 doors. And we are live in Zoom. Give it a few moments. Welcome, welcome. Hello, friends, we're going to give it a few moments to fill up the room. I noticed there was a little delay. Thank you for being here today. I'm going to give it just a few more minutes because there was a weird snag there. And right now, I'm going to put the links for today's events. And this has library news, and it also has links to today's presenter, and upcoming events, and to the playlist for today's event. And then, as always, books and resources come up while our presenters talk, I will keep up and add these to the document. And this is a live document that you can pick up at any time and grab all those amazing resources. I will also send out a follow up email. All right, let's get started. I am so excited again to be able to welcome Dr. Lewis R. Gordon here in conversation with Justin DeMong of the American before Columbus Foundation. And before we get started, just some library news. We want to welcome you, of course, to San Francisco Public Library. And we want to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramya Chesh Kolomi peoples, for the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homelands as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first persons, and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramya Chesh community. I we all encourage you to learn more about first person, first peoples culture, particularly here in the Bay area. There's some great resources in the document that I put in the chat box. Lots of good websites, lots of good reading lists. So follow up with that. And if you know what native land you're joining us from today, throw that in the chat as well. Today, we will have time for Q and A please use the Q and A function. And that'll be towards the end of the conversation. Some upcoming events we'd like to let you know about. We're going to be hosting a series of TEDx type talks around climate action. The first one is December 8 and it will include our mayor. And you can put the link in the chat later to register for this event. And it's a partnership with the city. And a partnership with SF environment. Tomorrow we have more music. Our amazing friend Linda Jackson will be presenting a part two of her presentation called There's Something About the Water Black Music in San Francisco. And all about musicians born and raised in San Francisco. It's very fun. And she's an amazing speaker. So come by for that one. It's going to be a good one. 11am. Little music and then you can go about your day. All right. And then next week, we have author Andreas Carlos talking about climate courage, his latest book, also a Bay Area author. And I'm going to skip over a few things, but we do have an in person couple in person events that we'd love to share with you. On December 12, we'll be honoring our poet, past poet laureate, Jack Hirschman, who has recently passed away. And we'll be showing the film Red Poet and the director will be in combo. And it should be fun in our beautiful corrette auditorium. We'll be able to spread out and enjoy the day. It's on a Sunday too. So the farmers market is there as well. A panel consisting of amazing humans. And they'll be discussing Dodie Bellamy's letters of Minna Harca. And this has just been re-released. It's sure to be an amazing panel. And this one is on Zoom. And then this one I'm super excited for. I love programs at the bar. So we have author Mallory O'Meara, and she's going to be discussing her book Girlie Drates, A World History of Women and Alcohol. And this will be held at our beautiful oasis right down the street from the main library at the champagne room. And I think that's all I'm going to announce today. And like I said, we have so many events online and starting to have some in person. And our branches are starting to open up. All branches are open. So we'll be having a lot more. Please stay tuned for our website sfpl.org slash events. Right now, I would like to turn it over to Justin Daman, who is the chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation and administer of the American Book Awards and who has been a really great partner to work with. And I've enjoyed all the amazing programs you bring to us, Justin. And as I know, today's will be just as amazing. Take it away, Justin. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Anissa. And again, my thanks to the San Francisco Public Library and the friends of the San Francisco Public Library. This is our fifth program in collaboration with the Before Columbus Foundation this year. We began with a celebration of Miguel Algarine and continued with the man whom we have the great pleasure and honor of bringing back to you this afternoon, Lewis Gordon, this May, in a discussion of one of his most recent books, Freedom, Justice and Decolonization. On the occasion of the birthday of Malcolm X, that was May 19th this year, we continued this summer with Professor Frank B. Wilderson and the most recent book from Professor Wilderson, Afro pessimism, now out in paper back from Norton, recently long listed for the National Book Award. And more recently, our program from just this past autumn, the American Book Awards, which will be rebroadcast December 19th on C-SPAN this year. Again, it is a great, great pleasure to welcome Lewis Gordon back to the San Francisco Public Library for our discussion this afternoon of Free Jazz and Black Power. Mr. Gordon is without question a preeminent figure in international philosophy. And I will mention that his forthcoming book from Farrar Strauss and Giroux, coming in just a few months, Fear of a Black Consciousness, which no doubt will be touched on this afternoon. Before we get into the discussion, I want to make my position very clear, which is that jazz, the music we know today as jazz over the last 100 years has been without question, the most pervasively influential art form on the planet Earth, its extra musical significance, particularly in terms of politics, which we'll be discussing this afternoon, but also within all of the arts, literature, painting, poetry, dance, film, television, have been infused with the spirit of jazz. I say this because I want to be also very clear and decisive that jazz is the creation of African-Americans. That is the creation of Africans in the Americas. And this is an argument from the center, the very axes of the project of the so-called New World. This is not an argument from the margins. This has nothing to do with anything that includes concepts such as equity, diversity, inclusion, or many of the other off-time slogans that have recently been hoisted upon us as part of neoliberalism or imperialism as the slave system of the West is known. So to be very clear about that, I want to now begin our discussion and our welcoming of Lewis Gordon by bringing our attention to a very short day by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King in the year of 1964 as an address to the Berlin Jazz Festival. And this is of course just a few months before his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. I will also note that this particular festival, this particular jazz festival for which the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King penned these words, which we are about to share with you as the beginning of our discussion is also the Berlin Festival in which Wayne Shorter took the helm as the musical director of the Miles Davis Quintet, which featured the young Tony Williams, Ron Carter, and Herbie Hancock, perhaps one of the most fertile and groundbreaking assemblies of musicians and minds in the history of this music. And so with that, before we turn to Lewis Gordon, let us find these words from Martin Luther King. God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creators with the capacity to create. And from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations. Jazz speaks for life. The blues tell the story of life's difficulties. And if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music. Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning. The musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth, which flow through his instrument. It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our freedom movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now jazz is exported to the world for in the particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith in music, especially this broad category called jazz. There is a stepping stone towards all of these 1964 words from Martin Luther King. Louis Gordon, as you hear these words written by Martin Luther King, what thoughts go through your mind? The first one is Amen, Dr. Martin Luther King. Amen, indeed. And some would say Ahmed. But before I reflect there, I would I would like first to say Halito, which is Choctaw for Hello Everyone. As I was saying to Anissa, to whom I give thanks for organizing the session, co-organizing it with you, Justin. And to you, thank you. I was reflecting on one of the people we would talk about, Don Sherry, maternal side was Choctaw. And a lot of the African Americans in California are descendants of people who fled from Oklahoma, who are also Afro indigenous. They were African American and also Choctaw. So Halito. And since I'm speaking from the colony of New England, I'll say what a key soap, which is Wampanoag, which is the term the Wampanoag people use when they greeted the pilgrims who did not reciprocate the Wampanoag people's act of kindness. So and of course, there's so many ways we could say hello to the audience. But a little shout out to, you know, some of my folks in South Africa. So bono, which is Zulu for I see you, which is how they say hello there. But I could also say Mualweni. And I could also say Domella, which is in Setswana. And so the one of the things that come to my mind immediately is how beautifully Martin Luther King, Jr. encapsulated part of what I talk about in the book you mentioned, fear of black consciousness. It comes out January 11, by the way, which is, you know, great, that's it a few weeks. And in the book, I had to talk about jazz because to talk about black consciousness is to talk about the struggle for freedom. And also to talk about the anti black racism is to talk about the struggle against freedom. But the thing that King brought out so beautifully is that the struggle for freedom requires also at the level of aesthetic expression, articulating the lay of motif of what we call modern life. I usually say Euro modern life, because modern actually just means to belong to the present. So there have been many moderns. But one of the tragedies, in fact, and an injustice, one of the crimes of Euro modernity is to try to inculcate into black and indigenous peoples, the idea that we don't belong to the future, which in fact delegitimates our present, and a form of primitivism is imposed upon us to tell us we only belong to the past. The extraordinary thing is under such epistemic