Amiri Baraka is one of the most influential Afro-American writers of my generation. Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Black Music, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, and his countless poems and essays (available www.amiribaraka.com) are penetrating commentaries on the American process for Afro-Americans. Baraka is also one of a handful of historians (Nat Hentoff, Howard Mandel, and more recently, John Corbett) interpreting improvised music that I read. Musically, Baraka’s poems are featured in New Music New Poetry, a performance with tenor David Murray and drummer Steve McCall as well as Murray’s recent Fo Deux Revue, the New York Art Quartet’s 35th Reunion, and Archie Shepp/Roswell Rudd’s Live in New York. It is an honor for me to present the award-winning playwright, author, Beat poet, social activist, jazz emissary, and most recently, Poet Laureate, Amiri Baraka, unedited and in his own words.
FRED JUNG: Let’s start from the beginning.
AMIRI BARAKA: When I was very young, I liked the blues, gospel, and then I started liking all those quartets that came out in the Fifties. Then my first cousin gave me a set of all his bebop records. I started playing them and started listening to Dizzy Gillespie, Monk, and so forth and so on. I just gravitated into that because my parents had Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald and people like that. Everybody liked the blues. Naturally, after that introduction to it, I just stayed up with it. I always thought of that music as a persona for myself. I always identified with it.
FJ: The culture’s identification with improvised music afforded its rapid progression, but in today’s prefabricated music, jazz has almost become unaccounted for.
AMIRI BARAKA: I think that the whole question of the music is that for many of us, it has always been intrinsic toward our development. I think we define our development by the music because it is American classical music. You dig deep into it.
FJ: Reading Black Music was important to my understanding of improvised music. In it, you state, in no uncertain terms that “black music should be played by black musicians,” words that have been misinterpreted as being inflammatory.
AMIRI BARAKA: I was saying essentially that that is its origins and that has been its strongest performers, that Afro-American people created this music and it’s logical. If you go to hear Chinese music, it would seem logical that you would look to Chinese musicians. Even though we are in a society that has been integrated, still, the major kinds of innovations that have come in American music have come from the Afro-American people. What is so convoluted and warped about this society is they still think that art music of the United States is from Europe. They have twenty-seven symphony orchestras in the United States, all devoted to European music. But this is not Europe. It is only the kind of colonial view of America that continues. Still, they look to Europe as the official culture and still looks to Europe as its paradigm. It reflects the kind of national oppression and racism, that white supremacy that is found in all aspects of American society.
FJ: You had an active role in the Civil Rights Movement, but a role that is distorted because of your close association with the Black Panther Party.
AMIRI BARAKA: Well, I was a Black Nationalist at one point, but the point is this, Fred, the official American historians, who are usually very narrow in their perceptions and their rational of things and suffer from the same kinds of chauvinism and white supremacy, they don’t understand that that struggle was essentially for democracy and self-determination. Now, you can call one side of it integration and one side of it separatist, but that is one of the most dislocating and disorienting things about our movement because people impose those kinds of labels, when it should be obvious to anybody that the boys and Garvey (Marcus Garvey) would have been better in one organization even though they struggled all the time, or that Malcolm and King would have been better in one united front organization based on a stable political instrument, a national political instrument that we could use. We have to struggle for equality and democracy and we have to utilize our self-determination. We have to begin doing the things that need to be done. I was in the Congress of African People. At the beginning, I was very close to the Panthers. As a matter of fact, when I organized the Communication Project at San Francisco State, the Panthers were our stage designers and our actors. We had a united, but it was broken up. I would say this without reservation, Fred, that I think Eldridge Cleaver, his emergence, once Huey (Huey P. Newton) and Bobby (Bobby Seale) were locked up, that I used to call him the cleaver because that is what he did. He cleaved open that united front we had.
FJ: Who are the important voices in jazz?
AMIRI BARAKA: There has been so many, but I would say obviously, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. They, to me, are the greats of the greats right away. Certainly, John Coltrane, and people like Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and even today, people like Abbey Lincoln, who are grossly underrated and covered. There have been so many great artists who have come up and created things and then been co-oped and their work stolen from them. One of the problems is the media, somebody else names us. Somebody names it rag, so anybody can play rag. Somebody names it jazz, so they can say anybody is playing jazz. If they say that this music you created is called jazz, the next thing you know, they can bring in Kenny G and say that this is jazz too. The emphasis should be on the whole history of the music and the fact that this is the music of Duke Ellington and this is the music of Thelonious Monk. This is the artistry of Billie Holiday, not creating some kind of all purpose, commercial catch all that allows them, because they are in control of distribution and production, to produce anything. Jazz now, you have to watch out because usually, they are not talking about anything that vaguely resembles it.
