Ralph Ellison, author of the instant classic Invisible Man, once likened the creation of fictional characters to a chief aim of democratic society: “the development of conscious, articulate citizens.”1 Both the writer and a free society are responsible to give voice, to give “eloquence,” to their respective dramatis personae.2 And as Ellison liked to remind us, the American cast of characters has always included the Negro. Ellison saw in the Negro American culture, displayed in the verve and elegance of “jazzmen and prize fighters, ballplayers and tap dancers,” an “affirmation of life beyond all question of our difficulties as Negroes.”3 So for Ellison, “individuality is still operative beyond the racial structuring of American society.”4
When critics chastised Ellison for preaching individualism to blacks instead of racial solidarity, he referred them to the jazz giants of old, whom he called the “stewards of our vaunted American optimism.”5 Ellison argued that blacks took pride in Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges “not because they were anonymous bumps within the crowd, but because they were themselves.” He reminded the critics, “If the white society has tried to do anything to us, it has tried to keep us from being individuals,” and noted the irony in black leaders decrying black individualism while they themselves were “doing all they can to suppress all individuality but their own.”6 Proud to be a Negro American, Ellison still did not believe true freedom or human excellence would be found down the road to color consciousness: “I recognize that we are bound less by blood than by our cultural and political circumstances.”7
Speaking of the American character, Ellison drew upon jazz to explain its development: “In this process our traditions and national ideals move and function like a firm ground bass, like the deep tones of your marvelous organ there in the chapel, repeating themselves continually while new melodies and obbligatoes sound high above. In literature this is the process by which the values, ideals, assumptions and memories of unique individuals and groups reach out across the divisions wrought by our national diversity and touch us all.”8
In his introduction to Living with Music, Robert O’Meally recounts asking a question of Ralph Ellison that gets to the heart of Ellison’s literary project: “Don’t you think the Harlem Renaissance failed because we failed to create institutions to preserve our gains?” To which Ellison replied, “No. We do have institutions. We have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And we have jazz.” Ellison implied that the Harlem Renaissance, or any other attempt by Negroes to put their stamp on American fine arts, needed no extra vehicle for securing its successes beyond the oldest and surest institutions of social freedom in America—the Constitution and Bill of Rights—and the musical genre of jazz. Without the Constitution and Bill of Rights as political touchstones for freedom of expression, even within a racially prejudiced society, the Negro’s scope to create great art would be even more limited. Ellison was always quick to remind his audience, black or white, not to overlook what Negroes already possessed and could claim as their own.
But why the Constitution and Bill of Rights? How were these the possession of a historically marginalized segment of America? Ellison believed these pillars of American government must be claimed by and for black Americans to the same extent as whites in order to affirm the equal humanity and American-ness of the Negro. Ellison’s dream, like that of Martin Luther King, Jr., was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” No white bigot’s ignorance of the text of his own nation’s political charter—an ignorance of the very basis of his own freedom—ought to stand in the way of Negro Americans claiming and acting upon that same charter of freedom. That would give up the struggle before it even began, to say nothing of neglecting the effort and sacrifice of “many thousands gone” who had a literal hand (and head and heart) in establishing the American regime.
As for jazz, it was an art form that antedated and survived the Harlem Renaissance. Ellison saw jazz as both a means and an end of Negro American freedom: it not only existed as a body of musical expression, with its own techniques and traditions, but also testified to the capacity of black Americans to thrive as artists within segregated America. By creating music that gave opportunity across the color line to excel, black Americans offered a beacon of hope to others who would dare to succeed in what little or great scope of freedom the majority-white society permitted.
And as black musical excellence made itself known to wider audiences, but especially to black audiences, interests beyond musical ones were piqued. The young Ralph Ellison could, at first, strive to become a world-class trumpeter and classical composer, only to be emboldened further to try his hand at writing. As Ellison once shared, he became a writer “because I had gotten the spirit of literature and had become aware of the possibilities offered by literature—not to make money, but to feel at home in the world.”9
In an online interview with “Jerry Jazz Musician,” Robert G. O’Meally explained how he came up with the idea for an Ellison jazz anthology:
Every time I give a course that touches on Ellison or on jazz in American literature … I put together a handout for my students that consists of Ellison’s writings on music. About five years ago, it struck me that that stack of Xerox’s was the best book on jazz I knew … I was sure that Ellison was right in the league with Whitney Balliett and Albert Murray and perhaps beyond them, as arguably the most eloquent writer that jazz has ever had.10
As author of Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1991), editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1997), and founder and director of the interdisciplinary Center for Jazz Studies, O’Meally has his jazz bona fides in order.
For Ellison, “living with music“—the title of his 1955 High Fidelity essay—meant literally living with and sometimes in spite of music (the latter being the racket produced from a neighbor upstairs who sang arias that Ellison tried to drown out with his own hi-fi set). O’Meally, the Zola Neale Hurston Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, borrowed Ellison’s essay title for a medley of Ellison’s reviews, essays, interviews, letters, and fictional excerpts that exhibit his devotion to jazz. All but the Juneteenth (1999) excerpt were originally written or published between 1945 and 1976. Moreover, most have already been published as collected essays or short stories in Shadow and Act (1964), Going to the Territory (1986), The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), and Trading Twelves (2000).
O’Meally gives brief, insightful background for each jazz piece, and includes a letter and two interviews—one he conducted with Ellison in 1976—not previously published. His interview of Ellison, part of his research for his biography The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980), is especially revealing of Ellison’s religious upbringing and his opinion of Malcolm X, the Communist Party of the 1930s and ’40s, and Africa from an American Negro perspective.