aesthetic and spiritual violence, the people fought back, but did not fight from the impetus of revenge and degradation, because they knew the struggle against anti life has to take the form of the affirmation of life, which is what King was saying, which is why this music in addressing alienation in a way that also affirms the human beings, right, to right to live, becomes a voice, as King pointed out for all. We know right now, there's somebody in Beijing, somebody in Auckland, somebody in Calcutta, somebody in cartoon, somebody in Johannesburg, somebody in in Salvador, all the way through to us in San Francisco, and in West Hartford, Connecticut, listening to something that's an expression of jazz, and the blues, that's not simply about passing time, but about being connected to what it is to be affirmed as a human being in a universe or pluriverse or multiverse that did not and does not give a damn about us. But we in doing so give a damn about meaning, life, reality, and one another. Yeah. With that in mind, I'd like to refocus on a specific aspect of what King was sharing with us a moment ago, which had to do with this statement here, that much of the power of our freedom movement in the United States has come from this music. I want to pivot back to that, because for those who may not bear the weight of the context of this statement, we're also talking about a particular period, not only in the accelerated development of jazz music, responsive to an increasingly banned flame of African revolution, of revolution that is taking place in the Caribbean and throughout the Americas, but also a rearticulation of joining and growth between African Americans, those in the United States, with those concerns that are taking place internationally. I think that this is crucially important for the discussion today, because part of what is emerging in free jazz, of course, which we can find this very same year in a Love Supreme, the masterpiece by John Coltrane recorded just a few months later, on near the same day that King delivered the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, by the way. So I want to talk about how this informs the changing imagination of the possibility and practice of freedom, which you touched on a moment ago, because this fire of African revolution, this alignment that's taking place between the freedom struggle inside of the United States, and elsewhere throughout the world, is the vision of that is really crystallized, not only in John Coltrane's music, but in free jazz in general. Could you speak to us about that moment in history? Because I believe it's so important to understand, in terms of what King is talking about and what you're describing here. Sure. I mean, King is talking about so many things. I mean, if we're talking about 64, it's right after, you know, the not only the March of Washington, but we're also talking about movements all the way through across the different independence movements and the continent of Africa. We're also talking about Vietnam. And if we know that comes home in a certain way with King after this period. But there's several things. First thing, of course, is analytical, right? In a way to say free jazz is to be redundant. Jazz is about freedom. But so why in the world say free jazz, right? And in a way, and it's interesting because King was thinking about this movement that became free jazz, because another term for it in times of modern jazz, all kinds of other other, you know, depictions. But you know, jazz is a music of freedom. But as we know, every time you take a step forward in freedom, especially not only this country, but globally, when we're talking about the forces of everything from capitalism to neoliberalism, etc. But is that it tries to push us a few steps backward. And some of the ways that effort is made is through a distortion of language. You know, and we're seeing that happening right now. I mean, look at it. I mean, there are people are trying to rip away women's rights trying to rewrite the language in the form of saying they're fighting for women's rights. Yeah, right. You know, there are people who are trying to take away black, the rights of black people to vote, like claiming they're trying to make voting rigorous. You know, there are all kinds of twist, but there were critics, as we know, who wanted jazz to be a kind of Sambo thing, they wanted jazz to be somehow a subset under the control of aesthetic and positions and modes of evaluation that would in a word domesticated. But but what I already said about the word modern, when you're going to make because the idea is to have particularly black people believe that we're not modern, that we're simply locked into being the consequence of white action. And thus, many black people regarded themselves in the past as constructed by whiteness. But whiteness said that there was no place for us. So it created a melancholia in which we're to be locked into a world in which we don't belong. But as we know, we have our own redemption narratives, our own question of belonging. And the moment we talk about Afro modern and Afro future, we're saying not only we'll belong, but we have to figure out a way to belong in our own terms. Now, why I bring this up is because you see, by putting the word free done, or free next to jazz to make it redundant, is not only a critique to those critics, because at the time, remember, all nearly, nearly all black musicians from that period jazz musicians, and many of the white musicians who played with them were resolute about this as a music of freedom, freedom struggle. And they were facing the kind of criticisms like black athletes face today, you know, shut up and play, don't get political. But we know that for instance, Abby Lincoln Max Roach or Amonata Maseka, as she's also known, responded with, you know, we insist, freedom now sweet. Right. There was no contrary. In other words, when jazz musicians talk about freedom, it was not a narrowly aesthetic term. It was a relational term that connected the music to the political realities, all the way through to the mundane activities, such as in the painting behind me, of sitting around for a meal. Okay, if you think about what goes on when you sit down for a meal. Okay, if you look at those people that family sitting down in the painting there, they sat down, they didn't want to eat. But they didn't know what the conversation around the dinner table is going to be. They also in the process had the affirmation of life across generations, across many ways. In other words, we see a celebration, a celebration of life that's in the improvisation of conversation at the table. Now, why do I say this? I also say this, because you see, what dominates particularly in the North American context, the discourse on freedom has been the perverse discourse on liberty. And many people don't understand liberty and freedom are not identical. Liberty is just the absence of an obstacle. But freedom is the affirmation of not only life and accountability. But it is also the construction of a reality through which people can be at home. And this is crucial because as we know, we could point out that a lot of what King was talking about, when he says freedom, it's not simply about people not being in your way. It's about being able to live in a way that affirms your dignity. This is the part of the music he was tapping into when he said freedom. Because, for instance, if we were to just get technical about it, simply the question of moving away the music charts, simply the question of moving away, saying you got to play in this chord or that chord, simply moving away the obstacles, does not mean what you will play is music. If we think about, there's a little thing I do sometimes when I give lectures with children, and sometimes I have the joy, sometimes there are pianos, there are drums, and we sit down and sometimes I give kids a music lesson. And one of the things I first say is when you sit down, come in front of the piano, get a group of kids, and I say, don't listen to anybody else. Just play, right? And they start banging and they're making all kinds of noise, right? And you hear cacophony. And I asked them, what did you just hear? And then they stopped and they said noise. I said, okay, now these are kids who don't know how to play the instrument. I said, okay, try again. But this time, listen to everybody around you. Listen. Play together. And even though they've never played, they don't know how to play the instrument. As they're listening and responding, they stop and they're all because they're like, oh my goodness, that sounded like music. So you could see the relational community part, that they're in freedom. Freedom is not simply about the question of asserting yourself. It's about being in a relationship through which communication, life, affirmation can create a world of belonging. And that connectedness, that connectedness is properly called freedom. And when I talk about freedom, or sometimes I often point out that although I argue freedom is having a home and belonging and being able to be in a form of nakedness of saying, this is how I'm going to build my relationship with others. One of the things that we should bear in mind is that a home is not necessarily a physical domicile, like an apartment or a house. For students, a home is finding out a major that you love. Some parents try to force them to study things that they don't love. They get alienated. They're not at home there. They're not free. It's what an artist discovers her or his or their art form. It is the point at which musicians can get together and hear and play and create. So they're all of these beautiful elements that are part of freedom. But the people who want to empower us wants us to think only about liberty. And so what they would do is then constructed in such a way that you become my limit, which means you have to get out of the way, which as we know is the history of disempowerment, enslavement, colonialism, etc. However, if I see power as the ability to make things happen with access to the conditions of doing so, then you, right, are a condition for us to work together for the expansion of the ability to make things happen. So you become a condition of possibility and I a possibility and thus empowerment, which is what the music is about, becomes such that there is no disengagement but instead a connection between power and freedom. And that is one of the beautiful things he hinted at because you see what are the subtexts of our conversation is black power. And we know that any society that's committed to anti-black racism is committed to the disempowerment of black people. But how are you going to fight anti-black racism through abdicating power? It has to be the re-empowerment of black people but in that empowerment and understanding that there is something wrong with any system committed to disempowering humanity. And this is why, and this is what King was