This piece originally appeared as the introduction to Joseph Jarman’s Black Case Volume I & II: Return From Exile. It is reproduced here in cooperation with Blank Forms Editions.
Black Case Volume I &II: Return from Exile
by Joseph Jarman, with a new preface by Thulani Davis and an introduction by Brent Hayes Edwards
(Blank Forms Editions, 2019)
Eclectic and captivating, Joseph Jarman’s 1977 Black Case is perhaps the most extraordinary of an efflorescence of literary publications by jazz musicians in the 1970s.[1] Although it includes a selection of Jarman’s verse, the book is more capacious and variegated than a poetry collection. It is equally a spiritual Baedeker, a compendium of “old new prayers” that opens with a repeated supplication (“we pray o God / for the ego / death / and that the power / of the evil vibration / be taken / from our presence”) that Jarman kept taped on the wall above his desk for decades.[2] At the same time, it can be described as an organizational statement: Black Case includes some of the earliest declarations of the aspirations of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the influential collective founded in 1965 in Chicago by Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, and Phil Cohran. As such, Black Case is also a manifesto, the “theme song of a new breed.”[3]
Black Case also incorporates photography—all taken by Jarman himself, with the exception of the portrait of Black Panther activist George Jackson by Thulani Davis and the photo of Jarman by Jim Ritchie—as well as musical scores, concert programs, theatrical scenarios, and various “notes of interest” that read like excerpts from a personal journal. These autobiographical notes range from transcriptions of dreams to devastating documents of the scourges of poverty, racism, police brutality, and drugs in black communities—sometimes erupting in sudden flashes that then linger in the mind, like the horrific death of a 15-year-old from a heroin overdose. There are also nuanced and unpredictable evocations of being a young black man growing up in Chicago, reminding us that even a “city boy” might go fishing with his father (as depicted in the almost bucolic photographs accompanying the publication’s first fragment) and love to get “dirt under [his] fingernails.”
Photo courtesy Thulani Davis
Perhaps unsurprisingly coming from a musician whom the journalist J. B. Figi called the resident “theoretician” of the Art Ensemble of Chicago,[4] Jarman’s book is in no small part a philosophy of what the AACM called “Great Black Music.” Black Case resonates with gnomic pronouncements and enigmatic koans on the meaning of the “new music.” The volume is above all an argument for music, for its beauty and “healing” capabilities—a musician’s mission statement. If “God comes to us in the sound of music,” Black Case is a kind of extended program for all the “priests, doctors and warriors” who devote themselves to the power of its message. “The music is so strong,” Jarman writes in another fragment near the end of the second volume, “so
clear, really – so pure and beautiful
but it is a music also of horror
‘whether we like it or not’ and it is
a music of liberation. Anyone
hearing the music must come
face to face with himself and
everything he does with his
life. The music forces him to
do it; and we, as musicians
playing it, often are driven to
fits of rage because we cannot
“understand” the music we play –
we can only feel the great
power of it.”
Along with its philosophical and sociological reflections on the impact of music, Black Case also offers a powerful mythology of Great Black Music in the poem devoted to the prophetic “Odawalla,” who comes to deliver “the people of the Sun” from the “grey haze of the ghosts worlds” by teaching them “the practice of the drum and silent gong.” At the same time, with its inclusion of dated artifacts and documents like program notes and scores, Jarman’s book has a noticeable historiographic impulse as well. In his definitive book on the AACM, George Lewis notes that as early as 1981, Jarman and Wadada Leo Smith had been compelled to try to construct a “general history” of the Association; one might sense that same impulse in the breadth of Black Case, a compendium that includes, among other things, the script for a play by Muhal Richard Abrams.[5]
Jarman explains in Black Case’s short prefatory note that the selections include writings of his from 1960 through 1975. As Thulani Davis writes in her Foreword, he had compiled a spiral-bound first version of the book in 1974, which he significantly expanded for the 1977 version (adding the photos, concert programs, and theater scenarios, as well as a number of texts, including some of his best-known poems such as “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City”). Both editions include two volumes. In his prefatory note to the 1974 version, Jarman explains the division between them: while the first volume comprises poems and other writings, volume two (the beginning of which is discreetly signaled after the score of “As If It Were the Seasons”) “has more prose writing and the tone is a bit more directed towards musicians and theatre people, also there are some pieces included that have been ‘set’ to music, though in reality all the words are music themselves.”
