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Rainbow Cultural History / Ethnic Folk-Dance Music: Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 |
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Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals
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Monday, 16 January 2006 11:13 |
Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972
Atlantic Records
Rainbow Cultural History / Ethnic Folk-Dance Music
By John Sinclair
The great American genius musician-composer Charles Mingus, in titling his major work The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady (Impulse A-35) added the sub-title Ethnic Folk-Dance Music to put the work in its proper context, i.e., the life of the people out of which the music arose and into which the music intended to return.
Or, something too serious to be falsely categorized, as "jazz" or blues or whatever, by individuals outside of the particular culture celebrated and crystallized by the music--individuals who were determined to take the music as something divorced from any human context, a thing to be labelled and analyzed away as if it were a lifeless artifact stuck up in some weird museum.
What these people forget is that the music has no meaning outside the context in which it is created--and that it is living breathing men and women who make the music happen, men and women who live lives very much like the rest of ours are. Or as Ornette Coleman explained it once, "Since there isn't too much I haven't told you about my music, I really told you about myself through it. The other autobiography of my life is like everyone else's. Born, work, sad and happy and etc. We do hope you enjoy our music." (Notes for This Is Our Music, Atlantic 1353).
The demystification of the music-making process must be effected if we are going to bring the music (or allow it to penetrate) further into our live--restoring the human context, and the human dimension of the music must be a central concern of every person who shares in the benefits of the music as a social force and who loves it in that term.
And, if the music is to realize its perfect completion as a first term in the lives of the people who are reached by it, there can be no confusion concerning where the music comes from, what it's meant for, and why it does what it righteously does to people.
Blues & jazz are both perfect examples of wqhat is meant by people's music, but at the same time both musics and their practitioners have sutfered since they came into (white) public consciousness from the mindless attempts of countless Euro-American missionaries to "legitimize" the music and "understand" it by relating it to a wholly alien standard, that is, by measuring its alleged strengths and weakncsses against a sterile European scale and then presuming to speak of the "authenticity" or the "purity" of "the form" as if it were just another vapid intellectual exercise being carried out by petit-bourgeoise academicians insulated in their experimental laboratories and by their patrons' grants from the hard cold realities of the lives of the poor, oppressed, powerless people from whom the music comes and to whom it is bound to return.
There is no blues music apart from the lives ot blues people; it is the same with jazz and rock & roll too, or any music which is a people's, or a folk, music--just as it is the same with Lawrence Welk music too, that it does not exist apart from the lives of Lawrence Welk people, and their hideous culture.
Blues music is music which is played in bars, at rent parties, barbeques, street dances, over the radio and into the lives of a particular people, where it does truly exist as a first term of those lives, or one of the things around which that people's lives are organized.
It is a functional music first of all, a music which is meant to lift people out of their infinite misery and get them on their feet dancing, or just swaying back and forth, taken out of their troubles for a while and given a respite from the incessant cruelties of the industrial society into which they have been forcibly impressed.
And it is a music which has been made from its inception by people who shared completely the life of their audience--by field hands in the South who learned to play guitar on crude hand-made cigar-box contraptions at night in the dark after working all day in the fields, and who were then called upon by their brothers and sisters to come forth at public gatherings to enable them to dance for a few hours before the next day's work; or by factory workers in the North who spent their days on the assembly line or in the foundry making their living and then picked up a few extra bucks at night and on the weekends grinding out some tunes in buckets of blood and other places where the full brunt of industrial life is brought to bear on all the various individuals on the scene, where men kill each other over a few dollars or a drink or a woman's attentions, havhlg learned from their employers the infintesimal value which is placed upon the life of a single man or woman.
Blues (and its flower jazz, which has grown straight from the root) has enjoyed another important function also, a function which has instlnctively heen learned and applied by rock & roll people--the music, as part of an entire seamless culture, has served to sustain an oppressed people through long years of captivity and exploitation at the hands of an alien people; it has served to codify and to make popular among a people certain principles of resistance and rebellion, of energy and vitality and creativity, which have inspired countless numbers of black people over the course of many many years of suffering in this place to hold on through the worst parts and to begin to fight back when the time gets right.
But first of all this music is people's music, it is made and transmitted by men and women off the streets of America and its first term is always the people who stand under it and use it in their daily struggle for survival. That is to say they are popular musics, blues & jazz (and rock & roll) have always been popular musics, and to try to deny them this primary term bv positing them as "pure" or "art" musics as Western intcllectuals will do is to miss the entire point of their meaning for the musicians and the people they "play" for.
Making music is making a living for these musicians, they work at reaching the most possible people in the most direct possible way, and when they perform or record they are reaching for the widest possible audience they can attain. They can't afford not to, having nothing but their music to keep them alive, and with the assembly line, the cotton field, the foundry, or a gun in the hand their only alternatives to making their music as popular as they can.
It is the people they depend upon, it is the people (and not "history or "art") they address with their musics, and it is the people's daily lives, encompassing the entire range of human experience, which provide the context out of which the music issues and into which it always returns.
The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 was organized by Peter Andrews and this writer as one attempt out of many we make to restore the music to its rightful context and its righteous primacy as a first term in the lives of a people who need the music, who relate to it as a basic need in their lives (just as black people have done before them), and who are as open to its magic and its precise utility as the people who first gave rise to it and who continue to create and aabsorb it as a first term in their lives.
We wanted to make the Festival a gigantic party open to 12,000 of our sisters and brothers, with the highest-energy blues & jazz music we could attract and the most open possible setting for the music to work its magic on those folks gathered there for the three-day soiree. And we wanted particularly to destroy the elitist Euro-American presumption that these musics belong only in museums, on records or in intimate small gatherings of intelligentsia who think themselves the only truly appreciative audience for such quaint esoterica.
You can hear for yourselves the response these "limited" rude & beautiful musics drew from the barbarian horde which assembled at what we formally dedicated as Otis Spann Memorial Field the weekend of September 8-9-10, 1972.
And you should know that those people truly partied down, in the highest and really the purest spirit of the blues & jazz musics they were subjected to: Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers, Koko Taylor & Willie Dixon, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Dr. John, Junior Walker & the All-Stars, Bonnie Raitt, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, CJQ, Lucille Spann with Mighty Joe Young, Freddie King, Luther Allison, the Boogie Brothers, Johnny Shines, Otis Rush, Sippie Wallace, and the infinitely dangerous Sun Ra and his Solar-Myth Arkestra.
These are the people you can hear playing their smoking music on this album, and although it isn't by any means all the music that came out into the open air that weekend, or even the particular chronology which went down there, it sure enough captures the feeling, and the spirit, and the beautifully human depth of feeling (and good feeling at that!) which were shared by the musicians and their audience at Otis Spann Memorial Field in Ann Arbor those three days last fall.
That's just about as much as you could ask of it, as long as it makes you feel good and gives you some of what you need to survive and grow in this weirdo time and place. I really hope you can dig it like the thousands of brothers and sisters of ours did on the site, because if you can't you've got some real problems, my friend, and this isn't even the time to talk about them.
For everybody else, please have a good time with this record, take it into your lives and let the music reach you like the musicians intended it to when they made it. And then we can start to get somewhere--like off our asses, on our feet and moving as far as the music can take us.
Power to the People's Music
All Power to the People
--Ann Arbor
January 22, 1973
John Sinclair co-produced the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972, hosts a blues & jazz radio show called Toke Time on WNRZ-FM in Ann Arbor, and is the author of Music & Politics with Robert Levin (World) and Guitar Army: Street Writings / Prison Writings (Douglas/World).
(c) 1973, 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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