|
Epistrophies Jazz and the Literary
Imagination
Brent Hayes Edwards
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017 Hardcover. x+320 p. ISBN 978-0674055438. $36/£35
Reviewed by
Babacar M’Baye Kent State University
Epistrophies : Jazz and
the Literary Imagination is a major contribution not only to African American Studies, but also
to Pan-African Studies since it provides a language and a theory that will
enable critics to study the sophisticated mixtures of sounds, texts, and other
features that go into the development and assessment of black music. It is a
handy theoretical work that shows how the long and established traditions of
African American music criticism began with a valuation of archives. These
archives do not have an elitist meaning in Edwards’ groundbreaking theory in
which they refer to various sources and fragments that help to reconstitute a history
of black music that reveals its backgrounds, anecdotes, participants, and its relationships
with literature. Explaining how the word “epistrophy” comes from a song of the
same title that the legendary Jazz pianist, Thelonious Monk, and the drummer,
Kenny Clarke, copyrighted in 1941 [20], Edwards represents it as a term with a
multiplicity of literary meanings [21]. According to Edwards, the concept also
“refers to a literary device in which a word or expression is deliberately
repeated at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses” [21]. A major contribution of Epistrophies
is its study of “the infinitely fertile interface between music and literature
in African diasporic culture” [16] and how, as Fred Moten puts it, “black
performance has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of
the surplus” [16]. Within this framework, Edwards describes “a brief passage in
Albert Murray’s masterful 1976 Stomping the Blues where Murray makes the
point that all new world black music can be heard as a practice of ‘reciprocal
‘voicing’” [16]. These arguments are highly meaningful because they help fill a
major void in black cultural studies scholarship, namely the lack of a
language, theories, and concepts enabling blacks of the diaspora and Africa to
explore the literary qualities of the music they have historically produced. To
examine these qualities, one must first perceive music as a form of literature,
which is probably the reason why Edwards recognizes his theoretical
indebtedness to Roland Barthes. Edwards states: [H]e [Barthes] reconsiders the
relationship between music and language by concentrating on the mode of
performance when music is language—when ‘the voice is in a double
posture, a double production: of language and of music’. [18] Such conceptions of voice and language allow us to study the complex relations between black music, language,
and culture. As hinted before, another key
contribution of Edwards’ book is its study of multiple aspects such as anecdotes,
liner notes, lyrics, and other aspects of black music as equally significant
elements. For instance, Edwards highlights a story in which, in the 1930s, Jelly
Roll Morton confessed to Alan Lomax that he disputed Armstrong’s origination of
“scat” since he [Morton] and Tony Jackson “were using scat for novelty back in
1906 and 1907 when Louis Armstrong was still in the orphans’ home” [28].
According to Edwards, “what’s fascinating about the story is the seeming need
to narrate scat as a fall, as a literal dropping of the words—as an unexpected
loss of the lyrics that finally proves enabling. The written words slip to the
grounds, and an entirely new approach to the singing voice is discovered in the
breach, in the exigencies of musical time” [28]. Edwards tells this anecdote to
substantiate a story about how, on February 26, 1926, a fumbled recording of
Boyd Atkins’ lyric, entitled “The Heebie Jeebies Dance,” led Armstrong to a “session
[that] is often credited as the ‘origin’ of scat singing in jazz” [27-28]. In
this discussion, Edwards combines an interpretation of lyrics of the song, “The
Heebie Jeebies Dance” with the stories that both Armstrong and Morton told about
the “origin” of “scat,” and the role that liner notes have in the study of this
African American oral and music history. Yet Edwards’ focus is not
limited to the values of musical anecdotes and lyrics, since he also pays
attention to the relationships between music and literature. Going against the
scholarly practice which centers mainly on the former standards, Edwards
writes:
If the question of music is indeed central to defining the lyric, one might have expected on the contrary that
black literature would be indispensable in the discussion, given the degree to
which it emerges out of a complex engagement with vernacular expression in
general and music in particular. [58] Drawing from the works of critics
such as Kimberly Benston or Caroline Levine, Edwards stresses the importance
that the study of “form” can have on the scholarship on African American
cultural criticism which tends to deal mostly with “content” or ideology [60].
Edwards rightfully states:
Critics have tended to read the issue of dialect in black poetry as solely an ideological one. But in fact, as
Eric Sundquist has pointed out, dialect is an issue of form, as well: it is an orthographical
technique by which written language represents oral language. [60] Furthermore, using Ralph
Ellison’s definition of blues as “the painful details and episodes of a brutal
experience,” Edwards examines the importance of form not only in lyrics, but
also in dialects, as reflected in the works of not only Langston Hughes and
Zora Neale Hurston, but also of such earlier literary bards as Ma Rainey and
James Weldon Johnson [61-83]. The results are insightful discussions in which
“The lyric is not a timeless, universal form; it is marked by history—and its
history couches a threat to the enunciation of black subjectivity” [83].
