by Amiri Baraka
We went to dances and parties all over The Hill. And sometimes we even ventured into other wards. There were a couple of gangs, but we weren’t really into the gang thing on the offensive. Ours was mostly defense and camaraderie. We loved to bullshit and put each other down. But we dug each other and felt for each other and even worried about each other. Yet it was funny when one or some of the Hillsides came up to Belmont and came upstairs to my house, it was always a tentative thing. Ours was a little apartment, maybe five rooms with hardwood floors and a porch overlooking Belmont Avenue. Right near the crossroads of the world. But the floors were waxed (my gig), there was wallpaper on the walls (my old man put it up), a piano and television. New linoleum on the kitchen floor, and doilies, cabinets with glasses and dishes. All the remains of the yellow dreams of a brown family. As modest as that was, and it was very modest, the Hillsides could be very quiet and respectable in there. They tried to be on their best behavior. While in others of the boys’ homes they were subdued to a certain extent, but never with the almost icy deference I saw in my spot.
And dig this, I was still going cross town every morning to the Vatican and watching white boys and girls do their thing and was bitter and envious at the same time. Yet when I would see them at some after school dance (I would be peeking in on the way to the 9 Clifton) it would crack me up. The little bouncy shit they did and doctrinaire “Lindy Hop” took me out. Though there was a couple of dudes like Frank B. who did not bounce when they danced and who talked just like we did on The Hill. I understand he is still locked up!
I was going from my sophomore year to my junior year. I wanted to try out for football. I knew I could make the team cause the playground ball we played was at a high level. I knew I was fast enough, yet the whiteness of the team, of the experience itself, put me off. I was embarrassed because I was small that they might not even give me a tryout, and I didn’t want to get embarrassed by those dudes. (Like the shoes on the desk bit!) I went out for track and cross country because I had more confidence and made those teams. I first got a junior varsity letter in track. It was a little white “B” with blue outline with a “2” inside it and I loved it. Especially since over on The Hill people wasn’t as familiar with Barringer letters and didn’t know quite the significance of it. The next year when I got a varsity letter, a big “B” in cross country, it actually got less play, even though it was much bigger, because it didn’t have the little gimmick “2” on it.
We were City Champs in track my last year and that was a really big thing. I had a letter jacket and could stroll all over Newark showing it off. But I got the letter jacket when I got the JV letter and that was my special dressed up everyday look. The high school athlete tip carried more note than even the old Cavalier jacket and I alternated it, according to the crowd. I also got track medals for finishing fourth in the All City Broad Jump and fourth in the Low Hurdles and I was trying to figure out a way I could wear those, but my sister made necklaces out of them and lost them (along with my college track medals) once I left Newark for college.
But the contrast was amazing (though I guess in some senses there were many similarities between the life of a young Italian high school student and an African American high school student in Newark). At least on the surface and in my feelings, how I was regarded and how I regarded my surroundings was totally different. To me, the high school and everything in it was as serious as a letter on a page. Not much.
Not just my day-to-day life, where I lived was naturally more important than the superficial academic high school formalities, but my life on The Hill had a door which led inside (the Hill and me) to much deeper experience. The canteen was a center for a time, and the Hillside Place dudes my fellow travelers in digging all that: the life and the sounds of our time. But wedged up in there was some brown and yellow shit (I told ya) along with the white. And that is a crisscross of reference, as well as emotion.
For instance, there would be parties arranged by secret yellow sources like birthday parties for W. from Bethany, which might be held at the Jones Street Y. And I would sit and watch what passed for dancing and drink the punch and keep my eyes peeled for the harder dudes who would be passing by outside. S. and R. from the Cavaliers were in this yellow-brown combine to bring yellow life onto The Hill. And we at least had reference to something real, our wheeling and dealing — “in your face, turkey” — out in the Waverly Avenue apartments playground. A lot of the dudes at these little gatherings, like at the church and the special Y sets, were funny time. Didn’t play no ball or nothing. It was some mixed up stuff.