Jazz country: ralph ellison in america provides a long-overdue introduction to Ellison’s literary legacy that is both learned and highly readable. Horace A. Porter, chair of African American World Studies and professor of English at the University of Iowa, paints a jazz-lensed portrait of Ellison in America. Specifically, he shows how jazz influenced Ellison as a human being, writer, and self-appointed “custodian and conscience of American culture.”
To understand America as a “jazz country,” Porter highlights salient themes of Ellison’s oeuvre that reflect the modes of both jazz and the American regime: freedom, unity, ambiguity, possibility, improvisation, discipline, and transcendence—all of which contribute to what Ellison called “the sheer unexpectedness of American life.” Ellison saw jazz as a “branch of our national culture,”11 and this not merely as a homegrown musical genre but as a vital chronicle of the nation’s development toward the equal protection of its citizens regardless of color. He believed that “the true subject of democracy is not simply material well-being, but the extension of the democratic process in the direction of perfecting itself. The most obvious test and clue to that perfection is the inclusion, not assimilation, of the black man.”12
By “placing jazz in the foreground” of Ellison interpretation, Porter gives due attention to the music that inspired Ellison’s early ambition to master the trumpet and eventually the craft of the American novel.13 For example, in the central chapter of Jazz Country, Porter shows how reading Invisible Man as a “jazz text” mimics “the musical process and form of democratic culture.” Add to this a chapter on Ellison’s close friends and kindred spirits—writer Albert Murray and painter Romare Bearden—and one that evaluates Ellison’s most formidable critics (past and present), and Jazz Country amounts to a compact commentary on the Ellisonian project.
Unfortunately, for a book devoted to the centrality of jazz to Ellison’s vocation, Jazz Country falters in its assessment of Juneteenth, the novel John Callahan culled from the three-part saga of race, religion, and politics that Ellison left incomplete upon his death in 1994. Although the dust jacket boasts that Jazz Country is “the first book to assess Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published novel Juneteenth,” Porter does not live up to his billing. In a chapter titled “Jazz in Progress: Juneteenth, Ellison’s Second Novel,” Porter’s “assessment” is hardly more than a verbatim excerpt of a negative critique by Louis Menand from The New York Times Book Review. Porter qualifies Menand’s critique by adding how difficult Callahan’s job was in editing Juneteenth from the 2,000-plus pages that Ellison left behind. He then spends the lion’s share of the chapter interpreting “Cadillac FlambÉ,” a short story published in 1973 and part of Ellison’s sprawling second novel-in-progress. (Callahan left “Cadillac FlambÉ” out of Juneteenth for narrative reasons—its inclusion would have introduced two key characters who appear nowhere else in the coherent narrative that became Juneteenth.)
The closest Porter gets to an interpretation of Juneteenth comes in the following chapter, entitled “Jazz Preaching: Reverend Hickman and the Battered Silver Trombone.” There one finds not the promised interpretation of the novel but an examination of a “Juneteenth” sermon14 by the novel’s protagonist, a former jazz trombonist-turned-preacher. This chapter works as far as it goes, interpreting the sermon through the lens of jazz, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the preaching of C.L. Franklin and Martin Luther King, Jr. But a more expansive introduction to the central figures and themes in Juneteenth is found in Robert J. Butler’s essay “Juneteenth: Ralph Ellison’s National Narrative,” published in his edited volume, The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison (Greenwood Press, 2000). Notwithstanding the puzzling omission of a more extensive treatment of Juneteenth, Porter has written the next best thing to a primer on Ellison and his “jazz-shaped” writing.15 Of course, the best place to start is with Invisible Man and Juneteenth themselves, and The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (edited by John Callahan).
O’Meally and Porter demonstrate that Ellison’s significance as an American writer should derive not only from his classic work, Invisible Man, and now the deservedly published fragment of the unfinished novel Juneteenth but also from essays and interviews that present a more robust picture of how the American regime has perpetuated itself in a world prone to revolution and tyranny. Jazz, what Ellison described as “an art of individual assertion within and against the group,”16 serves as a fitting analog for the society of free individuals that the American republic was intended to secure.
Ellison’s jazz writings center on the music and its seminal performers and composers. But given his convictions about the artist’s responsibility to his society, he usually managed to address the social and political implications of a musical genre that provided an escape and field of dreams for an oppressed segment of the American community. These writings not only increase our understanding and appreciation of jazz music but also improve what Ellison called our “moral perception” vis-À-vis the American quandary of race. Gleaning from Handel’s opera Rodelinda, Ellison mused: “Art thou troubled? Music will not only calm, it will ennoble thee.”17 In this fiftieth anniversary year of Invisible Man’s publication, all Americans should take note.
Lucas E. Morel is assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University and editor of a forthcoming book, Raft of Hope: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the Politics of the American Novel.
4. “A Completion of Personality,” Collected Essays, p. 799.
5. “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday,” Collected Essays, p. 678.
6. “Indivisible Man” (December 1970), Collected Essays, p. 394.
7. “‘A Very Stern Discipline'” (March 1967), Collected Essays, p. 750.
8. “On Initiation Rites and Power: A Lecture at West Point,” Collected Essays, pp. 533-34.
9. “What These Children Are Like,” Collected Essays, p. 550.
10. “Jerry Jazz Musician,” www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML. cfm?page=interviews.html.
11. “The Charlie Christian Story,” Collected Essays, p. 272.
12. “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” Collected Essays, p. 582.
16. “The Charlie Christian Story,” Collected Essays, p. 267.
17. “Living with Music,” Collected Essays, p. 236.
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