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DO IT YOURSELF, BROTHER: CULTURAL AUTONOMY AND THE NEW THING  
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Christian Noakes
March 1, 2024
Monthly Review
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_ The story of the struggle to liberate jazz from the exploitative,
white-controlled music industry in 1950s, the seminal events of the
movement and backlash from white civil society and the legacy of Black
cultural autonomy and resistance. _

October Revolution in Jazz 1964 poster., By wrti.org, Fair use.

 

Born out of oppressive conditions of the Black experience under white
supremacy, the rich musical tradition of what is commonly known as
“jazz” has a long and intimate relationship with the struggle for
human and civil rights in the United States. However, the post-Second
World War era saw a particularly militant and uncompromising form of
musical expression parallel to the rising Black Power movement.
Steeped in Black consciousness, internationalism, and
anti-consumerism, free jazz or the “New Thing”—the most common
name used among its practitioners at the time—represented a
revolutionary segment of subaltern culture in the United States.
Musicians strove to wrest control of their art away from a
fundamentally racist and exploitative music industry. It was, to many,
the sound of Black Power in the United States, music that showed its
“teeth in a snarl rather than a smile.”1
[[link removed]] Like
the Black Power movement, which saw a blossoming of grassroots
organizing to address the daily exclusion, exploitation, and
oppression of Black communities, practical concerns of
self-determination and collective autonomy were a central component of
the music’s sociopolitical ethos.

The common social, political, and economic aims of artists associated
with the New Thing were antithetical to the role jazz played in
dominant narratives of U.S. freedom and equality, which were
propagated in both civil society and the state. Both domestically and
abroad, dominant narratives of the universality of jazz served to
downplay the persistence of systemic racial inequality in the United
States—a reality from which Black artists were not exempt. As Iain
Anderson relates: “Although all musicians potentially faced
exploitation, black artists experienced systematic abuse owing to
their perceived lack of recourse against dishonest managers, lawyers,
booking agents, and record companies. They were more liable than white
musicians to be cheated of their composing and publishing royalties,
shortchanged their percentage of gate receipts, and denied
representation by the American Federation of Musicians.”2
[[link removed]] Artists
representing the New Thing were acting, in part, in response to these
blatant disparities.

Divorcing the art form from this reality of racial oppression and
longstanding racist assumptions concerning the perceived degeneracy of
jazz culture among the country’s white population, the U.S. State
Department propagated a Cold War narrative by parading select
musicians around the world as proof of a “colorblind” American
exceptionalism. Years later, the extent to which these tours provided
cover for covert Central Intelligence Agency and military operations
in the Global South would come to light.3
[[link removed]] In
stark contrast to such imperialistic appropriation, leading artists
opposed to the Cold War weaponization of jazz connected their art and
the fight from which it came with struggles for national liberation
throughout the Global South. Saxophonist Archie Shepp famously stated
that jazz “is anti-war, it is opposed to the U.S. involvement in
Vietnam, it is for Cuba; it is for the liberation of all people. That
is the nature of jazz. That’s not far-fetched. Why is that so?
Because jazz is a music itself born out of oppression, born out of the
enslavement of my people.”4
[[link removed]] Shepp
and his contemporaries sought to foster direct international
connections, refute Cold War narratives of American exceptionalism,
and testify that “Black music survived not because of capitalism but
in spite of capitalism.”5
[[link removed]] Toward
this end, many participated in explicitly anticolonial international
festivals, such as the Soviet-aligned 1962 World Festival of Youth and
Students in Helsinki and the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Algiers.
Such events were in direct opposition to the State
Department-sponsored tours by the likes of noted Cold Warrior Dave
Brubeck.

The antagonism between artistic exploration and the conservative
standards of “the industry” necessitated greater autonomy from
capitalist modes of production. Participants at all levels encouraged
each other to “do it yourself, brother. Not brother can you spare 10
percent.”6
[[link removed]] From
the creation of artist-run independent record companies to the
organizing of events and collectives geared toward promoting the
interests of the artists, the New Thing represented a larger trend
toward the democratization of subaltern cultural production.