FJ: You mentioned John Coltrane, tell me the impact of Trane’s A Love Supreme.
AMIRI BARAKA: It is a music that is a continuum of the past, of the tradition, but at the same time, is innovative and searching for new means of expression. I think the album that began Coltrane’s leap forward was Giant Steps. He was with Miles and then his real transition was when he got with Thelonious Monk in that whole summer. And Trane, obviously, is the most dominant voice of the Sixties. There were a lot of other innovators who were very good, people like Sun Ra, who is not known and of course, Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor. But the great figure of the Sixties is John Coltrane and I think that his legacy is so rooted in real feelings, rather than notes and so I always equate Coltrane with Malcolm. To me, they are two voices emerging based on the social turmoil of the period and able to incorporate that into their own art.
FJ: Both Abbey Lincoln and Archie Shepp have spoken out against oppression and injustice.
AMIRI BARAKA: Yeah, and that hasn’t helped them. It doesn’t help them get popular with the powers that be. They do that with white folks, Bruce Springsteen.
FJ: “41 Shots.”
AMIRI BARAKA: Yeah, and Stevie Wonder used to win the Grammys every year and then as Stevie got more conscious and he is one of the greatest composers/performers we have, then he gets less and less play and they have to cover him up with Boy George or Michael Jackson. As skilled as Michael Jackson is, he has nothing to do with the philosophical content that Stevie Wonder has.
FJ: Can you quantify Trane’s loss?
AMIRI BARAKA: You can’t lose a Malcolm or a Martin Luther King and at the same time, a Monk, a Duke, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and a Trane and be absolutely healthy. So it is up to these young people now, the new wave, to develop some serious kind of understanding of their own history and traditions.
FJ: Who is this new wave?
AMIRI BARAKA: There is all kinds of people. There is David Murray. There are piano players like John Hicks, D.D. Jackson, Vijay Iyer. There is so many people. What is that brother’s name? He put out a record called Cause and Effect, beautiful.
FJ: Abraham Burton.
AMIRI BARAKA: Right, Abraham Burton. There is a lot of young people who are really doing some great things. It is going to take them a while to actually be recognized. D.D. Jackson has an album out now called Suite for New York, a fantastic album. I would recommend that. People coming from all forms of multi-cultural America, Vijay Iyer is Asian, an Indian brother. One of the finest pianists, Jon Jang is another Asian. He is a very fine pianist. Then there is people like, what is my man’s name? He came out with an album called Last Chance for Common Sense.
FJ: Rodney Kendrick.
AMIRI BARAKA: Yes, very much influenced by Monk. Another fantastic musician. You’ve got some fine things out here. They’ve just got to get some kind of exposure.
FJ: What is the importance of jazz music?
AMIRI BARAKA: The music is our history. That is your history. It took me a while to absorb that, but that is where the book Blues People comes from. When the music changes, it indicates that the people have changed. That is why we need the kind of repertory orchestras in all these cities that reflect the shouts and hollers, the country blues, New Orleans, big band, what they call swing, what they call jazz, avant-garde, so that our people, and indeed, certainly, our children can understand how this music originated, what are its elements, and actually absorb its content. It tells the story of our very lives on this planet.
FJ: So is the young generation’s pursuit of hip hop thwarting jazz’s process?
AMIRI BARAKA: No, hip hop is like everything else. There is good, bad, and indifferent. Duke Ellington said that there is only two kinds of music: good music and bad music. Hip hop is divided into the same kind of thing. You’ve got the most progressive rappers, who are more or less covered by the corporations, the people that are talking about struggle and democracy and political consciousness. Then you’ve got the ones that are pushed forward by the corporations, who mainly are talking about superfluous, kind of ostentatious, and very hollow kinds of things. Even someone who was a formidable kind of artist like Tupac, the problem was that he wasn’t finally truly self-conscious. If your name is Tupac Shakur, you must understand that this society is raised against you from the beginning. Just like my sons and daughters, once you lay out your name as Baraka, you’ve got a whole element, who don’t even have to know you personally, that don’t want to see you succeed. My son, Ras (supported by Russell Simmons in his run for city council in Newark, New Jersey), has a record out that he did with Lauryn Hill. This is not really nepotism, but I think it is one of the finest records utilizing rap, rhythm and blues, spoken word, and yet, that is covered almost completely. You never hear that. Instead, you hear these negros running around talking about how much diamonds they got and how many women they can pop, just idiotic stuff that will not be remembered. At the same time, the corporations also co-op it. So it begins with black people, just like tap dancing, and look up and it’s Eminem, who gets the Academy Award and makes all the money. That is how it is. These rock and roll groups make billions and billions and that is rhythm and blues played by white people. The point is that every culture influences another, but one group should not be riding around in Rolls-Royces while we are out here unemployed.
