I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility—and vice versa. And so I play the invisible music of my isolation. The last statement doesn’t seem just right, does it? But it is; you hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians. Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
You need to go out and see jazz musicians play. That way, you can see the beat.
—Leroy Williams, percussionist
Both in art history and in the new field of jazz studies, it has become something of a commonplace that jazz music has influenced visual art—and doubtless the other way around—and that of all the visual artists engaged in this musical exchange, Romare Bearden is the obvious, irrefutable one.1 Bearden literally wrote jazz music2 and his art routinely depicted figures in the shapes and characteristic stances of jazz musicians, some of them specifically identifiable players and singers presented in (formerly) well-known jazz spaces. Bearden’s Young Louis Armstrong (Listening to King Oliver), Lion Takes Off, Sitting in at Baron’s, The Blues (his homage to Billie Holiday), Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden, and Jamming at Minton’s are some of these. At times Bearden also would title a work after a specific jazz composition: Carolina Shout, named after James P. Johnson’s Eastern ragtime classic, may be the most famous example here (Figure 8.1),3 though Wrapping It Up at the Lafayette, named after an important Fletcher Henderson composition, is also a significant example. Bearden’s collages named for Duke Ellington’s compositions alone would include I’m Slapping Seventh Avenue with the Sole of My Shoe, Reminiscing in Tempo, Paris Blues, and The Blue Light.
Other Bearden titles present more oblique kinds of jazz references—often with a savvy insider’s sense of the jazz world’s special turns of phrase: Vamping Til Ready, Second Line, The Woodshed, Stomp Time, Kansas City 4/4, Tenor Sermon. The titles of several exhibitions of Bearden’s work held during the artist’s lifetime (and many more after his death) have forthrightly underscored this musical intersection: Romare Bearden: Of the Blues (1975), Of the Blues (Second Chorus) (1976), and Jazz Collages (1980) are just a few of these.4 Dozens of jazz albums and books about jazz (including books of jazz poetry and jazz-inflected novels like Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar and Toni Morrison’s Jazz) use Bearden’s work as cover art and keep the connection between jazz and this artist in the public eye. In an important sense, all of these Bearden jazz works serve not just to confirm a music/visual art intersection but also to offer textured memory boards for musicians and scenes potentially lost to history: the paintings as records.5.
Figure 8.1 Romare Bearden, Carolina Shout. 1974. From the Of the Blues series. Collage with acrylic, 37½ in. × 51 in. Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York City. Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina.
But arguably more significant than the analysis of these peremptory “historical” jazz references is the conversation that seeks to identify ways in which Bearden’s practices as an artist reflected what might be called a jazz culture. Here influence is not quite the right word. For I refer now to the rich seedbed of a culture out of which sprang a thick forest of twentieth- and twenty-first-century forms: in music most obviously but also in jazz dance, both social dance and concert choreography, as well as in literature and in the visual arts, including jazz photography, jazz film, and jazz painting. Some would even insist on a jazz philosophy—a tone parallel to existentialism and the ongoing debates in American pragmatism and even chaos theory.
It is from this broad cultural standpoint that the analyses of Bearden by the writers Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray are so enduring. As they explored the work of this artist, some of their most radical questions have been: How was Bearden’s process of making art jazz-like? And how, beyond the clear-cut reference to a Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Willie the Lion Smith, can we discern jazz’s aesthetic values and cultural stances6 in the colors, lines, figures, patterns, and textures of a visual artist who emerged from the same generation and cultural milieu as these great jazz musicians? How, in other words, can knowing about the music’s cultural settings and its many manifestations grant a deeper reading of Bearden’s art—even when iconic jazz figures, titles, and other explicit references are not pointing us directly toward the music and its makers? How can a jazz factor be discerned even when jazz is not at all the explicit subject of the artist’s work?
After a review of Bearden’s most incisive commentators, Murray and Ellison, I consider his process of jamming the blues with other artists, the blues painter as swinging collaborator in the jazz mode.
First, Murray: what can he teach us about seeing/hearing jazz in a Bearden painting? In Murray’s indispensable catalogue essay called “The Visual Equivalent of the Blues,”7 written to accompany the major Bearden retrospective that opened in 1980 at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, the central point is that Bearden was born and bred in the briar patch of black America—in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina; in Pittsburgh; and then in New York—where blues-idiom music saturated the culture. He grew up in Harlem, near some of the most potent jazz venues in the world, and in a family counting among their close friends and regular dinner guests Fats Waller and Andy Razaf. Another frequent visitor to the Bearden household in Harlem was Duke Ellington, who was Bearden’s cousin, and who proved a very significant influence on the visual artist. But it was the musical setting as a whole that most inspired Bearden. Murray quotes him as saying:
Regardless of how good you might be at whatever else you did, you also had to get with the music. The clothes you wore, the way you talked (and I don’t mean just jive talk), the way you stood (we used to say stashed) when you were just hanging out, the way you drove an automobile or even just sat in it, everything you did was, you might say, geared to groove. The fabulous old Harlem Renaissance basketball team, like the Globetrotters that succeeded them, came right out of all that music at the Renaissance Casino.8
“Nor,” adds Murray, “were the Globetrotters unrelated to the fox trotters at the Savoy. When Ellington’s ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing’ came out, Bearden was eighteen and very much the fly cat about town.”
