11

CRY OF JAZZ

The Arkestra was acquiring a reputation as Chicago’s most cutting-edge ensemble, not primarily through recording (singles would remain El Saturn’s main product for quite some time), but rather through live performance. It worked as regularly as Abraham could arrange, holding down a steady gig as the house band at Budland, formerly Birdland (the name changed at Sun Ra’s suggestion when the esteemed New York establishment threatened to sue). Other venues included Duke Slater’s Vincennes Lounge, the Parkway Ballroom, the Grand Terrace, Roberts Show Lounge, Club DeLisa, Casino Moderne, Queen’s Mansion, 5th Jack Show Lounge, and the Wonder Inn.1 The band’s sound continued to develop as membership shifted, gaining fullness and drama when William Cochran replaced Robert Barry on drums and Victor Sproles played upright in place of Wilbur Green’s electric bass.² The Arkestra recorded often enough to produce a fat body of material on tape, available for pressing when the time was ripe. Material for Transition’s second volume of Jazz by Sun Ra, put to tape on December 1, 1956, languished in limbo after the company closed.3 The Arkestra played on, recording more singles, plenty of rehearsals, and some live sets at Budland and the Pershing Ballroom—work that culminated in a long studio session on March 6, 1959, yielding the second and last LP El Saturn would release during Sun Ra’s years in Chicago, the remarkable Jazz in Silhouette. It was a willfully exploratory record, a harbinger of jazz to come. Enthusiasts were taking notice of the Arkestra’s devotion to innovation, as did a writer for the Roosevelt Torch: “Their arrangements have been termed as the most advanced Modern Jazz yet devised.”⁴

An interesting opportunity to promote the band’s sound arose when the local filmmaker Edward Bland approached El Saturn and asked to use a few of the Arkestra’s recordings in a movie he was making about black life and music in Chicago. Like Abraham, Bland had grown up on the South Side and knew its conditions firsthand. Like Richard Wright, he felt keenly the plight of urban blacks caught between dreams of a better life and a squalid reality. Part documentary and part drama, The Cry of Jazz would explore the relationship between jazz and black experience by juxtaposing real-life images from the South Side with scripted conversation among a group of young fans.⁵ Abraham and Sun Ra liked the idea and offered Bland free use of five of the Arkestra’s recordings.⁶ To avoid attracting union attention, Bland inserted a diversion in the film’s credits: “music recorded in Europe.”⁷ It clearly wasn’t. The Arkestra plays a prominent role in the film, providing musical and visual background for several extended meditations on jazz, its history, and its contemporary implications for black life in America.⁸ Interspersed discussions occur among the racially mixed members of a Chicago jazz club, one of whom (a young black guy named Alex) knows whereof he speaks because he works as the arranger for “the Paul Severson Group.”⁹ Shot in noir-worthy black and white (menacing shadow/radiant light), The Cry of Jazz advances a view of jazz that, provocative in itself, serves as an illuminating foil to the very music it features—the Arkestra’s.

The film offers an extended visual and verbal commentary on the significance of jazz as a form of American music. It opens with a familiar claim made unfamiliar by the addition of a single adverb: “Jazz is merely,” says Alex, “the Negro’s cry of joy and suffering.” Merely? The word anticipates the film’s critique of jazz as a form of contemporary black expression. According to the film, there is something limited—and limiting—about it, and Alex is determined to show just what. He acknowledges that only “Negroes” possess the history necessary to create jazz, but the remark provokes a predictable response from one of his white friends: “Jazz is American.” So much for black history. America is so capacious! But Alex asks the group to consider the neighborhood around the place where his band jammed the previous day; the film then cuts to a slow, brutal montage of the South Side that continues for several minutes, depicting squalid tenements, abandoned cars, and junk piled in heaps. This is Richard Wright’s South Side in living monochrome, the black urban space where jazz happens in Chicago. Bland’s sobering images hang a disconcerting backdrop behind the little lecture Alex then gives his jazz-fan friends about the true source of the Negro cry of joy and suffering.

