Who Hears Here?: On Black Music, Pasts and Present

Titled after his 2001 essay for The Musical Quarterly, “Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin Trade,” Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.’s, Who Hears Here?: On Black Music, Pasts and Present is a twenty-five-year survey of the musician and musicologist’s multifaceted writing. The anthology contains a foreword by Tammy L. Kernodle, fourteen contributions, and an afterword by Shana L. Redmond. Kernodle’s and Redmond’s foreword and afterword, respectively, are book ends that are a testament to Ramsey Jr.’s immeasurable contributions to fields of inquiry like musicology, Black cultural studies, and American studies. According to Ramsey Jr., “three main impulses run through this work: historiography, cultural criticism, and genre studies” (3).“Cosmopolitan or Provincial? Ideology in Early Black Music Historiography, 1867–1940,” is the most historiographic of the works. The essay is a watershed moment for historical-based writings on Black music during the last decade of the twentieth century; it is also Ramsey Jr.’s first published journal article. The articles impetus for the archival retrieval of Black music historiography between 1867–1940 parallels the author’s quest for the recuperative project of Black music’s legitimate study in the academy. He writes, “despite this historical interest in black music, its journey to academic legitimization has mirrored the progression of black Americans themselves into mainstream American life: slow, demanding, and sinuous” (15). Originally published in 1996 for Black Music Research Journal, the essay tethers to current debates in Black studies concerning the conditioned desires of legitimacy in the academy and the institutionalization of Black study, in particular Black-music research coming out of fields like Black studies. Junior scholars like myself greatly benefit from the institutionalization of Black-music research, while also doing their best to evade its logics.The dynamism of Ramsey’s writing is evident in his chapter “Bebop, Jazz Manhood, and ‘Piano Shame,’” which first appeared in The Feminist Wire. The essay is a tapestry of personal narrative, gender studies (“the historical politics of ‘jazz manhood’”), and jazz studies (157). Arguably his most reflexive work in the collection, the essay is a consideration of the sometimes destructive attachments of Black men bebop musicians, like Bud Powell, to the category of the “jazzman,” as well as his own conditioning toward “traditional manhood” (156). Although the jazzmen of bebop use experimentation to negotiate the nexus of anti-Blackness and masculinity, they also procured “the traditional advantages of male power,” honing the phallocentrism of the scene (160). This procurement sometimes led to the marginalization of Black jazzwomen, in other instances, the annihilation of the self altogether. The pressures to live up to picturesque manhood often led to self soothing through alcohol and drugs. The essay ends on reflection, demonstrating his commitment to examining how his subjectivity shapes his thinking: “With all of these histories swirling around music, gender, and sexuality, it’s easy to understand why I bailed on my beloved piano and claimed an instrument in which I had little interest. Ideas about manhood and musicality have always been fraught, fickle, and powerful” (163). “Free Jazz and the Price of Black Musical Abstraction” carries the impulse of genre studies, providing an overview of free jazz of the 1960s. The essay charts the genre’s sound; its political link with “black power” (as an ideology and insurgent movement). In the essay, Ramsey examines the “social, cultural, and identity politics,” of free jazz and the “cross-fertilization of performance rhetoric” amongst black artists influenced by free jazz. (202). He frames free jazz as the site where Black poets and Black jazz musicians mutually influence each other artistically and politically, staking a claim to an emerging Black power politic. The essay also discusses the parallels between Western avant-garde music and the (Black) jazz avant-garde, including “difficulty, audience alienation, disdain of the of the popular,” as well as, ruminates on the “masculinist discourses” of free jazz musicians (204–205).The homophone of hear and here in the collection’s title locate the subjective in writing on Black music. Ramsey notes, “the ‘here’ in ‘who hears here?’ can stand as a metaphor for the world I encountered in the ML 3556 call numbers. It can also represent the living created in the community theaters. And ‘here’ in these spaces is not always about safety and nurturing; the idea can also acknowledge the negative impacts of power and subjugation” (11). Ramsey’s imaginative pairing of hear and here coextensively denotes and illuminates the inextricable link between subjectivity and listening: “[H]ow one interprets [black music] is always a direct function of the subjectivity of the analyst” (185). Who Hears Here? is emblematic of the need for critical and discerning Black music study.