Spontaneity : Maya Kronfeld
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4. Toni Morrison’s Drums, the East St. Louis Massacre, and the Silent Protest Parade
1. Introduction
This essay is part of my project of reclaiming the concept of spontaneity for philosophy, jazz, and literature.1 I bring together Immanuel Kant’s notion of spontaneity from the Critique of Pure Reason with Elvin Jones’ album Puttin’ it Together and Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz to address critical impasses around the concept of spontaneity and its cognate term, “improvisation.”2 The racist denigration of spontaneity in jazz, I claim, belongs to the same ideological paradigm that has distorted the popular understanding of spontaneity in its philosophical and literary formations. As much as the improvisational aspect of jazz has been celebrated, discussions of its famous spontaneity have been curtailed and defanged by a reductive reception. Indeed, the term “improvisation,” like the very term “jazz” itself, continues to mark an erasure.3 But Black musical aesthetics have continually defended philosophical possibilities that have been otherwise rendered invisible. The meaning I wish to restore to the concept of spontaneity can be expressed in the phrase “structure in the moment,” which I have proposed elsewhere, from the standpoint of musicians and rhythm section members.4 I need to make it absolutely clear at the outset that the spontaneity that concerns me is epistemic spontaneity; it has more to do with the imaginative underpinnings of knowledge production than with vitalism. This may be confusing to readers steeped in the colloquial use of the term (see section 3 below). My claim here is that verbal and rhythmic art can make palpable the spontaneous possibilities of knowledge-making that are always there but are either negated through structural violence or just ignored. But the epistemic sense of “spontaneity” is exactly what has become muted in the dominant reception of the term.
However, in the Critical Theory tradition, coming out of Kant but not always indexed to him, spontaneity has come to mean nothing less than the possibility of critical thought and change.5 It is, to quote Homi K. Bhabha, who follows Salman Rushdie, “how newness enters the world.”6 Yet Kant’s core idea in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87)7 that spontaneity is a constitutive feature of the human understanding—a feature of discursive thought—remains largely indigestible in a culture dominated by empiricist conceptions of the mind, expressed most recently by the Chat GPT craze.8 Counterintuitively perhaps for us today, Kant associated spontaneity not with unstructured flow but with the universal capacity to cognize—to creatively make something of what is perceptually given. Indeed, Robert Pippin refers to spontaneity as that “enigmatic synonym for thinking” in Kant’s philosophical system.9 At the same time, Kant’s notion of the mind’s spontaneity sits uncomfortably with the developmental, primitivist binaries that his own race theory helped consolidate.10 Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz can be positioned as a key intervention in the afterlife of cognitive spontaneity, offering a literary rejoinder to critical quandaries in both jazz criticism and the philosophy of mind that have obfuscated spontaneity’s importance for epistemology. In Morrison, spontaneity re-emerges as a knowledge problem.11 Her novel offers an account where rhythm—in particular the drums, the instrument most criminalized and co-opted by primitivist fantasies—becomes the prototype for an act of spontaneous cognitive judgment in a country where, as James Baldwin put it, “words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.”12 I join Michael Sawyer here in turning to Morrison’s oeuvre as crucial for an ongoing effort to reclaim the very category of cognition from its imperial trappings.13 Black cultural forms are an essential point of reference from which to theorize neglected dimensions of cognitive spontaneity in Kant’s theory of mind, at the same time that doing so points up the racist entanglements of Kant’s own system, as Charles Mills and others have argued within (and beyond) the rubric of Black Radical Kantianism.14
2. Putting It Together
So again I see my-
“One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought,” Toni Morrison writes in her Foreword to the novel Paradise, is “that it never produces new knowledge . . . It seems able to merely reformulate and refigure itself in multiple but static assertions.”16 Jazz music’s emphasis on the new emerges in the epistemological context of white supremacy that Morrison elaborates. In contradistinction to self-replicating discourses, the spontaneity of jazz, like that of the experimental verbal art Morrison herself is crafting, lies in the fervor with which its practitioners have pursued and produced new knowledge. Elsewhere, I elaborate an account of verbal and rhythmic art as spaces for new, not-yet-available concepts, for thoughts not yet thinkable.17
Very often that new knowledge includes encoding an awareness of what has been erased.18 This awareness is what Nathaniel Mackey, drawing on Bessie Smith, describes as the lyrical song-Bird’s “bass note” . . . a “note of alarm at the exclusions by which coherencies tend to be supported.”19 Mackey’s critical work here has an affinity with the philosophical work of Adrian Piper, who deploys the “Kantian Rationalism Thesis” to explicate “the phenomenon of xenophobia . . . a special case of a more general cognitive phenomenon, namely the disposition to resist the intrusion of anomalous data of any kind into a conceptual scheme whose internal rational coherence is necessary for preserving a unified and rationally integrated self.”20 It is in this context that Angela Davis observes, also in an explicitly Kantian vein, that “in art, knowledges that have always eluded conceptual thought can be rendered possible.”21
Classically, spontaneity is defined as “an action of the mind or will that is not determined by a prior external stimulus.”22 In the first Critique, Kant refers to the human faculty of understanding as “spontaneous” in order to account for the structural creativity of a mind that always exceeds its material. Cognitive spontaneity for Kant names the active power of the human understanding to shape, organize, synthesize and take a stand on what we perceive.23 Thought, Kant argues, is “an act of spontaneity”; it is not a passive registering of sensory data, but a way of taking the data to be something. In one iteration, Kant describes the spontaneity of the understanding in terms of our capacity to combine disparate representations: “We cannot represent to ourselves anything as combined in the object which we have not ourselves previously combined” (KrV B130; my emphasis). One of the chief responsibilities that Kant assigns to the human understanding is the activity of spontaneous synthesis. Kant writes: “The combination (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to us through the senses . . . for it is an act of the spontaneity of . . . the understanding . . . . To this act the general title ‘synthesis’ may be assigned” (KrV B130). All of this means that the proper “object” of one’s thought cannot be specified independently of the spontaneous resources of the knower.24 A major epistemic implication of cognitive spontaneity, then, is that what I take something to be is in excess of that something, and simultaneously allows me to know it. Rejecting the empiricist notion of experience as antecedent raw material for judgment, the Kantian picture points to sense perception as already deeply saturated with spontaneous understanding.25 What appears as given in experience turns out to be always discursively mediated. Analytic as well as critical theory approaches to Kant converge on this key point of the distance from the given, even while differing on its social implications.26
There is a dimension of agency to cognitive spontaneity, insofar as we aren’t wholly determined by the sensory materials that we cognize, although we are still answerable to those materials.27 In “Art and Answerability,” Mikhail Bakhtin writes, echoing an old Kantian problem but pushing beyond the doctrinal separation of art and life: “What guarantees the inner connection of the constituent elements of a person? Only the unity of answerability. I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art.”28 But there is a second dimension to spontaneity, bound up with the first, that I’ll call the “reflexive” dimension, following Henry Allison. The idea is that people have an awareness of actively participating in their own cognition.29 For Kant, the spontaneous synthesizing required for thought is a “conscious combining,” on which the consolidation of the knowing subject itself also hinges.30 The agency dimension and the reflexive dimension of spontaneity are mutually implicated in the spontaneous acts of taking the world to be such and such.31 In an astonishing passage that appears to reduce the self to what Hannah Ginsborg calls a “disembodied locus of spontaneity,” Kant writes: “I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its powers of combination” (KrV B159).32 The consciousness of self turns out to be nothing more and nothing less than a consciousness of spontaneity—a consciousness of the agency of putting relevant things together.33
Spontaneity both provides the condition for knowledge as we know it and holds open the possibility—whether realized or not—for a new epistemic “something else” (to quote Cannonball Adderley) beyond the type of informational “content” that is merely self-replicating and passively beholden to the data—or the ideologies—with which it is imprinted. But as Black musical aesthetics have made all too plain, the new in art is sometimes what is necessary just to make the real perceptible. In his critical poetics of Black music, expressed in fiction and essays, James Baldwin suggests that to play what one hasn’t heard before—that is, to break with prior forms of reference—is precisely to be answerable to what is happening. To play the form one must transcend the form. Paradoxically, the new very often is needed in order to see what’s there, especially when what’s there has been actively hidden from view by structures of oppression and domination or deemed unworthy of representation: “This is what happened, this is where it is,” Baldwin reiterates in “The Uses of the Blues.”34 Conversely, as Baldwin’s narrator sardonically points out in Another Country, the demand to play “what everyone had heard before” (as many jazz bands are pressured to do) dampens the resistance to the violence of the day:
This scene is “sensed” but not “seen” by the down-and-out drummer Rufus Scott, who remains outside the closed door of the jazz club, merely imagining what is taking place inside.36 Thus, Baldwin provocatively uses Rufus’ point of view to enact a “negative mimesis,” gesturing at the spontaneity that isn’t there—having been shut down and foreclosed by a culture that refuses to “hear” jazz as anything other than entertainment.
