The Counterpublic Papers vol. 4 no. 17

March 27, 2019

I’d heard about an article in Rethinking Marxism from Michael Dawson’s wonderful Race and Capitalism podcast and I ended up stumbling on an interview with the editors and Robin D. G. Kelley. They begin the interview with Kelley’s work on Thelonious Monk. Kelley pushes back against the idea that Monk was heroically self-trained:

A lot of people assume that what made Monk’s music so creative, so whimsical, so free, was his lack of training. In other words, that he was not a trained musician. This is the myth: that he didn’t have lessons, that he had no knowledge of classical tradition. Quincy Jones says this, Bill Evans says this, they all say it. And yet Monk not only was well trained but he had classical lessons; he took lessons from a black woman who lived in his neighborhood. He was surrounded by other musicians in a very public culture where Alberta Simmons—his piano teacher—and the heads of the Columbus Hill Community Center all provided education for young musicians. In other words, it was a whole community that helped him develop his aesthetic. That community was the community he played for.

What was amazing too was that he lived near Central Park when Goldman’s Band—which is part of the public culture we’ve lost—would spend the summer doing these free concerts: Tchaikovsky, John Philip Sousa, Beethoven. His mom would take him to Central Park to sit there and listen to this free music. Sometimes 20,000 people would come out for these concerts! And it was free! And so you could actually be poor, growing up on the west side of Manhattan, and have access to this rich cultural palette of music and art. That was the world that shaped him. (Kelley, Robin D. G., Jack Amariglio, and Lucas Wilson. 2018. "“Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange”: An Rm Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Part 1." Rethinking Marxism 30 (4):568-98.)  

    I’d been thinking about this NPR interview with jazz musician Robert Glasper, likely one of the two or three most influential jazz musicians of his generation. In it, he was talking about how Roy Hargrove (who had just passed away a few weeks earlier) had influenced him.

"I want kids to look at me and say, wow he looks like me and to get inspired the way I was," said Glasper, when talking about an early experience seeing Roy Hargrove play at his high school in overalls and Timberlands, instead of a suit. "They don't want you looking like their principal. They don't want to be that. You want to be what you see." 

    When Wynton Marsalis became the face of jazz music in the early eighties, he brought with him a style that emphasized clean two and three piece suits as opposed to the sometimes informal sometimes garish clothing worn by his predecessors. Above, Glasper was pushing back against this notion—in fact in as much as Marsalis is probably still one of hip-hop’s harshest critics we should read Glasper’s work in general is a pushback against Marsalis.

I remember when I got liberated, I remember the day. I was a senior in high school and Roy Hargrove came to my high school and he had on overalls and Timberlands. I couldn't believe it. First of all I'd never seen an all-black band. So this is my first time seeing an all-black band and it's jazz. It shouldn't be like that that's what it was. Never seen that before. And they all were dressed like me and they looked like me. That inspired me to be who I am. I was like you can be who you are right now, still have the language, practice and be one of the best at what you're doing and still be you, know what I mean?

    Glasper is forty. And he’s talking about his high school, puts this encounter somewhere around 1996 (the interview was conducted in 2018). 1996 and he’d never seen an all-black band? It shouldn’t be like that, that’s what it was. Perhaps because Hargrove had just passed away, Glasper focuses on his dress (Hargrove looked like me, dressed like me). But Glasper was already a musician at this point:

Once I started driving, in Houston I was like 14. You could drive. I had to drop her off at work which is this bar called the Bistro Vino in Houston. When I would pick her up from work around midnight...I used to have to park the car, go upstairs and I had to play the last song with her. The bartender knew the director of the high school for the performing visual arts. He was like, 'Yo, your son's really talented. I can hook it up to where he could get an audition for this jazz director at the high school of the performing arts. It's only one there in Houston and you had to be zoned to it to go but he was like he needs to go there. So I went there, auditioned, crushed it and I ended up going there. That really pushed me to be at the high school with that much talent.

    Juxtapose the public culture Kelley writes about above, against Glasper’s account. By the time he was 14 he was already a musician—but the route he took was a deeply individualized one. He’s focusing on the clothing choices Hargrove made, and yes maybe there’s something to it, while ignoring the entire structural apparatus that makes music a possibility for only a thin slice of high school students. (The same thin slice whose parents now think they’re forced to game the system to get them into college.)

….

    Alec MacGillis has been working on a long form piece on Baltimore for a while. “The Tragedy of Baltimore” just came out about ten days ago. (In fact, thinking about jazz and politics, it was followed up a couple of days ago by “Why Baltimore Persists as a Cultural Icon”.)

    For some, including my friends, the piece is not just a solid work of investigative journalism, but gets at the heart of what’s going on in the city.

    For me?

    (As an aside, I know Macgillis, don’t see him as often as I’d like.)

    In reference to Charm City (one of a number of Baltimore post-uprising documentaries) I wrote the following:

Any documentary that seeks to deal with violence in the city while simultaneously ignoring the corrupt police department (and the larger political economy in which Baltimore is situated), is going in the exact wrong direction.

    Macgillis does reference the gun trace task force, but it doesn’t appear until some 5890 words into an 8200 word article. We don’t know that Baltimore has more municipal employees in the police department than any other municipal agency (in fact, more than most of them combined). MacGillis notes that “metro Baltimore enjoyed higher levels of wealth and income—including among its black population—than many former manufacturing hubs”… note the reference to “metro Baltimore”. We don’t have any sense of what Lawrence Brown at Morgan calls the “white L/black butterfly” phenomenon. And while we do get a sense that Baltimore is a one company town we have no sense of how much Hopkins and other corporate actors have received in subsidies of some sort from the city.

    What we end up with as a result—and given how long the article already is, one can suggest that MacGillis can only cover so much—is an article that ends up naturally leading towards the types of solutions that Hopkins administrators are trying to ram through. If we have an uptic in crime that simply can’t be suppressed, and we have police that are beleaguered and “underforced”, and politicians that are clueless….then we have to have more (better trained) police. With more community involvement of course, but we have to have more police. As if  police units in public transportation, police units at the University of Baltimore, Morgan State University, Coppin State University, and maybe Hopkins (Hopkins police force legislation passed another hurdle last week as the state house judiciary committee voted 13-8 in favor), police units in the Baltimore City public schools, police units in most of the city’s hospitals, and additional private security units in neighborhoods and institutions throughout the city….aren’t enough.

….

(As an aside, read MacGillis’ article, then this one. Do they read like the same city at all?)

….

More to say. Not enough space to say it. Love the ones you’re with. If you’re at the end of your rope tie a knot. And again, keep hanging.