Jazz, one understands, is freedom music. As an art form of African American origination, fashioned in the crucible of Jim Crow and the endless aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade, jazz has always demonstrated the immanence of creative resistance to any instance of oppression. As historian Gerald Horne writes, jazz “is the classic instance of the lovely lotus arising from the malevolent mud.” For this reason, however, a dubious American nationalism tends to inform popular understandings of the genre. Jazz spans the world, not as an American export, but as a music of African provenance, distributed by the machinations of empire. Defying the historical strictures from which it originates, this plural music issues a deep and de facto internationalism, anti-colonial at its core.

Few artists have so powerfully distilled the determination of jazz against the colonizer as trumpeter, philosopher, poet, and linguist Jacques Coursil, whose passing on June 25, 2020, is an inestimable loss for emancipatory music and thought. Born to Martinican parents in Paris in 1938, Coursil joined the New York downtown scene of the mid-sixties, playing on classic sessions by Sunny Murray and Frank Wright for ESP-Disk. Back in Europe in the late sixties and early seventies, he contributed to the intellectual tumult of the Burton Greene Ensemble’s Aquariana, and led his own groups, recording Way Ahead with a European rhythm section and the classic Black Suite with Anthony Braxton on board. This later album is more spacious and contemplative; the player’s voices feel almost completely independent of one another, detachable from the whole, and they interact as such throughout, forming any number of collaborative modules. Beb Guérin’s bowing drones heavily below the purr of Braxton’s clarinet, recalling the highly textural music of Giacinto Scelsi, as Coursil sputters a series of athematic fanfares throughout.

A certain mythology has gathered around the thirty-five year hiatus that followed Coursil’s incredibly fruitful period of musical cosmopolitanism. There is a romantic obscurity to the way in which jazz fans discuss the career interruptions of their favorite players, mistaking hard times and financial exigencies for semi-monastic trials of spirit. A prime example would be Sonny Rollins, who retreated into a prolonged rehearsal session at the height of his fame, practicing all hours on the Williamsburg bridge and bearing solitary witness to the city; or Dexter Gordon, whose incarceration in the fifties secured his reputation as the perennial ambassador of bebop, and an intercontinental comeback kid. Other disappearances are far more lacunar and prolonged, such as that of sought-after bassist Henry Grimes, who devoted himself to poetry and literature during a decades-long stint in the workaday world, only to emerge with startling vigor in the early twenty-first century.

Coursil’s willful abstention from recording was in service to a scholarly path. Returning to France from the United States, he earned his first of two PhDs in 1977 and taught literature, linguistics, and philosophy at the University of Caen in Normandy, and at the University of the West Indies in Martinique. More recently, Coursil lectured in the United States at Cornell University and University of California Irvine on francophone and postcolonial literature, as well as philosophy of language. Coursil strove with the modesty of a professional to distinguish between these two threads of his life, but his intellectual formation surely encompasses jazz music, as a body of literature in itself, and a material corroboration of the lessons he would glean from his immersion in the idiosyncratic ferment of French psychoanalysis and analytic philosophy. 

In non-contrived improvised music, an instrumentalist discovers the order of sounds at the same time as their audience, fulfilling a dialogic circuit unto themselves. Thus, as Coursil explains in an essay on linguistic creativity, musical improvisation readily corresponds to the “non-premeditation of common speech.” Of special interest to Coursil, in the capacity of linguist and improviser alike, is the simultaneous reception of extemporized speech by both the listener and the speaker. Improvisation, Coursil states, reveals the novelty of the present, whether of speech or a melodic line; for where either is concerned, “before its advent, it has no ontological status.” This processual conception of musicianship leaves much to the specific instance of creation; and throughout his scholarship, Coursil extrapolates a social ontology from the grammar of jazz. 

In addition to his work on linguistics, Coursil emerges as a major interpreter of Edouard Glissant, the Martinican poet and literary critic whose creative and intellectual life similarly spans Paris and New York. Over the course of his work, Glissant develops a poetic and narrative critique of globalization—the “pitiless panorama of the worldwide commercial market”—in place of which he proposes a world in Relation. This is not a vision of relativism, Coursil explains in a recent seminar, for Glissant continues to speak of the world as a totality of relations; but in so doing he moves from the false holism of the “one world” to the omni-cultural, catch-all narrativity of the “all-world” and its many internal divergences. This description shapes Coursil’s musical and political internationalism, modeled on the de facto interworldliness of the colonized, whose freedom consists in a lived inventory of relations. 

Coursil’s first recording of the twenty-first century, Minimal Brass, was released in 2005 by John Zorn, who had studied with Coursil at the United Nations International School decades earlier. Minimal Brass is a practiced and contemplative solo recording, a program of both auto-accompaniment and self-differentiation. The three twelve-part fanfares comprising the album are highly composed, yet evoke the interrelation of layers that made Black Suite a model for free chamber jazz thirty-five years earlier. And whatever it might have weathered in the interim, Coursil’s sound is hugely improved by this passage of time. His flutter-tongued articulation contrasts an ambient duration of breath, unto an oceanic unity of speed and stasis. This is one technical manifestation of the duality of Coursil’s tone, which otherwise moves from heraldic brightness to a woody, flute-like sound, preserving a supportive breath within each note.

