of free
dom, and the disbelief of the enslaved. The side ends with the "Triptych:
Prayer, Peace, Protest," an extended dialogue between Roach and Lincoln,
inwhich the latter sings vocables while Roach freely improvises behind her,
each pushing, answering, and supporting the other in musical rapport. "I
feel this," Lincoln explained of the recording. As the movement enters the
"Protest" section, Lincoln wails while Roach rolls all around the drum kit.
The drive of the protest finds resolution in "Peace." As Max explained to
Abbey before the take: "['Peace'] is the feeling of relaxed exhaustion after
you've done everything you can to assert yourself. You can rest now because
you've worked to be free. It's a realistic feeling of peacefulness. You know
what you've been through" (quoted in Hentoff i960).
The second side turns its attention towards Africa and the sweeping
changes taking place on the continent and graphically reveals musical and
concerns of the and the connections?real
political Bandung era, perceived
and imagined?between the civil rights movement and Third World lib
eration. In "All Africa," Lincoln sings the names of tribes from all over the
continent, and Olatunji, playing apesi drums, answers her calls in his native
Yoruba. Finally, "Tears For Johannesburg" recalls the Sharpeville Massacre
that occurred less than a year before the recording. The song evokes the
incident and the continuing and ongoing struggle as well as the ghastly
nature of the oppressors. The rhythmic conversation between Roach, Du Vail,
Mantilla, and Olatunji speak to the polyrhythmic unity of the diaspora. All in
all, the mood of the album is one of righteous indignation and revolution
ary change; it is in direct communication with the battles of the emerging
Third World, at home and abroad, and presents a musical
portrait of the
past, present, and future of black liberation.
100 BMR JOURNAL
Randy Weston's Uhuru, Afrika, released in 1961, was in part a realization

and culmination of his long-standing interest in and engagement with the
musics of Africa and the diaspora. His salute to "New Africa" signified the
changing face of a decolonizing world, the black
continuously transforming
cultural aesthetic, and the historical lines of development and exchange
that draw all these musics together to inform the shared tradition. It is also
significant thatWeston pulled together an Afro-diasporic "powerhouse bat
talion," a truly big band, with players from all over the United States and
the diaspora.18 Randy Weston and Melba Liston did extensive archival and
musical research prior to the recording date; they worked and studied with
scholars, musicians and artists from throughout the diaspora, and "spent
hours in libraries reading, in clubs jamming, and around phonographs
listening" (Weston, 2003).
This particular record is kind of hard to describe. First of all, the

purpose of the record was to show that all the Black people of
African descent are related to one another. So we deliberately
got musicians from Africa, Cuba and the U.S.... The connection
was the African It came out a time when we
rhythms.... during
could see down .
.. we could feel it We
things going happening.
wanted this to be a to show
symbolic gesture by Afro-Americans,
our that some of the countries in Africa were their
pride getting
freedom. So the album was called Uhuru Uhuru means
Afrika.
"freedom" in Swahili.
?Randy Weston (1977, 23)
The album is a suite composed of four parts: "Uhuru," "African Lady,"

