blues
swing

blue note

mascon image

post

What is jazz? (Wikipedia definition)

Peretti's take:
--Ch. 1, "From Ragtime to Jazz in the 1910s" (10-31)
--Ch. 2, "Hot and Sweet, White and Black: The Jazz Age" (31-60)

listening:
--Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Livery Stable Blues
--Scott Joplin, Maple Leaf Rag
--James P. Johnson, Charleston
--Louis Armstrong, West End Blues
--Ben Webster, Boogie Woogie

poems by Langston Hughes:
--"The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.)" (CP 89)
--"Dream Boogie" (CP 388)
--"Dream Boogie:Variation" (CP 425-26)

post: Having read Peretti's two chapters and listened to some early jazz, use this post to explore the "jazziness" of Langston Hughes's "The Cat and the Saxophone," "Dream Boogie," or "Dream Boogie: Variation." What qualities put the poem into conversation with the new forms of jazz? How do the poem's rhythms, tones, and language translate jazz into words-on-a-page?

jazz

ragtime

hot
sweet

W. E. B. DuBois on Sorrow Songs

models (lyrics in Packet #1):
nobody know you, by Bessie Smith (1929)
nobody know you, by Eric Clapton (1992)
good morning little schoolgirl, by Mississippi Fred McDowell (1969)
good morning little schoolgirl, by Junior Wells (1965)
good morning little schoolgirl, by Grateful Dead (1968)
terraplane blues, by Robert Johnson
terraplane blues, by John Lee Hooker

literary blues:
Sterling Brown, "Cabaret" (JPA 22-24) and "New St. Louis Blues" (JPA 26)
Hughes, "Morning After" & "The Weary Blues" (JPA 95-96)
Robert Creeley, "Broken Back Blues" (JPA 48-49)
Sherley Anne Williams, "Any Woman's Blues" (JPA 235)

begin work on your blues imitation

Brown, Creeley, & Williams from JPA

Hughes's 1920s blues: "Midwinter Blues" (65), "Minnie Sings Her Blues" (68), "Listen Here Blues" (69), "Fortune Teller Blues" (70), "Homesick Blues" (72), "Bound No'th Blues" (76), "Po' Boy Blues" (83), "Brass Spittoons" (86), "Hey!" & "Hey! Hey!" (112), "Young Gal's Blues" (123), "Hard Daddy" (124)

Bookjacket for The Weary Blues

Hughes's 1930s anti-blues: "Tired" (135), "Negro Ghetto" (137), "The Negro Mother" (155-56), "Florida Road Workers" (158-59), "Open Letter to the South" (160-61), "Good Morning Revolution" (162), "Goodbye Christ" (166), "Song of the Revolution" (170), "Cubes" (175-76), "One More 'S' in the U.S.A." (176-77), "Ballad of Roosevelt" (178), "Let America Be America Again" (189-91), "White Man" (194)

no class (work on Ellison/Hughes prospectus)

browse the Schomburg Library's exhibition Harlem 1900-1940

Ma Rainey:
Ma Rainey online & Wikipedia
Ma Rainey, Yonder Come the Blues (1926) & See, See Rider (1925)
poems:
-- Brown, "Ma Rainey" (JPA 24-25)
--Young, "A Dance for Ma Rainey" (JPA 243-44)

Bessie Smith:
Bessie Smith online & in Wikipedia
Bessie Smith, Careless Love Blues (1925) & Backwater Blues (1927)
poems:
--Hayden, "Homage to the Empress of the Blues" (JPA 81-82)

Billie Holiday:
Billie Holiday online & Wikipedia
Billie Holiday, He's Funny That Way,Stormy Blues, & Strange Fruit
poems:
--Hughes, "Song for Billie Holiday" (Poems 360)
--O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died" (JPA 162-63)
--Collett, "Midsummer" (JPA 37)
--Mueller, "January Afternoon, with Billie Holiday" (JPA 158)
--Cassells, "Strange Fruit" (JPA 30-31)

Barrax, "The Singer" (JPA 9)

post: Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge, our next collection of poems, is a tribute to great women blues singers like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and the jazz singer Billie Holiday. What is it we look to these singers to perform for us? Listen to the cuts, read the poems, then choose one poem for one specific singer and explore what it is the poet wants from the singer of the blues. Is the woman blues singer in this poem muse, drudge, or both?