But some of the same records would play as in the blue and red light parties. And Mr. Lamar, who ran the Jones Street Y, was a tough hip old man. He conducted big bands of ghetto youth (like they say). And heavy-weights like Woody Shaw, Walter Davis, Wayne Shorter, Buddy Terry were coming through there. And some of these youth bands were so good they began playing gigs all over the town. They even started playing at the canteen.
These youth bands were playing in the canteen for a while. And they were good but they added another element that speaks to the whole nature of that time. As young people we were blues people; it is and remains African American popular music. It was the most natural element in our lives, the sound of those lives, as they were lived. In the late ’40s and ’50s the whole of the U.S. was going through changes and we were going through changes in it. What the blues said and says is the flow of our blood and the flow of us through this world. The old blues came into the cities before, even in the South, got hooked up to European instruments and marching bands and whorehouse employment post funeral enjoyment and became not just jass but jazz and not just that but us in a different way, somebody black with some other stuff to say. Some more stuff, what the city did, was propose itself to us as our new place (and home even away from home, which is still the South).
The music took on everything we ever did, which is why we loved it and made it (being us). So come into Newark, Jim, about nineteem and something, close to or into the twenties. And what you got? Some up North show time stuff. Some gay ballads, like Bert and Jim Europe and Eubie and them made. Could get raggy or barrelhouse, a strut come all the way out of the Gay Nineties.
But here come the blues. From out of the South, barrelin’ in on them trains, lookin’ for work. Moved into wherever, kept alive with a gut bucket. (“A bucket of guts to go, please, sir!”) The blues would come into these cities and take over whole neighborhoods, not to mention horns and pianos and the rap of the drum always been there. Rap rap rap rap, drummer rappin’. Like “I rather drink muddy water an’ sleep in a hollow log.” “Why, you ain’t even in New York, boy. This year’s New Ark.”
The blues would get dressed up. Put on some shiny brass and hang out in districts so out they was called red light, like our dark parties full of menace and joy. And the blues would be dressin’ up and stretchin’ out and soundin’ like it was somebody else, but we knew it was always the blues. It would take in and take on anything it needed to survive and grow and still be us.
Blues would show changed but itself anyway. Talking about different places it had been and what it had seen. How it had been treated, using anything it could to get our attention, its only love. So here they come with horns and electric guitars. (Was named Blind Lemon, and Leroy, then come up here and plugged theyself in, turned on for modernism, called theyself T-Bone!) Somebody put some slick shit in they heads to match they ideas. Like Red mud for the Nuer. Grease was the newer, conk! City shit.
As for jazz, we could dig the Dukish presumption, made you see how blues could show out. Could expand and talk history like a suite of symphonies. Where we been. How we got there. How we changed. (How some got strange!)
There is a heavy thing to us, blues says. A heavy thing, which always want to get out. It’s in that song and dance, that levitating stroke of walk (strut?). All the tragedies and high comedies, the constant grim ironies of tears or laughter. And beyond that. Beyond that. All the pas
t, zoomed like a real silver bullet toward the future. The long glittering song of motion which is now thinking about itself.
The “romance” of jazz is that it does not let go of its crowded past, its blue shadows nor the wisdom of the lone banjo at sunset near the anonymous plantation. Yet it wants to speak of everything in this place (even the shit it ain’t supposed to understand) since it is fed by everything even on the cool. Blues was naturally dismissed, some slave shit. Jazz would get smacked as payback for its presumption. No matter the rhythmic sophistication of naked savages so naive they used gold to sit their black asses on and fan themselves with peacock bennies. And then got the nerve to send messages through night black fingers smacking animal skins in Congo Square here in the New World.
