Cante Moro

I would like to touch on the topic of the “New American Poetry” where it opens onto matters we wouldn’t necessarily expect it to entail—not necessarily “new,” not necessarily “American,” not even necessarily “poetry.” What I would like to touch on is the New American Poetry’s Spanish connection: Federico García Lorca’s meditation on the “dark sounds” of cante jondo, deep song, the quality and condition known as duende. I will discuss that in relation to an array of “dark sounds” that bear on a cross-cultural poetics intimated by the inclusion of Lorca’s “Theory and Function of the Duende” in Donald M. Allen and Warren Tallman’s anthology The Poetics of the New American Poetry, an espousal of not only cross-cultural but intermedia fertilization and provocation, which I’ll relate to the work of a number of writers.

The title “Cante Moro” goes back to a recording that came out in 1966, a recording by Manitas de Plata, probably the flamenco musician best known to listeners in the US at that time. At one point during one of the pieces on the album, “Moritas Moras,” after the opening run of singing by José Reyes, a member of the group says, “Eso es cante moro,” which means “That’s Moorish singing.”¹ Calling deep song cante moro summons the past rule and continuing cultural presence of the Moors in Spain; it acknowledges the hybrid, heterogeneous roots not only of cante jondo but of Spanish culture generally, of, in fact, culture—collective poesis—generally. A Gypsy doing so, as in this instance, allies outcast orders, acknowledging hybridity and heterogeneity to entwine the heterodox as well—heterodox Gypsy, heterodox Moor. Cante moro bespeaks the presence and persistence of the otherwise excluded, the otherwise expelled.

Let me begin by saying a bit about Lorca. Of the twenty-five writers in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, Lorca is one of the anomalies, perhaps the anomaly—the only non-Anglophone poet and one of only two non-Americans included. It’s fitting he should give the volume its heaviest cross-cultural, cross-pollinating touch. He himself was drawn to the marginalized, the anomalous, to those relegated to the outskirts of sanctioned identity and culture. A large part of his importance to Spanish poetry is the respect he accorded the vernacular culture of southern Spain. He sought instruction in the mixed cultural inheritance of Andalusia, in the music of outcast Gypsies, in reminders of the expelled Moors. The book that made him famous is Gypsy Ballads, published in 1928. There is a correspondence between what Lorca was doing in Spain and what was going on in this country among black writers during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. The tapping of vernacular resources was a defining feature of the Harlem Renaissance, and it’s no accident that one of its most prominent poets, Langston Hughes, was one of the first translators of Gypsy Ballads into English. Lorca in fact had direct contact with Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance writers while studying at Columbia in 1929 and 1930. The work that came out of that stay, Poet in New York, contains a section called “The Blacks” that celebrates Harlem. The translation of that work by Greg Simon and Steven F. White includes letters Lorca wrote his family from New York. In one of them he tells of meeting the Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand and Passing, and of the party she gave for him at her house at which “there were only blacks.” Of the music they played and sang he writes, “Only the cante jondo is comparable.”²

In his essay on duende Lorca is working with the black aesthetic of Spain. One of the things he does early in the essay is quote the Gypsy singer Manuel Torre as having said, “All that has dark sounds has duende.” That, at least, is how it’s translated by J. L. Gilli in the version that appears in The Poetics of the New American Poetry.³ Christopher Maurer, in the more recent translation that appears in Deep Song and Other Prose, renders it, “All that has black sounds has duende.”⁴ Maurer also points out, in a footnote, that when Lorca met Torre in 1927, Torre, evoking the Gypsies’ fabled origins in Egypt, said to him, “What you must search for, and find, is the black torso of the Pharaoh” (DS 140). He meant that one has to root one’s voice in fabulous origins, find one’s voice in the dark, among the dead. The word duende means “spirit,” a kind of gremlin, a gremlin-like, troubling spirit. One of the things that marks the arrival of duende in flamenco singing is a sound of trouble in the voice. The voice becomes troubled. Its eloquence becomes eloquence of another order, a broken, problematic, self-problematizing eloquence. Lorca also quotes Torre as having told a singer, “You have a voice, you know the styles, but you will never triumph, because you have no duende” (DS 42). So duende is something beyond technical competence or even technical virtuosity. It is something troubling. It has to do with trouble, deep trouble. Deep song delves into troubled water, troubles the water. As a character in Leon Forrest’s novel Two Wings to Veil My Face puts it, “Still waters don’t run deep enough.”⁵

Lorca tells a story of the Andalusian singer Pastora Pavón, also known as La Niña de los Peines. He tells of her singing in a little tavern in Cádiz one night before a group of flamenco aficionados. He says that when she finished singing she was met with silence. Her voice, though technically perfect, and her virtuosity, though impressive, didn’t move anyone. “When Pastora Pavón finished singing,” Lorca writes, “there was total silence, until a tiny man, one of those dancing manikins that rise suddenly out of brandy bottles, sarcastically murmured ‘Viva Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here we care nothing about ability, technique, skill. Here we are after something else’” (DS 45). Which is not to say that one gets there by not having skill. One gets there by not being satisfied with skill. It is the other side, the far side of skill, not the near side. Then Lorca goes on to say, “As though crazy, torn like a medieval weeper, La Niña de los Peines got to her feet, tossed off a big glass of firewater and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, without breath or color, but with duende. She was able to kill all the scaffolding of the song and leave way for a furious, enslaving duende, friend of sand winds, who made the listeners rip their clothes with the same rhythm as do the blacks of the Antilles when, in the ‘lucumí’ rite, they huddle in heaps before the statue of Santa Bárbara” (DS 45– 46).