"Bantu," and "Kucheza Blues." Each section is a multilayered, multipart,
and polyrhythmic evocation and tribute to the black past and an expectant
future. Liston's arrangements (she and Weston had a long and fruitful his
tory of collaboration)?her use of sonorous harmonies and beautiful uni
son passages?vividly capture Weston's lush orchestral vision, the spirited
intricacies of his musical ideas, and provide an excellent platform for the
soloists. Lyrics written by Langston Hughes find eloquent expression in the
voices of Brock Peters and Martha Flowers. Weston's music and philosophy
strove to reveal and embody the interchange and interrelation, not simply the
debt of modern music toAfrica, but also the wealth of ideas and inspiration
18. The personnel consisted of Clark Terry, Benny Bailey, Richard Williams, and Freddie
Hubbard Slide Hampton, Jimmy Cleveland, and Quentin Jackson (trombones);
(trumpets);
Julius Watkins (French horn); Ron Carter, and George Duvivier (basses); Cecil Payne, Je
rome Richardson, Sahib Shihab, Budd Johnson, and Gigi Gryce (saxes); Yusef Lateef and
Les Spann (flutes; Spann doubles on Burrell (guitar); Max Roach, Charlie
guitar); Kenny
and (the ubiquitous)
Persip, G. T. Hogan, Armando Peraza, Candido, Olatunji (percussion);
also Tuntemeke from Tanzania, narrates the Kiswahili portions of the work.
Sanga,
generated from the diversity of the continent's expressive forms and rich
history19
The final movement of the piece is a 3/4 meter African blues ballad,
as Langston Hughes describes in the liner notes: "Had I been in charge
of naming these sequences, Iwould have called the final movement The
Birmingham-Bamako Blues, for in this section there are overtones of both
Alabama and Africa, Dixie and the Negro Motherland. The final sequence
is called Kucheza Blues meaning, in Kiswahili, the Swinging Blues" (1961).20
The cohesive sound of the ensemble on the final movement is a testament
toWeston's compositional skill, his percussive and physical piano style, and
his (Monk-inspired) two-handed technique, linking him to the centuries
of African drummers and musicians long separated by the black Atlantic.
The way the track came about in the studio is indicative of black cultural
practices and processes, as Hughes, resorting to an evocative, if essentialist,
register, explains:
The Kucheza Blues was before the mikes in true
performed recording improvi
a score. the of this blues there was
satory style?without Preceding recording
only a brief run through with Randy Weston playing the melodies and by
way of Melba Liston this here or that
'arrangement' suggesting there?largely
and osmosis. But every Afro-American worth his salt
by gestures, hummings
has the blues in his bones, feels the blues and no matter how 'contemporary'
he may be, loves the blues.... To the African drumbeat have been added the
Birmingham breaks, Harlem riffs and Birdland trimmings. The basic beat of
jazz, which began in Africa, thence to the new world, has now
transplanted
come back home. (Hughes 1961)
However, this adventurous musical endeavor was not without

problems.
Roulette Records' initial enthusiasm soon cooled due to disagreements
19. As Weston has said:
For me, the most compelling aspect of African culture is its music, in its
magnificent
power and diversity, with drums?African at the heart. The music of
rhythms?always
no other c ivilization can rival that of Africa in the complexity and subtlety of its rhythms.
All modern music?jazz, gospel, Latin, rock, bossa nova, calypso, samba, soul, the blues,
even the music of the avant-garde?is in debt to African .
When we go to
rhythms...
Africa we realize we just left, because America is such a young
historically, country.
We think we left a longtime ago, but itwasn't very long at all when you consider that
Africa was the birthplace of man and civilization. We are the children of the traditional
music of Africa that happened thousands and thousands of years ago as part of a great
civilization, (quoted inMusto 2004)
20. for the purposes of our discussion, "Kucheza Blues" was a tune
Significantly, originally
written by Randy Weston entitled "Gee Blues Gee" and dedicated to
Gigi Gryce. The latter had
recorded the tune under its original name earlier that same year (1961) on his LP Reminsicin ',a
hard bop outing par excellence.
102 BMR JOURNAL
over proprietary rights and artistic control. Weston (1977,23) noted, "They
wanted to make some sort of deal where Iwould be giving them power
over my music. to do a on me, but I have
They promised big promotion
learned one lesson: Never sell a tune! I refused, and therefore the album
got buried. There was no publicity put behind it. So because of that and
the message on the record, itwas very hard to find." The contradictions
of black artistic freedom within capitalist structures of production arose
again. The militant vision of a "Free Africa" and her free and
(musically
politically) descendants came crashing into the barriers of external economic
forces that shape, condition, contain and control its dissemination. Uhuru,
Afrika, in its successes and failures, was a vital and telling moment in both
Weston's career and black music. These visions of black unity and Third
World solidarity were sustained and stimulated by the changing political,
social and artistic contexts of the times.
The immersion of musicians, artists, and activists in diverse cultural and

