by Amiri Baraka
I had hit upon another idea in our search for some dust, however. I made a copy of Nellie’s key to the Sectarian Review, and unbeknownst even to her, I began to make clandestine visits to the offices. My object was to cop the review copies of books they always had there, or I figured they’d have, and resell them to various bookstores. I figured they’d take the books they were going to review and send them out. But the other books, the big art books and coffee-table books, plus the various kinds of fiction and nonfiction in which I knew the Sectarians had no interest, I’d drop into my army gas mask bag and slide on out before the whole building closed. I used to make this move about once a week, more if there was a big crop. I never took too many, since I didn’t want to get anyone suspicious or Nellie fired. But I’d wait till I knew she was gone, and she was the last one in the office. The two famous editors rarely came in. Then I’d take the books to Strand or Phoenix or Briggs’ Books and Things and get something like 25 cents on the dollar. If a book sold for $20 or $25, I’d really be in clover.
I used to get review records normally as a reviewer for Metronome, Martin Williams’ Jazz magazine, and even Downbeat occasionally. I’d sell these as well, if I didn’t want them, and get the same price, 25 cents on the dollar.
A small crisis arose when the deadline to move out of the East 14th Street barn came up and we still didn’t have a place. Finally, we had to move one way or another. Fee Dawson, by now, had moved into a loft, down at the other end of West 20th Street, right near Fifth Avenue. He was leaving to visit, but the loft had nothing in it really. I’d found a small group of rooms, the strangest-looking little apartment I’d ever seen, down on Cooper Square, a few steps from the Five Spot. Though the Five Spot was moving now too, up a couple blocks away to the corner of Cooper Square and St. Marks Place. The apartment had concrete walls and little winding halls, and a room that would be the kitchen with windows that opened out onto a roof. It was a wild place, but it needed work badly. It could not be lived in by small children. It needed doors and pipes for bathroom and kitchen, for tubs, commode, and stoves. It also was filled with debris. I found a guy who would do the work of fixing up the joint if I agreed to help him so he didn’t have to pay a helper. Nellie would go to Newark to stay with my family, with the two babies. I would stay at Fee’s place while this was going on.
At this same time, an old girlfriend of Jack Kerouac’s, Joyce Glassman, now Joyce Johnson, had become an editor at William Morrow. She told me if I submitted an outline for a book, something like the article I had published in Metronome, “Blues, Black and White America,” she could get it published, since some folks up at Morrow liked the article. I did an outline, Morrow liked it, I got a small advance — enough to pay Jeff, the carpenter, give Nellie some money, and at the same time have a little to sustain me at Fee’s loft. And so I began work, at the same time as we were fixing up the loft-like apartment on Cooper Square, on the book Blues People.
The feeling that went with moving plaster and garbage all day and helping with the plumbing and carpentry and in the evenings working feverishly on Blues People was elating. After a week or so I didn’t have to do so much to help the carpenter, so I could spend the whole day doing the research, reading, and writing. I’d go by Cooper Square every day to check on the progress and call Nellie about what was happening. She’d come over a day or so every week.
In a month plus a few days, the apartment, such as it was, was finished. Coooper Square is really a continuation of the Bowery and the section between the Bowery and Third Ave., they are the same street. I had made great gains on the book, gotten my basic premise together, and was clear about how I wanted to flesh out the Metronome article. In the next few months I was to finish it. The Cooper Square apartment had an ambience, a sense of place, as Charles Olson would have called it, that was unlike either West 20th Street or East 14th Street. Perhaps, for one thing, it was my own deepening sense of myself that was at large within those rooms: what the Cuban trip had begun to urge onto the surface, something that had existed in me as seed, as idea, as perception still to be rationalized. The political work that I was doing more of meant also that I had to offer another face to the world; maybe I was becoming someone else. Fair Play, On Guard, Organization of Young Men. I began to feel, even though I was definitely still a member of the downtown set, somewhat alienated from my old buddies. Perhaps alienated is too strong a word, but I peeped some distance had sprung up between us. I was writing the poems that would come out in a couple years as the book The Dead Lecturer, and again and again they speak of this separation, this sense of being in contradiction with my friends and peers.
