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Dan Rosenberg<\/strong> offers an appreciation of Sidney Finkelstein, who died on 14 January 1974.<\/em><\/p>\n Out Jumped Sidney<\/strong><\/p>\n The Marxist cultural critic Sidney Finkelstein lived in a suitcase in my mother\u2019s closet. My parents never used the suitcase in question for travel. When I was around 13, in 1966, I asked my father what the deal was with this suitcase. He put it on the big bed and opened it up, and out jumped several hundred pamphlets, booklets, and magazines, with materials by Finkelstein among them. They were all publications of the Communist Party USA, to which my parents, along with Finkelstein, belonged. Having worn red diapers all my life I was not completely taken by surprise, but my dad went on to explain that during the McCarthy period of the 1950s, (coinciding with my infancy) we had gone underground.<\/p>\n My parents lived a secret existence on the recommendation of the Party in the face of potential fascism. And my mother and father had cleaned out many of their books, while locking up the remainder in the green suitcase, which remained in hiding for more than ten years.<\/p>\n Encounters with Jazz<\/strong><\/p>\n Upon Sidney\u2019s release from the suitcase, I was able to read his articles on the arts and proceeded to acquire at last his fundamental book on jazz: Jazz: A People\u2019s Music. Sidney came out of the suitcase in the form of articles written for a magazine once called Masses & Mainstream and then Mainstream. My eyes rested first on one with an orange cover. Finkelstein had the headlining article: \u201cJazz: National Expression or International Folk Music.\u201d It appeared in 1960. That was the year I had begun studying the drums under the percussionist Roger \u201cMontego Joe\u201d Sanders in Brooklyn, from whom I learned a bit about improvising. [I learned a little later that he worked with Nina Simone, and much later that he recorded with Max Roach].<\/p>\n After the Beatles appeared in the U.S. in 1964, I went hunting across the radio dial in search of as much of their music as possible. When I could not find it on the AM stations, I turned in frustration to the ones on FM. This became an adventure culminating in two jazz stations at the far end, reception fading in and out although they were right there in New York City where I lived: WRVR and WLIB-FM. On the latter, I encountered the pianist Billy Taylor one afternoon as I struggled with my maths homework. He was the station\u2019s most illustrious disc jockey, and he explained and taught between the records. In time, I found \u201cJust Jazz with Ed Beach\u201d on WRVR, featuring two and four-hour programmes on particular musicians, with Beach\u2019s puns in the interludes. The names then appeared to me for the first time: Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, Freddie Hubbard, Hank Mobley. I never abandoned the Beatles, but more often I lived on the edge of the FM dial. In the same year I read Sidney\u2019s article on jazz in Mainstream, my dad took me to see Duke Ellington at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.<\/p>\n Around and about the Left movement in New York City, I certainly had heard of Sidney Finkelstein. My piano teacher knew him well, and spoke of him often when I mentioned my growing interest in jazz. Her appraisal in 1966 was a mixture of admiration and pity. He could have done so much, could have gone so far with his knowledge in a more tolerant society. She thought of him as simply brilliant, but spoke rather snidely of the fact that he could not play an instrument. She described to me his hands and fingers: fat, she said. Ungainly. Clumsy, cumbersome, too thick for the delicacy of piano fingering. She went on about her friend Sidney: he lacked style, and was a bit crude. I did not think much about this. I did not know him yet. Besides, she wasn\u2019t such a great teacher.<\/p>\n Finkelstein\u2019s Work<\/strong><\/p>\n Meantime, I slowly made my way through the bushel of Finkelstein articles now free of underground existence. In a piece \u201cHow Art Began\u201d (1954), Finkelstein discussed how early societies imaged their existences through artistic expression: pottery, increasingly embellished, for storage of food, water, and seeds; cave paintings, in depiction of the rituals of the hunt; burial tombs with carvings, portraits, and sculpture, culminating in pyramids; dances reflecting the rhythms of work, the gods, birth and death. Nothing arises from people more naturally than art, wrote Finkelstein. But in exploitive societies, the \u201cruling class sees only itself as human,\u201d impacting the acceptable forms and depictions. Nevertheless, working and lower class populations find \u201cways and means to express in art the humanity of the ruled, the \u2018nobodies.