Bruce Evan Barnhart is an associate professor of American literature and culture at the University of Oslo and co-director of the project Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. He is the author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture. His work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, and Novel. His latest publications are Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature, co-edited with Marit Grøtta, and LeRoi Jones, Jazz, and the Resonance of Class. His research interests include African American literature, post-Marxist theory, jazz, and Caribbean aesthetics.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So what drew you to jazz and its confluence and influence on literature?
BRUCE EVAN BARNHART
I remember hearing jazz when I was in junior high school and being totally gripped by it. So, before I went and got my PhD in literature and became an academic, I got a music degree. I thought I was going to become a musician, but you know how difficult that is. Then when I started to think about how to write on American literature during the 20s and 30s, particularly the Harlem Renaissance, the musical training and my love for jazz came back into play. That's when I wrote Jazz in the Time of the Novel, or at least the first draft of it that I turned in for my dissertation.
I don't know if music and my background in the arts has influenced my writing style or not. I would like to think so because that would be cool. I really admire how James Baldwin always talks about jazz as a kind of model for his writing style. But music has certainly had a profound influence on the way I see the world, especially in terms of the social world.
One of the big problems we have in all sorts of different places around the world is the question of how to coordinate difference. All sorts of people have different modes of living, different cultural rhythms, and different ideas about the future. Jazz is brilliant at a lot of things, but it notably brings together different people and allows them to retain their own sense of time and rhythm while playing together. It's a really profound model of social coordination. Now, of course it says something particularly pressing about the United States, but I think as a model for how differences go together, jazz is perhaps unparalleled.
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There's an interview where James Baldwin says, "you know, I've helplessly modeled myself on jazz musicians." It's there sometimes thematically in some of his novels, particularly, Another Country, but if you read his interviews, it's everywhere. It saturates his style. He thinks of it as something like a philosophy of existence. The famous example is when he's trying to write his first novel and he's holed up in a Swiss village. He's stuck. He can't create anything, but he's got a stack of Bessie Smith records. Listening to Bessie Smith sing, hearing the cadence and rhythm of her voice, opened up a possibility for him in writing fiction and about his own life at the same time. In my opinion, Baldwin's best writing on jazz, at least in the fictional realms, is this short story called “Sunny's Blues.” It's about how these two brothers can reconcile. They're very different. The older brother is the narrator and he says that the age difference between them is like a chasm which he wonders could ever become a bridge. That idea of making the age difference into a bridge is something very jazz-like. It's not saying let's bring us together so that we're the same. Rather he acknowledges that they have this difference, and he wonders if this difference could ever be a bridge? I think that's the question that jazz asks. Of course, it answers it and it says yes, it can be a bridge. It can be an ecstatic and profound celebration of human art and the shaping of not only musical structures, but also social structures.
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There are all sorts of fantastic things in the music, but if we think about the music as a model for social form or interaction, it lets one get away from fixed assumptions about the present and the future and attunes one to other people.
You're not dependent upon, if you follow a jazz model, a fixed conception of progress or a calendar, but rather other people. And other people are flexible—sometimes disappointing, but sometimes surprising in fantastic ways. If you take this model of jazz temporality and coordination, it suggests another way of organizing social life. One that is important and productive in all sorts of different ways.
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The practice of performing music and knowing how different forms work together allows you to write about it in a certain way. Not enough people write about music, and I would encourage all sorts of people who don't even have musical expertise to think about music and write through it. James Baldwin didn't have any musical expertise; he wasn't trained in piano or trombone or anything. Yet by listening carefully to the music and thinking about its implications, he wrote these incredibly insightful things. One shouldn't let a lack of musical expertise dissuade one from considering the importance of certain jazz performances.
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If you rely too much on technique or a certain kind of conceptual scheme rather than the physical sensuality of the musical forms in front of you, you lose something. Charles Mingus at a certain point in the 1960s wouldn't give his musicians sheet music. He would just play the music and then have them repeat it. He chose to do that because it got them away from thinking too conceptually and rather thinking more in terms of the centralist material reality of music itself.
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One of the things that I think is brilliant about Louie Armstrong's music, as well as the music of that and of later periods, is that contingency is not a problem; it's something to be celebrated. If you expect the drummer to be somewhere and you plan a phrase and then all of a sudden the drummer does something differently, in another musical form you might panic or think of it as a failure, but in jazz, that's an opportunity. Jazz music is a great medium for thinking about the shifting, contingent nature of the real world and of time. Time is contingent and jazz celebrates that fact. A lot of other art forms actually want to suppress it and create a certain fixed order of time or rhythm or temporal form.