“No dates are given” for the selections, Jarman specifies, “because they have no meaning in the ever present flow of our lives.” He also deliberately excludes a table of contents. And although there are a number of titled selections—such as “POEM ON THE SOUND,” “TRANS-LOVE POEM 2,” “for George Jackson,” “As If It Were the Seasons,” “ERIKA,” “Whats to say,” “Return From Exile,” “HATEWAR”—not all the poems in the book are introduced with a title. A good number, including some of the individual works that are best known because Jarman recorded them on albums with the Art Ensemble, simply incorporate the title word or phrase as part of their opening lines: “ODAWALLA”; “including circles”; “Bridge Piece”; and “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City.” The repetitions that echo through the collection—for instance, a section of “Whats to say” is one of the first selections in the book, and then later unfurls at greater length in the form of a musical score—create an effect of “flow” and interconnectedness. Despite the texts’ fragmentary nature and generic variance, the organization of the book stirs up a current, a singular mood that the reader enters and follows all the way through.
Jarman told the music historian Paul Steinbeck that a text that opens “El Paso – spring 1959 – I arrive on / the hot summer Greyhound from the East” was his first attempt at poetry.[6] Born in Arkansas in 1937 and raised in Chicago, Jarman enlisted in the US military a few years prior to that first attempt, in 1955, serving as a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division. The following year he was a member of a Pathfinder platoon that was deployed covertly in Southeast Asia. In one disastrous mission, Jarman’s unit assaulted a Vietnamese village suspected of hosting a cell of Communist fighters; eighteen paratroopers were killed in the operation, and Jarman sustained a severe leg injury during the retreat.[7] Traumatized by the encounter, Jarman “had to get out of the line,” as he later told a journalist.[8] In the end, he was able to acquire an alto saxophone and join the Army band in Germany, where he was stationed until he was discharged in 1958. Deeply disturbed by his military experience, Jarman “went to discover America. I went all over the United States, and down in Mexico, and hung out in the mountains, the Sierra, in northern Mexico.”[9] Indeed, as he recounts in the “El Paso” text, in the midst of his cross-country wanderings Jarman found himself mute for a time—as he explained later, “the vocal apparatus wouldn’t work. I had internalized all of the anguish and frustration”[10]—until he eventually got psychiatric treatment in Milwaukee before returning to Chicago.
While the “El Paso” text is wrenching on its own, in the flow of textual fragments in Black Case it takes on a somewhat different implication, ultimately woven into a current of growth, transformation, and self-discovery. Thus, on the following page we read:
yes;
to move from
one
to
another, the
part of yourself
unknown
to see
that –
finding fragments twisted
among these
years of ruins –
with it to sing
a stronger song
of yourself
Refusing to “look back / into a void,” Jarman finds succor in the music (“go contrary / go sing”) and in the integrity of self-sufficiency: a determination “to / make / the / changes / only from myself alone.”
Jarman’s introduction to Buddhism also dates back to the period of cross-country wandering depicted in the “El Paso” text. He spent some time in Tucson, Arizona, and got in the habit of lingering in a used bookstore there. He befriended one of the clerks in the store, who suggested that studying Buddhism might help in his recovery from the trauma of military service. The man gave Jarman a small volume called The Teachings of the Buddha, and he found it helpful.[11] “That’s what Buddhism teaches you,” he explained in an interview later. “You’re OK. If you want to be cool, be cool. If you want to be crazy, be crazy. There’s no gods, no demons to blame for your condition. Nobody controls your life but you.”[12] Once he returned to Chicago, he started studying the Jodo Shinshu tradition of Buddhism with the Reverend Gyoko Saito, and also pursued training in aikido with Fumio Toyoda Shihan. He continued these practices after relocating to New York in 1982 and eventually traveled to Kyoto, Japan, in 1990, to be ordained as a Jodo Shinshu priest. Upon his return he founded the Brooklyn Buddhist Association and the Jikishinkan (“direct mind”) aikido dojo, which became so central to his activities that in 1993 he took a temporary hiatus from the Art Ensemble. As Thulani Davis points out in her Foreword, the sensibility of “oneness” or “suchness” that suffuses many passages in Black Case (“Whats to say / is nothing”) originates in this longstanding commitment.