Referring to “the blues poem,” Edwards argues that it “opens a new window onto
the problem of subjectivity by formally taking advantage of a ‘heterodox lyric
tradition in the West’: that of black vernacular forms” [83]. Thus, it is also fantastic
that Edwards does not close the other possibilities that scholarship on these
forms can yield. For instance, he recognizes that “the implications of this
formal development” of blues and jazz poetry “are not at all limited to an
African diasporic literary tradition” and that, for instance, the growth of
“the Cuban musical form of the son, but also over time, up to and
including contemporary spoken word and hip hop” might be testimonies of the
larger significance of such poetry’s expansion [83-84]. Making a well-deserved
ode to Paul Gilroy’s canonical book, The Black Atlantic : Modernity and
Double Consciousness (1993), Edwards praises this work for its “consideration
of black musical expression’s role in a counterculture of modernity” [85]. This
is a fitting tribute to another major scholar of the hybridity of modern black
culture. Further exploring the relations
between African American music and literature, Edwards criticizes how the African
American author and critic Amiri Baraka once claimed that “there has never been
an equivalent to Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong in Negro writing” [86]. Edwards
disputes this assertion with an aim which “is not of course to undermine the
importance of black music or to crudely promote the literary at its expense but
to begin to challenge some of our assumptions about the relations among
aesthetic media in black culture” [87]. Edwards’ response to Baraka’s
contention is important both methodologically and semantically because it suggests
the equal role that black literature and music have in the development of
African American history, revealing the futility of the competitions and
dichotomies that critics often establish between the two cultural expressions. Going
beyond the controversies, Edwards corroborates the critics’ unnecessary tendency
to pit African American literature and music against each other by writing an
entire chapter entitled “The Literary Ellington.” In this other beautiful
chapter, Edwards shows how the “Duke” had the utmost respect for literature.
According to Edwards, though he viewed music as his “business,” Ellington felt
to say “something” on “the burning issues confronting us, in another language …
in words of mouth” [88] and “also wrote poetry” [89]. Edwards’ book is also vital
since it enhances black music scholarship by defining key concepts that will help
critics further study the music’s form. One of these concepts is the word “parallel”
which Ellington uses to describe his longer works, such as the 1951 “[A Tone
Parallel to] Harlem,” the 1943 New World A-Comin’ which he called “a
parallel to Roi Ottley’s book,” and Black, Brown and Beige (1943), which
was originally titled “A Tone Parallel,” and which Ellington described as “a
tone parallel to the history of the American Negro” [100]. Furthermore, as Edwards
explains, “Ellington also seems to understand the term parallel in a
structural sense, indicating the ‘musical’ use of a literary form” [101]. Through
these analyses, Edwards allows us to begin to have a language and theory for
interpreting black music as a genre in which a sound is a form of “literate”
communication. Elaborating on the influence of “parallel” on Ellington’s conception
of the role of sound in black music, Edwards asserts: This operation
privileges the sound of words over the particular ways they are written on the
page. Again, it underlines the specific parameters of a musical “parallel,” an
interpretive mode that reads by “hearing” phonemically at a certain distance
from the literary source text … It brings sound to the fore, as it were, places
sound before sense, in a spirit of semantic disturbance or “fugitivity” that
Nathaniel Mackey, among others, has argued is endemic to black traditions of
literate and musical expression alike. This effect is related to what is sometimes considered to
be a “trick” that Ellington trumpet players resorted to in performance: playing
“words” on their horns in a manner to imitate the relative pitch of English
pronunciation. [102] What Edwards has done here is
huge. He has allowed us to begin to study the relationships between sound, voice,
text, and meaning in black music and the connections among vast black
sonographic and literary traditions and archives. This methodology will be
useful for scholarships on various black musical genres in the United States
and the rest of the African diaspora. It will especially apply to the study of
black music in Africa. Also, through Edwards’ book,
one learns about the other contributions that musicians make consciously or
unconsciously through their art form. For instance, Edwards shows that Mary Lou
Williams is one of the jazz musicians who have “been driven to write or perform
a history of the music” [154]. Later, in a discussion of musical song titles, Edwards
challenges the view that “titles are names which function as guide to
interpretation” and, rather, maintains that they also “function as something”
which provides “a very small aperture into a larger area, a keyhole perhaps, or
some way of getting into the poem” [182]. These arguments enable us to further
study black music’s role as social, cultural, and political commentaries as
well as literary experimentations. Moreover, they help us to understand other
complex features of black music that can easily be neglected due to a critic’s lack
of theoretical background or familiarity with the tradition. Making it easy for
non-initiates to have access to this culture, Edwards draws on the works of the
poet and critic Nathaniel Mackey to produce a theoretical language for popular
understanding of the music. He argues that “what is common to black creative
expression is not necessarily an emphasis on what we have perhaps too easily
come to think of as ‘orality,’ but instead an aesthetic imperative to test and
break the limits of what can be said” [197]. In this vein, Edwards lists a
variety of “nonspeech” elements that Mackey finds as forms in which African
American music usually goes into: “moaning, humming, shouts, nonsense lyrics,
scat” [196]. These vocal and musical techniques that Edwards studies in Epistrophies
among many other devices will help literary and other scholars who were not
trained in the study of sound to have more confidence to examine them. For this
and other reasons mentioned above, Edwards’ book is a quintessential scholarly
contribution.
Cercles © 2020 All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
