Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Its fair enough to realize a writer has a scope to be
dealt within a finite amount of pages. 

For those who wish to read more about the politics of Jazz Bob Backus'
book Fire Music; A Political History of Jazz, can help
fill in a few blanks about the AACM, JCOA, STRATA, the 
Tribe, BAG and so on.  Dark Tree, a book about the late
Horace Tapscott, while not focused on politics certainly
provides a social history of South Central L.A. with music 
as a central catalyst and thread.

One question I have for Dick is in his book or elsewhere does he
discuss the various intent or effect of 'protest'. I think I understand
the idea of music as a tool of resistance against the
dominant (or perceived dominant) culture and also against/for topical
political issues, but what other varieties of protest exist? 
  

    
Darrell,

If you get to the chapter about the music of hate, you will encounter
protests against equal rights, and the neo-Nazi sentiments that regard
any group except "Aryans" as being worthless and hateful.  

Notice that the title of the book refers not to protest but to social
change.  Protest songs, as the term is generally used, do meet your
above definition - protests against the dominant culture.  But songs
may also take political positions against opposing ideologies.  For
example, I can imagine songs that oppose Palin or the Tea Party.  They
aren't dominant political groups, but they certainly may lend
themselves to descriptions in song.  Similarly, in the Viet Nam war
there were songs opposing and supporting the war.  So a pro-war song
might protest people burning their draft cards, and an anti-war song
might protest the loss of life or the war itself.  
  

    
Darrell,

The Tapscott book ties in, I think, with Spellman's book  in the sense
that it shows how difficult it is for an experimental jazz musician to
survive. Tapscott, like the late John Carter and Bobby Bradford,
turned to teaching young people both as a way of promoting the way and
of surviving.  George Lewis has a current book out that is a detailed
history of the AACM.  Athough the book is largely involved with music
history, it does provide some information about the conflicts within
AACM about whether it was appropriate to allow white musicians into the
club, so to speak.'
I'll look into Backus' book which I was am not familiar with. Frank
Kofsky was heavily into discussions of jazz as a form of black
nationalism.    
  

    
No one has even brought up rap, as yet.  There was an interesting
article in last Sunday's New York Times about the gay rap scene in New
Orleans.  Since rap has always had a strong macho orientation, and even
a homophobic one, the article fascinated me.
  

    
Thanks for the pointer to that article - here it is:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25bounce-t.html
  

    
I knew Frank Kovsky when I was at college.  He fawned over John
Coltrane and tried to to impose political revolutionary intent to the
revolutionary aspects of the music.  He knew his music history, but he
was just off because of his ideological constraints.  He was the first
Stalinist that I ever encountered.

Frank missed a once in a lifetime opportunity at the time. Dodo
Marmaroso was living in Pittsburgh in a a mental hospital then.  But
Dodo wouldn't admit to who he was and Frank would have been interested
in talking to him about music but couldn't impose his marxist framework
on Dodo's part in the music.  I heard that Dodo would play for the
other patients in the day room and they loved him.
  

    
> No one has even brought up rap, as yet.

Perhaps this is a reflection of age of participants here. Also perhaps the
protest dimension is not the first thing that comes to mind w/ rap, which
certainly has been used for social commentary but is more likely to be party
music, boasting, etc. You do talk about this in the book; 'authentic' rap
carries a gangsta legacy. (Interestingly, in my corner of the world, the
'authenticity' of Pasifiker hip-hop and rapping is defined almost entirely
by social commentary, including criticism of misogyny within islander
communities as well as racism and its consequences with the police, lack of
jobs, etc.)

I haven't heard much bounce but what little I've heard seems consistent with
the label: music to shake ya booty to, fast....
  

    

There are some old-school hip-hop/rappers b-boys b-girls that might
argue that the form and early movement was about innovation and
community. At least that's where my discussion with Kurtis Blow went a
few years back. In someways grass-roots community is a political thing.
I get the feeling though this book is more about lyrics.

The reportage of the down and out might be one kind of protest,
but I'm not sure if it applies here.

And since Marx is being mentioned, Stalinism/Communism is one thing
(hopefully now behind us). Marx's influence on how people think of
cultural resistance is another. Dick do you see there is any kind of
post-Marx way developing in looking at protest music and protest
movements? Some other point of view other than class politics?
  

    
Barry Warren Polley,
American Indian rap also is more political and less about bling,
sexual conquest, and the like.

Before Kofsky, Sidney Finklkestein was a Marxist critic who wrote a
book about jazz.  Not a bad book, but as you mentioned with Kofsky, it
did impose the marxist interpretation of just about everything.  The
communist countries, e specially Russia, had a difficult time with
jazza.  On the one hand it was bourgeois pap for the masses, on the
other hand it was an African-American form of music, and communists had
trouble down-grading expressions of black culture.

