|
Books by Kalamu ya
Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts
Movement /
360:
A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology
/
From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident /
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
*
* * * *
Clapping
On Two and Four
By Kalamu ya Salaam
The African American approach to performance has
many aspects, some of which, such as improvisation and emotional
intensity, are frequently cited. This essay will address two
seminal, albeit frequently overlooked, characteristics of public
performance in the Black cultural context. The first aspect is
the use of the music as a language and the second is the
function of performance as a means of achieving social stability
and cohesion.
A Black (or more precisely, African-heritage) approach to public
performance necessarily includes music. Even with the visual
arts, masks and costumes dance, i.e., they are made to move
rhythmically. Indeed, Black music is often characterized as
rhythm-driven.
I believe this rhythm emphasis is both contextual and inherent.
Contextual in that Black music came of age contemporaneously
with modern industrial developments in America. The recording
industry; electricity (plus electronic amplification and
alteration); radio; cars, trains and planes; all of these
were born and developed during the same epoch. This
industrializing and speeding up of daily life produced a major
change in the psyche and emotional desires of Americans.
The last of the pre-industrial (and simultaneously, the first of
the industrial) music forms was "ragtime"-a piano
music that through the use of "piano rolls" (a way to
mechanically reproduce the literal "sound" of the
music without the musician having to be present) ushered in the
industrial era of music making. In many, many obvious ways
ragtime bridges music performance as it was traditionally done
for centuries with the literally new noise of twentieth century
sounds. Although ragtime sounds stilted and
"mechanical" to those of us weaned on modern music, at
the time of its inception and development ragtime was a wild,
boisterous, and seemingly explosive music.
With its pronounced employment of syncopation, ragtime mirrored
the new ways a-coming and suggested a completely new way to make
music. Syncopation (and emphasis on the weak beats juxtaposed
against a de-emphasis of the strong beats, particularly in the
bass line) is ragtime's most easily identifiable characteristic.
Ragtime peaked in the decades of the 1880s and 1890s, and was
quickly replaced by a music called jazz as the most popular
expression of Black music specifically and American music in
general. In fact, by the 1920s, jazz was so popular that that
decade became known as the jazz age. Jazz as both a
music form and an approach to playing pre-existing music forms,
introduced not just rhythm innovations, but also harmonic
innovations, chiefly through the use of what is often called
"the blue-note."
Jazz is famously an amalgamation of many
ingredients; however, jazz is chiefly a mixture of blues and
ragtime devices commingled with a multitude of melodic sources
(folk songs from diverse ethnic sources including English,
German, Scottish on the Euro-side and field hollers, chants,
reels, arhoolies, line songs, ring shouts and other Negro
strains-I specifically identify these as "Negro"
because these forms are not simply African retentions, but more
precisely are African American extensions).
Jazz, blues, and their sacred cousin, gospel music, all have a
rhythm-device in common: the back-beat. Indeed, the back-beat, a
heavy emphasis on two and four, is a hallmark of African
American music and remains dominant as a rhythmic device into
the 21st century. An interesting note about the back-beat with
respect to gospel music is the flipping of rhythmic emphasis. In
the then popular waltz form, the emphasis was usually
ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three. But in gospel, when three-four
time is used, as it frequently is, the practictioners usually
clap on two and three, thus getting a one-TWO-THREE,
one-TWO-THREE rhythm. The back-beat.
None of the other popular musics of the African diaspora
(whether from the Caribbean, Central America or South America)
employs a heavy back-beat unless the particular form in
question, such as salsa, reggae or soca, is a form that was
significantly influenced by Black music from America. This
absence of the back-beat is distinctive especially given that
most African diaspora music heavily uses drums, or quasi-drum
instruments (steel pans for example).
This is a curious development that is made even
more curious by the fact that for the most part the drums of the
diaspora remained hand-drums and it was in the United States
that the mechanical drum, or the drum kit, commonly called the
trap drum or traps, was developed. So the place where the drum
had the least continuity in terms of usage and in terms of the
direct retention of African poly-rhythms, is the place where the
back-beat was emphasized and the drum kit was developed!
So then the cultural context of industrialization and the
specificities of Black musical development within the United
States are the general cultural context that sits atop the
inherent African aesthetics of music. One particular aspect of
the African aesthetic in music is the use of music to achieve
trance, or a state of altered consciousness usually induced with
the aid of dance.
This quality, which goes by numerous names
including "getting the spirit," "spacing
out," and "being possessed," is a desired effect
and not an accidental byproduct of Black musical production. In
other words, the music is designed to alter the consciousness of
the audience. Moreover, the audience is never seen as a voyeur,
who silently looks on, but as a participant, whose physical
interaction with the musicians is necessary in order for the
music to achieve its purpose of elevating, or transforming, both
audience and musician.