insightful in, in talking about in the excerpt you read from, is that the very empowerment that's involved here is one in which humanity is not hiding from itself, it's not limiting its capacity to communicate. But it's actually rallying the elements through which humanity can actually live. And this connects not only aesthetically but also politically in the form of de facto democracy. You know it's like what we said last spring, you know people know about black lives matter but would they miss the point? Black lives matter as a fight for the affirmation of, of not only humanity but it's a fight for democracy. And in democracy it means like that painting everybody gets to sit at the table. And when they sit at the table they get nourished. And boy, boy this music is nourishment. I would like to return to one of the points that you made a few moments ago which concerns our, our joining and growth as this gardening, this planting of seasons, of harvesting, joining and growth in the experience of, of listening to one another, to creating the music of that responsiveness to what we hear and the role of silence within that, that fertility of joining and growth. And part of the reason why I would like to return to this point you made is because the revolutionary impulse that emerges during this period of time that gives birth to free jazz is, as we've discussed, also a time when the deepening of democracy, as Vincent Harding described it, the transition from the struggle for civil rights to an international struggle for human rights. The music free jazz was often met with derision and resistance by describing its more caustic elements as somehow characteristic of violence. And where I'm going with this has to do with our talk also about the body, about reimagining the possibility of movement. When I say joining and growth of course I mentioned listening, I mentioned silence, but it's also how we greet each other in the way that we move with our bodies and imagine ourselves as free subjects. And where I'm going with this, Louis, is one of the key elements in jazz improvisation and one of the deepest misunderstandings about free jazz or the sound of it, and that is the ecstatic. The ecstatic embrace of the present as the possibility for assessing freedom, for the practical form of freedom, beginning with this ecstasy, which again during the period of the development of free jazz, as for its most controversial figure to be sure, Albert Eiler, certainly John Coltrane in his later period, but indeed Cecil Taylor and Hornet Coleman, were that these artists and the gifts that they brought us, what they harvested from the garden to return to that metaphor, was in fact an ecstatic sensibility and embrace of the present. As a philosopher, as a musician, as a man of our world, how do you embrace this idea of ecstasy and why was it so important at the time that this push back against it suggested that it was violent, that it was angry, that it was well, what it was not? Well, there are a lot of things I'd like to say because that's that those are quite a quite a few wonderful themes, but before I say something, I'm going to ask you a question as well, because I want to have that out there, okay, because this is a conversation. I love how I've been reading some of your pieces, not only on King and also on the music, whether it's through people ranging from Cecil Taylor all the way through to many people who analyze the music, like Manio, but I'd like you to add something about Manio here, and for the audience, you know, we're talking about a Martinican, because you brought up the global dimensions, just like we brought up global dimensions with South Africa from D'Alebrad to Massachilla all the way through, but I'd like you to just add to that your observation of Manio's observation on the music. Yes, yes, indeed. Well, what Lewis is referring to is an essay that he and I discussed that came from the Martinican poet and theoretician Poetry, Jazz, and Freedom, an essay published in Tropiques in the year of 1944, and what Manio proposes is the possibility of the development of an aesthetic that is based on some of the ideas that I just shared a moment ago, that is the ecstatic embrace of the present as a possibility, not only of a, and this is something of a paradox, a return to the future, but a resuscitation of the past that does not exist, that is to say to illuminate a kind of, again, a paradox, a sort of sophisticated naivete, you might say, which is the sense of wonder at the recreation of the world which exists in our present, to revive and resuscitate our spiritual identity, but with a decisively material concern towards the control of where our food, clothing, and shelter is involved, because what Manio is also talking about is the fact that when we operate in unity and harmony with each other, physically, mentally, spiritually, new worlds are born, new worlds are born, and that new world is also the positive destruction of this image of the past, which has been holding us in chains, but in fact does not exist if we, you know, embrace this ecstatic present. And, you know, this is on another thing, but it's very interesting, isn't it, Lewis, because this brings up a paradox which we discussed yesterday, but it plays directly into the question of free jazz, which is, this is a music that demands virtuosity, but at the same time, no thought. You know, you can't, Sonny Rollins talks about this, but in the moment of improvisation, one can't be too sophisticated about what one's doing, one has to be completely susceptible to the absolute environment at the same time, so this tension between these two poles of absolute submission and a kind of naivete and complete virtuosity and sophistication, but not in conflict, not in conflict. Yeah, I mean the music is a beautiful critique of the idea of the very notion that we're to have the outcome before the performance. Yes. And part of colonialism, there are colonial epistemologies and aesthetics which try to map out before you perform, which does not deal with the contingencies of reality. That's right. So yeah, you brought up some very important elements, the important elements of silence, the important element of ecstasy, the important element also of this problem of stratification, and so I'm going to start first with the question of silence. Now one of the things about a lot of times, one of the things as we know, paradoxically, silence can be very loud. Yeah. The other thing is silence only makes sense as silence paradoxically again, if you can hear it. So in those examples I talked earlier about listening, if you're not listening, you will miss the importance of silence. The complicated thing about silence is that silence in political terms has always been a struggle that was heavily gendered. It transformed itself onto race and has affected also forms of aesthetic production. Now you may wonder why I say heavily gendered. Well, in patriarchal societies the general premise is that women must be silent. Men speak and the political realm is the realm of speech where words are transformed into power and the power of action. And again, the presupposition is that women were not to speak, which cultivated a history of extraordinary listeners within the realm of the feminine. But women were not passive. They're always, I mean, and this is, it's not that societies are always patriarchal. If we deal with ancient commetin society, for instance, which was later colonized and renamed Egypt. But if we deal with the East African ancient societies, the whole premise about what the feminine, what women represented was very different. And the question of speech was more complex, but that would take a lot of time. But for now, the ways, one of the ways in which women fought back was writing and with music. So, right? And because music is the whole thing, it's to listen. And the whole complicated thing about speech and writing and to be involved in the public sphere, they became the dynamic. If one is to transform a society democratically, it's not only that we must have women speaking, as we saw with the power of someone like Stacey Abrams, but it's also for people to listen. It means more men, more people who are in hegemonic positions, in this country, it would be whites, should work at the art of listening. Because there are people in whom listening has always been forced. But it means, as the boys and many others pointed out, that plays the form of double consciousness to our relationship to the society. The consciousness of how we're constructed and the consciousness of how those who construct us see themselves. Yes. But beyond those is a potentiated double consciousness, which is the dialectical critique of any society that dehumanizes people and make them into problems. That's right. We already know the Black problem, the Jewish problem, the woman problem, the trans problem. We are, why in the world are these people problems? There's a problem with a society that makes them into problems. And so that dialectical potentiality, that openness, that happens. That openness breaks free of the hegemonic notion of closure. Closed societies, all those things are an effort to create the notion of being impervious. But the truth is, we're vulnerable creatures. And this brings out the psychoanalytical dimension of this. Because you see, I have a good friend, Barnaby Barrett. He teaches, he's a philosopher and psychoanalyst, but he has these brilliant insights. He's in South Africa. But you'll see this in a lot of, once I mentioned it, you'll see its point. You know, we live today in a society of a lot of people who are having sex without erotic life. Sex is easy, it's mechanical. Right. But the erotic is more complex, as Audre Lorde and many others pointed out. That's right. To be erotic, you have to become vulnerable. You must open yourself to which means you're listening. That's right. And the thing about the erotic, about erotic life is that it's something profoundly erotic about particularly jazz performance and blues performance. Because it's not all planned out in advance. The only way that performance can happen is if you open yourself to the other, to listen to her, to him or to them. And when that other performs, what's striking about it is your task is not to cover over the other. But as the person due to the abrigado, the accompaniment is actually to bring out the best of the other. That's right. So, right? So it's not like, oh, look at him or her or them showing off. Let me do something on the drums to break it up. You know what I mean? No. What I'm to do if the person is I'm to accent it so that person is oh. And so there is a performance like at the dinner table, people are performing. But you see, you wrote up that point about ecstasy. And ecstasy is a very existential concept. It's related to terms like enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, etymologically, means to be open to God, to open to the God. A love supreme is