{"id":109293,"date":"2017-03-27T18:35:14","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T22:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109293"},"modified":"2017-03-28T11:17:42","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T15:17:42","slug":"blues-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/27\/blues-to-come\/","title":{"rendered":"Blues to Come"},"content":{"rendered":"

Harriet Tubman\u2019s new album\u00a0<\/em>Araminta\u00a0<\/i>has a joyous aura of creative destruction.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Harriet Tubman<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In 1967, Thelonious Monk wrote his only waltz: a slow, sweet, faintly melancholy tune he called \u201cUgly Beauty,\u201d which appears on his album\u00a0Underground<\/em>.\u00a0<\/em>The title is probably Monk\u2019s translation of\u00a0jolie laide, a French expression for a woman whose less pleasing features somehow make her more attractive\u2014though I suspect that Monk had more gnomic intentions in deploying the phrase. The idea that beauty might arise out of asymmetry\u2014out of irregularities, imperfections, and apparent flaws\u2014would no doubt have appealed to the composer of \u201cOff Minor,\u201d with his predilection for dissonant intervals, altered chords and rhythmic displacement. Monk\u2019s music was a world of ugly beauty.<\/p>\n

The story of musical modernism could also be told as a story of ugly beauty\u2014of the steady triumph, in the face of critical resistance, of deviation, dissonance, and rupture. Many of the sounds we now consider beautiful were at first experienced as strange, unsettling, even frightening. In the feverish rhythms of\u00a0The Rite of Spring<\/em>, Adorno detected a fascist call for obedience. Philip Larkin accused John Coltrane of trying to be \u201cugly on purpose\u201d with his severe, probing improvisations. Some American supporters of the war in Vietnam are said to have heard sacrilege, if not treason, in Jimi Hendrix\u2019s electrical rewiring of the national anthem at Woodstock. The reasons for such resistance are as much political as aesthetic. As the philosopher Jacques Attali put it, \u201cnoise is violence<\/em>: it disturbs.\u201d The struggle to create new sounds, Attali argues in\u00a0Noise: The Political Economy of Music<\/em>, is usually received as a \u201csimulacrum of murder\u201d because it challenges the existing musical order.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Monk\u2019s title acquires even deeper meaning\u00a0if understood as a reflection upon the history of black American music, which grew out of, and continues to be shaped by, one of the ugliest experiences in modern history. \u201cIt was a new song,\u201d W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of black music in his 1935 history\u00a0Black Reconstruction in America:<\/em><\/p>\n

And its deep and plaintive beauty, its great cadences and wild appeal wailed, throbbed, and thundered on the world\u2019s ears with a message seldom voiced by man \u2026 They sneered at it\u2014those white Southerners who heard it and never understood. They raped and defiled it\u2014those white Northerners who listened without ears. Yet it lived and grew \u2026 and it sits today at the right hand of God, as America\u2019s one real gift to beauty; as slavery\u2019s one redemption, distilled from the dross of its dung.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The struggle of the black musical avant-garde has always been twofold: to achieve freedom not only from the ugliness of American life but from restrictive, often racially coded aesthetic conventions about what black music is, or can be. (Every revolutionary form of black music, from bebop to hip-hop, has provoked cries of \u201cugliness\u201d among fans of the style that preceded it.) These two purposes are joined, in a work of gnarled and thrilling majesty, on\u00a0Araminta<\/em><\/a>, a new album by the New York\u2013based improvising trio Harriet Tubman.\u00a0Araminta<\/em>\u00a0is too joyous to qualify as Attali\u2019s \u201csimulacrum of murder,\u201d but it has an aura of creative destruction, as if it were gleefully laying waste to calcified notions about beauty, race, genre.<\/p>\n

