Blues, Jazz & Polyphonic
Listening in George Elliott
Clarke’s Blue
Black Music as Survival
• I have sometimes thought the mere hearing of those songs
would do more to impress some minds with the horrible
character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of
philosophy on the subject could do” (Douglass 57)
• William Parker: “Black improvised music has had to fight for
its life since the first slaves were brought here in 1619”
(William Parker 58).
• “I contend that the Negro is the creative voice of America,
is creative America, and it was a happy day in America
when the first unhappy slave was landed on its shores.”
(Duke Ellington, The Duke Ellington Reader, 147)
Blues
• “Afro-American culture is a complex, reflexive enterprise which
finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a matrix. A matrix is
a womb, a network, a fossil-bearing rock, a rock trace of gemstone’s
removal, a principle metal in an alloy… The matrix is a point of
ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing
impulses always in productive transit” (Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues,
Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory 3).
• “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of
a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its
jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of
philosophy, but by squeezing it from a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism” (Ralph Ellison 8).
• Bessie Smith, “Back Water Blues”
Davis on Bessie Smith
• As Miles Davis poignantly states in his
Autobiography, “White people used to talk
about how John Hammond discovered Bessie
Smith. Shit, how did he discover her when she
was there already? […] It’s like, how did
Columbus discover America when the Indians
were already here? What kind of shit is that,
but white people’s shit?” (406).
Improvisation & Jazz
• Improvisation best understood in relation to a
constellation of terms: spontaneity, metaphor
(“carrying over”)—hence, metamorphosis—risk taking,
recreating, theme and variation, the ability to change
within a structure of rules which is itself constantly
changing.
• Jazz as freedom: “We hear the effects of this in the
southwestern jazz of the thirties, that joint creation of
artistically free and exuberantly creative adventures, of
artists who stumbled upon the freedom lying with the
restrictions of their musical tradition as with the
limitation of their social background” (Shadow xiii).
Con’t
• “For after the jazzman has learned the
fundamentals of his instrument and the
traditional techniques of jazz—the intonations,
the mute work, manipulation of timbre, the body
of traditional styles—he must then find “himself,”
must be reborn, must find, as it were, his soul”
(Shadow 208).
• Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless
improvisation upon traditional materials, the
jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds
it…” (Shadow 234).
Con’t
• “Jazz is the middle road between invisibility and anger. It is
where self-confident creativity resides. Black music is
paradigmatic of how black persons have best dealt with
their humanity, their complexity-their good and bad,
negative and positive aspects, without being excessively
preoccupied with whites. Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong,
and Coltrane were just being themselves” (Cornel West).
• Also like the blues, jazz is a musical form that easily
incorporates, adapts, and subverts other musical elements,
with early influences including “African and European
music, American folk music, marching band music,
plantation songs, spirituals and gospel music, minstrelsy,
ragtime and the blues” (Stanbridge 286).
Dissonance
• Duke Ellington would explain after playing a
dissonant chord on the piano, “Hear that
chord. That’s us. Dissonance is our way of life
in America. We are something apart, yet an
integral part” (qtd. in Ulanov, 276).
Revision & Repetition
• Revision: The jazz riff is a central component of
jazz improvisation and Signifyin(g) and serves as
an especially appropriate synonym for troping
and revision” (Gates, Signifying 105).
• “black cultures highlight the observance of
repetition, perceiving it as circulation,
equilibrium” (Tricia Rose, Black Noise 69).
• “Did it like Miles and Dizzy, now we getting’ busy
/ Bridging The Gap from the blues, to jazz, to rap
/ The history of music on this track” (Nas,
“Bridging the Gap”)
Polyphony
• polyphonic voices: voices from a variety of
social margins that are in dialogue with one
another.
• “black music cannot be reduced to a fixed
dialogue between a thinking racial self and a
stable racial community […] the calls and
responses no longer converge in the tidy
patterns of secret, ethnically encoded
dialogue” (Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic 110)
Poetry as Song
• Latin root textus, past particle of texere, “to weave”
highlights that textual and oral analysis might be more
symbiotic than irresolute
•  Rhapsodize, ‘to stitch songs together”
• Bringhurst on myth: Myth is that form of language in which
poetry and music have not yet diverged” (Sharp as a Knife
364). Clarke a mythical bard, a weaver of song?
• Clarke on his poetry as song: “I became a songwriter—a
lyricist—before I became, indelibly, a poet… my strength as a
poet, whatever they are, derive from the sonic universe of
African American verse and song” (Blues and Bliss 59-60).
• Clarke on criticism: Say I scribe “vernacular formalism”
(McNeilly) I don’t care—so long as I be sounded, recited,
sung.