This jazz world that Bearden knew before he thought of himself as an artist was splendiferous not only to hear but to see. Jazz players were great dressers whose autobiographies give considerable space to the hats, shoes, collars, vests, and coats (often with special linings), the diamond stickpins and other jewelry, and the hairstyles that went along with reigning, in the clubs and theaters where they appeared, as Duke, Count, Earl, Lady, or Empress (to say nothing of coming on as Sass, Rabbit, Hawk, Lockjaw, Little Jazz, Cannon, or ’Trane).9 Jazz autobiographies sometimes also allow space for descriptions of well-heeled Harlem audiences, whose members showed up not only to see but to be seen. The jazz people, as Bearden says, were looking good: they were stashed.
But we find Bearden’s jazz legacy not only in his overt tributes to these greats and to a jazz culture that was as much sounded as seen. Murray argues that to delve deeply into Bearden’s work is to appreciate that his stashes and stances as an artist were profoundly analogous to those of the blues-idiom musicians with whom he shared an inside sense of Harlem when it was the cultural capital of black America. And according to Murray, Bearden was well aware that his ways of working paralleled those of a jazz composer like Duke Ellington:
Of beginning by vamping until ready for the downbeat and first chorus of each composition; of hitting upon and playing around with details of both color and form as if with visual riff phrases; of relating solo-like structural elements to ensembles, sometimes as call-and-response patterns, sometimes as in jam session leapfrog sequences and sometimes as in full-band interplay of section tonalities (trumpets with or against trombones, reeds or piano, and so on).10
Relying on his own abilities for “on-the-spot improvisation or impromptu invention,” Bearden “approaches his subjects not as a portrait painter might, or a landscape artist of, say, the Hudson River School, but in the manner of a jazz musician.”11
Here, as in jazz, the improvisatory exploration of options, or the exploratory play (in several interviews Bearden calls it the “divine play”), is the thing: “You have to begin somewhere,” he told Murray,
so you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way. One thing leads to another, and you take the options as they come, or as you are able to perceive them as you proceed…. Once you get going, all sorts of things begin to open up. Sometimes something just falls into place, like piano keys that every now and then just seem to be right where your fingers happen to come down.12
Though (in Murray’s words) “obviously Bearden did not learn to paint by listening to music,” his increasing sensitivity to jazz practices and designs was central to his development. The painter Stuart Davis suggested that Bearden listen with particular care to the music of the virtuosic jazz pianist Earl Hines’s now intricate, now explosive chords and runs. According to Bearden, his talks with Davis were crucial in opening the mighty door of influence from music to painting: “From then on, I was on my way. I don’t mean to imply that I knew where I was going. But the more I just played around with visual notions as if I were improvising like a jazz musician, the more I realized what I wanted to do as a painter, and how I wanted to do it.”13 “What he learned from Hines,” writes Murray, “led him to appreciate the visual possibilities of Ellington’s extraordinary uses of blues timbres, down-home onomatopoeia, urban dissonance and cacophony in numbers like ‘Daybreak Express’ and ‘Harlem Airshaft.’ ”14 Bearden also learned from “Chick Webb’s accentuations in ‘Stomping at the Savoy,’ the rhythmic extensions of Count Basie’s deceptively simple abbreviations and the disjunctures of Thelonious Monk.”15 The painter was learning to seek translations and parallels from the realm of music to the world of his own work with brush and canvas, scissors and paper.
More broadly, Bearden had much to learn from the jazz musician about the relation of the artist’s traditions and his individual talent. Perhaps above all, he stood to learn a great deal from the jazz musician’s mandate, utterly at odds with his European classical counterpart’s professional obligation (which for the most part calls for the player to achieve a kind of anonymity in the achievement of the composer’s score, which—along with the conductor’s directives—reigns supreme), to develop an identifiable individual style, to achieve the sine qua non of jazz artistry: a personal voice or sound.
As Bearden considered his place among the cubists and fauves, for example, he learned to edit away those elements he could not, while claiming those he could, refashion as part of his own artistic voice. He might, for instance, have taken cues from Thelonious Monk’s reshaping of thirty-two-bar popular songs like “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” which Monk stripped down and rebuilt into his own “Four in One,” or from Ellington’s recasting of the traditional twelve-bar blues in “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.”
Moreover, from Basie, Ellington, and Monk—each of whom began as a quick-fingered, intricate Eastern ragtime “tickler” and then carved out of the ragtime mix a radically understated personal style—Bearden could see that a complexly patterned art could be pared down to a well-timed personal note or cluster of notes, all without losing any of the power of aesthetic statement. Such a lesson was reinforced, visually, by the example of Matisse, whose early odalisques were lushly copious in detail but whose cutouts—with primary colors and a minimum of decorative elements—were somehow even more strikingly evocative in their spareness.
Davis had suggested that Bearden listen for Earl Hines’s ways of spacing his notes, of creating sonic intervals—a key word in Bearden studies.16 These highly musical spacings suggested ways of thinking about intervals in painting—the visual work’s potential for rhythmical presentations of colors, lines, figures, and other elements, and the spaces surrounding or in between. This artist’s use of blank space was related, perhaps, to Count Basie’s or Monk’s highly charged silences17 and, as Bearden observed, to his experiences with paintings by artists from China and from Japan. Perhaps in both cases, musical and visual, the blank spaces also suggested to Bearden that there was space for future exploration, elbow room for improvisations and dialogues to come. Such “silences” between visual elements became vital to Bearden’s art, as the artist began to leave vibrant spaces into which the viewer (in the spirit of jazz as a collaborative call-recall process) could enter and dialogue with a painting.
