On cultural appropriation: Observations on blues, classic rock, jazz and literature
I'm going to take a break from my ongoing series, and follow up from some thoughts from last Sunday. Some thoughts I wasn't sure I had, or would have, or... something.
Anyway, last Sunday, I wrote a fake-out post which, despite the title, was actually about the history of jazz, and how that history has been influenced by struggles to define a uniquely African-American art form as white musicians and consumers popularized whatever African-Americans were doing within a few years. The cycle has been as identifiable in jazz as in everything else.
I made a few comments, unformed, about the idea of "appropriation," but never really went anywhere with it. I think I'll try. Today will be more wide-ranging, and I'll address blues, and some books I've discussed before, but this is a slippery topic. In order to introduce it, let's have a classic moment of cringe humor from a hipster indie movie. Ghost World. Here. Watch Steve Buscemi be Steve Buscemi.
Oy. Just... oy. There is so much here, but all I can handle for this morning is the "appropriation" aspect. Blues Hammer. Yeah. Take a moment to digest that. Perhaps with some antacid. The thing is... I've seen that band. In fact, if you check imdb, one of the band members is Johnny Irion, who is kind of a legit musician, but that's not what I mean. I mean, when I was in college, there was some local "blues" band that called itself Blues Highway, not to be confused with the great bluegrass band, Blue Highway, and that's basically what they were. Cringe-worthy white guys who, while not actually, literally wearing blackface, were playing such a parody of what was originally an African-American art form (kinda, but I'm getting to that) that you can understand how the word, "appropriation," gets used.
Of course, we need to clear up a lot of things about race and the blues. First, the lines between white forms of folk music and African-American forms of folk music didn't become as stark until record companies codified them. In the early 20th Century, white folk musicians and African-American folk musicians had significantly overlapping styles. Listen to Mississippi John Hurt playing "Nobody's Dirty Business," without preconceptions, and ask yourself if you could have classified it as an old country tune.
In contrast, consider Hobart Smith playing "Railroad Bill." 1942.
What kind of music was that? From a white guy from Appalachia in 1942? At least as bluesy as Mississippi John Hurt, I'd say. They were just all taking water from the same well. That's pretty much what "folk" music is, right? And this is before getting into the complication of artists like Dock Boggs, who sang like an Appalachian crooner and picked blues banjo back in the 20s. Straight blues. On banjo. Which is derived from African gourd instruments anyway.
So sure. "Blues." An African-American form. Perhaps you see where I'm going with this, and the challenge of deciding what constitutes "appropriation."
And yet, when we talk about the history of blues, we can wind up at "appropriation" pretty quickly. Part of that is that artists like Hobart Smith were rare, and the blues did, at a point, become predominantly African-American. The split, artificial or not, occurred, and became real if incomplete, even if musicians communicated across artistic boundaries all the time.
These days, if you hear a blues musician, you are probably hearing someone white. There are great African-American blues musicians playing today, and not just the old ones who are still outrunning Death. From Selwyn Birchwood to Robert Randolph, there is a thriving African-American blues scene. But let's be honest. More blues musicians these days are white.
That doesn't make them Blues Hammer. Is anyone seriously going to call the Tedeschi Trucks Band "Blues Hammer?" Those would be fightin' words, and I doubt you could find any African-American musicians who would back you up. (There are a bunch of African-American musicians in the band, by the way.)
Sooner or later, though, any discussion of this topic inevitably leads us to... lead. Or rather, "led." Zeppelin, that is. Led Zeppelin.
Like any white boy who has ever picked up a guitar, I know how to play... that song. It was one of the first songs I taught myself to play. I stuck my audio cassette (yes) of Led Zeppelin IV into my boom box, and repeatedly hit rewind while I worked out the notes, all so that I could cringe in self-disgust when the Wayne's World movie came out.
It was no longer party time. Definitely not excellent.
So yeah. That song. The thing about that song, grossly overplayed though it is, is that it has dynamic range, and structure, and basically, it doesn't sound like a '60s pop tune, or some drugged-out psychedelic parade of meaningless sounds. Overrated? Sure. But if I were able to listen with fresh ears, I think I'd probably be able to hear why it got overplayed. Too bad I can't listen with fresh ears.
Eh.
