This book and its companion volume, Thriving on a Riff, initially took shape as part of a research project, to which we gave the rather grandiose title Criss Cross: Confluence and Influence in Twentieth-Century African American Music, Visual Art, and Literature. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain and housed in the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham University, and to them we are greatly indebted. Indeed, several of the book’s chapters began life as papers presented at the Criss Cross conferences we hosted at Nottingham in 2003 and 2004: thanks are due to our keynote speakers, panelists, chairs, and all the participants for their contributions (which, in 2004, included a poetry reading by Michael S. Harper); to the AHRC, the British Academy, and the University of Nottingham Research Committee for additional conference funding; and to everyone who provided administrative, artistic, technical, and other essential assistance, especially David A. Bailey, Sally Britten, Sheila Jones, Ali Norcott, Horace Ové, Shona Powell, Ellen Salway, Byron Wallen, John Walsh, and Jim Waters from Nottingham Castle Museum.
The School of American and Canadian Studies offered both financial backing and a supportive intellectual home for the project itself and our subsequent work on the books. We are grateful to our colleagues, notably Celeste-Marie Bernier, Ian Brookes, and Richard King, for their advice and encouragement, and to the school’s ever-efficient office staff for their help, especially Helen Taylor and Stuart Wright. We have also benefited from the aid of other Nottingham colleagues, in particular Mike Beard (Photography) and Mervyn Cooke (Music), as well as the conceptual swingers of the campus Jazz Listening and Reading Group. Generous grants from the University of Nottingham Research Committee and Dean’s Fund have enabled us to reproduce many paintings in full color in the first printing of this book.
We were fortunate to have backing for our project from Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, and Nathaniel Mackey; their endorsement in the initial stages proved crucial. We would also like to thank the following people for their valuable input: our contributors, in particular Robert Farris Thompson for letting us reprint his essay on Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Richard Ings, Johannes Völz, and Sara Wood for their persistence against the odds; Norm Hirschy, our exemplary editor at Oxford, for his guidance, patience, and unfailing good humor; the anonymous readers whose comments on the original manuscript have, we hope, helped to make this a better book; and Jane Ira Bloom, Marty Ehrlich, Branford Marsalis, Doug Wamble, Gillian Atkinson at Document Records, Sherry McAdams at Marsalis Music, and Matthias Winckelmann at Enja Records for permitting us to include their recordings on the Hearing Eye Web site. (There is more about the Web site in the postscript to the introduction.)
We are honored and delighted that Joe Overstreet has allowed us to reproduce his painting St. James Infirmary on the cover of the paperback edition. The work comes from his 1988 Storyville Series, which he discusses in chapter 10. We (and GL in particular) wish to thank Ellen Banks, Jane Ira Bloom, Michael Cummings, Marty Ehrlich, Wadsworth Jarrell, Sam Middleton, and Joe Overstreet for graciously allowing time for interviews and for permitting us to use their artwork, both in the book and on its companion Web site. We are also indebted to Roy DeCarava and Oliver Jackson, who have generously consented to the inclusion of their work.
On behalf of our contributors and ourselves, we would like to acknowledge the help of the following people in providing materials, facilitating permissions, making connections, and generally performing good offices: Lynette Addison (Document Records), Fatime Ba (Kenkeleba Gallery), Donald Baechler, Dorian Bergen (ACA Galleries), Diane Bland (Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries), Maeve Butler (IMMA), Lynn DeRosa, DeAnn Dankowski (Minneapolis Institute of the Arts), Robert L. Douglas, all at Downtown Music Gallery, Tina Dunkley (Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries), Ari Evans (Studio Museum in Harlem), Melissa Falkner Mercurio (Birmingham Museum of Art), Tarin Fuller, Ann Eden Gibson, Jeannine Guido (Broad Art Foundation), Scott Hankins (Ackland Art Museum), Juliette Harris (IRAAA), Diedra Harris-Kelley (Bearden Foundation), Bill Hodges and Navindren Hodges (Bill Hodges Gallery), Michael Holman, Corrine Jennings (Kenkeleba Gallery), Rose Jefferson (National Urban League), Amy Helene Kirschke, Erin Krause (Donald Baechler Gallery), Tammi Lawson (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), George Lipsitz, Richard Marshall, Kunle Mwanga, Paula Mazzotta (VAGA), Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz (ARS-NY), Khela Ransier, Diane Roby (Anne Kohs & Associates), Myron Schwartzman, M. Lee Stone, Sylvia Sokalski (Galerie Bruno Bischofberger), Judy Thom (Archives of American Art), Marjorie Van Cura (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery), Tammy Wells-Angerer (Ackland Art Museum), and Aileen Zylman (Wadsworth Atheneum).
Finally, GL, as chief editor and roving researcher, wishes to add some personal acknowledgments: “I’d like to say a special thank you to Benny Andrews, Anthony Braxton, Frederick J. Brown, Marilyn Crispell, Bill Dixon, Kevin Norton, Rose Piper, and Vincent DaCosta Smith for talking to me about their work; to Dorian Bergen, Tammi Lawson, Khela Ransier, and in particular Corrine Jennings for the invaluable help they gave to the project (and to an art world tiro); and—with a Louis Armstrong trumpet fanfare—to Ian Brookes, Jack Collier, Nicole Dalle, Jeff Eaman, Roz Laurie, Stephen C. Middleton, Chrissie Murray, Dave Murray, Susie Roth, Victor Schonfield, Chris Trent, Diane Wallace, Nick White, and Val Wilmer, for all kinds of support through some tough times in recent years, when the kindness of friends and the solace of music have been my lifelines, together with the hope of seeing Eye and Riff into print. I am deeply grateful to everyone who has made this possible.”