It is interesting that Lorca makes the Old World–New World connection, a black connection, a connection between duende, black song in Spain, cante moro, and black song in Cuba, the music of the Yoruba-Catholic mix known as lucumí. This is one of the reasons Lorca is relevant to new American possibilities, to an American newness that is about mix, the meeting of different cultural styles and predispositions. He was interested in Old World predecessor mixes like those in Andalusia, whose further inflections in the Americas he recognized and embraced.

Lorca doesn’t so much define duende as grope after it, wrestle with it, evoke it through strain, insist on struggle. He writes, for example, that “one must awaken the duende in the remotest mansions of the blood” (DS 44), that “the duende loves the rim of the wound” and that it “draws near places where forms fuse together into a yearning superior to their visible expression” (DS 50). He notes that “[e]ach art has a duende different in form and style but their roots all meet in the place where the black sounds of Manuel Torre come from—the essence, the uncontrollable, quivering, common base of wood, sound, canvas, and word” (DS 52). One of the ongoing challenges of Lorca’s essay is how to bring duende, which he discusses mainly in relation to music, into writing—how to relate it to writing. I would like to touch on four American poets whose work intersects with Lorca’s and then remark on a few pieces of music that pertain to these matters. Three of the four poets were included in the anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960: Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Amiri Baraka. The fourth, Bob Kaufman, was not included, though he should have been.

First, Jack Spicer, who was based in the San Francisco Bay Area, a San Francisco poet. Though he began writing in the 1940s, he felt that his real work began with After Lorca, which was published in 1957. It is a book of poems and prose pieces, poems that are presented as translations of poems by Lorca—translations in a very loose sense. Some of them are translations in an even looser sense in that they are translations of Lorca poems that do not exist. Interspersed among these translations are the prose pieces, which are written as letters addressed to the dead Lorca. Lorca was killed during the Spanish Civil War, executed by Francisco Franco’s troops, which is another reason he has attracted a lot of attention—as a symbol, a sign of those times and the times we continue to live in. He is a poet of cultural openness, cultural mix, cut down by the emergence of fascism. A lot of writers have identified with Lorca and the position, implicit and explicit, he took against fascism. Remember that the Gypsies he so celebrated were one of the targets of fascism; a million Gypsies were killed in concentration camps.

Lorca was killed in 1936 near Granada. Spicer, a very playful writer, albeit a bit grim, begins After Lorca with an introduction attributed to “Federico García Lorca / Outside Granada, October 1957.”⁶ The gremlin, the imp, is very active in what he is doing. As well, Spicer picks up a certain insistence in Lorca’s discussion of duende, which is that it is a conversation with the dead, intimacy with death and with the dead. “The duende,” Lorca says, “does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. The duende must know beforehand that he can serenade death’s house and rock those branches we all wear, branches that do not have, will never have, any consolation” (DS 49–50) The disconsolate character and tone of Spicer’s work agrees not only with this but with the fact that one of the phrases that recur a great deal in cante jondo is the phrase sin remedio, “without remedy.” The assertion no hay remedio, “there is no remedy,” also occurs. Pepe de la Matrona, who has one of the darkest, gruffest voices one will ever hear (more an extended, variegated growl than a voice), sings a song called “Remedio No Tengas,” which means “You Would Have No Remedy.” Duende often has to do with a kind of longing that has no remedy, not simply loss, unrequited love and so forth, but what Lorca calls “a longing without object” (DS 112). He discusses this in relation to Gypsy Ballads, to a poem that has to do with a woman named Soledad Montoya, who “embodies incurable pain.” “The Pain of Soledad Montoya is the root of the Andalusian people,” writes Lorca. “It is not anguish, because in pain one can smile, nor does it blind, for it never produces weeping. It is a longing without object, a keen love for nothing, with the certainty that death (the eternal care of Andalusia) is breathing behind the door” (DS 112).

So Spicer opens After Lorca with an introduction written by Lorca, at that time some twenty years dead. In it Lorca says that several of the pieces in the book are translations of poems he has written since his death, though he does not say which. In the essay on duende he writes, “A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than any place else in the world” (DS 47). Spicer seems to have taken him at his word. Impish play and disconsolate spirit—“The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy,” we read (CB 12)—repeatedly embrace in an introduction whose antic humor gathers troubling undertones. The words execution and executed, used in reference to Spicer’s technique, resonate with and are darkly inflected by the circumstances of Lorca’s death. So too does the joke with which the introduction ends, where we read, “But I am strongly reminded as I survey this curious amalgam of a cartoon published in an American magazine while I was visiting your country in New York. The cartoon showed a gravestone on which were inscribed the words: ‘HERE LIES AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN.’ The caption below it read: ‘I wonder how they happened to be buried in the same grave?’” (CB 12).