prospectus

Muse & Drudge (Recyclopedia 97-124)

post: As you read these poems, listen for the ways that Mullen (like Rainey, Smith, and Holiday) stretches and twists words and phrases to play on their changes and squeeze multiple meanings from their sounds. To give just one example, the title "muse and drudge" reappears as "muted and dubbed," "mules and drugs," etc. Read through the first third of Muse and Drudge then pick one poem and stay with it looking up the words in dictionaries of English, slang, street language, ebonics, etc., and posting on one or more multiplicities in the poem.

post

Muse & Drudge (125-52)

listening:
--Found poetry, Double Dutch Jumprope Rhymes
--Wanda Coleman, Nigger Rhythm Rhymes from the Blues Part of Town
--Tracie Morris, Project Princess

bring to say-out-loud a stanza in which the meaning is carried in the beat

optional: Interview with Harryette Mullen on Muse & Drudge and her newest book, Sleeping with the Dictionary, from PENNsound

Muse & Drudge (153-78)

two models for Mullen's art:
--Louis Armstrong's scat singing: Heebie Jeebies
--Tyrone Guyton's Heidelberg Project (see Recyclopedia 174) & virtual tour

post: for this post, listen to the double dutch jumprope rhyme hotlinked into the February 16th assignment and to the scat singing by Louis Armstrong--his Heebie Jeebie's rhythmic vocalizing with nonsense words and syllables--then locate a stanza or a set of four stanzas in Muse & Drudge in which the meaning is carried by sound and rhythm as much as or more than by recognizable words and syntax. In your post, describe the multiplicities you hear through sound and rhythm: what kinds of meanings--or as Mullen puts it, what kinds of "scat logic" (153)--can sound and rhythm carry?

essays:
--Lorca, "Play and Theory of Duende" (In Search of Duende 48-62)
--Mackey, "Cante Moro" (handout)

listening:
--Pastora Pavón, Ay Pilato
--Miles Davis, Saeta
--Miles Davis & John Coltrane, All Blues
--Mississippi Fred McDowell, Everybody's Down on Me
--Mississippi Fred McDowell, Jesus is on the Mainline
--Rahsaan Roland Kirk, The Business Ain't Nothin' But the Blues
--[Iranian Singer], Love Song
--Sonny Rollins, East Broadway Rundown

poems:
--Lorca, "Poem of the Saeta" (In Search 29-39)
--Lorca, "Ballad of One Doomed to Die," trans. Langston Hughes (In Search 45-47)
--Hayden, "Soledad" (JPA 82)

Lorca, "Deep Song" (In Search of Duende 1-23) (optional)

post: "The duende's arrival," Lorca writes, "always means a radical change in forms" (53). Using the essays by Lorca and Mackey and the saetas written by Lorca and Miles Davis, explore the kinds of changes in conventional forms duende entails. Do you see aspects of duende in Hughes's blues or Ellison's blues-inflected novel? How is "deep song" recognized?

no class (read Jazz 1-87)

Jay Clayton's chronology for the events of Jazz

listening:
--How Long Blues (see Jazz 56, 58)
--James P. Johnson's Carolina Shout (stride piano: see Jazz 64)

Jazz (163-229)

post: In this post, discuss the narrative technique of Morrison's novel. In an interview, Morrison suggested that "jazz" enters the novel not so much as a theme or a reference or a backdrop as a structure. What jazz techniques give this novel its odd and compelling form?

concluding discussion of Jazz
--cover of Miles Davis's CD Live/Evil

post: The "voice" that narrates Morrison's novel opens the final section with the words "Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it" (219). In this post, examine the presence of duende in Jazz. Where does it come from? Who are its carriers? What do blues and jazz have to teach the narrator and the characters about the quality, duration, and effects of pain?

