2 of 5
As for jazz, it was an art form that antedated and survived the Harlem Renaissance. Ellison saw jazz as both a means and an end of Negro American freedom: it not only existed as a body of musical expression, with its own techniques and traditions, but also testified to the capacity of black Americans to thrive as artists within segregated America. By creating music that gave opportunity across the color line to excel, black Americans offered a beacon of hope to others who would dare to succeed in what little or great scope of freedom the majority-white society permitted.
And as black musical excellence made itself known to wider audiences, but especially to black audiences, interests beyond musical ones were piqued. The young Ralph Ellison could, at first, strive to become a world-class trumpeter and classical composer, only to be emboldened further to try his hand at writing. As Ellison once shared, he became a writer "because I had gotten the spirit of literature and had become aware of the possibilities offered by literature—not to make money, but to feel at home in the world."9
In an online interview with "Jerry Jazz Musician," Robert G. O'Meally explained how he came up with the idea for an Ellison jazz anthology:
Every time I give a course that touches on Ellison or on jazz in American literature … I 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 … 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.10
As author of Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1991), editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1997), and founder and director of the interdisciplinary Center for Jazz Studies, O'Meally has his jazz bona fides in order.
For Ellison, "living with music"—the title of his 1955 High Fidelity essay—meant literally living with and sometimes in spite of music (the latter being the racket produced from a neighbor upstairs who sang arias that Ellison tried to drown out with his own hi-fi set). O'Meally, the Zola Neale Hurston Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, borrowed Ellison's essay title for a medley of Ellison's reviews, essays, interviews, letters, and fictional excerpts that exhibit his devotion to jazz. All but the Juneteenth (1999) excerpt were originally written or published between 1945 and 1976. Moreover, most have already been published as collected essays or short stories in Shadow and Act (1964), Going to the Territory (1986), The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), and Trading Twelves (2000).
O'Meally gives brief, insightful background for each jazz piece, and includes a letter and two interviews—one he conducted with Ellison in 1976—not previously published. His interview of Ellison, part of his research for his biography The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980), is especially revealing of Ellison's religious upbringing and his opinion of Malcolm X, the Communist Party of the 1930s and '40s, and Africa from an American Negro perspective.
share this page
RSS Feed
