My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 40

(This essay is an excerpt from a new book-in-progress by
Kofi Natambu entitled A BRAND NEW BAG: How African
Americans Revolutionized U.S. Culture & Changed the
World, 1955-1975)

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

In the quest to critique many of the
philosophical assumptions governing
conventional modernist discourse in
art while still retaining a fundamental
aesthetic connection to other important
aspects and principles of modernism —
especially those having to do with the
continuous necessity of creative change
and revision — Davis epitomized
the ‘progressive’ African American Jazz
musician’s desire to use black vernacular
sources, ideas, and values to engage
these modernist traditions and principles
on his/her own independent social,
cultural, and intellectual terms.
In such major recordings from the
1957-1967 period as his orchestral
masterpieces Miles Ahead, (1957) Porgy
& Bess, (1958) and Sketches of Spain
(1960) — made in collaboration with
his longtime friend and colleague, the
white composer and arranger Gil Evans
— and his equally significant and
highly influential small group Quintet
and Sextet recordings, Milestones,
(1958) Kind of Blue, (1959) Live at the
Blackhawk, (1961) My Funny Valentine,
(1965) Four & More, (1964) E.S.P.,
(1965) Miles Smiles, (1966) Miles in
Berlin, (1964) Miles in Tokyo, (1964)
Live at the Plugged Nickel, (1965) and
Nefertiti, (1967) Davis was at the
forefront of those African American
artists of the period who, in all the arts,
were feverishly looking for and often
finding fresh, new modes of pursuing
aesthetic innovation and social change.
By dialectically synthesizing and
extending ideas, strategies, methods,
and structures culled from such
disparate sources as 20th century
classical music, the blues, r&b, and
many different stylistic forms from
the Jazz tradition (i.e. Swing, Bebop,
‘Cool’ and ‘Hard Bop’ etc.) — many of
which Davis himself had played a pivotal
role in developing and popularizing —
Miles helped bring about a new creative
synthesis of modern and vernacular
expressions that greatly changed our
perceptions of what American music
was and could be.

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Among many black people, Davis’s
outspoken, defiant social stance
and hip, charismatic aura signified a
profound shift in cultural values and
attitudes in the national black
community that also had a lasting
political significance and influence.
This was especially true for the
emerging adolescent youth and radical
young adults of the era whose overt
displays of rebellion and defiance of
racism and repression were becoming
pervasive with the rise of the Civil
Rights and Black Power movements.
Miles quickly became a major symbol
of this modern revolutionary spirit
in African American culture and was
seen by many as an important artistic
leader in this struggle and its widespread
social and political demands for
respect, justice, equality, and freedom
for African Americans that marked the
period. Thus, it is not surprising that
many of the various musical aesthetics
that Davis devised and expressed
during the late ‘50s and throughout the
‘60s consciously sought to advance
specifically new ideas about the structural,
formal, and expressive dimensions of
the modernist tradition in contemporary
Jazz music. These changes would openly
challenge many of the orthodoxies
of this tradition both in terms of form
and content while at the same time
asserting a radically different set of
ideological and aesthetic values about
the intellectual and cultural worth,
use, and intent of the music that in
attitude and style sought to resist or go
beyond standard notions of both high
art and commercial popular culture.
Simultaneously however, Davis sought
to consciously establish an even more
socially intimate relationship with
his black audience (and especially its
youthful members) that would embody
and hopefully expand Davis’s views on
the broad necessity for deeply rooted
political and cultural change within the
African American community and the
u.s. as a whole.