MARCH 20, 2014
“Jazz: The Experimenters,” a 1965 television broadcast of performances by the bands of Cecil Taylor and Charles Mingus, with commentary by Ralph Ellison and the jazz critic Martin Williams, currently on view at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem as part of an exhibition devoted to Ellison’s record collection, would be worth the trip, even in the absence of the enticing and evocative installation of artifacts, texts, and images that surrounds it. The broadcast is a major document in the contextualized history of jazz and its performance.
The program was recorded at the Village Gate, without an audience. Mingus’s group (two or three trumpets, alto sax, French horn, tuba, bass, drums) begins the broadcast, playing a sinuous slow composition, spotlighting a trumpeter’s silvery high notes over a dense orchestration, which in turn serves as a sonic backdrop for a voice-over that sets up the program’s axis of controversy—the reception and the significance of modern jazz, “often undanceable, unsingable, serious”—and introduces Ellison as the “host” and Williams as a commentator.
In his two appearances, Ellison—poised, formal, a little bit orotund—sketches a grand theory of jazz by which he frames what he considers the inherent problem with its modern varieties. He calls jazz musicians “practitioners of an outlaw art” that was the source of their artistic freedom—they could “create free of the concerns of status and respectability.” He cites the underlying premise of jazz as
an attempt to express with musical instruments the sound and the style of the Negro American voice as raised in prayer, protest, shout, and song. It was an attempt to humanize the world in terms of sound, an effort made with musical means to impose the Negro American sense of time upon the larger society and upon the world of nature.
As such, jazz has, Ellison says, a “highly conscious sense of its sources and its own traditions.” For Ellison, modern jazz musicians made the mistake of seeking “status and respectability,” and of seeking it as intellectuals and from intellectuals, predominantly white ones. Ellison blames these white writers for their inescapable evaluation of jazz and its specifically black American traditions in terms of their own Eurocentric tradition. For Ellison, the essence of jazz is a specific “reality of life and experience”—that of black Americans—“which nourishes the beginning of jazz and which will continue to nourish its future life.”
read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/03/why-did-ralph-ellison-despise-modern-jazz.html
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