an enthusiastic performance because it's this man with his saxophone letting go and opening himself up. Yes. The love of God. Yes. And this opening up has been in patriarchal societies, feminine. But you see the paradox. If you're going to be open to reality, you must let go of the closed notion of the masculine. And this is why it's psychoanalytical. One has to be willing to be entered. Entered by the music, by the God, by the pleasure. And that is profoundly erotic. And that means it's a level of intimacy. When one is there at that moment of performance, we are all one. But it's not one solipsistically. One in the sense of being closed. It's in the sense of one, in the sense of openness. It's the way Nefertiti and Aignatin talk about emanation. Emanation is to say that which produces reality is not itself produced and it's thus invisible. So there is this always sense of the transcendent in openness. So this, when we bring all of this together, is this is the clue that's going on when we're talking about the freedom. That's right. And I could talk about this in another way that's rather, that can connect through some of the musicians. Okay? I remember when I was an adolescent, when I was hanging out in New York with, I'll get it to know God, it was such a beautiful time in the 70s because they were just all of these living legends of music. And not just jazz music, but just all kinds, just around. But the thing about jazz musicians is they had this openness where they just loved young people. They wanted us to grow. And so, and they were constantly experimenting. And I remembered, I realized something one day and I wrote out a chart for a big band. Right? But the chart I wrote out, I tried an experiment. I wrote out for each instrument to play in a different meter. Try to imagine, because many people when you play music, you count off the meter. One, two, three, four, go. Or one, two, three, go. Or one, two, go. But because it was all in different meters, how do you count it off? And the answer is go. Right, right. So there was no outcome before performance. Right. You had to perform it. The thing that was really striking after they did the original, the way you set the chart, right? In all different meters, they were shocked to hear that it was music. And the reason it was music is because all music is ultimately connected, relationally. Right? This is what my additional orchestra did in their fusion stuff. But there are many others. This is what Coltrane and others realized, is that you could write a, you could have a song written as a bunch of bars. Or, but all a bunch of bars are, are basically a combination into one bar. But what jazz does is with that one bar or the one chart, is to make you aware that there is a reality beyond the chart. The chart is simply a context. But the performance is the reality beyond the chart. And this is so extraordinary. Because when you think about, when you think about this whole period, I mean, if you think about like Ornette Coleman and what, what, and one of the things, because I do like piano, drums and others. So I always listen to, you know, a lot of because of instruments. But if you look at Coleman's free jazz album, I mean, it's called free jazz, right? There's this great moment when, because he has two drummers, when Billy Hickins or Eddie Blackwell, I don't know which one of them, but I was listening to it recently. And as they were playing this, right? And remember with free jazz, it is like the way I just described, you don't have a meter. You don't say, you could, but you don't have to. You could just say go. There was a moment, as this is performed, that one of the drummers dropped his sticks. And I could hear it. And as the sticks clanged in the drop, it was integrated into the reality. They didn't say, oh man, we got to do another take. It became part of the musical performance. Because what it's saying is something we already know about the struggle for freedom. In the struggle for freedom, even the sticks that fall are part of the repertoire of what you have to use to continue the path of building freedom. And this beauty, this element, this ecstatic element, is there all the way through, not only Ornette Coleman, but if we talk about the art ensemble of Chicago, or Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry was part of those performances from Sun Ra, Mingus, Coltrane, all of them. But with Coltrane, as you know, for me, I mean, the posthumously released Ong captures that. And for a lot of the people who are thinking about these sounds, you see the thing about jazz, and the thing about especially free jazz, is the dissonance is important. You see, in a society that wants to claim conviviality and harmony all the time, what they're really saying is write out the contradictions. But jazz is saying, if you write out the contradictions, you're going to write us out. Black people are the contradictions of American society's lies about reality, which brings me to the last point. You know why, in the end, a lot of these musicians did this? It was not only the joy, the beauty, but it is the music of truth. Oppression is built on lies. Oppression is built on the lie that Black people are inferior and white people are superior. Indigenous people are to be emptied from the land. The idea that there's an intrinsic inferiority of women, we could go down the line, right? Oppression is built on lies. Counter oppression has to use truth. But the thing about it is, what is the sound of truth? Right? What is the music of truth? Well, the music of truth is that the contradictions, the dissonance, what we find in blues, the blue note, the notes between the notes, the fact that you can play music in different meters, you can be a musical outcounting meter, you can do all of those things. But the fundamental truth that you have to listen, you must play together, that ecstasy of living together, that point, that is the truth in the music. And it's the truth that transcends narrow notions of authenticity. Narrow notions of authenticity are too self-absorbed. It's the letting go. It's the letting go. And that, but at the same time, that letting goes a leap of faith. It's a leap of faith into the commitment that you will play together. And it's a faith in the other musicians or the community's ability to join in that celebration. And the last point, why I talk about those sticks falling on the floor, is because you see there's a problematic way of looking at music. It's similar to the problematic way of looking at food. The problematic way of looking at food is to look at simply what's in the pot or on the plate. The problematic way of looking at music is simply the instruments by themselves or what's on the record. But what they fail to, that view fails to understand is that the context is part of the music. The sound, the timber of the room, the clanging, there's food I cook and food, certain foods must be served on a porcelain plate or a clay plate or a metal plate because all metal is is the illusion of solidity. It's actually flavoring the food. The conversation part of the recipe of that dinner that Sula Gordon painted is that it's not just the items on the dishes. The food is also the conversation. And that element then, one of the things that about free jazz, and all of jazz actually, but free jazz particularly, is it's antipathetic to laziness. You have to be an active listener. Your listening is part of the music and everything, everything in that performance is part of the music including the very room itself. And so truth, ecstasy, listening and relationality, all of those are the expressions of freedom embodied in what we call free jazz. But what free jazz offers itself as is as part of a testimony in which we don't turn away from the contradictions of society. We face them. And of course it's going to come out at times angry, at times soft, etc. But there is something we have to deal with. And we have to deal with the fact that an anti-black racist society does not want to see black people with dignity and freedom. For them, the very notion of a healthy black person is violence. We have to understand we shouldn't be proving to people who hate us that we're not violent. What we need to do is to affirm with each other that we're people of love and life. And what is the violence is any society that blocks us from our right to exemplify dignity, beauty and freedom. Now for those of you who may have missed it, I want to pinpoint a particular step along the path where Lewis has so generously guided us these past few moments. And we had to do specifically with the question of the erotic. And he mentioned the great essayist and theoretician Audra Lorde. And of course what Lewis was referring to was a talk that was later transcribed as an essay called uses of the erotic. Now I want to bring us back to uses of the erotic and ask our friends at the San Francisco Public Library to put that into the chat. There are two versions of it. There's the original talk which is on YouTube and available widely and its transcription also distributed. But to really amplify just what it is that Audra Lorde is speaking about, I would also like to share with you what Lewis was referring to took place in the context of the advocacy of armed struggle towards revolution or blacks internationally. In that same talk that Audra Lorde gave that day she also talked about how the artist and intellectual and the warrior were one. And this question of that oneness emerged from the space that Lewis is talking about when he's speaking about these erotics which take place inside of free jazz in terms of vulnerability, susceptibility, joining in growth as I spoke of earlier in the conversation, and the art of listening, the co-mingling of spiritual destiny if you like, as the fount of creativity that can be discovered in sexuality when it is truly an expression of love, of mutual love. But you know Lewis I knew this was going to happen and we're starting to run out of time. So there's a wonderful question, I saw one, yeah. There's a couple of points I wanted to make before we delve into the Q&A and that is, you know, I don't want to mislead any of our listeners in terms of our expansion range of what we have put on to the questions of being, how an individual constitutes themselves as a subject within the whole. I want to draw all of our mutual attentions on to the free jazz movement in another particularly decisively materialist standpoint, which comes from the advocacy of revolutionary violence, which came from Charles Mingus, from Archie Shepp, from Amiri Baraka, from the alignment within the United States and elsewhere of cultural nationalists who regarded free jazz as emblematic of their particular struggle. Those who are nationalists who regard themselves also as separatists who are seeking a free African state and in that process I want to draw attention specifically to a couple of things and we're just going to have to get down on