Frank Lowe, a known an appreciated musician of the “Transitional Period” — otherwise known also as “Third Renaissance” of Black Arts in terms often used to periodize African American arts — remembers Rafael Garrett as his first teacher. Later, he invited him gladly to play with his group “The Jazz Doctors” after he came back in the States in the first eighties. Lowe’s words made me remember some moments of my encounter with Rafael. He was a man of a deep culture and intelligence whose conversation was as interesting as his music. Before to continue with my “fieldwork” in retrospective and autobiographical musical anthropology, I would point at some other implied aspects into dismissing this period in terms of an “overtly political” enterprise.
The basic aspect of this transitional interaction resumed into a more or less ‘neutral’ picture would have consisted in observing the commitment of the European reception and the subtle way in which the inner circles of the Italian symbolic production tried to adequate to actual progressive music production happening in the USA.
Certainly a person jealous of his privacy as Garrett, far from being involved in any ‘clique convenience’, did not have any reason in being restrained in describing whatever, comprised US politics. But what is also interesting to note about his short period in a provincial Italian town is that the non-artistic or the non-musical aspects of his daily life would not easily fit into some styled genre. The context was raw. Nothing to spy from or to report, no rich protector at hand, no Paris cafés, no Sartre nor any other appurtenance to a well written cultural history book.
He was very careful in respecting the memory of the persons he loved, first of all who passed. For the living great ones he played with, you had to judge from his way to laugh or decipher a word or two, most often aimed to bring me back to “mind the own business”. It had no use, at least for me, to insist with him asking him about John Coltrane, even if he had known him very well.
But in general the political with him could reach any topic treated with a sense of autonomy that did not reduce radical differences to common places. He had a special slant and capacity to disagree without closing his doors in front of the others. A frequent situation was his coming at odds with the inveterate macho ideology so spread among Italians or with the actual conservatism of “pure” jazz lovers, lovers of an object that was existing only in their dreams, up to a wealth of non western world-culture in which he did not hesitate to recognize “fascist” ways to be and think. And not only in countries like Turkey but also in Africa. In Italy he had to confront also with “red-Fascists” easily recognized from their monolithic ethos and from their absurd suppositions about the USA. Besides those cases, political discussions became interesting when they were coming to real problems.
I would like to confront the kind of “political” supposed being the base of the approach and the world view of the likes of Garrett, a master for the generation I am considering here, contextualizing from both side of the Atlantic the bridging constituted by their cultural interaction.
What is more interesting to note about the “immediately political” attributed from Gates to the “Third Renaissance of the Black Arts” [see previous article], is that such elegant minimizations are not so far from the paradox of assuming the role of tracing a line between culture and politics and in the same time using culture politically narrated in Frances Stonor Saunders’ book The Cultural War (2000).
Not only, but in the case of African American literature the control exerted by the FBI may pose the actual problem of how much controlled and controllers collaborated to a whole, because the history of the responses from writers to that control are paramount of a political measured to begin from the individual.
Unlike nearly every other institution of U.S. literary study, prone to showing interest only during well-promoted black renaissances, America’s ghostreading national constabulary rarely took its eyes off the latest in African American writing between 1919 and 1972.(Maxwell 2015:5)
If Gates — a reference in framing and commenting African American literature — is talking in terms of renaissances and dismissing one among the others, this can be assumed as an alarming sign of a loss, at least in what had been a common ground and aim between literary and musical fields and practices.
In fact, the notion of being grown or coming to the world “under control” makes sense also for music. It is very well known that be-bop was conceived among intentions of not to let the music being stolen by the white musicians. References to this fact are many, see for example the collection of meaningful passages in Judith Monson’s The Problem with White Hipness (2003).
As for the other side of the business, the labeling of European (and especially French and Italian) “Marxist” reception of jazz (supported from Amiri Baraka and Archie Shepp at that time) can be seen as legitimization of political investments in the new music. This points at the substance of the “core threat” (to official US propaganda), historically flowing through the enormous flaw that American democracy has always had. That’s (roughly) why what African American artistic personalities had to say about racism and inequality was always controlled. Of course, as it is equally known, the flaw was exploited from fascist and Stalinist propaganda as well. However, it is excessive to dismiss a complex artistic movement to keep countering these Cold War memories.
