The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 71/No. 7      February 19, 2007

 
Coltrane, Black rights, and the jazz revolution
(Books of the Month column)
 
Below is an excerpt from John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for February. The book presents a penetrating account of Coltrane’s role in leading the last major innovations in jazz, and how it reflected intense cultural and political ferment—the rise of resistance to racial discrimination. Copyright © 1970 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY FRANK KOFSKY  
During the autumn of 1964, a series of avant-garde jazz concerts took place in New York’s Cellar Cafe. Although the music itself was of great significance, of equal importance was the title chosen for the series: The October Revolution.

To be sure, most of the reporters present missed the implications in the reference to the triumph of Bolshevism in 1917—an interesting commentary on the political awareness of jazz journalists—but this was not at all the case with the participating musicians. Subsequent events have shown the October Revolution to be only one of a number of signs of a thoroughly radical upheaval, musical and social, taking place among young Negro jazz artists.

In every respect the combined social-musical revolution in jazz (as I suggested in the preceding chapter) amounts to a repudiation of the values of white middle-class capitalist America. This is most obvious from the statements of the musicians themselves, but it is also apparent—to those who care to listen with an open mind—in the wild and exciting music the revolution is producing.

Among its leaders, three names top the list: John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor. To name the leaders, however, is simpler than to describe the movement they head. The substance of the music, for one thing, is too elusive; the range of styles, for another, is too great. Still, beneath the apparently endless variety there are common themes that unify the diverse aspects of the revolution.

On a strictly musical level, one of these themes is the attempt of the revolutionaries to replace the fixed rhythmic pulse and unvarying cycle of chords that jazz artists have used as a framework for their improvisations since Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie first pointed the way in the mid-I940s. The new musicians have been moving away from these now-threadbare guideposts toward a fresh concept of group, as opposed to individual, improvisation. The reasons for this shift are, as I have said, both musical and social. At the social level, let it suffice that collective improvisation symbolizes the recognition among musicians that their art is not an affair of individual “geniuses,” but the musical expression of an entire people—the black people in America….

A second and related unity underlying the “new black music”—a name bestowed by poet-playwright-essayist LeRoi Jones, who himself functions as an unofficial advocate for the musicians—is a rejection of Western musical conventions. Such a rejection, I argued in the preceding chapter, surely has clear social implications above and beyond the artistic ones. In point of fact, it reflects the larger decision of the Negro ghetto to turn its back on an exploitative and inhumane white American society.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home