But if I'm writing about appropriation and Zeppelin, my focus is not really going to be... that song. We need to deal with theft. Cultural theft, if such a thing exists.
So in the 1960s, the blues weren't really big in the US, but a bunch of British kids got big into the blues. You know a lot of their names. Clapton. Richards & Jagger... Page. A lot of what they played and recorded initially was just a distinct offshoot of blues. Either covers, or original material done in the same style as the covers they were playing. Usually, they were clear on what they were playing, to the degree possible.
When Cream covered "Spoonful," nobody got pissed off. Why not? They gave proper attribution. Why is Zeppelin controversial here? For the same reason that I, as a professor, really don't like a certain category of student and Supreme Court Justice [cough, cough... Gorsuch]. Plagiarism.
Zeppelin... didn't always give proper credit. And that's the polite way to put it. Sometimes they gave some credit. Sometimes, they stole outright.
And the funny thing is, when they were playing blues-based material, that wasn't their worst theft. You probably don't even know which of their acts of thievery bothers me most because you never caught it. "Black Mountain Side." Cool acoustic tune from Led Zeppelin I, right?
Actually, it's called "Black Water Side," from Bert Jansch's Jack Orion. 1966. The fact that Jansch wrote it is so obscure, though, that even one of my wierdo musical obsessions-- Steve Tibbetts-- didn't get it. He covered it on Big Map Idea, and credited Zeppelin, not Jansch. Oh, Steve, say it ain't so!
Who, you may ask, was Bert Jansch? He was one of the guitarists from a British folk group called Pentangle. Pentangle also delved into blues, but jazz too. And Jansch, along with John Renbourn, was far more eclectic. Jansch, Renbourn, Pentangle, and that whole scene, were really following on the heels of someone else you don't know. Davy Graham.
For the record, if you're going to follow up on one name in this post, it should be Davy Graham, sometimes spelled "Davey," just to keep people confused.
Graham wasn't just digging into old blues and jazz records that he picked up at the corner record store back when such things existed. That was for schlubs like Clapton. Graham was actually traveling around the world, learning from masters of every style he could find, then going back to Britain and blowing everyone away on the acoustic scene. Jansch and Renbourn were sort of his primary disciples.
So really, Davy Graham was at the root of this whole thing, but my point is that Jansch recorded a cool song called "Black Water Side" in 1966, which Zeppelin completely ripped off. This wasn't like taking some old blues song, amping it up, changing it around, and laying the ground work for all hard rock to come in the process. No. Zeppelin just stole the song. Without crediting Jansch.
Which makes it poetic that Black Sabbath stole from Led Zeppelin. Repeatedly and shamelessly. Thieves stealing from thieves. You'd think that Zeppelin wouldn't be so obsessive about "blocking" users on youtube (the things I learn from Rick Beato). They don't exactly have any moral standing when it comes to intellectual property.
Anyway, though, what does this mean with respect to "appropriation?" Their adaptation of blues was really nothing like Willie Dixon or Bukka White or any of the others they ripped off, and they were creating something new. Yes, that song is grossly overplayed. Yes, I have trouble getting over them ripping off Bert Jansch, who is really one of my musical heroes. Yes, they failed to give proper attribution to the blues artists who... influenced them, but stepping back from that, they actually did play something different. One could look at Blues Hammer, and Led Zeppelin and draw a line of some shape between the two, but hypothetically, what if Zeppelin had given proper attribution?
Their contemporaries did, for the most part. When Cream played "Crossroads," they didn't pretend it was anything other than Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues." Mutated heavily. But... Zeppelin was changing the songs too. Give proper attribution and you're an innovator and not a thief. Don't give proper attribution, and you're a thief.
The thing is, not everyone saw it all that way, even for bands like Cream. What did the original blues musicians think of the Brits, Zeppelin aside? There was a split. Some saw opportunity. With the British blues bands drawing American audiences back to blues-based music, some artists, like B.B. King decided that this was a net positive for the source artists. They'd get more attention than they had before. At the same time, after all, the folk revival had a few people wandering around trying to find not just the active blues musicians, but the ones who had gone inactive, to get them back on stage, and into studios. Like... Mississippi John Hurt.