Another poet who was engaged with Lorca’s work, and another San Francisco poet, is Robert Duncan, an associate of Spicer’s. In his book Caesar’s Gate: Poems 1949–50 there is a preface Duncan wrote in 1972, the year the book was published, and in that preface there is a section called “Lorca.” The book includes a poem called “What Have You Come to Tell Me, García Lorca?” and in the preface Duncan recalls the 1940s and ’50s when he was reading Lorca. He writes for several pages about Lorca’s importance to his development, and he mentions Spicer as well. He discusses the historical predicament, the historical moment that was Lorca’s fate, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism. He discusses duende. He also discusses Lorca as a gay poet, a troubled, conflicted gay poet who was important to him and Spicer as gay poets. It is not that Lorca advanced a gay poetics, but that they saw in him and his work some of the trouble, for him, of being gay—a certain depression and self-censure, a censuring of his own homosexuality. Duncan writes this about duende:

In his lecture “Theory and Function of the Duende,” Lorca tells us: “The dark and quivering duende that I am talking about is a descendant of the merry demon of Socrates.” The madness, then, however it may relate to the practice of deliberate alienation which Lorca’s intimate friend from student days, Salvador Dalí, had brought into Surrealist circles of Paris from their Spanish conversations, and which led to the work of Breton and Eluard in L’Immaculée Conception, contemporary with Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, with Breton’s essay on the simulation of verbal deliriums from various categories of insanity—this madness is not ultimately a surrealist simulation drawn from a clinical model in a program of systematic alienation but, past that state, means to return to the divine madness of daemonic inspiration, the speaking more than one knew what, that Plato tells us his Master, Socrates, thought to be at once the power and the dementia of the poet in his art.⁷

He speaks of duende as a “mode of poetic dissociation” and of “disturbed meanings.” The poet speaks in tongues, multiply, troublingly: “Freed from reality, the trouble of an unbound reference invades the reader’s sense of what is at issue” (CG xxii).

So duende, for Duncan, is “the speaking more than one knew what,” the taking on of another voice, and that is very much what duende is in cante jondo. It is a taking over of one’s voice by another voice. This wooing of another voice, an alternate voice, that is so important to duende has as one of its aspects or analogues in poetry that state of entering the language in such a way that one is into an area of implication, resonance, and connotation that is manifold, many-meaninged, polysemous. One has worked beyond oneself. It is as if the language itself takes over. Something beyond the will, the conscious design or desire of the poet, is active, something that goes beyond univocal, unequivocal control. That is what Duncan means by “the trouble of an unbound reference”—an inordinacy, a lack of adequation that is to language what sin remedio is to a longing without object. Bound reference, univocal meaning, is no solution to the riddle of language.

Amiri Baraka cites Lorca as an influence in his statement on poetics in The New American Poetry. There is an early poem of his called “Lines to García Lorca,” which he prefaces with an epigraph taken from an African American spiritual: “Climin up the mountain, chillun, / Didn’t come here for to stay, / If I’m ever gonna see you agin / It’ll be on the judgment day.”⁸ By doing so he not only acknowledges Lorca’s interest in African American music and culture but furthers the analogy, the sense of rapport, between African American spirituality and Andalusian spirituality. Gypsies, though they do not appear explicitly in this poem, come in elsewhere in Baraka’s early work to embody a mobile, mercurial noninvestment in the status quo. One of the things going on in “Lines to García Lorca” is the implicit connection between that mercuriality, that nomadism, and the line “Didn’t come here for to stay,” behind which lies a well-known, resonant history of African American fugitivity and its well-known, resonant relationship to enslavement and persecution. Thus the resonant apposition of the poem’s opening lines, “Send soldiers again to kill you, García. / Send them to quell my escape.” At the end of the poem Lorca’s voice, “away off,” invested with fugitive spirit, laughs:

But, away off, quite close to the daylight,
I hear his voice, and he is laughing,
laughing Like a Spanish guitar.

The way in which fugitivity asserts itself on an aesthetic level, at the level of poetics, is important as well. The way in which Baraka’s poems of this period move intimates fugitive spirit, as does much of the music that he was into. He writes, of a solo by saxophonist John Tchicai on an Archie Shepp album, “It slides away from the proposed.”⁹ That gets into, again, the cultivation of another voice, a voice that is other than that proposed by one’s intentions, tangential to one’s intentions, angular, oblique—the obliquity of an unbound reference. That sliding away wants out. Musicians like Tchicai and Shepp were called “outside” players. Robin Blaser called Spicer’s work “the practice of outside” (CB 269). Let me, though, let another poem of Baraka’s, “History As Process,” say it, show it. Lorca does not explicitly come in, but the Gypsies do and so does the guitar:

1.
The evaluation of the mysteries by the sons of all experience. All suffering, if we call the light a thing all men should know. Or find. Where ever, in the dark folds of the next second, there is some diminishing beauty we might one day understand, and scream to, in some wild fit of acknowledged Godliness.

Reality, is what it is. This suffering truth advertised in all men’s loveliest histories. The thing, There As Speed, is God, as mingling possibility. The force. As simple future, what the freaky gipsies rolled through Europe on.
(The soul.)

2.
What can I do to myself? Bones and dusty skin. Heavy eyes twisted between the adequate thighs of all humanity (a little h), strumming my head for a living. Bankrupt utopia sez tell men no utopias. I will not listen. (Except the raw wind makes the hero’s eyes close, and the tears that come out are real.)¹⁰

One hears the pronouncements, the propositions. One also hears the slips, the slides, the shifting ratios—rhythmic, predicative, quick.