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n He wrote on architecture, film, literature, painting, and poetry, and more than once on Shakespeare. I had difficulty understanding everything. Mainstream and Masses & Mainstream possessed an impressive board of editors, to which Sidney belonged from the outset in 1948. Screenwriters like John Howard Lawson, writers like Lloyd Brown, Howard Fast, Phillip Bonosky, Jesus Colon, Barbara Giles, and Shirley Graham, artists like Hugo Gellert, scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, Herbert Aptheker, and Annette Rubenstein. Paul Robeson\u2019s name was always on the masthead.<\/p>\n Most were in or close to the Communist Party. Party members on the magazine belonged to the same Party club or branch of people working in the field of culture. Blacklisted journal full-timers were not among those who went underground but instead worked as open Communists, including Sidney. Masses & Mainstream started as a fairly appealing and large-format left-wing journal (taking off from the widely circulated but defunct New Masses), but the Cold War and anti-Communist persecutions beat it down into the narrower Mainstream.<\/p>\n My parents rebuilt their book collection even before they took the magazines out of the suitcase, but they owned none of Sidney\u2019s books. Later I acquired Realism in Art, How Music Expresses Ideas, Art and Society, Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature, Sense & Nonsense of McLuhan, and Composer and Nation. I showed a deft hand in obtaining books, sometimes without the knowledge of their owners. But in my mid-teens, Jazz: A People\u2019s Music was the one I wanted. My aunt had a substantial collection of old jazz records, given by her father: a good deal of Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, and Teddy Wilson. She had a four-album set of Louis Armstrong, also Duke Ellington\u2019s Masterpieces by Ellington. Of these, she made a present to me in 1970. And when I was about to leave her house with the record-laden shopping bags, she gave me Jazz: A People\u2019s Music. It appears that she was not the only one who made a present of it.<\/p>\n Back home, I studied it like the Bible. To this day, I am surprised that so few jazz historians and observers have mentioned his book. Then again, it was written in Cold War times. The well-known jazz critic Martin Williams certainly knew of Finkelstein, but told me in 1985 that he found it laughable for Marxists to write about jazz. His guffaw was instructive. Of those who commented favorably or drew upon the book, most were on or close to the Left: Francis Newton (the British historian E.J. Hobsbawm), Frank Kofsky, Amiri Baraka, and Ross Russell stood out. In his biography of Charlie Parker, Russell referred to Sidney as \u201ca recluse,\u201d \u201ctough and hardboiled,\u201d and \u201cproletarian.\u201d<\/p>\n I was soon thrilled to learn that Finkelstein would be coming to our house to lead a discussion on culture, sponsored by my parents\u2019 Party club. I determined to obtain his autograph on the sacred day, which was a Friday in December 1970. The crowd was already sitting in our living and dining rooms when he arrived. I had been clutching the holy book all night, and I came running when he rang the bell. He entered the house and I was rendered speechless with fright. I quickly gave Jazz: A People\u2019s Music to my brother Jesse and whispered that he should get Sidney to sign it for me. Sidney happily complied but autographed it \u201cTo Jesse with regards,\u201d an everlasting humiliation whose ink is sadly still visible.<\/p>\n Jazz: A People\u2019s Music<\/strong><\/p>\n Finkelstein published his book on jazz in 1948. He dedicated it to the birth of modern Israel, which took place that year. There had as yet been no wars between Israel and the Arab states. Finkelstein hoped that Jews and Arabs might live together peacefully. Finkelstein\u2019s subtitle, A People\u2019s Music, reflected his belief that African-Americans were its initiators and developers. The belittling, ignoring, ridiculing, stereotyping, and commercializing of jazz, in his view, belonged to the overall oppression of African-Americans. Supporting, appreciating, teaching, listening, and exploring the theories and accomplishments of jazz musicians were on the other hand part and parcel of fighting for equality. Leftwing artist Jules Halfant supplied illustrations for Finkelstein\u2019s book. As Art Director of Vanguard Records during Finkelstein\u2019s later years, Halfant hired Sidney to write liner notes. Sidney often gave Joan Baez and other Vanguard LPs to his friends. When I knew Halfant, he was on the board of a progressive Jewish children\u2019s school in Brooklyn, which one of my brothers attended.<\/p>\n At the time Jazz: A People\u2019s Music was published Finkelstein held to the Communist Party\u2019s view that the African-American people in the United States were an oppressed nation. U.S. Communists particularly applied the thesis to the contiguous areas of black majority or near majority in a region of Southern states, strongholds of slavery a century before. Their espousal of \u201cself-determination\u201d shared certain characteristics with anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa.<\/p>\n Finkelstein\u2019s first chapter is one of the clearest outlines of the emergence of a field of music. He asserts, \u201cThis genuine creation within jazz is an imposing production, the most important and lasting body of music yet produced in the United States.\u201d Thanks to the best in jazz (for he saw the influences of commercialism and branding), \u201cour age will be respected in the future.\u201d But jazz stemmed from many influences, thus assimilating old elements into a \u201cwholly new music.\u201d Since its main innovators came from \u201cthe most exploited people among us,\u201d Finkelstein was not surprised that by its white evaluators \u201cit is called\u2026\u2018barbaric.\u2019\u201d Significant achievement lay in their incorporation of African musical styles, \u201cEuropean hymn tunes, French folk songs, Spanish songs and dances, mountain songs and dances which were transplanted growths from Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n The Black Belt, 1936<\/em><\/p>\n It was above all \u201ca fresh and new musical creation\u201d of the \u201cNegro people.\u201d And, wrote Finkelstein in 1948, they constituted \u201ca group within America, a nation within a nation.\u201d Bringing together the Marxist criteria, he observed that African-Americans, \u201cbound together by their common economic life and struggle\u2026have built up a history, tradition, and cultural life of their own, along with a growing sense of their own nationhood.\u201d U.S. Communists would eventually abrogate the nationhood theory in the face of crucial socio-economic developments. But they nonetheless maintained the conviction that the fight for black equality was indeed a \u201cnational question\u201d central to the rights of all working people.<\/p>\n Ellington\u2019s Role<\/strong><\/p>\n Finkelstein explained that jazz is both simple and intricate, containing group, individual, social and reciprocal components. He objected strenuously to biased assertions of the \u201csubconscious,\u201d natural,\u201d and indeed \u201cprimitive\u201d attributes of jazz improvising. On the contrary, \u201cjazz is a flow of emotion in music guided by the most conscious skill, taste, artistry, and intelligence.\u201d The notion that \u201cmusicians who can\u2019t read notes\u201d create jazz tends to cheapen the integrity of improvisation. His extended treatment of the magnificent Duke Ellington is a comprehensive argument for the intelligence at the core of jazz. More than anyone else, submits Finkelstein, Ellington\u2019s \u201chandling of instrumental sound, \u2026power of melody, \u2026rightness of harmony and interweaving of melodic lines\u2026made many products of the conservatories seem, by comparison, mechanical and bloodless.\u201d Ellington\u2019s \u201cunity and variety\u201d often appeared through three movements of a composition: \u201can opening theme, which is actually a group of two or three melodies, and is antiphonal from the very first bars.\u201d This \u201cA\u201d section of a piece might be played twice. The \u201cB\u201d which followed was \u201cfrequently the section where the blues enter, often treated as a series of solos or duets.\u201d The closing reiteration of \u201cA\u201d always contained \u201ca new harmonic twist, a cadence of instrumental reply, rounding out the performance like the classical \u2018coda.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Bebop<\/strong><\/p>\n Finkelstein made many of the same points on jazz complexity in his other writings on music. The same year that Jazz: A People\u2019s Music came out he published \u201cWhat About Bebop\u201d in the September Masses & Mainstream. Here he discussed the latest genre in greater detail than in the book. He defended the startling new sound, whose beacon was Charlie Parker, as in full keeping with the \u201cconstant experiment and change\u201d characteristic of the \u201cmain line of jazz.\u201d He showed its constituent past, the blues and the music of Kansas City and the Southwest epitomized by Count Basie and Lester Young. He pointed out that a certain \u201cbitterness\u201d came through this particularly \u201cwitty\u201d music marked by \u201cunresolved dissonances, chromatic notes, common chords with raised or lowered notes.\u201d It demanded \u201cmusical tight-rope walking\u201d and \u201cthe most knowing musicianship.\u201d Finkelstein reminded his readers that bebop again revealed \u201cthe pre-eminence of the Negro musician in every new development of jazz.\u201d<\/p>\n His bebop article welcomed the other heralds of the new style: trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummers Max Roach and Art Blakey, saxophonists Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon, and Lucky Thompson, pianists Thelonious Monk and Tadd Dameron, trombonist J.J. Johnson. In another venue, Finkelstein warned: \u201cAlways in jazz, each innovation that found a public was immediately vulgarized, commercialized, and imitated by white musicians who made far more money than the genuine black originators.\u201d Elsewhere he added that black jazz musicians faced pressures not to remain creative: \u201cto clown, to play a role dictated by managers, agents, and sensation-mongers.