Blues is our poem of New World consciousness, jazz our articulation that we is familiar with all the shims and shams of the machine (vertical American Class society, plus the international advertisements of the planet’s beauty). Blues is our father and our mother, our grandparents, our history, plus our daily black soulful lives as brothers and sisters against and within the reality and the idea of this place. Blues is the basic pulse and song, the fundamental description and reaction. A slave’s music, a peasant’s music, a worker’s music, the music of a people, a whole nation, expressing that nation’s psyche, its “common psychological development.” And jazz, as Langston says, is the child, the blue/black prodigy of the earth mother/father, that wants to take its inherited sensitivity (could etch a blue outline of hope against a grey sky made reddish by fire and blood) and presume to claim (to know and understand) all that exists in America black brown red yellow or white. Jazz, the most advanced music of the African American people, not only begins by being thrown by its parents through the shiny channels of alien sound machines, and then claiming them (like Mr. Sax of Germany might not have dug or understood John Coltrane) but then it even wants to describe the whole of this society, its multinational reality, to that society itself, and propose alternatives to the very society (from the fundamental sound of the culture, its publicly stated matrix of creativity and profundity). Jazz challenges Europe because Europe cannot even get in America without jazz’ help. And then jazz want to take the real credit — it be legitimate American music, when Brahms and them is only visitors (get its arrogant drift?).
Jazz said, “We can deal with this hardware and them harmonies too, and we is rhythmically sophisticated, and can create what you call, uhhh, syncopation.” And to the inquiring stiffnecks, the academic deadbeats who had come out from under they hoods momentarily so they could write their essays on the relative worth of these Aframerican melodies, jazz would stare politely and whilst beset with multisyllabic descriptions of the towering greatness of all that is “west” or white or European or merely dead, jazz would answer, and without malice, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” And jazz’ parents would smile, being proud of their presumptuous offspring.
Other people would say “But how can you say all this, jazz, you was not even in the classroom?” (This was before integration!) “So you did not even hear what is being taught. All you knew was the blues and that’s downright paltry.” (That was before the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Bix Beiderbecke, Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Stan Kenton, Chuck Mangione or Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and the Comets, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kiss, and John Travolta. A long time before dudes started calling themselves PUNKS!)
And jazz would repeat its message from its Duke or stare monkishly just off to one side of the questioner’s ashen face.
So we had come into the world bathed in spirituals and blues. And by time I came to consciousness up in that northern city, blues also had large scale come out the country, had come into cities and even went with a buncha people up North lookin’ for work, or runnin’ from the Klan or they animal counterparts, the boll weevil.
We had give up the “Spanish” (Mississippi-Louisiana-Texas) guitar for the industrial one, the urban worker’s guitar that needed electricity to tell its tale. In my generation we came up with the rise of rhythm and blues, the big city blues of screaming horns and endless riffs. The big bands were actually big blues bands, and even the jazz bands were blues bands that also had another kind of story, one that included deeper histories and music so heavy it could call on an ology if it needed to explain itself.
The spirituals we carried with us even into blues. We needed quartets like the Ravens and the Orioles to translate our real funk, past the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots, who were chosen darksters white folks could believe in. Dinah and Ruth B. were gospel sounds inside the blues. And the gospel itself was an urban spiritual that wanted to bring blues right on into the church and forget the devil sposed have something to do with it.
When Big Jay, and Illinois, Jug and Gatortail, the honkers and screamers of our day, came on, it was blues church we groaned and stomped to. Those screams were like black folks in sanctification, brown folks when they quit bullshittin’ and let the full spirit take ’em.
But a lot of us were leavin’ the church (even while we sat in there bein’ pinched by brown grandmas), leavin’ it to yellow folks or black and brown fantasy folks who still wanted to sit on the porch rockin’ endlessly to familiar groans strainin’ and squintin’ they eyes tryin’ to look into the nothin’ mist for a sign that Jordan was close on or that angels was actually motorin’ our way in those sweet chariots we sang about.
