Thoughts on Jazz Linked to Writer’s Views on Politics, Culture

“In those days, it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.” The irresistibly quotable first sentence of Ralph Ellison’s 1955 essay “Living With Music” sounds a distinctive note: strikingly direct, yet subtly ironic, hinting at complex undertones. Most famous as the author of the mid-century American classic “Invisible Man” (1952), Ellison was also an astute music critic whose provocative writings on jazz continue to speak, not only to jazz aficionados but to everyone interested in American culture.

As editor Robert G. O’Meally puts it in his introduction, tongue only slightly in cheek: “Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) was a promising musician when, under the spell of certain nineteenth-century novelists and twentieth-century poets, he began to transform himself into a writer.” Segregated though they were, the public schools Ellison attended in Oklahoma City offered music appreciation, free instruments and lessons to any child who cared to learn, and the young Ellison drank in classical and jazz influences while honing his technique. Although he eventually gave up his career as a jazz trumpeter to become a writer, he retained his passion for music and drew on musical ideas of rhythm, composition, technique and expression in his writings.

This collection contains Ellison’s perceptive and illuminating appreciations of artists like gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, blues singer Jimmy Rushing, jazz guitarist Charlie Christian and two of Ellison’s greatest heroes, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. It also includes letters, interviews and--a great treat--half a dozen excerpts from Ellison’s fiction that brilliantly illustrate the ways in which jazz influenced not only the style and cadences of his prose, but his concept of the social and political role of the creative artist.

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Ellison’s strong likes and dislikes are much in evidence in his essays. Certainly, he deplored the ways in which the entertainment industry coarsened and trivialized popular music. As for his personal taste: He loved the swinging, danceable music of the singers and bands that flourished in the 1930s and 1940s but considered the subsequent bebop movement, if not a disaster, then at least a wrong turn. In his opinion, not only were bebop musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie pretentious, surly and often too drugged out to play well, but their abstract and cultish style took jazz away from its communal roots.

Although Ellison saw jazz as an American, rather than African, art form, he insisted on its uniquely Afro-American origin. In “Keep to the Rhythm,” a stunning chapter from his final novel, “Juneteenth,” we hear the story of black people in America retold at a revival meeting by a preacher who is also a jazz trombonist: “Ah, but though divided and scattered, ground down and battered into the earth like a spike being pounded by a ten pound sledge, we were on the ground and in the earth and the earth was red and black like the earth of Africa. And as we moldered underground we were mixed with this land. We liked it. It fitted us fine. It was in us and we were in it. And then--praise God--deep in the ground, deep in the womb of this land we began to stir! . . . [W]e stamped our feet at the trumpet’s sound and we clapped our hands, ah, in joy! And we moved, yes, together in a dance, amen. Because we had received a new song in a new land. . . .”

In Ellison’s 1945 essay “Richard Wright’s Blues,” we can see how his understanding of music informs his appreciation of literature. Like a blues singer, Ellison explains, the author of “Native Son” and “Black Boy” gives form and meaning to the chaos of pain and suffering. Here Ellison memorably defines the blues as “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” expressing “both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit.”

Ellison’s thoughts on jazz are woven into the larger fabric of his ideas about music, literature, politics, culture and the African American experience (or, experiences, as he might say, reminding us to look at African Americans as individuals, not stereotypes). There’s a nice irony in a story told by O’Meally, now a professor of literature at Columbia and founder-director of the Center for Jazz Studies, about his own early encounter with Ellison at Harvard in 1973. A thoughtful critic of the militant black nationalist movement, Ellison gave the dashiki-clad young O’Meally short shrift.

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In time, however, O’Meally came to understand what Ellison meant by insisting on the American-ness of African Americans, while Ellison, who granted O’Meally an interview three years later, presumably came to see beyond the dashiki. This lively and well-conceived collection of Ellison’s jazz writings, ably elucidated by O’Meally’s introduction and headnotes, is more than a tribute: It’s a celebration.