Spontaneity’s epistemic dimension—its centrality for knowledge production—may have been submerged or trivialized in the dominant reception of Western philosophy and the politics that saturate it. But what is even less frequently acknowledged is the centrality of the epistemic to the history of jazz, and the centrality of the history of jazz to epistemology.37 To take one example I have discussed at length elsewhere, T.W. Adorno’s profound theoretical commitment to genuine cognitive spontaneity underlies his lament about music’s commodification, but also betrays an unwillingness to recognize rhythm in Black music as a formal innovation and an agent of change—that is, as spontaneous in the genuine sense.38 Jazz and popular music, he writes, “divest the listener of his spontaneity”; instead of the music bringing out the critical agency of the listener, the music does it all for you: “The composition hears for the listener.”39 While this analysis may fly when it comes to the club that Rufus Scott did not enter, such pronouncements barely “kiss the hem of the dress of the lady called Jazz,” to quote Chaka Khan.40 The task of interrogating and reanimating extant accounts of spontaneity from the standpoint of Afro-modernist intellectual and artistic tradition remains at the vanguard of securing the future viability of a philosophy of mind that is more than what Aimé Césaire called “pseudo-humanism.”41
 The New Elvin Jones Trio, Puttin’ it Together. Blue Note—BST 84282, 1968
Describing his entire project as “my pursuit of knowledge through the drums,” master drummer Elvin Jones (1927–2004) reclaims the crucial role that synthesis plays in spontaneous knowledge–making, what he invokes playfully through the idiom of “puttin’ it together.”42 The cover art to his 1968 album Puttin’ it Together depicts each of the three trio members (Elvin Jones, drums, Joe Farrell, sax/flute/piccolo, and Jimmy Garrison, bass) as pieces of a puzzle: they are of course both the pieces of the puzzle and the ones “putting it together” in an improvisational exchange, suggesting one way in which jazz—and specifically the rhythm section—completes the picture of the real. This collective “conscious combination” refutes and revises Kant by going beyond the individualist “I think” with which apperception is traditionally associated.43 Drawing on Paul Berliner, Ingrid Monson, Vijay Ayer, and Keith Sawyer, Fumi Okiji opens up critical discourse to the intergenerational, retrospective collaboration that animates jazz practice, broadening the notion of “collective improvisation” beyond the static frame that sometimes restricts it: “past efforts have not been covered over or surpassed by new ones, but are retained and are in fact reanimated (re-worked) by the more recent.”44 This perspective resonates with Chana Kronfeld’s work on the simultaneous, bilateral activation of disparate domains in intertextuality and metaphor, where the agency of all participants, past and present, becomes animated.45 Margo Natalie Crawford writes that the
The possibility, so important for jazz, of reciprocal, intergenerational spontaneity both implied by and erased from Kant’s account is especially salient in a society riddled by what Baldwin called the distinctly American “inability (like a frozen place somewhere) . . . to perceive the reality of others.”47 Indeed, standard accounts of the Bebop revolution and its afterlife in jazz and Black music that manufacture a distinction between “art” and “popular music” may seriously distort what Mark Anthony Neal, drawing on Ray Allen and Farah Jasmine Griffin, theorizes as “black social improvisation”—the crucial “link” between “black musical improvisation and the building and maintenance of black community.”48 Neal writes: “Black popular music . . . frames musical improvisation as an important social phenomenon drawing upon various forms of sociality geared toward building and maintaining community.”49 He continues: “Bebop as a practice and a cultural artifact helped re-create the vitality of the covert social spaces of both the rural south and the urban cities, allowing for the creation of havens or ‘safe spaces’ where ‘community’ could be reconstituted.”50
In his role as bandleader, Jones had each member of the trio contribute a composition to the album. “This is a most unusual trio,” writes the great pianist Dr. Billy Taylor in the liner notes to Puttin’ it Together. Jones would later point to this piano-less trio record, which he led, as one of his favorites.51 Taylor goes on: Within the lineage of jazz drummers, “it was Elvin who developed the concept of using the drums to make a continuous rhythmic comment on what was being played.”52 In an interview with me, drummer and bandleader Dr. Jaz Sawyer explains that by the time of Puttin’ it Together (1968), Jones “had already mastered the quartet format with [Coltrane].”53 Admired for the astonishing power and intensity of his playing, Jones had developed an innovative rhythmic poetics of all four limbs.54 Sawyer reminds us that traditionally, “the hi-hat and the cymbal are considered timekeepers,” but Jones gave these components of the drumkit the freedom of expression and responsivity usually associated with the bass and snare drums. Now the left foot (hi-hat) and the cymbal are also free to become “equal partners” (as Jones once put it) in improvisation’s spontaneity.55 In a 1982 interview for Modern Drummer, Jones explains that the oneness of the kit—the unity of the instrument across all of its components—is the “premise” from which “all the basic philosophies” of drumming should proceed.56 In Puttin’ it Together, Jones moves from consciously [re]combining the components of the kit to now generating new forms of synthesis at the level of the ensemble, paring it down from the powerful quartet to the restrained trio of bass, drums, and sax (or piccolo on the celebrated “Keiko’s Birthday March” and flute on “For Heaven’s Sake”). The fullness of the experimental framework he had worked out in the Coltrane quartet and in larger ensembles afterwards, now resonates in the silences of Jones’ minimalist trio as a bandleader. Here he draws on his long-running partnership with bassist Jimmy Garrison to restructure the rhythm section’s division of labor. Sawyer observes that “on this album it is as if Jimmy [Garrison] becomes the drummer, and Elvin is playing the role of a bass or piano.” Other times, Jones is “playing the chords [on the drums] like a guitarist or pianist would, but without actually playing the notes.” With Coltrane, Jones had worked on “breaking it down”; now he was Puttin’ It Together. In a 1968 interview, just a few weeks after recording Puttin’ It Together, Jones explains:
Jones frequently invoked a painterly vocabulary in his teaching and drum clinics: “There are endless possibilities for changing the color and tone of music through the cymbal tone range,” he explains in a 1973 interview with Down Beat.58 When responding in a 1998 interview to Terry Gross’ question about “moving away from the time signatures and getting freer” in Coltrane’s quartet, Jones deftly navigates the politics of the legibility of Black arts: “There’s nothing strange about abstracts . . . It’s just a musical abstract [here he uses examples from cubism, fauvism, and abstract expressionism]. But the portrait is there, nevertheless.”
In Black Post-Blackness, Margo Natalie Crawford asks, “How has the strategic abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement been misread as strategic essentialism?59 Indeed, Jones suggests that Black polyrhythmic aesthetics undo the essentializing binary between representation and abstraction. The master drummer is always both playing the form and transcending the form. Jones’ famous drum solo on “Monk’s Dream” with the Larry Young organ quartet is often misconstrued as being out of time because of Jones’ complex phrasing and multi-faceted engagement with the underlying structure. In actuality, Jones’ improvisation is in a deep dialogue with the melody: “the portrait is there, nevertheless.”60 Black musical innovation all-too-often goes unacknowledged because the listener lacks the background to grasp its complexity.61
But solos are in no way the most important locus of spontaneity in jazz. As saxophonist-composer Darius Jones emphasized to me recently, improvisation is happening all the time in the rhythm section whether in church or on the bandstand—a salient quality of Black sound.62 Rather than seeing jazz as requiring Europeanist authentication, Elvin Jones’ penchant for “abstract conception” (in the words of drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts)63 underscores the Africanist abstraction that pervades modernism itself.64 Drummer Jack DeJohnette observes that “Jones had a way of getting the sound of a whole chorus of Ashanti African drummers in his solos.”65 Dr. Jaz Sawyer emphasizes that for Jones, polyrhythm was so much more than the literal, narrow definitions too often assigned to it by jazz critics. His playing was certainly “in the ceremonial, celebratory spirit of the African Ashanti drummers”; and it was polyrhythmic in the sense of developing far-reaching extensions and elaborations of “the traditional Bembé African rhythm which, as we know, is called 6/8.”66 But studying Jones also requires working against the reification of polyrhythm—against the limited popular understanding of the very concept with which he was most commonly associated. It is presupposed among musicians that 6/8 time is not something peripheral to swing, but rather lays bare the polyrhythmic underpinnings of the swing.67 Elsewhere I have offered a critique of Eurocentric accounts of syncopation in jazz and R&B.68 Polyrhythm is also “what makes a transnational approach to jazz inevitable,” as artist and anthropologist Jadele McPherson’s work makes clear.69 Constantly asked about polyrhythm by journalists, Jones describes it in an interview at Newport Jazz Festival in 1990 as a “Catch-22 term.” Elsewhere he explains polyrhythm as “coordinated rhythms”: “All rhythms do exist individually. However, it is the putting together and the end result of the combinations which is finally judged.”70 Building on his rich rhythm section history with bassist Garrison from the Coltrane years, Jones’ polyrhythmic foundation on Puttin’ it Together becomes so presupposed that he can now free himself up to experiment. On “Sweet Little Maia,” a composition contributed by Garrison in honor of his daughter, Jones brings the melody back in from Garrison’s double-stop bass solo at 6:39 with an eight-bar playful minimalism of swinging abstraction on the brushes, employing what Sawyer calls a “tap dance approach.”71
In her homage to Jones, drummer-producer Terri Lyne Carrington, director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice notes that “people always talk about the forceful part, the power. That’s not the first thing I hear.”72 Indeed, both Carrington and her mentor Jack DeJohnette have honed in on the muted expressivity of Jones’ brushwork during the Puttin’ It Together period.73 Analyzing Jones’ drum solos in a live precursor to the 1968 trio (the recently-released Live at Pookie’s Pub, recorded in 1967), Carrington remarks: “Even when the time breathes . . . you can hear when he goes to the bridge.” Saxophonist-composer Ravi Coltrane concurs: “No matter where he was within his musical phrase, he always outlined those forms. You could hear him coming around the corner, even if it was stretched out . . .”
3. What Spontaneity Isn’t
“[Jazz]’s most extraordinary achievement . . . is ‘the
“Elvin Jones called his album “Puttin’ It Together,” not ‘Throwin’ it Together,’” quips Dr. Jaz Sawyer. With Kant and Jones, I have been pursuing an account of spontaneity which re-claims it as a feature of the understanding, of knowledge production characteristically expressed in the form of “conscious combination” rather than a caprice of the passions. But the work of divesting spontaneity of its primitivist and racist baggage remains unfinished.75 There is a developmental trajectory implied by Kant’s and ensuing Romantic accounts of spontaneity that should not be ignored. The philosophical reception of spontaneity has often postulated the idea of a pre-spontaneous way of life considered more “primitive”—the developmental stage notoriously associated with “babes and beasts.”76 Cognition is forced into hierarchical form, becomes racialized, and is enlisted as an agent of racialization.77 By the same token—and this is a much less explored perspective—the almost tacit consensus that equates spontaneity with voluntarist, liberal notions of “free choice” seriously distorts the account of spontaneous conceptualization I have been elaborating here. Daniel Warren has suggested to me that, contrary to the voluntarist traditions that have persistently been read back onto Kant, Kant’s notion of cognitive spontaneity has little to do with the freedom of picking one representation over another, and hence does not conform with the liberal notion of “choice.” In the context of jazz improvisation, Scott Saul points out that postwar jazz musicians contested the “intellectual axiom of 1950s America” . . . that “‘freedom’ was umbilically joined to the ‘free market.’”78 Similarly, Adorno feels compelled to clarify this culturally illegible nuance in 1959: “On the one hand . . . ‘Spontaneität’ means the capacity for action, production, generation. On the other hand, however, it means that this capacity is involuntary, not identical to the conscious will of the individual.”79
What I would like to foreground is that rhythmic and verbal art can move us beyond developmental epistemologies to combat the appropriation of cognitive spontaneity and its dissolution into cliché. In different formations, these clichés have attended the reception and perception of jazz improvisation as well as of literature, skewing, for example, the Romantic spontaneous poetic expression of emotion, and modernist renditions of the vagaries of consciousness.
