TT 186: Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor explained by Ralph Ellison and Martin Williams
also: chat about it tonight on Substack chat
Brand new essay: All-Star Television: Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Ralph Ellison, and Martin Williams.
This article was truly a blast to write and was commissioned for issue 13.1 of the Journal of Jazz Studies. Thanks to Sean Lorre and Lawrence Davies for their thoughtful editing; I also got good feedback from Loren Schoenberg and Lewis Porter.
Brad Linde found the amazing 1965 video, and on the Mingus centennial I sent it along to Brian Krock for uploading to his YouTube channel.
The program has some of the most remarkable jazz on video I’ve ever seen, and the commentary is almost as fascinating. As I write in my essay:
The thread of Ellison’s commentary would be picked up by future African American writers and musicians. Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton Marsalis all regarded Ellison as a touchstone, and Ellison’s determination to define jazz, especially to define it in terms of a “Negro American” aesthetic, foreshadows Murray’s book-length manifesto Stompin’ theBlues and the “jazz wars” of the 1980s and ‘90s, of which Crouch and Marsalis were regular combatants.9 The first time I looked at Jazz: The Experimenters, I was a bit surprised to see Ellison in the “Stanley Crouch role.” This comment may paint me as naive, but I believe many of my peers also think of Crouch, Wynton, Ken Burns’s Jazz, and so forth as a phenomenon of the Jazz at Lincoln Center era. It is edifying to see Ellison take this side of the discourse decades earlier.
I’m letting my Substack readers know before anyone else…maybe some of you want to rap with me on a chat thread later? 9 pm EST tonight: I’ll be chilling in a Boston hotel room without anything better to do than trying out the chat function. Below is the boilerplate sent by Substack for their authors. You need the app, and it is still only for iOS.
This boilerplate apparently can’t be edited, and might claim I starting a chat right now. Again, the chat will be later, in under four hours, at 9 PM EST.
Today I’m announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication: the Transitional Technology subscriber chat.
This is a conversation space in the Substack app that I set up exclusively for my subscribers — kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post short prompts, thoughts, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.
To join our chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app (messages are sent via the app, not email). Turn on push notifications so you don’t miss a chance to join conversation as it happens.
How to get started
Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Chat is only on iOS for now, but chat is coming to the Android app soon.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.