In the prefatory note to Black Case Jarman adds that when he started writing, he also started reading “the Great Black Masters who were my contemporaries.” Along with Thulani Nkabinde (Davis),[13] Jarman cites the poets Amus Mor and Henry Dumas, two pre-eminent lights of the Black Arts Movement. Jarman would later describe Dumas’s mystical Afro-futurist poetry and short stories as a “principal inspiration for me,” and in 1979 he even recorded one of Dumas’s poems, “Black Paladins,” with its bold declarative tone (“We shall be riding dragons in those days / … we shall shoot words / with hooves that kick clouds… / in those days / we shall be terrible”).[14] The second section of the 1975 concert documented in Black Case is an “homage” to Dumas, and in 1982, Jarman presented another evening-length performance called “Liberation Suite” dedicated to Dumas.[15]
A legendary if somewhat mysterious figure on the Chicago scene, poet Amus Mor (also known as David Moore or Amus Moore) was an early member of the AACM who performed with Jarman on multiple occasions in the mid-1960s.[16] Although Jarman doesn’t name a source for the numerous comparisons of the cosmic force of Great Black Music to “sun” or “light”—as when one fragment voices a longing “to see heaven again in the eyes of black masses / dancing to the SUN music i am given / to create,” or when the mythical Odawalla comes to save “the people of the Sun”—it seems quite possible that he may have derived this metaphor from Mor’s work. Mor is featured on “The Bird Song,” the track that takes up the entire second side of pianist Muhal Richard Abrams’s first album, Levels and Degrees of Light (1968), and the poem he reads concludes with the following unforgettable benediction: “And the children of the sun, you special ones, watching a primadawn at the end of armageddon, in your abodes, beneath the living light, you’ve won your love.”[17]
The full range of tutelary references scattered through Black Case makes a fascinating list of names, not only other black writers and musicians such as the poet Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), the Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola, Muhal Richard Abrams, and the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, but also the aikido teacher Koichi Tohei, the meditation guru Paramahansa Yogananda, and the activist and journalist Robert Taber.[18] Given that Jarman’s composition “Dreaming of the Master” would later become one of the most recognizable tunes associated with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, eventually coming to serve as a sort of catch-phrase to name an entire series of their tribute records,[19] it seems worth pausing to consider the implications of the figure of the “master” in Black Case. It is first invoked in regard to the prophetic role of musicians:
Take a close look at the masters and you will see that all through our history, the history of Great Black Music, the masters have had ways about them, not only to “play” fantastic Soundmovement, but were able to reach many people through their work; this is because the people knew WHAT the masters were doing for them – giving knowledge and blessings.
This alternative tradition of mastery rejects the conventional sources of authority in the West: if “the object” is “to create / a music / from the sources of all life,” one poem counsels, “we must go away / from this western land / must seek the thought / of spirits of masters / of life.” As in the prayer that opens Black Case, at times the master is figured as a deity, but never one associated with a particular monotheistic tradition. Instead the term represents the power of the divine within each individual human being: “the master (ONEGOD) watches / (listen to the voice of GOD inside of you).”