political matrices enabled their artistic and political visions to express and
encompass African-American and Third World political aspirations and
formations at a critical historical conjuncture, to create and shape sophis
ticated aesthetics, rhythmic philosophies, and poignant political visions. I
want to suggest that this black musical dialogue in the era of decolonization
engaged Africa, the diaspora, and the Third World in a polyrhythmic and
multivocal discourse. The so-called hard bop moment in its stylistic diver
sity and historical continuities was an expression of "unities in difference"
and a vision of freedom and solidarity, worked out in and through sound.
The fact that this moment of the movement proved evanescent politically
invalidates neither the experience of its possibility nor the consciousness
necessary to attempt it.
What we are to do now is based on a dream for the

attempting
future. Whether we succeed or not, we are a seed. Ifwe
planting
are able to accomplish great things, this is beautiful. Ifwe don't,
we have started for others.
something
?Randy Weston
DISCOGRAPHY
Abdul-Malik, Ahmed. East meets west. RCA Victor LSP 2015 (i960). LP.
Blakey, Art. At the Caf? Bohemia. Blue Note BLP 1507 (1956). LP.
-. Orgy in rhythm, volumes 1 and 2. Blue Note BLP 1554 and 1555 (1957). LP
-. Cu-Bop. Jubilee JLP 1049 (1957)- LP

-. Art Blakey and the jazz messengers. Blue Note BLP 4003 (1958). LP.
-. 2.
Holiday for skins, volumes 1 and Blue Note BLP 4004 and 4005 (1958). LP
-. The African beat. Blue Note BLP 4097 (1961). LP.
Coltrane, John. Coltrane live at Birdland. Impulse A 50 (1963). LP
Davis, Miles. Miles Davis sextet. PRLP 182 (1954). 10" LP.
Prestige
Gillespie, Dizzy. Afro. Norgran MGN 1003 (1954). LP.
Gryce, Gigi. Reminiscin '.Mercury MG 202628 (1961). LP.
Lincoln, Abbey. Abbey is blue. Riverside RLP 1153 (1959). LP.
Roach, Max. Deeds, not words. Riverside RLP 1122 (1958). LP.
-. We insist!?Freedom now suite. Candid CD 8002 LP
(i960).
Weston, Randy. Uhuru, Afrika. Roulette R 65001 (1961). LP.
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Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago

On February 15,1961, Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.,Kennedy's new ambassador

1. This article is dedicated to Ngug? wa and Njeeri wa "the essence of art

Njoroge Njoroge is an assistant in the Department of History and a lecturer in the

Black Music Research Journal Vol. 28, No. 2, Fall 2008

(111). See also Chaliand (1989);Ahmad (1995);and Dirlik (1997).

Ghana became independent in 1957, and the Cuban Revolution brought

of the civil rights movement coincided with and counter-pointed decolo

"The Hard Blues"

"People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them."

"Jazz is not what it 'is'... it is what it is used for."

8. "The power of great music, of a compelling tradition ... is the of concentrating

institutions, in a developing global context. Black music and culture have

"Before the Music Got Separated"

Before the music got separated [I could] sneak up on a gig with

industry ploy. Cecil Taylor

was part of the broadening awareness of the 1950s, as the musi

In i960, Max Roach began to record a portion of awork in progress co-writ

Roach was accompanied on percussion by Afro-Cubans, Ray Mantilla, and

Randy Weston's Uhuru, Afrika, released in 1961, was in part a realization

This particular record is kind of hard to describe. First of all, the

?Randy Weston (1977, 23)

The album is a suite composed of four parts: "Uhuru," "African Lady,"

However, this adventurous musical endeavor was not without

19. As Weston has said:

The immersion of musicians, artists, and activists in diverse cultural and

What we are to do now is based on a dream for the

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1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global econo

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Gitler, Ira. 1964. Weston. Downbeat 16-17, 36.

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Hughes, Langston. 1961. Liner notes, Uhuru, Afrika. Roulette R-65001.

Lateef, Yusef. 2006. The gentle The N.J.:

Monson, T. 1996. Jazz improvisation and interaction.

1986. that stand for themselves. University of

Zuckerkandl, Victor. Sound and Music and the external world.

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