SOURCE: Werner, Craig. “Leon Forrest and the AACM: The Jazz Impulse and the Legacy of the Chicago Renaissance.” In Leon Forrest: Introductions and Interpretations, edited by John G. Cawelti, pp. 127-51. Bowling Green, Ohio.: Bowling Green State University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Werner argues that the art and experience of Leon Forrest and other contemporary musicians and artists who have attempted to merge African-American tradition with European trends are part and parcel of the Chicago Renaissance. Werner also states that these connections are a significant contribution to the development of African-American culture in the United States, and deserving of more recognition that they have been hitherto accorded.]

Leon Forrest's hometown of Chicago is in many ways the most paradoxical of American cities. By many measures the most segregated major American city, Chicago nonetheless nurtured some of the most challenging, multiculturally inclusive black artists of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Influenced by the interracial political and cultural exchanges of what Robert Bone has labelled the “Chicago Renaissance” (1935-1950), Chicago-based writers and musicians have felt little sense of contradiction between the vernacular and “high art” traditions of European- and African-American culture. Like Gwendolyn Brooks—whose life and work represent crucial links between the Chicago Renaissance and the generation of black Chicago artists who began working in the 1960s and 1970s—Forrest and contemporaries such as Clarence Major draw much of their power from the juxtaposition of European-American modernist and African-American musical traditions. Like founder and spiritual leader Muhal Richard Abrams, musicians affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers) combine European modernist approaches to composition with their multi-faceted African-American musical heritage to transcend limiting categorizations based on race or genre.

Theoretically engaging and emotionally compelling, their works offer crucial insights into the relationship between culture and liberation, understood in psychological, spiritual, or institutional terms. Brooks' dedication to community-based arts programs, particularly following her “conversion” to a black nationalist perspective during the 1960s, made her one of the South Side's best-loved elders. Similarly, the AACM drew inspiration from, and shaped its agenda in response to, the community activism centered on the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (Radano). Although Forrest was never a member of the Nation of Islam, he worked on the staff of the Nation's newspaper Muhummad Speaks from 1969 through 1973. Sharing the fundamental African-American sense of art as a “functional” aspect of everyday life, post-Renaissance Chicago artists consistently resist the academic tendency to divorce cultural production from political or spiritual awareness.

Outside of relatively small communities of intellectuals and artists, however, neither the writers nor the musicians have attained widespread recognition. Despite its marvelous live performances and fascinating revoicings of “accessible” classics such as Bob Marley's “No Woman No Cry” and Jimi Hendrix's “Purple Haze,” the Art Ensemble of Chicago (whose members include AACM members Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, and Joseph Jarman) receives much less attention (and sells many fewer albums) than Ornette Coleman or the World Saxophone Quartet, who share many AACM concerns. Although he shares both thematic and stylistic concerns with successful black novelists such as John Wideman or his former editor Toni Morrison, Forrest's work remains relatively unknown. In the context of American cultural economics, this lack of popular recognition perpetuates itself. Many of the best AACM recordings—including the vast majority of those produced prior to Abrams' move to New York in 1976—remain unavailable. Despite the support of Morrison and Saul Bellow, who wrote a glowing statement for the cover of There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, Forrest's original publisher, Random House, allowed all three of his novels to go out of print prior to their reissue by Another Chicago Press in the late 1980s. Only an historically significant “rescue” by Norton, which has no realistic hope of short-term financial gain, kept Forrest's Joycean (in both size and, in numerous passages, brilliance) Divine Days from going out of print when original publisher Another Chicago Press encountered paralyzing difficulties.

In the remainder of this chapter, I will argue that the art and experience of Leon Forrest and the AACM musicians highlights the difficulties faced by artists responding to W. E. B. DuBois's call for African-Americans to merge the fragments of their “double consciousness” into “a better and truer self” incorporating African and European traditions. After surveying the main currents of the Chicago Renaissance as they provided the setting in which Forrest and the AACM began to work, I will delineate some of the connections between the explicitly multicultural “jazz impulse” (which parallels important currents of European-American modernism) and the specifically black (and implicitly Afrocentric) “gospel impulse” in African-American culture. Finally, I shall provide a brief demonstration of how the jazz/modernism/gospel nexus comes together in Forrest's powerful narrative voice which—like Abrams' “Levels and Degrees of Light,” Mitchell's “Noonah,” or Myers' “African Blues”—clearly deserves a stronger response than it has yet received.

THE CHICAGO RENAISSANCE

One of the most important revisions of 20th Century Afro-American cultural history focuses on the significance of Chicago between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s. Prior to the publication of Robert Bone's germinal essay “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance” (1986), constructions of Afro-American literary history typically identified the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s as primary points of reference. Whether phrased in terms of the “School of Wright” or of “protest literature,” criticism of the intervening decades focused almost obsessively on Richard Wright. In turn, criticism of Afro-American literature of the 1950s frequently posited a simple reaction against Wright. In such frameworks, Wright becomes a writer of sociology, a naturalist with leftist inflections; Baldwin and Ellison appear as champions of a nonracial “universalism”; black women writers are marginalized (Hurston) or distorted (Ann Petry as naturalist, the early Brooks as universalist). Perhaps the most important implication of Bones' revision concerns the long-term influence of this simplifying critical discourse. The “sociological” approach to Afro-American literature, like its deracinated “universalist” double, established an interpretive framework—reflected in both academic criticism and the mass media—which continues to undervalue the work of artists who cannot be reduced to familiar categories.

