Robert O'Meally,
editor of
Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings
While Ralph Ellison will forever be best remembered as author of the classic
American novel of identity, Invisible Man, he also contributed significant
essays on jazz that stand as compelling testaments to his era. His
work included an homage to Duke Ellington, stinging critiques of Charlie
Parker and Miles Davis, and recognition of the changing-of-the-guard taking
place at Harlem's Minton's in the 1940's. He wrote on musical topics
from flamenco to Charlie Christian, and from Jimmy Rushing to Mahalia Jackson.
"I teach a class (at Columbia University) on jazz in American culture", editor
Robert O'Meally told us. "For years now I have put together a handout
for my students that consists of Ellison's writings on music. About five
years ago, it struck me that that stack of Xerox's was the best book on jazz
I knew." So, O'Meally went to Modern Books and set about compiling
Ellison's essays on jazz music that now exist between the covers of Living
with Music, a practical introduction to the musical intelligence of one
of America's greatest literary minds.
In our exclusive interview, O'Meally discusses Ellison's work, his views
on bebop, his reach across a generation in impacting Ken Burns' documentary
on jazz, and on Juneteenth, Ellison's posthumously issued second novel.
_______________________________
A Sampling of Interview Topics
Robert O'Meally's background
The genesis of "Living with
Music"
Ellison's turn from music
to writing
A "jazz-based" America
T.S. Eliot and Louis Armstrong
Ellison's view of bebop
Musical "masters of ecstacy"
Armstrong's "poetry out
of invisibility"
Ellison's view of Charlie
Parker
Ellison's influence on
Ken Burns' "Jazz"
The legacy of Ralph Ellison
Ellison's
posthumously released novel "Juneteenth"
Sound samples relating
to the interview
Ralph Ellison |
In the swift whirl of time music is a constant, reminding us of what we were and of that toward which we aspire. Art thou troubled? Music will not only calm, it will ennoble thee. - Ralph Ellison
_______________________________
Robert
O'Meally's background
JJM What is your background?
ROM I am a professor of literature in the English
Department at Columbia University and I have been on that trail most of my
life, which has led to a specialty in American literature and African-American
literature. Along the way, studying Ralph Ellison, led me to think about
the relation of music to literature and to recall part of my own background
as a fledgling, amateur musician. I played a little bit in high school and
into college. I grew up in a household where my parents were pretty good
piano players who also had a very good record collection. So, I grew up in
an era where music was very important. As a college student, the impact of
Ellison's work was very strong on me. I could "reclaim" a part of my own
heritage, as somebody who likes music and knows something about it.
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
ROM I grew up in the 60's, so I was dancing to
the Motown stuff, and James Brown. I liked Maceo Parker in Brown's band,
the way he could dance with the alto saxophone. My real hero was Johnny Hodges,
Duke Ellington's famous alto soloist. When I was in the band, I was probably
the only teenager within 1000 miles trying to make his horn sound like Johnny
Hodges. I used to go hear the Ellington band, and when they came to town,
to me, it was Johnny Hodges coming to town. It took me quite a while to begin
to listen beyond the solo slot and realize Ellington had a pretty good band
going too!
The
genesis of "Living with Music"
JJM How did you come to be the editor of this collection
of essays by Ralph Ellison, Living With Music?
ROM As I mentioned, I am an English professor.
Every time I give a course that touches on Ellison or on jazz in American
literature - I teach a class on jazz in American culture - for years now
I have put together a handout for my students that consists of Ellison's
writings on music. About five years ago, it struck me that that stack of
Xerox's was the best book on jazz I knew. So, I went to Modern Library and
we began talking about what a volume of Ellison's music writings might consist
of. I was sure that Ellison was right in the league with Whitney Balliett
and Albert Murray and perhaps beyond them, as arguably the most eloquent
writer that jazz has ever had. That's really where it began, but I have been
playing music when I taught Invisible Man for 25 years, and thinking
about the relationship of people like Johnny Hodges and Ellington and others
to writing. It was clear to me that somewhere along that line that Ellison,
who had been a musician who wanted to be a composer as a youngster, knew
what he was doing when he was writing about these musicians. He was writing
from the point of view of someone who had been on the bandstand and who tried
to make it as a musician himself.