Some of the old guys were happier about the situation than others. Among the more bitter was Skip James. You probably don't know Skip James by name, for a variety of reasons. He's one of my favorites. He was one of the weirdest of the old blues musicians, and ironically enough, he had a key role in Ghost World. Enid got obsessed with an old Skip James song. And, if you remember O Brother Where Art Thou, you've heard a Skip James tune. "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues." Cream also covered him.
Nehemiah "Skip" James was a genius and a virtuoso on both the guitar and piano. Yeah, really. But, he was bitter. He saw the 60s blues revival, and he saw a bunch of white boys from England getting famous, and he didn't like it. One can sympathize.
So this is sort of the question. The Skip James view of things. What the hell, man?!
Led Zeppelin really complicated any interpretation here by making music that was fundamentally different from their influences but just not giving proper credit. It would be so much easier to look at them the way history looks at Cream if they just gave proper credit. (Of course, it was more than just "influence" with Black Mountain Side.)
Either way, though, one can ask, is this "appropriation?" Did these bands-- white kids from Britain (Jansch was a Scot, not an Englishman) take an African-American art form for themselves? Does that cross some line? And if they get famous and Skip doesn't...
Yet if this doesn't happen, what are the odds that you're a fan of Zeppelin? Cream? The Stones? Take your pick? If you bother to read these music posts, you know my position on Ginger Baker, on whom Art Blakey bestowed his blessing, and if you're paying attention, you can probably guess that Jeff Beck is my favorite of the Yardbirds guitarists. Twist my arm, and I'll even admit that Kashmir kicks ass. There were things happening here, artistically, and do we say, no, because it would be appropriation? One can understand Skip's position. Yet, Ginger Baker had the Art Blakey seal of approval, and went off to Africa to play with Fela Kuti after Cream split.
Which is a good place to turn my attention back to jazz. For all of the Miles references in last Sunday's posts, I didn't address the elephant in the room for Miles Davis. Kind of Blue. Ask any jazz snob to list the 10 most important albums in jazz history, and even if you manage to find one of the contrarians who refuses to admit a fondness for this album, you'd be hard-pressed to find one who would deny its central importance. It was the landmark album in a style of improvisation called "modal" improvisation. Are you improvising over the chord changes, or within the chords themselves? That's kind of it. Bunch of music theory, go read about it.
What should you read? George Russell. The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Russell was a musician, bandleader and music theorist, and an under-appreciated genius because he wasn't a frontman. You know who got him? Miles. He read that book, and figured out how to put it into practice. This is a sort of physics versus engineering thing. On Milestones, you get some basic modal stuff, and then... 1959. Everything in jazz changed in 1959. Brubeck's Time Out. Mingus's Mingus Ah Um. Coltrane's Giant Steps. I can keep going, but the big one, indisputably, is Kind of Blue. One of the few perfect albums ever recorded. Miles had arguably the greatest band ever. He had Coltrane. Cannonball Adderley. Wynton Kelly. Paul Chambers. Jimmy Cobb. And...
...
Bill Evans.
Hi, Kermit!
Anyway, Miles did take some guff for having Evans in that band. Evans was white. He was also one of the few other people in jazz who could really wrap his brain around what Russell was thinking. It was actually that pair-- Miles and Bill Evans together-- who figured out how to put the Lydian Concept into practice. None of this works without Bill Evans, whose place in jazz history is as high as it can get. Not just as a pianist, but as a thinker. He's right there with Miles, and the most important album in jazz history doesn't happen without him. That's before getting into his trio with Scott LaFaro-- the greatest bassist you've never heard.
Was he engaged in appropriation? I spent last Sunday writing about the complicated issues of race in jazz, and the struggles among African-American musicians to create something uniquely African-American. There's Evans, the lone white guy in the band, picking up on the theories of Russell, another African-American, and not everyone in the jazz world was happy at the time. At this point, his position in jazz history is pretty much unassailable. It's really hard to find anyone who will say a negative thing about Evans, but that wasn't how everyone saw it at the time, which sort of makes the same point as above.
This isn't a bunch of white musicians hearing African-American bands, playing the same thing, and getting famous for it. That doesn't mean everybody was fine with it at the time. And that's sort of the problem, right? We're in murkier territory, especially when part of the artistic point is to define something that is culturally unique.