In Black Case, the achievement of mastery represents not an individual monopoly on insight, but instead an attunement to the principle of community, the force in the music that breaks down the “real distance between us” to reassert “the facts of / our togetherness.” What one hears in the music, according to one poem early in the first volume, is “a long / short dream as our hearts are / facts we feel again / the masters teaching / ‘love one another’.” At times it seems framed as an aspiration, as though the goal of the creative artist should be to join the company of the masters:
of music
the bell ringing across the universe
timbre for the ear inside the ear
of ourselves
and i joseph am
among them the masters
we will become of the voice
the bell that is music ringing
vital to every living thing
But a few lines later, we are reminded that “our object,” the true goal, is to evacuate the sovereign ego: “to / be / air / only.” Another fragment later in the book makes it clear that as much as Jarman’s work seems to invoke an inspirational pantheon of great men, it ultimately represents the renunciation of individual mastery in the interest of collective engagement—which of course seems altogether appropriate given Jarman’s Buddhism and the collaborative ethos of the Art Ensemble. He writes:
why must i become
“a master” – of anything
when all sound all movement
springs from the same
breath. it is my choice
to remain the unknowing
child – to know not if
its good or bad – this music!
In addition to Amus Mor, Jarman met a number of innovative poets in the period when he was just starting to write, including LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Allen Ginsberg.[20] Baraka in particular is invoked by name in two of Jarman’s most enduring single works, “Erika” and “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City.” The avowed influence notwithstanding, Jarman’s poetics achieves a noticeably different tone from the inflammatory aesthetic of the poems Baraka was likewise recording a few years earlier with musicians associated with the “new music,” especially his provocative “Black Dada Nihilismus” and “Black Art.”[21] As journalist Adam Shatz has observed, Jarman’s work is “quieter and more delicate.”[22] This quality is especially evident in “Erika,” Jarman’s spare and unvarnished but incomparably tender portrait of a “little rebellious girl” and her parents, who were friends of Jarman’s in Chicago:
child of our uncharted microtones
thrown through the dawn the maze of
longing
as she matures in Black America
the Panther, paying homage to the people
torn with gun, television hero
gone to madness –
seeking the answer
can we………….endure [23]
Or as J. B. Figi put it, if the music of Jarman and his AACM contemporaries is marked by “anger,” it is a “honed controlled anger”; beyond that particular emotion and its inherent limitations, their art evokes “a whole wheel of human emotions.”[24]
*
At the end of Black Case, Jarman includes a cursory discography of what he describes as “the ‘music-words’ that have been recorded,” meaning, versions of several texts in the book that he recorded on various albums. As signaled by his concoction of the arresting compound noun “music-words,” Jarman has an unusual understanding of the relation between language and music, which he does not considers as separate media but instead along a sort of continuum of expression: both carry sonic qualities as well as semantic content. Music and words are “two aspects of the same thing,” Jarman told the journalist John Pareles.
When we speak, we make music—we talk loud and we talk softly; we talk quickly and we talk slowly. Music is language. It has been said that it’s the language of the gods. We forget this because we’re so busy concentrating on one aspect or the other.[25]
Although Black Case’s discography includes musical settings of three poems (“Whats to say”; “As If It Were the Seasons”; and “The Lonely Child”), in fact only one of these recordings is a musical performance in the usual sense: the version of “As If It Were the Seasons” sung by Sherri Scott on Jarman’s second album, As If It Were the Seasons (1968).[26] The other recordings listed are recitations with musical accompaniment.[27]
Jarman manuscript courtesy Thulani Davis
There is also an entire category of recordings titled after poems in Black Case that are purely instrumental performances.[28] In his discography, Jarman simply refers to these as “music only,” but the intriguing implication is that these instrumental performances somehow capture the full texts even when they do not include the language at all. Reading Black Case, in other words, one might compare a given text with its cognate performance, reading “Whats to say” while listening to the bright and bustling version of the tune on the Art Ensemble’s Fanfare for the Warriors, or comparing the “hip facts” of “Reese and the Smooth Ones” with the insouciant 1970 album of the same name. Beyond the astonishingly bold conflation of media, we might also note the Art Ensemble’s unflinching collaborative spirit, since on the album, compositional credit for “Reese” is given to Roscoe Mitchell, and “The Smooth Ones” is credited to Lester Bowie. Apparently the impetus could go the other way, too, since Mitchell’s instrumental composition “Odwalla” inspired Jarman to write his poem “ODAWALLA,” which the group subsequently recorded (to different musical accompaniment).[29] And as I mentioned earlier, sometimes individual phrases in Black Case—rather than stand-alone poems—seem to have inspired Art Ensemble compositions, too, as with “Dreaming of the Master” and the book’s announcement of its “message to our folks.”[30]
There are a number of examples of jazz musicians, including Sun Ra and Marion Brown, who have taken a similar stance regarding the relationship between music and language.[31] In 1965, John Coltrane told two French interviewers that “from time to time” he wrote poems as the basis for his instrumental compositions, noting that a number of the tunes on his 1964 album Crescent, including “Wise One,” “Lonnie’s Lament,” and “The Drum Thing,” started out as poetic compositions.[32] But there is an especially radical degree of confluence between words and music in the cross-fertilization between Jarman’s Black Case and its cognate recordings and performances.
