[JRJ 9.2 (2015) 221-225]
doi:10.1558/jazz.v9i2.30470
(print) ISSN 1753-8637
(online) ISSN 1753-8645
Review
Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, Free Jazz/
Black Power, translated by Grégory Pierrot. Jackson,
MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015. 256 pp.
ISBN 978-1-628-46039-1 (hbk). $65.00/£41.00.
Chris Ealham
Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, Spain
[email protected]
Keywords: black power; cultural criticism; free jazz; Marxism
This book examines how, from the late 1950s/early 1960s onwards, the
practitioners of free jazz sought to overturn musical conventions in what
they perceived as a conscious, sonic revolution. Initially grounded in some
of the more experimental and dissonant recordings of Charlie Mingus and
Thelonious Monk, the first coherent manifesto of the atonal expression of
the ‘new thing’ is generally taken to be Ornette Coleman’s 1960 release,
Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Free jazz met with an immediate howl
of denunciations from most music critics and traditionalists. On one infamous occasion, Coleman, the doyen of the movement, was punched in
the face by Max Roach. That this aggression occurred at Manhattan’s Five
Spot Café, a haven for the jazz avant-garde and Beat writers, makes the episode all the more telling. Yet for all its detractors, free jazz generated some
of the richest and most original music in jazz history, produced by the likes
of Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Archie Shepp. Although he
was publicly critical of the movement at times, Mingus more than nodded
in its direction in his more savage compositions.
The principal merit of Free Jazz/Black Power is that it teases out the
logic of this much-derided and misunderstood sub-genre, placing it in a
wider sonic and socio-historical context. Originally published in France in
1971, it became a veritable landmark in the history of jazz criticism, and was
relatively swiftly translated into Italian and German. Moreover, this seminal study constituted a milestone in the development of cultural criticism,
predating subsequent developments in what has become labelled ‘cultural studies’. The appearance of an English translation is, therefore, most
welcome. Certainly, the authors, who also wrote (with André Cleageat) the
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hugely popular and oft-reprinted Dictionnaire du jazz (Carles, Clergeat and
Comolli 1988),1 have considerable experience as cultural commentators:
Philippe Carles was editor-in-chief of France’s influential Jazz Magazine
from 1971 until 2006, while Jean-Louis Comolli, editor-in-chief of Cahiers
du Cinéma from 1966 to 1978, has published widely on film.
The focus here is firmly on how free jazz served as a vehicle for sociopolitical resistance during a time when growing numbers of black musicians sought to articulate the protests of the African-American community.
Such an approach is unsurprising given the Marxist perspective that
informs this unreservedly polemical and engaged study. The analysis, then,
places the accent on the social content of art, and inevitably reflects postMay ’68 French Marxism, which is combined with borrowings from Theodor
Adorno. The authors also owe a huge debt to Amiri Baraka’s classic Blues
People (Baraka 1963). Indeed, they apply the core thesis of Blues People
to the ‘new thing’, identifying it as a musical product of the changing socioeconomic and political circumstances of African Americans (and, by extension, a style that was largely incomprehensible to white critics).
The force of this book, therefore, rests in its sustained analysis of the
conditions in which free jazz emerged—a time when more experimental artists rejected a jazz scene dominated by the creative atrophy of hard bop for
being increasingly derivative, domesticated and alienated from the black
experience. Their musical dissidence coincided with a profoundly radical shift in the consciousness of many African Americans, a change that
reflected the impasse of the Civil Rights movement, urban working-class
ghetto insurrections, and a new militancy most potently registered by the
emergence of the Black Panthers. The authors identify the ‘new thing’ as
an innovative language of musical protest and celebrate its political thrust,
as part of an urgent and passionate socio-cultural project for justice. Thus,
Carles and Comolli provide a corrective to the oft-expressed accusation
that free jazz betrays a disengaged, self-indulgent l’art pour l’art mentality,
devoid of moral content. Indeed, a recent study on protest music—the generally excellent Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of
Social Movements—almost entirely ignores free jazz contestation (Rosenthal and Flaks 2012). However, as is demonstrated here, album and song
titles, as well as the publicly stated motivations of prominent free jazz artists,
reveal this sub-genre to be a radical cultural expression, a musical cry for
1. This volume has most recently been published with the new title Le Nouveau Dictionnaire du Jazz.
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freedom in an oppressive world. Meanwhile, Carles and Comolli’s critique
of racism and oppression, forces that continue to shape the experience of
the African-American working class, endows the book with a contemporary
relevance. While the analytical approach adopted in Free Jazz/Black Power
will not appeal to all readers, the authors should be commended for their
honesty, which is sharply at odds with many of the critics they attack for
hiding behind an assumed ‘impartiality’ or ‘neutrality’ that is little more than
a mask for their own particular agenda. As the authors remind us, all criticism is shaped by ideology.
In the first part of the book, the birth of free jazz is framed as a militant
rejection of white cultural hegemony over what were originally black musical
forms. Integral here is a critique of the early phase of commercialized jazz
which, as the authors demonstrate, was accompanied by an aggressive
process of cultural colonization. This appropriation was heavily negotiated
by (white) music critics, who, it is argued, enjoy(ed) a symbiotic relationship with the music industry, seeking to domesticate and shape jazz music
to fit the needs of capitalist industry. In practice, the early critics are attributed with packaging and, when possible, moulding jazz so as to render
it attractive to the vast, predominantly white, market for recorded music.
