The earlier presentation of criteria and the concerns for what should drive and guide cultural codes, a Black aesthetic, have not grown absent from nor outside of a flowering of these kinds of ideas in our history. There are five critical musical periods that define a map for a Black music/art aesthetic: the Harlem Renaissance, the bebop era, the soul movement, the Black Arts movement, and most recently, hip hop. All of these music periods were defined largely by Black artists who raised key questions about America, the destiny of Black people in America, and how their art connected, constituted, communicated, and contained the work, identity, and lives of Black people. Equally pervasive was this music on the shaping of American cultural values and codes.
While the Harlem Renaissance, the bebop era, the soul movement, and the Black Arts movement are thick with social-political and aesthetic divides, including those that defined Black music according to a “White aesthetic and reasoning” (especially during the Harlem Renaissance), the outward and inward resonance was that this work shone with the meaning of Black life and ideas. These movements have not only provided us with an incredible body of work (music, poetry, writings, scholarship, sculpture, and more); they have also defined a Black aesthetic. While these were multiple disciplinary actions, music provided a consistent and public front, perhaps because music is more accessible and easily marketed to the wider general public than are some other art forms.
It is Black music that flowers most publicly. The soul movement is an example. To some extent, Coltrane, Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Albert Ayler, Max Roach, Mingus, and others in forward and socially vocal jazz found a space to speak in radio, records, and dialogue with critics. While the Harlem Renaissance created the first true, multivoiced discipline statements, it is somewhat problematic due to the sacrifice of a specifically Black criterion of expression and experience. The often heard commentary that this movement was White-backed and agenda-ed is easy to understand. It took Langston Hughes’s helpful essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” and the subsequent publication of the short-lived magazine Fire!! , to begin to allow that generation to break away and articulate a Black arts agenda.
Most notable were the writers of the Black Arts movement, who—like their Harlem Renaissance predecessors Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes—created a body of writing that truly reflected an indigenous art politic and Black aesthetic. Hip hop, for all its problems, is the first publicly marketed stance in nearly forty years which reflects Black identity and purpose. And while some argue this is only an old-school strength, this goal of articulating a meaning in contemporary Black life has been at the core of hip hop rhetoric since its inception, just as it was at the core of the slave holler, spirituals, blues, bebop, gospel, soul, funk, and all Black expressions, really. A short view of these movements reveals much about the conscious construction and expression of Black aesthetic philosophy tied to creative expression and social-cultural condition. The first four musical periods—the Harlem Renaissance, bebop, soul, and Black Arts—are discussed in this chapter. Hip hop is examined in chapter 4.
America, seeking a new spiritual expansion and artistic maturity, trying to found an American Literature, a national art and national music implies a Negro-American culture seeking the same satisfaction and objectives.
—Alain Locke, The New Negr o, 1925
The idea of a collective, identifiable Black aesthetic, as an ideology, a movement, first saw its American manifestation during the Harlem Renaissance. The 1920s were a decade of extraordinary creativity in the arts among African Americans largely focused in Harlem, New York, marking a brilliant time in American history and a defining time for African American identity. W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading intellectual of the day, believed racial progress was to be made through mainstream achievement. In his editorial work with Crisis Magazine, the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he promoted “excellence in business, education, and the arts.” This period showed an unprecedented thrust in American creativity, cultural activity in the arts of poetry, dance, painting, music, and theater. The primary goal was to express a new socialcultural awakening needed to diffuse racial stagnation imposed by racial hatred of Blacks in White America. This was a search for the face of a new dignity focused on upward mobility and cultural achievement.
The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke in 1925, became the manifesto of the movement. It chronicled Black writers, artists, thinkers, and social commentary; it named the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Renaissance. The book’s purpose was to “register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place.” Locke called this a “Spiritual Emancipation, grasping for group expression and self-realization.”
Aligning the Harlem Renaissance with the American ideals of uniqueness of voice, freedom, and uplift, Locke envisioned an important American moment and a chance for integration of two worlds: White and Black. More than 200,000 Blacks served in War World I; between 1920 and 1925, nearly 2 million Blacks moved North, fleeing Jim Crow, segregation, and lynching, and searching for economic and cultural betterment. The Black population in major cities like New York and Chicago quadrupled in size. In short, Blacks were no longer in isolation. This generated an economic, social, and cultural energy that supported the idea of a new birth.
