March 2008 Archives
Nothing But a Man: Remembering Ivan Dixon
It would be easy to think of Ivan Dixon, who died recently in Charlotte, North Carolina, as just another brilliant black actor or actress who never received the recognition that they deserved. Indeed if you placed Dixon's career alongside those such as Rosalind Cash, Roscoe Lee Brown, Gloria Foster and Calvin Lockhart, you'd have just an inkling of a level of genius that was tragically underutilized and overlooked. But Dixon, distinguished himself even among those stellar talents, by playing critical roles--as an actor and director--in two films that will forever serve as the most evocative examples of black masculinity and black radicalism in mainstream American cinema.
For many, Ivan Dixon was simply the black guy on the 1960's sitcom Hogan Heroes. Set in a Nazi POW camp, the show poked fun at the very idea of Nazi imperialism at a historical moment, the 1960s, when the United States was the most resonant example of such imperialism. A critique of America's own imperialistic desire, was the not-so-deep meaning beyond the clowning of Colonel Klink--the hapless face of Hitler's ambition. Dixon's Sgt. James Kinchloe, though, offered the only so-called "black" perspective on Nazi imperialism that could be easily accessed in mainstream American culture in the 1960s. It's not like Band of Brothers gave any inkling of what the brothers were doing in Europe during World War II. For better or worse, Dixon's Kinchloe also presented one of the first African-American television characters who was defined by a more global perspective, an aspect of his career that frames his early success as the Nigerian exchange student Joseph Asagai in the original stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun.
Dixon's most stirring role though, would be much closer to home, geographically and politically. Nothing But a Man (1964) directed by then 35-year-old German-born director Michael Roemer, depicts the life of Duff Anderson (portrayed by Dixon), a wandering day laborer, seeking to escape the demands of marriage and fatherhood in the poverty stricken American south. Dixon's wife in the film was portrayed by the legendary jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. Critic John Nickel suggests that Roemer's film anticipated the infamous Moynihan Report on the black family, which argues that black families needed to embrace mainstream patriarchy in order be fully integrated into American society. In essence, future US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argued that black communities were hamstrung by the overarching influence of black women.
Nothing But a Man's power come from also locating the impact of joblessness on the lives of black men (Roemer used NAACP field workers to help do research for the film), who felt as though they couldn't be men in their own households, if they weren't the primary financial providers in those households. Dixon brought a depth of humanity to this situation, particularly as he seeks out his own absentee father. Though Nothing But a Man lacks much of the nuance that three decades of black feminist scholarship has brought to bear on the dynamics of black gender relationships, the film remains a visual testament to the struggles of black men in the south, just as the Black Power Movement was about to erupt.
The Black Power Movement is full blown, by the time Ivan Dixon made the move to work behind the camera instead of in front of it. Though Dixon had begun to direct television episodes, including The Bill Cosby Show (1970), his first job directing a full-length feature was the little regarded blaxploitation flick Trouble Man (1972), which starred Robert Hooks and featured a now-timeless soundtrack by Marvin Gaye. For his next film, Dixon partnered with novelist Sam Greenlee for a cinematic version of Greenlee's novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which told the fictional tale of the first black FBI agent. In the film, the mild-mannered college-educated Dan Freeman (portrayed by Lawrence Cook), spends five years working at the FBI, essentially making photocopies. When he decides the leave after five years, he uses the expertise he learned in the FBI to equip black and Latino street gangs with the tools to mount insurrections in American cities. Freeman's mild-mannered radicalism is likely--along with Huey Newton--an inspiration behind Aaron McGruder's "Huey Freeman."
The Spook Who Sat by the Door opened in 1973 and was gone from theaters within a week--the film's distributors United Artists perhaps a little too concerned about Spook's incendiary message. On the occasion of the DVD release of the film in 2003, Dixon, who also produced the film (raising nearly all of its $1million budget from black investors) told The Crisis that he was blacklisted for about a year after the film's release--he would later direct several episodes of The Waltons, which in 1974 was akin to Obama winning the Iowa caucus. But he added that the film, "expressed everything that I felt about race." According to Tim Reid, who with his partner Daphne Maxwell Reid procured the DVD rights to Spook, "we felt this movie was ahead of its time and deserved a wider audience. Even now, it stands out from the crowd in Black cinema."
