Wednesday, June 27, 1973 pects that characterize much of Black poetry today. IN substance, black poetry is simply the pristine reflections of a young black generation's sensibilities. It is not profound in any sense, and is as unfinished and as unrefined as was the ideology of the "Black Revolu- tion" that inspired it. Rodgers is, at least, more accurate when she concludes that "Black poetry is becoming what it has always heed (sic). What the Kochman anthology, Rappin' and Stylin', does achieve overall is to first pose a general question: "What is the content of 'Black Culture?"? What are "black culture's" norms, values, aesthetic standards, frames, forms, etc.? But the Kochman edition's limited frame for black culture leaves things hanging- What is CULTURE after all? What do Kochman and company mean by black culture as a com- parative definition of CULTURE in a more universal sense? Cer- tainly, the fact that white na- tions, national minorities, ethnics do not define CULTURE in such limited and restricted class or sub-class frameworks as do the authors of Rappin' and Stylin' throws into question the defini- tive validity of much of their findings. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Maynihan are certainly ethnocentrically wrong as the Baratz team declares, when Glazer and Moynihan assert that "The Negro is only an American and nothing else. Hhe has no val- ues and culture to guard and protect." But this statement merely ac- centuates the question "What do Glazier, Moynihan, Baratz, Kochman et al. really mean by CULTURE?" The Glaziers and Moynihan mean that black Americans have no culture. com- parable to the cultural achieve- ments of European Christians and Jews. The Kochman writers and social scientists counter with the fact that Afro-Americans still bear the imprint of the Af- rican cultural background in their speech, kinesics, and music. However, the Kochman writers infer that the only class or sub- class among American blacks who reveal any of the lineal in- gredients of African culture are the street people, or segments of the "black folk," certain of the new black poets, some "nonvio- lent" hustlers; and the jazz (and other) musicians. In this view, members of the black middle class (both lower and upper) have lost (or are losing) all "class" identification and/or ideological connections with this "black culture." The Baratz team says that "The biddle class black man, no less than others, has been concerned with stereo- types and not with cultural dif- ferences. He has been the one at the cultural crossroads who has borne the brunt of white mis- reading of black behavioir: it is he who has the, identity crisis in the black community." THE SUMMER DAILY tional minorities within white nations, can claim the sum total of their artistic, aesthetic, poetic, musical, literary, and dance heritage as their cultural heri- tage (regardless of what class representative creates it) then why not black Americans? NOW it is true that the black middle-class has found many avenues through which to defect, from their "cultural" and other responsibilities to the ghetto. And they certainly do experience what the Baratz team calls an "iden- tity crisis in the black commun- ity." It is also true, as the Bar- atz team says, that "I recogniz- ing a distinct cultural system, we also healize how much white can learn from black culture. Bi- culturalism is a two-way street." The fact is, however, that whites have been "learning from black culture" a long, long time be- fore the Baratz team from aca- demia woke up to that reality. The whites have learned the black's music systems and have relate a description of what is the true "lifestyle" of the true class representatives of "black culture" with what is the true music of black culture which is, of course, the blues. As it turns out, the social scientists have se- lected the street people, the cool people, the hustlers, the enter- tainers, and, of course, the jazzmen. It is implied that what Julius Hudson calls the "typical, impoverished black lower class might not any longer claim to be the "chosen" representatives, having been victimized by the "culture of poverty" distortions. However, to the street people and the hustlers are added the new adherents of the "black is beautiful" rhetoric and t h e "Afro" hair-stylists who sport the modified African male costume, the dashiki, with the addition of "wire-rimmed glasses and tur- tlenecks." Of this black phe- nomemon, the Baratz team says that it the best example of how "existing cultural patterns ef- Page Eleven in a self-imposed bind in their efforts to keep "black culture" strictly confined to present day street people whose liking for soul music links them to the black practionioners of the "ur- ban blues" of Charles Keil (e.g. B. B. King, Bobby Bland, Lightin' Hopkins, Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, etc., and finally Aretha Franklin of the 1960s). But in his very learned dissection of the anatomy of jazz, Keil brings into play the entire range of his in- tellectual resources and critical powers to keep jazz restricted to the virtuoso level of pure per- formance, or "music as a crea- tive act" belonging purely to the "performance-oriented tradition." In order to keep jazz separated and apart from the "Western tradition" of musical "syntax" with "form and expression," jazz cannot (or should not) be con- sciously composed or "harmon- ically oriented." It is for this reason, most likely, that a Char- where UT every middle class has, used it against blacks; more or less, been sensitive have long incorporated the1 about stereotypes, especially the dance into their American middle classes of underprivileg- terns, and have used his ed ethnic minorities. However, tural lifestyles" as theme sensitivity over stereotypes does literature, etc., etc. not necessarily denote complete But it is these same whites alienation from the lower class have assiduously conspire "culture." The problem here is prevent "biculturalism" fro that the Kochman writers are coming a two-way street in imposing on black culture a too relationships with blacks. narrow