Providing an alternative to such narrow constructions, Bone's identification of a Chicago Renaissance contributes to the construction of a cultural history in which the synthetic sensibilities and reception difficulties of Forrest and the AACM are at least comprehensible. Bone asserts that between 1935 and 1950 Chicago had all of the elements of the Harlem Renaissance with the exception of an effective publicist such as Alain Locke. Listing the Chicago-based writers (Wright, Brooks, Margaret Walker, Frank Marshall Davis, William Attaway, Theodore Ward, Arna Bontemps, Marita Bonner) who created a body of work as rich as that emanating from Harlem in the 1920s, Bone details the importance of migration, patronage, academic institutions, and publishing outlets. In exploring the significance of the Chicago Renaissance, it is useful, if somewhat artificial, to focus first on developments within the African-American community and then on the interaction of this community with white Chicago.

The Chicago Renaissance originated in the massive migration of Afro-Americans from the rural South to Chicago that began during World War I and continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Inspired in part by the crusading journalism of Robert Abbot in the Chicago Defender (which also published the work of black writers such as Langston Hughes who did not participate directly in the Renaissance), the migration was significant in economic, political, and cultural terms. Black workers moving to the South Side brought with them cultural traditions that shaped some of the most important subsequent developments in American vernacular culture. Transplanted from Mississippi and Arkansas by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and others, the Delta blues strongly influenced black secular music and rock and roll, which was in its inception interracial, but rapidly came to be marketed primarily by and for whites. Similarly, the sacred traditions of the southern black church rapidly developed into the polished gospel music of Clara Ward, Roberta Martin, and Mahalia Jackson, which in turn contributed to the vocal styles fundamental to 1950s rhythm and blues and 1960s soul music. Alongside these musical developments arose literary organizations exemplified by the South Side Writers group which the Mississippi-born Wright helped organize in 1936 (Fabre 128). As interracial cultural contact declined during the 1950s and 1960s, these specifically African-American cultural resources provided a supportive context for the development of second generation Chicago artists such as Forrest, whose family came to Chicago from Mississippi (the paternal side) and New Orleans (the maternal side).

Several significant forums for interracial cultural and political interaction complemented these developments within the black community. As Berndt Ostendorf and William Howland Kenney note in their investigations of Chicago jazz of the 1920s, pre-Renaissance Chicago had provided a setting in which white musicians could absorb at least the superficial aspects of Afro-American musical aesthetics. Of greater lasting importance, however, was the patronage provided black artists and intellectuals by the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Noting the shift away from the individual patronage characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance, Bone details the importance of the Fund as a source of economic support for black writers and scholars, especially after Edwin Embree assumed its directorship in 1928. Relying on the advice of an interracial board of trustees including Charles S. Johnson, Embree used the Fund's fellowships program to support Wright, Bontemps, Attaway, Walker, Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, E. Franklin Frazier, and Katherine Dunham. The Fund's support of non-Chicago writers such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and, later, James Baldwin underscores the significance of the Chicago Renaissance in the general development of Afro-American culture of the 1930s and 1940s.

Most of the writers supported by the Rosenwald Fund were directly involved in organizations that encouraged interracial contact. Wright viewed the John Reed Clubs, sponsored by the Communist Party of the United States, as a vital source of support for black writers attempting to overcome their cultural isolation. The Illinois branch of the Federal Writers' Project provided both financial support and a forum for contact between black and white writers. While a great deal of the interracial cultural activity took place on the political left, even relatively conservative cultural organizations supported interracial communication during the Renaissance. Based in Chicago, Harriet Monroe's influential Poetry magazine published the work of black poets, most notably Langston Hughes, alongside that of T. S. Eliot and Carl Sandburg. One of Poetry's patrons and a prominent member of Chicago's social scene, Inez Cunningham Stark conducted a poetry workshop for aspiring South Side poets, which culminated in a competition won by the young Gwendolyn Brooks.

The most significant institutional interaction between black and white intellectuals during the Renaissance, however, centered on the University of Chicago Sociology Department. Developed under the guidance of Robert Park, the “Chicago School” of sociology viewed cities as settings for the development of new, more advanced forms of culture. Delineating a race relations cycle progressing from contact and conflict to accommodation and assimilation, Park envisioned America as a “melting pot” which would eventually generate a “raceless” society (Matthews; Ross; Bone 455-56). Part of Park's attempt to realize this vision involved direct support for black intellectuals, most importantly Charles Johnson, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton (Ross 439). As Chair of the Sociology Department at Fisk University, Johnson extended the influence of his former teacher into the Afro-American academic world. Equally significant, however, was the research carried out by Cayton and Drake as graduate students at Chicago. Investigating the South Side from a Parkian perspective, Cayton and Drake published their findings as Black Metropolis, which includes an important preface by Wright.

Reflecting the interaction of sociological and cultural perspectives, Black Metropolis and Wright's novel Native Son played crucial roles in encouraging sociological approaches to Afro-American culture. Focused on the broad social significance rather than the individual nuances of Afro-American experience, the sociological approach encouraged interpretations of black culture as “protests” intended to engage and rectify social “problems.” Despite the Parkian commitment to increased interracial contact, the widespread acceptance of such approaches (which were rarely applied to white artists) ironically contributed to the growing intellectual and social segregation that helped bring the Chicago Renaissance to an end in the 1950s. Despite the use of quantitative evidence generated by Chicago school researchers in support of liberal policy agendas beginning in the 1940s, the application of sociological methods to cultural criticism allowed white readers and critics to underestimate both the individuality and the complexity of Afro-American cultural expression. Neither Forrest's fiction nor the AACM's music responds well to interpretations emphasizing “problem” or “protest.”