Charles Mingus’s Counterfestival and the Jazz Artists Guild

The bassist and composer Charles Mingus was a longstanding proponent
of such collective autonomy as well as a figure that undermined
industry attempts at hyperclassification that have historically
divided artists by using artificial consumerist barriers. Fed up with
the “music business” and finding it harder to land recording
dates, Mingus founded Debut Records in 1952 alongside drummer Max
Roach—one of the most outspokenly militant modern jazz artists of
the time. In stark contrast to the exploitative and highly unequal
recording industry, each musician was given equal shares of sales,
while the company took only 10 percent.7
[[link removed]] According
to historian Gerald Horne, it was also suggested that Mingus form
“co-op clubs” with other musicians to challenge the dominance of
club owners.8
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In line with this desire for greater artist autonomy, Mingus organized
a counterfestival in opposition to the highly commercialized Newport
Jazz Festival in 1960. With an estimated six hundred people in
attendance, The Newport Rebels Festival, as it would come to be known,
included crossgenerational acts representing a wide variety of styles.
Participants included swing legends, such as Coleman Hawkins,
alongside leading figures on the cutting edge of the New Thing, such
as Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy. Much like Mingus’s own
compositions, the festival helped breakdown rigid categorization and
the dominant dichotomy between tradition and innovation. Shunning the
music industry, Mingus and the other musicians organized virtually
every aspect of the festival themselves, from promotion and sales to
construction of the stage and the conducting of ceremonies.9
[[link removed]] As
the cultural producers of the music, organizers worked to build power
at odds with the exploitative jazz industry. The festival resulted in
the creation of the Jazz Artists Guild by Mingus, Roach, and Jo
Jones—an independent collective intended to produce music, promote
concerts, and, most importantly, to give musicians more power over
their music.10
[[link removed]] Another
highly influential endeavor Mingus took on was the creation of the
Jazz Composers Workshop, which proved a space for musicians to develop
their art away from the dictates of the market.

The October Revolution in Jazz

In 1964, trumpeter Bill Dixon and pianist Cecil Taylor organized a
series of concerts held at the Cellar Cafe in New York City. Taking on
the preparation for the concerts himself, Dixon contacted musicians,
planned the schedule, and placed advertisements in local papers.
Bringing together neglected or disenfranchised artists was a guiding
principle of the event. As Dixon states, “I had one rule.… Anyone
could play at the Cellar, as long as they weren’t playing any other
place.”11
[[link removed]] Billed
as the October Revolution in Jazz, this four-day festival included
some forty ensembles and solo performances, and was estimated to have
had around seven hundred people in attendance. Performances went until
midnight, at which time panels discussed various topics. Panel
discussions included “Jim Crow and Crow Jim,” “The Economics of
Jazz,” “The Rise of Folk Music and the Decline of Jazz,” and
“Jazz Composition.”12
[[link removed]] In
his invaluable research, historian Benjamin Piekut found that

the discussion centered on issues of work and work privileges: the New
York Musicians Union Local 802’s disregard for jazz musicians, the
difficulty of landing a recording contract or playing date at one of
the major clubs, the exclusion of African American musicians from the
lucrative market of television music and commercial jingles, and the
white monopoly of well-paying club dates in the Catskills and Broadway
and off-Broadway shows. Jazz musicians of all colors were constantly
having to negotiate unfavorable working conditions, but the panel
conversations discussed the fact that black players were at an even
larger disadvantage.13
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The series fostered a greater desire for collective autonomy and
provided a glimpse of how artists could organize their music apart
from the highly commodified jazz industry. Much like the establishment
of the Jazz Artists Guild in the wake of Mingus’s counterfestival,
the Jazz Composers Guild grew out of the performances and discussions
of the “October Revolution in Jazz” series. According to Dixon,
the aim of the guild was “to establish the music to its rightful
place in society; to awaken the musical conscience of the masses of
people to that music which is essential to their lives; to protect
musicians and composers from the existing forces of exploitation; to
provide an opportunity for the audience to hear the music; to provide
facilities for the proper creation, rehearsal, performance, and
dissemination of the music.”14
[[link removed]] The
realization of such a vision necessitates that artists build an
alternative to the parasitic capitalist relations of cultural
production. Touching on the necessity of such alternative power,
cofounding composer Taylor stated that they “had hoped to get
together and try to make conditions that were more the way we felt
would benefit the musicians and, like, not necessarily the gangsters
that we usually have to deal with.”15
[[link removed]] To
foster a communal sense of self-respect among the musicians, guild
members intended to withhold their labor from any job deemed
unbeneficial to the guild as a whole.