The last of the four poets is Bob Kaufman. His work was not included in The New American Poetry, even though it was very important to the Beat movement. He was very involved in the development of the Beat movement in San Francisco, in North Beach, and is said to have coined the term beatnik. Some people consider him the prototypical Beat poet. Steve Abbott has called him “the hidden master of the Beats.”¹¹ A poet of African American and Jewish descent to whom Lorca’s work was very important, he refers to Lorca in a number of poems, echoing lines from his work, sometimes quoting or paraphrasing them outright. In “Lorca,” for example, we find the line “Give Harlem’s king one spoon,”¹² harking back to Poet in New York, where “The King of Harlem” begins with the lines “With a wooden spoon / he dug out the crocodiles’ eyes” (PNY 29). What spoke most to Kaufman was Lorca’s valorization of African American presence. In his lecture on Poet in New York, Lorca argued that “the blacks exercise great influence in North America,” that “they are the most delicate, most spiritual element in that world” (PNY 186). The “great sun of the center” (PNY 35) that he encourages black people to seek in “The King of Harlem,” to continue seeking, is, among other things, the covert centrality of an otherwise marginalized people, a “sun” that cross-linguistically puns on “soul” (“el gran sol del centro”).

Kaufman’s apocalyptic, ironically patriotic prose-poem “The Ancient Rain” generously samples, as we would say nowadays, “The King of Harlem” and “Standards and Paradise of the Blacks.” Its embrace of Lorca’s endorsement of new American possibilities, new American mixes, resounds in telling counterpoint not only with Kaufman’s noninclusion in The New American Poetry (only one nonwhite poet’s work was included) but with the negligible attention accorded him and his work in the numerous writings on the Beat generation as well:

At once I am there at the great sun, feeling the great sun of the center. Hearing the Lorca music in the endless solitude of crackling blueness. I could feel myself a little boy again in crackling blueness, wanting to do what Lorca says in crackling blueness to kiss out my frenzy on bicycle wheels and smash little squares in the flush of a soiled exultation. Federico García Lorca sky, immaculate scoured sky, equaling only itself contained all the distances that Lorca is, that he came from Spain of the Inquisition is no surprise. His poem of solitude walking around Columbia. My first day in crackling blueness, I walked off my ship and rode the subway to Manhattan to visit Grant’s tomb and I thought because Lorca said he would let his grow long someday crackling blueness would cause my hair to grow long. I decided to move deeper into crackling blueness. When Franco’s civil guard killed, from that moment on, I would move deeper in crackling blueness. I kept my secrets. I observed those who read him who were not Negroes and listened to all their misinterpretation of him. I thought of those who had been around him, those that were not Negro and were not in crackling blueness, those that couldn’t see his wooden south wind, a tiltin’ black slime that tacked down all the boat wrecks, while Saturn delayed all the trains. (AR 80–81)

“Crackling blueness,” out of “Standards and Paradise of the Blacks,” is the sky cracked by lightning, the imminence of thunder and rain, wrath and redemption, “the bitter freshness of . . . millenary spit,” as Lorca puts it (PNY 25). It is also the raspy, cracked voice of duende, the ominous, black vocality of the blues and of cante jondo.

Those, then, are four instances of American poets making use of the work of Lorca. They relate to the question of how one’s writing can draw upon that of predecessors, the sense of tradition, a lineage one creates for oneself, that one seeks out in the work of others. Call it influence without anxiety. As a writer, one has to find one’s tradition, create one’s tradition, and in doing that one creates lines of affinity and kinship that can cut across national boundaries, ethnic boundaries, and so forth. They also relate to the question of how one’s writing can be informed and instructed by other artistic media, how one can create or pursue lines of kinship and conversation with nonliterary media. That’s one of the useful senses the phrase I used earlier—“cultivation of another voice”—has. A different medium is a different voice, an alternate vocality. Lorca’s sense of duende comes out of his engagement with music, the Andalusian music he was obviously moved and inspired by. Attentiveness to those other, alternate voices that speak to you—painting, sculpture, whatever—can make you susceptible, impinge upon you in ways which alter your own voice.

My work has a pronounced relationship to music. I was always struck by Louis Zukofsky’s definition of poetry as a function whose lower limit is speech and whose upper limit is song. He uses the integral sign from calculus to suggest that we are integrating that lower limit, speech, and that upper limit, song. Poetry is an integral function. But even before I came across Zukofsky’s formulation of it I heard poetry as a musical deployment of language, the music peculiar to language, language bordering on song, speech bordering on song. From doing a lot of listening I have gotten certain ideas about music, a thematics of music, but also an impulse toward a musicality in the writing. Years ago I wrote a poem for John Coltrane, “Ohnedaruth’s Day Begun,” in which there is this passage:

I grope thru smoke to glimpse New
York City, the Village Gate, late
’65. I sit at the bar drinking scotch between
sets, some kid comes up and says he’d
like to hear “Equinox.”
We play “Out Of
This World” instead, the riff hits
me like rain and like a leak in my
throat it won’t quit. No reins whoa
this ghost I’m ridden by and again
I’m asking
myself what “climb” will Nut ask of
me next? . . .¹³

This has to do, among other things, with a surge, a runaway dilation, a quantum rush one often hears in Trane’s music, the sense that he’s driven, possessed—ridden, as it is put here, which recalls the African possession religions in which worshippers are spoken of as horses and the gods, the spirits, are spoken of as horsemen, riders. To be possessed is to be mounted and ridden by a god. You find that imagery in vodoun in Haiti, in candomblé in Brazil, in lucumí or santería in Cuba. Possession means that something beyond your grasp of it grabs you, that something that gets away from you—another sense in which fugitivity comes in—gives you a voice. Like Lorca, who, remember, refers to lucumí, I think of this as related to duende.