And I think I'll wrap things up with a few comments I have made about books from earlier posts. Mainly, Seth Dickinson. I wrote about his Baru Cormorant books several times, and the short version is that the first book-- The Traitor Baru Cormorant-- is very good, but the sequel is deeply problematic. Part of the problem with The Monster Baru Cormorant is how it handles a metaphor for American/Western contrasts with Africa. The books take place in an alternate world in which the rising power is the Falcrest Empire, which is a stand-in for America/the West and evil/capitalist/imperialism. Their primary rivals for power are the Oriati Mbo, who are African.
Afro-futurism is a burgeoning genre in science fiction and fantasy, and here are your obligatory references to Nnedi Okorafor, NK Jemisin, and the lineage tracing back to Octavia Butler and even Ursula Le Guin. (The protagonist in Left Hand of Darkness was black.) Trying to write it when you're white, though, is a little like playing blues or jazz, at a time when they are predominantly African-American, and culturally African-American. Are you going to come across as Blues Hammer? You may be going for Bill Evans, but there are some pitfalls. My basic observation about The Monster Baru Cormorant was that Dickinson treated the Oriati Mbo in such idealized terms that he denied the characters or the place any depth or reality. In contrast, authors like Butler and Jemisin tackle issues of race and racism, but do so while imbuing their characters with such individual humanity and complexity that their books work at the individual, human level as well as the political-social level.
And that contrast has me revisiting my thoughts about Dickinson and what really bugged me about the second Baru Cormorant novel. I think it's Blues Hammer. I think it's an appropriative version of Afro-futurism that failed, having been robbed of the individual humanity the characters always have in a Butler or Jemisin novel because Dickinson was screaming about PLOOOOOWIN'! Pickin' COTTON ALL DAY LONG! Except that instead of a suburban white boy who has clearly never worked a field in his life singing about such, Dickinson just creates a perfect Africa where everyone is perfect and they don't even mistreat anyone in the LGBTQ community because he wants to be the most progressive writer of Afro-futurism around.
Of course, who is the arbiter of appropriation? Who are the arbiters, plural? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that second Baru Cormorant novel will go down in history like Bill Evans. Part of the point of all this ramblin' is that this is a slippery concept. So I guess I'll...
Usually I reference the Allman Brothers, and Ramblin' Man. Allmans, all the way, but this seemed appropriate. [See what I did there? Sorrynotsorry.]
Anyway, last Sunday, I wrote a fake-out post which, despite the title, was actually about the history of jazz, and how that history has been influenced by struggles to define a uniquely African-American art form as white musicians and consumers popularized whatever African-Americans were doing within a few years. The cycle has been as identifiable in jazz as in everything else.
I made a few comments, unformed, about the idea of "appropriation," but never really went anywhere with it. I think I'll try. Today will be more wide-ranging, and I'll address blues, and some books I've discussed before, but this is a slippery topic. In order to introduce it, let's have a classic moment of cringe humor from a hipster indie movie. Ghost World. Here. Watch Steve Buscemi be Steve Buscemi.
Oy. Just... oy. There is so much here, but all I can handle for this morning is the "appropriation" aspect. Blues Hammer. Yeah. Take a moment to digest that. Perhaps with some antacid. The thing is... I've seen that band. In fact, if you check imdb, one of the band members is Johnny Irion, who is kind of a legit musician, but that's not what I mean. I mean, when I was in college, there was some local "blues" band that called itself Blues Highway, not to be confused with the great bluegrass band, Blue Highway, and that's basically what they were. Cringe-worthy white guys who, while not actually, literally wearing blackface, were playing such a parody of what was originally an African-American art form (kinda, but I'm getting to that) that you can understand how the word, "appropriation," gets used.
Of course, we need to clear up a lot of things about race and the blues. First, the lines between white forms of folk music and African-American forms of folk music didn't become as stark until record companies codified them. In the early 20th Century, white folk musicians and African-American folk musicians had significantly overlapping styles. Listen to Mississippi John Hurt playing "Nobody's Dirty Business," without preconceptions, and ask yourself if you could have classified it as an old country tune.
In contrast, consider Hobart Smith playing "Railroad Bill." 1942.
What kind of music was that? From a white guy from Appalachia in 1942? At least as bluesy as Mississippi John Hurt, I'd say. They were just all taking water from the same well. That's pretty much what "folk" music is, right? And this is before getting into the complication of artists like Dock Boggs, who sang like an Appalachian crooner and picked blues banjo back in the 20s. Straight blues. On banjo. Which is derived from African gourd instruments anyway.