On this subject of purposeful silences in the music, specifically, those places where the bebop drummer “lays out,” Bearden’s friend the drummer Max Roach has said,
It’s not that there’s necessarily nothing going on. There’s always a pulse there. There are times when there’s nothing but the pulse…. Some of the horns, like Lester [Young] and Bird [Charlie Parker], had a built-in rhythm section. They didn’t need a drum or a bass player. When they played, you felt the pulse. So that allowed the drummer to do colors. It freed us. With these people, it was always there: the silence, the meter. The pulse was there, in the silence. Bearden’s paintings are like that.18
And looking at a Bearden painting, Roach said: “There’s the rhythm I see here.” Or, in the words of Ellison’s Invisible Man, the “invisible music” one hears there.
Murray’s language earlier about cross-disciplinary avenues of influence and his emphasis on the blues-idiom art’s function of “keeping the blues at bay” bring to the surface what may be his most important contribution to Bearden studies and indeed to cultural studies in general. I refer to Murray’s clear, steady insistence on contemporary art’s “prevalence of ritual,” the writer’s own ringing phrase used to title one of Bearden’s most significant shows. Here again it is quite useful to consider Bearden’s jazz stances in relation to works without an explicit jazz reference. Whether speaking of Bearden’s early religious paintings, his subsequent bullfight series influenced by Lorca and Hemingway, his Odysseus series, his many bathing women and families at dinner, or, for that matter, Of the Blues, Murray observes that art stems from repeated, definitive community experience that eventually becomes ritual practice and then ultimately, through the creative play and the elaboration and refinement of the individual man or woman of genius, is refashioned into art.19 In Murray’s view, Bearden embraced this idea of “the prevalence of ritual,” because “it helped save him from genre painting that was like reporting: ‘This is the way it is to be black in the United States.’ Or: ‘This is what they do in the black community’ or ‘illustrations from black history.’ ”20 In other words, while in his art Bearden was very often remembering scenes from his childhood, and while he did want to celebrate black American life, he did not intend to be an “illustrator” merely, but an artist who captured the note and trick of life as experienced by human beings everywhere.
Briefly put, Murray’s theory of the prevalence of ritual in the world of blues and jazz is that the music is (or was, in its heyday through the first half of the twentieth century) the music of Saturday night ceremonies where people gathered not only to celebrate themselves and their traditions but also to perform together, as dancers, singers, and instrumentalists (that cultural triumvirate of the Saturday night party), certain community-sustaining functions: (1) to court, and (2) to stomp troubles away. In such a scene, thick with the sounds of revelry, the musicians functioned as ritual leaders: stylish sustainers of a people violently repressed in the very strange land of their birth. Here Murray’s emphasis is not on a blues song’s lyrical plaint or complaint, but instead on the dance hall–wide celebration of a group’s historical capacities to prevail with a blue-black American cultural style that has become, as Murray has frequently declared, the envy of the world.
Murray would add that blues-idiom music is not the simple sound of moon-and-June avoidance or rosy escape—just the opposite: it is the sound of direct confrontation with the inescapable fact that life is full of woe. In the words of many a blues ballad, often repeated in essays by Murray, life is a low-down dirty shame. But having admitted as much, there is nothing to do but celebrate your group’s historical strategies, or stances, against the chaos of daily living. And, again, to pull together—in a ceremony of courtship and fertility and family—on a stomping floor where blues troubles are crushed and dispelled (if only temporarily) through rites of cleansing and purification. “I think the way to escape from reality is to get to the heart of it,” Bearden told an interviewer in 1968. “Confronting it, moving toward the core is the only way…. Like a hurricane, you know, destroying everything around it—if you get to the eye of it there’s certain calm.”21
In this context of art, confrontation, and ritual, it is exciting to think of Bearden’s “wall ornaments” as Murrayesque battle gear, commemorating the many and ongoing battles against life’s blue demons and details, and the will, in spite of them all, to “find the rhythm,” in the words of one Bearden show: to prevail through the time-tested strategies expressed in art. Body-deep in the briar patch of the blues, Bearden created Beardens: collages and paintings as stamped with his individuality of style as is the deep-in-the-keys piano work of Thelonious Monk or the hardy mute-work of trumpeter Roy Eldridge. In this view, Bearden’s paintings function as emblems.22 Of what, asks Murray, in his essay’s sermon-like peroration,
is a Bearden emblematic if not the fundamental rituals of the blues idiom and the way it conditions one to survive?—(with one’s humanity, including one’s sense of humor intact, to be sure). And what more graceful, more stylishly heroic method of survival can there be than by expressing flexibility through elegant improvisation?—under the pressure of all tempos, in response to all disjunctures and even in the face of impending nothingness. Because this is precisely what it does, a Bearden wall ornament works on the beholder not only as a work of art but as something even deeper: a totemistic device and talisman for keeping the blues at bay.23
It should be clear by now that to insist on the ritualistic function of Bearden’s work is not at all to designate him a “modernist high priest,” disengaged from the world. For while Bearden’s images of ritual action intentionally suggest universal reaches and parallels, his work cannot be understood, in its richest aspect, apart from the specific socio-historical circumstances from which his unique expressions of ritual were created. Bearden’s work is deeply imbedded in the hereness and nowness of black American life as he knew it, complexly charged politics and all; as such, it stands as a form of social action that still has viability years after the artist’s death. Likewise, it is imperative to understand that Murray’s own discourse on Bearden—his insistence on Bearden’s universal resonance and on his tightly trained artistic process—itself responds to lived social conditions: Murray’s writing takes deadly aim at those who would see black artists as untutored recorders of an unrelentingly tragic (not to say monolithic) “black experience.”