This perspective is first of all a rejection of disciplinary limits and an insistence on open-ended exploration. As Jarman puts it in one fragment:
I seek new sounds
because new sounds
seek me
Why, please tell me
must i limit myself
to a saxophone or clarinet![33]
More broadly, it is related to the radical intermedial impulses of Jarman’s work with the Art Ensemble. Paul Steinbeck has offered the insightful observation that in the group’s performance methodologies,
verbal and vocal intermedia are just two components of a much larger toolkit for group improvisation. Sometimes musical sounds prompt other sounds, and texts inspire vocal or verbal replies. In other moments, the band members respond to a suggestive chord with spoken dialogue, or greet the reading of a poem with an eruption of instrumental music.[34]
To see words and music as part of this “much larger toolkit” is to recognize that this element is linked to the commitment to theater (implying not only language and sound, but also character, costume, dance, spacing, and visual aesthetics) that represents another key thread in Black Case, as well as in the “soundmovement” of the Art Ensemble. The sections about theater in the book are not simply archival documents, but guides to what may be the ultimate multimedia art form for Jarman. In the end, as the book declares, theater is the main tool we must use “to kick down / the / walls / of our own creation,” our ingrained modes of self-delusion and alienated practices. “I’ve always been interested in blending all the elements,” Jarman told one interviewer. He found confirmation for his approach in a trip to Marrakesh, Morocco, where he witnessed performances that combined music, dance, poetry, and painting. In other cultures, Jarman said, “all of these things are blended in together. Only here, because of the illusion of intellectualism, our society separates the validity of human expression.”[35]
In the Art Ensemble, Jarman told a journalist in the 1980s, “a lot of the paraphernalia of theater comes out of my ideas.” He continued:
When I was a student in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, street theater and Beat culture were in vogue, and later in the 60’s political theater was a great influence, as our people became conscious of the necessity of getting our message across outside the privately owned media. We’d play concerts on the street corner, and people would come up who would never see a concert otherwise.
When you hear music, you see it, too. I remember back in the 50’s, when Miles Davis came to town in his Italian suits, we’d go just to check him out – and oh, by the way, he played trumpet.[36]
In other words, their aim as performers was to present “a total expression that an audience has to approach with greater involvement than merely listening.”[37] As an aesthetic manifesto, Black Case might be described as the definitive articulation of this approach.[38]
Although the texts in Black Case were written in (and invoke) “many cities in America and in Europe,” as Jarman writes in the prefatory note, the subtitle “Return from Exile” refers to internal alienation rather than to a distancing from a birthplace or national homeland. But the book also subtly explores the dynamic between physical mobility in every sense and the costs of spiritual and political self-transformation. In the 1974 edition, one sees clearly that the photo of Jarman both on the cover and on the prefatory page is actually Jarman’s passport photo: in other words, these are pages that allow him to travel—that let him “make the changes” from one state to the next.