But urban industrial United States was teaching a lot of us. The material reality of being urban workers and shaky middle-class members of an oppressed nationality. These things were teaching us in the factory classrooms and other sweatshops, on the streets, over the radios, and over television, in the movies, in school classrooms. The world was here and some people was heavy into it suckin’ it dry. Our sad streets seemed to some of us to have maps and paths drawn on ’em glowing in the dark. We saw arrows away from the plantation in green-glowing neon under our eyelids just before we went to sleep. Ways out, even when we didn’t know we cared. Ways away. We wanted to go where the factorie’s conception arose and the intelligence of the sparkling machines came from. We wanted to go where that money went. Or we wanted to step into the books or understand more than the streets, we wanted to understand our feelings about them. We wanted to step into the radios (we sent messages and notes). We wanted to step into the movies and television screens. The grey steel streets were indeed paltry (not our feelings, and no, not the blues) but those gray streets were dead and cold, despite our warm living selves celebrating the life in us dancing across their surfaces. What was most important about the survivors was our will to be more than those streets proposed, to be happier than possible (in your philosophy, Horatio).
So the blues was myself and my life and the lives of those around me. But we were all in motion. The R&B life on the streets of the Central Ward, in the Masonic, on Hillside Place, and Spruce was natural to me. But something else was developing as well. In me, in us, in the music, in the society. It’s all connected.
The horizontal quality of black life, that is, the smashed flat quality of life for the oppressed, proposes that we is all generally equally mashed. So that one whole can incorporate us in our parts, though even so there was always a slight verticality. A yellowness and brownness, from the slavery time days when the Tom Jeffersons and other great philosophers would throw black women down and fuck them up (get them pregnant) with yellow life. And many of their yellow sons and daughters was the first petty bourgeois we had, even during slavery times. Though there was a black bourgeoisie in minute quantities, a slave-owning black bourgeoisie even during slavery. That is, free slave-owning niggers!
But as the verticality extends and gets larger so the contrast within our ranks. So the wider divergence of ideologies within the nation, reflecting the sharpening of objective economic division. The blues band of the ’30s becomes both the rhythm and blues band of the ’40s and ’50s as well as the jazz band and combo and later bebop combo of the
’40s and ’50s. It is simply one people showing its divergence socially though the aesthetic reflections of different sectors of themselves.
The youth bands we began hearing at the Masonic were just a few years older than I was and I was on top of middle teens then. Bands like Nat Phipps and Jackie Bland had the most note for us. And they played both the blues numbers and the incoming rhythm and blues hits and jazz and even a little new jazz. They were playing the whole of the continuum, like most of the big bands then, still able to play both big blues and jazz, they had a blues singer and a jazz singer, or one singer who could sing both. And we danced to all of it.
They would play “Harlem Nocturne” and “Flamingo,” stock band arrangements of anything danceable, Ellington, Basie, “Caledonia.” Jackie Bland was probably the most advanced. He had them playing “Ooopapadow” of Diz, and Wallington’s “Lemon Drop.” Herman’s takes of Diz were popular. They wasn’t prejudiced, they even ended the sets with Kenton’s “Intermission Riff.” But mostly it was rhythm and rhythm and blues and blues ballads. Wayne Shorter played with Jackie and Nat, and Grachan Moncur III played with Nat as well as Knobby who’s now with Herbie Mann plus some great young players like Ed Lightsey on bass, Nat’s brother Billy on reeds (the whole Phipps family played — Nat a pianist). And hip musicians liked Hugh Brodie, Allen Shorter, Herbie Morgan went through the bands. Hank Mobley was blowing with Billy Ford and his thunderbirds at the Howard Bar and James Moody lived on Monmouth Street up the street from my girlfriend D.
Jackie had the most strange presence and he would conduct the band (really like Diz) with head, arms, legs, butt, even his eyes shooting in all directions. These bands played the whole spectrum of the music, our whole history, from old blues to new jazz, and we danced to all of it. “Hucklebuck,” “Honey Dripper,” “Four Brothers,” and the band members were great heroes to us.