The migration North began around 1905, and was really spurred on by the ideology of “race men,” those who advocated racial uplift based on making visible the social-cultural-intellectual mobility of Blacks. “Economic nationalism” was exemplified by Philip A. Payton and the Afro-American (AA) Realty Company, a Black-owned business. Payton as well as T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the influential Black newspaper New York Age, were connected to Booker T. Washington and his National Negro Business League founded in 1900. The AA Realty Co. bought and leased buildings, and progressively placed Negro families. While they folded, they did initiate a wave of purchases among other Blacks who could afford homes. This created a buzz that Harlem was the new Black mecca, the Negro capital of the world. Harlem became the home of the most pervasive cultural and social institutions for Black people: the NAACP, National Urban League, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, newspapers and journals such as Crisis, Messenger, and Negro Word.
Three forces were at work: (1) economic nationalism, (2) migration of southern and international Blacks, and (3) a buzz within the artisticintellectual community that fostered this huge cultural springing. The work could be thought of as modernism, the avant garde, but it was saturated with racial feelings of pride, expression, dignity, upward mobility, socially laying the foundation for a representation of Black people in the modern world, a new definition of Blackness, and the first Black public outcry for the importance of Africa as a cultural home. Locke, in particular, studied African arts and connected Picasso, Georges Braque, and Cubism with African aesthetics. White patronage helped to support the movement. William E. Harmon, a wealthy real estate developer, established the Harmon Foundation to provide Negro Achievement Awards. Charlotte Osgood Mason as well as publishers Knopf, Macmillan, Harcourt, Brace, and Harper House published literary works.
The era produced dozens of young progressive artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers who defined the period: Augusta Savage, Palmer Hayden, Richmond Barthé, Aaron Douglas, Archibald Motley Jr., W. H. Johnson, Melvin Gray Johnson, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, William Grant Still, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, among others. This was singly the most concrete and enduring arts movement in American history. Musically, Harlem was home to great Black musicians and popular styles. James P. Johnson, the great stride and ragtime pianist, created the piece “Charleston,” which became a national dance fad. Thomas “Fats” Waller, Eubie Blake, Lucky Roberts, Willie “The Lion” Smith all became “total orchestra” pianists, playing clubs and “rent parties” and creating a style known as stride piano of Harlem. Harlem’s Cotton Club was where Duke Ellington got a regular radio hookup and became a national star. He also appeared in films, including the 1935 short feature Symphony in Black, the first time a Black artist was presented in the mainstream media as a thinking artist and not merely an entertainer. In total, we had the formation of what was termed “the New Negro.” Black people, having come to New York, created this new community. It was cosmopolitism and international. It simultaneously participated with and recreated parts of a larger American culture. This was linked to the conscious creation and backing of a Black intelligentsia whose major concerns were racial and cultural uplift, and the creation of art: the codes of cultural conception. From this came the establishment of a largely held Black American aesthetic steeped in social-cultural awareness, if not cultural criticism; it was a mobilization of ideas, criteria, and standards of excellence as well as definitions of beauty—a true American arts movement that shaped everything that was to come after.
The Music proclaimed our identity; it made every statement we truly wanted to make. . . . The role of music goes hand in hand with social reformation—the changing of society to make things right. . . . What we were doing at Minton’s was playing seriously, creating a new dialogue among ourselves, blending our ideas into a new style of music. Musically we were changing the way that we spoke to reflect the way we felt. . . . Our music had a new accent.
—Dizzy Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop
While all of the periods mentioned provide incredibly rich and foundational ideas for the discussion of Black aesthetics historically, no period better exemplifies the setting of codes directly and consciously by musicians than the classic bebop period (1940–1949). The first commercial recording was available in 1945, and the continuation of hard bop went into the early 1960s. Here are true Black musician codes. These codes are deeply rooted in the blues and in Black cultural and functional roots worked out for Black people (although along came the gaze of White critics, lovers of the music, cultural spies, and thrill seekers) in a Black club context, by musicians again who believed their music was an extension of a Black movement of ideas, values, critique, and worldview. Most importantly the musicians made bebop as “Black music.” These bebop performance conventions were experiments shaked, baked, and disseminated into the wider culture. These expressions in music, slang, dress, language, style, approach, philosophy, and worldview, along with a defiant stance, set standards and defined the codes for what the modern Black artist should be. Dizzy Gillespie’s famous autobiography was named To Be or Not to Bop. The bebop period defined modern urban musicianship and again set the standard of what a modern, progressive Black musician was to be. This music was deeply embedded into the musical and oral consciousness of Black cultural traditions. Musicians held high standards, and the expectation of virtuosity at all levels was the preferred normalcy.
