“Creative and Cultural Lag”: The Radical Education of Ralph Ellison

What does American democracy sound like? Thanks to Ralph Ellison, a student of the chromatic runs of guitarist Charlie Christian as well as the fractured syntax of poet T. S. Eliot, more than a few Americans now suspect that it sounds like jazz. While Ellison once pledged to high-flying confidant Albert Murray that he “wouldn’t be a jazz critic for love or money” (TT 193), he spent crucial writing time in the dozen years after Invisible Man (1952) beingjust that. From 1955 through 1964, Ellison contributed a string of jazz-centered essays to fully visible periodicals such as Esquire and the Saturday Review. With painstaking elegance balancing spiked judgments, he surveyed everything from the frontier lyricism of singer Jimmy Rushing, to the cult of the brilliantly doomed alto saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, to the speculative sociology of Blues People (1963), LeRoiJones’s pioneering study of black music in white America. Several of these pieces on jazz gained the status of small classics during the conquering twilight of Ellison’s life, when his late 1960s reputation as an elitist sellout faded along with the militancy of the Black Arts movement.