Ellison's
turn from music to writing
JJM What event in his life turned him away from
seeking a career as a trumpet player and toward that of being a writer?
ROM Well, it didn't happen all in one day, I don't
think. He was a music major in college during the depression, and he had
come to New York from Alabama to try to get to work as a trumpet player,
and he found there were a lot of good trumpet players in New York at that
time. He couldn't get any work, which is part of the story. The other thing
is that on that trip to New York, he met Richard Wright, who was then barely
known as a writer, and Wright encouraged Ellison to write a review for the
magazine Wright was editing. Ellison said that once he found himself putting
something on to the page, he felt hooked almost right away. Wright invited
him to write a short story for the magazine, and that was it. Ellison put
his trumpet away right away and said he wouldn't go on any more professional
gigs for fear that he would be diverted from his new career, which was trying
to make the music happen in language.
Richard Wright |
JJM His first essay on music was on flamenco
music…
ROM Yes, that's right. In the 50's he was invited
by Saturday Review to do pieces for them. He had already published
Invisible Man. Ellison had been in Europe, and he loved flamenco for
some time, and got to witness some flamenco players, and felt that they were
so close to the blues that he wrote wonderfully about flamenco as also a
music of undefeated, oppressed people, made by people who like to swing and
like to have a good time. It wasn't for people to come and clap politely,
it was a music that you needed to be a part of. He knew what that meant,
as someone who had been to the Savoy Ballroom and places like that. So that
really began a series of pieces for the Saturday Review, and one for
Esquire, which add up to a very good series which is, as I say, the
best book on jazz I know.
A "jazz-based"
America
JJM He referred to America as a "still forming nation
in a state of relative nakedness," and he also observed that American life
is "jazz-based." What did he mean by American life being "jazz-based?"
ROM I think what he meant was that not only had
jazz been America's popular music for quite a while, but even beyond that
period of the 30's and the 40's, something about the music formed a soundtrack
of American life through the century. What he means by that is that this
music that depends on improvisation, and depends on individual assertions,
and soloing, and that depends on listening to those in the group around you,
really expresses a superior form of democracy at its best . To be a member
of the Basie band, you had to sit and listen to others play, then you had
to stand up and be yourself. This is the American way of asserting your own
individuality while honoring and feeling responsible for the people around
you.
JJM You edited another book that touches on this
a little, called Jazz Cadence in American Culture, that touches on
what you described as Ellison's definition of America being "jazz-based."
One essay that I chuckled at a little relates American architecture
in the 20's and 30's to jazz, and I can picture that easily in my head and
understand the corelation…
ROM Ann Douglas writes about this, and she said
that you look at Manhattan and the kind of strong backbeat of those streets
crossing one another…You think of that as the rhythm section and think
of the spires shooting up as a solo line of Gillespie's, and you have a sense
of what she meant when she agreed with Ellison that America is shaped by
jazz.
JJM Ellison said, "I am not particularly religious
but I am claimed by music." His wife, Fanny, said "When he can't find the
words at the typewriter, he goes upstairs and plays the trumpet." How was
music a model and such a deep influence on him as a writer? You keep
hearing how he writes "rhythmically" and I keep relating that to Jack
Kerouac…
ROM Kerouac is another great example of somebody
for which jazz was a model. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) was another who says
that everything he writes has what he calls a "musical insistence." In Ellison's
case, I think he was trying to write rhythmically, I think he presents jazz
characters as heroic guides to the young men trying to find their way he
writes about. He says that when you run into someone who knows a lot about
jazz, then you have run into someone who is very wise. The other part that
I think is fascinating is that as a musician who was trained classically
but could also play jazz, he knew that it took more than a broken heart to
play the blues. It took more than just sincerity and good intentions to write
a novel. He went about trying to do so studying and practicing. He liked
Hemingway, so he would take a Hemingway story that he liked and he would
copy it out in long hand, just as he would playing a tune or a Bach piece,
over and over again to get the music in his fingers. So, he thought that
music as a kind of model for American society and the musicians were heroic
Americans. But also the discipline of the musicians was heroic.