\u201d Moreover \u201cpowerful commercial music houses\u201d would rather the artist \u201cplug\u201d or \u201cput over\u201d the \u201csongs they want to make into hits.\u201d And in \u201cJazz: National Expression or International Folk Music\u201d (mentioned above), he took issue with his fellow Communist E.J. Hobsbawm for failing to appreciate the crucial role of African-Americans in shaping jazz, to which he devoted the entire final chapter of his history of classical music, Composer and Nation.<\/p>\n A Master Class with Finkelstein<\/strong><\/p>\n On the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend 1971, about a month before my 18th birthday, I went over to Sidney Finkelstein\u2019s house. He had just moved to our neighborhood. I brought Jazz: A People\u2019s Music with me. While at college that Fall I had made careful notes about music I wished to explore and discuss with him. Although my earliest jazz discoveries included the musicians most eminent when I was a teenager, particularly John Coltrane, my focus on this day was the tenor saxophonist Young and the alto saxophonist Parker. I especially wanted to listen to Young\u2019s recordings with Count Basie from the 1930s.<\/p>\n True, I had picked up a Basie album in one of the record stores in the town of State College, Pennsylvania, but it dated from the 1940s band that had Lucky Thompson on tenor. I would come to respect Thompson as a superior musician and composer, but at the time I was set on deepening my understanding of Young, and his disciple Parker. Finkelstein remarked that Count Basie \u201cwas strong in the one point where [Duke] Ellington had been comparatively weak. Ellington had never made much of the solo tenor sax\u2026\u201d This point may have been truer when Sidney\u2019s Jazz was published (though at the same time he recognized the importance of tenorist Ben Webster to Ellington), but Ellington would make much greater use of tenor soloists in later years, especially Paul Gonsalves. In any case, I wanted to hear the Basie sound with Young, which Sidney described so evocatively: the opening spare piano on so many pieces, the powerful bass and rhythm guitar, the drummer Jo Jones\u2019 mastery of the high-hat, and the powerful riffs behind and in between the soloists.<\/p>\n Lester Young<\/em><\/p>\n Sidney opened up the door and let me in. It was a sprawling house. A burly fellow, he drew me into his living room, which contained built-in bookcases on every wall. Perhaps he had more upstairs. I was envious, books were packed like commuters struggling to breathe on the subway, floor to ceiling. My one-time neighbor, the great Puerto Rican Communist writer Jes\u00fas Col\u00f3n, who had been an editor with Sidney of Masses & Mainstream, had had a similar set-up. But Jes\u00fas had lived in an apartment, towering his books in the hallways.<\/p>\n Sidney shelved his records similarly, in the dining room: all the walls were covered, even above the windows. He filed them by type: classical, folk, jazz, blues. Within each, he classified them by period and genre. At the end of each shelf, he attached a sign to guide his searches. The majority of his records were 78 RPMs, no surprise considering that this format had characterized music releases for most of his life. We had some 78s at home as well. From Sidney\u2019s records, the root of the \u201calbum\u201d concept was pretty obvious: a collection of songs, like a collection of photos. Here were a number of Teddy Wilson\u2019s records with Billie Holiday and Lester Young, in a hardcover binder containing ten 78s, with two songs apiece. Over there were Benny Goodman sets, with Lionel Hampton, Gene Krupa, and Wilson. Like books, the spines of the binders held the titles.<\/p>\n But thousands of LPs took up one side of the dining room. I do not know how Sidney could get the ones from the upper reaches. I did not notice a ladder enabling him to do so, or to pluck a book from the thin atmosphere by the ceiling. I\u2019m sure he had a way. I had told Sidney over the phone of my concentration on Young and Parker. In the most extreme Brooklyn accent I had ever heard, he confirmed the goal of our session. While he went over to the stacks of 78s, I browsed his long-playing records. Sidney knew where the desired 78s were, so I did not have much time. He had one shelf with the modern jazz names with which I had become initiated into jazz. I remember in living color: Sonny Rollins\u2019 Saxophone Colossus, Charles Mingus\u2019 Pithecanthropus Erectus, John Coltrane\u2019s Giant Steps, and Ornette Coleman\u2019s The Shape of Jazz to Come, an elite representation for sure.<\/p>\n Young and Parker<\/strong><\/p>\n Sidney came back to the record player with a stack of albums of 78s. We began with \u201cLester Leaps In,\u201d went then to \u201cDickie\u2019s Dream\u201d and \u201cOne O\u2019 Clock Jump\u201d (on which Young played the second tenor solo)…..<\/p>\n![\"DR](\"images\/culture\/DR_book_front.png\")
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