For another thing, my writing on black music had increased in very large measure and, for certain, that was an answered promise that went back to my youth as a set of fresh ears trailing across Belmont Avenue listening to black blues and knowing that was the real language of the place! I even got something like a gig about this time. Esmond Edwards, the A&R man for Prestige records, gave me a gig writing liner notes. I got a disc about two or three times a month, and for each set of notes I wrote I got $50! I wrote liners for Gene Ammons, Shirley Scott, Arnett Cobb, Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, and many many others. The Blues People research also meant that I had to study not only the history of African American music but also the history of the people. It was like my loose-floating feelings, the subordinated brown that was hooked to the black and the blues, were now being reconstructed in the most basic of ways.
I was still drifting around the Village hooked up to any number of completely transitory, mainly white, female liaisons. But even that was somewhat altered. For one thing, I got involved with this beautiful black woman who was the mistress (on the real side) of this rich Village publisher. She was so out she’d go by there and get money from this dude and then we’d take off and go somewhere. In one sense, I guess I identified with her, because she seemed completely sealed off in an all-white world. He, the publisher, handled her like expensive merchandise. And one night, we look up, and we’re the only black people at this book party, and our eyes collided so heavily I swore someone could hear it. But she was even more confused than I. One day she comes to my house on East 14th Street, with some friend of hers, under this completely phony guise, and she says something to Nellie and wants me to leave the house and go with her at that moment. That was a little out even for me. She was still chippying around as an omnisexual or whatever, so our thing was short-lived. The wild thing is that one night, maybe six or seven years later, I see her at some function and she’s become a Muslim, a member of the Nation of Islam. We said nothing to each other, we even pretended not to recognize each other. But that really twisted me up.
Another kind of salon or circle began to form at Cooper Square. The tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp moved downstairs sometime after we did. At that time he was completely unknown, his first glimmer of recognition was playing in the jazz group that was part of the play by Jack Gelber, The Connection, which opened at the Living Theater, Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s avant-garde theater.
The altoist Marion Brown was also part of that circle. He had come up from Atlanta University to the big city and was still not certain he even wanted to play music. He was into writing, acting, whatever. William White lived right around the corner just off Cooper Square, in a basement apartment on East 4th Street, with his wife, Dorothy. He’d just come up from Howard University, where he went despite my telling him all those months in Puerto Rico not to. He was trying to make it painting in the big city. White had several friends whose main focus was scag, and that’s what they contributed to the circle.
The black painter Bob Thompson and I had gotten tight a year or so before. I’d seen him in the Cedar and at some parties. A big, husky, homely dude with hair standing up all over his head. I was always in and out of his loft. (The poet Quincy Troupe reminds me of Bob sometimes.)
A. B. Spellman was still around, now married to a French woman and living not far away down near Houston
Street. C.D. was also around. And the painter Joe Overstreet, with his loud-ass self, was there.
Some of the people from the West 20th Street group were still coming by. Joel Oppenheimer and Gil Sorrentino perhaps more than anyone else, and “Cubby” Selby (he’d be looking for shit as well). But there was a distinct change in this circle, one I understood much later. Marion might come around in the morning and we’d bullshit and get high on whatever. We’d go around to bug White or maybe Marion’d come with White and we’d get high and listen to music and bullshit. Archie or Joe might be on the scene. Sonny Murray, the great drummer, lived not too far from us and he’d like as not come in with Marion or, later, by himself. He had just begun to work with the jazz innovator Cecil Taylor. Cecil wanted to rehearse in his loft most of the days. But that was part of it — the time necessary to be put in, to reach the level we all wanted, those of us who were really serious! You got to put in that time, as Max Roach would say.