T.S.
Eliot and Louis Armstrong
JJM He connected music with literature really early
on, in fact, he was deeply influenced by T.S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland,"
and he made a connection between Eliot's poem and the "rowdy poetic flights
of Louis Armstrong."
ROM I love that phrase.
T.S. Eliot |
JJM He was quoted as saying this about the "The
Wasteland." "Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than
were those of the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand them,
its range of allusion was as mixed and varied as Louis Armstrong." Much as
Ellison's writings were rhythmic, what I am wondering about is…He left
his readers in a similar position as not being able to necessarily understand
what he was writing, particularly when he would get into this stream of
consciousness writing so prevalent in Juneteenth. Is he a difficult
writer to connect with?
ROM Well, I think he tried so hard to throw out
a line to the readers, quite literally, but he is a writer who says, "You
are coming to my book, I worked hard to write this book, I want you to work
hard to read it." I read Invisible Man when I was in high school,
and lord knows what I was getting out of it, but the story line pulled me
forward. When I read it five years later, it knocked me dead, because it
was all this commentary about American history, references to Melville and
Poe and Richard Wright. I think he is a difficult writer, particularly in
Juneteenth, because he knows so much and wanted to write the Great
American Novel, to carry you along the story line, but he also wants to tell
you everything he knows. I think it's a tremendously demanding thing he asks
of his reader, but I think the reward is that you can read it the rest of
your life, and the more you know, the more you are able to draw from what
he has written.
JJM I think he could make a case that Invisible
Man is the Great American Novel. Enough people would people would get
on that side…
ROM I get students from Korea and Pakistan and
Africa, coming to me saying that they felt like the "Invisible Man" or "Invisible
Woman" when they came to America. They identify with the green-horn in society,
trying to figure out what to hold on to as they move forward. I think that
the metaphor for invisibility is one for Americans but also for modern times.
As you move around, you are starting over, no matter country you are starting
from.
JJM I guess it's more of a book about trying to
find one's own identity in difficult circumstances...
ROM Ellison said that the question for the
American writer is a question of identity - that our society moves so quickly,
that there are so many different kinds of people, that you are not able to
just depend on who your father or who your mother was - you have to start
over, and answer what is going to be your career, where you live, who are
you? And nowadays, when that definition can change, people take several jobs
during a lifetime, it's an ongoing process of figuring out who you are.
Ellison's
view of bebop
JJM Let's shift a bit to the music…Ralph Ellison
wrote this about bebop. "The world evoked by this music is a different world.
The music here is more abstract. It has become seperated from the ritual
form of dance and the vocal definitions once supplied by song are missing.
More important, the response of its audience is more intellectual. Indeed,
it is mainly intellectual, and thus its participation is less immediate."
At one point, Ellison even referred to bebop as "decadent intellectualism."
Did Ellison feel as if bebop contributed to the fall of jazz as much as,
say, the appearance of Elvis Presley?
ROM I would say that Ellison was a man of his own
era and of his own place. He grew up in Oklahoma City, where blues-based,
danceable, roadhouse and public dance music was the same. After he moved
to New York, he went to the Savoy Ballroom once or twice a week. That was
his music. Big band, with all the colors, and the blues always close in sight.
So, for him, the small groups drawn from the big bands were never as interesting.
Once the small groups took over for a variety of social and artistic reasons,
the clubs hired these few musicians in smaller groups, he wasn't as interested.
He felt that once the dance wasn't there, it wasn't the community institution
as it was when the dance was involved. I think he was put off by the solos
he felt went on too long. I don't think he felt jazz ever died, but I think
he felt it was a false move.