Jazz, Alex says quietly but with professorial authority, arises from a contradiction between freedom and restraint. This contradiction gets built into the music’s fundamental form, which Alex understands to contain four basic components: two that are conducive to restraint (chords and chorus) and two that foster freedom (melody and rhythm).10 Because the harmonic structure of the chords regulates a tune’s progress, while the chorus inevitably recurs, jazz becomes a formula for endless repetition and constraint, an effect Alex interprets darkly: “This endless repetition is like a chain around the spirit and is a reflection of the denial of the future to the Negro and the American way of life.”¹¹ Or again: “the Negro experiences the endless humiliation of daily American life [on the screen appears a sign that reads “For Rent: WHITES ONLY”], which bequeaths him a futureless future.” Endless repetition recapitulates humiliation, trumpeting the hard fact that America denies blacks a future.

Melody, on the other hand, provides an occasion for improvisation, while rhythm induces the exuberant tension of swing. Both augur freedom: players improvise, and everybody moves. But a problem emerges with these formal freedoms, too. They remain too tightly bound to the present moment to offer much of an alternative to the futureless future of repetition. As Alex puts it, “Jazz is a musical expression of the Negro’s eternal re-creation of the present.” Denied a future, the present is all blacks have, and so the joys they celebrate in the freedoms of improvisation and swing turn out to produce another kind of constraint, that of confinement to the here and now. Under these circumstances, constant creativity is the only way for the Negro to feel free: “otherwise, the dehumanizing portrait America has drawn of him will triumph.” Endless repetition meets the perpetual present; jazz reproduces the Negro’s experience of contradiction between constraint and freedom in such a way that it at best becomes only “an unconscious holding action until he is also master of his future.” Alex—with Bland behind him—implicates jazz in the social and cultural segregation that condemns blacks to a futureless future.

The implications of this impasse finally become clear in the last half of the movie, when Alex forces the issue with a blunt declaration: “Jazz is dead.” An idiom that recycles constraint in the name of momentary joy becomes a hungry corpse and makes zombies of its listeners. Alex warms to his theme and delivers another lecture, this one on the development of jazz from New Orleans to bebop, in part to illustrate his claim that, given jazz’s investment in endless repetition, no true growth is possible in its basic form. Evade the changes, and you lose the form; lose the form, and you kill the swing. Jazz seems formally committed to its own stagnation and death, becoming nothing more than “a genteel slavery.” Alex predicts the same futureless future for jazz as faces the American Negro: “empty variations on obsolete themes, or worse.” Unless . . .

Unless the Negro can continue to create in the spirit rather than the form of jazz: “The body is dead, but the spirit of jazz is here for a long time, just like the Negro.” Hope for a future for blacks—and in fact for America—resides in the possibility that the Negro will forsake the dead form of jazz for the vital force of its spirit; it “depends on what the Negro does with the spirit of jazz. [. . .] The spirit of the Negro will remake serious music, but the sounds of jazz will not be used.” Jazz is dead. Long live—something else. In the spirited conversation that follows, tensions between blacks and whites rise in a way that moves beyond the pointless joys of swing. America needs a future for the Negro in order to transcend constraints that produce an empty life for all. The death of jazz thus opens the possibility of new life, or so says Alex: “The death of jazz is the first faint cry of the salvation of the Negro through the birth of a new way of life.” “The Negro and the rest of America,” adds a black friend. Without a new future, all that most Americans will see “in tomorrow’s mirror” (Alex’s words) “is a Cadillac or a deep freeze.” “Or,” says his friend, “a man walking on the moon.”

The Cry of Jazz offers a brilliant assessment of the state of jazz in the late fifties. But the band it uses to illustrate its thesis seems—in retrospect, at least—to have been an odd choice. Alex describes the Arkestra’s music in a way that ties it to a terminal history:

The newest sounds to come along in jazz are written by the composer and arranger Sun Ra out of Chicago. Sun Ra, among other things, fuses the snakelike bebop melodies with colors of Duke Ellington and the experimental changes of Thelonious Monk. The Sun Ra says of this music that it’s a portrayal of everything the Negro really was, is, and is going to be, with emphasis focused on the Negro’s triumph over the occurrence of his experience.