That is one place in my work where ideas having to do with duende come in. Another place is Bedouin Hornbook, which even more extensively and graphically has to do with music. It is prose, written mainly in the form of letters addressed to an angel by a musician/composer, N. Duende is a term that comes up a number of times in these letters. One instance is this one, toward the end of a letter that accompanies the tape of a composition that N. has written, where we read, “The name of the piece is ‘Opposable Thumb at the Water’s Edge.’ Its basic theme I’d put this way: Graspability is a self-incriminating thirst utterly native to every hand, an indigenous court from which only the drowned hope to win an acquittal. The piece makes use of two triadic phrases which I call utility riffs: ‘whatever beginnings go back to’ and ‘an exegetic refusal to be done with desire.’ These generate a subtheme which could be put as follows: Thirst is by its nature unquenchable, the blue lips of a muse whose refusals roughen our throats with duende.”1⁴ Unquenchable thirst is a longing without object. Blue, the color of its ostensible object, plants a disconsolate kiss.

Let me now refer to several musical examples that relate to these matters. The first is a piece by the singer whom Lorca writes about in his essay on duende, Pastora Pavón, La Niña de los Peines. Found on the album La Niña de los Peines, it is called “Ay Pilato” and is a type of song known as a saeta. The saeta is a song heard in Andalusia during Holy Week, the week before Easter. A procession takes place through the streets, a procession that includes musicians—sometimes playing nothing but muffled drums, but often including horns, brass instruments. The procession carries an image either of the Virgin Mary or of Christ, sometimes both. At each point where the procession stops there is a singer on a balcony overlooking the street. The procession stops right beneath the balcony and the singer sings to the image they carry. Saeta means “arrow.” The song is piercing, heartrending. We hear the singer singing from a position of being pierced. What we also hear is a Gypsy-Moorish-Arab substrate piercing—breaking through from underneath—the occasion’s Christian surface.

Another saeta, the first one I ever heard, is by Miles Davis, one of the pieces on his album Sketches of Spain. Miles was very attracted to flamenco. On the Kind of Blue album there is a cut called “Flamenco Sketches,” and on a later album, the famous Bitches Brew that came out in 1970, there is a cut called “Spanish Key,” all of which lends itself to the Andalusian/African American rapport we have seen Lorca and others get at. In late 1959 Miles teamed up with pianist/composer/arranger Gil Evans and recorded Sketches of Spain. One of the five pieces on the album is a saeta, with Miles, on trumpet, playing the role of the cantaor, the singer on the balcony. They go so far as to simulate a procession, opening and closing the cut, simply called “Saeta,” with march music. One hears that tremulous, piercing sound Miles gets out of the trumpet, which there have been various attempts to describe. One critic called it the sound of a man walking on eggshells, and there is the story of a little girl who said he sounded like a little boy crying in a closet.

The next piece does not relate as explicitly to Andalusia but it still has to do with the things I have been discussing. It is John Coltrane with Miles Davis’s group, from the last concert tour that Trane made as part of Miles’s band. It was recorded in Stockholm in 1960 and released on the album Miles Davis and John Coltrane Live in Stockholm 1960. The solo he plays on Miles’s composition “All Blues” has the quality of reaching for another voice, stretching the voice, passionately reaching; it has the quality of duende that Lorca talks about as a tearing of the voice, a crippling of the voice that paradoxically is also enabling. I have discussed, in an essay called “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol,” the connection between limping and enablement in relation to the African god Legba, one of the gods of vodoun, candomblé, and lucumí. Legba is the god of doorways, gateways, entrances, thresholds, crossroads, intersections. Legba is crippled, the limping god who nonetheless dances. That conjunction of limping disability with the gracefulness of dance is one of the things I hear coming through in Trane’s solo. This also relates to a forking of the voice, so that we hear the intersection of two lines of articulation—doubling the voice, splitting the voice, breaking the voice, tearing it. There is a dialogical aspect to African American and African music that is very strong. It comes across in call and response, the antiphonal relationship between lead singer and chorus, preacher and congregation. It comes across in the playing of musicians like John Coltrane, who use the upper and lower registers of the instrument as though they were two different voices in dialogue with one another, in a sometimes quarrelsome conversation with one another, competition with one another. In this instance Trane gets into doing some things with overtones, multiphonics, that make it sound as if he’s playing two different horns, trying to play in two different octaves at the same time. It makes for an unruly, agonistic sound in which it seems that the two lines of articulation are wrestling, that they are somehow each other’s contagion or contamination. It is appropriate that that solo should come in a piece called “All Blues.”

