http://www.eastbayexpress.com/music/digable_poet/Content?oid=1224384
Amiri Baraka celebrates his new essay collection at Yoshi's.
By Rachel Swan
November 4, 2009
Writer's block is a luxury that few working writers can afford
least of all Amiri Baraka, who, at 75 years old, remains one of the
most prolific authors in the world. Luckily, he's one of the few who
doesn't suffer from mental snags or insecurities. Over a career that
spanned six decades (and counting), Baraka became known as a social
critic and agitator Beat, then Black Nationalist, then Third World
Marxist, then staunchly independent, but always political to the
point of being acerbic. (The word "controversial" appears in the
first sentence of his Wikipedia definition, and nobody's ever taken
it out.) But his writing has an immediacy that draws you right in,
whether or not you agree with the content. More importantly, he has
the one thing that every other writer in the world strives to attain:
He has a voice.
No wonder Baraka is so often compared to a free-jazz artist. "Amiri
has a very lyrical way of speaking, a very rhythmic way of speaking.
... Hearing him talk is like a conversation between Coltrane and
Elvin Jones," said saxophonist Howard Wiley, who will back the poet
at Yoshi's in San Francisco on November 9. Wiley went on to say that
Baraka's rhythmic command isn't limited to the stuff that's written
down or performed. It's right there in the intonation of his speaking
voice. "His rhythm, the space between the words. He talks the way
you know, when you see soul brothers walk down the street all the
time. He talks the way soul brothers walk. He talks the way Miles Davis plays."
Generally, Baraka prefers to speak over music. It's a form he's known
since childhood from listening to old talking blues 78s and hearing
the pastors at his old church. ("When they preached, people always
played behind," Baraka explained.) He first saw it done in a jazz
context when Langston Hughes performed with Charles Mingus at New
York's Five Spot club, some time in the 1950s. His Yoshi's concert
with Wiley on sax, Sly Randolph on drums, and David Ewell on bass
will feature classic be-bop tunes like "Misterioso," "Giant Steps,"
and "Straight No Chaser." When no band is available, Baraka sometimes
intones the "Misterioso" bass line by himself.
Born in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka grew up listening to
gospel, spirituals, and big bands on his parents' record player. When
he was about thirteen, a cousin turned him on to be-bop, and the
following year Baraka started amassing his own collection. His first
purchase was Dizzy Gillespie, the second was Charlie Parker. Words
often eluded the poet when he tried to describe his attraction to
that particular form of jazz. With all those weird harmonies,
intricate rhythms, bent phrases, and corkscrew runs, it was obviously
difficult to play. But the best players made it sound loose and free.
As he later wrote in the 1993 essay "The High Priest of Bebop" (part
of his new collection, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American
Classical Music), Baraka wasn't just struck by the musicians'
technical mastery or seeming lack of inhibitions. Rather, it was the
whole scene that enchanted him. "I was fascinated by the weirdness of
it all," he wrote. Not only the names, Bird, Klook, Max, Bud, Miles.
Damn! And Monk's middle name was, what? Sphere! But the music, for
that first wailin 78, maybe it was Max Roach and his Be-Bop Boys. I
was all the way in it."
That sensibility quickly bled into his writing. For years Baraka
wrote with records playing in the background because they created
what he calls "a sympathetic environment." He became a be-bopper in
his own right: spontaneous, improvisational, full of zig-zaggy
phrasing. And like a jazz musician who gets bored of playing through
changes, Baraka doesn't cotton to the rules of expository writing.
He's a blurter with a fondness for exclamation points. (One of the
essays in Digging is called "Duke Was a Really Great Pianist!") When
possible, he likes to write things in one sitting, then be done with them.
"I'll tell you the truth, I hate to do revisions," Baraka said.
"That's not the last thing you're gonna write, so why torture that
particular thing, you know what I mean? Writer's block is something I
haven't had much experience with." Since he came up in the 1950s and
1960s, Baraka began his professional career on a typewriter. In the
late 1950s he founded a small press company to publish Beat poetry
collections. In the 1960s, he wrote liner notes for Prestige Records.
He's owned a computer for the past twenty years, but you can tell
from the tempo of his writing that he's much better suited to
pouncing on typewriter keys than pecking at a keyboard. The ideas
always come at a fast clip and hit hard on the page, as though they
were hammered in.
"A critic who praised Bunk Johnson at Dizzy Gillespie's expense is no
critic at all, but then neither is a man who turns it around and
knocks Bunk to swell Dizzy," Baraka wrote in his famous essay "Jazz
and the White Critic," which was as much about the role of writers in
assigning value to things as it was about racial hegemony. In that
sentence, Baraka denounced a huge cross-section of his peers
basically, any writer who followed the trend of dividing jazz artists
into "schools," so they could be falsely pitted against each other.
There's a huge argument at stake there and few have ever articulated
it in such a jazzy way. It's not just the consonance of words like
"Bunk" and "knock" that makes this sentence crackle; it's the rhythm,
the percussiveness, and the sense of a palpable human being behind the page.
Nowhere is his voice so present than in the poem "Somebody Blew Up
America," which prompted former New Jersey governor James E.
McGreevey to contest Baraka's 2001 state Poet Laureate title. Attacks
on various Bush cabinet members, (e.g., "that Skeeza Condoleezza")
and the suggestion of Israel's involvement in 9-11 made it his most
contentious work to date. But it's also his most musical not only
because of the phonetic quality of the rhymes but because it's
structured like an incantation. Baraka repeats the word "Who" over
170 bars, with lyrics that change from show to show: Who believe the
confederate flag need to be flying/Who talk about democracy and be
lying/Who/Who/Who/Who?
"You know that poem that he always gets in trouble for saying?" asked
Wiley. "That one, he always makes it relevant to the time. It still
has that timeless quality." It's not clear to what extent Baraka
writes things out ahead of time, and what just comes out on the spot.
Oftentimes, a great deal of the poetry sounds improvised. Wiley says
the group will even get onstage without a set list or game plan, and
not trip about it. He says all the great jazz musicians did it that way.
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