We find a similar stance in Ralph Ellison’s equally important writing on Bearden. Yet Ellison perhaps more lucidly reconciles Bearden’s category-transcending art with a commitment to social justice. Especially instructive is the essay that he composed for the artist’s watershed Romare Bearden: Paintings and Projections show of 1968.24 Ellison’s central argument in this essay is that Bearden refuses the facile documentarian’s reflex of representing Harlem, that is, the black communities of America—in this period just after one wave of race riots and just before another—as ravaged and despairing, and nothing more.25 Operating instead in the spirit of an Ellington or Armstrong, Bearden takes artistic materials where he finds them—a blues melody, so to speak, here, a dance rhythm there, a citizen’s cry of anger here, a child’s innocent eyes there, a window framing a train flying on the horizon—and runs them through the alembic of his genius to create “forms which would convey something of the depth and wonder of the Negro American’s stubborn humanity.” In the mode of a blues player, Bearden assembles an array of heads and hands and torsos and bits of cloth and sometimes the musical instruments of those who had struggled to outlast what Ellison has termed “the decimating and fragmentizing effects of American social processes.”
The author of Invisible Man goes on to make the musical connection explicitly:
Here too the poetry of the blues is projected through synthetic forms which visually are in themselves tragicomic and eloquently poetic. A harsh poetry this, but poetry nevertheless, with the nostalgic imagery of the blues conceived as visual form, image, pattern and symbol—including the familiar trains (evoking partings and reconciliations) and the conjure women (who appear in these works with the ubiquity of the witches who haunt the drawings of Goya) who evoke the abiding mystery of the enigmatic women who people the blues.26
Presaging the central thrust of Murray’s work on the prevalence of ritual, Ellison adds: “Here too are renderings of those rituals of rebirth and dying, of baptism and sorcery which give ceremonial continuity to the Negro American community.” Like Murray, Ellison felt that one way for the African American artist to escape the provinces of local folk art was to represent historically repeated activities within the black community, and thus to explore not only the temporal depths of black life but also to plumb those realms where all peoples meet: where abiding patterns of human experience reveal common roots as mankind seeks, at the most radically shared level, to stay alive, to reproduce, to work, to love, to find life’s beauty and sustained meaning.
With these expansive dimensions ever in mind, Ellison presents jazz and blues artists themselves as more than mere survivors; they are exemplary, heroic beings. And like the heroes of the blues,27 Bearden himself is described by Ellison as a kind of sacred visionary and ritual leader whose job is precisely to offer truth, hope, and continuity to the human family. Surely this sense of the artist’s mission helps explain the overwhelmingly sacred tenor of Ellison’s essay on Bearden, where again and again the writer describes the artist’s work using such biblical terms as faith, transfiguration, revelation, abiding, immaculate, and resurrection alongside edgy descriptions of the not always so high or holy places and people of the blues. Indeed, here as elsewhere when he describes jazz artists, Ellison looks at Bearden’s work and sees spiritual music and church people standing shoulder to shoulder with blues people.28 He reads the collages as expressive of a world cut to pieces but nonetheless, through the artist’s discerning vision, a world revealed as one where hope of re-assemblage is real. In Bearden’s work,
Harlem becomes a place inhabited by people who have in fact been resurrected, re-created by art, a place composed of visual puns and artistic allusions where the sacred and profane, reality and dream are ambiguously mingled. Resurrected with them in the guise of fragmented ancestral figures and forgotten gods (really masks of the instincts, hopes, emotions, aspirations and dreams) are those powers that now surge in our land with a potentially destructive force which springs from the very fact of their having for so long gone unrecognized and unseen.29
Ellison’s eloquent descriptions of Bearden’s art reflect not only the language of the down-home blues (and certain darker examples of the spirituals)30 but also the forms of the new post–World War II jazz called bebop: 31 the fragmented lines and dissonant harmonies of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, or Thelonious Monk. As with the boppers,
Bearden’s meaning is identical with his method. His combination of technique is in itself eloquent of the sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history. Through an act of creative will, he has blended strange visual harmonies of the shrill, indigenous dichotomies of American life, and in doing so has reflected the irrepressible thrust of a people to endure and keep its intimate sense of its own identity.32
Also like the boppers—and again not unlike the down-home blues singers, with their songs of dislocation and disease, love and trouble—Bearden’s cut-and-paste pictures discover much that is attractive in the “ugly beauty” of the postwar world.33 “There is beauty here, a harsh beauty,” says Ellison, “that asserts itself out of the horrible fragmentation which Bearden’s subjects and their environment have undergone.” As in the music, too, this harsh beauty is projected without sentimentality or special pleading. Here is an art of “tragic beauty … of a man possessing a rare lucidity of vision,”34 an art for Harlem and for us all: “By striving to depict the times, by reducing scene, character and atmosphere to a style, he caught something of both the universality of Harlem life and the ‘harlemness’ of the national human predicament.”35 Here indeed is one of the great phrases for describing so much of Bearden’s project as an artist: “the ‘harlemness’ of the national human predicament.”