JJM There seems to be something bordering on anger
in his writing on bebop. He comes to the defense of Louis Armstrong when
answering critics who felt Armstrong's stage clowning embodied "Uncle Tom
behavior." Ellison makes a case that Dizzy Gillespie's stage antics,
or Miles Davis' performances of indifferences were also a means of "selling
out." He defends Armstrong further with the viewpoint that at least Armstrong
was determined to keep his music "deeply meaningful and swinging." How did
the musicians of the bebop era, of Charlie Parker's era, feel about Ralph
Ellison?
ROM I have to say that while Ellison kept in touch
with people he knew from the Basie band and from his own southwest travels,
and Teddy Wilson, who he knew from his Tuskeegee connection, I doubt very
seriously if Charlie Parker ever heard of Ralph Ellison.
JJM Good point. Parker was pretty preoccupied with
other things in his life…
ROM Gillespie was a reader and he probably was
listening carefully. He always was putting together a big band of his own,
and did get above Armstrong in his own way. I wouldn't be surprised to learn
that Gillespie was a little annoyed at Ellison putting down bebop, but also
intrigued by his defense of Louis Armstrong, who he also loved. Gillespie
knew very well that Armstrong was nobody's Uncle Tom, and when you go on
stage, you are supposed to make the audience happy.
JJM I think what Ellison was defending, as you mentioned
earlier, was the ritual of the dance. Bebop threatened the ritual.
ROM It's ironic, because Ellison's critics,
especially early on, accused him of being overly intellectual, trying to
put too much in every paragraph. But Ellison did feel it was possible to
go too far with intellectuality and away from the gutsy root of the art form.
I think you are right, that once bodies aren't moving on the floor, and once
singer's voices aren't part of the ritual, they lost something. In Washington,
D.C., where I grew up, people did a dance called "the bop", and it certainly
was possible to dance to the music, but it was much more difficult than it
had been. I think that the main thing here is that we have a man from a different
generation who is hearing the music as noisy - not as noisy as Elvis - I
am sure he didn't care for Elvis. He might have said "well, the blues are
in there." Ellison loved Ray Charles…
JJM Yes. Someone asked Ellison what he thought of
Ornette Coleman and he shunned Coleman's work and went into a discussion
of what Ray Charles was doing.
ROM Yes, he said if you peel back those layers
of blues by Ray Charles has much more complexity in there than anybody suspects.
Ellison wants the complexity but is afraid that it can kind of run overboard
and become self-indulgent. That is another word that he would use for the
beboppers. In the case of Coleman, Ellison preferred players with a big tone,
lyrical players, like Johnny Hodges and Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster,
and here comes Ornette Coleman, with this stove-pipe sound, that more brittle
kind of sound, and Ellison didn't hear the bluesiness.
JJM Well, it's as shocking to somebody that grew
up in a different era as rap is to me as a person who grew up listening to
R&B and rock and roll. It does take some getting used to…
ROM It's one of the funny things for me, in this
book Living with Music…When I interviewed him in the mid-70's,
Ellison was telling me about watching the TV show Soul Train, and
somehow the image of the man who wrote Invisible Man propped in front
of the TV watching Soul Train struck me as being very funny. Not
surprisingly, he didn't care for what he saw. He thought that the kids weren't
dancing with each other, they were dancing to be seen by the camera. With
no band there, he thought they were trying to have a relationship with a
machine. Of course, it's not as interesting.
Musical
"masters of ecstacy"
JJM In his notes to the novel Juneteenth,
he wrote, "A great religious leader is a master of ecstacy. He evokes emotions
that move beyond the rational on to the mystical. A jazz musician does something
the same. By his manipulation of sound and rhythm he releases movements and
emotions which allow for the transcendence of everyday reality." I thought
that was very cool. To me, I think of someone like John Coltrane as a "master
of ecstacy," especially the way he relates his music to this whole religious
concept. Who do you suppose were Ellison's "masters of ecstacy", in his view
musicians who moved their work from the "rational to the mystical?"
