“Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere”: Harmolodic Choruses for Jayne Cortez

Abstract: Surrealism was from its outset deeply engaged with the Africanesque, if much less engaged with Africa itself. Much as Roussell had written at length of Africa without disembarking there, surrealists, to paraphrase Jayne Cortez, wanted the culture without the people. Minotaure published Griaule, jazz found its way into the poetics, and despite bearing scant relation to actual Black peoples, early surrealist writings profoundly altered Western modes of art. The advent of Négritude marked a veritable earthquake within surrealism’s Africanesque topography, one felt immediately throughout the diaspora. In the United States, subsequent generations began increasingly to see intimate relationships between Négritude’s approaches to surrealism and the specifically African American musical modalities of blues and jazz. The Chicago Surrealist Group has long been particularly noted for their embrace of the arts of the blues. This is the stage at which the proposed essay will take up the account. Rooting its explorations in the poetry of Jayne Cortez, the essay will offer a close listening to the poet’s many recordings in blues and jazz settings, teasing out the implications of Cortez’s wedding of surrealism (“superrealism” in the term she adapts from Senghor) to the “harmolodic” approach to the organization of improvisational music associated with Ornette Coleman.