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Quiz_ Problem Set 4_ Saul 2021/11/1 下午2:57 Quiz: Problem Set 4: Saul https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1507262/quizzes/2364484/take 1/7 Problem Set 4: Saul Started: Nov 1 at 2:57pm Quiz Instructions This problem set is based on Scott Saul’s 2001 article "Outrageous Freedom: Charles Mingus and the Invention of the Jazz Workshop." It is untimed, open-book, and open-note. Feel free to discuss the questions with classmates, but make sure your answers are your own. 1 ptsQuestion 1 p 0 words In 3-5 sentences, explain how the musicians in the Jazz Workshop collaborated. 1 ptsQuestion 2 Saul wrote, “These formal innovations made the Jazz Workshop into a form of radically participatory democracy, but Mingus's Workshop also had a dark side Edit View Insert Format Tools Table 12pt Paragraph 2021/11/1 下午2:57 Quiz: Problem Set 4: Saul https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1507262/quizzes/2364484/take 2/7 p 0 words unrecognized in the utopian visions of Mills or King.” In 3-5 sentences, explain the “dark side” of the Minus Workshop. 1 ptsQuestion 3 List 2 songs that Saul uses as examples to illustrate “extreme tempo changes.” 2021/11/1 下午2:57 Quiz: Problem Set 4: Saul https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1507262/quizzes/2364484/take 3/7 p 0 words 1 ptsQuestion 4 p 0 words In 3-5 sentences, define “extreme tempo changes,” and explain why they matter in the Jazz Workshop’s music. 2 ptsQuestion 5 Write a paragraph (approximately 4-6 sentences) that explains how the federal government used jazz during the Cold War era. Edit View Insert Format Tools Table 12pt Paragraph Edit View Insert Format Tools Table 12 t P h 2021/11/1 下午2:57 Quiz: Problem Set 4: Saul https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1507262/quizzes/2364484/take 4/7 p 0 words 1 ptsQuestion 6 Select and copy 2 quotes from the article that talk about freedom. 12pt Paragraph 2021/11/1 下午2:57 Quiz: Problem Set 4: Saul https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1507262/quizzes/2364484/take 5/7 1 ptsQuestion 7 Find and copy the block quote from the article in which Mingus describes his “tone poem” (“Pithecanthropus Erectus”) in his album’s liner notes. 3 ptsQuestion 8 In the Journal of American History, the scholar David W. Stowe noted that, “[t]he dynamics and aesthetics of the music shed light on the era’s politics, while African American politics helps us grasp the musical affiliations and creative choices of artists.” Write a paragraph (approximately 4-6 sentences) explaining how freedom relates to politics in the 1950s and ‘60s, according to Saul’s article. 2021/11/1 下午2:57 Quiz: Problem Set 4: Saul https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1507262/quizzes/2364484/take 6/7 3 ptsQuestion 9 Write a paragraph (approximately 4-6 sentences) that explains in your own words one claim Saul makes about the role of freedom in Charles Mingus’s music. 1 ptsQuestion 10 List five keywords for this article (these would help scholars with related interests find this essay when doing database searches). 2021/11/1 下午2:57 Quiz: Problem Set 4: Saul https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1507262/quizzes/2364484/take 7/7 Not saved Submit Quiz Outrageous Freedom: Charles Mingus and the Invention of the Jazz Workshop Outrageous Freedom: Charles Mingus and the Invention of the Jazz Workshop Scott Saul American Quarterly, Volume 53, Number 3, September 2001, pp. 387-419 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 25 Aug 2020 17:36 GMT from University of California, Berkeley ] https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2001.0029 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/2505 https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2001.0029 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/2505 387MINGUS American Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3 (September 2001) © 2001 American Studies Association 387 Scott Saul is an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia. This article is part of a larger project entitled Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the’60s. Outrageous Freedom: Charles Mingus and the Invention of the Jazz Workshop SCOTT SAUL University of Virginia Where Did the “Free” in Free Jazz Come From? THE MUSIC WAS ARGUABLY BORN ON 30 JANUARY 1956, A WELL-NIGH APOCALYPTIC moment when jazz composer Charles Mingus set in motion a novel but durable experiment in musical orchestration and simultaneously un- veiled a menacing critique of modernist authority. Mingus had as- sembled his Jazz Workshop in the Atlantic studios to record “Pithecan- thropus Erectus,” a “jazz tone-poem” that was simple in the primordial sense. An allegory of Promethean ambition and slave revolt, “Pithecan- thropus” was intended to illustrate the rise of the first man, the bloating of his ambition, his rule over his fellow men, and then—most extend- edly—his downfall at the hands of a mass insurrection. It was a ferocious version of the plot that, as sociologist Paul Gilroy has remarked, is central to African American modernism: the “interroga- tion of the concept of progress from the standpoint of the slave,” this time voiced by a 33 year-old composer and bass virtuoso whose ambitions had so far swelled larger than his commercial accomplish- ments. “Pithecanthropus” was his Workshop’s major label debut as well as his most groundbreaking work to date.1 Yet it was not simply the plot that transformed “Pithecanthropus” into the sourcebook of postbop jazz. More strikingly, Mingus found a license for freedom in the mechanics of the tone-poem, just as his modernist model Richard Strauss had introduced new dissonances in chf 388 AMERICAN QUARTERLY his fin-de-siècle tone-poems like Also Sprach Zarathrustra. Mingus’s music needed to stretch musical form and reach for an embattled dissonance if it was to summon the power necessary to overthrow such a primordial master—a figure Mingus aspired to be yet also loved to defeat. In the second module of “Pithecanthropus,” geared to represent the force of collective will, Mingus’s Workshop refused to be bound by customary guidelines or measure-by-measure formulas of improvisa- tional length; his soloists persevered simply until a spontaneous verbal cue initiated a new section. Likewise, the Workshoppers swerved away from a well-tempered sound in favor of percussive pounding and saxophone blats, wails, and screams. “Pithecanthropus” marked a new harnessing of collective energy in jazz, a new language of seemingly unbounded melodrama.2 I will return later to “Pithecanthropus,” but as a tortuous drama of deliverance it serves as an apt starting point for my central argument here: Mingus’s Jazz Workshop gave “freedom” a different meaning than the one assumed in dominant Cold War paradigms, which linked freedom to free enterprise and parsed the world into the Free West and the Unfree East. