CHAPTER 1

Aldon Lynn Nielsen

"NOW IS THE TIME"

Voicing against the Grain of Orality

Take 1: "The Cry of My People"

"What time is it?" It's still a good question four decades after the composerand saxophonist Joe McPhee shouted it into a room at Vassar College'sUrban Center for Black Studies, as a kickoff to a burning performanceof his composition "Nation Time." McPhee's question was timely; itwas, to borrow a phrase out of that time, "right on" time, though his performancewas, in a sense, before its time. Recorded live, this concert wasseldom heard in its time, circulated as an LP from CJR Records, only tobecome more widely known when it was rereleased three decades later bythe appropriately named Atavistic Records in their still more appropriatelynamed "Unheard Music" series. This particular unheard music comprised anineteen minute instrumental extravaganza built around the simple openingriff (a riff growing out of the spoken question, "What time is it?) butrapidly gathered impetus and fire from the improvisational coauthorshipof McPhee's small band of jazz giants, including Mike Kull on keyboard,Tyrone Crabb on bass, and two percussionists, Bruce Thompson and ErnestBostic. A review of the later rerelease, published in the Alternative Press,reports that McPhee "takes his sax to places Maceo Parker never dreamtof," a judgment that is in no way a negative comment on James Brown'sgreat collaborator (118). Rather, it is a reminder for any who may need itthat the "out" Jazz of the Black Arts and Black Power years could be everybit as funky, every bit as danceable, every bit as "relevant," to use anotherterm of the time, as anything Soul had on offer. And this is important torecall only because so many seem in need of just such a reminder. At a conferencesome years ago, when a presenter played a segment from AmiriBaraka's Motown LP Nation Time titled "Who Will Survive America?" poetAskia Muhammad Toure could be heard to comment from his seat in thefront row, "We used to boogaloo to that." Many have forgotten the purchasethat the most avant-garde music and poetry had on an energizedyouth audience in those years. We have been told so often that becauseFree Jazz (free verse?) somehow turned away from the audience and killedthe genre, this music requires a certain amount of rerelease to overcomethe negative commentaries that were circulated, mostly (with always theexception of the exceptionally dour Stanley Crouch) by people who hadnot been there.

An urban center for Black Studies is not the sort of thing most now associatewith Vassar, but it was there and it provided time for McPhee to unfoldhis music. The recording of "Nation Time" happened during concertsin December of 1970, only months after Amiri Baraka had published hischapbook It's Nation Time through Don L. Lee's Third World Press. It waswork that had quite deliberately not been included in Baraka's last significantcollection of poetry from a major commercial press, Black Magic, workthat he was to perform incandescently at the climax of the Black NationalPolitical Convention, in Gary, Indiana, in March of 1972, an enactment ofthe poem so effective with the massive audience there gathered that evenso mainstream a figure as the Reverend Jesse Jackson immediately took upthe call and its response: "What time is it? It's Nation Time." Baraka hadexplained the origins of his poem as coming directly out of the greetingsblack people offered to each other in the streets back in the day, a way ofcalling one another to the time. Both Baraka's poem and McPhee's musicunderscore something too easily and too often forgotten in the interveningyears: while it is true that any amount of essentialism could be sensedfloating in the air like incense at any such gathering in the late 1960s andearly 1970s, nation was not a given. Nation was, to put it mildly, a socialconstruction in time. Like the gathering at Vassar in December of 1970,nation was a constant improvisation within the...