Atet A.D. (1-24)

sample tracks:
--Thelonious Monk, Pannonica
--Andrew Hill, New Monastery
--Wayne Shorter, Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum
--Rashaan Roland Kirk, We Free Kings

Atet A.D. (25-122)

sample tracks:
--Elvin Jones/Jimmy Garrison Sextet, Half and Half (Illuminations)
--Rashaan Roland Kirk with Jack McDuff, Funk Underneath
--John Coltrane, Sun Ship

post: One definition of a pun is two or more signifieds competing for the space of a signifier. Atet A.D. runs on puns: each word, it seems, bursts with significations, many of which are mixed or contradictory and all of which are mobile. An example of such an "echoic whir" (25), blur, buzz, or "antithetic spin" (53) is the run on mist/missed/mystery in Seattle, but these aural overlaps are everywhere. Pick one of these chords in the reading and follow it through N's letters to the Angel of Dust.

Atet A.D. (123-184)

sample tracks:
--Archie Shepp, Girl from Ipanema
--Sun Ra, We Travel the Spaceways

post: Toward the end of Atet A.D., two bottles wash up on the beach, both containing gremlins or, as Mackey put it in an earlier book, djinns. In this post, return to "Cante Moro" to help you consider to what extent N.'s B'Loon stands in for that "kind of gremlin" or "gremlinlike, troubling spirit" Mackey identifies as duende.

Peretti,
--Ch. 4 Jazz Goes to War
--Ch. 5, Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, Affluence, and Anxiety

Baraka, "Jazz and the White Critic" (BR 179-86)

Blue Note album covers:
--Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool
--Sonny Rollins, Blue Note Vol. 2
--Thelonious Monk, Monk at the Five Spot

in-class viewing of sections from Ken Burns' Jazz

midterm improvisation

Poems for Charlie Parker ("Yardbird" or "Bird") - see Peretti 101, 104
--Creeley, "The Bird, the Bird, the Bird" (JPA 48)
--Creeley, "Chasing the Bird" (jazz packet)
--Dodson, "Yardbird's Skull" (JPA 52)
--Harper, "Bird Lives: Charlie Parker" (JPA 74-75)
--Kaufman, "Walking Parker Home" (JPA 110-11)
--Spicer, "Song for Bird and Myself" (JPA 203-06)

listening:
--Parker, Koko
--Parker, Scrapple from the Apple

Poems for Lester Young ("Prez") - see Peretti 93-94
--Baraka, "Pres Spoken in a Language" (BR 262)
--Ted Joans, "Lester Young" (JPA 106)
--Al Young, "Lester Leaps In" (jazz packet)

listening:
--Lester Young, Lester Leaps In
--Charles Mingus, Goodbye Porkpie Hat (Mingus Big Band version)

post: For this post, choose one poem on Charlie Parker and explore its attempt--successful or unsuccessful--to capture the tones, pace, or techniques in Parker's "Koko" or "Scrapple from the Apple."

Ginsberg's Howl

listening:
--Ginsberg reading of full text of Howl

bebop sounds:
--Charlie Parker, Scrapple from the Apple
--Lester Young, Lester Leaps In

post: No one could mistake the rhythms of Howl for, say, Fred MacDowell's blues or Duke Ellington's swing. What formal and thematic qualities of Ginsberg's poem give it, as Ginsberg said, a bebop "modality of consciousness"? After listening to Parker and Young--Bird, Prez--listen to Ginsberg then work back and forth between the two with your own riff on these materials.

continuation of Howl

Jack Kerouac
--"Choruses" from Mexico City Blues (JPA 115-16)
--from The Subterraneans (jazz packet)
--October in the Railroad Earth
--Charlie Parker

Ferlinghetti, "Sometime During Eternity . . . " (JPA 61)

Rexroth, "Written to Music" (JPA 174)

post: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Rexroth all, as Ginsberg puts it in Howl, gravitate to "the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix." That fix may be the blues or Ornette Coleman's free jazz, the funk of Harlem, the drugs associated with jazzmen like Charlie Parker, or, more simply, assumptions they as white writers make about black musicians and poets. In this post, discuss the use of black arts and traditions by these white writers. What do they look for in black art? How carefully do they "listen" to the blues or free jazz? What do they take? What, if anything, do they miss?