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement more generally, Mingus brought the fight for “freedom” onto home territory for the sake of unfinished business. Marked by its volatility, Mingus’s music suggested that freedom had to be seized through struggle—a struggle that engaged African Americans with one another and posed them against their audience. This struggle was bound up in a fatal uncertainty: the Jazz Workshop, by reevaluating the role of the rhythm section in jazz, occupied a middle ground between the unpredictability of direct action and the rule-bound character of games. Disciplined and liberating, it broke down the presumed antith- esis between individual freedom and social order. Mingusian freedom was a democratic event, not a hoped-for ideal; it was messy and participatory, not rationalized or private. For these reasons, its modus operandi was close to the Civil Rights Movement’s strategy of provocation through nonviolence: both Mingus and the Movement tested principles in the heat of instigated group conflict. Both were part of the high democratic drama that novelist Ralph Ellison, referring sometimes to intellectual exchange and sometimes to democratic politics, fit under the rubric of “antagonistic cooperation.”3 This essay will look first at the general working methods of the Jazz Workshop—how the Workshop embodied a radical alternative to Cold 389MINGUS War understandings of freedom yet revealed a dark side to the Civil Rights dream of struggle and deliverance. Then it will turn to Mingus’s role as a jazz entrepreneur, and his repeated attempts to stake out his own niche in the music industry. Mingus brought the ethic of struggle to his audience, deflating it as a consuming public and reconstituting it as an appreciative if not quite beloved community. Third, I will turn to his autobiography Beneath the Underdog, a sentimental education of the jazz artist that rephrases artistic struggle as a battle between commodified and uncommodified sexual relations. Finally, I will return to “Pithecanthropus Erectus.” Unsurprisingly, considering how he developed a romance of commercial antagonism, Mingus launched his Workshop with an epitaph for the creative artist, the ever-ambitious modernist. More surprisingly, and more productively, his music also suggested that the fall of the individual genius was simultaneously the revolt of the popular. The underachieving public—an audience that Mingus repeatedly attacked—was channeled into a drama of social and racial emancipation, with astonishing results. The Jazz Workshop, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement The Jazz Workshop was the main vehicle for Mingus’s challenge to dominant conceptions of freedom. The bassist took out a legal copy- right on the phrase “Jazz Workshop,” and the tag served as a kind of marketable trademark, attesting to jazz authenticity and his desire to control his own fortunes. It was the name of Mingus’s working band from 1954 until his death in 1978, the name of his music-publishing imprint, and the name of his self-founded record label. All told, the “Jazz Workshop” was a multi-faceted operation whose goal was to carve out an autonomous power base for Mingus within commercial jazz—his own free enterprise zone.4 This self-capitalization was tied to an equally arduous and ambitious musical project: a “Workshop” aesthetic that was a volatile experiment in the clashing of moods. Mingus was acclaimed as the “Lee Strasberg of jazz,” and he founded a Workshop that was, in many ways, an Actors Studio for the aspiring jazz musician. Like Strasberg, he focused on “drawing out” the latent emotions of his Workshoppers, practicing the art of instigation with on-the-spot musical cues as well as extra-musical eruptions (everything from a punch in the nose to a dismissal from the group). More than any other contemporary musician, Mingus estab- 390 AMERICAN QUARTERLY lished jazz as music of psychological turbulence—music that probed the soul, stripped away the veneer of conventional decorum, and gave voice to the most knotty, and sometimes least articulate, of emotional states.5 Critic Nat Hentoff was typical in praising Mingus and validat- ing this confessional aesthetic at the same time: Mingus “tries harder than anyone I know to walk naked,” he wrote in 1957. The bassist had “a relentless drive to excavate his music from the deepest recesses of his feelings and memories” and then to force these feelings on his sidemen through his compositional forms.6 It is crucial to recognize that this collective exercise in emotional probing was accomplished through a new approach to jazz composi- tion, one that highlighted its processual and omnivorous nature. The Workshop foregrounded what musicologist Robert Walser has called the signifyin’ in jazz—the way the music “works through reference, gesture, and dialogue to suggest multiple meanings through associa- tion”—rather than the signification of notes as such.7 The foundation of the Workshop strikingly coincided with Mingus’s decision to stop writing out the various instrumental parts, to teach them instead—for all their complications—through oral instruction. This oral, vernacular signifyin’, however, was far removed from the jaunty tricksterism and deceptive satire usually associated with the