My own view of what Ellison sees as fragmentedness and rebirth in Bearden’s art would be closer to the position taken by Toni Morrison, who has argued that this artist’s collages may be seen not as fragmented but as layered. 36 In Bearden’s work (and, she said, in her own fiction) she sees artistic renderings of a complexly layered black community with individuals of complexly layered consciousness. Perhaps Morrison would say of her works in fiction what Bearden says of his paintings and collages—that they always involve “putting something over something else.”37 This is an important corrective that resists the deficit model of black life in America (a model, by the way, that Ellison declared war against at the beginning of his career). Keeping both terms in mind—fragmentation and layering—may get us closest to the truth of Bearden’s aesthetic and sense of life in black America as collaged.
For Bearden, making art meant recording a personal and national past through call-and-response patterns across art forms—patterns which, particularly in light of his deep-structured historical project, he was brilliant to rephrase “call-and-recall.” The notion of call-and-recall helps illuminate Bearden’s work since it emphasizes the deep historical investment of an oeuvre that is itself characterized by visitation and revisitation. As Ruth Fine writes, “the jazz practice ‘call and recall’ is embedded in [Bearden’s] repetition of motifs, always with variation of one sort or another.”38 Both within single works and running through a series, and even across the decades of his career, Bearden recycled his favorite images, in each instance with a different emphasis—much as Ellington redrew “Sophisticated Lady” and “Mood Indigo” throughout his career. Likewise, just as Ellington offered his own versions of classic works by other composers, whether Tchaikovsky or Gershwin or W. C. Handy, Bearden repeatedly alluded to painters whose work he admired—particularly Picasso and Matisse, from whom he borrowed methods and swapped images (as well as artistic strategies) over and over again.
But call-and-recall, more than the open-close call-and-response, also suggests a certain ease of exchange between art forms: a rebounding sense of ever-ongoing interpersonal, inter-generic conversations and collaborations. Speaking of such dynamic interaction between literature and the visual artist, and referring to Bearden in particular, Toni Morrison once told an audience that the divisions between the arts are not only porous, they are liquid. 39 I count myself fortunate to have witnessed one of Bearden’s great collaborations, as he and Murray devised titles and texts for what would become Bearden’s Profile series. Every Saturday morning in the late 1970s, up the stairs at a wonderful old bookstore on the upper east side of Manhattan called Books & Co., Bearden and Murray would christen new pieces by the painter; in verbal-visual jam sessions bright with wine and laughter, the two would work out titles that often reflected a specific Bearden memory at the same time that they swung open to the wider South, to Harlem and what Ellison had named the “ ‘harlemness’ of the national human predicament.”40
As far as I can tell, these visual-verbal jam sessions, and others like them, contributed to the 1978 show called Romare Bearden Collages, Profile/Part I: The Twenties and then to the follow-up show Romare Bearden Collages, Profile/Part II: The Thirties, which was held for a month in the spring of 1981. Both shows were held at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery on East Seventy-fifth Street (just around the way from Books & Co.), where the collages and a few watercolors were hung above brief texts, never more than two sentences long, that were handwritten in a looping cursive style by the artist on the gallery-white walls. In each case subtitled “picture titles and text reviewed and edited by Albert Murray,” the shows’ elegant little catalogues featured reproductions of art from the shows above the Murray-inflected titles and texts.
While the exhibition was ultimately stunning, the magical sessions at Books & Co. made me aware of a vital aspect of Bearden’s identity as a painter involved in a jazz process. I refer to Bearden the generous and gifted collaborator.41 Like call-and-recall, improvisation, individuation of voice, and the impulse to swing, collaboration is a sine qua non definitive aspect of jazz music and culture. In jazz, co-laboration, “a laboring together” (as the Latin roots denote), refers to the dynamic and seemingly clairvoyant ability of one artist to move in tandem with another, to the drummer’s and bassist’s way of knowing a split-second in advance the rhythmical pattern that the pianist is about to play, and to turn that corner together with him or her with élan vital: to live and breathe together, the two and the three as one. I have in mind the aforementioned triumvirate of the jazz ritual—instrumentalist, singer, and audience (especially the dancing audience)—calling/recalling, improvising, anticipating/amen-ing as members of a single body: collaboration as the essence not only of jazz art but of ideal community, of true democracy, which Ellison once said is our nation’s name for love.42
There is no getting around the fact of Bearden as soloist: painters, for the most part, are solitary workers. But these wonderfully fruitful sessions with Murray made me see this artist as a powerful soloist in a variety of contexts of mutual inspiration and give-and-take—of Bearden as member of a duo not unlike, say, Ellington’s masterful four-handed sessions with Billy Strayhorn, Jimmy Blanton, or Ray Brown. For as in those cases, here was Bearden, speaking with Murray as a fellow traveler through the rough country of the blues (in both cases southern and northern), the two fellow artists playfully transmuting blues experience—Ellison’s “decimating and fragmentizing effects of American social processes” along with Murray’s own good-time Saturday night ritual revelry (in the case of the Books & Co. meetings, they were good-time Saturday morning rituals)—into verbal and pictorial art that fit together as jazz art.
Romare Bearden was a jazz and blues painter. He was stashed with information and imagery from the jazz-blues culture that Houston Baker and John Szwed have called the “blues-matrix.”43 Bearden’s profiles and stances, both his own as an artist and those of the figures in his paintings, reflected this deep connectedness and awareness. So did his practices as an improvising, call-recall/riff-style visual artist. So especially did his identity as a mighty solo performer who loved to collaborate—to swing with other artists and intellectuals in the creation of images that danced on the canvas; and that spoke and sang in time with accompanying words (titles and sometimes other texts) that were thick with the sound and image of the music—these important factors marked Bearden as an artist with more than a brush with the blues.
