African American Literature: 30s through 60s--Jazz Life: A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960

This photo graced the album Black Brown and Beige: Duke Ellington and his Orchestra Featuring Mahalia Jackson released by Columbia Records in 1958.  These are two of the most elegant and most interesting people that the African American Blues tradition ever produced, two of the most famous and successful and unscathed by the racism and Jim Crow that were the scourge of the nation at the time.  I don't know as much as I would like to know about how they managed it but there's no question that they were birds of a feather (Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox) and they made a fine couple in this picture, which I have no idea who took it except that it was taken at the time they made the album together and there were other photos, which are included in the reissue package designed and compiled by the brilliant Phil Schaap although the print is so small I despair of ever finding the information I am looking for.  


We will be hearing from both of them in the Blues People Curriculum on various occasions.  Both are heard from via the audio recordings including in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature.  I fear not nearly enough but these are more musical questions. 

This is the same Mahalia Jackson we meet on the pages and in the magnificent albeit rarely seen photos of JAZZ LIFE: A JOURNEY ACROSS AMERICA IN 1960 described below, the same America.  People go to her house in Chicago and she cooks for them, probably something she learned to cook growing up in New Orleans.  

I found this photo on line and used it here, wanting the album but feeling as though it was an expense that I could spare myself.  Finally, I broke down and bought it (turned out to be very inexpensive) as much to learn more about the photograph and the historic collaboration as to hear the music.

 I already had had the experience of being disappointed by the fact that the wonderful performance of Mahalia Jackson at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, in which she is accompanied by Duke Ellington, is not really captured in all its musical richness either on the film make by Bert Stern, JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY, or on the Newport Jazz Festival recording released of it.  It seems it was rather common to re-stage performances for the albums that were released as Newport Jazz Festival performances.  Moreover, black artists were so subject to being corrupted.  Their sound, their look, and everything else about them.  You never knew and you still don't know what part is this and what part was something somebody just slapped on them on their way out of the door.

In fact, I am thinking of poor Louis at that very same festival singing his trademark "Sleepytime Down South" with that ragtag gang of All Stars he was hanging out with then. Not that I didn't cherish every bit of it but I could see the strain he was under.  I've gotten so I can feel every bit of the strain he was under because I at a age and at a point where I am feeling that strain myself.

 For all I know, the recordings that were released were actually made at the festivals, although maybe at some other point in performance.  All they had to sell was lps, which had very limited recording space.  Also, I don't know much about what remained on the cutting room floor although this version includes many unreleased cuts so there is a vault of some kind somewhere.  Whats in it I don't know.

Nor would there have been much point in miking every instrument back then since they didn't have the technical capacity to use all the tracks anyway yet.  Perhaps all the sound is kept somewhere for future generations but I don't suppose I will ever find out what it sounded like to hear the Duke Ellington band backing Mahalia Jackson in the open air of Newport, Rhode Island, or even to be at a Newport Jazz Festival.

   In my view, a recording made under studio conditions, even if it was Duke Ellington and his orchestra and Mahalia Jackson, could never touch a live performance.  The best I've ever seen for this period were made abroad.  For instance, Duke Ellington in Amsterdam in 1958 is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard.  But what makes it so sweet is the way it looks (released as part of the Jazz Icon series on DVD), and my total inability to have imagined at the time (in the 50s or the 60s) that such a thing as such exquisitely beautiful, exquisitely elegant black men could ever exist on film.  I already knew it could never be made in America and lord knows I never had a clue taking classes at NYU in their Ph.D. program that film could ever result in anything so exquisite.