Though far too many people will only remember Ivan Dixon for his role on Hogan's Heroes, Nothing But a Man and The Spook Who Sat by the Door will remain as testaments to Dixon's critical role in two of the signature moments in African-American cinema.
of (Black) Men and Song (ver. 1.0)
Listening to Andy Bey is like dreaming about what you've never been. And perhaps this is what fueled Bey in the first place--the opportunity to imagine in sound, in phrase, and in melody a world yet to be inhabited by those singers male and black. It is all too easy to suggest that a vocalist like Bey might have been listening to Bobby Blue Bland, Solomon Burke or even Ira Tucker--as they all were--but there's something about Bey's delivery that suggest something more original and dare I say substantive--at least on the level of style. Bey is one of a kind--something you could only conjure in a dream, really.
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I often think about this notion of originality. A colleague of mine, an art historian of some stature, has suggested that no artist is influenced (inspired maybe?), but it's all about an active appropriation of something else(s) in route to something of their own. Ok, so Sinatra had Billie Holiday in his head and Marvin Gaye had Sinatra in his ("...in the wee small hours of the morning...) and Ronald Isley and Bobby Womack--peers and contemporaries of Sam Cooke--no doubt recalibrated because of Cooke (like Ms. Dinah did for Aretha and Nancy Wilson), though Cooke himself found the road to Damascus (that Norman is a funny Mfer) trying to sound like R. H. Harris. And nobody would say that any of these folk weren't American originals, so that's not my point.
But sometimes there is simply little that can qualify or quantify talents that just seem to drop from space. Either these singular forces change the whole endeavor--like James "on the 1" or Ms. Billie's subdued, though still sublime field moans--or they go unrecognized simply because there's little logic behind their very presence. And indeed there are any number of women folk who I'm thinking of here--Linda Jones, Betty Davis, and Bettye LaVette to name a few, but I'm also thinking about men folk like Donald Smith (brother of Lonnie Liston), Terry Callier, Jon Lucien, (even) Will Downing and of course Bey, who are almost always an afterthought when we talk about the those singers male and black, who have been charged with moving mountains and parting seas with just the turning of phrase (call it black music's Moses complex).
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I dream men like Dwight Trible--these singers black, these singers men--even as they tug at those baritone and tenor strings that so embody the very idea of some pristine, immaculate dark masculinity. Their willingness to explore the full range of their expressiveness--emotiveness gone awry--simply undermines the comfort that the deepness of their voices presupposes. And it's not like this is a new phenomenon--figures like Jimmy Scott, Ronnie Dyson, Eddie Kendricks, and Rahsaan Patterson are standard bearers of sort for this thing, but because they live(d) in a register up-above, it has always been easy to dismiss their presence--and their art--as being less than something fully masculine (as if there was such a thing). And this is where men like Trible and Jose James (like Bey and Johnny Hartman) who force us to re-imagine our investments in masculinities that don't bend and don't break..
Dwight Trible--who can make you cry--has filled a void left by the great Leon Thomas (the only vocalist other than the late Phyllis Hyman to successfully match wits with saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders). A mainstay of the Build An Ark (let it rain, let rain) collective and Trible even has a foot in the hip-hop world via his work with The Life Force Trio (something like Archie Shepp unleashed on a Primo soundscape). But to understand Trible is to acknowledge those he's...ahem...appropriated. When asked about his "influences" Trible responds "Do you know Linda Jones?... She opened up the spirit and let it all out, you know I mean, Oh God she was something special and if you listen to a record by her, you'll probably hear her influences on me in there." And of course the notion that Trible was "influenced" by Jones, belies the fact that Linda Jones is one of those obscure geniuses that one would have to actively seek out; Linda Jones doesn't just fall out of the sky into your lap.
The Living Water, Trible's grand opus (to date), is at once a tribute to the giants whose wells he replenishes from--Coltrane, Malcolm, Wayne Shorter, Abbey Lincoln, Freddie Hubbard, and the aforementioned Andy Bey--but also a measure of an art that literally flows, taking with it elements of all it comes in contact with. As such it's difficult to listen to Trible's breathtaking reimagining of Bey's "Celestial Blues" and not feel as though the full weight of this culture and this music ("this" as a signifier of "that" which we still struggle to adequately qualify and quantify as the force of blackness--a black hole if you will, which gives life and light) is coming through in every phrase and every note. And yet, this gets us back to this notion of originality--and thinking that perhaps artistic originality is ultimately about the willingness of an artist to speak back to that which she so thoroughly takes from.