Taylor points to racial tensions among members and “scabbing” of
both white and Black musicians as key factors in the failure of the
guild.16
[[link removed]] Shepp
in particular is often singled out for releasing _Four for
Trane_ with Impulse! Records without the consent of the collective.
However, this record was made prior to the founding of the guild, and
Impulse! already had contractual control. This highlights on the one
hand the alienating and dispossessive nature of artistic production
under capitalism and, on the other, the importance of alternative
institutions such as artist-run record companies in struggles for
artistic autonomy. More generally, if members who took jobs without
the consent of the collective were, in fact, breaking a strike, then
it seems fair to also assess the guild’s strike preparation—or
lack thereof, as was the case with regard to strike funds to make
withholding of labor feasible—and general inexperience as
contributing factors in the guild’s demise.

There was also a significant range of political and social commitments
among guild members with some taking more radical positions than
others. In fact, Dixon was apparently the only member of the guild in
favor of outright withdrawal of the music from the market.17
[[link removed]] Therefore,
structural fault lines, such as the failure to set up anything
resembling a strike fund or to come to a group consensus on the
withholding of labor, played a larger role than is suggested in much
of the literature. The organizational obstacles introduced by
sociopolitical heterogeneity within the group also included a wide
range of commitments that were at times openly hostile toward
clarifying what members such as Dixon saw as the social reality of the
New Thing—that is, its historical significance under and against
white supremacy.

While charges of individuals scabbing may fail to fully address
structural shortcomings or the inherent difficulties in building
alternative power in opposition to wealthy corporations, the
well-documented racial tensions introduced by white members cannot be
overstated and provide an important organizational lesson applicable
well beyond the arts. Carla Bley points to the aversion of many white
members toward addressing issues of racial inequality, which they
considered irrelevant to a common struggle faced by all members. These
members relied on language of common struggle not to build interracial
solidarity, but to obscure the internal racial contradictions for the
comfort of white members and the effective reproduction of the Cold
War myth of colorblind jazz. Dismissive of the concerns and well-being
of other members, Paul Bley says of guild meetings in his 1999
autobiography: “What a bunch of wounded souls there were at these
meetings. Talk about group therapy. It was nothing for someone to
stand up at a meeting and talk for two or three hours about the pain
that they felt, the struggle—the inter-group, inter-race,
inter-class, inter-family, inter-musical, _inter-everything_. The
next night, the working nucleus of the guild would get together and do
all the work.”18
[[link removed]] In
truth, such aversion to democratically addressing internal power
dynamics was a significant impediment to group cohesion and a key
factor in the guild’s eventual demise. Collectively, the guild
failed to address internal contradictions around the insidious
colorblind liberalism of white members, as well as those
contradictions of a more organizational and strategic nature.

Jazz Press and the Reaction of White Civil Society

In addition to having to deal with white musicians who felt entitled
to play jazz music without its social context, the New Thing came up
against white reaction from the very industry against which it was
rebelling. Relying on many of the same social mechanisms of coercion
and delegitimization used in the defense of white supremacy more
broadly, white critics often claimed the musicians’ desire to take
their lives into their own hands and speak in their own voice with
their own rich cultural history was a form of “reverse racism.”
Persistent charges of “Crow Jim” (slang referring to perceived
discrimination against whites) on the part of white critics obscured
the structural nature of Jim Crow and other racist policies that
codified systematic material deprivation and terrorization of Black
people by equating anti-Black racism in the United States to Black
people wanting to collectively organize and shape their own culture.