It is fitting, then, that he would claim never to finish, but only to “relinquish” his works.44 The Murray-Bearden sessions were an instance of two artists collaboratively improvising not only to merge image and word but also to merge one man’s recollections with another’s. But even more broadly—and as indicated by the shift of subjects in the captions, from “she” to “I” to “you”—they were relinquishing these works to the viewers, calling for public participation in and creation of a new kind of collective past.
The sessions at Books & Co. where images from down home and uptown were given titles made me consider the importance of seeing Bearden’s art as part of a collaborative process involving other artists, surely, but also involving the blues people—not just his famous fellow artists but the everyday people—pictured in his work. What would Bearden’s art have been without Maudell Sleet? The (various forms of the) Three Folk Musicians? What without the many and varied conjure (Bearden sometimes preferred “conjur”) women? Lulu and Susannah? Without the Harlemites slapping Seventh Avenue with the soles of their shoes? Toni Morrison told an interviewer: “Whenever I feel uneasy about my writing, I think: what would be the response of the people in the book if they read the book? That’s my way of staying on track. Those are the people for whom I write.”45 Likewise, Bearden developed a creative process including a dynamic sense of conversation and collaboration between the Maudell Sleets of his memory, the artist at work, and perhaps also with Sister Sleet’s real-life counterparts, attending a Bearden show or looking here and now at reproductions of the art. Murray’s and Bearden’s work left plenty of openings for the reader-viewer (not just the Maudell Sleets in their audience but all of us) to participate in the creative process, to respond to the artist’s and writer’s call, in the jazz mode. Rather than “speaking for you” (the Invisible Man’s resounding fear), Bearden prompts his imagined audience to recall and call back, invites you into a space ringing with history, memory, and sound.
To see Romare Bearden’s collage The Blues, please go to the Hearing Eye Web site at http://www.oup.com/us/thehearingeye.
1. See Richard J. Powell, ed., The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism, exhibition catalogue (Washington, DC: Washington Project for the Arts, 1989); Mona Hadler, “Jazz and the Visual Arts,” Arts Magazine 57.10 (June 1983): 91–135; Donna M. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Elizabeth Goldson, ed., Seeing Jazz: Artists and Writers on Jazz, exhibition catalogue (San Francisco: Chronicle Books/Smithsonian Institution, 1997).
2. In the early 1950s, Bearden took a sabbatical from painting to write songs, one of which, “Sea Breeze,” was recorded by jazz artists Dizzy Gillespie, Gigi Gryce, Tito Puente, and Oscar Pettiford. Jazz singer Billy Eckstine recorded “Sea Breeze” in 1951. Branford Marsalis made a new version for his 2003 album in tribute to the painter, Romare Bearden Revealed (Marsalis Music/ Rounder Records 116 613 306–2, 2003).
3. Carolina Shout is a fine example of Bearden’s creation of layered visual counterparts to a complex musical culture. Surely the title (and the African iconography) refers to “ring-shouts,” which historian Sterling Stuckey has called “the principal dance of the slave era,” with strong connections to Africa. With his work’s title and iconography, Bearden invokes the African background as well as his roots in the black Carolina of his boyhood, where possession-inducing ecstatic black church dance-and-song rituals were called “shouts.” (Originally this painting was entitled The Baptism.) But Bearden would also have been aware of a “shout” as a secular form (with sacred and African implications) brought north by immigrants from the South. James P. Johnson himself discussed the history of his composition “Carolina Shout” in terms of this secular emphasis: “The Northern towns had a hold-over of the old Southern customs. I’d wake up as a child and hear an old-fashioned ring-shout going on downstairs. Somebody would be playing a guitar or Jew’s harp or maybe a mandolin, and the dancing went to ‘The Spider and the Bed-Bug Had a Good Time’ or ‘Susie.’ ” Piano players know that Johnson’s “Carolina Shout” is a complicated piece to play, a “finger-buster.” In the 1920s it was considered a potent test-piece for those wishing to join that era’s most elite ragtime piano “gladiators.” As such it may have suggested to Bearden a world where he also measured himself against the great painters of his time, the soulful finger-busters of the canvas. The Johnson material is quoted in John Szwed and Morton Marks, “The Afro-American Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites,” Dance Research Journal 10.1 (Summer 1988): 33. And see Sterling Stuckey, Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 54.
4. More could be added about titles in Bearden studies. Note, for instance, that several of the documentaries about his work use musical titles—Bearden Plays Bearden and Visual Jazz, for example.
5. In his eulogy to Bearden, delivered 6 April 1988, Ellison made Bearden a vital recorder of America’s past: “Now perhaps we should remind ourselves that we are a collage of a nation, and a nation that is ever shifting about and grousing as we seek to achieve the promised design of democracy. Therefore one of the reasons that we revere Romie is for his discovery that one of the ways for getting at many of the complex matters which we experience, but seldom find recorded in official history, is through art. Art is the mystery which gets left out of history.” Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 835.
6. In this case of the use of the word stances, note that in Blues People (New York: Morrow, 1963) LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) accentuates the word stances in discussing blues-idiom musicians, meaning not only their idiomatic postures while playing (or getting ready to play, or listening to others play), but also their philosophical or aesthetic standpoints, perspectives, or worldviews: how they stand, physically, but also where they stand on large issues that matter. For the idea of stances as aesthetic perspectives, Baraka is indebted to Kenneth Burke. It also should be noted that Burke is of central importance to Albert Murray and to Ralph Ellison.