Harriet Tubman was formed in 1997. Its three members, the guitarist Brandon Ross, the bassist Melvin Gibbs, and the drummer J. T. Lewis, are veterans of the New York scene, steeped in jazz, rock, and R&B; they\u2019re also keen students of history. Lewis told me that the group\u2019s name \u201ccame with its own weight and history and reverence.\u201d Tubman escaped from slavery in 1849 to become an organizer of the Underground Railroad, and her example of flight, freedom, and resistance is acutely felt in the band\u2019s music. As Lewis notes, the name is also a \u201cmetaphor for freedom of expression, for unshackling the chains of \u2018how things are supposed to be\u2019\u201d\u2014not least, he added, in \u201cthis business of music, which has a lot of chains.\u201d They\u2019ve always chosen titles that affirm their connections to black history, and\u00a0Araminta<\/em>\u2014derived from Tubman\u2019s given name, Araminta Harriet Ross\u2014is no exception; the record features tributes to Tubman, Nina Simone, Chester Himes, and Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

The music on\u00a0Araminta<\/em>\u00a0is brash, turbulent, and yet also, somehow, rather stately: it roils, swells, and contracts with an almost orchestral density that envelops the listener. Ross, Gibbs, and Lewis are joined on six of the eight tracks by the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, one of the great figures in post-sixties free jazz, a musician who, as the critic K. Leander Williams once said to me, \u201cmakes every note feel epic.\u201d Smith brought that exalted sense of drama to his own four-hour civil rights suite,\u00a0Ten Freedom Summers<\/em>, and he proves a perfect foil for Harriet Tubman. It\u2019s not only that he shares the band’s \u201cPan-African spirituality, mysticism, and freedom-driven politics,\u201d as Greg Tate writes in his liner notes; he adds a swirl of bright timbres that offset Gibb\u2019s growling bass lines, while engaging Ross in some gorgeous, old-fashioned call-and-response. From the very moment Smith appears on the opening track \u201cThe Spiral Path to the Throne,\u201d blowing long, plangent lines over Ross\u2019s industrial, almost charred sounds, he helps imbue\u00a0Araminta<\/em>\u00a0with a radiant sense of intensity, and occasion.<\/p>\n

The tunes are relatively slender, built on short figures and hooks, but the rhythms, patterns, and textures present a complex puzzle. (Ross is a one-man atmosphere factory, availing himself of all the sounds\u2014cries, squeaks, cracks, fuzz, whispers, organ-like echoes\u2014that an electric guitar, in the hands of a master, can produce.) As Lewis told me, the band draws on, combines, and reshuffles an entire history of black music, from \u201cNegro spirituals, field work songs, Yoruba cleansing chants, and gospel\u201d to \u201cMarvin Gaye, Teddy, Aretha, Anthony Braxton, Chuck Berry, Ornette and Threadgill \u2026 It\u2019s all from the same source.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Lewis was echoing a theory of the ultimate unity of black music, most famously expounded by Amiri Baraka in his 1966 essay on the \u201cchanging same\u201d\u2014and later developed by Baraka\u2019s most gifted critical proteg\u00e9, Greg Tate. In his liner notes to\u00a0Araminta,<\/em>\u00a0Tate writes that the music embodies the \u201cshape, warp and woof of ALL blues to come,\u201d and there is no escaping the band\u2019s commitment to taking blues into the twenty-first century, particularly on the exquisite closing track, \u201cSweet Araminta,\u201d a lullaby for the trio that\u2019s as fleeting as it is delicate.\u00a0The playing here is rich, almost drenched, in the yearning of the blues\u2014but the sonic effects, and the feeling of space between the notes, are otherworldly.<\/p>\n