The legacy of the Chicago Renaissance, then, is mixed. On the one hand, it encouraged an explosion of creative and intellectual activity by Afro-Americans that has few parallels. For young blacks such as Brooks, Forrest, Abrams, and Mitchell, the Renaissance provided a stimulating environment which allowed them to respond with equal intensity to the black community as a distinct reality and to the surrounding white community. At the same time, however, the Chicago Renaissance established the sociological premises that would discourage the development of an interracial audience willing to engage the full complexity of the resulting work.

AFTER THE RENAISSANCE

By the middle of the 1950s, the Chicago Renaissance had clearly come to an end. Whatever the critical misapprehensions of their work, Ellison and Baldwin signalled new concerns in Afro-American literature. Afro-American music was entering a period of rapid transition. Influenced strongly by the electric blues emanating from Chicago's Chess studios, rock and roll emerged as a focal point of American popular music. Transforming American musical traditions without regard to racial or generic distinctions, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and others created the blues/gospel hybrid that would eventually be labelled “soul.” Most directly relevant to the development of the AACM, early 1950s jazz underscores the cultural dilemma facing post-Renaissance Chicago artists. Long perceived as an example of white exploitation of black musical forms, big band jazz attracted few young black musicians during the 1940s, although several, including Charlie Parker, served apprenticeships with big bands. Developed as a radical alternative to white jazz, be-bop was increasingly perceived as an African-American “art” music requiring great technical virtuosity and theoretical knowledge, but no longer deeply embedded in the life of the black community. In response, jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane established the contours of the multi-faceted “free jazz” movement, which includes most AACM work.

Politically, several significant national developments deeply influenced Chicago's young black artists. The Southern Civil Rights Movement created a new sense of optimism regarding the possibility of racial progress. Whether viewed in terms of desegregation—the removal of barriers excluding blacks from full participation in public life—or of integration—the realization of a Parkian vision of assimilation—the Movement encouraged community-based political activity. Ronald Radano has demonstrated convincingly that the AACM drew its inspiration and institutional structure directly from community organizations founded in Chicago during the late 1950s and early 1960s: the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, the Chicago Freedom Movement, Operation Breadbasket, People United to Save Humanity, and the local offices of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Despite the general optimism, however, several cross-currents anticipated the de facto cultural segregation that undercut the development of an audience prepared to respond to the new generation of musicians and writers. Under the guidance of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam articulated its black separatist agenda from a South Side base. Particularly after the emergence of New York-based Malcolm X as a charismatic national leader, the Nation exerted a strong influence not just on its members but on the growing number of young northern blacks for whom the promise of the Civil Rights Movement increasingly appeared to be a lie. Although Forrest never seriously considered joining the Nation (which did not require the staff of Muhammad Speaks to be members), he was obviously aware of its mythology and agenda. Equally important was a shift in tone within the Civil Rights Movement during the mid-1960s. Black liberation theologian James Cone describes Malcolm's perspective during the 1950s and early 1960s as a vision of America as “nightmare” in contrast to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of the American “dream.” Extending his analysis to the mid-1960s, Cone emphasizes the increasing similarity between Malcolm and Martin's visions. After his journey to Mecca, Malcolm returned with a much broader vision of the possibility of human community. Confronting Vietnam and the spectre of domestic violence, King increasingly emphasized the nightmarish reality rather than the visionary possibilities.

Nowhere was the connection between these visions clearer than in Chicago. King's experience in Chicago—specifically his unsuccessful campaign to desegregate housing—marks a major turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. The shift of attention from the south to the urban north—which brought the movement to the communities of the northern liberals who had supported the earlier stages—brought the reality of northern segregation (both physical and cultural/intellectual) into sharp focus. When the residents of the white working class suburb of Cicero met King's march with taunts and violence, it became clear to many young blacks—especially in Chicago—that the dream was far from realization. The increasing prominence of black militant organizations in the community both reflected and contributed to the growing separation between black and white communities, especially outside the middle classes.

So, although their visions of human and artistic possibility had been shaped in a world where interracial communication seemed a possibility if not yet a reality, black Chicago artists who began work during the 1960s found themselves in an almost entirely African-American context. Although the members of the AACM were highly aware of the works of European and European-American composers such as Stravinsky, Bartok, Dvorak, Stockhausen and Cage, they had almost no direct contact with white composers in the Chicago area. As Radano and John Litweiler observe, their activities were based almost exclusively on the South Side. The most important academic institution for the younger generation was not the University of Chicago but Wilson Junior College where Forrest and musicians such as Mitchell, Jarman, Favors, Henry Threadgill and Anthony Braxton studied between 1955 and the founding of the AACM in 1965.

Despite these tensions, neither the AACM musicians nor Forrest express any sense of contradiction regarding their use of European- and African-American cultural traditions. In large part, this reflects their understanding of the relationship between the modernist and traditionalist currents of European-American aesthetics. Avant-garde composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, and Cage interest Abrams, Jarman and Mitchell in large part because they reject 19th century compositional practices. Much modernist composition reflects a widespread dissatisfaction with the hierarchical implications of harmonic structure, which (at least in the new constructions of musical history) required that all musical elements be subordinated to a tonal center, conceived in terms of “tonic” and “dominant” elements. The serial composers' rebellion against traditional harmony paralleled Miles Davis's movement away from scale-based bebop improvisation to the melodic emphasis of modal jazz. Similarly, explorations of “folk” music as the base of “high art” composition conducted by Stravinsky, Bartok, and Ives could be seen as analogous to the African-American composers' revoicings of blues and gospel. Significantly, each of these composers evinced a serious interest in African-American music, both as vernacular “material” and as a source of insight into the relationship between compositional structure and improvisational freedom. Rather than representing an antagonistic alien influence, then, European-American modernism provided many AACM musicians with access to alternative perspectives on shared aesthetic problems.