As participants, white musicians did face discrimination. However,
such discrimination did not come from a systemic effort on the part of
Black musicians that could be considered analogous to the systemic
oppression of Jim Crow, but rather from the hiring practices dictated
by a highly commodified and racialized industry. The fact that white
artists to some degree shared in the economic hardship that came with
participating in a Black and noncommercial art form is something to
which none of the people who cried “Crow Jim” ever called
attention. Instead, white people claimed musicians were discriminating
against them, when the musicians were in fact responding to the
systematic discrimination in the music industry. Those whites who
wanted to play the music and respected the desires of its originators
were welcome, and they struggled alongside their Black comrades
against the music industry and the hegemony of Western musicality. The
claim that “the white man has no civil rights when it comes to
jazz” is far too absurd to be taken as anything other than a
childish throwing up of one’s hands amid mere discussion around the
racial context of the music.19
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Furthermore, if the success of Harry Belafonte was proof enough that
Black artists were not systemically excluded from other forms of
music—as the author of an article in _Time_ magazine
asserted—then one would think the high esteem that white musicians
such as Charlie Haden were afforded in the artistic circles in
question would be enough to refute charges of “Crow Jim.” However,
such charges were never meant to describe fairly and accurately race
relations in the music industry. Rather, they were a particular
manifestation of a common tactic of oppression that is so pervasive
that it does not require the conscious intent or awareness of those
who perform this function.

Much like claims of “white genocide,” the charge of “Crow Jim”
was a reaction to a problem that did not exist. More precisely, it was
the social reaction to Black Power under the guise of addressing
fictional systemic discrimination against white musicians. While
artists such as Taylor, Mingus, Shepp, and Coleman asserted that the
music belonged to Black people, they still hired white musicians.
Black musicians also acknowledged the economic hardship of white
people who played free jazz while maintaining that the hardship of
Black artists was far more pervasive, violent, and not simply on the
basis of playing music deemed undesirable by the music industry.20
[[link removed]] The
fear of exclusion is a colonial fear of reprisal, an unfounded fear
that the oppressed would be equally as cruel to their oppressors as
their oppressors have been to them.

As a cultural expression of Black Power, the music of the New Thing
and its practitioners faced the same mischaracterizations and
demonization as the broader movement for Black self-determination.
Walter Rodney spelled out the meaning and function of Black Power as
well as the role of white reaction to it in maintaining racial
oppression:

Black Power is a call to black peoples to throw off white domination
and resume the handling of their own destinies. It means that blacks
would enjoy power commensurate with their numbers in the world and in
particular localities. Whenever an oppressed black man shouts for
equality he is called a racist.… Imagine that! We are so inferior
that if we demand equality of opportunity and power, that is
outrageously racist! Black people who speak up for their rights must
beware of this device of false accusations. It is intended to place
you on the defensive and if possible embarrass you into silence.21
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In addition to these charges of reverse racism or “Crow Jim,”
which were led not by white musicians but white critics, publications
like _Downbeat_ viewed music through the lens of liberalism,
dismissing the economic discrimination faced by innovative artists as
the failure of the latter to understand “supply and demand.”
Coverage often divorced artists deemed to represent “free jazz” or
the “avant-garde” from their own musical tradition, and in some
cases, pitted musicians against each other for the sake of scandal and
sensationalism.22
[[link removed]] In
1966, the magazine organized the “Point of Contact” debate.
Participants included Shepp, Taylor, and Sonny Murray as
representatives of the New Thing; Cannonball Adderley as a
representative of the more conventional hard bop style; and Rahsaan
Roland Kirk, who was involved in both “inside and outside
styles.”23
[[link removed]] Art
D’Lugoff, a white club owner, participated in the debate as a
representative of the “jazz industry.” Rather than passively
accept the liberal economism that pervaded popular discourse or play
into divisions being fostered among the participating artists, Taylor
and Shepp criticized the booking practices of D’Lugoff and other
club owners and denounced the racist structure of the music industry
more generally. Shepp made clear that individuals like D’Lugoff were
in fact merely functionaries of a larger structure of racial
oppression, stating that “The club owners are only the lower echelon
of a higher power structure which has never tolerated from Negroes the
belief we have in ourselves that we are people, that we are men, that
we are women, that we are human beings.” In making collective
efforts toward greater self-determination and cultural autonomy, Shepp
and other artists of the time did not request, but rather asserted
their right to a basic human dignity.