When Thulani Davis and I were discussing this remarkable book, she wondered if there was some significance in the fact that Jarman kept the majority of his manuscripts in a leather tote bag. (Another AACM contemporary, Henry Threadgill, remembers vividly that when he first met Jarman in 1962 in the cafeteria at Wilson Junior College in Chicago, Jarman was sitting alone at a table eating lunch with a briefcase sitting on the floor next to him.[39]) After all, what does it mean, Black Case? A case study, clearly: an indictment of the “Amerikan nightmare,” as well as an ongoing lament for the “people in sorrow”—and perhaps a “path to the light.” At the same time, in its autobiographical elements, the book compiles a personal case, too, a sort of symptomology: “and so these words / the / poem to say it / how ‘i’ happen / to be this fact / light, eyes a tear for the children / of the universe.” And it is likewise a case in the sense of an argument: a volume of dispersed notes and fragments that somehow succeeds in articulating a singular philosophy of music. But to think of the title also as an allusion to the bag is to think of Black Case as a figure for the form of the book itself: loose manuscript pages cradled in black leather, packed and ready for the voyage home.
Brent Hayes Edwards is an award-winning author, translator, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
[1] In addition to autobiographies by major figures including Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus (New York: Knopf, 1971) and Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Da Capo, 1973), the decade saw the publication of a number of collections of poetry and music theory, such as Sun Ra, The Immeasurable Equation (Chicago: Ihnfinity Inc. / Saturn Research, 1972); Leo Smith, Notes (8 Pieces) Source: A New World Music: Creative Music (n.p.: Leo Smith, 1973); Yusef Lateef, Kenneth Barron, Albert Heath, and Robert Cunningham, Something Else: Writing of the Yusef Lateef Quartet (New York: Autophysiopsychic Partnership, 1973); Marion Brown, Afternoon of a Georgia Faun: Views and Reviews (n.p.: Nia Music, 1973); Marion Brown, “Faces and Places: The Music and Travels of a Contemporary Jazz Musician” (MA thesis, Wesleyan University, 1976); Oliver Lake, Life Dance (New York: Africa Pub. Co., 1979); Marion Brown, Recollections: Essays, Drawings, Miscellanea (Frankfurt: Juergen A. Schmitt Publikationen, 1984). On writings by jazz musicians more broadly, see Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).
[2] Thulani Davis, email correspondence, 30 July 2019.
[3] Other early AACM statements include Muhal Richard Abrams and John Shenoy Jackson, “The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians,” Black World 21, no. 1 (1973): 72–4; Smith, Notes. It is worth noting that the first published organizational document of the Association may be the statement of “AACM purposes” in Jarman’s liner notes for his second album, As If It Were The Seasons (Delmark Records DS-417, 1968). The definitive history of the AACM is George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Regarding Jarman’s career and his work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago in particular, the other indispensable sources are Paul Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Lincoln T. Beauchamp, Jr., Art Ensemble Of Chicago: Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future (Chicago: Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing, 1998). Page references to Black Case will be provided parenthetically in the text.
[4] J. B. Figi, “Art Ensemble of Chicago,” Sundance (November–December 1972): 44.
[5] Jarman, “AACM History: Interview with Leo Smith,” tape recording, January 2, 1981, collection of Shaku Joseph Jarman, cited in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, xxiv.
[6] Paul Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 22.
[7] Paul Steinbeck, “The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s ‘Get in Line’: Politics, Theatre, and Play,” Twentieth-Century Music 10, no. 1 (March 2013): 12.
[8] Figi, “Art Ensemble of Chicago,” 44. As Paul Steinbeck has noted, this experience seems to have provided the inspiration for “Get in Line,” the memorable Art Ensemble piece composed by Roscoe Mitchell that offers a satirical portrayal of conscription and the soul-warping demands of military discipline. Art Ensemble of Chicago, “Get in Line,” A Jackson in Your House (BYG Actuel Records 529.302, 1969).
[9] Figi, 44.
[10] Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 21.
[11] Barefoot Doctor, “Wonderful World: Joseph Jarman,” Straight No Chaser 2, no. 9 (Spring 2000): 22.
[12] Jarman, quoted in Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 23.