Caution should be considered here not to overly romanticize or mythologize every aspect of this, as it was a difficult time socially for these musicians. This lifestyle, highlighted to cult “code status,” led to habitually late hours and drug abuse. Despite this, every generation of musicians since, even rock and rollers, recognize the important contributions the beboppers made to American music. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk have become icons of everything artistically productive, ingenious, and revered. If we look at the music, aesthetics, and social-political ideas, we see the centrality of the conscious posturing, creations, and aspirations that defined what this generation of young musicians were writing as their bebop codes.
Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk, J. J. Johnson, Art Blakey, Billy Eckstine, Charlie Christian, Budd Powell, and Mary Lou Williams were all great young musicians who discovered and then set the codes for the greatest musicians movement in our history to date. Mary Lou Williams stated it this way: “If we are to make progress in modern music . . . we must be willing and able to open our minds to new ideas and developments.” As bebop drummer Kenny Clarke said, “The idea was to wake up, look around you, here’s something to do, an integral part of your cultural aspect.”
Charlie Parker, one of the architects of the style which blended Kansas City blues with a melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic wizardry not matched since, mused philosophically, “They teach you there’s a boundary line in music, but there’s no boundary line in art. Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”1
A bit more of a musical discussion here is important, helpful, and needed to outline the musical, inventive aspect of contributions which were so completely transformative and yet embodied the best of Black American forms already in practice in the public marketplace, on records, on the radio, and in dance halls, clubs, and churches. The beboppers gave us these new music codes:
The death of bebop understandably coincides with shifts in Black and national needs, and with some economic and social realities. The move to r&b and pop music styles was better suited to returning servicemen who were focused on love, family, and building the new postwar economy. Bebop maintained a New York cultural-based identity which did not translate to a majority of Black urban centers, where church music, r&b, and blues were embraced. The urbane, slick, New York model gave way to r&b identities and sounds. But bebop music here, too, shaped everything that was to come from it during the decades of the 1950s through 1970s. It is even the grandfather of hip hop phrasing and posturing, as we will see in chapter 4.
The soul era, in particular, was a productive period for Black Americans. The music created by Blacks and for Blacks during this era communicated a general philosophy of refusal to accept the undesirable and a determination to create a better future.
—Portia Maultsby, Soul Music
Soul music was a movement, a musical style, and an approach to life that incorporated ideology, spirit, and political consciousness. It is a great illustration of music and social-cultural codes combined. The important music period of soul, 1965–1975, represented for Black people and artists cultural and political empowerment, a musical and style category, spirituality and expression, depth and meaning, race pride and civic responsibility. These ideas were articulated in the concepts of soul music and the slang the music generated: soul brother, having soul, soul food, soul hair, singing with soul, and getting down to the soul of the matter. Authenticity, image, and identity were the dominant expressive and creative themes. In this turbulent period in American history, music sought to uphold a social consciousness about race, class, women’s rights, police brutality, civil rights, integration, and antiwar protests. Black music and artists were seen as agents for social change, and they paved the way for Black people to enter mainstream American culture. Most importantly, Black American music was no longer a fringe race music but was “charting” on music stations nationwide. By the 1970s, Black artists were on the major rosters at CBS, Warner, Polydor, Columbia, RCA, and Epic.
The civil rights era erupted in America, and for Black people the music was a direct expression of political concerns. The defining elements of the Black music aesthetic, functionality, and meaning come together. Spirituals, blues, gospel, r&b, instrumental facility, training, technique, innovative artistry, international recognition, appreciation, and the power of a relevant social dynamic now defined the aesthetic. The soul music period included artists such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Earth, Wind & Fire, Al Green, the Staple Singers, Otis Redding, the Supremes, the Jackson Five, and Parliament Funkadelic.
This period of music production most succinctly mirrored what Black people, and America, were thinking and feeling about living in this culture. The music was inextricably bound to the way people were living. The issues, concerns, worldviews, political perspectives, styles, and social customs were embedded and carried by the music. The simultaneous explosion of Black identity and America’s acceptance of this presence could be seen, felt, and heard in volume. The American model of hard work, dreams, and cultural productivity was imaged in Black American music culture in the creation of Motown Records. This record label set new image and visual standards in terms of making Black artists visually palatable and acceptable in “mainstream America” and certainly articulated the codes for Black popular culture.
The young writers of the black ghetto have set out in search of a black aesthetic, a system of isolating and evaluating the artistic works of black people which reflect the special character and imperatives of black experience.