Sonny was always looking for smoke or whatever and some conversation. He was always full of his chuckling humor and talking about the music. We would sit around and get blind or blind-blind, talking about whatever came into our heads. Whenever someone would show, we had no bell, they had to stand downstairs and holler up; it would be the end of my work day and bullshitting and getting high was the order of the day!
But these were mostly black men that I began to see in the daytime hanging out, where before at West 20th Street, any daytime hanging out was with the Black Mountain crowd and mostly on the weekends because I had the technical editor gig. I was not doing any day gig now, I was writing, actually pretty prolifically. But my daytime hang buddies were black.
White, Bob Thompson, and I (mainly at Bob’s urging) were always putting in “bag time” walking around looking for dope. We might go wandering up Eighth Avenue in Harlem, in and out of some greasy joints, chasing the bag. We were all “chippying,” using scag from time to time, but mainly anytime we could get it. I mostly snorted it, but I was shooting it, too. Bob and White were shooting much more than I was. But all of us up in that group snorted scag like we’d drunk booze at West 20th Street. Plus my old friend Tom Perry would come by and we’d really get it on. (Steve Korret had left the States in 1960, as a new decade came in, connected up perhaps to a previous generation that saw Europe as center. At one point, he’d stopped Joel Oppenheimer and me in the Five Spot and jokingly made reference to a Blues poem of Joel’s in the magazine. Korret was very ironic and curt with Joel but in his humorous albeit quasi-nasty way. He said something to the effect that he wanted to check Joel’s blues, which was also the name of the poem, to see if it was authentic. I’m going to study this aesthetic you’ve roped this boy in with, is what he was implying. Later, on West 20th Street, we’d had an argument. He’d said, “Why are you talking to me in this way?” He was telling me about something he’d been doing at the UN. He’d left the bookstore and gone to the UN to work, divorced Charlene, and he was living with another woman who worked at the UN. In a month he was gone, to Scandinavia, where he lived until 1992, when he died.)
I still went to the Cedar and bellied up to the bar with Basil King or Joel or Gil or A.B. or even Bob and White would come along, but now I was much more into the jazz clubs that were opening and some coffeehouses and lofts that were playing the “new thing” rather than the old stiff formal expensive nightclubs. The Five Spot was the center for us. When Thelonious Monk came in for his historic eighteen-week stay, with John Coltrane, I was there almost every night. I was there from the beginning listening to Trane try to get around on Monk’s weird charts, and gradually Trane got hold to those “heads” and began to get inside Monk’s music. Trane had just come from playing with the classic Miles Davis group that featured Cannonball, Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers, and Red Garland. The Club Bohemia was where I’d heard them “max out” and make their greatest music. And that was a slick nightclub, albeit in the Village. But the Five Spot was on the East Side, on the Bowery. C.T., Cecil Taylor, had really inaugurated the playing of the Music in the place. Before that it had been one of those typical grim Bowery bars, but some of the painters who had lofts on the Bowery and in the area began to come in and drink and they used to ask Joe and Iggy to bring in some music. So the completely unorthodox Cecil was one of the first to come in. By the time Monk and Trane got there, the Five Spot was the center of the jazz world!
In one sense our showing up on Cooper Square was right in tune with the whole movement of people east, away from the West Village with its high rents and older bohemians. Cooper Square was sort of the borderline; when you crossed it, you were really on the Lower East Side, no shit. The Music itself, rapid motion during this period. Trane’s leaving Miles and his graduate classes with T. Sphere Monk put him into a music so expressive and thrilling people all over tuned in to him. Miles’ group was classic because it summed up what went before it as well as indicated what was to come. Miles’ “perfection” was the interrelationship between the hard bop and the cool and in Miles, sassy and sly. So that on the one side the quiet little gurgles that we get as fusion also come out of Miles (all the leading fusionaires from “Cannonball” on are Miles’ alumni) as well as the new blast of life that Coltrane carried, thus giving us the Pharaoh Sanderses and Albert Aylers and the reaching searching cry for freedom and life that not only took the music in a certain direction, but that direction was a reflection of where people themselves, particularly the African American people, were going. It is no coincidence that people always assciate John Coltrane and Malcolm X, they are harbingers and reflectors of the same life development.