[13] In addition to the personal history Thulani Davis gives, it is worth noting the discographical traces of their collaboration as well: soon after they met, Jarman recorded his composition “Thulani” as a guest on Frank Lowe’s album Black Beings (ESP Disk ESP-3013, 1973), and a few years later Thulani wrote a poem that appeared as the liner notes for the duet album by Jarman and Don Moye titled Egwu-Anwu (Song Song) (India Navigation 1033, 1978).
[14] Jarman describes Dumas’s influence in his interview with Ted Panken: “Joseph Jarman Profile,” Feb. 15, 1987, WKCR radio broadcast, transcription available at https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/in-honor-of-joseph-jarmans-74th-birthday-a-wkcr-interview-from-1987/. Jarman, Johnny Dyani, and Don Moye, Black Paladins (Black Saint BSR 0042, 1979).
[15] John Pareles, “Multimedia Jazzman from Chicago,” New York Times (Aug. 13, 1982): C6; John Rockwell, “Jazz: Joseph Jarman’s Multimedia ‘Liberation Suite,’” New York Times (August 16, 1982): C16.
[16] On Mor’s participation in the AACM, see George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 124. He never published a full-length collection; his best-known published works are the two poems (“Poem to the Hip Generation” and “The Coming of John”) included in BlackSpirits: A Festival of New Black Poets in America, ed. Woodie King (New York: Random House, 1972), 134–141. Mor’s reading of the first of these poems on the concert album that led to this anthology gives an excellent sense of his riveting delivery and exceptional charisma, as well as what Jarman terms his “boppish realism”: “The Hip Men,” BlackSpirits: A Festival of New Black Poets in America (Black Forum B 456L, 1972).
Mor participated in concerts by Jarman on at least two occasions: he read poetry for the “Winter Playground” concert Jarman gave at the University of Chicago at the end of 1965, and he also read as part of “Hollows Ecliptic” at the Abraham Lincoln Center on the South Side in January 1967. See Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 55; and John Litweiler, “Fanfare for the Warrior: Remembering Joseph Jarman,” Point of Departure 67 (2019), available online at http://www.pointofdeparture.org/PoD67/PoD67Jarman.html.
[17] “The Bird Song,” Muhal Richard Abrams, Levels and Degrees of Light (Delmark Records DS-413, 1968). In invoking “the children of the sun” in these lines, Amus Mor may be alluding to a much longer tradition in black nationalist thought, going back at least as far as George Wells Parker’s pamphlet The Children of the Sun (Omaha, NB: The Hamitic League of the World, 1918; reprint Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1981), an extended argument that world civilization originated in Africa. One might also point to the Harlem Renaissance writer Fenton Johnson’s well-known poem of the same name: “Children of the Sun,” in The Book of American Negro Poetry, ed. James Weldon Johnson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 117–18.
[18] Jarman includes a quotation from Taber’s The War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare (New York: L. Stuart, 1965).
[19] Jarman’s composition “Dreaming of the Master” first appeared on the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nice Guys (ECM 1126, 1979). At the end of the next decade, the group recorded a series of tribute albums using the phrase (now in the plural) as an umbrella title: Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Ancient To The Future: Dreaming Of The Masters Series Vol. 1 (DIW 804, 1987); Art Ensemble of Chicago with Cecil Taylor, Dreaming of the Masters Suite Vol. 2: Thelonious Monk (DIW 846, 1991); Art Ensemble of Chicago, Dreaming of the Masters Suite: Music Inspired by and Dedicated to John Coltrane (DIW 854, 1991).
[20] Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 111.
[21] Amiri Baraka, “Black Art,” on Sonny Murray, Sonny’s Time Now (Jihad 663, 1965); and “Black Dada Nihilismus,” New York Art Quartet and Imanu Amiri Baraka (ESP Disk 1004, 1965).
[22] Adam Shatz, “New Sounds,” London Review of Books Blog (January 28, 2019), online at https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/january/new-sounds.
[23] Steinbeck, interview with Jarman, quoted in Message to Our Folks, 111.