As far as the Kurtis Blow discussion, isn't that what proponents of
all musical genres say?  The punk people cite their community, the
straight edge skinheads do the same, and so forth.  Certainly the song
The Message, one of the earliest rap records, contained quite a few
social-political ideas in a single song.  
Konsson post-
i don't think Marxism is exactly behind us, although communism
probably is, with a few exceptions.  But the whole cultural studies
crowd has been heavily influenced by Marxist thought, especially the
works of Gramsci. I'm not sure I understand  what you mean by something
other than "class" politics, so I won't comment further until I get a
better idea of what you're saying.  It's certainly possible to have a
radical, somewhat skeptical view of the world without being an orthodox
Marxist.  
  

    
I think that Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" is an useful alternative
to orthodox marxist  analysis.  It is no wonder that the cultural
studies people latched onto it and made it a central part of their
framework. As well as Walter Benjamin's work.

Eric Hobsbawn, another marxist, wrote a series of essays on jazz under
the pseudonym Francis Newton(after trumpeter Frankie Newton).
  

    
David,
There an organization called IASPM, the Int'l Assoc for the Study of
Popular Music.  They tend to follow the people you mention above.  I
used to go to their meetings, but their papers and writings are riddled
with terms like "bricolage," "hermaneutics," and so forth. 
After a while you need a smokescreen for the jargoneutics, so to
speak.   

I have found George Lipsitz to be the most interesting person that's
in that group of college professor-theorists.  he seems to listen to
the most varied diet of music as well.  

Some of the others have, as they say, been in the academy too long.  
  

    
(Any off WELL readers who would like to post, are invited to send
their comments to inkwell@well.com)
  

    
I know what you mean about the "pedagogical pedantics" that inflect
academic discourse.

Funny you should mention Georgie Lipsitz. That is his phrase he used
in high school.  He is a childhood friend of mine.  We played in the
high school band together and were usually found at the back of the
band bus listening to and egging on the Puerto Rican kids who were
playing rumbas.

  
  

    
Regarding American Indian Rap being more political than ... oh, let's
say "mainstream" rap - I think that's true of the great majority of rap
that is not part of or aspiring to the American commercial mainstream.
Rap started as and remains a genre focused on social change - if not
political change (and they are not necessarily the same).
There's a wonderful film on the music of Istanbul called "Crossing the
Bridge" which features a fine Stambuli rap artist who speaks to this
very subject, how his art is important, unlike American rap - his
father nods approvingly in the background.
Today's Washington Post has an article on Palestinian rap.
  

    
I just got back from the pool, and there was a thought swimming
through my head the whole time - _Talkin' 'Bout..._ is focused on the
lyrical content of music, although each chapter has a brief stylistic
history, of the musics associated with the social group presented in
the chapter. 
But there is a subtext running through the whole book, which I wish
had been more explicitly brought out - of the MUSIC itself being an
agent of social change - and social change.
IT is most explicit in the chapter on Rock'n'roll - but little
glimmers of it appear throughout the book - I think in particular in
the chapter on Latin-Americans - and the particular Caribbean crucibles
of NYC and Miami ... there's a big story of "social change" in the
very existance of a music called "salsa" (some of the architects of
"salsa" never like the term)
(and i don't mean this in the Adorno/Marcus sense that everything is
fodder - I mean this quite directly, in a McCluhanist sense - 
Like Rock'n'roll, Salsa IS social change - 
  

    
what is the big story of social change in salsa?  rock n' roll was
initially not embraced by the major record companies, but it was
embraced by its audience, thus spurring on independents.  Salsa was
Cuban music, son montuno, played by Puerto Ricans.  It always was
embraced by its audience.  They started throwing in bombas and plenas,
r&b, added trombones, and altered the orchestrations somewhat. 
Otherwise the music was the same.  The big name players were pretty
faithful to Cuban forms.  What social change are you talking about?
  

    
I agree with David Gray that the music itself can be seen as vehicle
of social change. It's probably most obvious with rock and roll, in the
sense that the breakdown of black-white separation and antipathy was
often shattered by the music, the performers and the audience being
both black and white.  
However this is a reasonably lengthy book, and rather than make it the
sense of a  unabridged dictionary, I made the conscious choice to use
music itself as more of a backdrop than a focus, although I certainly
didn't ignore it.  There easily could be a whole other book written
about how dance styles in music have influenced cultural attitudes and
provoked changes.  I'm thinking of rock, of disco and the gay dance
clubs, and of the Latin dance styles.  