From this perspective it is easy to understand Black music as a
social force. I propose we take this understanding a step
further. First, let us look at the music as language and second
as a social stabilizer.
The majority of African Americans are descended from peoples of
West and Central Africa, from peoples whose spoken language was
often tonal and for whom singing accompanied nearly every aspect
of daily life-particularly work and ritual activity.
The American insistence that the Negro speak
English and the American prohibition against the use of African
languages would seem to mitigate the retention of tonality as a
part of language, but again, similar to the emphasis of the
back-beat in a culture where the drum was outlawed, tonality is
asserted as a prominent feature of Black music. Specifically,
instrumentalists developed techniques to make their horns sound
like they were talking, singing, or laughing while
simultaneously singers developed techniques to make their voices
sound like instruments. In essence, that which was suppressed
reappears as a dominant characteristic.
Moreover, in terms of representing the attitudes and
psychological state of its makers, Black music carries an
emotional breadth and depth rarely found in written literature,
whether that literature be text or composed music.
Black music is a language of the lived experience, a way to
communicate to the world and with each other, how it feels to be
so Black (and blue). What is important to realize is that the
very style and structure, the "how" the language
sounds is an inseparable part of the content, or meaning, of the
language. Or, to quote a folk saying: it ain't what you say,
it's the way that you say it. This emphasis on process is not
simply an emphasis on stylization, but is rather a clear
prioritizing of the concrete lived
experienced. In this context, the whole self is celebrated, not
just ideas, but body and soul, ideas and emotions.
But beyond, this emotional wealth, there is the greater truth,
Black forms of making music are not an end in themselves, but a
means toward the end of achieving social cohesion. Under the
influence of the music, all the participants are first brought
to a state of unity via the rhythm-or as they say in church, if
you can't sing, at least pat your foot and keep time. While some
may minimize or ignore this attribute, every body literally
moving (clapping, foot-patting, etc.) on the one is a sine qua
non.
To listen to music without moving is not to be involved in the
music. Even the most avant garde of free jazz generally invoked
a physical response if no more than swaying to the underlying
pulse of the music. I suggest that this attribute of collective
movement, the individual getting in tune with the group, is a
significant characteristic; and, of course, the use of
poly-rhythms and poly-phonics allows the individual to make a
unique contribution to the collective, thereby achieving both
unity and individuality. Indeed, Black music is the most
democratic American artform in that it successfully stresses
both the collective and the individual at the same time.
From a psychological standpoint the music offers one the
opportunity to identify oneself as a part of a larger social
grouping and simultaneously to distinguish oneself as a
particular individual within that group. Thus, Black music is
the perfect embodiment of American social values most often
thought
of in political (democracy) or economic (free market) terms, but
values which also have aesthetic corollaries.
The embodiment of democratic ideals along with technological
progressiveness—Black music has always been at the forefront of
using and creating technological innovation in terms of
"how" to make music, whether one wants to talk about
instrumental techniques and innovative approaches to playing an
instrument, or talk about the use of machines (from the levers
and pulleys of the trap drum kit, to the computers and
midi-based equipment of rap and popular music production)—is precisely what has made Black performance in
music the most popular and most influential performance style
worldwide.
Why do so many people like Black music? Because it is hip! Why
is Black music so hip? Because it simultaneously draws on the
most ancient of traditions while utilizing the latest
technological advances available, and all while emphasizing both
social cohesion as well as individual development—which, not
surprisingly, is basically a working definition of hipness.
Kalamu ya Salaam is a prolific performance
poet, dramatist, fiction writer and music critic. He is founder of Nommo
Literary Society, a Black writers workshop; leader of the WordBand, a
poetry performance ensemble; poetry editor for QBR Black Book Review and
moderator of e-Drum, a listserv for Black writers and their supporters.
He also performs with the Afro-Asian Arts Dialogue
kalamu@aol.com
* * *
* *
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
*
* * * *
Guarding the Flame of Life
*
* * *
*
* * * *
New Orleans Jazz Funeral for tuba player Kerwin
James /
They danced atop his casket Jaran 'Julio' Green
* * *
* *
|
Track List
1. Congo Square (9:01)
2. My Story, My Song (20:50)
3. Danny Banjo (4:32)
4. Miles Davis (10:26)
5. Hard News For Hip Harry (5:03)
6. Unfinished Blues (4:13)
7. Rainbows Come After The Rain (2:21)/Negroidal Noise (15:53)
8. Intro (3:59)
9. The Whole History (3:14)
10. Negroidal Noise (5:39)
11. Waving At Ra (1:40)
12. Landing (1:21)
13. Good Luck (:04) |
* * *
* *
music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
* * *
* *
* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
|
* *
* * *
|
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
|
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 7 January 2012
|
