Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners
By Ed Pavlic
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About this ebook
More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin’s passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and musicians.
Presented in three books — or movements — the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. It introduces the key terms of his lyrical aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of Baldwin’s career from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning journals in the 1940s to his last published and unpublished works from the mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, singers whose message and methods were closely related to his developing world view. It concludes with the first detailed account of “The Hallelujah Chorus,” a performance from July 1, 1973, in which Baldwin shared the stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles. Finally, in Book III, Pavlić reverses our musically inflected reconsideration of Baldwin’s voice, projecting it into the contemporary moment and reading its impact on everything from the music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances of Turf Feinz, and the fire of racial oppression and militarization against black Americans in the 21st century.
Always with an ear close to the music, and avoiding the safe box of celebration, Who Can Afford to Improvise? enables a new kind of “lyrical travel” with the instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery Baldwin’s work invokes into the world.
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Reviews for Who Can Afford to Improvise?
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Who Can Afford to Improvise by Ed Pavlic is an accessible and far too rare form of literary criticism. Most critical books will tackle the works of the artist as works, be they novels, poems or whatever. The better works of criticism will also contextualize these works within the period in which they were created. Pavlic also brings an understanding of James Baldwin's work into active discourse with the present, a contextualizing within the period in which they are read.This would be valuable for looking at any writer since one wonderful aspect of the literary arts is their ability to speak to different generations, different cultures and different historical periods. What Pavlic emphasizes here is the importance of "black music writ large" to Baldwin in both his life and his art. This lyrical aspect, as in music, is experiential in nature. If one also accepts that a reader, particularly an active reader, is also 'writing' the novel she is reading, then a work from 1963 can easily speak to life in 2016.This volume is less a collection of essays about specific works than it is a playing of Baldwin's oeuvre with some riffing or improvising added as a way of contextualizing these works within contemporary culture. A type of call and response though that analogy is admittedly weak in my application here.I reread some of Baldwin's books after I read this and found I had a much different interaction with them, almost exclusively from paying greater attention to voice first. I would highly recommend this for those interested in Baldwin, as well as applying that approach to other writers whose works seem to speak to you even when you aren't sure why.Reviewed from an ARC made available by the publisher via NetGalley.