ROM That's a good question. Let me say before answering
it directly, that even when you are dealing with somebody that Ellison didn't
know, you can apply the terms that he used. That idea of "masters of ecstacy"
without question applies to A Love Supreme and so much of John Coltrane.
I think that Miles Davis' In a Silent Way has that same kind of sense
of epiphany. When you listen to My Funny Valentine by Miles, you get
goose pimples, and it's something like a religious sense that Miles is speaking
beyond. It's as if language wasn't adequate to say what he wants to say.
He was speaking beyond words. For Ellison, Jimmy Rushing would take him there.
He talks about a sense of communion that was achieved at dances by Rushing,
"Mr. 5 x 5", would achieve a certain level. It was an ecstatic modality,
taking what he calls a "communion of dancers" off into this other realm.
I think he also talks about Ellington's as a band through which you could
hear the voice of God, especially if you didn't go to church. It struck him
that his mother, who was so religious that she never went to dances, told
him that she wanted him to be a musician like Ellington was. His mother discerned
this religious depth in Ellington's music. As for Louis Armstrong, there
is a great passage in the beginning of Invisible Man where he listens
and he hears a woman wailing a spiritual. I think what he is saying there
is that within "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?" there is a whole
history sounding, including a history of people praying for deliverance.
Armstrong's "poetry out of invisibility"
JJM Based on how much focus he puts on Armstrong
in Invisible Man and some of the essays that are compiled in the book,
I would have to put him there as well. In fact, of Armstrong, he once said
he "made poetry out of his invisibility." You sort of echo this when you
wrote that "Armstrong made the most out of having a freer hand in the creation
of his art form, precisely because white institutional powers failed to recognize
him as an artist." Can you explain that a little bit?
ROM People ask me what Ellison meant by the title,
"Invisible Man," and it's like asking, "What did Melville mean by the white
whale?" He meant so many different things by this metaphor. One thing, he
was referring to African-Americans who at that time were called by sociologists
marked for special treatment because of their high visibility - so they stood
out so much that they weren't as meltable into America's melting pot. Ellison
was playing with that and the fact that a racist never quite sees you for
what you are, there is an underestimation, and a blindness that goes with
that. There are lots of things like that that he meant, but also he meant
that if you are in a society where the powerful people don't take you seriously,
it can be an advantage in the sense that you can go off and practice and
do anything you want to do. You can experiment freely. Your invisibility
can make you freer to discover new modes of expression, and make you more
of an experimenter than the school marm or the official proctor ever would
have allowed. He talks about jazz as developing in academies but most
significantly in academies on the dance floor and in the jam sessions where
the musicians and the dancers set the standards higher than most schools
would allow. It's a funny irony that for him, invisibility is a shame, but
we might not have gotten Charlie Christian going off or Ellington or Parker
without this…
Ellison's
view of Charlie Parker
JJM Ellison wrote this about Parker. "For all of
its velocity, brilliance and imagination, there is in it a great deal of
loneliness, self deprecation and self pity. With this there is a quality
which seems to issue from its vibratoless tone the sound amateurish
ineffectuality as though he could never quite make it."
ROM Man, that's cold blooded.
JJM Yes, I can see this if he was talking about
some high school kid blowing an alto or something, but this is Charlie Parker
he is talking about here…
ROM I know, and I think Ellison was a fighter,
and he's defending Louis Armstrong against a Louis Armstrong detractor, and
I think he is also coming right into the face of people who love Parker and
saying, compare him with these huge toned players coming before him, and
it is not as rich a sound. I can't even fathom to tell you what Ellison was
saying here. I don't agree with him on that, because I am so moved by Parker.