this subject, because we're almost out of time but let me be very clear about something here, which I mentioned at the very beginning, which has to do with the extra musical impact of what it is that we're talking about and that has to do with the alignment of free jazz with black power and the cultural groups that grew out of the free jazz movement, which included, you mentioned the art ensemble of Chicago, I think it's important to really seriously consider how free jazz began to evolve something which began with the modern jazz quartet and the jazz messengers and that is co-operatively led groups, groups of musicians playing free jazz where there was no de facto leader. I can think of the New York Art Quartet, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the New York Contemporary Five, the Revolutionary Ensemble, Circle, back when Chick-Carrilla played free jazz for a minute there with Anthony Braxton, but also groups like the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, collectives working in common struggle, the Black Arts and Repertory Theater and School, of course, in Harlem and New York, the Black Artist Group in St. Louis and many others, so I want to bear emphasis on all of those things because I don't want to create the impression that what it is that we're talking about is any way, a summation, we're only beginning to touch on the depth of the correlation between free jazz and again what I mentioned, the militancy revolution at the international level, which was characterized as we mentioned earlier towards the development of the civil rights struggle, towards the human rights struggle and again the cooperative spirit, but you mentioned again John Coltrane and some of the consciousness which emerges from his music and I was reminded of course of something that Amir Baraka had had had written about Coltrane's music and I would like to get your response to this before we turn to the Q&A. There is a daringly human quality to John Coltrane's music that makes itself felt wherever he records. If you can hear this music it will make you think of a lot of weird and wonderful things. You might even become one of them. I think that's the key here. You might even become one of them because when we think about the arc and panorama of the last 100 years, jazz beginning as dance music, jazz beginning as this cultivation of a deeper sensuous freedom and reality, possibility within the imagination, a possibility which I think really reaches its apex in the work of Entezaki Shange and specifically for color girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enough and what I mean by that is that here you have free jazz and poetry and choreography becoming one. So when Baraka says if you listen if you hear it these weird and wonderful things you might even become one of them. Louis are you one of those weird and wonderful things? It would be a delight to discover so. You know one of the things that come to mind immediately, well there's several things. The first thing is when we talked about ecstasy earlier it's linked to existential listening. And the whole question of existence, a lot of people don't realize the word existence means to stand out. That's right and you stand out but not stand out in a narcissistic sense. You stand out because you see being by itself is just there but to exist you have to be doing something which is back to the performance. So the thing about existence is existence always poses the problem of freedom. The problem with many human beings is their human beings were afraid of freedom. They want to go back into what they consider the blanket of being. That's right. Because to exist is to take responsibility for existence and for some people that is too much to bear. That is too much. The other thing that's really really really striking is also just things you see immediately. Like when I you know it's funny when sometimes when we jam in my living room sometimes I'm on the piano but you'll see this when you play jazz piano right you know you could do classical piano but if you think about classical piano you almost have to sit and just your fingers move. And even if the person is going to look dramatic it's just a head and the hands. But a jazz musician has to tap a foot like the way I'm doing right now. So you know right and this this percussive this tapping when you think about that sound uh this is something that's been commented upon by whether we call them philosophers thinkers whatever for thousands of years. But among them was among the Germans Arthur Schopenhauer. But he's also thought about by people like Ceriara Bindo. It's been thought of it's thought about all over the place. You could see it in African writings. You could see in African American writings. This sound this deep rooted thing down there that is talking about what Schopenhauer called it will but or will. But but the thing about it is right there's this thing that's repetitious that's telling you deep deep down it doesn't matter what you do. You came from nothing you return to nothing. So at that moment you face a Sisyphusian reality for people wondering what the notion of utility. But at that moment it's the musician the jazz artist the people who say oh yeah you know as the song goes everybody got to live. And every one day you know but everybody is going to die. We know there it is. But the action is what you do in between. Yeah. Is the meaning you produce. Yeah. And I bring that up because you see many people want that being in some of my writings I call it that's decadence disciplinary decadence. They want a disciplinary decadence kind of music to say music is only music if and only if it is within this parameter. But there's a thing I talk about and methodologically it's the same thing they say only if you do it this way. But there's a thing I talk about in a fancy term called a teleological suspension of disciplinarity and what that means is being willing to go beyond the discipline for the sake of reality. Yeah. Now here's the thing. What free jazz is saying is that who says music has to be exclusively in the way as dictated especially by a person an oppressive society. That's right. Why don't we go beyond music as conceived that way. Why don't we commit a teleological suspension of music and that teleological suspension of music. And you know it's a word teleological means purpose the purposeful suspension of music paradoxically is a music beyond music. What it's saying is that music is musical when it's living not dead. And I could just because there was a quite there's a Q&A I saw a question asking about Elvin Jones right. It's from John Spalloni. He says or Spalloni. Can you speak to the concept of playing in different meters as exemplified in the drumming of Elvin Jones. And the answer of what I'm going to say is connected to what I'm just saying now. Right. There's a thing I do in some of my lectures where I start off by giving seven tabs. And I asked the audience what I did but I told you ahead because we have limited time. Those are seven tabs. But then I said to the audience you know seven is also four and three one two three four one two three one two three four one two three. It's also five and two one two three four five one two one two three four five one two. You notice even though I tapped the same way each time the counting made it sound different. And and that's because we bring meaning to reality. But here's the thing. You could play seven that way or you could play seven funky. That's seven or you could do it in a more circular form. That's seven. They're all seven. So even though there's this boom reality out there that says supposedly objectively doesn't matter what you all do. There's just boom boom. What we say is okay. But what we bring to it is so much polyrhythmically right and that's the Elvin Jones point. What Elvin Jones was always playing and not just Elvin Max Roach did this beautifully too. God Tony Williams does it. Tony Williams man. But here's the thing and here's the thing. You can play in multiple meters on instrument at the same time. So for instance even if you're doing a four four swing. That's I think the listeners could hear this out right. I could play six eight onto it. Four five six four three four five six. Even though that one is four my left hand was six. But I could with my foot in seven and I could with my left foot on the hi-hat but five even though and right and that's like what I was talking about the music earlier. This is what Elvin Jones understood. He brought in beautifully. This is why Coltrane wanted to play with this band so much and it says something politically. So many jazz musicians did time. Talk about our incarceration system. He waited for Elvin Jones to get out of prison because in Elvin's playing was not a repetitive one two three four one two three four one two three four. Elvin's style was the circle. Right. Right. The circle going and once you think in terms of the circle. The circle means then there are you know that that if you go in it may open and this is something that was later seen with people. You know I mentioned some of those wonderful drummers like Billy Higgins you know and Eddie you know Gladden and people like that. But but there's so many drummers who begin to understand but it's not just there it's on the piano all the other instruments that this openness is polyrhythmic. And what jazz is always saying always saying is if you really listen if you really really listen there's always more to reality. And that is the crucial thing is you know from physics and you know it's one of the things with Stefan Alexander a former student and colleague of a friend of mine he's a physicist at Brown University. He points out that you know giant steps right is a musical statement of the double helix. You know DNA. Yeah. You could see all kinds of principles in theoretical physics being expressed particularly quantum physics in jazz music because it is relational. And if once you start with reality is a relationship of temperature of quantum cold. You see what I'm getting at? Yes. Always more hotter you get. There's always somewhere that's colder. But but a hotter you get is a certain point where the ecstasy is like almost like just simply light. Yeah. So certainly certainly. And you know Amir Baraka was not only on point there but the thing about Coltrane 2 is there's something in Coltrane that many people I think don't talk about though. I mean it's with a lot of other people there are all kinds of brilliant things in Coltrane. But when Coltrane blows a note even in his ballads but it's there in specific this simultaneously not only polyrhythmic structures he even played chords. There's always always a yearning. Yeah. Earning because humanity is never a complete reality. We're always a reaching for. And I mean many people do it but Coltrane does it did it so beautifully. And even though we're talking about free jazz you know that moment where I said to you I see