Grounded in the lived reality of Black oppression and resistance, the
New Thing contradicted the Cold War weaponization of jazz and
challenged the racial prejudices of white listeners. The creation of
structures of cultural production that were controlled by artists
collectively in opposition to the highly exploitative and
discriminatory “jazz industry” reflected a common desire for
greater artist autonomy and improvement of conditions more generally.
While efforts such as the Jazz Composers Guild would be short-lived,
the legacy of Black cultural autonomy in the art form lives on to this
day in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
(AACM). Founded shortly after the guild in 1965, the AACM has the dual
function of providing an organizational nucleus for the collective
artistic exploration of “Great Black Music”—as AACM members
prefer to call their music—and providing musical education to
Chicago’s Black population. The AACM’s ongoing legacy flies in the
face of the all-too-common dichotomy between groundbreaking art and
community engagement.24
[[link removed]] From
Mingus to the Jazz Composers Guild and the AACM, Black cultural
autonomy has been asserted and at times contested. Rather than
belonging to the national myth of American exceptionalism, the history
of such efforts and the art it produced belong to a larger
international history of subaltern struggles in the field of cultural
production.

Notes

* ↩
[[link removed]] Walter
Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (New York: Verso, 2019),
45–46.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Iain
Anderson, This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American
Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 76.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Penny
M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the
Cold War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006).
* ↩
[[link removed]] Archie
Shepp quoted in Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, Free
Jazz/Black Power (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015),
11.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Archie
Shepp interviewed by Taneli Viiahuhta in Free Jazz Communism: Archie
Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet at the Eighth World Festival of Youth and
Students in Helsinki 1962 (Helsinki: Rab-Rab Press, 2022), 81.
* ↩
[[link removed]] LeRoi
Jones (Amiri Baraka), Black Music (New York: Akashic Books, 2010),
138.
* ↩
[[link removed]] John
F. Goodman, Mingus Speaks (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2013).
* ↩
[[link removed]] Gerald
Horne, Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the
Music [[link removed]] (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 181. The great John Coltrane was
also considering taking this route toward greater collective autonomy
at the time of his death in 1967.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Anderson, This
Is Our Music.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Anderson, This
Is Our Music, 92; Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: The Civil Rights
Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
* ↩
[[link removed]] Quoted
in Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York
Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011), 102.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Bernard
Gendron, “After the October Revolution: The Jazz Avant-Garde in New
York, 1964–65” in Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the
Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
212–213.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Piekut, Experimentalism
Otherwise, 104.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Quoted
in Robert Levin, “The Jazz Composers Guild: An Assertion of
Dignity,” DownBeat 32, no. 10 (May 6, 1965): 17–18.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Taylor
quoted in A. B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business (New
York: Limelight Editions, 1994), 25.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Spellman, Four
Lives in the Bebop Business, 27.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Piekut, Experimentalism
Otherwise, 127.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Paul
Bley and David Lee, Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation
of Jazz, 92.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “Music:
Crow Jim
[[link removed]],” Time,
October 19, 1962.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Levin,
“The Jazz Composers Guild.”
* ↩
[[link removed]] Rodney, The
Groundings with My Brothers, 50.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Far
from being a new dynamic in the 1960s, historian Robin D. G. Kelley
points out in Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American
Original (Free Press, 2009) that a similar dichotomy abstracted the
relationship between musical expressions a decade earlier when bebop
was being distinguished from swing in popular discourse.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Monson, Freedom
Sounds, 266.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Adequate
treatment of the extensive literature on the AACM alone is worth far
more attention than can be provided here. Furthermore, the in-depth
firsthand historical analysis of George Lewis’s A Power Stronger
Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of
Chicago Press, 2008) alone can say far more than I ever could.

_CHRISTIAN NOAKES is a worker and freelance writer. He received a
Masters in Sociology from Georgia State University._

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