Hence, the authors insist that the majority of critics falsely emphasized the
symbiosis between jazz and ‘swing’, projecting an image of the music as
primitive, elemental and, fundamentally, emotional. Accordingly, jazz both
should and, indeed, could not be theorized in any way. At the same time,
inspired by their aim of getting jazz accepted, mainstream critics emphasized the respectability of what they depicted as a universal musical language that deserved to be considered as an art form in itself. According to
the authors, the ‘original sin’ of the free jazz movement was to renounce
the core values of the European musical tradition, simultaneously clashing
with the racist-traditionalist schema of industry controllers and music critics. Thus, it was no surprise that most established critics went to war with
the ‘new thing’, dismissing it as ‘anti-jazz’, and rejecting it as being too
‘intellectual’ to produce either good music or ‘real’ jazz.
This is all grist to the mill for Carles and Comolli, who stress how the
discourse employed by previous jazz critics sealed the exploitation and
oppression of an already uprooted and dispossessed people. The authors
were clearly ready to ride the printed punches that inevitably came their
way. Indeed, Free Jazz/Black Power can be seen as a salvo in the cultural
battle for the heart of jazz: Carles and Comolli sought to ‘liberate’ the music
and defend the genre as a coded and highly specific form of socio-political
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expression from the censorship of capitalist industry. Accordingly, it is
argued that if music does not function as a vehicle for revolutionary ideas,
it perforce becomes emasculated, pruned of all social criticism, and served
to the public as a bland commodity. For some, this will smack of a kind of
conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, as is widely accepted, censorship often
has very subtle consequences, such as promoting self-censorship among
those who live or create in its shadow. Meanwhile, it is timely to recall some
of the high profile cases of direct censorship by record companies of music
with an unpalatable message, such as in 1959, when Columbia Records
vetoed the lyrics on Mingus’s ‘Fables of Faubus’, his broadside against
Governor Orval Faubus and President Eisenhower during the Little Rock,
Arkansas, school integration crisis. Due to contractual issues, the full version of the song only appeared (with a different title) a full year later with
Candid Records.
While musicological analysis is not the authors’ strongest card, in the
final part of the book they briefly appraise the sonic dimensions of free
jazz—its rejection of a single rhythm in favour of polymorphism, the centrality of group improvisation and modal harmonies, the rejection of academic training, and the use of non-traditional instrumentation, including
shouting. Here, Carles and Comolli expose the misconception that free jazz
lacks internal logic, while also pointing to certain paradoxes, such as how,
despite the aversion to fixed forms and conventions, practitioners of the
‘new thing’ ended up establishing a formula of sorts. This is followed by an
exhaustive 14-page discography of free jazz recordings, along with some
important foundation stones and later works by white European practitioners, such as Peter Brötzmann and Gunter Hampel.
Those who question whether it is reasonable to speak of the free jazz
sub-genre as a movement will probably be unmoved by this volume. Certainly, such labels, much like the term ‘jazz’ itself, are notoriously problematic, especially when we are referring to an array of artists with a range
of motivations. Nevertheless, it seems incontrovertible that free jazz artists
were engaged in an increasingly politicized range of activities as part of a
revolutionary rejection of the past. Take, for instance, 1964’s ‘October Revolution in Jazz’ in New York, a series of concerts and debates on corporate
exploitation and racism in the music industry that attracted important artists
such as Andrew Hill, Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor. This attempt to overturn the
established order of things and enable artists to take control of their music
was a precursor to the ‘Loft Jazz’ scene (which reduced the dependence of
artists on generally hostile, or at best suspicious, club owners). It also led to
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the formation of the Jazz Composer’s Guild, a collective designed to defend
musicians’ interests and a forerunner to the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra
Association and the New Music Distribution Service, which helped artists
enjoy new control over their music and avoid the pressure of the big record
labels. Meanwhile, as the inherent spirituality of the soundtrack to the Civil
Rights movement gave way to the defiant rage of Black Power, many political activists viewed free jazz, with its virulent, uncompromising sound and
the challenge it issues to listeners, as a tool for liberation.
It would be remiss of me not to raise some critical observations. At
times, the authors conflate race and class, something that was not uncommon with the Marxism of the era in which this book was written. Today,
we are well aware that black America is not a social monolith and, moreover, it is unlikely that the African-American middle class, which has been
fierce in its moral (and often moralizing) rejection of hip hop music, would
embrace a protest movement like free jazz, were it to emerge today. The
book would have benefited from an epilogue examining the evolution of
free jazz since this volume first appeared in France. A paradox of free jazz
was that it ended up becoming divorced from the black working class that
it initially addressed. This gulf was driven by the emergence of eminently
danceable genres such as soul, and reached new levels in the late 1960s
with funk which, on occasions, adapted the same militant assertiveness as
the first wave of free jazz. As younger black musicians gravitated towards
the new dance music, the ‘new thing’ increasingly attracted a white crowd,
as reflected in the geography of later live free jazz recordings, which were
centred more on Greenwich Village than Harlem. Finally, in an age in which
a minority of ‘alternative’ hip hop artists articulate the social protest of the
African-American working class, it would be interesting to learn about the
extent to which free jazz has provided inspiration for later musical dissidence. In particular, there is work to be done regarding the relationship
between free jazz and jazz rap, one of the most politicized branches of the
hip hop movement, although this almost certainly requires a book in itself.
References
Baraka, A. (1963) Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William
Morrow & Company.
Carles, P., A. Clergeat and J.-L. Comolli (1988) Dictionnaire du jazz. Paris: Robert
Laffont (reprinted 2011. Le Nouveau Dictionnaire du jazz. Paris: Robert
Laffont).
Rosenthal, R., and R. Flacks (2012) Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the
Service of Social Movements. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016.