This business of the pursuit of another voice, an alternate voice—in Bedouin Hornbook N. calls it the pursuit of a metavoice—is very much a part of the African American musical tradition, very much a part of the African musical tradition. The dialogical quality in music of this disposition can be heard in a number of different idioms and forms. The blues is certainly one of them, as can be heard in the next two pieces, both by a blues musician from the Mississippi delta, Mississippi Fred McDowell. One of the striking things about the blues tradition is the way the instrument becomes that other, alternate voice. Everyone talks about the speechlike qualities of instruments as they are played in African American music. Built into that is some kind of dissatisfaction with—if not critique of—the limits of conventionally articulate speech, verbal speech. One of the reasons the music so often goes over into nonspeech—moaning, humming, shouts, nonsense lyrics, scat—is to say, among other things, that the realm of conventionally articulate speech is not sufficient for saying what needs to be said. We are often making that same assertion in poetry. This is one of the reasons that in poetry we seek out “the trouble of an unbound reference” about which Duncan writes, as well as one of the reasons this music has been so attractive, so instructive, such an inspiration to poets.

In the music of Mississippi Fred McDowell one hears an interaction between voice and guitar, a slide guitar, the way the line between speech and song is very fluid, frequently blurred. This is very much a part of the tradition. There is an album called Singing Preachers that features preachers whose sermons would taper off into singing, speech into song, and vice versa, back and forth. In “Everybody’s Down on Me” on his album I Do Not Play No Rock ’n’ Roll, McDowell starts off talking and works talk into song. We get a mini-lecture, a sermonette as to what this recourse to sound, a sound peculiar to the slide guitar, a raucous, unruly wail, is about, what it comes out of. He talks about being betrayed, saying that you need an unruly, outrageous sound when you feel there’s no other way you can get satisfaction. What you can say, what can be stated within the limits of conventionally articulate speech, is not enough. What you need is this sound. Notable too is the fact that he starts stumbling, the way he stumbles as he tries to talk about that sound until the sound itself comes to his rescue. The sound itself rescues crippled speech, which, again, is the eloquence of Legba, the limping eloquence or enablement of Legba.

Another context in which to think about this recourse to an alternate voice, this movement into a voice beyond one’s voice, into a metavoice, is shamanism, the shamanic roots of music evoked by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in his novel The Lost Steps. It was published in the 1950s and has to do with the journey of a composer/musician into the jungles of South America in search of the origins of music, something of an ethnomusicological expedition. Carpentier was, among other things, a musicologist. He did research, for example, into the African roots of Cuban music and culture, into lucumí and so forth, and his first novel, Ecue- Yamba-O! has to do with that. The recourse to another voice, the need for an alternate voice, is something he goes into in several passages in The Lost Steps. In the depths of a South American forest the narrator witnesses a shamanic rite performed over the body of a hunter who was killed by a rattlesnake bite. He takes this to be the origin of music; he sees the shamanic confrontation with death as the birth of music:

. . . the shaman began to shake a gourd full of pebbles—the only instrument these people know—trying to drive off the emissaries of Death. There was a ritual silence, setting the stage for the incantation, which raised the tension of the spectators to fever pitch.
And in the vast jungle filling with night terrors, there arose the Word. A word that was more than word. A word that imitated the voice of the speaker, and of that attributed to the spirit in possession of the corpse. One came from the throat of the shaman; the other from his belly. One was deep and confused like the bubbling of underground lava; the other, medium in pitch, was harsh and wrathful. They alternated. They answered each other. The one upbraided when the other groaned; the belly voice turned sarcastic when the throat voice seemed to plead. Sounds like guttural portamenti were heard, ending in howls; syllables repeated over and over, coming to create a kind of rhythm; there were trills suddenly interrupted by four notes that were the embryo of a melody. But then came the vibration of the tongue between the lips, the indrawn snoring, the panting contrapuntal to the rattle of the maraca. This was something far beyond language, and yet still far from song. Something that had not yet discovered vocalization, but was more than word.¹⁵

He later speaks of this as his having seen “the word travel the road of song without reaching it,” and later still of “its verbal exorcism turning into music when confronted with the need for more than one intonation” (LS 200, 217).

Think about that in relation to La Niña de los Peines, whose voice breaks and seems intent on some higher octave, some higher voice. Think about it in relation to the John Coltrane solo, where, working with multiphonics, he voices discontent with the given intonation, bent on going beyond it. Think about it in relation to antiphony, the call-and-response, dialogical impulse that can be heard even in music played by a lone performer, the interplay between voice and instrument especially within the blues tradition, in the music of someone like Fred McDowell. One of the reasons for the development of slide guitar was the need to get a more human (but not quite human) sound out of the guitar, out of the instrumental line—human-but- not-quite-human speech as well as human-but-not-quite-human cry.

In the second piece by Fred McDowell, “Jesus Is on the Mainline,” also on the I Do Not Play No Rock ‘n’ Roll album, one of the striking things is the way he lets the guitar speak, actually lets it take parts of his lines. He will begin singing a line only to break off and let the guitar finish it, suggesting a continuum, a complementarity, between human voice and instrumental voice, an interchange between speech and song, verbal articulation and nonverbal articulation. If you have read Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo, you may remember the episode in which he writes about an ancient musician named Jethro, an ancient Egyptian musician whose sound he describes as a kind of muddy, delta sound, blurring—muddying—the distinction between the Nile delta and the Mississippi delta. Fred McDowell’s guitar has the kind of sound Reed has in mind.