Kaufman, "Bagel Shop Jazz," "Battle Report, "War Memoir," "War Memoir: Jazz, Don't Listen to It at Your Own Risk" (JPA 109-113)
Kaufman, "Crootey Songo" & "Abomunist Manifesto" (jazz packet)

Ted Joans, "Jazz is My Religion," "Jazz Must Be a Woman," and "Lester Young" (JPA 104-06)

Baraka's beat period:
--poems from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (BR 3-15)
--"How You Sound??" (BR 16-17)

scat (Wikipedia)
-- Armstrong, Heebie Jeebies

post: For this post, go to Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus, sign in as a guest, and look up the word "beat." Thinking back through your reading in Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, Kaufman, and Baraka, pick a cluster of three or four terms in the array to map the term "beat" as it applies to the aims, methods, and identities of these writers.

scat

Beat

abomunist

Baraka's transition from Beats to Black Arts (1963-65):
--poems from The Dead Lecturer (BR 51-75)
--chapter from Blues People: "Swing--From Verb to Noun" (33-50)

listening:
--New York Art Quartet, Black Dada Nihilismus
--DJ Spooky mix of Black Dada Nihilismus

post: Rejecting white avant-garde poetry as a model, Baraka turned to blues and jazz as carriers of black history and culture and sophisticated models of artistic form. Focusing on "An Agony. As Now.," "Rhythm & Blues," or "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS," use this post to explore the resonance between one of these poems and Beat poetry, on the one hand, Black music, on the other / or (alternative post) Baraka ends "Black Dada Nihilismus" with a list of names. Pick one, research it, and then write a paragraph that explores why Baraka dedicates his poem to this person.

black chant / black scream

Baraka, Dutchman (BR 76-99)

Montage of a Dream Deferred through "Nightmare Boogie" (388-418)

"Bop," from The Best of Simple (handout)

listening:
-- Hughes performs Dream Montage
--Gillespie, Salt Peanuts

images from Harlem 1900-1940 (Schomburg Center for Research)

discussion team: Wendy Cook, Mike Healy, Erin Platz, Matt Rinker, and Adam Smith

post: After reading through Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred (marked in CP by a vertical gray stripe), listen to Hughes's reading of an excerpt from this poem and to Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts," then discuss one specific short poem's be-bop markings: its "conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages . . . in the manner of the jazz session" (CP 387). In what ways could the poem you are examining be said to be a be-bop poem?

Montage of a Dream Deferred (388-429)

post: In "Theme for English B," Hughes conflates his interiority ("Me, who?") with his surroundings ("I guess I'm what / I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you" (409). In this post, focus on Harlem as the central character of Montage. How does this suite of poems present Harlem's divergent voices and perspectives? What are the cadences and concerns of the Harlem community as presented in this collective portrait?

Peretti, Chapter 6 "We Insist": Jazz Inside and Outside the 1960s (134-54)

Baraka,
-- "The Changing Same" (BR 186-209)
-- "The Black Arts (Harlem, Politics, Search for a New Life)" (BR 367-99)
-- "The Screamers" (BR 171-77)

Ray Charles, I've Got a Woman

Charles Mingus / three from Mingus Ah Um
--Fables of Faubus
--extended version Original Fables of Faubus (from Mingus Presents Mingus)
--Better Get Hit in Your Soul
--Goodbye Porkpie Hat (for Lester Young)

Ornette Coleman
--Lonely Woman
--Free Jazz (excerpt)

Sonny Rollins:
--East Broadway Rundown
--Paul Blackburn, "Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five Spot" (jazz packet)
--album cover: Rollins's Way Out West (1957)

Archie Shepp
--Malcolm, Malcolm

outside

changing same

dirty bop

Black Power

outside jazz

poems for Coltrane
--Baraka, "AM/TRAK" (JPA 2-7)
--Brathwaite, "Trane" (JPA 17-18)
--Coleman, "Cousin Mary" (jazz packet)
--Harper, Dear John, Dear Coltrane (on Love Supreme) (JPA 77-78) & "Here Where Coltrane Is" (JPA 79-80)
--Madhubuti, "Don't Cry, Scream" (jazz packet)
--Matthews, "Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41" (JPA 146)
--Sanchez, "a/coltrane/poem" (JPA 183-86)
--Shiraishi, "Dedicated to the Late John Coltrane" (JPA 194-98)
--Taggart, "Giant Steps" (jazz packet)

listening:
--Coltrane, Acknowledgement, from Love Supreme
--Coltrane, Cousin Mary
--Coltrane, Giant Steps
--Coltrane, My Favorite Things
--Coltrane, Naima
--Coltrane, Alabama / compare with the rhythms of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s eulogy for the black girls killed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963