   It's interesting that George Wein didn't allow more film to be made at Newport, although if it had ever gotten out in technicolor the racial experiment that was going on there, it would not have been allowed to continue I should think. In the 50s, sliding right into 1960 with room to spare, the Newport Jazz Festival provided a utopian alternative racial space, one of the few in which blacks and whites of the highest caliber freely intermingled and associated with one another, thanks to the brilliant interventions of George and Joyce Wein, one of our most celebrated interracial couples.  It was still illegal in some states for blacks and whites to marry, and certainly there were still lots of white Americans who thought it should be illegal for whites and blacks to party together like that.  Yet George and Joyce were not only married but making history with some of the most brilliant performers in America in the brilliant summer sunlight.

  Anyhow I gather that somehow Duke Ellington (who was in my estimation one of the greatest purveyors of American folk culture/popular culture ever born) is just for brainy folk so I don't know how many of my acolytes in World Humanities Blues People will be able to catch on.  Words can't say. 

    But the whole point of this was to mention this wonderful supersize, heavily illustrated book of photographs by William Claxton and Interpretative Text by Joachim E. Berendt, which is entitled Jazz Life: A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960, Taschen 2005.  It is composed of the pictures and information collected by Claxton and Berendt as they travelled across the United States seeking out the rich variety of African American musical culture taking place in the year of 1960.

Initially, the book was only published abroad, not in english, and was not well known but the book I have has German, French and English, and was signed by Claxton and sold to me for $200 by a high-end photography shop that had recently opened near me.  

The young man who waited on me kindly explained how Claxton's distribution worked.  As it turned out the shop was another outlet for the main shop in another location, which also functioned as a photographic gallery.  The book was, in essence, a collection of copyrighted photographs which you might use to make a selection of one or more prints that you might like to buy from Claxton, frame and put on your wall.  There was actually a market for such a thing, people buying individual prints of photographs for thousands of dollars that they could not obtain in any other way directly from the photographer or his representatives.  The runs were limited in number in order to ensure the increasing value of each print, just as would be the case with lithographs or other kinds of artistic prints.  

The book itself is reissued a number of times in limited printings with each printing going up in price, if demand continues to rise, or down if the demand falls off.  Also, Taschen, which is one of the publishers who participate in these arrangements, would simply stop making more copies at some point in order to facilitate the collectability and value of the original editions.  So the book, itself-- if carefully maintained without damage and so forth--could also end up being worth a fortune in some rare instances.  

Both Claxton and Berendt were white (Claxton recently died) while a considerable number of the photographic subjects of the book are African American.  The photographs are, in many cases, absolutely exquisite and more importantly not the same pictures you see all the time.  Indeed, I bought the book after leafing through it because I knew that it contained a documentation of the year of 1960 in the United States, including the relationship between whites and blacks, such as it would be impossible to find elsewhere.  

Moreover, this is clearly a more racially integrated version of the cultural milieu of 1960 than those of us who teach African American Studies are in the habit of employing.  I am eager to see how his musical inventory would match up with the one I have been able to reconstruct from archival sources.  

But I cannot legally reproduce a single one of these pictures, which is ironic.  I've got some juicy bits of 1960s history in my hot little hands.  I can tote it to class and let my students look at it--although I will certainly have to take a cab and just their breathing on it is likely to diminish its collectability (by which I mean its financial value).

There isn't even an image of a person on the cover, just lettering and the book, itself, is 600 pages.  

Open Letter to Amiri Baraka aka Leroi Jones

I wrote this as the dedication to my curriculum blog when it begun in 2008, withdrew it, revised it and posted it again in 2013. I never got it to him but I think this is the right context in which to re-dedicate my curriculum, which has always been a homage to, for instance, the conversation over black music and the blues of Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison and Steven C. Tracy's brilliant follow up of the Dialectic in Langston Hughes and the Blues University of Illinois Press 2001.

I hardly know where to begin if you are actually going to be reading this but you and your work, in particular Blues People and the new introduction to it you wrote, have been in my thoughts recently. I've been putting together a new curriculum.  I wanted to do something which would focus upon how important the blues aesthetic (and or philosophy) of our folk, our ancestors has been, was and continues to be to the American experience and landscape. 