[24] J. B. Figi, “Chicago/Wild Onions,” CHANGE 2 (Spring-Summer 1966): 21.
[25] Pareles, “Multimedia Jazzman from Chicago,” New York Times (Aug. 13, 1982): C6.
[26] “As If It Were the Seasons,” on Jarman, As If It Were the Seasons (Delmark Records S-417, 1968).
[27] Here is full discographical information for the recordings that feature recitations of poetry from Black Case:
“Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City” (page 128 in Black Case), Jarman, Song For (Delmark Records DD 410, 1966);
“Erika” (85), Art Ensemble of Chicago, A Jackson in Your House (BYG Actuel 529-302, 1969);
“Including Circles” (95), recorded as “Morning, including Circles,” Jarman and Anthony Braxton, Together Alone (Delmark DS-428 1974);
“Odawalla” (79-80), included in “Illistrum,” Art Ensemble of Chicago, Fanfare for the Warriors (Atlantic SD 1651, 1974);
“Lonely Child,” Don Pullen, Joseph Jarman, and Don Moye, The Magic Triangle (Black Saint BSR 0038, 1979).
[28] Here is discographical information for the instrumental recordings based on poems in Black Case:
“People in Sorrow” (71, 72), Art Ensemble of Chicago, People in Sorrow (Nessa N-3, 1969);
“Reese and the Smooth Ones” (102-103), Art Ensemble of Chicago, Reese and the Smooth Ones (Actuel 529.329, 1970);
“Odwalla” (79-80), Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Bap-tizum (Atlantic SD 1639, 1973);
“Whats to say” (36, 93), Art Ensemble of Chicago, Fanfare For The Warriors (Atlantic 1651, 1974);
“Erika” (85), included in “A to Ericka,” The Art Ensemble 1967/68 (Nessa Records ncd-2500, 1993);
“Erika” (85), recorded as “Ericka,” Roscoe Mitchell, Nonaah (Nessa Records n-9/10, 1977).
[29] Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 259.
[30] Works in this category include:
“Dreaming of the Master,” Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nice Guys (ECM 1126, 1979);
“Message to Our Folks” (104), Art Ensemble of Chicago, Message to Our Folks (BYG Actuel 529.328, 1969).
[31] See Edwards, Epistrophies, 131, 184–85.
[32] Michel Delorme & Claude Lenissois, interview with John Coltrane, Jazz Hot (September 1965), translated by David Sinclair, CHANGE 2 (Spring-Summer 1966): 67. See also Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 244–48, which includes Coltrane’s poetic text for his instrumental composition “Psalm” on his album A Love Supreme.
[33] This perspective is echoed in another book by an alto saxophonist published in the same period, Oliver Lake’s Life Dance, where he writes: “NO SEPARATION…. Yeah, don’t put me in no bag…. / i’m open, may do anything / PUT ALL MY FOOD ON THE SAME PLATE!” Lake, “Separation,” Life Dance (New York: Africa Pub. Co., 1979), 40.
[34] Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 108.
[35] “Joseph Jarman,” interview by Jason Gross, Furious Sound Forever (October 1999), online at www.furious.com/perfect/jarman.html.
[36] Pareles, “Multimedia Jazzman from Chicago.”
[37] Bill Quinn, “Caught in the Act: Joseph Jarman,” Down Beat (March 9, 1967): 28, quoted in Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself, 153.
[38] Black Case includes another poem, “Bridge Piece” (114–122) that may be the text from one of Jarman’s largest multimedia pieces of the same name, presented at the Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago in February 1968. As Paul Steinbeck describes it: “When audience members arrived at the performance, they were ‘directed into areas where they would have to sit down or stand up.’ Some had to put sacks over their hands, and others were draped with tinfoil. There were strobe lights, video projections, a smoke machine, and performing artists who circulated amid the audience: a juggler, a tumbler, and someone carrying a portable radio tuned to a Top 40 station.” See Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks, 57–8.
[39] Conversation with Henry Threadgill, 24 January 2019.