Written in the language of contemporary literary theory, Soundworks is a difficult volume to digest and it is far from easy to summarise the many threads to the arguments it advances. Working through its 200 pages, it sometimes seemed as if its various themes might be better illustrated diagrammatically than in a straightforward review. Yet, Soundworks rewards perseverance.
Reed's central point concerns how black aesthetic practice evidences a social, cultural and philosophical critique of how human relationships under capitalism – in terms of race, class and gender – are defined and distorted. His focus here is on poetry and jazz in collaboration as sonic art. Reed argues that in the recordings by black jazz musicians and poets he examines, new, transgressive meanings – semiotic and semantic – can be heard to emerge. It is not just a matter of taking poetry off the page but one of poetry as sound or, to use Reed's term, ‘soundwork’; to describe these collaborations, he has also coined the word ‘phonopoem’.
The issue here is less that of poetry and music as protest in terms of its semantic content, though those poets and musicians he examines, such as Amiri Baraka, Archie Shepp and Jayne Cortez, often made specific political points in their written and recorded work. Reed is all too aware of the capacity of the culture industry to incorporate and absorb political artworks. Rather, he seeks to identify that which cannot be absorbed, that which is left over once the digestible has been consumed. It is these indigestible kernels that can be seen (or heard) to contain the seeds of human liberation.
If blackness/whiteness, gender and class are social constructs, used arbitrarily to maintain existing power relations, it is only when their arbitrary nature becomes apparent that it becomes possible to imagine worlds where such distinctions become meaningless. Hence, Reed's focus is on black sound. For, in the work of the artists he explores, the contradiction between the fractured humanity of bourgeois liberalism and real human potential are made explicit. It is here that radical art achieves the capacity to “pierce reification's veil” (p. 172). Moreover, while jazz studies have all too often emphasised the importance of black male artists, Reed gives equal prominence to the work of singer-poet Jeanne Lee, poet Jayne Cortez and saxophonist-multi-media artist Matana Roberts.
For Reed, ‘soundwork’ is a product of the coming together of all aspects of sound – the technical is in his schema as important as the aesthetic and corporeal (pp. 166–170). While he does not offer a precise definition of ‘soundwork’, it is clear that he sees this in relation to improvisation's capacity to create new affirmative identities through reframing the possible.
Taken in its most capacious sense such reframing is the task of black soundwork, for which critics must listen: an affirmation – indeed, celebration – of black life and its possibilities as they overflow available frames of thought, without conflating the distinct, overlapping irrationalities and discontinuities of sound, music, text, and blackness (p. 59).
Art is work, its meanings as process being as, or more, significant than art as product. This is particularly true of jazz. Improvisation in the context of a group demands collaboration in the fashioning of new stories and meanings and a radical practice, rather than product, is consequently less readily absorbed by the culture industry. Inevitably, the usual suspects are brought to bear from Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno to Stuart Hall and Jacques Rancière, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten. But from their statements, Reed builds a complex and convincing case for the liberatory promise of art in general, and black art in particular.
For Reed, art can create (a) commons, in the sense of the word used by Moten as shared communities of value and action. It offers the possibility of communities other than those delineated by the dominant order. “Soundworks” as recorded sound and as text, in turn, offer the potential of communities for affirmation beyond the geographical. In this context, I take Reed's term “phonopoem” to be a descriptor of a shared process and product derived from the collaborations of these poets and musicians, where the meanings of the sound are also the product of critical listening, multivalent and semiotic as much as semantic.
The most satisfying aspects of Soundworks are found in Reed's analysis of the recordings and performances he examines. Moreover, it is these sections that contain Reed's best writing. He seems able to match the tone of his analysis and description of the musical and poetic personalities of these artists, and his enthusiasm for their art is evident. While the poetry of Amiri Baraka, Charles Mingus and Langston Hughes may be reasonably familiar to those interested in this area of performed poetry, even there Reed brings fresh insights. However, when it comes to the oeuvres of Cecil Taylor and Jeanne Lee, Reed opens up whole new vistas, while, with Matana Roberts, Reed takes the reader on a voyage of discovery.
My only reservation regarding Soundworks relates to the terminology-ridden language of contemporary literary theory that often intrudes. Reed's arguments are too valuable to limit their reach through an excess of jargon. This reader was frequently forced to ask, “What's up synecdoche?”. That said, Soundworks is an intriguing, fascinating work. Just keep the latest Webster close by.
