Since slavery, Du Bois argued, Black people had wrested the sublime from the abominable, from everything they’d suffered since their arrival on American shores after the Middle Passage. Yet rather than repress the horror, jazz musicians placed the struggles of Black America, and therefore the question of American democracy, at the centre of their work. Throughout his career, Ellington composed tone poems about Black life. Rollins dressed up as a cowboy on the cover of his 1957 album Way Out West, in a mischievous appropriation of the frontier legend, and a year later released the first civil rights album, Freedom Suite. Charles Mingus, one of the most outspoken jazz musicians, introduced his 1964 piece ‘Meditations on Integration’ by warning that while segregationists didn’t have ‘ovens and gas faucets yet’, they did have ‘electrical fences’. His piece, he said, was a ‘prayer that we can find some wirecutters and get out’.
Mingus didn’t have to look far. Jazz itself acted as a superb pair of wirecutters. Few art forms have proved as supple, as welcoming of foreign influence. I am thinking of Mingus’s embrace of mariachi music, Ellington’s Far East Suite, Coltrane’s exploration of Carnatic traditions and Davis’s fascination with Spanish folk music. I am thinking of the violinist Billy Bang swinging with Vietnamese musicians in a work reflecting on his experiences as a ‘tunnel rat’ during the war. Jazz, the most American of musical languages, has also been the most open to the world.
This sensibility, this wire-cutting cosmopolitanism, is under assault today, but it has deep roots in American culture. ‘You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world,’ Herman Melville wrote in his autobiographical novel Redburn, published twelve years before the outbreak of the Civil War. ‘We are not a narrow tribe of men … our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world.’ Writing six decades later in the Atlantic Monthly, the social critic Randolph Bourne elaborated on Melville’s reflections, describing America as ‘not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colours. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one colour, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision.’ This vision of America as a ‘federation of cultures’, Bourne emphasised, was the antithesis not only of white supremacy, but of the ‘melting pot’. And nothing threatened it so much as war and what he called ‘the sewage of the war spirit’. Liberal intellectuals who ‘still seem to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war’, he warned a year before Woodrow Wilson took America into the First World War, should understand that ‘willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it.’