So sure. "Blues." An African-American form. Perhaps you see where I'm going with this, and the challenge of deciding what constitutes "appropriation."
And yet, when we talk about the history of blues, we can wind up at "appropriation" pretty quickly. Part of that is that artists like Hobart Smith were rare, and the blues did, at a point, become predominantly African-American. The split, artificial or not, occurred, and became real if incomplete, even if musicians communicated across artistic boundaries all the time.
These days, if you hear a blues musician, you are probably hearing someone white. There are great African-American blues musicians playing today, and not just the old ones who are still outrunning Death. From Selwyn Birchwood to Robert Randolph, there is a thriving African-American blues scene. But let's be honest. More blues musicians these days are white.
That doesn't make them Blues Hammer. Is anyone seriously going to call the Tedeschi Trucks Band "Blues Hammer?" Those would be fightin' words, and I doubt you could find any African-American musicians who would back you up. (There are a bunch of African-American musicians in the band, by the way.)
Sooner or later, though, any discussion of this topic inevitably leads us to... lead. Or rather, "led." Zeppelin, that is. Led Zeppelin.
Like any white boy who has ever picked up a guitar, I know how to play... that song. It was one of the first songs I taught myself to play. I stuck my audio cassette (yes) of Led Zeppelin IV into my boom box, and repeatedly hit rewind while I worked out the notes, all so that I could cringe in self-disgust when the Wayne's World movie came out.
It was no longer party time. Definitely not excellent.
So yeah. That song. The thing about that song, grossly overplayed though it is, is that it has dynamic range, and structure, and basically, it doesn't sound like a '60s pop tune, or some drugged-out psychedelic parade of meaningless sounds. Overrated? Sure. But if I were able to listen with fresh ears, I think I'd probably be able to hear why it got overplayed. Too bad I can't listen with fresh ears.
Eh.
But if I'm writing about appropriation and Zeppelin, my focus is not really going to be... that song. We need to deal with theft. Cultural theft, if such a thing exists.
So in the 1960s, the blues weren't really big in the US, but a bunch of British kids got big into the blues. You know a lot of their names. Clapton. Richards & Jagger... Page. A lot of what they played and recorded initially was just a distinct offshoot of blues. Either covers, or original material done in the same style as the covers they were playing. Usually, they were clear on what they were playing, to the degree possible.
When Cream covered "Spoonful," nobody got pissed off. Why not? They gave proper attribution. Why is Zeppelin controversial here? For the same reason that I, as a professor, really don't like a certain category of student and Supreme Court Justice [cough, cough... Gorsuch]. Plagiarism.
Zeppelin... didn't always give proper credit. And that's the polite way to put it. Sometimes they gave some credit. Sometimes, they stole outright.
And the funny thing is, when they were playing blues-based material, that wasn't their worst theft. You probably don't even know which of their acts of thievery bothers me most because you never caught it. "Black Mountain Side." Cool acoustic tune from Led Zeppelin I, right?
Actually, it's called "Black Water Side," from Bert Jansch's Jack Orion. 1966. The fact that Jansch wrote it is so obscure, though, that even one of my wierdo musical obsessions-- Steve Tibbetts-- didn't get it. He covered it on Big Map Idea, and credited Zeppelin, not Jansch. Oh, Steve, say it ain't so!
Who, you may ask, was Bert Jansch? He was one of the guitarists from a British folk group called Pentangle. Pentangle also delved into blues, but jazz too. And Jansch, along with John Renbourn, was far more eclectic. Jansch, Renbourn, Pentangle, and that whole scene, were really following on the heels of someone else you don't know. Davy Graham.
For the record, if you're going to follow up on one name in this post, it should be Davy Graham, sometimes spelled "Davey," just to keep people confused.
Graham wasn't just digging into old blues and jazz records that he picked up at the corner record store back when such things existed. That was for schlubs like Clapton. Graham was actually traveling around the world, learning from masters of every style he could find, then going back to Britain and blowing everyone away on the acoustic scene. Jansch and Renbourn were sort of his primary disciples.