AS far as salsa goes, salsa was notoriously a-political, with the
exception, mostly of Ruben Blades, who like Wyclef Jean wanted to
pursue a political career as well as a musical one.  The difference
being that Ruben is a lawyer and a serious political radical whose
songs always announced his political inclinations.

There are also both films and books about heavy metal music in Islam,
and several books that discuss rap in various cultures around the
world.  
  

    
Ruben Blades got nearly 20% of the vote when he ran for President of Panama
in ... um was it 2001? - it earned him a cabinet position, Minister of
Tourism, in which he served from 2004 to 2009, with one three month leave of
absence for a European tour with a band from Costa Rica ...

The roots of what is called "salsa" are in a protest music from the late 
18th Century... but my point in saying "salsa" has been a music of
social change is to stress that "social change" is not just "political"
and/or protest.

Forgive my audaciousness here - but I think the book approaches but 
doesn't quite adopt that view - although Dick has said here, and does
say in the book that Music of Social Change is more than just "Protest
Music" - 

Here's a good example - Little Richard's "Tutti-Fruity" - not the
least bit politcal - but maybe one of the most effective "protest"
songs of all time and a WORLD of social change ... I live in the
society that song changed and I'm glad of it!

I don't know much about the Latin Music scene, 
- but "salsa" appears to be a music of liberation
and unification to me ... it's Pan Caribbean/Central American/New
York ... and we can't forget the strong strains of African and
German influence in this music (yes German - particularly in the
Central American strains) ...
I also know that those colleagues of mine in my life as a performing
musician who DO know about Nuyorican and other Latin American musics
always express exasperation when folks talk of "salsa" as if it's a
thing ... as opposed to a huge bucket with many things, some of 
which are only vaguely related to each other ...
  

    
I thought Dick made that conceptual point in the book, esp. in his 
conclusion where he talks about the jazz music of people like John 
Coltrane as having as much to do with social change as lyrics.
  

    
Dick already made the point that "salsa" is basically apolitical.  The
only protest I know about is they object to the name salsa.

It is pretty well understood that Havana is center the latin/caribbean
musical universe. Just like New Orleans is for jazz.  Or the South
Bronx for hip hop.  The musical forms developed there are taken as the
standard throughout the region.  That doesn't mean that parallel forms
didn't develop independently elsewhere. Or like Puerto Rico, Jamaica,
Trinadad, Columbia, and New York they play the dominant forms and
inject their local conventions into the music.  Same thing with Kansas
City, Chicago, and New York for jazz.

If you are looking for political content in latin music, look at the
trouve(troubador) music in Cuba or the corridos in Mexico. Or look at
how hip hop has been embraced in the area.  They have been mining a
political vein since they learned about scratching, turntabling, and
rapping.   
  

    
Indeed, there is a nice section on corridos and narcocorridos in the 
Spanish-music section in Dick's book.
  

    
In you're going to bring in the social content of Central-South
American music, (which is not part of the book,) the political music of
Chile, reggae in Jamaica, and, to an extent calypso music in Trinidad
are all relevant.  Reggae has =a similar discussion to rap, in that you
hear reggae or traces of it everywhere, including the Hopi
reservation.

There are so many Cuban musicians, I would venture a guess that
there's  underground anti-communist music in Cuba.  A friend of mine
named Rey Sanchez, who teaches at Miami U.,  wrote a hilarious song,
called Viva Fidel.  The song thanks Fidel for getting Rey to Florida,
and enabling him to have a nice house, two cars, and a good job. 

Most of the cultural theorists are in the words of a previous post
"post Marxist," and I suspect they have little enthusiasm for
investigating anti-Castro music, just as they don't seem to research
neo-Nazi music.  
  

    
re: >  It is pretty well understood that Havana is center the
latin/caribbean
 musical universe. Just like New Orleans is for jazz.

I'm a bit confused by tense usage above - *is* New Orleans the
center of the jazz musical universe? Now, in 2010?

Yeah, New Orleans years ago (and it was a Caribbean City as much
as a Mississippi City before the railroads), Havana years
ago ...


./
  

    
Pretty strong linkage between NoLa and Havana, tradewise and musicwise
(clave links the two as an artifact of the slave trade). But that *was* and
I'm not sure that anyplace *is* the centre of the jazz universe anymore. The
wind carried the seeds and a thousand flowers bloomed; the centre of MY jazz
universe is Scandinavia, and no doubt YMMV.

The book has a few personal anecdotes that are not at all distracting. I
hope Dick is willing to share how he came to play backup for Anita Bryant!
  

    
Of course (barryp) is right.  I meant historical centers.  N.O and
Havana were where the music first emerged to the world at large.