If some of the nuances of Kant’s notion of the mind’s spontaneity have often fallen out of view in its afterlife, the same can be said of the reductive construal of Romantic notions of spontaneity tout court, as is most clearly shown in the reception of William Wordsworth’s theory of poetry. Claudia Brodsky has emphasized that what has come down to us as Wordsworth’s famous formulation that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is a distorted half-quotation. The full statement is, “For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.”80 As Brodsky notes, “the truncated version of Wordsworth’s definition has long been the single lens through which his own work is most readily, while disparately viewed.”81
The result is the limited visibility of the alternative, more nuanced accounts of cognition that are encoded within these artistic practices and trends (from Wordsworth to Jones to Morrison). The primitivist and implicitly racist discourse on spontaneity that is so common in Western culture—associating it with the irrational, formless flow of “anything goes”—does violence to subjectivity as such by excluding from it all structure and epistemic value. Conversely, valorizing spontaneity in art and expression has been used to pit it against theoretical reflection, giving thought itself a bad name by equating it with rigid pre-determination. This is why I made above the rather bold suggestion that the reductive treatment of Wordsworthian spontaneity and the racist denigration of spontaneity in jazz belong to the same ideological paradigm. Fumi Okiji has confronted this conceptual double bind more boldly than any. She writes: “Jazz, interpreted as a manifestation of freedom from intellectualized approaches to creative expression, is understood by the primitivists to come from a people with direct access to a primal human essence all but lost by their European counterparts.”82 Sometimes this has come in the form of the racism of praise. To give one example endorsed by Alain Locke, the Belgian jazz historian Robert Goffin waxes poetic in the 1930s that “the technique of jazz production has been rationalized by Ellington . . . he has gradually placed intuitive music under control.”83 At the same time, as Robin D.G. Kelley has shown, this primitivist embrace was the price for “plac[ing]” black musicians squarely within the pantheon of surrealism’s founders.”84 “‘What Breton and [Louis] Aragon did for poetry in 1920,’ noted Goffin, ‘Chirico and Ernst for painting in 1930, had been instinctively accomplished as early as 1910 by humble Negro musicians, unaided by the control of that critical intelligence that was to prove such an asset to the later initiators.’”85 Those very primitivist perspectives, of course, were often reappropriated by jazz artists fashioning an acerbic musical critique. Think of Duke Ellington’s Money Jungle trio album from his later years, or, in the literary domain, of Morrison’s defamiliarized flipping of the concept of “jungle,” focalized through Stamp Paid’s point of view in Beloved.86
Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1957); Miles Davis, Miles: Noir sur blanc, dir. Jacques Goldstein (1986)When beat generation writers referred to their work as “spontaneous,” they in many cases reiterated the same binary oppositions that Okiji calls attention to.87 In “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1957), Jack Kerouac claims to model his prose poetics on jazz, by championing what he calls “blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject . . . swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement.”88 The complex rhythmic structure of Kerouac’s own prose, however, belies the reductive understanding of spontaneity that his essay asserts.89 In fact, Kerouac shared the bill with Elvin Jones at the Village Vanguard in the very same year that “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” appeared, an encounter that did not prove as amicable as Jones’ collaboration with Allen Ginsberg.90 His love for jazz notwithstanding, Kerouac’s view of spontaneous writing, or “blowing” as indiscriminate, limitless, and undisciplined does not comport with that of Miles Davis, who tirelessly insisted in public interviews—as in the French documentary pictured here—“I’m no accident.”91 Davis reminds viewers of the grueling (and still somehow culturally invisible) process of practicing one’s horn—the deliberative work that is the obvious precondition for improvising, what Walton Mayumba deftly terms the “tutored spontaneity of jazz improvisation”92: Je ne suis pas un accident. Davis adds: “White people give the Black musician in America the attitude that ‘you don’t have to practice, you got it, it’s natural.’”93 I have been suggesting that many of the racialized inflections that have accrued around the term “spontaneity” in the West can be brought to the fore by focusing on jazz improvisation – with “improvisation” as a cognate term for spontaneity.94 The philosophy taught by jazz musicians through and about their art includes the insight that their music performs conceptual work – but in a way that continually contests the “divisions between life and thought” that have plagued the Western philosophical tradition.95 Indeed, the possibility of ascribing spontaneity to conceptual thought still remains totally counterintuitive within the dominant intellectual culture; and yet that is precisely what both Kantian spontaneity and jazz improvisation maintain. For me this is not just a matter of theory, but part of the lived experience I have shared, as a pianist, with my musical collaborators.96 Questions about improvisation put to musicians after shows by certain well-meaning listeners can be painful because it would take so much work to undo the presuppositions that inhere in the question, “Were you improvising when you did that?” To say “yes” would be to capitulate to the primitivist assumption that jazz is a type of unstructured magic; to say “no” would be to give in to the contrary assumption that it’s all planned out in advance. According to this logical bind, the music is legible as creation only on the assumption that it is pre-meditated—a sinister view from which it follows that structured forms are by definition doomed to miss the moment. It is as if something in the colonial tongues, and their attendant intellectual cultures through which many Americans speak makes it difficult to specify an intermediary position between a scripted score and the subjective play of “anything goes,” between fixed structure and arbitrary flow. In contrast to these discourses, jazz musicians show that one can play, speak, or think in a structured manner in the moment. But this philosophical possibility is exactly what is foreclosed by the manufactured dichotomies I have sketched out here. Historically, codified musicology and journalistic jazz criticism in the West have all too often had a thinly-disguised colonizing function when it comes to discussions of Black music. Matthew D. Morrison elucidates the racialized gulf between what he calls “ephemeral Blacksound” and the sheet music industry, a context where songs are “heard and legally taken up by white writers and publishers who had both the means and the structural access to claim ownership over . . . performed material.”97 This publication history of early blues and ragtime, going back to the nineteenth century, describes how white markets—and epistemologies—have mediated the conditions under which blues and ragtime become legible as artistic products and texts. These dynamics, illuminated by Morrison, are a necessary backdrop for understanding the ensuing problematic history of jazz criticism up into the twentieth and twenty-first century. Jazz practitioners themselves, of course, and the people close to them, have continually pushed back against the discursive formations imposed upon the music from without, calling into question especially the racist presuppositions that sometimes attend “improvisation” in its dominant reductive use. James Baldwin’s intimacy with the music is evident in his witty rejection of the very locution “improvisation” in a 1979 essay, written as a critique of jazz criticism of the time: “Go back to Miles, Max, Dizzy, Yardbird, Billie, Coltrane: who were not, as the striking—not to say quaint—European phrase would have it, ‘improvising’: who can afford to improvise, at those prices?”98 As Editor Randall Kenan writes: “Though Baldwin originally wrote this piece [“Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption”] as a review of James Lincoln Collier’s The Making of Jazz (1979), the essay turns into a meditation and manifesto about race and music.” Going back to Zora Neale Hurston, significant Black music criticism has been written in the genre of the book review, correcting the record.99 George E. Lewis writes that “buried within th[e] Eurological definition of improvisation is a notion of spontaneity that excludes history or memory.”100 This goes for both the ignorant erasure of jazz’s intertextual idiom and quotation, and for the historiographical erasures that such a limited view of improvisation enables.101 To redress these distortions, saxophonist Gary Bartz, following master composer and bassist Charles Mingus, has in recent years revived the notion of spontaneous composition as a substitute for the tainted term “improvisation.” Bartz’ and Mingus’ usage here philosophically resonates with Elvin Jones’ notion of jazz’s spontaneity as “putting it together”:
Gary Bartz is alluding here, among other sources, to Mingus’ critical reflections in his award-winning liner notes to his 1972 album Let My Children Hear Music.103 In this liner note essay, titled “What is a Jazz Composer?,” Mingus refers to his artistic project as that of a “spontaneous composer,” thereby challenging the ideological straitjackets that constrain aesthetic possibility on both sides of the racialized divide between so-called “classical” and “jazz” music.104 He makes a claim for the historical indispensability of Black artistry for expanding the music’s range—quite literally, extending the upper register of musical instruments like the trumpet. Jazz musicians continually prove “that the instrument can do more than is possible . . . the range has doubled in octaves.” For Mingus and his ten-piece ensemble on Let My Children Hear Music, the expansion of register and instrumentation into new domains becomes both a metaphor for and a literalization of stretching beyond the racist strictures that have constrained the orchestra institutionally and philosophically. His notion of spontaneous composition is the philosophical equivalent of a new harmonic voicing or rhythmic syncopation; that is, something difficult to think under existing concepts and yet instantly made conceivable the moment it is articulated. It is itself an example of new synthesis, spontaneous thought instantiated.105 The essay “What is a Jazz Composer?”, then, is not only a matter of rectifying perceptions of jazz; classical music remains impoverished so long as the “composed” is understood to be incommensurate with the “spontaneous.” “Adagio ma non troppo” on Let My Children Hear Music is an “improvisation on symphonic form” that Mingus specifically refers to as a “spontaneous composition” (12, 55): “I always wanted to play classical music—not Beethoven or Bach or Brahms but improvise and compose new string quartets” (55). When I asked composer-guitarist John Schott to comment on Mingus’ notion of spontaneous composition, he emphasized Mingus’ long-standing relationship with drummer Dannie Richmond, who played on Let My Children Hear Music among at least three dozen other recordings with Mingus over the course of twenty years: “They worked out musical concepts together,” he notes, emphasizing the reciprocal reflexivity that, as we have seen, is frequently left out of discussions of spontaneity, Kantian or otherwise.106 As Mingus said [quoted in Mingus Speaks], sometimes the mind-reading got so intense, that “it made him start to believe in God.”107 “And You and I know exactly what that is,” Schott says to me. “That is a musical accomplishment that can’t be put on paper; even one instance of it can never indicate the totality of it.”108 Mingus’ theorization of spontaneous composition is in stark contrast to the legacy of jazz criticism all the way at least into the early 1990s. See, for example, Ted Gioia’s award-winning book, The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture, named a “Jazz Book of the Century” by Jazz Educators Journal. Oddly enough, the following passage which equates spontaneity with formless unreflection appears after Gioia’s groundbreaking chapter debunking “The Myth of Primitivism”: “The very nature of jazz demands spontaneity . . . . The virtues we search for in other art forms—premeditated design, balance between form and content, and overall symmetry—are largely absent in jazz . . . [The jazz musician’s ] is an art markedly unsuited for the patient and reflective.”109 I have tried to show in this section that by pushing back against what spontaneity isn’t, Black music has continually defended philosophical possibilities that have been otherwise denied and foreclosed. 4. Toni Morrison’s Drums, the East St. Louis Massacre, and the Silent Protest Parade come aboard East Saint Jazz’s cyclic jam session, In an interview about her 1992 novel Jazz, Toni Morrison states: “Jazz was my attempt to reclaim the era from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it also uses the techniques of jazz—improvisation, listening—to ask questions that I want to ask myself.”111 For Morrison, that spontaneous dimension by which the mind actively and interactively constructs its knowledge is indispensable. Her work suggests that verbal art can follow jazz in holding non-deterministic, spontaneous ways of knowing that are negated under the reigning social order.112 Herman Beavers observes: “Jazz is Morrison playing the changes on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.”113 Indeed, Morrison’s focus is akin to what Saidiya Hartman would later theorize as “the revolution before Gatsby.”114 Morrison’s fiction redresses the co-optation of the jazz age, but she brackets that historiographic corrective as even less important than the capacity “to ask questions that I want to ask myself.”115 Jazz, for Morrison, thus emerges as a knowledge project. Her narrative process in Jazz generates specific questions but also seems to engage the question form itself as the site of spontaneous inquiry. She writes:
Morrison’s image of the book that “watches itself think and imagine” re-animates the deep links between self-awareness (what Kant called “apperception”), knowledge and spontaneity. Her attention to the formal techniques (the “artifice”) undergirding the appearance of spontaneity resonate with Morrison’s 2004 critical analysis of the jazz-informed paintings of Romare Bearden117: “Choice of color, form, in the structural and structured placement of images, in fragments built up from flat surfaces, rhythm implicit in repetition and in the medium itself – each move determining subsequent ones, enabling the look and fact of spontaneity, improvisation.”118 Not much jazz music is played in the novel Jazz; indeed, we seem to find jazz just where it is nowhere to be found.119 Instead, Morrison makes it possible to strip back the clichés that have impeded the registering of subversive sound in the American historical imagination. Her refusal to present, even represent jazz to us as a finished product or content of narration evokes the long history of Black musical artists who themselves contested the very term “jazz” as a (white) misnomer for the music that they innovated, as we have seen.120 Stephen Best has shown how Morrison’s novel A Mercy radically defamiliarizes the concept of race by returning to a moment in time when the concept was not yet fully consolidated.121 The novel Jazz may perform a similar function by beginning at a moment when the concept of jazz had not yet been fully appropriated for white commercial markets.122 As Daphne Brooks puts it, Morrison’s Jazz is “confounding to some because of its refusal to literalize the jazz experience in America.”123 The only sustained dramatic situation in which live music occurs in the novel is in the “Fifth Avenue March” scene, a fictional re-writing of the 1917 Negro Silent Protest Parade in New York City. This highly structured political action, described by James Weldon Johnson in his book Black Manhattan as “one of the strangest and most impressive sights New York has witnessed” was organized by the NAACP in response to an explosion of extreme violence by a mob of white men and women against Black communities in East St. Louis on July 2 and 3, 1917, but preceded by months of terror.124 The Fifth Avenue March scene is a pivotal moment in Morrison’s novel where we see one of the central characters, Dorcas, as a child-survivor of the massacre now witnessing the protest parade. The massacre, considered one of the worst in American history, was documented by NAACP co-founder and pioneering anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett who courageously traveled to East St. Louis on the following day to collect local testimony.125 In recent years, historian and Alderman Terry Kennedy, whose father survived the massacre, has explained in an interview for professor Denise Ward-Brown’s documentary film Never Been a Time (2017): “Hundreds of White Americans attacked the Black section of East St. Louis and tried to burn it to the ground, killing three hundred people but dislodging thousands from the city.”126 Ward-Brown’s film, premiering on the centennial of the massacre, “questions and analyzes the coded language” and series of erasures with which the massacre entered (or did not enter) the official historical record. For a century, it has been referred to by historians as the “1917 race riot,” following the terminology which was used by Congress in 1917127; as Dr. Andrea Boyle points out in the film, the term “riot” continues to obscure anti-black violence by white Americans today. Historian Charles L. Lumpkins, author of American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Riots and Black Politics concludes that the violence needs to be understood as “part of an ethnic cleansing campaign.”128 He elects to use the term “pogrom” for this study because the violence has a “political importance”—it cannot be explained simply by “white workers’ fear of black competition,” as the history is usually told, but needs to be understood also as a systemic attack on “African American community building and political involvement.”129 Judge Milton. A Wharton explains this reframing: “A pogrom is something that has a desired direction. In the East St Louis Pogrom, the interests of the people who perpetrated this incident was not just to kill Blacks or to burn homes. They wanted to remove the African-American presence from East St Louis.”130 The term “pogrom” is also adopted by Members of The East St. Louis 1917 Centennial Commission and Cultural Initiative (CCCI), including many Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) alumni and faculty, who organized a series of “cooperative events” in 2017, including the Sacred Sites and the Historical Marker projects.131 CCCI commissioners include editors of the literary journal Drumvoices Revue Darlene Swanson Roy and East St Louis poet laureate Eugene B. Redmond, a close collaborator of Toni Morrison. “There has never been a time” when the 1917 massacre “was not alive in the oral tradition,” asserts Eugene B. Redmond,132 whose poem in honor of Miles Davis is my epigraph for this section.133 Davis, who was born in 1926 and raised in East St. Louis, tells Quincy Troupe in his 1989 autobiography: “It was there, back in 1917, that those crazy, sick white people killed all those black people in a race riot . . . . That same year black men were fighting in World War I to help the United States save the world for democracy. And it’s still like that today. Now, ain’t that a bitch. . . . When I was coming up in East St. Louis, black people I knew never forgot [the massacre].”134 In “Just Before Miles: Jazz in St. Louis,” William Howland Kenney points out that “grass-roots musical training for boys in black St. Louis emphasized the cornet and trumpet,” giving birth to the “black St. Louis school of jazz trumpeters from Robert Shoffner to Clark Terry” to Davis.135 The East St. Louis jazz milieu, an intellectual, artistic and activist center that also nurtured the epoch-making “doyenne of dance” Katherine Dunham, embodies what Morrison describes as the “intergenre sources of African American Art . . . . the resounding aesthetic dialogue among artists.”136 Interestingly, Morrison’s character, Dorcas resonates strongly with Josephine Baker, who survived the East St. Louis massacre as an eleven-year-old.137 Tyfahra D. Singleton notes that Josephine Baker at various junctures “chose to begin the story of her life with the East St. Louis massacre of 1917—a collective trauma in place of her personal ones which came years before.”138 In Henry Louis Gates’ 1985 interview with Baker and James Baldwin, Baker remembers: “All the sky was red with people’s houses burning.”139 In her speech at the 1963 March on Washington, Baker returns to the fire as a violent catalyst for a life in jazz and activism, as well as for her exile:
 July 28, 1917. The NAACP Silent Protest Parade on Fifth Avenue. Photograph by Underwood and Underwood. James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library141There are four drummers in this image of the 1917 Silent Protest Parade. The two drummers in the middle are playing snare drums, with the drummers on either side playing field drums which are made of a thicker canvas, but still possess snares. As drummer Savannah Harris pointed out to me, the absence of a bass drum (which would have been central for a military parade) suggests that these drummers were playing in a somber style.142 Yet given that this is a silent protest, a crucial question taken up by Morrison’s fictional rewriting of the march becomes: How did the sound of the drums help to constitute this silence? One single phrase repeats with disarming uniformity across historical accounts of the landmark parade: “muffled drums.”143 The “muffled drums” reflected a definite sonic intention on the part of the planners. The NAACP memorandum distributed in advance of the march read: “The laborer, the professional… —all classes of the Race—will march on foot to the beating of muffled drums.”144 The march’s organizers included Madame C.J. Walker, W.E.B Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson, who was the march’s sonic architect, credited with making the decision to employ the strategy of a silent march.145 He can be seen in the image marching next to Du Bois. Thus, cooperative engagement —not detachment—marks Johnson’s work as a historian of the march, which he covers in his Black Manhattan. For someone with as highly-trained a poet’s ear as Johnson, his choice of a silent march is profound. The phrase “muffled drums” appears in poet, anti-lynching crusader, and march organizer Carrie Williams Clifford’s poem “Silent Protest Parade,” from her collection The Widening Light (1922):
Clifford uses modernist monorhyme (the nasalized “m/n” ending) to make prosodically and rhythmically present the sound of the muffled drums. But the unified and unifying sound of this rhythmic restraint (“ten thousand of us, if there was one”) contrasts sharply with the musical expectations of white spectators looking to be entertained:
Clifford’s work illustrates the way that poets join and anticipate the refusals of jazz musicians to capitulate to primitivist projections that negate the music’s spontaneity by reducing it to its entertainment value. Morrison’s novel Jazz is saturated with these historical echoes. The 1917 Silent Protest Parade is described in the novel through the eyes of Alice, a churchgoing, morally conservative woman of the older generation in charge of her recently-orphaned niece Dorcas, whose parents were murdered during the massacres in East St. Louis just weeks before the March. Alice struggles to make sense of the sounds she hears, and to sort out the jarring juxtaposition between the “lowdown,” “below the sash” music she disapproves of and the differently-valenced drums that accompany the protest on Fifth Avenue.148 The way Morrison, through Alice, puts together the jazz-blues of the juke joint with the muffled drums of the protest cracks open the clichés that accumulate around the concept of jazz and exposes the colonial regime that artificially splinters Black music into distinct genres.149 Morrison is evoking narratologically what saxophonist and cultural historian Howard Wiley calls the “oneness of the music.”150 Through competing modes of understanding expressed as shifts in point of view, Morrison’s novel disqualifies ideas of authenticity that are persistently projected onto Black American musics and their representations. She uses the moment when Alice takes note of the drums to stage an encounter between apparently incommensurable modes of knowing:
The drums evince spontaneity in the true, epistemic sense that I have been pursuing in this essay. Their interpretive power, what I have called “the ability to produce new knowledge, in contradistinction to self-replicating discourses” emerges in Morrison’s passage as a direct response to the exhaustion of available language, and specifically to the failure of affirmations like “all men are created equal” to refer.152 The agentless syntax in the phrases “what was possible to say/what was meant” itself formally articulates the historical erasure in question, but also paradoxically turns the drums (the indirect object of the sentence) into the conveyer of an intentionality that reaches even beyond the collective, towards some impersonal universal. The drums, with their deep imbrication with Black critical epistemologies serve in Morrison’s text as the paradigm for a cognitive act of synthesis that is gestured toward but never fully realized in a society where the possibility of “putting it together” has been violently foreclosed.153 Even Morrison, under whose pen language could not have been more vibrant, makes it clear that the music steps in where the language of official history fails, the rhythm of the drums taking on the burden of the linguistic. Language, in becoming more like music, becomes itself again.154 The putting-together of drums and verbal art has been the crux of the decades-long collaborative projects spearheaded by the aforementioned East St Louis Poet Laureate Eugene B. Redmond, the author of the critical history Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976), as well as founding editor of Drumvoices Review: A Confluence of Literary Cultural and Vision Arts (opening issue 1991/1992). Throughout the 1970s, Morrison and Redmond worked together intensely on the posthumous publication of the poetry and fiction of Henry Dumas, who also lived and taught in East. St. Louis and SIUE.155 Just as salient here is Morrison’s work as editor on the groundbreaking volume Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writers, compiled by St. Louis poet (and Miles Davis literary collaborator) Quincy Troupe.156 In recent years, scholarship has increasingly focused on Morrison’s profound impact on African-American literary publication in her capacity as editor for Random House.157 What has been less explored is how Morrison’s collaboration with jazz-affiliated poets—specifically, with East St. Louis poets—might enrich contemporary readings of the novel Jazz and its reimagining of the Silent Protest Parade.158 Redmond traces the portmanteau “Drumvoices” (and its attendant concept, refusing to separate drum from voice) back to his collaboration with dance and anthropology pioneer Katherine Dunham, who, like Dumas, took a teaching position at SIUE.159 Dunham, the “mother of modern dance,” claimed East St. Louis as her activist, intellectual and artistic home.160 This East St. Louis-based theorization of drum and text, drum and voice provides a rich background for Morrison’s novel and for the drums’ reclamation of spontaneous knowledges in particular. As Morrison’s Fifth Avenue march scene continues with little Dorcas and her aunt Alice looking on to the protest parade, the drums express their knowledge by holding space for the “gap” between young Dorcas’ trauma during the East St. Louis massacre (as imagined by Alice) and its available descriptions:
The simile that figures the drums as a “rope cast for rescue” suggests that the drums perform the work of spontaneous synthesis, putting the fragments of Dorcas’ family story together with the massacre in East St. Louis and the faces of the collective protesters in Manhattan. As Beavers puts it, the drums “re-enact a counter-pointed present and past.”162 But the “rope cast for rescue” is not an arbitrary image. Rather, as marking both a metaphorical and a metonymic process, it evokes via negation the frame of Dorcas’ recent trauma by conjuring the fire truck that never came during the massacre and the ensuing arson in which her parents were murdered. In a flashback, we learn: “a little girl named Dorcas, sleeping across the road with her very best girlfriend, did not hear the fire engine clanging and roaring down the street because when it was called it didn’t come.”163 This chain of litotes characterizes, in great detail, the event that did not happen, but should have and could have saved Dorcas’ parents had they been living in the white part of town. The drums “spanned the distance,” synaesthetically evoking the sight of the firemen’s “rope of rescue” which was never seen, and the “clanging” that was never heard. This is one way in which the silent march and its muffled drums makes experientially present that which did not happen—but should have. The drums, then, begin spontaneously to synthesize, or “put together,” non-linearly the visual and sonic images that had been fragmented intra-textually throughout the novel, producing newly available knowledge. This also puts the drummers in the position of first responders who can be relied upon. Morrison locates in the drums, provisionally, a power to “combine” what is disparate, without resolving the broken fragments of reality into what Adorno called a “false harmony.”164 But as Jovonna Jones points out, even this provisional synthesis remains perspectival, as what the drums are to Alice, they are not to Dorcas herself.165 Dorcas rejects the “rope of rescue” image that resonates with Jeremiah’s rescue from the pit by the king’s African slave, Ebed-Melech Ha’Kushi [עֶבֶד-מֶלֶךְ הַכּוּשִׁי] (Jeremiah 38:1–13).166 Instead, she looks at the drums as “the first word of a command,” evoking the ethical and erotic call of God to the prophet, who in the Hebrew is always also a poet.167 The link to biblical prophetic poetry appears when Dorcas’ traumatic memories are concretized through the image of a burning “bright wood chip” that is stored inside her body from the time of the fire: “it smoked and glowed there still” (see Ezekial 1:27). That image ties to the biblical topos of consecrating a prophet-poet, a tradition that emphasizes the toll exacted by being chosen and the ineluctable link between promise and jeopardy, which Dorcas (sacrilegiously) links to the ethics and erotics of jazz, sex and liberation that launch her from passivity to action, though ultimately at the cost of her own life: “The drums assured her that the glow would never leave her”; “there was no place to be where . . . somebody was not licking his licorice stick, tickling the ivories, beating his skins . . . while a knowing woman sang ain’t nobody going to keep me down you got the right key baby but the wrong keyhole you got to get it bring it and put it right here, or else.”168 Drumming in Morrison’s novel—associated both with the “lowdown music” of the jook joint and with the strategic silence of a protest march—leads to new theorizations where rhythm’s spontaneity figures neither as intellectualized activity nor as something unthinking or unthought. As Kinohi Nishikawa pointed out to me, theoretical discussions of improvisation often center on melodic instruments like the trumpet or saxophone, with rhythm systematically disregarded or at best marginalized. In this context, it is significant that Morrison’s fiction offers an account where rhythm—in particular, the drums, the instrument most appropriated by the racist imaginary—are the prototype for spontaneous knowledge-making. Published on June 6, 2025 * Maya Kronfeld is Assistant Professor of Theory in the Literature Program at Duke University * 1. Maya Kronfeld, Spontaneous Form: Philosophy, Literature, Jazz (solicited by Duke University Press). Earlier versions of sections of this essay were presented for the Political Concepts Conference at the Cogut Humanities Center at Brown University, the Princeton Society of Fellows, the Pittsburgh Jazz Studies Department, the Literature Program at Duke University, and the “What’s Left of Kant” conference at the Franke Institute at the University of Chicago. Thanks especially to Bridget Alsdorf, Akeel Bilgrami, C.D. Blanton, Stephen Best, Judith Butler, Agnese Di Riccio, Hannah Ginsborg, Rob Kaufman, Peter Maduro, Fumi Okiji, Ulrich Plass, Michael Sawyer, Autumn Womack, Daniel Warren, Carson Welch, Moulie Vidas, and Erin Graff-Zivin for their important feedback. I am indebted to the Princeton Firestone Liberary and to Autumn Womack for access to and friutful discussion around the Toni Morrison papers, and to Womack, Kinohi Nishikawa, and all the participants of Sites of Memory: A Symposium on Toni Morrison and the Archive (Spring 2023).↩ 2. On improvisation’s vexed relationship with spontaneity, see George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16:1 (1996): 91–122; see especially Lewis’ citation of Anthony Braxton on the term “improvisation” (95) and his critical assessment of John Cage and the notion of “pure spontaneity” (especially 97–99). I share Michael Gallope’s critique of the fetishistic metaphysics and reductive vitalism that are all too often projected onto the “now” of spontaneous improvisation. On generative paradoxes within improvisatory practices see Michael Gallope, “Is Improvisation Present?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 143–159.↩ 3. The term “jazz” has from the very beginning been contested by its own practitioners. It has been identified by master drummer-percussionist Max Roach, for example, as issuing from a colonizing imaginary (Max Roach, “What ‘Jazz’ Means to Me,” The Black Scholar 3:10 [1972]: 2–6; see also Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews [New York: Da Capo Press, 1977]). Miles Davis remarks in a 1984 interview: “‘Jazz’ is only a white man’s word he gave to music that he couldn’t play” (see “Miles Davis in Norway,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdnk7-40kfA). For a contemporary critique, see Nicholas Payton, “An Open Letter to My Dissenters on Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore” (December 2, 2011), quoted in Thomas Zablinger, “Jazz,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, ed. Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 502.↩ 4. Maya Kronfeld, “Structure in the Moment: Rhythm Section Responsivity,” in “Jazz” in the Present Tense, ed. Kwami Coleman, Kimberly Hannon Teal, Fumi Okiji, and Nate Sloan, special issue of Jazz and Culture 4:2 (2021):14–22.↩ 5. For T.W. Adorno’s explicit defense of his own use of the Kantian term Spontaneität, see “Words from Abroad,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson, with a new introduction by Paul Kottman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 198. Deborah Cook links Adorno’s notion of spontaneity with the concept of non-identity: “Like non-identity, spontaneity. . . is the basis for resistance to the current situation, the promise of the possibility that what is might be otherwise” (Deborah Cook, Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts [London: Routledge, 2008], 144). Discussing the centrality of spontaneity for critical agency in Adorno, Robert Kaufman writes: “In the process of spontaneous exploration (undertaken by the artist, the artwork, and the audience), previously occluded aspects of the social are made available…How, spontaneously yet rigorously, to make thought sing and to make song think?” Kaufman, “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Thomas Huhn (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2004), 363. On Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and his ambivalent relationship to Kant’s first Critique, including the notion of spontaneity, see J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).↩ 6. Homi K. Bhabha, “How Newness Enters the World,” in The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2004 [1994]), 303–337.↩ 7. All following citations are from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969 [1929]).↩ 8. See Noam Chomsky, “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” The New York Times, March 8, 2023 (available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html). As Robert Hanna has shown, Chomsky adapts Kant’s insight that the mind “spontaneously generates its own representations” to show that “any strictly empiricist explanation of our grammatical knowledge automatically fails” to explain our “linguistic productivity or creativity.” See Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See especially Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).↩ 9. Robert Pippin, “Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind,” Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 43. I do not wish to enter here into the dense thicket of whether premonitions of “freedom” are to be found in Kant’s purely theoretical account of spontaneity (that is to say, spontaneity of the understanding). The present discussion is confined to epistemic spontaneity, and even that in a limited way. Pippin’s example of listening to drums anticipates my discussion in what follows. For an important discussion of the relation between cognitive spontaneity and moral spontaneity, which is out of the scope of this essay, see Patricia Kitcher, “Kant’s Spontaneous Thinker and (More) Spontaneous Agent,” in Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy, ed. Stephen R. Palmquist (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 36–53. Kitcher makes a compelling claim that the two types of spontaneity ought to be kept separate. See also Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Markus Kohl, “Kant on Cognizing Oneself as a Spontaneous Cognizer,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50:3 (2020): 395–412. I thank Robin D.G. Kelley for discussions on this point.