FJ: How would you level the playing field?
AMIRI BARAKA: First, as far as the culture is concerned, we need a cultural revolution. We need to raise aggressively, educate, mobilize, organize, not only the Afro-American people, but all progressive people, to reject the kind of commercial, imperialist, pornographic culture that has been imposed on us by five media owners, who controls the films, television, books, CDs, and it is this kind of monopoly, capitalist domination that implies censorship just by the kind of exclusive ownership. If Michael Jackson sells 90 million albums worldwide and he gets twenty percent and walks around with money, which I do not oppose at all, still, that other eighty percent is spent on people who despise us or who want to utilize us, at best. Why are our jazz festivals in Europe? Where is the jazz festival in every one of the twenty-seven cities we live in? They could raise not only the level of productive forces, the education, the employment, but raising the actual economic base of our society. Black people make 500 billion dollars a year. We are the sixteenth largest gross national product in the world. We are right behind General Motors, who is fifteenth. No people that has 40 million plus people and 500 billion dollars a year should have to take orders from anybody. That is the basis for our self-determination. We have the resources. We don’t have the political and ideological and philosophical focus.
FJ: What you speak of is informed and judicious, but do we live in a society that is capable of hearing it?
AMIRI BARAKA: It is not the society, but we who need it. We must organize ourselves to develop that kind of true self-consciousness and understand our origins, what are our strengths, our weaknesses, and begin to unify ourselves and become some kind of cooperative movement. We will never be masters of monopoly capitalism. Bush and company want some kind of military dictatorship of the world. I think they want to turn the whole world into niggers, not just us. At this point, our survival is faced with this kind of neo-fascist development that you see, Afghanistan one month, the next month, Israelis killing Palestinians, next month, invade Iraq, and now, they are talking about Iran. So there is an element of self-defense, but it is a question of self-determination. Rather than our young people longing to belong to some kind of Warner Bros. thing where they are going to play some kind of modern negro, like they gave those Academy Awards to Denzel (Denzel Washington) and Halle Berry. Why did they give them for the first time in seventy-five years? Because they wanted us to go to war. Suddenly, you have Denzel, he didn’t get that award for Malcolm X or Hurricane. He got it playing a corrupt negro cop, corrupting a white rookie cop (Training Day). Halle Berry was in one of the racist films that I’ve ever seen (Monster’s Ball). They give them awards, but Duke Ellington, the greatest composer that America has ever produced, they refused to give him a Pulitzer Prize in 1967. You see thousands of movies that are pure garbage, pornography, yet we are suppressed. And one aspect of that suppression is us not understanding our strengths and the path to real development.
FJ: What counsel would you provide to Afro-Americans in positions of leadership?
AMIRI BARAKA: The point is to what extent are they truly self-conscious? To what extent do they understand themselves and the world? The movement was actually set back in the Seventies by a combination of assassination, King, Malcolm, Medgar Evers, even the Kennedys and the whole Nixon’s offer of black capitalism, which created an even wider gap between the masses and the elitist. Now, you have negros that they put fronting American Express (Kenneth Chenault), or AOL Time Warner (Richard Parsons), or the Secretary of State (Colin Powell), or head of national security (Dr. Condoleezza Rice), or a negro on the Supreme Court (Clarence Thomas), but they are part of the entity which oppresses us. I am not condemning them personally, as much as I am saying that that ultimately is very limited as far as development. Colin Powell being the Secretary of States doesn’t erase the ghettos. The brother that is the figurative head of Time Warner, he might be a nice dude, but that appointment does not eradicate the poverty and the lack of education of our people. If we are thinking about that, rather than the individual, disconnected self-aggrandizement, then we have to think about collect solutions for what we do.
FJ: And the future?
AMIRI BARAKA: I have a book coming out on Trane coming out next month called Later Trane, and that tries to explain how he developed and what it has to do with the world’s development. That is coming out and there is a book called Digging, essays from the last twenty years. We produce programs at the end of the month. We are functioning now in the libraries and in the schools because once I was named Poet Laureate, I wanted to do something much more public. That is what we have been doing. Even now, we are producing monthly poetry sessions.
Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and is Wang Chunging tonight. Comments?