I first met Joseph Jarman and the other members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC) on July 5, 1973, at the Newport Jazz Festival when they played in Central Park as the third band on a bill with groups led by Archie Shepp and Sam Rivers. It was a glorious day to be out hearing bands I had never seen in person. I had just moved back to New York from San Francisco where I had first discovered the Art Ensemble on the radio, discussing their recent return from three years in France. Lester Bowie was laughingly saying they were going to be on radio silence for a while. I went in search of the BYG recordings then and had become a big fan of how they spoke about their conception of Great Black Music. Seeing them was a landmark in what was then unknown to me to be an extraordinary time in music and particularly in all facets of what one really must call Great Black Music—Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Fela Kuti, Ornette Coleman, Curtis Mayfield, LaBelle, Pharoah Sanders, Bob Marley, Leontyne Price, Wayne Shorter, Stevie Wonder, Burning Spear, Salif Keita, and dozens more. Looking back I can say, of course, I met Jarman then. His appearance in Java cloths and woven dashikis, feathers, bells, and on the horns, gongs, and in declamation on the stage are iconic moments from that period. The first time I visited Joseph, he was listening to Jimmy Cliff and Sidney Bechet. He played me 78s of Charlie Parker. Just life as it should be, it seemed.
Also in those days, we all printed our own poetry. We made books. I knew as many people who made books then as I now know who write blogs. Learning that I did such things, some months later he sent his spiral bound, 8 1/2” × 11” first edition of Black Case Volume I & II: Return from Exile. He was thirty-seven years old, had the sense that the time had come when the “new music” would find its American audience, and he seemed to have shaken something rather like a shadow that hung over photos of him in Europe that he would not let me hang on my walls. Black Case was a collection of poemsand sheet music with lyrics that are now well-known, such as “As If It Were the Seasons,” and some that continue to represent his ethos regarding the new music, such as “What’ s To Say” (see pp. 276–78). There were photos of his Chicago neighborhood and of him playing with other musicians in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. It was fierce, longing, ecstatic, lonely, haunted, and evoked war and the Black movements in the streets. I would later realize that he was studying aikido and, in so doing, learning zazen, sitting meditation. For about four or five years he sat every night trying to get his legs, which had been damaged by jumping out of military planes, to fold down into at least a half-lotus posture. A sense of the “oneness” or, as we call it, the “suchness” of the universe is on the horizon in the text as well. Like his knees, understanding the oneness came close to the ground over time. I told him he should print more copies of the book.
I sent him a book of poems that had just come out, Play Ebony, Play Ivory (1974) by the late Henry Dumas, a man three years his senior, also from Arkansas, who spoke deeply to Joseph. He memorized passages of the book. He also spoke lines from Amus Mor, whom I did not know, and was, of course, a fan of Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer (1964). I, in turn, learned to do my own version of “ODAWALLA” from hearing it in performance. Joseph spun tales of the mythmakers and scientists, the Dogon people, about which I knew nothing. I was thrilled when he told me in 2001 that he had been to Mali and visited Dogon country and then ancient Buddhist shrines in India. Moments of closing circles going back to the 1970s return from exile.
On a visit to my East Village apartment he asked for a print of a photo on the wall that I had taken of George Jackson in 1970 during an interview in San Quentin. He put it in the second edition of the book, published in 1977 in a new blue-and-white, square-cut format. It was not a great print because I had printed it myself while learning my way around a darkroom, but it is the only publication of any of those images and I remain pleased to be part of his only book. Joseph continued to write until the early 2000s, mostly lyrics for what I call his sacred songs. He started writing a memoir in the late nineties and continued to try to work on his book until about 2008. I never saw any of it. He had stopped working on it before therapy had made it possible for him to convey some of his experience with war beyond the allusions in his poems, but even without that I imagine his tales of his journey to be a wild ride. Joseph Jarman loved this world and despite all he had been through came to have a sense of wonderment and amazement that one could envy. At eighty-one, he could not remember names, having suffered a stroke where such details rest, but his face would light up or tear up, or both, when he would sing from the thousands of tunes and lyrics still in his head. The inscription he wrote in my copy of Black Case says, “cause I gotta put it out there.” Many of us are glad.
To read our selection from Joseph Jarman’s Black Case, purchase a copy of CR 62.4/63.1/2.