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It's hard to make generalizations about the novel as a form because there are so many different instantiations of the novel, there are so many great novels. But in general, especially when thinking about the early 20th century, the novel has a certain kind of idea of progressive development built into it. When you read a novel, it's as if you can feel that sharp edge of the end of the novel mentally. You know there's an ending coming, and you don't know exactly what the ending is going to be, but you know that it's going to link everything up and make it all make sense. It trains you to lean towards the future in a certain way. You read an individual event, but you're subconsciously storing it away, knowing that it will be important later. You train yourself while reading a novel to take individual events and link them all to future redemption. But jazz doesn't do that. It has a certain repetition in it. When something interesting happens in the moment, it is enjoyed for itself. It's not necessarily going to be picked up later or incorporated into an overall form. It is just a contingent event that has its own density and beauty to it in the moment.
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Technology enables a lot of things, but there's something to be said for an analog, face-to-face encounter, one musician or dancer facing another person in a live moment. I think that's what the brilliance of jazz performance is about; you get three, four, however many people up on stage, and they have some idea about what might happen, but they're basically alive to the human differences in the moment. If the bass player does something different, then the saxophonist and the pianist have to respond in real time. You don't filter it, but rather you have to figure out how to adjust yourself to it in the moment.
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There's a way in which America is responding to jazz by containing it, thinking of it as something primitive. This is something that is codified or thematized in Nella Larsen's novel. The protagonist enters the cabaret and the music drives her with a certain kind of intensity, an ecstasy that is unparalleled throughout the rest of the novel. It's exciting and it moves her in a certain way, but she knows that if she becomes a part of this jungle music, she'll be figured as a certain kind of woman. She's very aware of all the different racializing gazes that will want to prescribe her a certain position, so she can't fully enter into it. She enjoys it for a couple of minutes, but then she eventually moves to Denmark. It's a great codification of the way in which jazz is exciting and opens all sorts of possibilities, but in terms of the way it's reacted to, the way it's described in reference to marketing, and the way it's labeled, there are all sorts of racial assumptions, including primitivism, which work to limit recognition of its sophistication, its brilliance, and its importance.
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Personally, when I think about the most amazing things that humans can do, I can't help but think about high level jazz musicians. The amount of information that they're processing—harmonic, melodic, rhythmic information all on the spot—and the act of not only taking it all in and figuring out where they fit in it, but also responding to it and creating something with a certain form and meaningfulness to it is, I think, one of the most impressive things that I've known any human being to do.
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If you think about jazz in terms of the treatment of repeated sequences with possibilities for change, creativity, and improvisation, then you get a sharper sense of the way in which jazz is entangled with the way in which people live their lives or might even act as a model for how people live their lives.
We've all got these repetitive rhythms. But within those forms, jazz would suggest there that are all sorts of opportunities for creating something vital, new, and different. Jazz is not just about the "new" and the "made up on the spot,"; it's this articulation of the creative newness with continuity. You repeat the same thing over again and it creates a certain kind of continuity. That's important for both dancing, listening, and frankly life in general. It's this really interesting model for how to coordinate continuity, repetition with improvisation, or, the new, the surprise, the contingent.
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If you follow the lines laid out by the dominant form of the novel, there's not really space for accidents or surprises, for unexpected opportunities. If you know where you're going, if you're headed towards this future of redemption at the end of the novel, then any divergence has to be something wrong or an accident. I love the novel and I think all sorts of people do interesting things with the form of the novel. But this temporality in which there's a future horizon towards which everything is directed has all sorts of pernicious effects on the way in which people live. If you have this sense of positing a future horizon to which we're directed, then one can't take opportunity of the surprising, the contingent, or the accidental. Also if you encounter something—some other person or some other rhythm or some other instrument—and they're doing something that you don't expect, there's a tendency to either dismiss that or to see it as a threat.
If we were more jazz-shaped as a society, if we had the kind of temporality present in the brilliant performances of Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong, then when things were unexpected or somebody spoke or had a rhythm of social living that was different, we would see it as an opportunity, a possibility for some other construction of myself and construction of meaning. If you start to think about the difference between a jazz-based celebration of contingency and the accidental, versus a certain novel-based, investment in a future or horizon, then there's a real sharp difference that is not only cultural and aesthetic, but is tied to life and in a certain sense politics.
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Toni Cade Bambara did so many different things from the late 60s and the 70s. I'm very partial to a group of short stories gathered under the titled Gorilla, My Love. I think there's a certain jazz influence there, and there's a couple of short stories that have jazz in them, but she combines what you might call a certain sophisticated literary style with attentiveness to orality in a way that I think is really brilliant. I think a lot of times those things line up; a certain kind of literary form is very open to, shaped by, or responding to oral forms and jazz. I would put the two things together under the heading of listening. It's a word you use all the time, but I think a real honest, open listening to something in all its nuances and its timber and its multidimensionality is a bit rare. It takes some work to get yourself into a space where you can really hear what somebody else is saying or the improvised jazz music.
