Meditation and furye early 1960s and its “turn to the ghetto”: free jazz in the face of the anti-recist political perspectives

Abstract

In the 1960s, the United States of America was still under a segregationist racial regime that obliterated the real possibilities for the black part of the population to be included in its political, economic and social dynamics, especially with an escalation of racist violence in both the South and the North. In this context, the figures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X gained a lot of prominence as the main political leaders of this historically vilified and excluded population. Malcolm X, in particular, defended a very original idea of black emancipation, advocating as one of its central factors the flourishing of a revolutionary black culture, with special emphasis on the racial reality of urban centers. Contemporary to these debates, free jazz emerged, as we shall argue, as one of the main spontaneous offshoots of Malcolm's idea through a sonic insurrection that, while seeking to reinvent itself based on the African-American aural tradition, aimed to get closer to the reality of the urban ghettos; the privileged locus of racial tensions that escalated vertiginously, often resulting in the reinforcement of racist violence by the government authorities themselves. As we intend to show, it was through the encounter between free jazz and the racial situation in the ghettos that the musicians' deeper engagement with a revolutionary aesthetic took shape, thus becoming one of the most important episodes in the intertwining of aesthetics and politics in the 20th century.