Confronted with the simple facts happening on the local spots, those statement may be translated as foreign office language reporting the brutal buy and sell question: in Europe leftist organizers, more often using the funds of local city-administrations, are buying the “political” progressive music sold by unscrupulous self-appointed
“creatives” victims of discrimination in the USA. Tolerate it, interfere with it, how to assess the harm that this bring to the Cold War’s lofty American idea of free culture?
However, on the whole, the dimension of the cultural movement in the USA is to be collocated — and Gates is the first to notice it — in a context in which a new Black middle-class is aiming to upper (and unbound) social mobility. If the whole of the Black American culture is particularly sensible to world visions that once again do not coincide with the mainstream popular culture of the USA, this does not preclude internal local wars in African American symbolic production circles. These is the general blunt panorama of what immediately follows the “Third Renaissance”. On the other side, the trans-national one, it was a movement of musicians appreciated and respected in the whole world, that by its turn was open to the best of European and all other cultures and to those that who were mutually sensible to the same questions and issues, long-time friendships gave life to trans-Atlantic metaphor. It is also comprehensible that local European musicians that were feeling that the money spent for jazz and improvised music should have been better employed to sustain themselves, took as refreshing news the cultural resizing of the transitional wave in the eighties [see the link to Braxton in the main page of this blog].
Sustained from a trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific net of capabilities and support, musicians as Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Butch Morris, George Lewis, among others, could develop particular concepts of composition influencing their own performance. Archie Shepp will look deeper into the blues tradition after his encounters with African musicians at the Panafrican Festival of Algiers in the year 1969 (iiac 2015), voicing his opposition to the official inter-Atlantic anticommunism. While Shepp’s sound becomes more imbued of the lessons of Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas it could seem reasonable that his music was reconnecting to a past in which, at the time of the “Second Renaissance of the Black Arts”, in the thirties, the USA had a Socialist and even a Communist party. By his turn, Sun Ra will mythologize “his-story” signified by his own slogans as “Space is The Place”. Other undiscussed masters such Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman could be appreciated by a wider public.
Rafael Garrett’s approach was multifaceted and rather difficult to summarize, especially today. When I met him he was “way out” even from many contemporary tendencies. Surely he was interested in the physiology and maybe the archeology of music, and to its mystery, in a way similar to how language has interested so many philosophers.
His experimental practice of traditional instruments, especially flutes as the Turkish Ney and the Japanese Shakuhachi and a wide range of self-made flutes, was centered on extending their range for what concerns timbre, voicing, staccato and harmonics. In performance he often used his voice (Shepp does it customarily too), mixing or substituting it to the wide possibilities of his multi-instrumental outfit, including his masterly played double-bass, clarinet, percussion, and many other “little instruments”. I saw him like an ethnomusicologist that could experiment directly through his capabilities and intelligence of a wide range of instruments. This research is to reconnect to experiences taking form already in his Sound Circus times, with Gerald Oshita and Oliver Jackson, and afterwards with his life-mate Suzaan Fasteau. He was a performer that could travel in the many soundscapes of jazz and beyond it, from “now” to be-bop and the ultra-sophisticated version of the bop language performed by legendary Chicago musicians such as Wilbur Ware and Ike Day.
He could be the “Brother that had little instruments who played themselves” (Malachi Favors), the younger brother that entered the “bright circle” of John Coltrane as well as the post-bop bassist who added value to Rashaan Roland Kirk, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp and Frank Lowe’s projects, though I am sure he brought in the USA something of us.
Maybe his solidarity with the Beat Generation of Allen Ginsberg and the Summer of S. Francisco 1967 was a part of his same constitution as an artist and human being, as a problematic entry-visa to the whole world, maybe because this solidarity was the place in which he liquidated the F.B. eye blues once for all. (Wright 1949)
references
iiac, 2015, Premier festival culturel panafricain à Alger en 1969 : entretien avec Archie Shepp, interview d’Eloi Ficquet et Pascale Ratovonony à Ivry/Seine le 14 mai 2013, in : « 080 – L’archive des festivals panafricains », institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contémporain.
William J. Maxwell, F.B. Eyes, 2015, How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, Princeton University Press.
Ingrid Monson, 2003, The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse, «Journal of the American Musicological Society», 48:3 p. 396.
Frances Stonor Saunders, 2000, The Cultural Cold War. The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York, The New Press.
Richard Wright, 1949, The F.B. eye blues, https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:294360/