We are publishing the vision statement for our symposium “Seizing Our Future: The Revolutionary Music of Ellington, Mingus, Sun Ra and Bootsy,” May 10-11th, 2025 in Philadelphia.
“The mystic spell of Africa is and ever was over all America. It has guided her hardest work, inspired her finest literature and sung her sweetest songs. Her greatest destiny—unsensed and despised though it be—is to give back to the first of continents the gifts which Africa of old gave to America’s fathers’ fathers’.”
W.E.B. Du Bois
“The people must prove to the people a better day is coming.”
Curtis Mayfield
Arising from the ancient African village, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, plantation slavery, Civil War, Black Reconstruction, the Black Church and Revolution, Black music is at once the music of Black freedom and of humanity’s quest for freedom and democracy. It is everything African, everything modern and futuristic. It joins the rhythms, melodies and work songs of Africa with the folk and classical music of the world’s cultures. In the end it is everything African, everything human and thus All Humanity in its scope and essence. It is a companion to the new movement of world thought initiated by W.E.B. Du Bois at the start of the 20th century. It is a new music for the epoch of the rise of AfroAsia.
It is evidence of the complex, yet ever unfolding, history of Black folk and the history of their consciousness. During enslavement it merged Africa’s art, poetry and music to Black America’s struggle for freedom, producing Sorrow Songs (a rhythmic narrative of a disappointed people) which defined this new people, in this strange land. This new people in spite of everything created music, art, poetry and an unbending spiritual striving to be free.
With the end of slavery, a new form of Black music, the Blues, was invented. The Blues expressed the consciousness of Black folk in the throes of the chaos and uncertainty after slavery and the defeat of Reconstruction. The Sorrow Songs and Blues are the folk music of Black America; they contain unique rhythms, cadences and melodies, alongside hitherto unknown chord structures, intervals and musical notes, that for the white world were exotic, mysterious and even threatening. They were sad, expressing tragedy in ways unknown to European classical and folk music. There was, on occasion glimpses of joy, satire and playfulness. But what defined this folk music was an unyielding desire to be free and opposition to their oppressors and slave owners. This is the oldest American music and the foundation upon which all American music stands. It is the ground of the American artistic, musical and spiritual lived worlds. If an American people is to be created out of the chaos of the current crisis, it will be due in no small measure to the art and music of Black striving.
With the 20th century new forms of the synthesis of the Sorrow Songs and the Blues occurred, energized by the incorporation of new instruments and large and smaller group configurations. New chords, melodies, lyrics and rhythms produced a thoroughly modern music. This started a new world movement of music. It would lay the foundation, although hardly recognized early on, for a new civilization. As such a new music for humanity was being created; an extraordinary gift.
These composers and musicians, while dismissed, trivialized and mocked, courageously embraced the purpose of their music and marched forward. Their advanced guard, despite everything, began to glimpse the revolutionary and futuristic possibilities of what they were doing. Discriminated against, lynched, jailed, forced to compose and perform in the most humiliating conditions, they took instruments cast aside by most white musicians and produced new sounds. They literally reinvented old European instruments, played them in unusual ways, expressive of their interior lives and their people’s history. In historic and unprecedented imaginative leaps, they went from Black folk music to a music that rivaled the European classical repertoires. This was an achievement of collective genius. Showing virtuosic expressiveness, they spoke to the collective suffering, as well the personal and interior lives of a people only a generation out from slavery. In a world where white supremacy dehumanized Black folk, these composers and musicians showed them in all of their humanness and complexity.
This new 20th century music reflected a new level of Black people’s consciousness. The composers and musicians represented a new type of revolutionary and freedom fighter; their music was a new revolutionary declaration.
In the early 20th century, the musicians and composers evidenced unusual virtuosity and artistic discipline. This music began to show a collective virtuosity; especially as they taught themselves the possibilities of European instruments. They engaged the European classical and folk repertoires; in fact, reinventing orchestral and small group formats first developed by Europeans. They were insatiable in their search to know the possibilities of music. Their sacrifice for the purpose of art and freedom was in many ways unimaginable; their courage in the face of mocking and oppression had perhaps never been seen. The volume and varied types of what they created exceeded their white peers in Europe and the United States. These were unschooled geniuses propelled by a desire to impart to their sisters and brothers dignity and freedom. And to show to the world what Black genius looked like. Seldom have musicians and composers occupied a place as the revolutionary vanguard of their people, as was the case with these musicians. While unacknowledged by the white American music world, these artists were sought out in Europe, Asia and South America. Musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden, King Oliver and Sydney Bechet found receptive and encouraging audiences outside the U.S.
Larger orchestral groups and small ensemble formats were experimented with. Groups of five and seven, a type of small big band, were the earliest arrangement. The earliest forms of improvisation were primarily collective. Larger orchestras grew out of marching bands. The large orchestras appear mainly in the 1920s, exemplified by Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and James Reese Europe.
The music began to take on greater structure, characteristic of symphonic orchestras and chamber ensembles. Henderson and Ellington were the vanguard of a new symphonic, experimental revolutionary music, that fit the tastes and aspirations of young and militant Black audiences of the Harlem Renaissance. The Black talented tenth rushed to embrace this new music. It was celebrated by poets, writers, intellectuals and revolutionaries. Many were fascinated by, some even becoming supporters of, the Russian Revolution. They started to view Black folk as a nation within a nation. Despite the changes in the music, instruments and size of the orchestras, freedom and the exploration of the Black lived world remained their purpose.