(Covering) Strange
Tags: Lizz Wright, Musical Covers, The South
Location, location, location, as in when Fred Moten theorizes about the tropes and aesthetics of escape and fugitivity that power certain black expressive cultures, it is always almost understood this also about a devotion or incarceration (take your pick) to place. Simply put, there's nothing never to escape to or escape from if without this fidelity to someplace, somewhere. So when Stuart Gorrell got to thinking about "Georgia on My Mind" it was the sister of Hoagy Carmichael (who wrote the music) and we'll accept that the feminine can be a metaphor for place, but when Ray Charles sings "Georgia on My Mind" it can never be nothing but place.
Lizz Wright's most recent recordings, Dreams Wide Awake and The Orchard, evoke the beauty of the pastoral south, which for African-Americans of southern heritage, animates the irony of loving (even aesthetically) the very Southern plantations that were the literal sites of our brutality; so desired because of that very beauty (amidst the betrayal) and the capacity of these places to generate a generational wealth that we hungered for. It's no surprise that many of the institutions in Black America have appropriated some aspects of the political economy of the plantation--including aesthetically--in order function as legible subjects in an American contexts. I can't help thinking about what's on Lizz Wright's mind.
In publicity photos, Wright often possesses a sly look of bemusement, like someone whose very being is linked to a fated incarceration to the images that propel her into a relative celebrity among jazz contemporary aficionados. Wright's smile--something like an offhanded joke played out only in her mind or an all too secret shiver in her coital region--is less about the boredom of doing yet another photo-shoot where Verve can exploit her own pastoral beauty (in direct opposition in the girlish android-noids found in contemporary R&B), but an artful act that itself represents an engagement (not a masking) of the full weight of having to be in this place.
To think this "Strange" place, to turn a phrase on Wright's cover of Patsy Cline's country classic, or to consider Chocolate Genius's invocation to chase said Strangeness (duly amen-ed by Wright), is to engage in an almost remembered mythology about how race and music are supposed to be imagined. And even as we hear the strains of Craig Street, with ample assistance from Toshi Reagon, order the very logic of The Orchard, it resists being an event; instead drawing from the everyday strangeness of the those who have struggled to make sense of our devotion to that which we should (and do) ostensibly hate. I mean, imagine Lizz Wright walking into a country bar in Macon in 1962 singing somebody's Patsy Cline. And yet, how many black folk might have shed a tear when Cline's voice was silenced, as they might have shed a tear for Hank Williams, Sr. a few years before?
As such Wright's choice of covers--easily the strongest performances on The Orchard--give pause; demons (Ike Turner) and royalty (Sweet Honey in the Rock) and curiosities (Cline and Led Zeppelin) among them--the cynic in me wants to think that Wright (or likely her record company)was picking covers like one might pick peaches from an orchard in the month of June, but yet the execution of these covers suggest much more. Lizz Wright is not Norah Jones.
Wright's performance of the Ike & Tina Turner's "I Idolize You" is rife with all of the dramatic irony that was wholly missing in Tina Turner and Beyonce's recent Grammy performance of "Proud Mary"; Ms. Turner and Ms. Knowles index the considerable distances between the worlds that they and Ms. Wright inhabit, where Ms. Wright finds a freedom--laying in the [strangeness]--to critique, speak back to, argue with, and even embrace the music that was produced in collaboration with one of the most volatile and violent relationships that pop music has ever known. With our second sight firmly recalled, "I Idolize You" gives more inkling to the unhealthy obsession that Ike Turner had for the woman who served as his idol, his inspiration, and his meal ticket. Wright's version, which forces us to taste everyone of those lyrics, manages to find something there needing our care, asking us to consider how Ike Turner might have been betrayed by that place and the people trying to make sense of the absurdity of that place. Got forward a few years and listen to how Ms. Turner screams "Nutbush."
And if you've ever heard Robert Plant scream, it is perhaps apropos to ask what terror(s) he gives voice to. Plant's plaintive vocals on the original version "Thank You" sanction an emotiveness--and we can write Jeff Buckley into this also--that spoke to the boundary collapsing--politically, socially, aesthetically--of the late 1960s; boundary collapsing that was immediately policed (in some spheres they called it busing). We should read Wright's cover in that same light--of course a young black woman from rural Georgia should feel compelled to cover Led Zeppelin. Ask any black kid, who was bussed to a largely white school district (and this is my man Jon Caramanica's argument, by the way), and damned if they weren't fully present in that experience, if they tell you that they were never forced to listen to Led Zeppelin or some other version of Jesus Rock ("yes, I've seen the great guitar god!"). Perhaps ask Bettye LaVette what it means to speak back to that, though the same kids who claim to love Janis Joplin, ain't never heard of Bettye LaVette and that's the very reason why Lizz Wright has every right to sing Led Zeppelin or anybody else she so pleases to cover.