The introspection of Minimal Brass turns outward to the world on 2007’s Clameurs, adapting source texts from the pre-Islamic poet Antar, as well as several key Martinican thinkers, including Edouard Glissant, the poet Monchoachi, and revolutionary psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon, perhaps the single most important political theorist of the latter half of the twentieth century. As Coursil explains, “the four oratorios for trumpet and voice that make up Clameurs reproduce in each of their languages (Creole, French, Arabic) these poets’ cry of the world.” The album’s prologue, “Paroles nues,” extends the essential nudity of his solo album, as Coursil’s horn floats atop an ominous electronic pulse. But the densely overdubbed harmonic substratum of Minimal Brass has shifted into airy electronica. Most tracks build on only a couple of chords and a repetitive bass groove, over which Coursil duets with himself, weaving mellow phrases with his gravelly monologue in a call-and-response.

Coursil’s voice is the major feature of this Antillean anthology. On “Wélélé Nou (Nos Clameurs),” a title track of sorts—wélélé is an onomatopoeic Creole word for uproar or clamor—Coursil conjures Monchoachi in a hoarse whisper, dubbed atop an aspirant basso profondo. The voluminous husk of his voice is a physical presence, a one-man chorus and multiplicitous address. An eerie sociality inheres in Coursil’s layered recitation, as conveyed by a profusion of voices in “l'Archipel des Grands Chaos,” where the words of Glissant are adapted into a group liturgy. This parallels Coursil’s sound in itself, making a philosophical statement on the collectivity immanent to individual expression. In “Frantz Fanon 1952,” Coursil recites from Fanon’s classic work Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), asserting the integrity of the enslaved and emphasizing the individual as a node of global relation: “I am a man, and it is the past of the whole world that I must reclaim.”

This notion, of the individual as an historical culmination demanding redress, underwrites Coursil’s 2011 album, Trails of Tears. As the title suggests, the album investigates the forced migration of tens of thousands of Indigenous North Americans throughout the nineteenth century, situating this atrocity alongside the transatlantic slave trade, two foundational processes of racial capitalism. As Ojibwe historian David Treuer explains in a recent book review, “in the 1830s—the decade of removal—the federal government made nearly $80 million selling Native American lands to private citizens, around $5 million more than it spent. And in the 1840s, those lands produced 160 million pounds of ginned cotton, 16 percent of the national crop. The real winners, then, were southern slaveholding landowners and their investors in New York.”

The traumatic rend known as the Trail of Tears clearly demonstrates how processes of dispossession and accumulation, slavery and investment, transpire in tandem. Coursil’s concept album commemorates this history, reinterpreting the forced intimacy of continents as a conscious affinity. The seven movements of Coursil’s suite trace the procession of displaced Cherokee from Georgia to present-day Oklahoma and conclude in Senegal’s Île de Gorée, one of the earliest European settlements in Africa and an important outpost for slave traders. Based on the strong identity of trumpet and voice that Coursil forged on Clameurs, this instrumental rendering of place feels conversational as well as narrative, a wistful annotation of so many captured landscapes and their people. 

Trails of Tears opens on a haunting, folksy melody, gliding above producer Jeff Baillard’s atmospheric keyboards and Alex Bernard’s watery, meandering bass. The album’s agitated centerpiece, “The Removal” (Acts I and II), reunites several alumni of the ESP-Disk label, including bassist Alan Silva and drummer Sunny Murray, whose 1966 self-titled album furnished Coursil his recorded debut. The tension is palpable. Pianist Bobby Few stabs sparingly at chords as bird-like horns make lamentations. More sorrowful than mimetically violent, “The Removal” is one of the key performances in a long history of jazz engagement with freedom movements.

Silva was present for Coursil’s final recording, too, a conversational duo from 2014, released on the boutique RogueArt label. Dedicated to the late trumpeter Bill Dixon, another figure of the New York avant-garde whose style spans modern composition and free jazz, FreeJazzArt is not only a collaboration between Silva and Coursil, but a collaboration of their pairing with Dixon’s posterity. “To play a trumpet duo with Bill Dixon,” Coursil’s liner notes explain, “you had to find an adequate timbre, a bit dark, vaguely harsh, introspective, without estheticism, without pathos, without vibrato.” If Dixon’s absent voice is nonetheless a tonal interlocutor, then Coursil’s spacious phrasing places him within the music, as a principle of relation, while Silva’s ghostly harmonics score the air between participants. It is a beautiful recording, and a return of sorts for those involved to the New York of their mutual formation.

As an academic and an improviser, Jacques Coursil was devoted to the drafting of these new relationships and ways of being, outside and within the false whole of colonial rule. This creativity is modeled at a higher level, too, in the jurisdictional consilience that would form his later records, blending jazz and theory, poetry and history, horn and drum, island and voice. The magnitude of his loss is enormous, but the sound remains, soughing not sobbing, and the music, taking up the past in revolutionary summary, as the artist’s own cry of the world.

Cam Scott is a poet, critic, and non-musician from Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty 1 territory. He is the author of ROMANS/SNOWMARE, a book of poetry published by ARP Books in 2019, and WRESTLERS, a visual suite published by Greying Ghost in 2017.