↩ 10. For an in-depth discussion of this Kantian problematic and problem with Kant, see R.A. Judy (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,1992), and, most recently, his Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). On the interdependence of “species” and “race” as epistemological constructions in Kant and his animalization of blackness, see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020). On the “racialized and gendered theses undergirding” Kant’s notion of the sublime, see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “‘Theorizing in a Void’: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 117:3 (2018): 617–648.↩ 11. For a provocative engagement with and critique of Morrison’s epistemological assertions, see Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 14–15.↩ 12. James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 36.↩ 13. Michael E. Sawyer, The Door of No Return: Being-as-Black (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2025) and “Toni Morrison’s Trans-Subjective and Trans-Generational Phenomenology,” Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology 2:1 (2022):1–13.↩ 14. Charles W. Mills, “Black Radical Kantianism,” Res Philosophica 95, no. 1 (2017): 1-33; Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1998; Mills, The Racial Contract. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). And see Frank M. Kirkland, “Framing Mills’ Black Radical Kantianism: Kant and Du Bois,” Kantian Review 27:4 (2022): 635–650.↩ 15. Nathaniel Mackey, “Ohnedaruth’s Day Begun,” from Four for Trane (Los Angeles: Golemics, 1978). Reprinted in Eroding Witness (Pittsboro, North Carolina: Selva Oscura Press, 2018 [1985]), 77. This early poem by Mackey is in memory of John Coltrane, and Four for Trane is named after the Archie Shepp album of the same name. See discussion in Mackey, “Breath and Precarity: The Inaugural Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics,” in Poetics and Precarity, ed. Myung Mi Kim and Cristanne Miller (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018): 1–30; and in Nathaniel Mackey, “Cante Moro,” Blackout ((poetry & politics)), 27 September 2018 (available at: https://my-blackout.com/2018/09/27/nathaniel-mackey-cante-moro/).↩ 16. Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Vintage International, 1998), xv. ↩ 17. Maya Kronfeld, “The Indispensability of Form: A Kantian Approach to Philosophy and Literature,” in the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy and Literature, ed. R. Lanier Anderson and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).↩ 18. See Robert Kaufman, “Lyric’s Expression: Musicality, Conceptuality, Critical Agency,” Cultural Critique (2005): 197–216.↩ 19. Nathaniel Mackey, “Introduction: And All the Birds Sing Bass,” in Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 10.↩ 20. Adrian M.S. Piper, “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism,” Philosophical Forum 24, 1–3, (Fall-Spring 1992-93): 3; reprinted in Robin May Schott, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 21–73; and in John P. Pittman, African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions (New York: Routledge, 1997). See also Adrian M.S. Piper, Rationality and the Structure of the Self: A Two-Volume Study in Kantian Meta-Ethics, 2nd ed. (Berlin: APRA Foundation, 2013).↩ 21. Angela Y. Davis, “Art, Philosophy and Politics,” paper delivered at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (September 8, 2015). Davis’ early work also provides a critical analysis of the way Kant’s account of cognition naturalizes and reifies what are in fact historical processes. See “The Concept of Freedom in Kant’s Three Critiques” [1985]. Angela Y. Davis Papers, 1937–2017. MC 940, 39.4. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.↩ 22. Kate A. Moran, Introduction to Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1.↩ 23. Hannah Ginsborg, “Kant and the Problem of Experience,” Philosophical Topics 34:1–2 (2006): 59–106.↩ 24. See Patricia Kitcher, “A Kantian Critique of Transparency,” in Kant and the Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Reason, and the Self, ed, Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 158–172; Patricia Kitcher, “Kant on the Unity of Self-Consciousness and Moral Agency,” in The Self: A History, ed. Patricia Kitcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).↩ 25. Hannah Ginsborg, “Kant and the Problem of Experience.” While Pippin emphasizes that spontaneity as “thinking things together” is bound up with the capacity for “taking” the world to be such and such, Ginsborg has powerfully elaborated the claim that even in mere “perceptual experience” prior to full-blown judgment, the spontaneous operation of the understanding is still evident in the perceiver’s sense of the “appropriateness” of her own “synthesis.” Additionally, Ginsborg’s recent work importantly pries apart spontaneity from rationality (Ginsborg, “Spontaneity without Rationality,” in Perceptual Knowledge and Self-Awareness, ed. Andrea Giananti, Johannes Roessler, and Gianfranco Soldati (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). These are widely debated points in Kant scholarship, which I can only gesture at here. See Colin McLear, “The Kantian (Non)-Conceptualism Debate,” Philosophy Compass 9:11 (2014): 769–779.↩ 26. See Maya Kronfeld, “Immanuel Kant,” in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, eds. Cymene Howe, Martin Kreiswirth, Andrew Pendakis, and Imre Szeman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).↩ 27. As Richard Leppert puts it in his commentary on Adorno’s Esssays on Music, “[t]he new constitutes difference and spontaneity, in essence: agency” (T.W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002], 342.↩ 28. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990 [1919]), 1.↩ 29. Many have complained that Kant’s view here is hyper-intellectual and places too high a cognitive demand on the subject. As J.M. Bernstein deftly puts it, the reflexive “accompaniment” of the “I think” becomes “muted to the point of silence at the moment of mental activity since were it to sound it would obscure what is to be seen or known” (Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 25). Henry Allison’s distinction between reflexive and reflective self-consciousness is useful here: Reflexive self-consciousness is the first-order awareness of what one is doing; reflective self-consciousness is a second-order awareness of oneself as doing it. On this interpretation, exercising cognitive spontaneity can involve the former kind of awareness, without necessarily involving the latter. See Allison, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 100.↩ 30. Kitcher, Kant’s Thinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 146.↩ 31. For an influential contemporary discussion of the thesis that agency is a necessary condition for thought, but one not tied to a Kantian framework, see Akeel Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).↩ 32. Hannah Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9.↩ 33. See Ginsborg, “Spontaneity Without Rationality.” Crucially, the consciousness of normativity is central to Ginsborg’s account of spontaneity.↩ 34. James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Vintage International, 2011), 59.↩ 35. James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Vintage International, [1960] 1993), p. 5.↩ 36. James Baldwin, Another Country, p. 5.↩ 37. See Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): “Strict musicological analysis of jazz . . . is . . . as limited as a means of jazz criticism as a strict sociological approach; it is the philosophy of [Black] music that is most important” (“Jazz and the White Critic,” in Black Music [New York: Da Capo Press, 1963], 19. Michael J. Love’s theoretical notion and embodied performance practice “(RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM)” resituates Black vernacular dance and rhythmic art more generally at the center of theorizing knowledge: available at: https://www.dancermlove.com/rhypistemology; see also the USC Experimental Humanities Lab conference and forthcoming special issue of Boundary 2 of the same title, edited by Erin Graff-Zivin and Jonathan Neal.↩ 38. Maya Kronfeld, “The Philosopher’s Bass Drum: Adorno’s Jazz and the Politics of Rhythm,” Radical Philosophy 205 (2019): 34–47.↩ 39. T.W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Essays on Music, 442.↩ 40. “Black Music Month QLS Classic: Chaka Khan,” Questlove Supreme podcast (June 2, 2024), available at: https://omny.fm/shows/questlove-supreme/qls-classic-chaka-khan.↩ 41. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press [1955] 2000), 37.↩ 42. The New Elvin Jones Trio, Puttin’ it Together. Blue Note—BST 84282, 1968.↩ 43. See Ingrid Monson’s notion of “intermusicality” as “intertextuality in sound” (Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996]), 97–132.↩ 44. Fumi Okiji, “Storytelling in Jazz Work as Retrospective Collaboration.” Journal of the Society for American Music 11:1 (February 2017): 70-92. Paul Berliner, The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994); Keith R. Sawyer, “Improvisational Cultures: Collaborative Emergence and Creativity in Improvisation,” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7: 3 (2000): 180–85; Vijay Iyer, “Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004): 393–403.↩ 45. See Chana Kronfeld, “‘I Want to Mix Up the Bible’: Intertextuality, Agency, and the Poetics of Radical Allusion,” and “Living on the Hyphen: The Necessary Metaphor,” in The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 117–174 and 225–266; and C. Kronfeld, “Beyond Untranslatability,” PMLA 138:3 (2023): 759–768.↩ 46. Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 1.↩ 47. David Adams Leeming, “An Interview with James Baldwin on Henry James,” The Henry James Review 8:1 (1986): 47–56, 14.↩ 48. Mark Anthony Neal, “‘…A Way Out of No Way’: Jazz, Hip-Hop and Black Social Improvisation,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin, and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004): 195–223; Ray Allan, “Shouting the Church; Narrative and Vocal Improvisation in African-American Gospel Quartet Performance,’ Journal of American Folklore 104 (1991): 295–317; and Farah Jasmine Griffin, “‘Who Set You Flowin’?’ The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).↩ 49. Mark Anthony Neal, “‘…A Way Out of No Way’: Jazz, Hip-Hop and Black Social Improvisation,” p. 196.↩ 50. Mark Anthony Neal, “‘…A Way Out of No Way’: Jazz, Hip-Hop and Black Social Improvisation,” p. 202.↩ 51. Elvin Jones, Interview with Anthony Brown and Ken Kimery, Archives Center, National Museum of American History (June 10–11, 2003), available at: https://jazzday.com/media/AC0808_Jones_Elvin_Transcript.pdf.↩ 52. Dr. Billy Taylor, liner notes for The New Elvin Jones Trio, Puttin’ it Together, Blue Note, 1968.↩ 53. Interview with me, June 7, 2024. Sawyer’s composition “Spontaneity” on his album Itz Time is especially pertinent here (Pursuance Records, 2004). See also Dr. Sawyer’s weekly radio shows “The Jazz Intersection” and the “The Jazz Sessions” on 94.1FM KPFA Berkeley and 90.7FM KPFK Los Angeles. https://www.jazsawyer.com/radio.↩ 54. For a rich extensive discussion of Elvin’s work in this period, from musicians’ perspectives and his “constant conversation” with Coltrane, see Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 338. Berliner’s own close reading of Jones’ accompaniment of McCoy Tyner in “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” (Coltrane, ‘Live’ at the Village Vanguard [1962]) is illuminating (see p. 625).↩ 55. See Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. for a parallel discussion of the “liberation of the drummer.” He traces these innovations back to Max Roach’s and Art Blakey’s visits to Africa. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). And see Brenda Dixon Gottschild on the “democracy of body parts” and the Africanist principles of polycentrism and polyrhythm that pervade American performance in dance and other contexts. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Connecticut & London: Praeger, 1996), 14.↩ 56. Rick Mattingly,“Elvin Jones,” interview with Elvin Jones, Modern Drummer (December 1982): 8–14.↩ 57. Whitney Balliett, “A Walk to the Park,” interview with Elvin Jones, The New Yorker, May 10, 1968: 45.↩ 58. Herb Nolan, “I Play Drums, That’s Just What I Do,” interview with Elvin Jones, Down Beat 18 (1973):18–38. See also Fred Moten’s work on Jones and synesthesia. Jarrett Earnest, “Fred Moten,” in What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2018), 311–312.↩ 59. Margo Natalie Crawford, “The Politics of Abstraction,” in Black Post-Blackness, 42.↩ 60. See Paul Berliner’s illuminating work in Thinking in Jazz on the “structural markers” in Jones’ drumming.↩ 61. See T. Storm Heter, The Sonic Gaze: Jazz, Whiteness, and Racialized Listening (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022).