PROMPTS FROM DISCUSSION TEAM (Conrad Bendixen, Andy Carey, Julie Schmitz, Abi Sonnek, and Sara Werner): As you prepare for class, please consider these questions and bring thoughts, comments, and further questions to class on Wednesday:

1. John Taggart's "Giant Steps":
--How is Taggart's poem related to Coltrane's composition of the same name? How are the poem and the song similar? How are they different?
--What was Taggart's agenda in writing this poem? What does it have to do with Coltrane?
--How does the imagery of saints and snakes work in the poem?
2. Michael Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane":
--How do you understand the title of this poem? Why is he addressing Coltrane as two different people?
--Do you hear echoes of and references to other blues and/or jazz we've studied?
3. Baraka's "Am/Trak":
--How is the scream used in this peom?
--What is the form of the poem? How does it construct the poem's message?

Albert Ayler (see Baraka's "Changing Same" 196-97 and "Black Arts" 369ff)
Ayler article in Wikipedia & associated links
poems
--Brathwaite, "Clock, for Albert Ayler" (jazz packet)
--McCabe, "For Albert Ayler" (JPA 150)
listening:
--Ghosts: First Variation
discussion team: Laura Kacere, Rachel Kim, Justin Riley, and Wendy Xu

Pharoah Sanders:
Sanders article in Wikipedia & associated links
poems:
--Bowering, "Pharoah Sanders, in the Flesh" (JPA 16-17)
--Mackey, "Capricorn Rising for Pharoah Sanders" (jazz packet)
--Wright, "Treatment" (JPA 241-42)
--Baraka, For Pharaoh Sanders
listening:
--Sanders, Aum/Venus/Capricorn Rising
discussion team: Sam Caster, George Flanders, Anna Wiegenstein

poems for Charles Mingus & Ornette Coleman
--Jayne Cortez, "Into This Time" (JPA 42)
--Taggart, "Coming Forth by Day" (JPA 207-08)

Kaluma ya Salaam and Reginald Martin, historical overviews of the Black Arts Movement

Baraka, poems from Black Magic (BR 210-24)
--cover of Black Magic

listening:
Baraka, Bang Bang Outishly (for Monk)
Monk, Straight, No Chaser

post: As Baraka's first black nationalist-inspired poetry collection, Black Magic (1969) was meant to further the aims of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Remembering the free jazz we've listened to over the last weeks and considering the overviews of the Black Arts Movement you read for today, discuss one or two poems from Black Magic that help illuminate Baraka's revolutionary tactics. What does he mean by "magic"? What does he mean by "black"? How does the concept of "black magic" work to further the Black Power and Black Arts political agendas?

black aesthetic

jazz tribute poem

return to Baraka, poems from Black Magic (BR 210-24)
--cover of Black Magic

Ron Karenga, On Black Art & Black Cultural Nationalism
Larry Neal, from The Black Arts Movement
Charles H. Fuller, Jr., Black Writing is Socio-Creative Art & Black Writing: Release from Object

post: Socio-creative art is, Charles Fuller, Jr., explains, "a manner of self-expression and artistic form born directly from the collective social situation in which the Afro-American found himself in this country." By this definition, blues and jazz are--and always have been--socio-creative. But how is the community envisioned in Black Art different from the blues or jazz community? Who's in this community? Who's out? To back up your ideas, work with the essays we've read for today and one or more poems from Baraka's Black Magic.

poems by Mari Evans, Etheridge Knight, A. B. Spellman, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, and Nikki Giovanni (Black Arts packet)

discussion team: Matt Ireland, Mandie Pirog, Alyssa Russell, and Jenny Soler

Mood 1 ("Cultural Exchange" 475-81), Mood 10 ("Bird in Orbit" 515-19), Mood 12 ("Show Fare, Please" 523-25), plus "Liner Notes" (following 526)

listening:
Louis Armstrong, Hesitating Blues
Original Dixieland Jass Band, Livery Stable Blues
African talking drum
Yusef Lateef, Three Faces (flute jazz) Moods 6-12 (502-31)

in-class review session