and simplistic definition. is revealed most clearlyN It is so narrow that the poetry ever white anthropologists, of a Gwendolyn Brooks might sicologists, linguists, etc., exist beyond the conceptual with "black folk music" o range of "black culture" and blues. The blues remains thus be seen as a creative arti- musical reservoir of the fact which is the extraordinary "black culture," the true' poetic creation of an isolated "soul." Thus it follows t personality who just happens to true "folk" or "ghetto"t be black. If white nations, or na- tion of black culture must is he now? whites black pat- "cul- s for s who d to m be- their This when- mu- deal r the s the true black hat a rendi- I cor- fect the. adaptation of new forms, (of how) . . - Afro-Amer- ican culture in the United States has dealt with efforts to infuse African styles into the Creolized culture." We know, of course, that many of the black youth who exhibit these adaptations are not street people but students, many of whom are the sons and daugh- ters of the "black middle-class" and do not have too much iden- tification with the doings of street people. (And how much do these new, young Afro-blacks really identify with the blues these days?) CHARLES Keil explains a lot but doesn't help us too much in hisarticle "Motion and Feel- ing through Music;" for in this contribution Keil is dissecting various styles of pure black jazz, which represents another depart- ure from the content of his Ur- ban Blues. It would seem that Kochman as editor accepted the wrong theme from Keil for Rap- pin' and Stylin' Out. For unless one starts with the stated pre- mise that jazz is an offspring of the blues, then the Kochman "class" thesis regarding the roots of black culture further distorts the problem of what is black culture. The class of ur- ban blacks described by the writers of the Kochman antholo- gy are, generally speaking, de- votees of present-day "soul mu- sic," which is a derivative of classical blues. However, one cannot avoid posing an embar- rassing question for the Kochman writers: Why is that the street people and the cool people of the late 1960s and present 1970s generation do not generate much "motion and feeling" for the jazz musicians of whom Keil writes--Kenny Clark, Philly Joe Jones, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and others. IT IS Charles Keil who most graphically points ttp the flaws in the white liberal (or ra- dical) conception of "black cul- ture." His contribution to the Kochman anthology concentrates on jazz, not blues, and jazz is not the favorite black musical idiom of the street people of the black ghettoes today. Keil says that all music has syntax or embodied meaning or some kind of "syntax or gram- matical rules of (a) musical sys- tem or style." However, "black music" (and by inference, other expressions of black culture or life style) is "music as a crea- tive act rather than as an ob- ject." And he reminds the read- er-critic that "Outside the West musical traditions are a 1 m o s t exculsively performance-oriented traditions." And he cites as ex- amples-"African and African-de- rived genres," specifically, in these instances, blues and jazz. And it is on the "cultural" im- pact them of blues and jazz that the entire black "class" theses of both Kochman et al. and Keil go awry. The Kochman anthologists are les Keil cannot cope with a jazz musician like Duke Ellington, and does not mention a number of very famous jazz musicians who were thoroughly trained in the Western musical tradition before they became jazz musicians, e.g. Jimmie Lunceford and Fats Wal- ler to name a couple. These black musicians actually consciously composed jazz music which was not simply "performance-orient- ed" in the way Keil describes it. Moreover, the Harlem hepcat class mentioned at the outset, who were the street people or the cool generation of the 1930s and 1940s, contrary to Kochman's contributors and Charles Keil, were more sophisticated devotees of jazz than are the cool genera- tion of Rappin' and Stylin' Out. With regards to jazz, the hustlers of the thirties and forties were not only "performance oriented" but their "motion and feeling" toward jazz was also tampered with the same "syntactical" re- sponse to the harmonic and com- posed elements in jazz that West- ern devotees reveal in the re- sponses to Western-styel music forms. In other words, the Har- len hepcat and his subclass so- - cial types who were not prac- ticing jazz musicians were very perceptive and articulate jazz critics who could dissect the "syntax" of an Ellington, a Fletcher Henderson, a Chick Webb, a Louis Armstrong, a Jim- mie Linceford, a Tiny Brad- shaw, a Claude Hopkins and many others. They also knew that a Fletcher Henderson or a Teddy Wilson were responsible for the jazz arrangements that made it possible for Benny Goodman or a Tomimy Dorsey to attain their jazz performance levels. Moreover they had a word for the "syntax" of jazz and that a "riff," and they could recognize "riffs" and also whose "riffs" they detected. They could also offer sophisticated criti- cisms of the structure of "white" jazz as differentiated from black jazz. WHAT DOES all of this imply for the Kochman anthology? It means that they have made but a halting, half-hearted step in the direction of a "new social science" free of the eth-centric hangovers. By restritirg them- selves to much toSnso interpre- tation of black cultrrc behavior, they have as a result mited the concept of people's culture to a study of behra'ior 'l -atterns when culture, assi' h, is exressed on many mer 'reatie, -esthestic, form;listi:, artistic, literary, and critical l e v e l s. White social scientists (along with a number of blacks), having accepted the challenge of examining black cul- tural norms, are contriving to keen black culture "class-bound" to the ghetto. This is not to imply that Rappin' and Stylin' Out has failed to help point the way to- ward the "new social science" methodology, but t h e y have chosen to take off down a dead- end street falsely marked "This Way" if they do not see the ethncentric mote in their eyes.