Blues, Jazz & Polyphonic L istening in George Elliott Clarke’s Blue

1. Blues, Jazz & Polyphonic Listening in George Elliott Clarke’sBlue

2. 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)

3. 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”

4. 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).

5. 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).

6. 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).

7. 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).

8. 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).

9. 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”)

10. 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)

11. 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.

12. 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 myparentsto 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

13. 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).

14. Make It New "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)

15. Semiotic Intertextuality

16. 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)

17. Blueas 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).

18. 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)

19. 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.)”

20. 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).