Similarly, as his incisive comments on William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison and James Joyce indicate, Forrest draws freely on European, European-American, and African-American cultural resources. Honoring the memory of Lucille Montgomery, a black teacher who encouraged his development by insisting that Forrest read Langston Hughes and DuBois alongside the European-American classics, Forrest asserts a “complex, varied, Black/white” perspective as the foundation necessary to respond to the “ancestral imperative” and to “forge the intellectual tools to free our people” (“Light” 29). This sense of a shared cultural project was of immense importance to post-Renaissance Chicago writers and musicians. Performing under various names including Abrams' germinal Experimental Band and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, AACM members have made major contributions to the American compositional and improvisational traditions. Among the musicians who have contributed to what Art Ensemble of Chicago member Joseph Jarman (echoing New England Conservatory faculty member and influential jazz critic Gunther Schuller) called “third stream music with a heavy jazz bias” (Litweiler 173) are Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors (all of the Art Ensemble), Henry Threadgill, Amina Claudine Myers, and Anthony Braxton. Movements associated either directly or indirectly with the AACM developed in St. Louis (the Black Arts Group), Detroit (Strata), New York (Collective Black Artists), and, more recently, New Haven, where composer-pianist Anthony Davis occupies a position in some ways analogous to Abrams' in Chicago (Giddins, Riding 193). Significantly, each of these cities also supported the work of broadly conscious writers including Eugene Redmond and Henry Dumas (St. Louis) and Robert Hayden (Detroit).

In addition to their interest in European-American modernism, most of the musicians affiliated with these groups resist attempts to draw distinctions between forms of black music. Articulating the sensibility behind the Art Ensemble's use of the phrase “Great Black Music Ancient to Future,” Mitchell observes that when he was growing up in Chicago “music wasn't divided into categories the way it is now, with one age group listening to this and the next age group listening to that, and so on. I liked what my parents liked—Nat Cole and other pop singers, as well as Charlie Parker and Lester Young. You were exposed to all kinds of music on the radio in those days, and when you became a musician, it was just a matter of deciding what kind of music you wanted to play” (Davis 180). Recalling his early career as a writer, Forrest emphasizes a similar access to multiple sources of inspiration: “I listened almost religiously to all kinds of Black music, while I was writing and incorporating every sound I could set my ear to into my fiction (including of course the spiritual incantation of ‘A Love Supreme’ by ‘Trane”) (“Light” 31).

Critical descriptions of both AACM music and Forrest's fiction tend to foreground the modernist, rather than the vernacular, dimensions of the work. Perhaps the best musicological analysis of the AACM (and free jazz generally) is that of Ekkehard Jost, who describes “a movement in all directions, toward all aspects of world music. This could become possible only when the formal, tonal and rhythmic canons of traditional jazz were overthrown, and it has led not only to incorporating musical elements of the Third World, but equally to adapting the materials and creative ideas of the European avant garde” (175). Attributing the distinctiveness of the AACM specifically to “geographical location” (163), Jost identifies a number of specific concerns involving the fundamental elements and relationships of the art form, which are analogous to those explored in Forrest's fiction. Jost specifies the AACM concern with the relationship between individual (solo) voice and its collective setting (168); a tendency to emphasize the texture or tone color of local events (168); and the belief that each of these events assumes meaning “not as an isolated occurrence sufficient unto itself” but from “a dialectical relationship to the music around it” (171).

Similarly, John Litweiler frames his discussion of the AACM in terms that recall Forrest's investigation of the fundamental mystery of the artist's voice. For Litweiler, the most intriguing dimension of AACM music is “the tension of sounds in the free space of silence” (176). Identifying the underlying aesthetic assumptions of the Art Ensemble of Chicago as an outgrowth of “modern American selectivism,” Gary Giddins sees the core of the group's structural practice in “contrasting tableaux or accumulated details assembled around a single motif; in each case, a large-scale work is constructed of fragments” (Rhythm-a-ning 196). Jost sounds a similar theme when he describes several of the most important AACM works as “multi-thematic suites, or pieces in which one or more melodic models serve as the contents of a collective or ‘group memory’ improvisation” (171). No literary critic has provided a better description of the structures of There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, The Bloodworth Orphans, or Two Wings to Veil My Face.

JAZZ, AFROCENTRIC SPIRITUALITY AND THE GOSPEL IMPULSE

What distinguishes both Forrest's fiction and the AACM's music most clearly from European-American modernism is their underlying spiritual vision. Where many AACM members articulate their spirituality in Afrocentric and/or mystical terms, however, Forrest draws his vocabulary directly from the gospel church. The difference is more apparent than real. Many AACM members trace their musical roots directly to the gospel church: Braxton sang in a gospel chorus; Leroy Jenkins learned to play violin in church; Malachi Favors is the son of a preacher. Similarly, Forrest's perspective on the gospel church, particularly as it involves the black preacher, clearly emphasizes an encompassing spiritual vision that moves far beyond the confines of most European-American popular religion.

For the AACM, as Radano suggests, modernism (understood as a reaction against hierarchical aesthetics), rhythm-centered experimental technique (understood as a reaction against the tyranny of harmony), and a serious interest in spirituality express the same basic concern. Mitchell makes the connection between technique and spiritual vision explicit when he says “Cats that play bop are more concerned with things like chords and changes rather than spirits … in free music you are dependent on the spirits because you don't want to fool with those chords” (Radano). Similarly, Abrams explains the AACM emphasis on process in spiritual terms: “Change is synonymous with any conception of the deity” (Litweiler 198). In an often-cited comment on the impact of the AACM on his own life, Art Ensemble member Joseph Jarman describes what amounts to a conversion: “Until I had the first meeting with Richard Abrams, I was like all the rest of the hip ghetto niggers; I was cool, I took dope, I smoked pot, etc. I did not care for the life that I had been given. In having the chance to work in the Experimental Band with Richard and the other musicians there, I found the first something with meaning/reason for doing. That band and the people there was the most important thing that ever happened to me” (Jost 164). AACM member Alvin Fielder echoes Jarman when he comments simply that the AACM “was like a church—it was my church” (Radano).