—Hoyt W. Fuller, “Toward a Black Aesthetic”
The Black artist takes this to mean that his primary duty is to speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black people. Therefore the main thrust of this new breed of contemporary writers [artists] is to confront the contradictions arising out of the Black man’s experience in the racist West. . . . Implicit in this re-evaluation is the need to develop a “Black aesthetic.” We advocate a cultural revolution in art and ideas.
—Larry Neal, The Black Arts Movement
The fact that we are Black is our ultimate reality.
—Maulana Karenga
The Black Arts movement, often referred to as the artistic wing of the Black Power movement, was a radical uprising of young Black artists and thinkers. Overlapping in time with the soul movement, the Black Arts movement came together in 1965 and broke apart in 1975–1976. Its leaders raised up the idea of a Black Arts aesthetic movement to address the conditions of Black people principally living in U.S. cites in the turbulent civil rights years. This movement, unlike soul, was completely driven by artists living largely on the outside of the mainstream, artists who set the agendas and specifically meant to create a political and “movement” art. Yet, in many ways, these artists were more “inside” the lives, consciousness, and concerns of everyday Black people, hoping to survive equally culturally, politically, and socially. For this group, everything began with the arts. No other movement had the simultaneous politically and ideologically driven manifestos, icons, and grassroots support wrapped around its aesthetic as did the Black Arts movement. Black Power, Black nationalism, and even off-to-the-side but critical, the Black Muslims, with the important symbol of Malcolm X, all helped to crystallize, focus, and energize a Black aesthetic, as artists tuned into the thinking of Black radicals and art for the people.
Although ideas among the leaders of the Black Arts movement varied about what Black people needed to survive, the artists were united in their focus and concern, and in believing that they had an obligation to lift up the community. While the artists of the Black Arts movement focused principally on life for Blacks in the United States, they also looked at the Black diaspora, and especially at Blacks in Cuba, the Caribbean, and Africa. This diasporic aspect and definition of “Black” is as critical now as it was then. Even Black artists outside of the Black Arts movement, like Romare Bearden, were influenced by Black Arts. Bearden’s collages, for instance, combined street scenes, music images, and the beauty of Black folks—angled, pasted, and painted objects that were repositioned, redefined, and rethought. All this raised questions about value systems, integration. and the meaning of melding into America. An artist as widely accepted as poet Gwendolyn Brooks invited to her home such young Black Arts poets as Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni to discuss the state of Black people and what needed to be addressed and done.
The Black Arts movement in its more radical formation was guided by the theoretical approach and ideas articulated in Addison Gayle’s 1971 The Black Aesthetic. The writers collected in that volume examined the codes that were growing forcibly out of the 1960s uprising of Black Power and Black nationalism. They focused on art as a concrete expression of sets of political and cultural principles. Their main hope, as seen in the quotations opening this section, was that the literary, musical, and visual works of Black artists should be politically engaged and socially uplifting, that artists’ aesthetic and ethical beliefs should be connected. In Hoyt W. Fuller’s words, the poetic work stood in for the “collective consciousness of Black people, a part of the real impulse of the Black Power movement and a ‘real re-ordering’ of the nature and function of both art and the artist.”2
These ideas further flowered in numerous movements across the country as well as on college campuses. Black Arts groups formed in cities like Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis, and on the campuses of San Francisco State College, Fisk, Howard, and the University of Michigan among others. The Black Arts movement was further codified in a more cohesive cultural ideology by Maulana Karenga, who defined seven criteria: mythology, history, social organization, political organization, economic origination, creativity, and ethos. All of this was under a larger social umbrella of “Black consciousness,” a concern and connectedness about the consequences of people of African descent having to now define their destiny.
Jazz resonated and created a counterindustry movement and a consciousness as well. Archie Shepp created the work Fire Music. Musicians formed cooperatives such as the Jazz Composers Guild in New York, the Black Artist Group (BAG), the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, which grew out of the AACM, called its work Great Black Music when forming in 1965. For the first time since the early twentieth century, there was an all-Black-owned recording company, Black Swan Records. Blacks were independently involved in creating, producing, distributing, and booking their own music.