At the same time this new music explored the spiritual lives of ordinary Black folk. In spite of the racist characterization of Black folk, this music alongside poets and writers asserted that Black folk in all their varied physical types, of colors, sizes, class backgrounds and locations, were beautiful and were a people of dignity who must be respected. The musicians and composers heard the music and words of Bessie Smith and Gertrude Ma Rainey. They could hear through them the language and ways of speaking, aspirations and problems of everyday life in a racist society where most Black people were poor, occupying the lowest rungs on the economic ladder. But then the musicians, most of whom grew up in the South, knew the agonies and disappointments as well as the joys of most Black people. Their improvisations presented the chance to express feelings that they could not otherwise express.
Du Bois declared the problem of the modern world was the color line and race; he was in effect establishing the foundations of a new movement of world thought. Black music of the 20th century was the musical equivalent of this new world movement of thought.
Like Du Bois, the composers and musicians looked back to the Civil War and Reconstruction and understood the significance of the emancipation of four million enslaved workers. But a counterrevolution, against their emancipation occurred also. Being children and grandchildren of slaves and having grown up under severe Jim Crow segregation and terror, the counterrevolution against their people’s freedom was a personal matter. They looked with horror at the rise of whiteness and the nationalization of racist terror and laws that supported all of this. They, however, resolved to fight.
Many of them were aware of the competing political platforms of Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey and various ideologies from socialism and communism, to liberalism and Black capitalism. All of this infused their music with a politics not previously seen on this level in American music. In the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, they began to see the defeat of Reconstruction through new and radical lenses. The sole answer to racial oppression, they reasoned, was complete freedom. They saw in Pan Africa and Pan Asia allied movements to their own. Their imaginations quickly took on a Pan African and Pan Asian sensibility.
After slavery, minstrelsy was a desired form of Black performance for white audiences. By participating in this degrading entertainment many artists sought acceptance and money; raising the question, What is Black music? The advanced guard of Black composers and musicians increasingly saw Black music as that music that stood up for Black people; anything else was musical surrender to white supremacy and entertainment for white folk, seeking confirmation of their racist views. Hence music must serve the people, dignify them and raise their consciousness.
In the end, this must inevitably emerge from a new consciousness and a new imagination—a Black Proletariat Imaginary. The Black Proletariat Imaginary grounded the new music in three foundations: Love, a Moral/Revolutionary Imperative, and Freedom.
After World War II new experiments took place. Such artists as Charles Parker, Bud Powell, Thelonius Monk, Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie challenged previous norms, while deepening the commitment to radical change. Paul Robeson in many respects was their ideological leader; they agreed with him that the musician and artist must take a stand on the right side of world revolutionary forces. They were in the forefront of supporting Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Movement.
In the last half of the 20th century, as the Civil Rights Movement exploded in the nation and as a new Black Arts Movement captured the consciousness of Black folk, new musical movements arose. In jazz, such artists as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, and Miles Davis created new fusions of earlier forms of jazz, while advancing new musical experiments. The political and ideological dimensions of the music were made more prominent. The AfroAsiatic commitments became more radical.
Support of the world revolutionary process and African and Asian independence movements deepened; as did exploring and embracing non-Western religious and philosophical practices such as Islam, African spiritual and cosmological systems, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Some openly embraced the writings of Mao Zedong and the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. Many rushed to support the Black Panther Party, Angela Davis, the Attica prisoners’ uprising, and freedom for political prisoners. At the same time in R&B a romantic ideal appeared, exploring the special forms of Black romantic love, Black erotic sensibilities, and an embrace of the beauty of Black men and women. Composers and musicians like Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone and Donny Hathaway composed music and lyrics that addressed poverty, war and peace, civil rights and the special possibilities of Black people loving one another in a white supremacist society.
A Symposium and Conversation to Reclaim the Revolutionary Possibilities of Music
Deploying this worldview and in organizing this symposium, the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation will examine compositional and performative legacies of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra and Bootsy Collins to investigate the democratic and revolutionary essence of their work and its meaning for this time of crisis. By taking seriously this great music and the four composers we will examine, we are taking Black people and the liberation of humanity from empire and imperialism seriously. We view this as a common reach for the future. In so doing we seek to reground the ideological and political struggles in the 21st century. We believe it is necessary that every current of past cultural and artistic revolutions be a part of, and be critical to, the thinking of all revolutionaries, democrats, socialists and fighters for peace in this time. This is at the same time a political and critical rejection of corporate pop culture and the efforts of the ruling elites to cognitively, morally, and culturally manipulate the U.S. and world peoples, especially young people and the poor. Corporate pop culture is artistically empty and in the end, antirevolutionary and antipeople.
Using videos of live performances and recordings of their most important work and discussion we will ask the question, Is this music still relevant, can it be reclaimed for this time of crisis and if so what must be done to guarantee it?
In embracing the Great Sacrifice and the Moral Courage of Ellington, Mingus, Sun Ra and Bootsy Collins, we express our faith in the possibility of a new cultural and political Renaissance for this time.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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