Clarke on Music in his work
•
•
Well, I am a frustrated musician. And singer for that matter. And one of the most
traumatic incidents of my adolescence was when I was 12. And I was sent by
myparents to join the Baptist church choir, and I got sent home the same night,
because the choir director said, “No, we can’t use you... you go home.” So that
was... it was a memorable experience because I was convinced I couldn’t sing. And
I probably can’t sing. On the other hand, I feel that impulse towards song, and
towards music, and I’m finding now in my life that when I come to read work, I find
myself moving more towards that song style, speaking, singing kind of together at
the same time. Which actually is—and you fall into all kinds of clichés and
stereotypes—but some preachers, or testifiers, in the black church tradition,
present their sermons in exactly that way. I’m not trying to be one of those guys,
or women—I’m not—but I do realize that I grew up in that tradition, and there’s a
sense in which the sermon is supposed to be chanted, almost— almost chanted as
much as it is spoken. And there’s room for the audience, the congregation, for the
antiphonal response, call and response, etcetera, etcetera. And so, I think there
might be a bit of that influence there too. As I move in that direction, I don’t know
why, but I find myself moving more towards that song as a way of understanding
how to put words together. (31:00)
http://www.improvcommunity.ca/content/george-elliott-clarke
Dialogic Remapping
•
•
•
Influence: Clarke on Walcott “I thank you for pioneering a way of blackening
English, of roasting syllables upon the righteous fires of your anger and your love
until they split and crack. You cannibalize the Canon and invite your brethren and
sistren to the intoxicating, exhilarating feast” (“Open Letter” 16-17).
Epigraphs in Blue are dialogic, and paratextual conversations outside and within
the text itself. (see “Bio-Black Baptist/ Bastard” pg. 19)
It’s important for me to recognize forbearers, ancestors, artistic genealogical family
and song, because none of us is here solo, or alone in a sense. We all come from a
context. There is a genealogical context, cultural context, and there’s also an
artistic context. And one has many artistic relatives so to speak and you want to
claim kinship at least with different folks. And, so that was a way for me to say, “ok,
here is someone whose work has been important to me in some way, or whose
work I’ve enjoyed in some way, let me dedicate a poem to him or her, or let me riff
off his or her style as I perceive it.” And… again as a kind of act of homage. But at
the same time an act of tacit appropriation or attempted appropriation, etcetera,
etcetera. And, then revisiting and rewriting in certain ways (from interview).
"Day by day make it new / cut underbrush, / pile the logs
/ keep it growing" (Ezra Pound, Canto LIII).
“Popular music is nothing if not dialogic, the product of
an ongoing historical conversation in which no one has
the first or the last word. The traces of the past that
pervade the popular music of the present mount to
more than mere chance… they reflect a dialogic
process, one embedded in collective history and
nurtured by the ingenuity of artists interested in
fashioning icons of opposition” (George Lipsitz, Time
Passages 99)
Defining Blue through negation
• Like the word nigger, the word blue has been
continuously shaped, and reshaped, inscribing
meaning.
• bell hooks describes the appropriation of English
by slaves as an act of resistance: “I imagine them
hearing spoken English as the oppressor’s
language, yet I imagine them realizing that this
language would need to be possessed, taken,
claimed as a space of resistance… English was
transformed, and became a different speech”
(Teaching to Transgress 168)
Blue as Blackness
• Blackness: politically and culturally constructed category.
• Chris Jennings argues in his interpretation of Blue:
“Blackness does not define the speaker; the speaker
achieves blackness by re-inscribing it, by applying flame” (A
Review of Blue 145).
• “In Canada, some are born black, some acquire blackness,
and others have blackness thrust upon them” (GEC,
Odysseys Home 16).
• “Blackness for me, like black Canadian, allows for a certain
kind of malleability and open-endedness which means that
questions of blackness far exceed the categories of the
biological or ethnic” (Rinaldo Walcott 22).
Invoking/ Provoking Offence
• Shakespeare, Shelly, Yeats, Chaucer constantly
evoked. Is this an effort to legitimize the text?
• Judith Butler insists on the importance of
“troubling” language of making “troubling” the
active verb.
• Performative language: rhetoric, hyperbole,
energetic language, engages in itself, and the
other.
• See pomes: “Calculated Offence” (23); “Of Black
English or Pig Iron Latin” (from Black)
Of Black English or Pig Iron Latin
(from Black)
“For a nigger, niggling with English…
(A tinny Walcott, I would like, I’d like,
Black English to sound more like tempered steel.)”
Heteroglossia In Africadian Lit
• “If Anybody wants to keep creating they have to
be about change” (Miles Davis. Autobiography
394).
• “You are black Canadian as you wish, more or
less, in our context. And that makes for a far
more heteroglot, far more diverse community
than you have with African Americans” (Clarke,
Crime of Poetry 57).
• “I will, to my dying breath, say that black
Canadian writing is as regional as Canadian
writing in general” (62).