Living with Music

 Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings, Edited by Robert O' Meally, 336 pgs. 

    This was the second book in our Rhythm N' Books music book club. One of my favorite works by Ellison, and probably his most well known, is Invisible Man, which is a classic piece of African-American fiction and highly recommended reading. Ellison's prose is, as always, equal parts erudite and eloquent and no less so here. In Living with Music, the editor compiled a terse collection of 'some' of Ellison's writing related to music. I say 'some' because as a reader you might think this is a collection of jazz criticism or music analyses from Ellison ( as I was led to believe). But there are only a few essays which fit that description. 

    The first half of the book starts out with jazz criticism--his essays about Charlie Christian and Charlie Parker are illuminating and useful in sussing out some of the major changes that were taking place in jazz at the time.  For the remainder of the book, the editor pulls excerpts from interviews with the author and music-related passages from some of his major works. That said, this collection, while useful in providing biographical touchstones for the author, seems like a title in search of a collection. However, there are some great insights into one of America's greatest authors. Ellison was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson and in many of the former's essays, you get a sense of American transcendentalism merging with the African American experience. I was surprised to learn about Ellison's negative perceptions of bebop, which took over the more traditional, danceable blues and jazz forms popular in the day. In fact, he despised it. Bebop at the time shook the music world because it was so different, but would go on to take it's rightful place in the canon. It reminded me of Nina Simone, who had similar opinions towards hip-hop as it was beginning to emerge as a popular genre. Both, geniuses in their right, would be wrong about the direction of the future of music. But this collection serves as an illuminating appendix to the work of a literary master and music lover who believed jazz belonged to everyone.