By William C. Anderson with Ashanti Alston
“You make new laws, you learn new music. You don’t go back.
Anybody can copy… The lazy ones play like we used to play
because they don’t have anything up here.”
– Miles Davis, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation interview 1984
People making music together can set an important example of how to learn to listen. Listening carefully might seem intuitive or natural to some, but that’s not always the case. We all have different relationships with sound, and rhythm doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Not to mention, the world is inundated with noise that interrupts our daily lives and drowns out some of life’s more important melodies. Just because we set out to make music together doesn’t mean it will be good music. The ability to recognize a tune or see a place to intervene in a song doesn’t necessarily mean the result will be satisfactory. Life is similar in many respects. We find ourselves part of families, communities, groups, organizations, and more, seeking to achieve different aims. In a societal context, people hoping to make positive changes to better everyday conditions have to listen and be thoughtful. You can’t do things on behalf of a multitude of people without first hearing the varied needs you’re trying to meet. Like some of the best music, you have to be able to improvise instead of offering standard notes that don’t deviate when the time is right.
“Ashanti told me, ‘As a kid, listening to jam sessions in my neighborhood,
you get a sense of what radical listening is. Because in the jam sessions,
the people involved got to listen to each other.'”
Ashanti Alston, former Black Panther, Black Liberation Army soldier, and political prisoner, and I found ourselves discussing music. It had come up more than once. The first time we were in conversation at Brown University, and that’s when I found out he liked jazz. A huge fan of the genre myself, I took the opportunity to let the analogies flow freely as we discussed Black radicalism, anarchism, and what’s required of freedom-seeking people. The next time we discussed it was for an interview, which I’m reflecting on here. He made a number of comments about what jazz represented and could symbolize, paralleling a number of feelings I generally have. I hadn’t necessarily thought about many of the things he was saying in the ways he was expressing them. Still, once he put it out there, I left the conversation feeling inspired. Then I realized that, at the time we spoke, we were actually making music together, and that was exactly one of his main points.
Ashanti told me, “As a kid, listening to jam sessions in my neighborhood, you get a sense of what radical listening is. Because in the jam sessions, the people involved got to listen to each other. They got to really listen to know how they’re performing or when it’s time for them to solo.” He described this as a “give-and-take” and “kind of interplay” that leads him to ask the question: “Why can’t we function like that in our political organizing?” The song he was singing to me when he asked this aloud felt like a lament. As much as he talked about the potential we had together as people, if we learn from the jam session example, his remarks were undergirded by a subtle acknowledgment that we often fail to collaborate. He’d also been referencing Wynton Marsalis, comparing jazz to democracy shortly before that. For Ashanti, he was ultimately emphasizing “a way of being that allows for difference and confrontation.” The weight of variance can be hard for many, as repetition offers the comfort of familiarity. Good or bad, you still know what to expect if you keep playing the same song on repeat. However, things can change in an instant during the live performance we call everyday life. And there are high-profile examples that illustrate this.
Once upon a time, at a show in the early 1960’s in Stuttgart, Germany, jazz legends Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock were playing together. Herbie recounted that Tony Williams was playing drums, Ron Carter was on bass, and Wayne Shorter was on saxophone. They were performing the jazz standard and timeless hit, “So What?” Herbie spoke highly of that night and how well everyone was playing together while also having fun. However, a problem arose when in the middle of Miles’ solo, Herbie played the wrong chord. Herbie stopped but he describes how Miles paused and then played notes that made his wrong note, correct. He was “astounded” by the fact that “Miles was able to make something that was wrong, into something that was right.” According to Herbie, since “Miles didn’t hear it as a mistake,” he “felt it was his responsibility to find something that fit.” Herbie said it taught him something about life, in that, “We can look for the world to be as we would like it to be as individuals…but the only way we can grow is to have a mind that’s open enough to be able to experience situations as they are and turn poison into medicine.”
“Culture is an important part of interpreting the best ways we can proceed
in confronting our everyday reality. If we cannot imagine or see the potential
in what’s around us, we risk missing lessons that can teach us
how to pursue better conditions and radical transformation.“
This story was one that Ashanti and I both knew, and it came up during our exchange. If we put Hancock in conversation with the political insights we gain from thinking about improvisation, many possibilities emerge. As praxis, Ashanti’s challenge to allow difference and confrontation looks like Miles Davis correcting a “wrong” note. Rather than seeking comfort in our retreats to predictable modus operandi, we have to embrace what we cannot see. As jazz drummer Makaya McCraven explained about improvisation at a show I attended in Brussels, Belgium, “We’re all here trying to figure this shit out in real time every day… sharpening our skills so we can confront the unknown.” This is why culture is an important part of interpreting the best ways we can proceed in confronting our everyday reality. If we cannot imagine or see the potential in what’s around us, we risk missing lessons that can teach us how to pursue better conditions and radical transformation.