For Ellison, the big band setting, where for one chorus, or half a chorus,
Johnny Hodges would come step up and take a chorus, that was enouugh. But
the idea that the saxophonist would step up before the audience and play
for half an hour, struck him as self-indulgent. So that's why Ellison called
it all the things he did, because he loved all the other things about jazz,
this community based, ritual, religious music of understatement, not excess.
Ellison's
influence on Ken Burns' "Jazz"
JJM In 1973, Ellison made reference to jazz as an
American institution, along with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The filmmaker Ken Burns feels there are three major themes of American history,
the Constitution, baseball and jazz. How much influence did Ellison's philosophy
of jazz have on Burns' filmmaking?
ROM I don't know Ken Burns personally, but I think
one thing we can say, in episode after episode, the narrator of the documentary
would read from Ellison, over and over again. Somebody on his advisory team
knew Ellison's work. My guess is that since Albert Murray was so important
in it, he was instrumental in that. Stanley Crouch is important to
the film, and he is an Ellisonian from the bottom of his heart. Wynton Marsalis
is a very careful student of Ralph Ellison. So is Gary Giddins. I think there
are lots of people who would say that if you are going to write about Armstrong
or Duke, don't forget about this or that. Even when they got to the Parker
section, they were reading from Ellison. That was probably not the best place
to read from. I honor Burns, and I think he pulled together a team of advisors
who tried to write about the music to say about its impact on our society,
and that's very Ellisonian.
JJM Something that you said earlier that you said
also reminded me of something Wynton Marsalis said during the Burns documentary,
and it was echoed by Burns, who used the term democracy also, where musicians
play together and learn to get along, and this came through in much of Ellison's
work…
ROM I think if I could be as strong an individual
as Lester Young was, and still as capable of fitting into that great reed
section of the Count Basie Band, then I would be able to do two of the things
democracy depends on, thinking for myself, having my own voice and being
my own man, and at the same time listening carefully to other people and
not blowing them away with my own selfishness. For Ellison, maybe more than
any other point, he felt art was an assertion against chaos in general. I
think that the idea that a jazz band is a perfect example of democracy in
action is a masterful point in Ellison's writing.
The legacy
of Ralph Ellison
JJM What is your point of view on the legacy of
Ralph Ellison. Beyond his obvious achievement of Invisible Man, what
kind of a man was he?
ROM I think you have two questions there. What
kind of a person was he? He was a very private man. He preferred not to make
TV appearances, he wanted his best self put forward, and he felt he did that
best on the printed page. He worked very hard to make every page as perfect
as he could, but generally otherwise shunned a public role. To meet him was
to meet a very quiet, reserved, retiring individual, but you were always
aware of the magnitude of his intellect. He spoke in paragraphs, and it's
as if he was polishing every one as he created it. He was a very good public
speaker for this reason, because he could get up there with no notes and
make these sentences in front of your eyes. You could also feel the intensity
of the man. You were talking earlier about what felt like anger when he was
describing things he didn't like, and you could feel some of that if you
were with him, if a certain topic would come up. You could feel the effort
to restrain himself. When James Baldwin was talking about the race problem
in the United States, he called Ellison "the angriest man he had ever met
in his life."
Ralph Ellison |
JJM Yes, and Norman Mailer described Ellison as
a "hateful writer."