The founding of the AACM was in May 1965. This ensemble, political, and musical group tried to adhere to principles of Black Power while they trained younger musicians. They led clinics, performances, and concerts where musicians upheld the principles and ideas of the AACM. When we get to Anthony Braxton, a member of the AACM, we see a real attempt to experiment. This is the Black intellectual avant garde. Braxton brought Black vernacular culture to the experimental framework. The AACM was reconstituting forms and traditions. What’s interesting about the Chicago movement in the 1960s was that it also extended to the social dynamics of Black folks. There was an incredible bursting open of new kinds of expressive modes. Political venues were examined. The establishment was being shot down. And, for artists like Braxton, the “establishment” included institutions of education, politics, and economics as well as musical institutions. That means the symphony orchestra and Western European mechanisms were rejected.
This Chicago music movement looked to Africa. The AACM saw a spirituality in the way African music was organized; they embraced the notion of music as ritual. The artists were not just performing on the concert stage; they were really engaged with the audience. The music and the movement merged; a Black social cause became an American social concern. Black traditional music circles merged with jazz performers who were challenging traditional concert music and, therefore, breaking into new areas.
Ornette Coleman’s 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation was an attempt to turn jazz on its head again. The artists played exactly what the energy dictated. They focused not on the musical score but on where the music told them to go. This was radical. With this side of concert music, you had aleatoric practices and free associations. You had atonality and serialism. All of these forces began to converge, and the AACM brought all of this together in very wonderful ways. Anthony Braxton became a central composer in that movement.
This whole Chicago movement was also challenging the European notion of a sole composer. Instead, for them, communal music was important because that was central to the kind of social politics that were part of the civil rights and Black Power movements. They also insisted on playing original music and helping to facilitate one another’s music.
Amiri Baraka is the towering figure who embodied and emboldened the Black Arts movement during the 1960s. An artist who speaks from the vantage point of the common language of the streets, Baraka is also a studied literary scholar and one of this nation’s great poets. A literary, political, and theatrical trendsetter, a publisher and arts movement impresario, he is an overarching artist, mind, public figure, and personality. Baraka is the cultural aesthetician, poet, writer, social and art critic; the revolutionary and controversial author, playwright, and political activist; the cultural icon and the founder of the Black Arts movement.
Known today as the famous poet of Newark, New Jersey, Baraka was born there as Everett LeRoi Jones and was known first as writer LeRoi Jones. He studied philosophy and religion at Rutgers University, Howard University, and Columbia University. In the 1950s, in his young twenties, he moved to Greenwich Village, coming into being with the beat poets movement, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. A 1960 visit to Cuba birthed within him pieces of his socially active life. He commented in his autobiography, “Cuba split me open,” having encountered political activists who challenged his complacency. He began to embrace Black nationalism. His musical counterparts were Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, musicians who demonstrated that it was possible for Black artists to produce progressive and not merely entertaining art, music that was rooted in transcendent, African American musical culture. In 1963, he published his seminal book Blues People. In that same year came his play Dutchman, which won an Obie award. Norman Mailer commented that it was the “best one act play in America,” and LeRoi Jones became a national sensation.
Controversy has always followed the poet, and so has action. In 1964, he galvanized a number of colleagues and opened the Black Arts Repertoire Theater School. They produced plays, poetry readings, musical pieces and concerts, and performances for the community. Based on the Baraka model of arts and social engagement, similar schools sprouted up all over the country. In 1965, Baraka declared, “It’s nation time.” He formally called on artists to take responsibility to move the community forward. This was the definition of Black art; a Black aesthetic was needed and was now in motion; the Black Arts movement was born. In 1967, the year he changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka, he published Black Music.
Amiri Baraka is the person who gave us the language to speak critically, socially, and contextually about Black music culture in America. He literally and figuratively wrote the book, Blues People. We, as musicians, would be indebted to him if this were all he had done, but he has given us so much more. Baraka’s towering presence helps us to cement our perspectives on the critical aspects and importance of Black music in art education in this country. Blues is the most dynamic, functional, and theoretical root of all the popular music forms we study here in this work. Further, Blues People established in clear form the appreciation and historical development of several aspects of Black America’s “paths to citizenship” through Black music: blues, jazz, and other popular music forms.
In Black Music, Amiri Baraka writes, “It is the philosophy of [Black] music that is most important, and this philosophy is only partially the result of the sociological disposition of Negroes in America.” He tells us, “all of these attitudes are continuous parts of the historical and cultural biography of the Negro as it has existed and developed since there was a Negro in America, and a music that could be associated with him that did not exist anywhere else in the world.”3
Given these various themes and directions, hip hop music rises easily as a protest movement of young people into the next modern era of the 1980s. With this, we have the continuation of some codes, the creation of some new, and the busting up of others.