Blues the Prophet, Jazz the Messiah
>>text BY David Herrle>>PIC by Daniel Altherr

Though Alexander had adored the blues since boyhood, adult social madness complicated his adoration and, consequently, his simultaneous love for jazz. Instead of simple, direct teenhood edification, adult Alexander felt like an interloper in the post-African “blood rite” implied in the blues. His guilt chased him from the blues as from the black side of the tracks lest he be punished for his trespass. He saw a pallid, gutless wraith in the mirror: made eunuch by labor-muscled slave incubi who broke into milk-skinned girls’ lurid dreams and pleased them in ways white males had long abandoned for the sake of cerebral monopoly rather than nurtured, active bodies. All the rhetoric, spite, hate, and trash flattened him into a two-dimensional reflection, an animated image on a Wanted poster of the same white culprit. Somehow the guilt convinced him that he had performed the impossible during some coma, some blackout, by transmigrating back into men and men and men until he himself brought the whip down on a black back or called a house boy hither or plunged — grunting — deep between the sacrificial thighs of West-African female stock in the corner of a barn.

The composite wraith stared back, lips quivering as if wanting to plead, “Who do I give this to? Can someone take this load? I woke up from the birth canal and found this yoke on my neck, and I don’t know why or where to put it. Each time I try to shrug it off, it presses down heavier! Who will take this from me? And where did it come from?”

But then Alexander became defiant and inflamed with righteous indignation. Anger at exclusivity, especially founded on monopolization of residual misery under evil, jolted him from his guilt. “I’m a man, nothing less or more! I’m a man and not a reincarnation of a reincarnation! I cannot travel back in time, so you’ll never find my fingerprints at that crime scene! I won’t carry this evil load! And I won’t surrender the blues! Music waits for no man! No exclusive highway of veins can contain expressed souls!” He reasserted his loving belonging to the blues, proudly played his albums, listened as a backslidden smoker welcomes the first return cigarette. And he visited jazz when his cautious heart slithered out into the sun or bright moon.

Alexander envied the artificial sanctum not as one of Conrad’s dark-hearted rapists siphoning white ivory from and pumping darker darkness into the Dark Continent, but as a curious enthusiast. Alexander didn’t want to float on misty Congoes drifting backward into primordial haze to relive savage errors and past sins. Like Whitman: only forward!

Richard Wright and the artist-formerly-known-as LeRoi Jones were wrong for their mental segregation. “Collective improvisation” of any music was an open source. As Melville had showed that evil is no black thing by depicting an adversary as white whale, showing that the phantom guarding the mind’s demonic cave is not Diderot’s “hideous Moor,” so skin beautiful as blackest night could not retain blues as rite when the collective Author contextualized, syncretized, and elevated the art from plantations, bayous, tribe sorrows, group afterlife hopes. Why should Baraka be the only one allowed to speak for Lady Day?

Ralph Ellison proclaimed a free-for-all “beauty and universality”; Big Bill Broonzy sang, “This train don’t carry white or black, everybody ride it is treated just alike”; Leadbelly proclaimed that “everybody have the blues!” Speaking for jazz development, black sax man Oliver Nelson dared admit, “Thank God for slavery, because if we hadn’t had slavery, we wouldn’t have had the music.” And Alexander hailed, “I’ve got a right to sing the blues!” He believed in David’s 40th Psalm: “God put a new song in my mouth,” he’d cry. “How sweet the sound!” Jazz came as a gospel to retroactively free the blues from its bitter chains.

For the blues had been attractive, irresistible, and amorous — and it conceived children. It wept from the Ole Miss Delta, circulated, mutated, and generated other strains, translated the shimmy into sound, modified Western harmonies. Jazz was conceived in a thousand seedings! Off-beat African accents, rhythms upon rhythms and crossing rhythms, sync-sync-syncopation, slides and crushes and glissandoes, ghost notes, arpeggios, open tones, mashed majors and minors, flatted thirds and fifths, double paradiddles, double double paradiddles, flam accents and inverted triplets, antipodes and devious antidiatonic tambral note-bending, point and counterpoint, holler and answer from the sun-beaten oral days, the talkin’ telegraphic drum and croonin’ cryin’ guitar, slurrin’ trombone and flurried piano — from grass roots to rooftops. American improvisation took the blues up in a procreative whirlwind and shot the seeds across the fruited plain, the fecund woods, the smoggy cities, the clubs, the churches, the makeshift pioneer bands that played faster-tempoed spells for frenzied dancers. Black leaked into white and white leaked into black; little backroom bands became Big Big Big!