↩ 62. Darius Jones, personal conversation, Wesleyan University, October 16, 2024. For a multi-disciplinary artistic embodiment of this principle, see his most recent release, see Jones, Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye)—AUM Fidelity, 2024 (available at: https://dariusjones.bandcamp.com/album/legend-of-eboi-the-hypervigilant-eye).↩ 63. Ethan Iverson, “Interview with Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts,” May 2021, available at: https://ethaniverson.com/interview-with-jeff-tain-watts/.↩ 64. Following Michael J. Love in his “‘Mix(tap)ing’: A Method for Sampling the Past to Envision the Future,” Choreographic Practices 12:1 (2021): 29–45, I am using Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s term “Africanist” from her Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance. Gottschild adapts this usage for dance and performance studies from Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). See of course also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (New York: Verso, 1993).↩ 65. Legends of Jazz Drumming, Part Two. Hosted by Louie Bellson. Alfred Publishing, 2005. See excerpt at 29:50 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgUjCLt4n0g.↩ 66. See master drummer and theorist C.K. Ladzekpo on the Anlo-Ewe view of cross-rhythm. C.K. Ladzekpo, Foundation Course in African Dance-Drumming. http://www.richardhodges.com/ladzekpo/Foundation.html.↩ 67. See drummer Charlie Persip on Jones’s triplets, quoted in Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 153. And see Olly Wilson, “Black Music as an Art Form,” Black Music research Journal 3 (1983): 1-22; available at: https://www.jazzstudiesonline.org/files/jso/resources/pdf/3%20Black%20Music%20as%20an%20Art%20Form.pdf.↩ 68. See discussion of Marvin Gaye in Kronfeld, “The Philosopher’s Bass Drum,” 43–44.↩ 69. See Jadele McPherson, “Fugitive Acts: One Hundred Years of Afro-Cuban Performance,” in “Overcoming the Difficulty: The Racial and Gender Politics of Cuban Performance in Tampa,” PhD Dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center, 2024.↩ 70. “Thoughts by Elvin,” compiled by Norman Grossman and transcribed by Ed Soph (available at: https://www.ramseycastaneda.com/resources/elvin-jones-advice-thoughts.html#google_vignette). Elvin Jones Interview, 8/18/1990. Newport Jazz Festival. Wolfgang’s Documentaries and Interviews (available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmaq1aXnVR8).↩ 71. See the work of acclaimed choreographer and artistic director Maia Claire Garrison, available at: https://maiaclaire.wixsite.com/maiaclairegarrison.↩ 72. “Discovering Elvin Jones: Revival: Live at Pookies Pub.” Panel discussion with Terri Lyne Carrington, Ravi Coltrane, Bob Falesh, Zev Feldman, Ashley Kahn, and Alvin Queen. 15 December 2022, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFfCVp26MtU.↩ 73. Here is DeJohnette: “Everyone remembers the [Coltrane] period, but I like to remember Elvin also for the sensitivity that he had when he was outside of the quartet, when he played very tastefully and dynamically with shading and touch” (“Elvin Remembered,” in Elvin Jones: A Drummer Supreme 1927–2004, special tribute issue of Modern Drummer (2004), 74.↩ 74. Alain Locke, The Negro and His Music (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Press, 1936), 100. For a contemporary artist offering a parallel insight, see trumpeter Etienne Charles’ 2011 interview in Chicago with Irockjazz (available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlkDuH2iirg).↩ 75. On “ambivalence in Kant” and his poststructuralist readers, see Fred Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” in Stolen Life, vol. 2 of consent not to be a single being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018 [2004]), 270.↩ 76. Colin McLear, “Kant on Animal Consciousness,” Philosophers’ Imprint 11 (2011): 1–16.↩ 77. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). For recent discussion within analytic Kantianism, see Huaping Lu-Adler, Kant, Race and Racism: Views from Somewhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).↩ 78. Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 12. For an illuminating interpretation of Kant’s restriction on knowledge, see Daniel Warren, Reality and Impenetrability in Kant’s Philosophy of Nature (New York: Routledge, 2001).↩ 79. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 198.↩ 80. William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), I:127; cited in Claudia Brodsky, Words’ Worth: What the Poet Does (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 29.↩ 81. Claudia Brodsky, Words’ Worth, 27.↩ 82. Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 19.↩ 83. Alain Locke, The Negro and His Music, 100.↩ 84. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Keepin’ It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous,” in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 161.↩ 85. Robert Goffin “Hot Jazz” (1934); quoted in Robin D.G. Kelley, “Keepin’ It (Sur)real,” 161.↩ 86. Duke Ellington, Money Jungle, United Artists, 1963; Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage International 2004 [1987]), 234.↩ 87. See also discussion of cross-culturality and the Black Mountain poets in Mackey, Discrepant Engagement.↩ 88. Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” in The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts, ed. Ajay Heble and Rebecca Caines (London: Routledge, 2015), 207–209.↩ 89. For a counterpoint to Kerouac, see Mackey’s transmedial account of “breath” in projectivist poetry and jazz (Mackey, “Breath and Precarity,” 1–30).↩ 90. See pianist Tommy Flanagan’s account as told to Mark Stryker: “There was the time the J.J. Johnson Quintet alternated sets at the Village Vanguard with Jack Kerouac, who read from his books or extemporized. Flanagan, Elvin Jones, and Kerouac ended up at the pianist’s apartment one night. ‘Before the morning was over, Elvin threatened to kill him,’ Flanagan said. ‘Kerouac said something outrageous . . . and Elvin took offense. I think I did, too, but Elvin was more menacing’” (Mark Stryker, Jazz from Detroit [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019], 70. On Ginsberg’s collaborating with Jones on a musical setting of William Blake’s poem “Grey Monk,” see Robert Head, “An Interview with Allen Ginsberg” (1970), in Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, ed. David Stephen Calonne (Jackson: University of Press of Mississippi, 2019).↩ 91. Sybil Newton Cooksey calls into question the “ideals of freedom and authenticity” so easily projected onto the younger Davis by French existentialists during his 1949 visit to France. Sybil Newton Cooksey, “Miles’s Smiles: Mid-Century Portraits of Fugitive Improvisation,” in Creolizing Sartre, ed. T. Storm Heter and Kris F. Sealey (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2024), 25–50.↩ 92. Walton M. Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 57. Shana L. Redmond’s recent discussion of Lalah Hathaway’s vocal art sheds light on the “educated maneuvers that inform . . . improvisation”: “the song as process revealed the unanticipated genius of her labors,” Redmond writes. Shana L. Redmond, “Jubilee: The (Positive) Science of Black Music,” in Music and Human Flourishing, ed. Anna Harwell Celenza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 47–48.↩ 93. Monica Huerta’s The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism incisively correlates whiteness with “the capacity to authoritatively determine what qualifies as intention” (New York: New York University Press, 2023). This may have important ramifications for the co-optation that has attended jazz from its inception during the same time period covered in Huerta’s book (1882–1902).↩ 94. There very well may be a correlation between the erasure of the structure in jazz’s spontaneity and the erasure of the meticulous structured preparation behind Black political resistance movements, but I will leave this to scholars and activists in the field. I thank Robin D.G. Kelley for a fruitful discussion on this point. See also the discussion of Rosa Parks and the “superhero myth” and the “spontaneous combustion myth,” both of which are debunked in the curriculum of the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL) in Oakland, CA. See Building Power, Sharpening Minds: Political Education Workshop Manual (2007), available at https://www.schoolofunityandliberation.org/work/curriculum (last accessed October 1st, 2024). I thank Amelia Post, Director of Learning & Leadership Development at Somos Mayfair in East San José, CA for this connection (https://www.somosmayfair.org/).↩ 95. See Robert Kaufman, “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26:4 (2000): 709.↩ 96. For further discussion from a musician’s standpoint, see my “Structure in the Moment: Rhythm Section Responsivity,” 19.↩ 97. Matthew D. Morrison, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United Sates (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2024), 4.↩ 98. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 148 (see also 145–153). This quotation serves as the title of Ed Pavlic’s important book on Baldwin, Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).↩ 99. Zora Neale Hurston, “Jazz Regarded as Social Achievement” [Review of Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz by Rudi Blesh, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946], in You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Genevieve West (New York: Harper Collins), 134–137; Amiri Baraka, “Jazz and the White Critic.”↩ 100. George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950,” 107.↩ 101. See also Vijay Ayer’s use of the term “engraving” to redress the critical impasse in question. “Big Ideas in Improvisation Lecture 2021: Fred Moten and Vijay Iyer in Conversation.” IICSI, available at: https://vimeo.com/563391101.↩ 102. Gary Bartz’s Facebook Page. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003520385976 emphasis added. See also Joan Gaylord, “Gary Bartz: Students are Learning but They are Learning Backwards,” All About Jazz, August 19, 2013, available at: https://www.allaboutjazz.com/gary-bartz-students-are-learning-but-they-are-learning-backwards-gary-bartz-by-joan-gaylord.↩ 103. Charles Mingus, “What is a Jazz Composer?” Liner Notes to Let My Children Hear Music (1972), available at: https://www.charlesmingus.com/mingus/what-is-a-jazz-composer. Strangely, Mingus was nominated for a Grammy for these liner notes, but not for any of his albums.↩ 104. On Mingus’ notion of “extended form” (referred to as “plastic form” by Andrew Hamzy), see the detailed discussion in Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, 162–163.↩ 105. See musician-producer Melanie Charles’ analysis of Mingus’ performance with Rahsaan Roland Kirk on the Ed Sullivan Show, 1971. Melanie Charles, “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Avant-Garde Jazz,” New York Times, 5 July 2023, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/arts/music/avant-garde-jazz-music.html.↩ 106. John Schott, personal conversation. 14 July, 2024. See also Schott’s review of Mingus Speaks: https://www.johnschott.com/2015/05/07/mingus-speaks-by-john-f-goodman-uc-press-2013 and, among many recordings, his experimental large-ensemble album with Ensemble Diglossia titled Shuffle Play: Elegies for the Recording Angel (New World Records, 2000), comprised of 28 meditations on the history of recordings (see https://newworldrecords.bandcamp.com/album/john-schott-shuffle-play).↩ 107. John Goodman, Mingus Speaks (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 139.↩ 108. See also Olly Wilson, “The Heterogenous Sound Ideal in African-American Music,” in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), 327–338.↩ 109. Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 57. Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz (New York: Basic Books, 2016) contains a much more nuanced discussion of spontaneity that draws on Mingus to emphasize the “in-the-moment” non-reproducibility of spontaneity, but still doesn’t express the relation of this to structure, or reflection (47).↩ 110. Eugene B. Redmond, “‘So What’? … It’s ‘All Blues’ Anyway: An Anecdotal/Jazzological Tour of Milesville,” in Miles Davis and American Culture, ed. Gerald Early, foreword by Clark Terry (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001), 45.↩ 111. Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Plume Books, 1993), xix.↩ 112. Ibid.↩ 113. Herman Beavers, “Morrison, Jazz, and Postmodernity,” Penn Arts & Sciences, 2011, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8svk-lvArI. Beavers continues: “Gatsby doesn’t swing because it doesn’t know how to sing the blues.” See Beavers, Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). On the limited perception of jazz thematized in Gatsby, see Mitchell Breitwieser, “Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation,” American Literary History 12 (2000): 359–381.↩ 114. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), xv.↩ 115. Toni Morrison, Conversations, ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 204.