Coltrane as a dialectic of monk and Mingus. I'm not sorry monk and Miles Davis. Miles Davis modal structures monk's ability to work with dissonance but what monk and Coltrane really the person who inspired both of them was Duke. Yes. And that's when Coltrane and Duke played together that openness because Duke never constrained. Even though we hear these beautiful melodies and the way in which he would do a solo he never really constrained himself to the chords. No. Duke's performance was like a painting. And we see this in many ways because this is a technical music point but it's one of the reasons why Coltrane especially having guard album when he was playing without even having a guitar or piano. They just had bass and drums. The point is once you have the route there are many directions you can go from that route. And those many directions shows the openness the possibility of music. That means music is not only the production of meaning but music is always always a yearning. And before we turn to the Q&A I'll just say Lewis when we come back to this discussion and on the point that you just mentioned we need to bring in Eric Dolphy. And the position that Dolphy and Trane took which was to not denounce but to renounce music as recreational activity as entertainment and to sublimate it entirely to its ritual capacities. But I'm going to leave it there and we'll bring in Eric Dolphy next time but it's very important given our time to turn this over to you our audience and please invite you to bring your questions to us this afternoon and with that in mind I'll invite Anissa back into the discussion and please invite Anissa to speak to us of any specific questions that that may be in the chat or in the Q&A. We do have one question just came into the Q&A and then I do see one attendee has their hand up John Jang did you want to speak? Oh John Jang yeah. I will commit that to happen there you go you should be able to unmute John. Thank you Anissa. Well thank you Justin and Dr. Gordon for enlightening with with us. Lewis is fine. Lewis is fine. Okay my question is around rejecting the term jazz and I'll give you some context. I'm 67 years old and I had the great honor to record do a recording with Max Roach and do a European tour one of the last ones he did in 2001 and he was at the same time he's working on a book is up his biography and one of the work one of the working titles was jazz is a four letter word and he said that that that's a term that black people did not create and that it's references to his fornication and so now like Duke Ellington in his biography music is my mistress not jazz in the interviews he consistently rejects the term jazz so during I'm like I say I'm 67 years old during the 70s there were a lot of books they by black writers and even white writers that did not the titles were not jazz so it was black music like A.B. Spellman Leroy Jones aka Mary Baraka even the white writer Frank Kofsky black nationalism and the revolution and the realm well anyway I'm sorry I got made my point and then I was surprised there wasn't any mention of Malcolm X because in his book by any means necessary at the O.A.A.U. the Organization of Afro-American Unity Public Rally in New York during the summer of 1964 he recognized that black music is important to black liberation so let's say if I did okay that was a long con framework but so going back to the question about rejecting the term jazz and I want you also to answer that Justin yeah well the first thing is yeah for for many years I just simply say African-American classical music and when I was I remembered when I was in Harlem in the 70s a lot from Freddie Wades Charlie Purcell Frank Foster we all they all just said African-American classical music the the complicated thing that we may want to bear in mind is sometimes if we if we're going to because the the term that was used to describe the movement we're talking about right which was the layup motif in many ways of the period of the the the black power and black liberation struggles in the 60s it was referred to as free jazz we're using that designation mainly because that's an entry into the discussion is familiar to most audiences the um the importance of free jazz to that connects if we think of Paila Jarrima's Bush Mama it was free jazz that was also being played in that film now the thing to to to bear in mind though is that you know that argument I made about potentiated double consciousness addressing the contradictions of the society part of the contradictions of the society is that a society that is colonial racist etc is a society that's afraid of intimacy and it wants to to to look at it in a very degenerative way and it's also a society that's afraid of what we could call physical bondings or connections in terms of for instance sexuality so yes it was it originally jazz and jazz but where it was actually at first a term that white people threw onto it onto the term the music that was being performed but we have to understand that meaning is also always being transformed and the musicians who were at first deprecated under the term jazz transformed the term in such a way that there were whites saying damn I wish I could play that and within that framework the music became a source of dignity not only for the people in this country the U.S. but as Maboko Mori points out in his in his you know in his philosophical work particularly his memoir right looking through philosophy in black it begins to take on a form similar to the transition of what happened with black because I would argue that jazz shifted from a lowercase right passive negated term into an uppercase term the way black from the lowercase black shifted to the uppercase black and that uppercase black is one about agency it's about being historical agents it's about being people who create and so I would argue that it is correct to point out the proper history it should not be suppressed it shouldn't be hidden but it's also important to bring out that there can be a productive discussion of addressing the contradictions because of the varieties of music this music has generated and that variety goes all the way not only from what's called free jazz or some people could call modern music but also into everything from somber to different rhythm and blues forms of reggae forms of calypso everything all the way through to what we see would fail akuti in Nigeria so yes thank you for bringing up that point and I think the last point is is a little trickier although I love the term african-american classical music there is a form of catch 22 because classicalism has a hint of not addressing the ground roots level people all right it's a form of a kind of high culture term that doesn't that we don't want we don't want to lose sight of the fact that our brothers sisters or what or those who may not ascribe to those binaries who are living the under the heels of the society the squalor the people who are looking at the slums the underclass the lumpen proletariat all of those elements um they're not properly brought into the political dimensions when we use the term classical and the moment jazz loses its roots from being connected to the what france fenon called the dangne de la terre the dammed of the earth the moment jazz loses that jazz I would argue becomes itself co-opted in a system that's against freedom my absolute fondest jazz moment was I could I could I remember it to this day it was in 1978 I was in uh it was in Harlem on a Monday night but I had a jazz quartet but we were just hanging out because we were visiting a friend and we heard this amazing music uh it was it was a brown 138th street coming out of a really squalid bar and what was cool about being an adolescent New Yorker in the 60s I mean in 70s is in this case the 70s is you didn't need ID you could go to any nightclub and just show up so even though I was under age a bunch of us said we gotta this is amazing music let's go in and listen to it and I go in and it's totally it's a dive an absolute dive and when I went into this place my jaws dropped and I was just sitting there transfixed because in this dive in this poor like I mean this was the period angel dust was all around people were all worried about all kinds of stuff squalor in front of me I'm not kidding was Art Blakey and the jazz messengers it turned out that they whenever they toured New York at that time found a way to show up to play at no cover charge in the poorest areas of New York in bars because they wanted to remember the roots from which this music came and so we don't really have the right language yet we're struggling with it but I don't want to also lose our connection to the people who are the damned of the earth well first of all John I just want to thank you for for being here for those who are not familiar John Jang is a brilliant jazz composer and pianist and I would like to extend an invitation to Mr. Jang to join in a discussion on this subject but for the sake of brevity and since the composer honored me by addressing the question to me as well I will keep my response very brief because I know there's others who are waiting with their questions and what I'll say is this is that the etymological concerns of anything that is related to the history of black Americans has not been properly excavated as yet as as Louis said a moment ago we're still searching for the right language any musician will tell you that the difference between music and recorded music is very extreme and most of the time that people use the word music they're referring erroneously to recordings of music now I bring that up because there is an extremity here we're talking about intelligibility yes anytime it comes to the excavation of the history of blacks in the United States there are serious problems of actually getting to the point where we can talk about what actually happened here which is one of the reasons why that term forgiveness should be rejected right away I mean in terms of the history of the transatlantic slave trade we don't even have a body camp yet and as far as these people who are talking about slavery in the United States we already know from our studies that the majority of the people who were brought here in slavery were brought to nations in the Caribbean and below the equator so we need to expand this frame not only on the question of the etymological origins of jazz but what it is that we're talking about at all when we're talking about blacks in the new world and cultural production and again you know I won't go on about that but I will say John I'm really happy that you're here and I really want to bring you back to this discussion and of course it should go without saying that on the question that you introduced naturally I would defer to the authority of Max Roche and Duke Ellington but in all seriousness we have questions out there in the audience and Dwayne Nethravel if you're out there I would say you should come in on this