I've been thinking about a course called Blues People: African American Culture in the 20th Century, but as broad as possible given that it must be broken down into never very lengthy readings for undergrads who work and have a million other things pressing on their young lives. In fact, I taught this course in the fall of 2008 and also in the spring of 2009 in double sized classes (60 students). Also, I have done Blues People in an M.A. version in the fall and in a Ph.D. version in the spring of 2009.  The Ph.D. version was magic once I gave it over to the music as much as I wanted having the opportunity to work with Music Ph.D. candidates who were able to back up my lack of musical expertise.

For a long time I have been using visual culture and music to animate the literature and get it across in the classroom. The opportunity to teach this at the level of a global discourse is very appealing to me because I have been conceptualizing it that way for some time. At Cornell, I also had access to an expense account to purchase the materials, as well as world class technological support. I will always be grateful to Salah Hassan for that because it is just impossible to conceptualize what is possible with the technology if you have never had a chance to experiment with it. Now I am back at the City College of New York, which is lagging  a little behind the rest of the university system so far as technology.  I think it may be that some english professors don't believe that they are really supposed to supplement the text in any way.

So I imagine myself to be a little army of one to create from the ground-up this complex curriculum composed of music, literature, visual art, film and photography. I just discovered that my longtime colleague Joanne Hamilton has been teaching a course on the Blues Aesthetic for years, and that we can strategize together, although it seems her focus has been primarily on the visual arts.   I am very much into visual arts too but it is difficult to do justice to both the music and the visual arts in a single class, particularly when there are so many technological drawbacks.The very best way to do all of this is to be able to get online in the classroom, for both the teacher and the students, but alas this is still quite difficult on most of the City College campus.

Perhaps because I get to see so few African American students, and so many students of color from all over the world--India, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Latin America-- I feel like I have to represent for the ones who are absent (in jail and so forth) until we can get this situation together and get our children back in school.  I am returning now to your insistence all those many years ago that the blues (the music) was the cornerstone of our culture.

Besides, to tell you the truth, I am thinking racial phenotype isn't nearly so important to disseminating this message of humanity as it is that the receiver of it have a supple mind.  Many young people by the time they reach 20 are already hardened in their prejudices. But I feel that I may have figured out how to teach the art, the photography and the literature using the music as the base structure, and that when one does this--everything becomes much more coherent, especially for young people.

Okay, so all of this is old news for you, the father of us all but wanted to share. Also, in a sense what I want to build is the bridge between the Blues People you wrote in 1963 and the introduction you attached to it in 1999. And in fact at this point our young people (from all over the world) are so lost that almost anything they are handed is a great deal more than they can currently expect to get in the course of their college years.

Anecdote. 

Jazz Icons has issued a second series of DVDS, including one beauty of Duke Ellington doing a concert in Amsterdam in 1958.  I think of it as 60 minutes of pure liquid perfection, and a perfect illustration for the astute of how the folklore and the folk blues of African Americans was transformed through cultural performance into something quintessentially American and, at the same time, obviously in keeping with the fanciest kind of presentation you could imagine. Mother says it is classical music. Indeed, or so it seems because with my Zora Neale Hurston and Afro-Am Folklore class the semester before last on Wednesday evening at 7:30 p.m., by the time the concert was finished, only me and one other student remained. When it ended, I said to him (his name is Evan and he is a wonder, a poet) I guess we can tell who the jazz lovers are around here.

Something about that film in a darkened room made all 20 of them (graduate students no less) feel as though it was a good time to leave early and get home. Each one said goodbye to me quietly, as though they couldn't conceive that I would mean them to stay. This kind of behavior really baffles me except that I think it is possible that some people simply do not like music. Mom says you have to learn to listen when you are young, just as you must learn to look at art and photography and read when you are young, which is why she writes so many children's books.

I use Blues People as part of the insight in all of my courses. Thanks and I just loved the new fiction.
(revised and updated August 9, 2013)

Michele