The most bracing sound on\u00a0Araminta<\/em>, however,\u00a0<\/em>is something less commonly identified with the \u201cchanging same\u201d of black music: namely rock, of a grungy, subterranean kind. On \u201cNe Ander,\u201d for example, Lewis and Gibbs build an almost unbearable sense of tension with a relentlessly pounding beat over which Ross uses a wah-wah pedal to create a solo of squawking, trumpetlike notes. We are as far as possible from the tension and release, or the elegance, of jazz, and much closer to certain forms of punk and metal. On tunes like \u201cNe Ander\u201d and \u201cReal Cool Killers\u201d\u2014a swaggering blues dedicated to Chester Himes that suggests a cousin of Jimi Hendrix\u2019s \u201cVoodoo Child (Slight Reprise)\u201d\u2014Harriet Tubman works up a thrashing, aggressive energy that hasn\u2019t been much heard in jazz since Miles Davis took a five-year sabbatical in 1975 after a series of raucous concerts in Japan, later released as\u00a0Agharta<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Pangaea<\/em>, both ancestors of\u00a0Araminta<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The effect of\u00a0Araminta<\/em>\u00a0is to excavate a history of black music\u2014of avant-garde jazz-rock\u2014that, even today, remains somewhat hidden, in large part thanks to the narrow imagination and racialized marketing of the music industry. In a perceptive new study,\u00a0Just Around\u00a0Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination<\/em>, Jack Hamilton chronicles how, in the sixties, rock \u201ccame to be understood as the natural province of whites,\u201d even though its origins are in the blues, and many of its pioneers\u2014such as Chuck Berry, who died earlier this month\u2014were black. By the time Hendrix died in 1970, Hamilton observes, rock had been so \u201cwhitened\u201d in the popular imagination that an obituarist could refer to him as \u201ca black man in the alien world of rock.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miles Davis, who was deeply influenced by Hendrix and Sly Stone, said of his own electric work, \u201cI don\u2019t play rock, I play\u00a0black.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>His point was that his new music was both: he wasn\u2019t abandoning black music to play rock so much as he was returning to his East Saint Louis blues roots. (His album covers would refer to his electric jazz as \u201cnew directions in music by Miles Davis.\u201d) Nor was he alone in playing an amplified, futurist form of the blues: Davis was taking part in a revivalist avant-garde that lasted well into the eighties, including Herbie Hancock\u2019s Mwandishi<\/em>, the bands Ornette Coleman assembled on albums like\u00a0Science Fiction<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Body Meta<\/em>;\u00a0and the electric blues of the guitarists James \u201cBlood\u201d Ulmer and Sonny Sharrock, with whom J. T. Lewis played. (This movement has been overshadowed by\u2014when it hasn\u2019t been confused with\u2014\u201cfusion,\u201d a slicker and commercially more popular form of rock-influenced jazz. Indeed, by the 1980s, when Wynton Marsalis launched his campaign against any\u00a0<\/i>form of electric jazz, many people forgot that there was a current within electric jazz that was aesthetically radical. Nor did it help that some of its exponents, such as Hancock and Davis, who had emerged from his retirement, were by then playing what amounted to fusion.) The ghosts of Coleman, Sharrock, and Ulmer are all audible on\u00a0Araminta<\/em>. As Ross says, they \u201cbroke through the orthodoxy of the forms they emerged out of, and offered a personal statement about it from their own experience. That is the \u2018tradition\u2019 represented by those artists, and I do feel Harriet Tubman is a beneficiary of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That this tradition remains obscure is, perhaps, a reflection of the fact that jazz, even at its most adventurous, is still widely understood as a music of roots, rather than one of routes, and that rock is often considered as \u201calien\u201d to jazz musicians as it once was to Hendrix. \u201cWhat I don\u2019t like is this business of trying to classify people,\u201d Hendrix said in 1969, after his appearance at Woodstock. \u201cIt\u2019s like shooting at a flying saucer as it tries to land without giving its occupants a chance to identify themselves.\u201d Harriet Tubman\u2019s new album is a reminder that when creative musicians fly into the outer space of improvisation, they don\u2019t spend much time worrying about the planet they left, or where they might land. Like their namesake, they have only one concern: to lead people to freedom.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the\u00a0<\/em>London Review of Books\u00a0and a fellow in residence at the New York Institute for the Humanities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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