question with John when we get to that point yeah thank you John John Jang it's so wonderful for you to participate thank you and then Lewis do you see the two questions in the Q&A function let me see by the way while I looked them up a wonderful book I recommend to all of you is by a woman by the name of Natalie Etokay and the book is called Melancholia Africana and she constructed an interesting neologism she puts four with a slash and then given and her point is that the truth is white America doesn't want to be forgiven because you see because if they're forgiven they'll be indebted and because they're locked in the logic of contracts you see what I'm saying they're so afraid of being in debt that they avoid it because they'll owe us but there is another kind of four and that's the one she talked about giving where you are what you are giving for is an opportunity to build something better and so that's a more generative kind but again you notice she had to create a neologism because the language is currently constructed would only create certain kinds of problems just like we're seeing when we talk about everything from reparations or just a basic decent treatment because the fact of the matter is it's easier it's easier if they're not forgiven because then they see themselves as being without debt so the first one is from Matthias Moschinski thank you so much for this I've been thinking about how Fanon calls the blues a modicum of stylized oppression in racism and culture and now this formulation great right go to Coltrane for instance is work on Alabama would you be willing to say something about how the music unstructures relationship between beauty and terror thank you Matthias Moschinski for that question I'm just going to read the others because you know and then we could go to go to it where does Fela fit in with the free jazz movement give it as early exposure to Sun Ra Hugh Massakil and others in reference to his political overtones I hinted at some of that earlier but I'll come back to it and what does the relationship of hip hop and afro pessimism have to do with the free jazz and black power so to the first one one of the things I'd like to add and I talk about this actually in my fear of black consciousness book the racism it's not only in race racism and culture Fanon was actually disparagingly talking about the more Louis Armstrong blues and it's not the music itself but he's talking about what was imposed upon Louis Armstrong which is the idea for him sometimes to act even like a Sambo character and the fact of the matter is that's not Louis' aim you know one of the things that always shocked me about Louis Armstrong is when we look at him in film how young he was because he looks old man racism ages you the brother looked old but he was a young man and so what's interesting is if you look in Le Dagné de La Terre I don't there are lots of reasons I don't like to say the wretched of the earth but in that text Fanon talks about bebop and he talks about it with celebration because he pointed out that white critics at the time hated bebop they absolutely they wanted to tell well we already know it's just like men do mansplaining there's white there's white splitting on the black people try to tell black people how we should play music and the thing about bebop was that bebop was a music not only way light years ahead of what people considered music at the time but it also was a music that exemplified some worth certain things that a lot of a lot of anti-black society did not want to see coupled they don't we already know they don't see the words power and black coupled but another thing that they don't want to see coupled are words like black and genius and the fact that it's crazy I challenge anybody to listen to a lot of bebop and and not think how could so many people of genius quality be in a single in just a single movement of reform but we can go along on it but the thing about it is yes if that point about relationship between beauty and terror this is the point I was hinting at when I said potentially a double consciousness because potentially a double consciousness is about truth and the truth is there is terror there is suffering but the human being has the capacity to respond to it in a way that's premised upon radical love and radical love is not passive because you see narcissistic love is just looking for a reproduction of the self that is what colonialism is radical love is a celebration of the freedom of the other to the point of even dealing with those who are anonymous and as a consequence it's profoundly intimate erotic and at the same time courageous so yes the response to terror is not to be terrorised and locked in fear but to be actional and that is in the music and in terms of the what Philip Platt said we're about failure well failure think about it this is the music as we've been pointing out is that so politically rooted but what we forget when we talk about it exclusively in the U.S. context is that the euromeric modern construction of violence created colonies with structures of structures such as the police that even in black countries terrorized black people failure well my favorite failure song is sorrow tears and blood where it's actually a magnificent critique of police forces but we forget that in Nigeria that's a black police force what we have to deal with is that why even among black people the very semiotics the very large logic the very sides and symbols of how of safety is premised upon this abordination of black people if we're going to be courageous we're going to have to be like failure failure who fought over and over against the police to the point where they threw his mother out of a window and killed her failure who was incarcerated tortured failure who would stand up there it is underwear and say in front of an audience to bring out right the unpredictability the failure who made sure there was room some of his compositions are so long exactly like free the free jazz movement but precisely because failure understood that power truth dignity freedom and joy are interrelated and then if we come now to that last part about the relation of hip hop and afro pessimism to do with free jazz and black power that's that would require a lot of time but the short version is hip hop if you go from its roots hip hop throughout hip hop basically is one of the offshoots of what we could call black it's black music and black music is fundamentally about freedom but in hip hop hip hop emerged with the youth saying that what I have to say matters hip hop is an expression of saying we say black lives matter it's a way of saying black youth matter but also when we think about but there's a more complicated issue about afro pessimism but right because and one of the reasons it's a complicated situation is because a lot of afro pessimistic discourses have certain premises in them that I don't think coheres very well with the notion of free jazz and black power and one of them is the notion of the ontologizing and for yes a big word it comes down to the ossification or the notion of the absoluteness of black death of blackness with death right that that's the first one the problem with that is that is that does not bring out bring up the resistance and the affirmation of life that emanates from black people it's focused too much on what is imposed onto black people second that point about outcome before performance the problem is there are too many pronunciations in afro pessimism that are closed the truth is there's a lot we don't know and the fact of the matter is part of life is the is the is is the willingness to take that leap into the possibility it's not the naive because I think where afro pessimism is right on point is that it has also a critique of optimism because optimism is based on a kind of forecast that's frankly naive the truth is you just don't know but the thing about it is with pessimism you don't know either but with free jazz there's contingency and that contingency means that if you know that term we said performance performance is another way of saying power it means the ability to make things happen what you don't know is whether what you make happen is going to have the kind of meaning you expect but what you do know is that if what you make happen is such that there is a form of life affirmation and love for those to come who will never know you what they would say looking back to you as an ancestor is those is that wonderful description and that wonderful inscription consists of the words thank you in other words thank god you acted and I do think that is the core element when there is live free jazz performance the musicians if a musician says yo they didn't tell me the key yo they didn't tell me the meter yo yo then there's the others are going to say why don't you not play man in other words at the end of that performance that nobody knew what the outcome would be we listened to today as I was just listening I remember when I was an adolescent just listening to what's called free jazz but or we could call modern African American classical music I remember listening as a 12, 13, 14, 15 year old sometimes for days to this and beginning to see and understand the relationships through so many dimensions of reality that it became so difficult to explain to others so that performance is also a thank god you acted because none of those musicians would have any equal who the hell Louis Gordon would be or who some of us here whether it's Justin or to John Jang or many of the others they had no reason no we're here but at the same time their radical act of love gave us this connection to a possibility that makes us look at reality in extraordinarily different ways mm-hmm and Louis I think it's important to emphasize as per what you offered a few moments ago in relationship to bebop music that a lot of the most vibrant denunciations of bebop music as with free jazz came from what the Franklin Fraser described as the black bourgeoisie that is the black population that was safely ensconced in its educational class and social position well safely is really begging the term isn't it but from this from this nettle they had plucked this flower they considered safe and there they are and again the most vibrant denunciations were coming from that community and to expand a bit on that the language that was used to denounce bebop music and later free jazz was almost invariably states of mind using psychoanalytic terms and categories to describe the creators as insane crazy anxious frantic mad I mean these were the descriptions of this ecstatic state of mind that that needed to be quashed that needed to be crushed yeah that's what gets back to that point I was saying earlier about why the dangne the damned of the earth are crucial symbiotic elements you're right because the critique is ultimately a critique of what today is called respectability notions you know but you know this is a system in which black people