So really, Davy Graham was at the root of this whole thing, but my point is that Jansch recorded a cool song called "Black Water Side" in 1966, which Zeppelin completely ripped off. This wasn't like taking some old blues song, amping it up, changing it around, and laying the ground work for all hard rock to come in the process. No. Zeppelin just stole the song. Without crediting Jansch.
Which makes it poetic that Black Sabbath stole from Led Zeppelin. Repeatedly and shamelessly. Thieves stealing from thieves. You'd think that Zeppelin wouldn't be so obsessive about "blocking" users on youtube (the things I learn from Rick Beato). They don't exactly have any moral standing when it comes to intellectual property.
Anyway, though, what does this mean with respect to "appropriation?" Their adaptation of blues was really nothing like Willie Dixon or Bukka White or any of the others they ripped off, and they were creating something new. Yes, that song is grossly overplayed. Yes, I have trouble getting over them ripping off Bert Jansch, who is really one of my musical heroes. Yes, they failed to give proper attribution to the blues artists who... influenced them, but stepping back from that, they actually did play something different. One could look at Blues Hammer, and Led Zeppelin and draw a line of some shape between the two, but hypothetically, what if Zeppelin had given proper attribution?
Their contemporaries did, for the most part. When Cream played "Crossroads," they didn't pretend it was anything other than Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues." Mutated heavily. But... Zeppelin was changing the songs too. Give proper attribution and you're an innovator and not a thief. Don't give proper attribution, and you're a thief.
The thing is, not everyone saw it all that way, even for bands like Cream. What did the original blues musicians think of the Brits, Zeppelin aside? There was a split. Some saw opportunity. With the British blues bands drawing American audiences back to blues-based music, some artists, like B.B. King decided that this was a net positive for the source artists. They'd get more attention than they had before. At the same time, after all, the folk revival had a few people wandering around trying to find not just the active blues musicians, but the ones who had gone inactive, to get them back on stage, and into studios. Like... Mississippi John Hurt.
Some of the old guys were happier about the situation than others. Among the more bitter was Skip James. You probably don't know Skip James by name, for a variety of reasons. He's one of my favorites. He was one of the weirdest of the old blues musicians, and ironically enough, he had a key role in Ghost World. Enid got obsessed with an old Skip James song. And, if you remember O Brother Where Art Thou, you've heard a Skip James tune. "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues." Cream also covered him.
Nehemiah "Skip" James was a genius and a virtuoso on both the guitar and piano. Yeah, really. But, he was bitter. He saw the 60s blues revival, and he saw a bunch of white boys from England getting famous, and he didn't like it. One can sympathize.
So this is sort of the question. The Skip James view of things. What the hell, man?!
Led Zeppelin really complicated any interpretation here by making music that was fundamentally different from their influences but just not giving proper credit. It would be so much easier to look at them the way history looks at Cream if they just gave proper credit. (Of course, it was more than just "influence" with Black Mountain Side.)
Either way, though, one can ask, is this "appropriation?" Did these bands-- white kids from Britain (Jansch was a Scot, not an Englishman) take an African-American art form for themselves? Does that cross some line? And if they get famous and Skip doesn't...
Yet if this doesn't happen, what are the odds that you're a fan of Zeppelin? Cream? The Stones? Take your pick? If you bother to read these music posts, you know my position on Ginger Baker, on whom Art Blakey bestowed his blessing, and if you're paying attention, you can probably guess that Jeff Beck is my favorite of the Yardbirds guitarists. Twist my arm, and I'll even admit that Kashmir kicks ass. There were things happening here, artistically, and do we say, no, because it would be appropriation? One can understand Skip's position. Yet, Ginger Baker had the Art Blakey seal of approval, and went off to Africa to play with Fela Kuti after Cream split.
Which is a good place to turn my attention back to jazz. For all of the Miles references in last Sunday's posts, I didn't address the elephant in the room for Miles Davis. Kind of Blue. Ask any jazz snob to list the 10 most important albums in jazz history, and even if you manage to find one of the contrarians who refuses to admit a fondness for this album, you'd be hard-pressed to find one who would deny its central importance. It was the landmark album in a style of improvisation called "modal" improvisation. Are you improvising over the chord changes, or within the chords themselves? That's kind of it. Bunch of music theory, go read about it.