Another example of multivocality is from an album with the shamanic title I Talk with the Spirits, recorded in the 1960s by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who plays flute on it throughout. On a piece called “The Business Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues,” Rahsaan hums while playing, which is something other flute players sometimes do as well. Yusef Lateef is one of the first I ever heard do it. The technique has become something of a standard in the repertoire of jazz flutists. On the current scene, James Newton is a flutist who uses it a lot. Interestingly, it was not something that Eric Dolphy, who was a great flutist, did that much with, but that’s another story. Rahsaan, though, hums and even speaks as he plays. Again, the play of voices, a move into multiple voices, is analogous to speaking in tongues. One hears a braiding of vocal and instrumental lines that holds a great deal of attraction for jazz musicians. I have even heard saxophone players hum while playing. Pharoah Sanders does it from time to time, and I have heard Dewey Redman do it as well. There is a piece in Amiri Baraka’s book Tales in which he writes, “The dialogue exists. Magic and ghosts are a dialogue, and the body bodies of material, invisible sound vibrations, humming in emptyness, and ideas less than humming, humming.. . .”¹⁶

One of the things I have been discussing is cross-culturality, sensing rapport across cultural lines, picking up on rhymes between cultures, dialogue between cultures. A piece that presents Rahsaan’s multivocal technique of humming while playing the flute in another context is a love song from Luristan, in Iran, found on the album Folk Music of Iran. It is performed by a singer accompanied by a flutist playing a reed flute known as a nay. The nay has quite a special place in the mystical traditions of that part of the world. Rumi, for example, writes of the nay, “Hearken to the reed-flute, how it complains, / Lamenting its banishment from its home.”¹⁷ He goes on to say that the reed was cut from rushes and that what we hear in the sound of the nay is the remembrance of that cutting, that the very sound calls to mind the cutting which brought it into being and which it laments. The sound subsists on that cutting. The nay not only mourns but embodies separation. Fittingly, the song from Luristan, simply called “Love Song” on the album, contains the lines “I am burning, / I have the taste of separation.” In this song the flutist hums while playing the nay. In Iran this technique is known as zemzemeh. In this piece the splitting of the voice, the cultivation of a multiple voice, seems to embody at the instrumental level the “taste of separation” that is complained of in the lyrics. So again one hears humming, the additional voice and vibration it brings in, the buzz it elicits.

Think about that buzz, that vibration, that multiply-aspected vocality, in relation to poetry, to the cultivation of multiple meaning in poems, the play of polysemous articulation. A poem’s order of statement is what has been called a buzz of implication, something one can hear in even a very brief passage. Take, for example, these lines of Robert Kelly’s in a book called Songs I–XXX:

I was not a tree,
I hung in my bones like a man in a tree,
the tree talked. I said nothing¹⁸

The play of assertion against a recanting of assertion amounts to a buzz. The changes it registers concerning the status of treeness, the status of the speaker, and the status of speaking make the passage what Rahsaan took to calling his band: a vibration society. The words buzz, whisper among themselves, vibrate with such implicit assertions as that the tree that talks is a skeleton, that the man is not his bones, that bones are gallows, and so forth. I think of this also in relation to the cultivation of resonance in African music. In Zimbabwe, for example, they not only place the mbira, the so-called thumb piano, inside a calabash gourd, which they call a resonator, but they also attach cowrie shells to the outside of the gourd. The shells rub against the gourd and make a raspy, buzzing sound when the mbira is played. The African predilection for a burred, “dirty” sound, which the Cameroonian musician/musicologist Francis Bebey, among others, has commented on, is reluctant to let a tone sit in some uncomplicated, isolated, supposedly pure sense of itself. Poems likewise buzz with meanings, implications, and insinuations that complicate, contaminate, “dirty” one another.

A piece that brings us full circle, back to Andalusian/African American resonances, is Sonny Rollins’s “East Broadway Rundown” on the album of the same name. The bass player Jimmy Garrison takes a solo, playing the bass like a big guitar (which it is), playing it, more specifically, like a Spanish guitar—playing the flamenco riffs that came to be one of his trademarks. When Sonny Rollins comes in, what takes place is an interesting interchange that has remained a suggestive, poetic image for me over the years. Rollins removes the mouthpiece from his saxophone and plays it, sans horn. So, again, we have separation, severance, amputation. Bedouin Hornbook opens with the idea of music as a phantom limb, a phantom reach with/after something you have but do not have. It is a kind of remembering, a mended dismemberment. This is one of the pieces that put that idea, that figure, into my head— a bassist playing flamenco while a horn player makes a voice, a high, falsetto voice, out of breakage, an alternate voice out of separating the mouthpiece from the horn.