7. Albert Murray, “The Visual Equivalent of the Blues,” in Romare Bearden: 1970–1980, ed. Jerald L. Melberg and Milton J. Bloch, exhibition catalogue (Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum of Art, 1980), 17–28.
8. Ibid., 20.
9. John Szwed’s history of jazz pauses to make this observation about jazz artists’ modes of self-presentation:
Onstage the musicians were rakishly attired in tuxedos or freshly pressed suits, starched shirts, and patent leather shoes, women singers in evening gowns. Drummers sat amid gleaming foliage of cymbals and gongs, the head of the bass drum painted with tropical scenes and lit softly from behind. Spotlights bounced off gleaming brass and mirrored hanging balls, creating a smoky phantasmagoria.
John F. Szwed, Jazz 101—A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 131–32. In this regard, Harlem stride piano player James P. Johnson’s remarks about Harlem ticklers’ dramatically stylized behavior are especially illuminating: see Tom Davin, “Conversation with James P. Johnson” (1955), in Jazz Panorama, ed. Martin Williams (New York: Collier Books, 1964), 57–58.
10. Murray, “Visual Equivalent,” 17.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 17–18. In a 1968 interview, Bearden described this playful process of a new work’s beginnings in terms that reflected jazz as well as lessons learned from Delacroix’s journals: “Now if I’m doing a collage,” he said, “after I put down these rectangles I might paste a photograph, say, anything just to get me started, maybe a head at certain—a few—places in the canvas that I’ve started. The type of photograph doesn’t matter at all because this is going to be a hand or a little landscape that I put down just to get me started. As Delacroix said, a painting or drawing is developed by first putting down something and then the superimposition of ever more definite statements. That’s how I start this thing: rectangles, pasting on this, and the superimposition of ever more definite statements.” Henri Ghent, tape-recorded interview with Romare Bearden, 29 June 1968 (Washington, DC: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).
13. Quoted in Murray, “Visual Equivalent,” 23.
14. Ibid., 18.
15. Ibid.
16. See Calvin Tomkins, “Profile: Putting Something over Something Else,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 224–42.
17. In Monk’s music, writes John Szwed, “the silences were treated as a part of the melody.” Szwed, Jazz 101, 172.
18. Quoted in Myron Schwartzman, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art (New York: Abrams, 1990), 288.
19. See Albert Murray, The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement (New York: Pantheon, 1996).
20. Robert G. O’Meally, interview with Albert Murray, 9 April 1994 (Washington, DC: Jazz Oral History Program Collection, Smithsonian Institution).
21. Ghent, interview with Bearden.
22. See Constance Rourke’s American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931; reprint, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), 86.
23. Murray, “Visual Equivalent,” 28.
24. The exhibition was held at the Art Gallery of the State University of New York at Albany, 25 November–22 December, 1968, and Ellison’s catalogue essay was reprinted in The Massachusetts Review, Winter 1977. It also appears in Ellison’s Collected Essays (684–93) under the title “The Art of Romare Bearden.” My citations are from that edition.
25. Murray and Ellison shared the will that Bearden’s work be viewed as more than merely representational or locally political. Murray: “I insisted that he not let people reduce his work to a black boy hollering out for attention…. These [paintings by Bearden] were aesthetic statements, not pictures of ugliness or poverty. The collages, the pieces of cloth and so forth, were not tatters, they were textures ” (O’Meally, interview with Murray). It also is vital to realize that both Ellison and Murray were sometimes short-sighted in their insistent dismissal of some of the overtly political black art of this period. At times their defenses of Bearden were suspiciously autobiographical, that is, more expressive of their own aesthetics than Bearden’s. So many Bearden works are piercingly political and aware that all politics, as the expression goes, are local, even in art.
26. Ellison, “Art of Romare Bearden,” 690–91.
27. See Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973).
28. Indeed it is significant that the most heroic figure in Ellison’s late fiction is Hickman, an evangelical preacher who started out as a blues trombonist, and whose wisdom has been tempered both by his church experience and by his hard days on the roadhouse circuit, shouting the blues for dancers at public parties. See Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth (New York: Random House, 1999).
29. Ellison, “Art of Romare Bearden,” 691.
30. Consider, for example, the spiritual declaring, “I don’t know what my mother wants to stay here for / This world ain’t been no friend to her.” Reprinted in The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes, ed. Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee (New York: Dryden Press, 1941), 419.
31. Here it is appropriate to remember how often bebop was balanced on the strong foundation of the blues, and sometimes on spirituals and gospel music as well. It also is important to take note of Ellison’s distaste, in general, for the new jazz of the 1940s called bebop. He preferred, and was most eloquent when describing, the swing or (as he liked to say) “stomp” music of his own generation—particularly the blues-based big band dance music of Count Basie and other groups that played music for dancing. Nonetheless, note the connection between Thelonious Monk and the evangelical gospel circuit on which he traveled as a young piano player. Note, too, the blues basis for such classic bebop elaborations as Charlie Parker’s “Parker’s Mood” and “Ko Ko.”
32. Ellison, “Art of Romare Bearden,” 693.
33. “Ugly Beauty” is the name of a Thelonious Monk composition.
