Black Music on Planet Justice
Soundtrack for a Sustainable AfroFuture
That sounds great, she said, of my recent work. And I thought, what if we took that expression literally, not as a terse, dismissive verbal emoji — a way of deeming anything as okay-ish enough? You know, like when you hand someone a document to proof and they scan it for 30 seconds, hand it back and say, “looks good”. What if we broke that expression down — Sounds Great — in a way that reframes sounding as an unambiguous active verb — to sound: to occupy the sphere of awareness bounded by hearing? To Sound Great, then, would literally be to occupy hearing — to saturate the listener in the stuff of sound, and to do so, greatly. Then, I think we must clarify the sense of scale here as one, not of volume, where fullness could be loudness to the point where ears reveal their fleshy vulnerability and hearing becomes painful. No, we are speaking of a density in the experience of hearing/listening as a particular habitus of attention. In the classical music of my people, Jazz, there are many strong examples of this fullness, this sounding greatly, going back to the soaring, overlapping improvised solos of Dixieland and continuing through the truly titanic music of the Big Band era. But because human attention is not a constant, an invariant capacity that does not change over time, the ability of a musical style, voice, or movement to occupy hearing fades as its presence becomes less startling, more familiar, more enculturated, and therefore, more mundane.
The movement that spiraled out of Ornette Coleman’s plastic alto saxophone and Cecil Taylor’s precisely architectural piano has been called Free Jazz, and more recently Creative Improvised Music, or even, Ecstatic Jazz. By whatever label this renegade, expeditionary music has been called, it remains a cultural obscurity, even among the race of people who birthed it. It is a music that has insulated its ability to Sound Great against the attrition of time and popular taste with a holistic embrace of genuine freedom, that is, by releasing the Black occult arts of improvisation from the solo. Under this bold rubric, master musicians set about making an unapologetically difficult music in which form and the content occupying form were both conceived as improvisations. This idea about generating a perpetually new Black music takes its full expression in the groundbreaking work of the late Butch Morris, a genius among geniuses who I had an opportunity to study closely.
But where does this new music, this difficult, non-idiomatic, way less than popular music, fit within the ongoing social crisis that has defined Black life for four centuries, from sea to shining sea? We have a tradition, a clearly identifiable tradition, of Black protest music. Think Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” Gill Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” or Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright”. An inventory of the great musical artists who breathed life into this tradition is unnecessary. What matters is that the shock troops of BLM have a musical food that inspires and refreshes them as they pour their determined resistance into the streets of America. So, let’s continue please, Beyoncé, Donald Glover, Mourning [A] BLKstar, Joey Bada$$, Lil Baby, and many others, to make a modern protest music that fits precisely the mood and temper of these times, but is that all we need as we aim our efforts in the direction of Liberation, true and lasting?
What about Justice? “As a Black man in America,” Butch Morris explained to me, “justice is the most important word. Justice is the most important word because for years people have been asking for freedom and they didn’t know that freedom is not synonymous with justice. I believe in justice.”
Me, too. Recently, I have been juggling a pair of metaphors to energize and refresh the power latent in this idea of Justice. “Justice is an unknown land,” I shout at my audiences and social media community, “a bold and exotic technology that we have never experienced, never employed.” I have taken to using this bombastic language for several reasons. As the term systemic racism entered the zeitgeist, it seemed critical to disabuse my people, Black people, of the notion that a system that was founded on oppression of the cruelest sort could ever be reformed or reengineered to do anything other than hurt us. The idea of transforming this American system into an engine for Justice is as silly as the notion that your Uncle Buddy’s broken down ’76 Eldorado could be rebuilt into an interstellar spaceship. In fact, if I had to choose, I’d bet on that caddy’s chances for space travel before I’d waste a dime on the idea that anything called America could ever be more than a work camp and a shooting gallery.
But why, I’m sure you’re asking, exoticize the essence of this concept. How can Justice be a technology and why such a strange one if it is? We are a people who have placed great faith in technology. Technology solves problems. Certainly, the disease within our society, the cancer that consumes our world, cries out for a technological fix, maybe clean energy, or universal broadband, but Justice?
If any humans on this third stone from the Sun have ever known Justice (and I suspect, we have not) then it is an advanced technology, irretrievably lost with the secrets of Atlantis. It will, when placed in our hands (that is, when we arrive on its distant shores) change everything. Like fire.
So, we need a modern Black music — more about dynamic, large-scale transformations than protest, a here and now music grounded in the vernacular of a struggle that started before 1619 and has since been an oh-so-heavy cross-generational cross to bear for me and mines. Continue, please, Black musical creators to push us through these trials, towards our slain King’s promised land, but we also need (now more than ever) a victory music, a sound object planted firmly in the fertile soils of that terra nova. This music is and must be strange, as strange, fresh, and beyond recognition as the fresh air of Justice is to those whose collective psyche has been scarred so deeply by its absence.
This new music is not a site for ancestor worship, although I will not ask you to stop feeding our shrines. It is instead a sonic altar upon which to place offerings to the sweet innocence of Black children who will never know racism, never have to fight their way out from beneath its stubborn weight, never have to sing we shall overcome…some day.
While the streets of Louisville, Portland, Rochester, and Kenosha swell with the focused anger of the masses of Black people, we must honestly acknowledge that the unknown land is never discovered by a crowd. Only a few intrepid pioneers are lucky and tough enough to stand alone in the new territory and survey its promising riches. We who have determined to build a New Black Music, an exuberant, futurefunk already thriving in the fertile promise of our self-determined tomorrow, are just such intrepid pioneers. Obstinately planted where patience has run out of road, our Black tomorrow music is built from the fiery spontaneity of the free jazz tradition, accelerated through the potency of 21st century tools. Our sound product is crafted with a courage that is exceeded only by our love. Our music sounds great and our future sounds great, too. Meet you there — don’t be late.
Never forget the children of MOVE (May 13, 1985).
Alter Destiny is closer than you think.
A (very) short playlist from the AfroFuture:
Moor Mother
Luke Stewart
Twin Jude
Jamal Moore
Nik Francis
ONO
Model Home
Bushmeat Sound
Speaker Music
Discipline99
Hprizm
Black Spirituals
Harriet Tubman
Blacks’ Myths
Sun Ra Arkestra
