JSngry

Believe me, at one time that particular sexual ideology was a very dominant one among African-American males I knew, It was one of those "under the carpet" (no pun intended, I swear) things that didn't get discussed until guards were let all the way down. And this was in the sexually "liberated" mid-70s! Those who admitted to it were subject to much heat from their peers, believe me. Millie Jackson spent a large portion on one cut of her live album addressing the issue, essentially asserting that it was time for that nonsense (the enthusiastic rejection of cunnilingus) to end! Then there's the (mostly Southern, I believe) folkloric belief that putting menstrual blood in a man's food is a way to keep him hooked. That's some old, old hoodoo shit right there. So you're already cunillinguating with a menstruating woman. Being fat and Jewish is just icing on that particular Freak Cake! And...I can see readers recoiling in horror as we go down this road...

Ok, your Parts 3,4, & 5 are the Brazil tapes, and in marginally better sound than I have them. It's till tough sledding, but the individual voices can be made out, roughly. Thanks for sharing this!

Gee, thanks. Can I get that in writing in case I have to be off from work?

Sounds like you've got some Art Pepper and Elvin Jones...

Hmmm...doesn't seem like hashing/rehashing all this out is the best use of my undivided attention...there's no sex to be had, no music to be made, nor good food to be eaten.

Why stop at Baraka?

Can't comment on the whole thing, but Part 1 Track 1 is Coltrane playing "Chasin' The Trane" w/no other horns present, and Track 2 is definitely not from the 1950s, not with that type of bass playing and recording, and it's not Woody'n You. Which is to say that these cuts, anyway, are not the Joe Brazil tapes under discussion here. Maybe on some of the other parts, perhaps?

The "Pussy Eater" thing...you do know that that's got nothing at all to do with Jews, don't you, not in and of itself. The appropriateness of cunnilingus was the subject of some of the more prolonged (and at times unintentionally hilarious) debates I ever had back in the day, when my jazz was going in search of itself. Termites! The rest of it, yeah, there's issues there, to be sure. But substitute "jews" with "white" and you've got any number of variants on various rants (poetic and otherwise), I've heard over the years from local-ish Southern Black Poets, for whom having any sort of "Jewish Power Structure" to confront was not as much a reality as it would have been for Barka at that time & place. Landlords, academics, intellectuals, literati, etc. All of which is just to say that the gut instinct is to take it at least somewhat personally. I mean, how can you not? I don't know that the gut instinct always produces the most constructive ultimate outcome, though. It's like wanting to get off the merry-go-round but never getting off the damn horse.

Thanks, Jim. Actually, I would read it only half that way, the second half (but with some trimmings to take account of Baraka's twists and turns as he moved from one ideology to another). Basically, in Jones' first incarnation as a poet (more or less), I think of him (and thought of him at the time) as being roughly parallel to a valuable, individual second-wave figure of the nascent jazz avant garde -- say, a Marion Brown (if in fact Brown was in the second wave of the avant garde chronologically and in terms of influence; if Brown doesn't fit, there are others who would). That is, Jones the poet was significantly beholden to the so-called Black Mountain poets (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, etc.) and their generally somewhat younger (but still older than Jones) New York-area offshoots -- Joel Oppenheimer, Gilbert Sorrentino -- plus, of course, Jones' friend, the marvelous Frank O'Hara. If so, then his eventual shift to the sort of self-conciously jingle-jangle poem and/or voice that Allen Lowe quoted from above ("Hey Jew boy with that yamaka on your head/ You pale faced Jew boy I wish you were dead"), and the other different, deliberately "artless" manners (that is, manners that would proclaim to his audiences that Jones was now not into being artful in ways that implicitly separated him from his community as he perceived it) would be as though Marion Brown eventually and self-consciously began to play like a latter-day Earl Bostic (actually, I like a fair amount of Bostic) and walk the bar like Big Jay McNeely. Of course, IIRC, Jones in his writings about music eventually did take just that stance toward the jazz avant garde, saying that it had broken faith with the "street," that is with "The People" and their needs -- this a la the Socialist Realism reaction to the Soviet artistic avant garde in the late '20s and early '30s in Russia, a chunk of history with which Jones was quite familiar. Makes sense to me. I was just looking for an humorous/ironic way to posit Barka as Hard Bop, given the original subject matter of the thread. And...Marion Brown turning into Earl Bostic...geez, that would be the REAL New Hard Bop!

It's fun to have fun. But you have to know how!

Add -lest there be any suspicion amongst any potential Silencers, I in no way meant "tribe" above to be Jewish-specific. We all have our "tribes". Lord knows I've had mine...