34. Ellison, “Art of Romare Bearden,” 692, 693.
35. Ibid., 688.
36. From Toni Morrison’s talk at Columbia University on 16 October 2004.
37. See Tomkins, “Profile.”
38. Ruth Fine et al., The Art of Romare Bearden, exhibition catalogue (New York: Abrams, 2003), 36.
39. From Morrison’s talk at Columbia.
40. Murray himself spoke of these sessions in a 1994 interview in which he said:
You should ask [my wife] Mozelle how we worked. If he called and I was not at home … he said, “Well, Mozelle, tell him I need him. Tell him I got about a dozen orphans over here with no names.” He and I would talk about the paintings. Then I would start throwing out titles and he would grab one. Or he would look at a painting and say, “This is so-and-so.” But meanwhile we would play with it. And then he would choose a title, and I might continue to edit it. You see, there was an opening chord … this was next … the so-and-so opens after this, on the downbeat. You know?
And according to Murray, sometimes the words would come first:
There were all kinds of riffs that you could play with words that he could turn into a painting, you see. So sometimes a painting came before, and sometimes it came after. Sometimes the title would give him an idea for a painting; and sometimes the title would be put on because of what we would talk about when we would look at the paintings. And I would get something off of not calling attention to certain things, and make things more intriguing by picking out something else to call it other than what it obviously is. So we played that way.
(Interview with O’Meally. Murray seems to have had in mind Mr. Blues Leaves a Calling Card, whose caption refers to something “other than what it obviously is.”)
41. Eventually I would learn that Murray was by no means the only artist with whom Bearden shared jam session projects. Through most of his career, the painter was living and working near and with musicians, writers, and dancers, as well as fellow visual artists—women and men also struggling to translate the bluesy waves and particles of everyday living into art. And over the years Bearden worked with choreographers Alvin Ailey, Dianne McIntyre, James Truitte, and of course his wife Nanette Rohan (who for decades had her own modern dance company); writers James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray; photographer Sam Shaw as well as the artists associated with the working group called Spiral as he formulated his own ideas of what jazz and blues might mean on canvas and in the other arts. In May 1986, Bearden appeared on stage at the Hartford Atheneum with the alto saxophonist (multi-instrumentalist)-composer Jackie McLean—the two men performing “Sound Collages and Visual Improvisations” in conjunction with a Bearden exhibition at a gallery nearby. Bearden’s biographer Myron Schwartzman recalls the evening:
The performance was a provocative and toe-tapping interpenetration of music, talk and art. For McLean, it was a lifelong dream realized to be on the same stage as Bearden. He played African percussion instruments, piano, and saxophone. Then Romare spoke about his art and asked Jackie to accompany him on the piano while, with his characteristic nonchalance (Bearden could always rivet an audience), he drew with markers what turned out to be a jazz portrait of Jackie at the piano with the name “Dolly” as part of the design. It was perfect.
(Schwartzman, Romare Bearden, 291)
42. See Ellison, Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, 701.
43. See Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Szwed, Jazz 101.
44. Schwartzman, Romare Bearden, 38.
45. Thomas LeClair, “ ‘The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” New Republic, 21 March 1981: 25.
Fine, Ruth, et al. The Art of Romare Bearden. New York: Abrams, 2003.
Goldson, Elizabeth, ed. Seeing Jazz: Artists and Writers on Jazz. San Francisco: Chronicle Books/Smithsonian Institution, 1997.
Melberg, Jerald L., and Milton J. Bloch, eds. Romare Bearden: 1970–1980. Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum of Art, 1980.
Powell, Richard J., ed. The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism. Washington, DC: Washington Project for the Arts, 1989.
Marsalis, Branford. Romare Bearden Revealed. Marsalis Music/Rounder Records 116 613 306–2, 2003.
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Brown, Sterling A., Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, eds. The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes. New York: Dryden Press, 1941.
Cassidy, Donna M. Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.
Davin, Tom. “Conversation with James P. Johnson.” 1955. In Jazz Panorama. Ed. Martin Williams. New York: Collier Books, 1964. 44–61.
Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: Modern Library, 1995.
.———. Juneteenth. New York: Random House, 1999.
Ghent, Henry. Tape recorded interview with Romare Bearden. 29 June 1968. Washington, DC: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Hadler, Mona. “Jazz and the Visual Arts.” Arts Magazine 57.10 (June 1983): 91–135.
Jones, LeRoi. Blues People. New York: Morrow, 1963.
LeClair, Thomas. “ ‘The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” New Republic, 21 March 1981: 25–29.
Morrison, Toni. Untitled talk on Romare Bearden. Columbia University, 16 October 2004.
Murray, Albert. The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement. New York: Pantheon, 1996.
———. The Hero and the Blues. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973.
.———. “The Visual Equivalent of the Blues.” In Melberg and Bloch, Romare Bearden. Exhibition catalogue. 17–28.
O’Meally, Robert G. Interview with Albert Murray. 9 April 1994. Washington, DC: Jazz Oral History Program Collection, Smithsonian Institution.
Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. 1931. Reprint, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953.
Schwartzman, Myron. Romare Bearden: His Life and Art. New York: Abrams, 1990.
Stuckey, Sterling. Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Szwed, John F. Jazz 101—A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz. New York: Hyperion, 2000.
Szwed, John F., and Morton Marks. “The Afro-American Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites.” Dance Research Journal 10.1 (Summer 1988): 29–36.
Tomkins, Calvin. “Profile: Putting Something over Something Else.” In The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. Ed. Robert G. O’Meally. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 224–42.