I will finish by mentioning some further extensions and elaborations of cante moro. One of the interesting things that have been happening lately with flamenco in Spain is the assertion of its ties to the Moors, to some of the Arab musics of North Africa. This includes collaborations between flamenco musicians and North African performers of a type of music whose roots are in Muslim Spain, a type of music still known as Andalusian throughout the Maghreb. Two recorded instances are José Heredia Maya and the Andalusian Orchestra of Tetuan’s Macama Jonda and Juan Peña Lebrijano and the Andalusian Orchestra of Tangier’s Encuentros. In the 1970s and ’80s Lole Montoya, of the group Lole and Manuel, recorded a number of songs in Arabic, traveling to the Sono Cairo studios in Egypt in 1977 to record a song made famous by the legendary Om Kalsoum, “Anta Oumri.” Also interesting are the connections some of the younger flamenco musicians have made with New World extensions of the African-Iberian mix. A group called Ketama blends flamenco with Cuban rumba, Brazilian samba, and so forth. They have also collaborated with a kora player from Mali, Toumani Diabate. One of their influences is a musician named Manzanita, whose 1978 album Poco Ruido y Mucho Duende presented him accompanied by, as its liner notes explain, “dos músicos de color en razón a su sentido improvisatorio y a su ‘feeling,’ muy próximo al gitano” (“two black musicians because of their improvisatory sense and their ‘feeling,’ very close to that of the Gypsy”). The two musicians are bassist David Thomas, from the United States, and percussionist Pepe Ebano, from Cuba. Another of Ketama’s influences is singer Camarón, who in the late 1970s expanded his instrumental accompaniment to include trap drums, keyboards, and electric bass. Finally, a few years ago a group called Pata Negra released an album called Blues de la Frontera. As is clear from the title, they play a flamenco-blues mix. It builds on the rapport that has long been noted between the two. I remember hearing a radio documentary on Jimi Hendrix. One segment was a tape from a recording session, maybe a jam, and Hendrix was talking to the other musicians and said, “What I want is a Muddy Waters/flamenco sound.” The other musicians said, “Yeah!” Everyone knew exactly what he meant. No problem.

Notes

¹ See the discography at the end of this essay for recordings referred to in the text.
² Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Greg Simon and Steven F. White (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 214. Hereafter cited parenthetically as PNY.
³ Federico García Lorca, “Theory and Function of the Duende,” in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald M. Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 91.
⁴ Federico García Lorca, Deep Song and Other Prose, trans. Christopher Maurer (New York: New Directions, 1980), 43. Hereafter cited parenthetically as DS.
⁵ Leon Forrest, Two Wings to Veil My Face (Chicago: Another Chicago Press, 1988), 192.
⁶ Jack Spicer, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975), 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CB.
⁷ Robert Duncan, Caesar’s Gate: Poems 1949–50 (Berkeley: Sand Dollar, 1972), xxi–xxii. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CG.
⁸ LeRoiJones, “Lines to García Lorca,” in New Negro Poets: USA, ed. Langston Hughes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 55.
⁹ LeRoiJones, Black Music (New York: Morrow, 1967), 160.
¹⁰ LeRoiJones, Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 38.
¹¹ Steve Abbott, “Hidden Master of the Beats,” Poetry Flash, no. 155 (1986): 1.
¹² Bob Kaufman, The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978 (New York: New Directions, 1981), 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically as AR.
¹³ Nathaniel Mackey, Eroding Witness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 73.
¹⁴ Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook (Lexington, KY: Callaloo Fiction, 1986), 43.
¹⁵ Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Noonday Press, 1989), 184. Hereafter cited parenthetically as LS.
¹⁶ LeRoiJones, Tales (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 91.
¹⁷ Jalaluddin Rumi, Teachings of Rumi: The Masnavi, trans. E. H. Whinfield (London: Octagon Press, 1979), 1.
¹⁸ Robert Kelly, Songs I–XXX (Cambridge, MA: Pym-Randall Press, 1968), 53.

Discography

Camarón, Calle Real. Phillips 814–466–1, 1983.
———. La Leyenda del Tiempo. Phillips 63–28–255, 1979.
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew. Columbia GP 26, 1970.
———. Kind of Blue. Columbia CS 8163, 1959.
———. Sketches of Spain. Columbia CS 1480, 1960.
Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Live in Stockholm 1960. Ragon DRLP 90/91, 1985.
Folk Music of Iran. Lyrichord LLST7261, unknown.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk, I Talk with the Spirits. Limelight LS82008, 1965.
Lole and Manuel. Casta. CBS S-26027, 1984.
———. Lole y Manuel. CBS S-82276, 1977.
———. Nuevo Día. Movieplay 15.2320/3, 1975.
Manitas de Plata. Manitas de Plata—Flamenco Guitar, Volume 2. Connoisseur Society CS-965, 1966.
Manzanita. Poco Ruido y Mucho Duende. CBS S-83188, 1978.
José Heredia Maya and the Andalusian Orchestra of Tetuan. Macama Jonda. Ariola I-295.400, 1983.
Mississippi Fred McDowell. I Do Not Play No Rock ’n’ Roll. Capitol ST-409, 1969.
Pata Negra. Blues de la Frontera. Hannibal HNBL-1309, 1987.
Pastora Pavón. Grands Cataores du Flamenco, Volume 3: La Niña de los Peines. Le Chant du Monde. LDX 74859, 1986.
Pepe de la Matrona. Maestros del Cante: Pepe de la Matrona, Volume 2. Hispavox 150–055, 1984.
Sonny Rollins. East Broadway Rundown. Impulse! A-9121, 1967.
Negro Religious Music, Volume 3: Singing Preachers and Their Congregations. Blues Classics BC-19, 1968.


This essay is reprinted from Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews © 2018. Used with permission by the University of Iowa Press.