Black anarchist political prisoner Martin Sostre once said:
Culture is a weapon. I’ve always said, we have to employ all means necessary, and culture is part of the revolutionary struggle. It projects revolution and attracts masses. The interpretation of the progressive aspects of culture, of art forms, of every aspect of society has to be mobilized to raise the consciousness of the people and get the message over. Culture should always be used as a medium to project our revolutionary anarchist message – through plays, movies, performing, lifestyles, dress, language, art, dance, music, posters. If the artist is projecting raised consciousness and interpreting the revolution in simple strokes of his pen or brush a poster is a very effective form.
Sostre is instructive on how to reflect on the music we make together to raise consciousness. While I was writing this, I found myself at another concert again. This time I was at The Listening Room in Toronto, Canada. While the house band played customized covers of the artist whose music was the theme of the night (Maxwell), other artists watched in anticipation. These events invite other musicians to watch and come up in between house sets and tap in and swap places with players on stage. All night, I watched guitarists, woodwind players, drummers, and pianists swap out. It seemed as if they were improvising by saying, “I see how you’re doing it, but let me show you how I do it.” And whenever that happened, the entire musical experience was elevated not only for those playing but also for those of us looking on and listening. This is how I imagine Sostre’s description of what flows in other realities relating to shaping a better society through struggle. It’s about creating newness without actually believing that novelty is pure, standalone genius. We all have to learn somewhere and listen to someone or something else first.
Form and content are both mutually expressive of the whole. And they are both equally expressive…
Each have an identifying motif and function.
In Black music, both identify place and direction. We want different contents and different forms because we have different feelings.
We are different peoples.
In addition to acknowledging much of what’s already here, it should be noted that such evolutions are part of the Black experience in the so-called “New World,” as well as of the music we produce. Consider the enslaved Africans who created music like Cumbia, tango, and rumba across the Americas and made self-defense danceable with capoeira. Connect them to the rebelliousness that birthed jazz in New Orleans’ Congo Square. As Ashanti said to me, “You got people coming together to create music, but it’s a music coming out of a Black experience…It was a rebellion against the more conventional forms of music.” So, although there are many songs we’ve already heard that might have been good at the time or popular for the utility of how they made us move, that doesn’t mean we can only play like that forever. Furthermore, let us decide which songs had the potential to be ours, rather than those we were forced to sing in predetermined formats because that was the Western and Eurocentric standard.
This brings me to Amiri Baraka, who once penned as Leroi Jones:
Form and content are both mutually expressive of the whole. And they are both equally expressive . . . each have an identifying motif and function. In Black music, both identify place and direction. We want different contents and different forms because we have different feelings. We are different peoples.
Baraka wrote this in The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music), where he also addressed forms of improvisation that took shape as Black music genres and their variations developed. He references how saxophonist Albert Ayler “talked about his music as a contemporary form of collective improvisation (Sun-Ra and John Coltrane are working in this area as well).” And determined that this is “where our music was when we arrived on these shores, a collective expression.” He asserts that, “The return to collective improvisations, which finally, the West-oriented, the whitened, say, is chaos, is the all-force put together, and is what is wanted.” He distances Black people from the idea of “Western” expressions of the solo, individual, self-centered expressions. There’s also an anarchist comparison here since he informed us that such Black improvisations were seen as “chaos.”
As Ashanti once wrote in his famous essay Black Anarchism, “it seemed like anarchism was just about chaos and everybody doing their own thing—and for the longest time I just ignored it.” Later, he understood it better for his own purposes as well as those of Black people. Ashanti stated:
When I speak of a Black anarchism, it is not so tied to the color of my skin but who I am as a person, as someone who can resist, who can see differently when I am stuck, and thus live differently. What is important to me about anarchism is its insistence that you should never be stuck in old, obsolete approaches and always try to find new ways of looking at things, feeling, and organizing…This is why I think there is so much potential for anarchism in the Black community: so much of what we already do is anarchistic.
Indeed, there is much that’s anarchistic about us, including our music. And though that doesn’t mean we’re inherently this or that, this is one of many instruments here that we can play. We can learn to listen so that we know when to pick up others. We can make an entire mosaic of different people with different interests and different sounds come together for a beautiful song. Every sweet symphony of possibilities that lies within us can be composed if we all learn how to listen, improvise, and contribute the best notes we have when our turn comes.