Generally recognized as the spiritual center of the AACM, Abrams sums up the communal function of the organization: “if the AACM is anything, it's a very excellent idea. It's not so much what is or isn't done, it's the idea and what it could mean to different groups, depending on their energy. The idea: to pool our energies to a common cause” (Litweiler 196). It is hardly surprising that some of the most powerful AACM music—Abrams' Levels and Degrees of Light and Myers' gospel-inflected “African Blues” from Amina Claudine Myers Salutes Bessie Smith—expresses spiritual experience. In contrast to this spiritual emphasis, European-American modernism, as Timothy Reiss observes, has been predicated largely on a repudiation of theological, essentialist, or transcendental ideas. This characteristic divergence of European- and African-American world views may well account for the difficulties both the AACM and Forrest have experienced in obtaining a serious hearing from the white avant-garde in spite of large areas of shared concern.

These issues coalesce around the changing significance of the “jazz impulse” in African-American aesthetics. Ralph Ellison, the most insightful and influential theorist of the relationship between African-American music and literature, defines the jazz impulse as a way of defining/creating the self in relationship to community and tradition. Applicable to any form of cultural expression, jazz provides a way for new ideas, new vision, to enter the tradition. As many artists and critics have observed, almost all successful jazz is grounded in what Ellison calls the “blues impulse.” Before one can hope to create a meaningful new vision of individual or communal identity, the artist must acknowledge the full complexity of his/her experience. Although the blues impulse is based on intensely individual feelings, these feelings, for most blues artists, can be traced in part to the brutal racist context experienced in some form by almost all blacks. Substituting the less “philosophical” term “affirmation” for what Ellison calls the “transcendence” derived from the blues confrontation, Albert Murray emphasizes that, especially when his/her call elicits a response from a community that confirms a shared experience, the blues artist becomes “an agent of affirmation and continuity in the face of adversity” (38). Both the individual expression and the affirmative, and self-affirming, response of the community are crucial to the blues dynamic. Seen in relation to the blues impulse, the jazz impulse provides a way of exploring implications, of realizing the relational possibilities of the self, and of expanding consciousness (of self and community) through a process of continual improvisation.

What has been less clearly recognized in discussions of African-American aesthetics is that both the blues and jazz impulses are grounded in the “gospel impulse” (see chapter nine). The foundations of African-American cultural expression lie in the call and response forms of the sacred tradition; in the 20th century, the gospel church provides the institutional setting for the communal affirmation of individual experience. As Amiri Baraka notes in Blues People, both the call and response structure of the secular work songs and the AAB form of the classic blues can be traced to sacred forms which encode West African understandings of self, community, and spiritual energy. If the blues impulse can be described as a three-stage secular process—1) brutal experience; 2) lyrical expression; 3) affirmation—, then the gospel impulse can be described in parallel terms derived from the sacred vocabularies of the African-American church: 1) the burden; 2) bearing witness; 3) the vision of (universal) salvation. Bearing witness to his/her experience of the “burden,” the gospel artist—possessed by a “Spirit” transcending human categorization—communicates a vision affirming the possibility of salvation for any person willing, as Forrest phrases it, to “change their name.” Whether phrased as “burden” or “brutal experience,” as “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” or as “bearing witness,” as existential “affirmation” or spiritual “vision,” the blues/gospel process provides a foundation for the jazz artist's exploration of new possibilities for self and community.

The relationship of blues and gospel is not simply formal, however. As Greil Marcus notes in his discussion of Robert Johnson, most black blues artists bear witness to their brutal experience in a vocabulary derived from the black religious community, from which they feel excluded. Contrasting sharply with European-American modernist expressions of a world in which religion has been reduced to comforting delusion or oppressive institution, Johnson's songs express a theologically resonant damnation, not simply alienation. Many of his most powerful blues have explicitly religious titles: “Hellhound on My Trail;” “Me and the Devil Blues;” “Stones in My Passway;” “If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day.”

Both the relational sense of self and the refusal to separate secular and sacred experience reflect what V. Y. Mudimbe refers to as West African gnosis. In traditional West African thought, as Robert Farris Thompson demonstrates, human beings stand continually at the crossroads, negotiating the exchange of energies between spiritual and material spheres, between ancestors and descendants. Organizing this gnosis around the “orisha”—spirits associated with overlapping and interrelated energies that can be summoned in response to ever-changing circumstances—this Afrocentric sensibility contrasts sharply with Judeo-Christian traditions emphasizing the battle between God and Devil (seen as profoundly different, essentially binary, forms of energy) for possession of the individual human soul. Described in detail by Mudimbe, Thompson, bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins (who emphasizes the connections between Afrocentric and feminist epistomologies), this type of Afrocentrism also differs from the Nile Valley (priestly and at least implicitly patriarchal) Afrocentrism of Molefi Kete Asante, which frequently inverts existing binary structures to assert a relatively static vision of “African” civilization. Recognizing the Afrocentric dimensions of the gospel impulse is important for several reasons. Although some black religious singers—notably Bessie Jones and Bernice Johnson Reagon—are conscious of the African roots of the gospel tradition, many church members continue to view Africa through the European-American dichotomy of “pagan” and “Christian,” thus creating the seeming paradox of a profoundly Afrocentric institution that openly repudiates Afrocentric phrasing.

