Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties

Is, Freedom Ain't, Scott Saul presents a detailed reading of Charles Mingus's "Haitian Fight Song" and makes the case that interdisciplinary study of innovative musical practices that emerged from jazz in the post-World War II and Cold War years can have a wide impact in a number of discourses.The dual process of looking at specific musical texts and situating the artistic practices that they represent in a larger social and cultural milieu is the general aim of the book.As Saul states, "hard bop" is "music of cultural burial and cultural awakening" (2).Indeed, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't is centrally focused on the historical formation of hard bop and the overlapping imperatives of larger social, cultural, and political struggles: I consider hard bop to be a musical facet of the freedom movement-an extension particularly of the idea of direct action into the realm of structurally improvised music.The hard bop group, with its loose, spontaneous interplay and its firm sense of a collective groove, modeled a dynamic community that was democratic in ways that took exception to the supposedly benign normalcy of 1950s America.(6) Saul's expansive study draws its name from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, from a sermon delivered by a preacher that uses the rhetorical ideas of "black is" and "black ain't" to problematize assumptions about racial identity.Saul borrows this notion, arguing that "jazz of the 1950s and 1960s was marked by an Ellisonian recognition of both the strength of African-American culture and the futility of race-hardened thinking, and was energized by an Ellisonian desire to marry virtuosity and community involvement" (xiii-xiv).Saul's project rests within an interdisciplinary discourse which calls upon jazz praxis to help illuminate processes of transformation in African American cultural and racial identity.Two studies that are closely related to Saul's work include Eric Porter's What is This Thing Called Jazz?African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists and Frank Kofsky's John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s.Saul's frequent reference to the genre of hard bop in the historical development of the jazz tradition owes much to David H. Rosenthal's Hard Bop: Jazz & Black Music 1955-1965.

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