are illicit and this goes back to the Afro-Pessimistic point this is where that's what they're building on this society is premised on the idea that to appear as a human being who is black is treated as an aberration but the response should not be to denude ourselves of our humanity and the response should not be to try to demonstrate our humanity to those who question it because why should they be the standard right the real question is for us to build a better conception of what it is to live in a world that is healthier and a world premised on the affirmation of what it is for us to be valued and as per René Manille that's right now or as Charlie Parker would say now is the time now is the time I see that Kouadou, Duane, Detreville raised has a hand up I have a loud thank you have you heard oh okay say there's always been this controversy surrounding the etymology of the word jazz and I just whenever I hear it I feel like I have to chime in because it seems like this one etymology always gets left out of the picture and that is that in his book Flash of the Spirit the late great African studies scholar Robert Ferris Thompson noted that the word is Creolized Kikongo and he drew this etymology from the late great Congolese scholar Dr. Kim Wan Dende Fuki out and you know stemming from that is he says that this word dizinza and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly means to like spew forth semen so it has to do with the erotic these things that you were talking about before and and these and and the sex act and even Ellington in an interview in an airport in Stockholm said that the word to him meant freedom and so you know he said he wasn't always adamantly against the term and so I'm a little I get a little nervous sometimes when people try to dislocate this cultural continuity which really really is very important to an understanding of both the word and the aesthetic and so hey I want to thank you both for what a fantastic discussion this has been but just in terms of the africanity of the art form maybe you all could chime in in regards to that african aesthetic in it and that in the centrality of that in regards to this radical notion of revolution in jazz thank you for bringing that up oh I'll go ahead Luis no no thank you for bringing that up we were answering in a way just to save some time but you're absolutely correct it goes all the way back to for instance jasm which just means energy vitality or spirit you're absolutely correct or jism and today but as you know one of the problems if you think about like what was done to the word woke right the reactionary forces always take a term that could be initiated out of community and you're right this is from a creolized term and turn it into a pejorative term but of course the idea of turning life force jism and jasm terms for instance that are ultimately even more anciently connected to words like ha and ya which again it'll take some time for me to talk about the different languages well in addition to whether we're talking about languages such as wallop all the way through the ancient languages like meadow netter but what they have in common is and this is where it goes full circle if we go back to co-train with a love supreme then what they have in common is the idea of the idea of life force is not something that is contained but is something that actually lives if you all I had a wonderful conversation with Teodorus Keros the other day about his book on how one deals with self definition and we got into a discussion of ancient African languages and one of the things to bear in mind is that there's certain concepts like noon all the way through even in a con soon soon that point out that it would be incoherent the way we use in the English language the word existence as an example and that's because colonialism is knocked out the verbal dimensions of English because in a property based culture you begin to have a lot of nouns but the notion of if you were to speak to many varieties of African peoples prior to the 19th century and you were to say something like the Cartesian dictum I think therefore I am a typical African say you are what you're doing what in other words the idea of existing without doing makes no sense and so this comes full circle because the love supreme is also an encomium to action it's to be doing and so yes thank you Kauru I think that point you're bringing it up because we were trying to respond to the the double the negative double consciousness moment and then bring up the potentiated double consciousness moment that etymological point that it's not simply what white people use as language or Europeans but a lot of the language we have today is what the indigenous peoples the African peoples the Asian peoples bring into this conglomeration of reality at least in the English language we call English and now spread into many other languages because in France they will be using our term to refer to this music as they would be in Sweden or Germany but yes your point is well taken I would again like to invite both the composer Shang and Duane Dedeville to return to a conversation about specifically this subject and the etymological origins of jazz but as a very brief response because we're over time now to Duane and the rest of the audience I want to be very clear that there is an enormous amount of dissension and argument among the musicians and composers themselves on these subjects that we're discussing there is no one particular point of view I'll give you a couple of examples and then we can move on you know Art Blakey famously said to Arthur Taylor our music has nothing to do with Africa Art Blakey considered the activity of the Black Panthers quote to be smelling their own piss Betty Carter the goddess Betty Carter one of the greatest storytellers that this nation has ever produced considered Sun-Water Sun-Raw Sun-Raw to be an absolute fraud and that he was killing romance in Black music okay so just to be clear those are just two examples I mean I could go on I just want to be I just want to be sure that everyone knows that there is a great deal of dissension and argument within the categories that we're discussing and and by no means is there a point of view that defines what these categories are so as per the discussion regarding jazz again I'll invite a seminar on this particular topic at some point in the future by way of this before Columbus Foundation in the San Francisco public library sure and just very quickly to add to what Justin said for me one of my absolute favorite singers is Dinah Washington oh yeah and and one of the things and one of the complaints about Dinah Dinah played the both worlds but Dinah had some recordings that could put Cardi B and the others to shame that's all I gotta say that's all I'll just make it short go listen to some early Dinah yeah um well I Anissa you you have been so generous this afternoon I understand we are tipping past our our frame are there any more questions or how would you like to proceed I don't see any more questions and yes you can go as long as you want I love the weird and the wonderful which you both are it's fantastic I'm always mind blown when you come Lewis and it's just been wonderful and obviously open invitation anytime and I'm gonna I'm gonna cut but you may close it out Justin Lewis any last thoughts and I'll just also say I'll put the link in that I knew that there would be a ton of resources as you were speaking so I added those to our doc and if you don't have San Francisco Public Library Guard you should get one because we have all of this amazing music streaming downloadable and vinyl and CD so please get your card and you can access all of this like right when we hang up from this call and I'm gonna let you take it away Justin and Lewis well again I'll thank the Before Columbus Foundation and for those of you who are in our audience today and in the future I encourage all of you to find us online at before columbusfoundation.com where you can support directly programs such as these and also find the past programs that I described earlier in today's broadcast also I'll mention once again the American Book Awards it's a present iteration will be on C-SPAN on C-SPAN 2 as part of its book TV programming coming up on December 19th Lewis it's always such a pleasure to work with you we've been working together for years now many different mediums on radio and stage now here on the the internet and I know we're going to continue to develop and expand on this horizon I'll just sign off with this one quote from James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues and turn it over to you because I think in many ways it crystallizes a lot of what we've had to say today all I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it and even then on the rare occasions when something opens within and the music enters what we mainly hear or hear corroborated are personal private vanishing evocations but the man who creates the music is hearing something else is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air what is evoked in him then is of another order more terrible because it has no words and triumphant to for that same reason and his triumph when he triumphs is ours well said you know this this music is as we've been pointing out an allegory of freedom but freedom is not about a private property to exclude from others freedom if we look at what the performance of this music is telling us is something that occurs through living together and in playing together bring out the best in each other if we think about for instance we're in the middle of a pandemic what has created a lot of abilities at least to make the lives of some people better is that a lot of people let go of their egos let go of their selfishness and generated their energy together in science in arts and in everyday life to create an opportunity and also ways in which people can achieve health and so with that in mind when we think through that that's the equivalent of science grooving that's the equivalent we could bring that to our political life if democracy can groove through being a commitment not to compete with each other but actually to accentuate the strengths and bring out the best in each other that is one of the messages even with their disagreements from the participants and also from what this music allegorizes and it's with that I say to all of you thank you for joining us today now this evening here and I with and I continue to wish you all safety health and despite these moments being so difficult joy affirmation of life as a reminder of your humanity yes thank you so much Louis thank you all right thank you all Justin Lewis a big big 100% thanks and we'll see you all again library community get your card we love you we miss you come to the line we love you too we will be there thank you Anissa okay thank you Anissa have a good night okay night night good night take care everybody thank you all