What should you read? George Russell. The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Russell was a musician, bandleader and music theorist, and an under-appreciated genius because he wasn't a frontman. You know who got him? Miles. He read that book, and figured out how to put it into practice. This is a sort of physics versus engineering thing. On Milestones, you get some basic modal stuff, and then... 1959. Everything in jazz changed in 1959. Brubeck's Time Out. Mingus's Mingus Ah Um. Coltrane's Giant Steps. I can keep going, but the big one, indisputably, is Kind of Blue. One of the few perfect albums ever recorded. Miles had arguably the greatest band ever. He had Coltrane. Cannonball Adderley. Wynton Kelly. Paul Chambers. Jimmy Cobb. And...
...
Bill Evans.
Hi, Kermit!
Anyway, Miles did take some guff for having Evans in that band. Evans was white. He was also one of the few other people in jazz who could really wrap his brain around what Russell was thinking. It was actually that pair-- Miles and Bill Evans together-- who figured out how to put the Lydian Concept into practice. None of this works without Bill Evans, whose place in jazz history is as high as it can get. Not just as a pianist, but as a thinker. He's right there with Miles, and the most important album in jazz history doesn't happen without him. That's before getting into his trio with Scott LaFaro-- the greatest bassist you've never heard.
Was he engaged in appropriation? I spent last Sunday writing about the complicated issues of race in jazz, and the struggles among African-American musicians to create something uniquely African-American. There's Evans, the lone white guy in the band, picking up on the theories of Russell, another African-American, and not everyone in the jazz world was happy at the time. At this point, his position in jazz history is pretty much unassailable. It's really hard to find anyone who will say a negative thing about Evans, but that wasn't how everyone saw it at the time, which sort of makes the same point as above.
This isn't a bunch of white musicians hearing African-American bands, playing the same thing, and getting famous for it. That doesn't mean everybody was fine with it at the time. And that's sort of the problem, right? We're in murkier territory, especially when part of the artistic point is to define something that is culturally unique.
And I think I'll wrap things up with a few comments I have made about books from earlier posts. Mainly, Seth Dickinson. I wrote about his Baru Cormorant books several times, and the short version is that the first book-- The Traitor Baru Cormorant-- is very good, but the sequel is deeply problematic. Part of the problem with The Monster Baru Cormorant is how it handles a metaphor for American/Western contrasts with Africa. The books take place in an alternate world in which the rising power is the Falcrest Empire, which is a stand-in for America/the West and evil/capitalist/imperialism. Their primary rivals for power are the Oriati Mbo, who are African.
Afro-futurism is a burgeoning genre in science fiction and fantasy, and here are your obligatory references to Nnedi Okorafor, NK Jemisin, and the lineage tracing back to Octavia Butler and even Ursula Le Guin. (The protagonist in Left Hand of Darkness was black.) Trying to write it when you're white, though, is a little like playing blues or jazz, at a time when they are predominantly African-American, and culturally African-American. Are you going to come across as Blues Hammer? You may be going for Bill Evans, but there are some pitfalls. My basic observation about The Monster Baru Cormorant was that Dickinson treated the Oriati Mbo in such idealized terms that he denied the characters or the place any depth or reality. In contrast, authors like Butler and Jemisin tackle issues of race and racism, but do so while imbuing their characters with such individual humanity and complexity that their books work at the individual, human level as well as the political-social level.
And that contrast has me revisiting my thoughts about Dickinson and what really bugged me about the second Baru Cormorant novel. I think it's Blues Hammer. I think it's an appropriative version of Afro-futurism that failed, having been robbed of the individual humanity the characters always have in a Butler or Jemisin novel because Dickinson was screaming about PLOOOOOWIN'! Pickin' COTTON ALL DAY LONG! Except that instead of a suburban white boy who has clearly never worked a field in his life singing about such, Dickinson just creates a perfect Africa where everyone is perfect and they don't even mistreat anyone in the LGBTQ community because he wants to be the most progressive writer of Afro-futurism around.
Of course, who is the arbiter of appropriation? Who are the arbiters, plural? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that second Baru Cormorant novel will go down in history like Bill Evans. Part of the point of all this ramblin' is that this is a slippery concept. So I guess I'll...
Usually I reference the Allman Brothers, and Ramblin' Man. Allmans, all the way, but this seemed appropriate. [See what I did there? Sorrynotsorry.]
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