Recognizing the underlying connection helps clarify the relationship of Forrest's aesthetics to those of the AACM. In part because of their emphasis on rhythm, AACM members frequently express the spiritual core of their vision in (West) Afrocentric terms. Perhaps because of the Nation of Islam's association of Africa with a binary mythology of black Gods and white devils, Forrest emphasizes the specifically American practices of the gospel church. Like the early James Baldwin, who critiques binary myth-making (whether Christian or Muslim) in The Fire Next Time, Forrest articulates a profoundly Afrocentric cultural sensibility in a voice that insists on the “jazz” complexity of African-American experience. Commenting on the significance of Africa in the contemporary black church in Chicago, Forrest emphasizes the actual distance between American blacks and (one of) their ancestral homeland(s): “Yet how much the congregation knows of Africa is worthy of contemplation. More than likely, the thinking would go something like this: There are oppressed poverty-stricken people over there; they are black and we are black; they have been oppressed and so have we. Wherever the black man is in the world, he is catching hell. We came from Africa; therefore, we must help them. And it is in this sense that the black man here identifies with the heartaches over there” (“Souls” 133). However useful as a source of political or cultural motivation, this type of identification remains far too abstract to provide a base for the type of transforming voice Forrest seeks to create in his fiction.

LEON FORREST AND TRANSFORMATION

One of the most frequently used terms in Forrest's non-fiction, transformation is crucial to the jazz, blues and gospel dimensions of his vision. In an important autobiographical essay titled “In the Light of the Likeness—Transformed,” Forrest associates the “improvisational genius” of jazz with the “magical realism” of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. Commenting on his own multi-cultural heritage, Forrest emphasizes black music as a “source of personal or group survival” that enables African-Americans “to place a stamp of elegance and elan upon the reinvented mode.” “Reinvention,” for Forrest, “has been the basic hallmark of the transformation” of black fiction exemplified by Ellison and Toni Morrison (31-32).

Although his own work is obviously oriented toward modernism and the jazz impulse, Forrest acknowledges its base in blues and gospel. He agrees with Ellison and Murray that a direct apprehension (rather than theoretically mediated interpretation) of experience defines the blues impulse: “For the blues singer, personal, existential experience always outweighs handed-down wisdom” (33). Echoing Murray's observation that the purpose of the blues is to allow the singer to survive long enough to get the blues again, Forrest observes: “the worst thing that can happen to you, if you are a blues believer, is the loss of the blues. It is an eternal education. You lose the blues at the risk of losing your hold on existence” (33). Responding to Big Bill Broonzy's music as a process in which “each new carving (is) connected to the theme of the larger blues he's creating,” Forrest emphasizes the jazz implications of the blues impulse, describing Broonzy's “shape-singing of his character's personae; transformed into something heightened and different” (22).

One of the most significant aspects of Forrest's perspective concerns his awareness of gospel, which has received little attention as a source of literary inspiration. Commenting on the “transformations” of Thomas A. Dorsey, widely recognized as the “father of gospel music,” Forrest celebrates the former blues pianist's ability to “transform the refinements of the spiritual into a music that fitted the more angular needs of an awakening people, hungry-hearted for a dialogue in song which captured both their secular and their spiritual sense of life as agony and wonder” (26). In his discussion of call and response in Chicago's black churches, Forrest again emphasizes the irrelevance of binary constructions: “There is a place here for the commingling of the sexual and the spiritual” (“Souls” 130). Forrest describes the sermon form in terms paralleling AACM musical structures: “The structure of a black Baptist sermon is orchestrated, with highly associative links to group memory, the Bible, Afro-American folklore, Negro spirituals, secular blues phrases, politics, and personal testimonial” (131). Highlighting the jazz implications of such complex structures, Forrest celebrates the sermon as “the very source for reinvention and transformation of the self” (“Light” 23).

Describing his vocation as a writer, Forrest images the African-American novelist as a kind of jazz preacher: “he can go on to transform life into new life, even as he is transformed by his creation, as a preacher is transformed, as he seeks a collective transcendence” (“Light” 24). Forrest connects this vision directly with his own career when he describes how a visitation from the spirit of Mahalia Jackson helped him find his voice during a period when few of his “intellectual friends … cared for the life of the spirit” (33-34). Mahalia's presence helped focus Forrest's desire “to be a singer of the language—in the tradition of her majestic self and the Negro Preacher” (34). Turning his attention to his fiction, Forrest identifies the “Black church, the Negro spiritual, gospel music, sermons, the blues and jazz” as “both the railroad tracks and the wings for my imagination” (30).

However compelling this conceptual framework, Forrest has encountered many of the difficulties faced by the AACM in calling forth a broad-based response to his vision. On one level, this is an economic problem. Gary Giddins has detailed the problems faced by AACM members trying to make a living from their music (Riding 190-91). Lester Bowie recalls the early days of the AACM: “I and other players … enjoyed playing in free form, free fashion, but we would always play it for ourselves and never thought seriously about performing it in front of an audience. We knew that it was impossible to get hired at a club doing that” (Litweiler 186). Such real and pressing economic concerns reflect a related problem in contemporary African-American culture. As Forrest observes, the power of call and response aesthetics derives precisely from their realization in a communal context. The affirmations (and dissents) of the congregation—which in turn call forth responses from the preacher—express the dialectical relationship between improvisational vision and individual experience. Forrest describes the ideal: “A sermon is open-ended, allowing a preacher to expand new ideas or to cut out sections if they aren't working. The role of the congregation during a sermon is similar to that of a good audience at a jazz set—driving, responding, adding to the ever-rising level of emotion and intelligence. Ultimately, the preacher and the congregation reach one purifying moment and a furious catharsis is fulfilled” (“Souls” 131).