There's a certain kind of listening that comes both out of the music and out of the literature which I think is perhaps one of the most important things one could get from any art form. I'm thinking about listening quite broadly, not just in terms of the stuff coming through the ears, but rather our response to the world, whether it's visual, written, or whatever.
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One of the things about jazz is each musician is always interested in the materiality of the sound. Before jazz, a trumpet player trained in classical tradition would approach sound as, let's refine it. Let's get away from the fact that it's actually sound created by vibrating lips. But jazz is like, No, man. The funny noises are the weird sounds that can be made. The things that come out of the materiality of the body. Those are things we embrace.
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Synesthesia is fascinating. The thing that I think is really interesting about writing about music is that music doesn't really fit into words. It pushes you to be creative in how you think about it. So you think about all these different analogies, like what color is the Coltrane recording? What form, or if it were an animal, what kind of animal? There's something really rich to be gained when you write about something that doesn't fit into writing. Because it pushes you and it makes you realize that no matter how good you are with words, the words don't exactly capture what you want. So I think if you want to write about anything from an academic or frankly any perspective, a certain kind of humility is important. You want to get it as closely as you can, but you have to recognize that you're not actually getting it.
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I think translation is a good way of thinking about writing about music. There's always something left out. What you're trying to do is just create an engagement, a dialogue. That was really important for me when I was thinking about literature and jazz because what I had read during most of the research before was, how does literature represent jazz?
In example, jazz is an object that literature then represents. But it seems if you really want to get at the resonance of literature and jazz, you want to think about the two of them in a dialogue. How does jazz talk to literature and how does literature talk to jazz? I always think of that idea of call response or antiphony is central to jazz. There's always this back and forth interchange between different mediums, different senses, different discourses and that is something I was trying to keep in mind.
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When jazz was emerging, it was a validly secular music. Both mainstream white American churches and African American churches were hostile to jazz. That's the devil's music. That's the stuff that happens on Saturday night versus the stuff that happens on Sunday morning. But if you start looking at the historical or biographical backgrounds of many jazz musicians, the majority of them grew up in churches or performed in the church. So the church has a space of not only religious belief, but more importantly for jazz of musical ritual and of community. There's a continuity between the way in which jazz when it works—and of course there's a lot of jazz that doesn't work out well, as well as the brilliant stuff that we love—it is translating some of that community, that social effervescence, and that ritual power that is embodied in certain African American religious traditions.
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1920 is the first time that the United States is more urban than rural. There's something about this changing notion of time. It's not just about living in a city, but it's about people moving into a city and wondering what forms of living together do we need? What forms of social coordination do we need? Jazz responds to that. It's thinking about different people fitting together. Jazz is a very urban music. That moment in history is more urbanization and a setting aside of all the assumptions about how time and life unfold in rural settings versus the question of how we cope with all sorts of different people from all sorts of different backgrounds, speaking with different accents, living together in the same social space.
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James P. Johnson played at a certain bar in New York City where Carolina dock workers from the Georgia Sea Islands, the place that has retained the most Africanisms in speech and music. These workers from the Georgia Sea Islands would have very distinct ways of dancing, and James B. Johnson would watch as he was playing. He'd figure out certain kinds of rhythms and patterns to play to go with their dancing and that became integral to his style. The Charleston is of course a cliched Hollywood marker of the 20s, but before anything else, it's a performance by James P. Johnson. He created the Charleston. It's created by this New York pianist looking at these people from a rural southern African American community with strong Africanist traditions of dance. He looked at it and thought, how can I get that into piano playing? I find that to be a really interesting and powerful example of music reacting to the reality right around it. It's as if in a certain way, these unnamed dock workers become part of the composition of James P. Johnson's music.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
As you think about the future and education and the importance of the arts, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?
That's a big question. It sounds like a cliché when I put it into words, but I think just this idea that the future actually is open. I don't think we do enough to think about the openness of the future, the way in which it could be almost anything. That's one of the things that I think is important about the strongest novels and the strongest forms of jazz. It teaches you on a visceral level that time is possibility. We live within these temporal forms and it's easy to forget that they're created by humans. But we create time every day. Whether we accept getting to class at nine o'clock or not, we're part of these rhythms. I don't think we do enough in education to ask students to think about all the different things that might happen in the future. I think we're a little bit too focused on learning certain things from the past. I think it's important to be exposed to that idea of possibility, this idea that every present moment is also a possible opening.
The novel encodes a certain kind of form and if we get jazz and the novel together as we do in the 20s and 30s, then we get a hybrid form of a very futural oriented, temporality based on the novel and a certain rhythmic embrace for the present based upon the jazz.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Kaitlyn Keyes.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