Like the leap from Bach to Ravel, blues rolled from the gutbucket to jazz Oz, on and on from corn ditties, moans and broken men, Son House, Patton, Robert Johnson, Pink Anderson, Bertha Lee, meat-shakin’ women squeeze lemon juicy, Fuller and Crudup, to the Big Easy, speakeasies, Vaudeville, Black Swan, banjo mojo, Jitterbug, Funky Butt, Dixieland, Prohibition-bingin’ flappers, the Charleston, Jelly Roll, Bellson, Krupa, Rich and his drumsticks, pokin’ the hootchie-cootchie and grindin’ the coffee, tappin’ slow tappin’ fast, stompin’, struttin’, shakin’ y’ass y’ass, Cab scattin’, sproutin’ jass gonads and jazz legs runnin’ through ragtime to swing to bebop to hard bop to boogie-woogie, Jelly Roll, Duke, Satchmo, Bessie, Basie, Bird, Gershwin, Sullivan, Velvet Fog, Tatum, Diz, Miles, Milt, Monk, funk, Dolphy, Parker, Tyner, Coleman, Coltrane, modal, new thing, free, Pharoah, Mingus, Costa, Rufus Thomas, Sax Collossus Rollins, fusion, soul, blues-rooted rock ‘n roll!

Menthol and marble Shirley Horn voices, Creole cool, Dada of piano keys and gin-and-lime saxophones and breezy brass and steamy reeds! Crash-crash! Clish-clish! Thum-dudda-thum-thum-clish! Thum-dudda-thum-thum-clish! Sibidda-dalum-lum-sid-sid-sid-BOOM! Sibidda-dalum-lum-sid-sid-sid-BOOM!

Jazz, silver jazz. The blues’ sexier, classier sister. His truly destined love. Yes, contortionist, messianic jazz: the grand melting pot of rites that gave retroactive membership and irrevocable reciprocity. Blues the prophet; jazz the gospel. The blues the dogma; jazz the atman, the universal breakthrough. Jazz is the only pantheism I believe in, Alexander realized. And without blues he’d have had no road to find it. No, Alexander refused to feel guilty for following the blues road. No “blood rite” any more than “right” blood. Children deserved to grow up in something better than old chauvinism. “This is this music of mine and yours!”

Uncle Remus, you hear my call?
Bigger Thomas was SMALL!
Killin’ blonde-whites like rats can’t make hate right.
Uncle Remus, you hear my call?
Legrees and Jack Bennys,
push your own ploughs
and drive your own cars, y’all!
Oh, I’m throbbin’ with brothersister love!
Stompin’ hearts, glorified from Above!
Row, row, row our boat ‘way from the bad blood,
row, row, row our boat ‘way from the bad blood.

How long would slave ships crash through American brains as through the ocean frothing like wasted semen in a corpse’s uterus? Who could shake the Satanic nightmare that had added hypocrisy to brutality so it surpassed the pre-conquest Indians’ own brand of inhumane territory wars, terror, and butchery?

Alexander hated the sick feeling of being on the verge of blurted apologies that didn’t belong to him. He, too, was a victim, a victim to the Great Pain that lived in human hosts like a sentient virus. He was sick of Mankind’s theystory: They versus they, they paying they or they paying back they, they hating they and they flipping they so that they could be the they that punished they in turn. He feared the cyclical minority urge to be the They on top for a few centuries until the sons of Ham, the progenitors of Cush and Nubia, the once-kings of Congo- and Nile-veined Africa, could regain their due plumage in present descendents. Alexander felt that his line of Japheth — the line that shot off Greeks, Slavs, Teutons, Jutes, Celts — was cursed to forever be resented as clowning Al Jolsons and hounded to eventually pay a price that not one earthly kind could claim true exemption from.

One night Alexander turned off John Lee Hooker’s “Baby Please Don’t Go” and scowled at himself in the mirror. “I won’t apologize!” he raged. “I won’t! I WON’T APOLOGIZE! I’m not to blame for this socially acceptable Original Sin! I didn’t ask for this! I don’t ask for any of this...this...this SHIT!” Tears came and he dropped to the floor weeping.

Carry ‘way our wrongs, Lord
Carry ‘way our wrongs
Make ‘em gone like in David’s psalm
Make ‘em gone like in David’s psalm
Sweep Your broom, Lord! Swish!
SweepYour broom, Lord! Swish!
SweepYour broom
Don’t want a white man’s burden
Kipling crippled me
Kipling crippled me
Only God can sweep that broom
To set we brothers free
To set we sisters free

The secret strategy, Alexander concluded, was miscegenation. It had gone from taboo to fad to fetish, yes; but as dangerous bees produce honey, so sweetness came from biracial generation: marvelous offspring as evidence, God’s way of saying, “It is good.” It would topple racists’ towers, befuddle tribal literature and limpieza de sangre, defy Marcus Garvey’s and Cecil Rhodes’ hopes of black for black and white for white.

Alexander wanted to grab the next black man who gave him shit for being a white sore thumb in an all-black club or area by the collar and shake him, force a hug on him, and say, “Cervantes said it best, brother! ‘Pure of race, every Ass wants to be’! Look in the mirror! Look at us! See us? I am! You are! WE ARE! Let’s love! Let’s suck this common oxygen and marvel at we miracles! We’re only a half-step away from each other! Live with it, you son-of-a-bitch! Live with us!” Then he’d back off, straighten the man’s collar, and softly say, “A thousand years from now, my descendents will have kinky hair and yours will have white thumbs. We’ll be brothers, man. And nobody can stop it.”