If this dynamic interaction is available to preachers and jazz musicians, it remains relatively abstract for novelists, who rarely engage in a direct call and response with an audience. Observing the reluctance of some middle-class blacks to accept the “marriage of blues and spiritual” (“Light” 26), Forrest questions whether call and response aesthetics are still capable of organizing the “cosmic consciousness of the race:” “If the preacher stood as the linkage and the oracle from Mississippi to St. Louis to Chicago, let us say, how much does the substance of his sermon now renew the sons and daughters of the great migrations—now unto the fifth and sixth generations” (“Light” 32). This troubled awareness of the changes experienced by the black community in northern cities—the fragmented urban world familiar to European-American modernism—lies behind Forrest's understanding of contemporary alienation (whether phrased in blues or existential terms) in relation to a spiritually resonant heritage that at times seems to be slipping away. However difficult it may be to elicit an affirmative response (and the absence of the response, as numerous jazz musicians and modernist writers have learned at great cost, may result in madness, addiction, or death), only a complex, realistic call offers any hope for meaningful transformation.

I would like to conclude by suggesting several approaches to Forrest's work in relation to the jazz impulse. Gayl Jones provides a valuable overview of the ways African-American novelists translate jazz into written forms:

In literature jazz can affect the subject matter—the conceptual and symbolic functions of a text, translate directly into the jazz hero, or have stylistic implications. The writer's attempt to imply or reproduce musical rhythms can take the form of jazz-like flexibility and fluidity in prose rhythms (words, lines, paragraphs, the whole text), such as nonchronological syncopated order, pacing, or tempo. A sense of jazz—the jam session—can also emerge from an interplay of voices improvising on the basic themes or motifs of the text, in key words and phrases. Often seemingly nonlogical and associational, the jazz text is generally more complex and sophisticated than the blues text in its harmonies, rhythms, and surface structures.

In addition to using many of these devices, Forrest draws on jazz by treating the literary text as a form subject to revision in the manner of a jazz composition, and mythology as a reflection of cultural psychology rather than a repository of universally applicable values. It should be emphasized that these approaches are analytical conventions; the real jazz richness of Forrest's voice is best experienced through direct response to the many passages in his novels that resemble the contextualized solos of AACM music. Among the most powerful of these are Nathaniel's meditation on the nightmare of history in chapter four of There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden and Ironwood “Landlord” Rumble's solo (along with Nathaniel and Noah Grandberry's responses) in chapter eleven of The Bloodworth Orphans.

One of the major problems facing Forrest as a jazz writer involves the relatively “fixed” form of the literary text. Where musicians can vary their call in response to the changing contexts of performance, writers are usually limited to the original form of publication. This problem parallels that faced by jazz musicians who record their music, thereby transforming a single version of a piece into a “standard” point of reference. Although some musicians address this problem by recording multiple versions of the same song over an extended period of time, Langston Hughes' term “disc-tortion” (Reader 89) applies to both recorded music and literary forms. Highly aware of this problem, Hughes suggested one response when he published distinct versions of his modernist epic “Montage of a Dream Deferred.” The version published in the 1958 Langston Hughes Reader is divided into five distinct sections while the version published in Selected Poems the following year treats the entire poem as one large movement. In addition, the later version reorganizes smaller sections. For example, Hughes breaks the poem “Jam Session” (Reader 107-08) into three distinct lyrics, “Jam Session,” “Be-Bop Boys,” and “Tag” (Selected 246-47).

Adapting this approach to the novel form, Forrest significantly altered the 1973 text of There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden when it was republished by Another Chicago Press in 1988. Published during a period when some of the most influential black writers—notably Baraka—were asserting relatively closed ideological visions that simplified cross-cultural experience, the first version of the novel concludes with an image of ongoing process that cannot be easily reduced to a political formulation: “Ii crumbled upon the floor rising and falling rising and falling and rising and falling” (163). Published during the later years of the Reagan presidency, the later version concludes with a new section, “Transformation,” that places the first version's theme of ongoing process in an explicitly political context. An implicit response to the increasingly desperate realities of the black community, Pompey c.j. Browne's sermon in the final chapter of “Transformation” calls for a renewed response to Martin Luther King's vision. Listening to Rev. Browne at “The Crossroads Rooster Tavern,” whose name combines African, blues and gospel imagery, Nathaniel Witherspoon meditates on the preacher as a figure who “over the years, has himself become something of a transformation of Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King, Leon Sullivan and Richard Pryor” (205). Rev. Browne sounds a necessary challenge to the community which is literally and figuratively at the crossroads: “Yet I hear Martin's voice still to fight on, crying forth in the wilderness; we feel like-a-shouting marching out of the wilderness demanding of the Lord remembrance: Honor, Honor unto the Dying Lamb of our learning lanterns—the frontier of the shrouded dream. Thank God Almighty I'm free at last; but free to uncover what freedom beyond the mountain top's metamorphosis? Is paradise without politics?” (213-14). As contextually aware jazz artist, Forrest knows that the question demands a much different response in 1988 than it would have in 1973.

Forrest's treatment of myth also reflects his commitment to envisioning new possibilities. In his influential essay on Ulysses, T. S. Eliot defined the “mythical method” as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (177). Resisting Eliot's elevation of myth over experience, both leftist (Bertolt Brecht) and Afro-American modernists (Zora Neale Hurston) view myth as a part of the perceptual system operating within the world. The shift in emphasis encourages a dialectical understanding of how experience leads to changes in the understanding of particular myths and of how choosing new myths for inspiration can change experience. Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain exemplifies the process. Although she acknowledges both the Judeo-Christian and Freudian interpretations of Moses, Hurston emphasizes his role as African conjure man, thereby encouraging black readers to develop a higher awareness of their African cultural heritage.