Bland samples five of the Arkestra’s tunes to illustrate “the newest sounds to come along,” but if the movie’s discussion is to be the measure, that music appears destined either to die or to become something other than jazz. Bland presents the Arkestra in a way that visually anticipates the former. The ensemble and even individual players rarely appear as full images; instead, we see them only as fragments of a band: a reed section, a bassist, half a drummer, hands on a keyboard, fingers over valves. Shrouded in murk and shadow. Blank silhouettes. The Arkestra plays blues, swing, and bebop behind city scenes of black life, including a happiness church, a pool hall, and nightlife on the street. But when Alex starts his disquisition on the death of jazz, the musicians all fall out, leaving only abandoned instruments on the bandstand.

In an interview conducted years later, one hard not to read as a reference to The Cry of Jazz, Sun Ra states what he sees as obvious: “They said Jazz is dead. But no, Jazz isn’t dead. The musicians are dead. They are the ones are dead. Jazz will never die.”12 Contra Bland and Alex, Sun Ra asserts that life will always belong to jazz. The Arkestra’s appearance in The Cry of Jazz substantiates that claim, perhaps despite the film’s overt message. The Monk-like intro to “A Call for All Demons” (think “Mysterioso”) eschews traditional form, as does Sun Ra’s comping during the snaky minor head. The Arkestra seems to be on the verge of giving old jazz new wings. Then there’s the strange piano passage (actually played by Eddie Higgins over shots of Sun Ra’s hands at the keyboard) that repeats a jagged phrase over and over again, ostensibly to demonstrate “endless repetition” and its “futureless future.” Maybe so, but it also anticipates exciting new developments to come in jazz and popular music: minimalist seriality, digital sampling, and—most pertinent to Sun Ra’s music—post-harmonic sonorities of noise. Bland’s burial of jazz seems premature. The year The Cry of Jazz appeared, 1959, witnessed an extraordinary dawning of new horizons that pushed jazz beyond Bland’s simple swing formula of constraint and freedom: the modal explorations of Miles Davis on Kind of Blue, the melodic odysseys of Ornette Coleman on The Shape of Jazz to Come, the harmonic invention of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, and the Arkestra’s sonic “images and forecasts of tomorrow” on Jazz in Silhouette.¹³

It’s a gorgeous, adventuresome recording, a joyous riposte to Bland’s jazz obituary. Corbett ruminates evocatively on the title: “Jazz in Silhouette. It’s not jazz, per se. It’s the outline of jazz, the futuristic relief of jazz. [. . .] Jazz silhouetted: an absent space in which jazz can transform into something else”—while remaining jazz, Sun Ra would add.¹⁴ Rather than bemoan the futureless future of blacks, Sun Ra devotes the considerable skill of his Arkestra to imagining the future—as music. Doing so involves combining the past (“Ancient Aiethopia”), the present (“Velvet,” “Enlightenment”), and the future (“Saturn,” “Images”) and rejecting the linearity of Bland’s analysis of jazz history. Music doesn’t move from an absent past through a constrained present to a nonexistent future. It happens all at once, everywhere, everywhen. Hence the Gestalt figure-ground gimmick of the silhouette, multiple planes yielding reversible perceptions. What was, is—and will be.

“In tomorrow’s world, men will not need artificial instruments such as jets and space ships. In the world of tomorrow, the new man will ‘think’ the place he wants to go, then his mind will take him there.”15 Listen to “MUSIC FROM TOMORROW’S WORLD.”¹⁶ Listen today. Time matters less than space, a future emanating sound. Can you get there? Can you hear tomorrow? “Ancient Aiethopia” rescinds chorus and chords, preferring a pure poetry of sound. “Saturn” harks back to swing and forward to polyharmony. The piano introducing “Images” just hangs like a shadow in space until the Arkestra (fore)casts it into form. Music of, for, by, beyond the future. “Music is the shadow of tomorrow / Today is the present future of yesterday / Yesterday is the shadow of today.”¹⁷ The future happens—as shadow—in the Arkestra’s music. What can you hear? How does the future sound?