Word: baraka
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...IMAMU BARAKA had his way, whites would not even be allowed to review Edward Bland's film, The Cry of Jazz, let alone play or write real Jazz music themselves...
...Baraka who in his essay Jazz and the White Critic, said so eloquently what took Bland about fifty minutes to express ineffectively in this 1959 film. Bland contends that white musicians have taken over and subsequently destroyed black jazz. Bland bases his contentions on the argument that jazz is built upon the contradiction between restraint and freedom which only blacks, through their heritage of suffering in America, can understand...
...must turn to Baraka's essay, written four years after this film was made, to find the glue that Bland needs to bind his loosely-constructed "unique suffering" argument together. Rather than ignoring the existence of a few competent white jazz musicians, Baraka admits that some white musicians, "originally Dixieland Jazz Band, Bix, etc. sought not only to understand that phenomenon of the Negro Music, but to appropriate it as a means of expression which they might utilize...
...Baraka also agrees that the black experience is singular but he at least allows the white artists a stab, even if a little off-base, at playing and even writing jazz music...
Regardless of both Bland and Baraka, whites will continue to play (or at least listen to) what they think is jazz. And even if, as both claim, whites will not be able to understand the social or cultural origins of jazz because they have not experienced them, whites will no doubt continue to believe that they even enjoy just the type of jazz that Bland and Baraka say they...