Reflecting Hurston's work in comparative anthropology with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University which culminated in her writings on African religions in Haiti (Tell My Horse) and New Orleans (Mules and Men), Moses is part political leader and part conjure man. Revoicing a familiar image from the spirituals, which frequently parallel the situation of the slaves with that of the Hebrews in Egypt, Hurston presents a Moses who experiences deep frustrations while attempting to shape an oppressed and demoralized people into a powerful, self-reliant nation. Unlike the Biblical Moses, however, Hurston's Moses is not by birth a member of the community he leads out of bondage. Rather, he is a member of the Egyptian nobility who is transformed first into a Hebrew and then into a Hebrew leader by the mythmaking powers of Miriam and Jethro. The phrase “I AM WHAT I AM” reveals the importance of Hurston's confrontation with the inherently ambiguous substructure of cultural mythology. Drawing on his profound knowledge of the natural and supernatural forces—from a West African spiritual perspective there is no fundamental difference—Moses uses beliefs, as much as material forces, to restructure political reality.

Anticipating Hurston's political positions of the 1950s—which superficially appear “conservative”—Moses, Man of the Mountain suggests that the key to meaningful progress for African-Americans lies in a belief in their own myth-making power rather than in protesting their political situation. Sounding the jazz/modernist theme of the isolation of the artist who redefines the mythology, and therefore the reality, of a community, Hurston summons the rhythms of the gospel preacher in her description of Moses as an artist who gradually assumes power over and responsibility for his own mythology. As Moses contemplates the beauty and terror of self-creation, of transformation, Hurston describes his situation in terms that would certainly be recognizable to Forrest and the musicians of the AACM:

Moses had crossed over. He was not in Egypt. He had crossed over and now he was not an Egyptian. He had crossed over. The short sword at his thigh had a jewelled hilt but he had crossed over and so it was no longer the sign of high birth and power. He had crossed over, so he sat down on a rock near the seashore to rest himself. He had crossed over so he was not of the house of Pharaoh. He did not own a palace because he had crossed over. He did not have an Ethiopian Princess for a wife. He had crossed over. … The sun who was his friend and ancestor in Egypt was arrogant and bitter in Asia. He had crossed over. He felt as empty as a post hole for he was none of the things he once had been. He was a man sitting on a rock. He had crossed over.

(104)

Forrest uses a similar mythic method in his treatment of Wallace D. Fard, who is described in The Autobiography of Malcolm X as the messenger who “had given to Elijah Muhammad Allah's message for the black people who were the Lost-Found Nation of Islam here in this wilderness North America” (161; for background on Fard, see Lincoln). Associating Fard with the organizing theme of the lost child, Forrest approaches the “source” of the Nation of Islam's binary mythology in a way that underscores his determination to decenter simplifying myths.

Throughout The Bloodworth Orphans, Fard appears in myriad forms, most of them associated with the African-American search for origins. From his initial appearance in the “List of Characters” where he places newspaper advertisements in hopes of obtaining unwanted babies, Fard—under numerous names—is frequently mentioned but never unambiguously present. Forrest's treatment of Fard as a trickster figure in the tradition of Brer Rabbit or Rinehart from Ellison's Invisible Man emphasizes the inadequacy of any identity or spiritual vision based on an unambiguous myth of origins. Present only as a linguistic construct, the Fard of The Bloodworth Orphans can be called on to authorize any belief system. In the final chapter of The Bloodworth Orphans, Noah Grandberry describes Fard—transformed into Ford, perhaps in reference to one of the founders of white America's economic mythology—as an animal trapper, a curve-ball pitcher, and a conjure man who, in the tradition of Hurston's Moses, eludes all definition: “But I have never known anyone in my long life to eat one of those graveyarders and live to tell it (yet FORD, why old Ford, old centerpiece W.W.W., or W.F., could)” (322). Referring to the “character” explicitly as “mythical,” Grandberry interprets “Ford's” association with the snake in accord with both the Christian myth of the snake as a sign of the devil and the West African myth of the snake as an emblem of the orisha Shango (himself a figure for the conjure man): “Oh, I've seen some wear the skin of that snake around their waists to conquer their foes. I remember when I met our foe, and particularly Your Foe, for the Second time, the mythical Reverend W.W.W. (or as I used to call him, upon a sterling occasion, W.A.D.) Ford, as he was then known, why, he was wearing one of those snakes about his waist” (322). Resolution of these meanings lies entirely in the responses of Grandberry's and Forrest's audiences. In contrast to both Eliot and the Nation of Islam, myth for Forrest represents a way of meditating on origins rather than a fixed point of reference for judging the chaos of contemporary experience.

The most rewarding experience of Forrest's fiction, however, is to be derived not from a general set of guidelines for reading, but from the reader's open response to passages such as Rumble's solo, which revoices motifs from the spirituals (the motherless child), the Odyssey (the lost son), the Nation of Islam (the Lost-Found people), Invisible Man (the hospital setting as the equivalent of the Golden Day), Afro-American folklore (John Henry) and countless other sources. Like the musicians of the AACM, Forrest consistently strives to realize the underlying imperatives of the jazz, blues and gospel impulses: to acknowledge the complexity of experience in a way that enables the individual and the community to realize change in accord with an encompassing spiritual vision. I would hope that by suggesting appropriate contexts for the reading of Forrest's fiction, this chapter will encourage the development of an audience willing to provide an affirmative response contributing to the release of the potentially liberating energies of our African- and European-American ancestors.

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