I really don't see any possible way that Black America will become The New Nazis. Ever. Not even with a secretly-Muslim black president! Until that comes to the table as an even remotely viable possibility, I say let's keep it in the ballpark as to how to react to it. There will always be hateful & hurtful language used to express feelings of frustrations and resentments. Sometimes it will be calculated rhetoric, sometimes frenzied rant, sometimes a cry of pain, and sometimes some dumbass talking some ignorant idiocy. Bringing out the Silencers to censure the language does nothing to further the dialogue about why this would be happening, and denies the opportunity to distinguish between disingenuous manipulation, misdirection of legitimate frustration, out and out vile gutter-hate, and, oh by the way, possible self-examination as to why these motherfuckers be so damn ANGRY all the time. I don't care who you are, no matter where you go, there's going to be somebody who'd rather you not be there (I was adopted at the age of 4 days, so I guess that notion has been with me pretty much all my life at some level), and reflexively shutting them up (or trying to) won't change anything. Nor will "circling the wagons" with your "tribe" especially when your "tribe" contains about as many people with whom you'd just as soon keep away from as not (another less I learned from being adopted). The only true freedom is Inner Freedom, and like I suggested earlier (and as a result was told to get fucked...gee, that doesn't exactly dispel the paranoia about there being Silencers in the shadows, does it?) the path to Inner Freedom might not always be peaceful or quiet.

Yes - it should have read I'm really surprised that none of Jones' more passionate detractors have accused him of being to "radical poetry" what Hard Bop was to jazz...that is to say, an initially bracing "call home" only to devolve into simplistic ideological pandering. I know it's not all that linear, but the notion that Baraka = Hard Bop would be a wickedly funny one for somebody so inclined.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyFa-12BybI

A bumpy ride?

That's a bummer too...they never really were around in the stores here, and by the time I really figured out what they really were (I though they were that sorryass label that released whole albums under different names, but that was Giants of Jazz), they were gone. Oh well...time to start looking at leisure and carpe-dieming when possible. And next time, pay attention!

Bingo!

Yeah, well, fuck us all. And life will still go on.

I'm really surprised that none of Jones' more passionate detractors have accused being to "radical poetry" what Hard Bop was to jazz... Not sure if the first "casualty of war" is truth or humor...

What is that stuff?

Our stuff is all starting to bloom already...about a month earlier than usual. We had no snow, and only a few nights below freezing. all this on top of one of the hottest, driest, summers on record last year. Interesting times, as they say...

I mean, seriously - am I supposed to read that (again, yes, I know the work) and pretend that I don't know about the historical tensions between inner city African Americans and Jews, say OMG, that's TERRIBLE, and then run away in disgust?, game over as far as all that's concerned? I can't do that. I do know about the historical tensions between inner city African Americans and Jews. I also know about the recent (and ongoing) tensions between inner city African-Americans and Asians. I also know that lack of economic wholeness is one legacy of slavery that has never been fully resolved in America, and probably never will be. I don't have an answer, and there probably isn't one. "Let it go" and reparations are both ridiculously simplistic notions in both theory and practice. So yeah, there's problems, frictions, ugliness, whatever. And there probably are mau-maus, ready or or otherwise, some of whom I know and many more I don't, who, under the just-so confluence of circumstances probalby would slit my throat and kill my babies. I'd be as shocked and disappointed in the Spirit Of Human Resiliency if there wasn't as I would be Scared As Shit if it actually went down. And yet, life goes on. One more thing I know - so far, The Rhetoric Of Hatred hasn't fixed anything, but neither has the Spirit Of Brotherhood. One might be forgiven for contemplating the possibility that The Ultimate Answer is to find wholeness within and then go likewise from there, to there. To that end, I'm not so sure that I (or anybody, really) should be the one to assume that the path to The Ultimate Answer will always be either peaceful or quiet.

And BOOM goes the dynamite.

But seriously - do "I" think it's a "good poem"? I don't know, what/whose criteria/agenda am I supposed to use? Whose do I want to use? Whose will I use? All I can tell you is that as a further expansion upon Malcolm X's "chickens coming home to roost" comment in the aftermath of JFK's assassination, I think that, yes, it effectively communicates the notion that "Collective Capitalist Evil" (remember, he asked "who put the Jews in ovens, and who helped them do it?") led to an inevitable bitch-slapping of The Current Home Of Collective Capitalist Evil. . The Forever Radical in me (as well as the More Mature Objective Observer) has to agree that there is no small truth to this notion, even as The Proud American in me has to agree that This Cannot Stand, the Economic Realist in me knows that, like damn near everything else, Capitalism is only as good (or evil) as the Capitalists who practice it, and the Mature Adult in me has no problem whatsoever in calling bullshit on the conspiracy theory nonsense (here as well as elsewhere). "Conspiracies" do exist (hell, what's a well-executed five year business plan if not a conspiracy?), but...absent any corroborating evidence, get real, ya' know? I also know that I do enjoy hearing Baraka reciting his work, a lot more than I do most poets. A helluva lot more. I often enjoy his work more in the hearing than in the reading. I also think that the hootie-owl thing at the end is a very Monkish thing to do. That's what I think.

Well, good!