essay “Jazz and the White Critic” (1963), Amiri Baraka argues that “Negro music is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about the way music is made.” Furthermore, Baraka believes that white critics’ approach to jazz criticism stripped “the music too ingenuously of its social and cultural intent. It seeks to define jazz as an art (or folk art) that has come out of no intelligent body of socio-cultural philosophy.” Baraka draws a hard line with what he sees as the search for organic unity and structural coherence: “In jazz criticism no reliance on European tradition or theory will help at all.”14 At the same time, however, Baraka insists on the uniqueness of the American experience and argues for “standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend on our native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and local cultural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical writing or commentary about it.”15
With Blues People, Jones attempts to develop what he sees as a more appropriate theory for black music. Its reach has been broad: one writer hails it as “the founding document of contemporary cultural studies in America” because of the way Baraka combines aesthetic judgments with poignant cultural and political critique.16 Not everyone agreed with this “social” interpretation of black music. In his famous review of Blues People, the African American novelist Ralph Ellison draws a line between art interpretation and sociology, arguing that “the blues are not primarily concerned with civil rights or obvious political protest; they are an art form and thus a transcendence of those conditions created within the Negro community by the denial of social justice.”17
My work here flatly rejects the notion that music itself can transcend, in the sense suggested here by Ellison, the conditions of its historical and social milieu. Yet historical actors have certainly used music to assert their own senses of beauty as well as to make sense of, confront, negotiate, and/or change their social, political, and economic conditions. Music’s ability to do this kind of cultural work is, in fact, one of the reasons we find it such a powerful medium. The Amazing Bud Powell attempts to uncover the cultural work of Powell’s music partly by dealing with issues, methods, and questions appearing in Early Jazz and Blues People. How, I ask, do we make sense of Bud Powell’s music as that of someone whose talents could never lift him above the challenges he faced as a uniquely gifted but disabled black American man at a time of tumultuous transitions in the material conditions of African Americans across the board? What were his musical contributions, the structure of his sound language, the broader stylistic worlds he engaged, the conditions of the music’s reception, and the critical discourses that surrounded and tried to make sense of it? In what social orders did bebop emerge, and how did musicians such as Powell navigate them?
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My first chapter discusses the idea of bebop’s pedigree as a serious art: how that concept emerged and which musical, social, literary, and pedagogical discourses support the claim. From today’s vantage point, the “art of bebop” notion condenses a collection of disparate yet interdependent factors: formal musical analyses, commercial interests, subcultural visual styles, western ideas about musical “complexity,” aesthetic multiplicity and sonic assemblage, traditions of avant-garde black youth culture, violent state-sponsored suppression, the cultural politics of geography, a jousting written criticism, a discerning and thoughtful audience base, and a politically focused body of interdisciplinary scholarship. Powell’s points of intersection with these variables form an important thread in this book.
In chapter 2, Powell’s artistic agency, together with his life’s challenges, is situated in the context of modern jazz’s growth in the music industry and in the broader world of black artistic experimentation in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time that Powell was building a name in the jazz world, poets such as Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks were refining, and indeed remaking, the black artistic landscape through their bold experiments with the written word. Painters such as Norman Lewis were also troubling artistic waters with the visual language of abstraction as practiced by the always politicized creative imagination of the black man. The chapter places Powell’s life as a musician squarely within the context of the various identifications he made during bebop’s early development. By identifications, I mean the specifically musical and social associations he made among the choices that were available to him. In my view, it is impossible to fully appreciate Powell without considering, in some relevant way, the work and lives of his contemporaries. He and the other modern jazz musicians all “made” bebop within the music industry’s business practices and venues. As we learn, Powell’s genius was geographically, historically, and culturally specific. It did not, and in fact could not, transcend its milieu—indeed, his genius was a product of its time, place, and artistic position with other musicians in bebop’s orbit.
Chapter 3 focuses on three broad social orders: art discourse, the idea of “blackness” in historical jazz criticism, and American psychiatric practice. I treat each of these as important structural factors with undeniably direct and indirect bearing on our contemporary understanding of Powell and his accomplishments. The role of race “thought and practice” in jazz’s literary aesthetic discussions and in the pianist’s experiences with psychiatric institutions throughout his adult life animates and connects these seemingly incongruent discursive spheres of influence. As we shall see, the compelling literature that established an art discourse in jazz aesthetics was shaped by ideas about race and blackness within energetic discussions about the “Africa” in the music. Taken together, these factors—the industries of music criticism and psychiatry and each of their roles in creating a jazz-art idea—provide compelling contexts for understanding some of the very powerful social ideas associated with Powell’s exploits as well as his reputation in American music history. The chapter helps to move my discussion beyond sound organization in order to explain the ways in which various social orders have inspired meaning in Powell’s music.
Much has been written recently about the “masculinist” discourses that have informed jazz’s public persona since its early years. Bebop, with its storied history of gladiator-style jam sessions/cutting contests patterned on athletic conquest, is legendary in this regard. Moving beyond this proving ground for musical “manhood” through spontaneous technical display, chapter 4 considers other factors. This key symbol of modern jazz masculinity can also be understood by engaging the histories of attitudes about a range of topics, including gendered ideas about musical instruments and commercialism, rhythmic coherence and the body, racial social orders, artistic heroic individualism, and the creative hierarchies assigned to both composition and improvisation. All of this is meant to deconstruct what constitutes jazz manhood or, in Powell’s specific case, to declare how the notion of his genius is a very gendered proposition from top to bottom. When situated within historical patterns of the larger American musical landscape, the jazz manhood complex takes on a more comprehensive import.
Chapter 5 provides a technical working through of the particularities of Powell’s contributions within the developing language of modern jazz. The presentation of this part of my discussion may challenge some readers not familiar with music theory. I have nonetheless tried to make the main ideas accessible to nonspecialists. Throughout the book, I show that modern jazz’s quite fascinating historiography has forwarded theories of its sound organization and cultural politics from the very beginning. Together with the details of Powell’s musical rhetoric, we witness a new style crystallizing through the recordings of a gifted yet challenged musician. As I stated above and reiterate throughout this book, with bebop, jazz expanded its social pedigree and became “art”; and it also morphed jazz itself into a genre distinct from other contemporary vernacular forms. This trajectory is easily traced from Powell’s earliest recordings to his later work.
In many ways, this book, one that centralizes the contributions of Bud Powell, details the collision of two vibrant political economies: the discourses of art and the practice of blackness. The “race” discourses that have formed a persistent source of controversy in jazz history are important (and certainly fascinating) enough to scrutinize here. As we will learn, the story of bebop is about the discourses of art and blackness meeting head-on and tussling it out in both musical and critical terms. Modern jazz occupies a singular position in American musical thought and scholarship. The so-called bebop