"Here we are" or "here they are," America?
Geoff Dyer writes about the death of Ornette Coleman.
When did it begin, this longing for freedom of which Ornette’s music is the undying expression? You could say that it began with the founding fathers as long as you factor in that the American project of freedom and equality for all was in its original intent predicated on a percentage of the population being denied any freedom. Right from the start there was a cage in which the dream of freedom would begin its long incubation.
It’s strange how listening to early Ornette—as I’m listening to him now—is to surrender to the closing claim of that great chronicle of the so-called jazz age: to be borne back ceaselessly into the past. Specifically, I find myself being drawn back to 1843, to a lecture by James McCune Smith entitled “The Destiny of the People of Color,” part of which is quoted by David Brion Davis in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. As Davis puts it, McCune Smith’s lecture concludes “with a prophecy that the African Americans’ struggle for liberty would lead to a revolutionary contribution to American culture”:
We have already, even from the depths of slavery, furnished the only music which the country has yet produced. We are also destined to write the poetry of the nation; for as real poetry gushes forth from minds embued with a lofty perception of the truth, so our faculties, enlarged in the intellectual struggle for liberty, will necessarily become fired with glimpses at the glorious and the true, and will weave their inspiration into song.