ROM I can see where he would say that, but there
is another side to Ellison. If Ellison was relaxed and with people he knew,
he was a terrifically funny man, a storyteller of life. He would reenact
some story that he wanted to tell you. I saw him read material from what
eventually became part of Juneteenth, and what he was reading was
so overwhelmingly funny to the audience that Ellison had to stop for a minute
to let himself just crack up before going on to the work. So, he was a
complicated character, full of humor, and full of anger as so many people
who are full of humor are. He was a very brainy, very ambitious man. Now,
as far as what was his legacy, Ellison once asked in one of his essays, "What
do we care of Sophocle's wounds? Or what kind of man was Aristophanes?" What
we care about is the art. Now that we have so much information about the
artist we care about both, he is right in a way that art is long, and that's
the thing he will be known for. I think he will be known as the creator of
this great metaphor of invisibility. I think he will be known as the creator
of the character Rinehart. There is a kind of "Rinehartism" that applies
across race and national lines. I think he will be known as the writer who
felt that jazz itself was an institution before it was picked up by Lincoln
Center or any universities. That the musicians policed the stage and the
dancers policed the swing. I think he will be known as the one who said "American
culture is jazz shaped." If you look at our sports or listen to our speech
or even look at the way we dress, there is a bit of Lester Young in there,
Lady Day's picture keeps turning up for us, it's part of our national
iconography. It has given us a sense of who we are as Americans. I think
that insight, that we are the people who need to be resilient. In New York,
you can walk down the street and go from the Indian section of town to Chinatown,
to Korean parts of the neighborhood, to Dominican, and you have to have a
certain kind of flexibility and generosity to be able to swing from street
to street. I think that insight, that jazz is a way of life in America, is
going to last a very long time.
Ellison's posthumously released novel "Juneteenth"
JJM What is your take on Juneteenth?
ROM John Callahan did a job that was masterful,
under most difficult circumstances. He is not Ellison, but he did it awfully
close to being right. I teach that book. I have students doing their
dissertations about it. I think it's going to survive all these questions
and take its place as a great American novel.
JJM For me, so much of his work in Juneteenth
needs to be reread. It's so much like reading poetry, you can't read a sentence
and just go on to the next one. You have to put the book down and absorb
its meaning. This whole book is poetry…
ROM The character named Bliss, at one point, becomes
a racist and Ellison is asking how that happened. He is asking where
it comes from, but he grows up an evangelical preacher taught by somebody
who had been a blues player. It's Bliss who said, "We seek not perfection,
but coordination." He's got the kind of jazz aesthetic working there, even
though he fails it in himself, he says that we need to not only check our
balances, but to balance our checks. Check our checks and balance our balances.
He is playing in a jazz-like way, calling for this same sense of resiliency,
as opposed to a kind of frozen state, which actually does encase him.
JJM I was trying to relate the character Hickman
to Ralph Ellison, because Hickman was a trombonist who put the trombone down
to become a preacher. I couldn't help but think of the similarities between
Hickman and what Ellison's own life was because he put his trumpet down to
basically preach in his own way…
ROM I think that's a very insightful parallel,
that Ellison is creating a version of himself - the musician who becomes
a specialist at speaking - the word artist. I think it's also fascinating
that Hickman, at the point of the service when the spirit gets high, would
still reach over and grab his trombone and take it out to what Ellison calls
"the next level of undifferentiated cry." This point beyond language. I think
Ellison, as a writer, wanted both the language and all the rich imagery that
we expect from a great preacher, and he wanted that music out beyond the
words too. That's why I think that Hickman is a great example of what Ellison
wanted, and the fact that he is a preacher and had this other yearning for
communion and ecstatic revelation, and all that, also makes this parallel
a fruitful one.
JJM The other thing that was interesting to me was
the fact that Ellison created the character, Senator Sunraider, who was a
racist senator from New England, of all places, which to me is the least
likely place for a racist senator to be from. I think of New England and
its liberal heritage…What was that all about? Was that a message that
racism lurks even in places where you least expect it?
ROM I think he did want to warn us that racism
is a national problem, even the boy who was himself raised by African-Americans,
becomes a racist. I think he is reminding African-Americans that we had better
watch out too, that we don't carry black pride so far that we are subject
to commit the sins that were committed against us. When I lived in Connecticut,
the klan was very active, right on top of us. They hated the Catholics, and
they hated the Jews. I think Ellison wanted to say that yes, this is a black,
southern problem, but watch out New England. Ellison also writes about New
York, about how he first moves there, there were places that he wasn't expected
to go, and how he would just sort of iron his face and just walk on anyway.
He knew there had been traditions of segregation in places we associate with
great freedom.
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If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Richard Wright biographer Hazel Rowley.
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Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
The Ralph Ellison Project
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