↩ 116. Toni Morrison, Conversations, 85; emphasis added.↩ 117. Toni Morrison, “Tribute to Romare Bearden,” in The Source of Self -Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Vintage International, 2019), 291.↩ 118. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard. See also Mayumba’s illuminating discussion of Ellison’s Invisible Man in terms of “literary improvisation” (Shadow and Act, 58).↩ 119. However, records do play a key role; see Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2021). For further discussion of jazz as a formal—rather than thematic—matrix for the novel, see Kronfeld, Spontaneous Form (forthcoming). See poet and professor Noami Extra’s non-thematic reading of jazz poetry centering the “unseen carework” of Black women as “shapers of sound and aesthetic” (available at: https://www.naomiextra.com/). See especially her readings of poetry by Amina Baraka and Abbey Lincoln in “Listening from Beyond: Jazz, Poetry & Gender,” Jazz House Kids (New Jersey Council for the Humanities), available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UitQEQdaGdo.↩ 120. See, as mentioned above, Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones; Max Roach, “What ‘Jazz’ Means to Me”; Nicholas Payton, “An Open Letter to My Dissenters.”↩ 121. Stephen M. Best, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” Modern Language Quarterly 73:3 (2012): 453–474.↩ 122. See Toni Morrison, “Interview with Salman Rushdie (1992),” in Conversations, 51.↩ 123. Daphne Brooks, “Toni Morrison and the Music of Black Life,” Pitchfork, August 15, 2029. https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/toni-morrison-and-the-music-of-black-life/.↩ 124. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan, new introduction by Sondra Kathryn Wilson (Boston: Da Capo, 1991), 236. Charles L. Lumpkins points out that the earlier massacres on May 28 and 29 have been all-but erased from official accounts. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 74.↩ 125. The East St. Louis Race Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century (1917) is collected in Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, ed. Mia Bay and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2014), 456–496. Martha Gruening and W.E.B. Du Bois also travelled down and reported on the massacres in The Crisis. See Gruening and Du Bois, “The Massacre of East St. Louis,” Crisis 14 (1917): 21–38.↩ 126. Never Been a Time, a film by Denise Ward-Brown. 365 Degrees Production, 2016. https://www.365degreesproductions.com/never-been-a-time.↩ 127. Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic Books: New York, 2020), 241.↩ 128. Charles Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Riots and Black Politics (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2008), xi.↩ 129. See Koritha Mitchell, who draws on the East St. Louis massacre in her theorization of “Know-Your-Place Aggression.” Mitchell, “Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care,” African American Review 51:4 (2018), 259. And see Koritha Mitchell for a critical perspective, “beyond protest art,” theorized from close readings of African-American authored lynching dramas: “Is it possible that black art about lynching is a continuation of African Americans’ self-affirmation? Might such art simply be the kind of community-centered success to which white mobs responded?” (Koritha Mitchell, “Introduction: Whose Evidence? Which Account?,” in Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 [Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011], 19). And see also the tradition of “looking out” that Autumn Womack theorizes as disrupting the relationship between photography and “a cultural logic that nurtures lynching” (Autum Womack, The Matter of Black Living, 124).↩ 130. Ironically, the term “pogrom,” in its Jewish historical context, has also been criticized for obscuring the systematic, institutional framework of that mob violence—the very same dimension that the term “riot” obscures.↩ 131. A rich array of archival resources is available at https://estl1917ccci.us/. Historical markers were put up for the first time in 2023, as a result of these coordinated efforts. “SIUE Alumni and Faculty Serve on the East St. Louis 1917 Centennial Commission, Helping to Commemorate the Past to Celebrate Recovery,” 3 August 2017, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. https://www.siue.edu/news/2017/08/SIUE-EastSt.LouisRiots.shtml.↩ 132. Harper Barnes, Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 240.↩ 133. See poet and professor Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond’s Community Archive, including the podcast “The Class of 1917,” where Redmond interviews descendants of the massacre’s survivors. Available at: https://thecommunityarchive.org/2023/10/11/archive-the-class-of-1917/.↩ 134. Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 14–15. This very dissonance is registered by James Weldon Johnson in his account of the 1919 Hellfighters Homecoming Parade (also on Fifth Ave in New York City). See Black Manhattan, 236. I discuss this further in Spontaneous Form. See also Davis’ 1985 interview with Gwen Sommers in Atlanta, produced by Bruce Kauffman, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgunB9Q2jZQ.↩ 135. Miles Davis and American Culture, 26.↩ 136. Toni Morrison, “Tribute to Romare Bearden,” in Source of Self-Regard, 294.↩ 137. Tracey Sherard, “Women’s Classic Blues in Toni Morrison’s Jazz: Cultural Artifact as Narrator,” Genders 1998-2013 1 (2000); available at: https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/2000/03/01/womens-classic-blues-toni-morrisons-jazz-cultural-artifact-narrator. Baker is the subject of Denise Ward-Brown’s and Joanna Dee Das’ film Seeking Josephine Baker: Dancing on the Land and the inspiration for the research program “The Land on Which We Dance: Reclaiming the Spaces of Black Dance in St. Louis.” The members of the group write that “While scholars note St. Louis’ contributions to jazz music . . . the historical record falls silent when it comes to dancing bodies” (available at: https://thedividedcity.com/theland/).↩ 138. Tyfahra D. Singleton, “Facing Jazz, Facing Trauma: Modern Trauma and the Jazz Archive.” Ph.D. diss., UC Berkeley, 2011.↩ 139. Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image, Foreword by Simon Njami (University of Illinois, 2007), 236–237.↩ 140. Ibid.↩ 141. Image reproduced in Michael Morand, “Beinecke Marks Centennial of 1917 NAACP Silent Protest Parade with Photograph Display, July 21–30.” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, July 10, 2017 (available at: https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/article/beinecke-marks-centennial-1917-naacp-silent-protest-parade-photograph-display-july-21-30).↩ 142. Savannah Harris, interview with me, April 2020. For a twenty-first-century recording reimagining the relationship between live drums and drum machine to create novel textures see Savannah Harris, “Child,” written by Harris, produced by Harris, Joy Morales, and Morgan Guerin, Apple Music, Juneteenth 2024: Freedom Songs (available at: https://music.apple.com/us/song/child/1748694907).↩ 143. “A Negro’s Parade with Muffled Drums,” read a newspaper article a few days later (see The Survey, August 4, 1917, 405–406.↩ 144. The flyer and memorandum distributed by the NAACP in advance of the historic march can be accessed online, via the National Humanities Center (available at: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai2/forward/text4/silentprotest.pdf).↩ 145. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1933), 320. See also Rebecca Meacham, “Lynching: Silent Protest Parade,” in vol. 2 of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 751.↩ 146. Carrie Williams Clifford, The Widening Light (Boston: Walter Reid Company, 1922), 16.↩ 147. Carrie Williams Clifford, The Widening Light, 17.↩ 148. Toni Morrison, Jazz, 56.↩ 149. See Amiri Baraka, “Jazz and the White Critic: Thirty Years Later,” in Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 145–154.↩ 150. Personal interview, 15 May 2009. For a major musical and ethnographic intervention in the historiography of swing, based on his research at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, see Howard Wiley & The Angola Project, 12 Gates to the City, CD (2010). And see Ariana Proehl, “Crate Digging with Bay Area Jazz Saxophonist Howard Wiley,” KQED, April 19, 2023, available at: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13927947/crate-digging-with-bay-area-jazz-saxophonist-howard-wiley.↩ 151. Toni Morrison, Jazz, 53. See also “‘Inside Nothing:’ The Silent Protest March in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” available at: https://bluesjazzbookclub.com/2018/02/14/inside-nothing-the-silent-protest-march-in-toni-morrisons-jazz/.↩ 152. Paul Gilroy has shown that black music is at the vanguard of a turning point in modernist thought, with its rebellion against realist representation – not having had the luxury of resting well with conventional meanings (see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic). At the same time, the notion of “functional music” theorized from black musical forms has offered an important challenge to formalist aesthetics in the West. See Amiri Baraka as Leroi Jones in Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963). I do not see these vantage points as antithetical but cannot enter further into this here.↩ 153. See, for example, Paul Gilroy, “Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a ‘Changing’ Same,” Black Music Research Journal 11:2 (1991): 111–136; See discussion of drum and poem in Samuel A. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 28.↩ 154. In the 1980s, Morrison describes her own task of honing novelistic language as doing “what the music used to do” before it became co-opted: “the music isn’t ours anymore” (see Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie [Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994], 121, 112. Thus, in an inversion of the 1920s scenes she reimagines in Jazz, Morrison entertains the possibility that her novels might start to fulfill the same function for Black youth that Black music held for previous generations.↩ 155. For recent work situating Dumas at the center of Black musical and literary critical practice, see Nijah Cunningham, “Scenes of Argument,” PMLA 135:5 (2020), 99–51001; Harmony Holiday, “Some Requiem: On the Doomed Glory of Henry Dumas,” Poetry Foundation 21 (March 2021), available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/155701/some-requiem; and Harmony Holiday, “The Afro-Horn Was the Newest Axe to Cut the Deadwood of the World: Liner Notes for Henry Dumas’s ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken,’” Black Music and Black Muses, 14 June 2021, available at: https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/the-afro-horn-was-the-newest-axe. See also Holiday’s collaboration with Fred Moten on their audio setting of Dumas’ short story, the first release in a series entitled Djeli (available at: https://mythscience.bandcamp.com/album/will-the-circle-be-unbroken).↩ 156. Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writers, ed. Quincey Troupe and Rainer Schulte (New York: Random House, 1975).↩ 157. Cheryl A. Wall, “Toni Morrison, Editor and Teacher,” in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, ed. Justine Tally (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008):139-148; Kinohi Nishikawa, “Morrison’s Things: Between History and Memory,” Arcade, 2021. https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/morrisons-things-between-history-and-memoryhttps://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/morrisons-things-between-history-and-memory.↩ 158. See Harper Barnes, who includes Morrison’s novel in his historical account of the “legacy of a massacre.” Never Been a Time, 189.↩ 159. “Eugene B. Redmond Oral History Interview #2, 23 November 2011. SIUE Lovejoy Library; accessible at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h56tNHGqJSM.↩ 160. “East St. Louis: Dunham Technique. If Cities Could Dance.” PBS. https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/east-st.louis-dunham-technique/if-cities-could-dance/.↩ 161. Toni Morrison, Jazz, 58.↩ 162. Beavers, Geography and the Political Imaginary, 110.↩ 163. Toni Morrison, Jazz, 57.↩ 164. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 158.↩ 165. Jovonna Jones, “Look, Look. Look: The Work of Black Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” Callaloo 41:2 (2018): 93–104.↩ 166. Ebed-Melech pulls Jeremiah out by the very ropes with which he had been cast down.↩ 167. Toni Morrison, Jazz, 60.↩ 168. Toni Morrison, Jazz, 60. In Hebrew, Me’i is the gut—the place where the fire of prophecy burns inside the prophet’s body; for a woman it could also mean “womb”—corroborating the erotics that Dorcas embraces and associates with jazz, but that Alice tries to keep at bay.↩
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