And so I, we, followed Trane. We watched him even as he stood staring from the Club Bohemia listening to Miles and going through some personal hells. We heard him blow then, long and strong, trying to find something, as Miles stood at the back of the stage and tugged at his ear, trying to figure out what the fuck Trane was doing. We could feel what he was doing. Amus Mor, the poet, in his long poem on Trane says Miles was cool, in the slick cocktail party of life, but Trane would come in “wrong,” snatchin’ the sammiches off the plate.
The Five Spot gig with Monk was Trane coming into his own. After Monk, he’d play sometimes chorus after chorus, taking the music apart before our ears, splintering the chords and sounding each note, resounding it, playing it backwards and upside down, trying to get to something else. And we heard our own search and travails, our own reaching for new definition. Trane was our flag.
Trane was leaping away from “the given,” and the troops of the mainstream were both shocked and sometimes scandalized, but Trane, because he had come up through the ranks, had paid all the dues, from slicksteppin’ on the bars of South Philly, honking rhythm and blues, through big Maybelle and Diz on up to Miles and then Monk, could not be waved aside by anybody. Though some tried and for this they were confirming their ignorance.
But there were some other, younger, forces coming in at the time and this added still other elements to the music and spoke of still other elements that existed among the African American people. Ornette Coleman had come in, countrified, yet newer than new. He showed at the Five Spot, first, with a yellow plastic alto saxophone, with his band dressed in red Eisenhower jackets, talking about “Free.” It was “a beboppier bebop,” an atomic age bebop, but cut loose from the prison house of regular chord changes. Rhythmically fresh, going past the church revivals and heavy African rhythm restoration that Sonny Rollins, Max Roach and the Messengers, Horace Silver had come out with attempting to get us past the deadly cool of ’50s “West Coast” jazz. Ornette went back to bop for his roots, his hip jagged rhythms, and said, “Hey, forget the popular song, let’s go for ourselves.” And you talking about being scandalized, some folks got downright violent. Cecil Taylor was on the scene first and his aerodynamic, million-fingered pianistics, which seemed connected to the European concert hall, made people gloss over the heavy line of blue syncopation that Cecil came with, and the percussiveness of his piano was as t
raditional for black “ticklers” as you could get. But that was new too and sassy, even arrogant (like Cecil himself), as if he had gone to the academy (he had) copped what they had, and still brought it back home.
Plus, all of Ornette’s band could play, they’d start and stop like it was in medias res, it seemed there was no beginning or formal ending, yet they were always “together” — Don Cherry, like a brass pointillist, with his funny little pocket trumpets; Charlie Haden, the white bass player who got down on his instrument, strumming and picking it like a guitar, showing that he had heard Monk’s great bassist, Wilbur Ware, and knew which way that ax was going, but at the same time original and singing. And Billy Higgins, of the perpetual smile, cooking like you spose to, carrying the finally funky business forward. They all could play, and the cry of “Freedom” was not only musical but reflected what was going on in the marches and confrontations, on the streets and in the restaurants and department stores of the South.
The ’60s had opened with the black movement stepping past the earlier civil rights phase in many ways. One key addition and change was that now the black students had come into the movement wholesale. So that from 1954 (when Brown v. Board of Ed. showed that the people had forced an “all deliberate speed” out of the rulers instead of the traditional “separate but equal”), through 1960, Martin Luther King and SCLC, mostly black, southern, big-city ministers, leading that struggle for democracy, were at center stage. But in 1960, the student sit-ins began, and, on February 1, black students at Greensboro began a movement that brought literally hundreds of thousands of black students, and soon students of all nationalities, into the struggle for democracy as well. So that soon we would hear the term SNCC, who, at first, were still hooked up with the middleclass ministers and their line of nonviolence, but that would change. But now, the cries of “Freedom” had been augmented with “Freedom Now!”