ment: twenty bucks a week for a year), Ed scored his first film composition gig. Little did he know the door it would open. “I went to deliver this score and here was this filmmaker, editing away in his basement, and I thought, ‘That’s all it takes?! You can do that?’ That stuck.”

“Jazz is the one element of American life where Whites must be humble to Negroes.”

As the ’50s rolled in, Bland spent his days studying, hustling gigs, and spending many long nights debating with friends, Black and White, about the state of all things worldly, particularly in jazz. A more laid-back form of jazz stemming from the West Coast, performed and popularized mostly by Whites and called by many West Coast or cool jazz, was hitting the airwaves. It seemed it was all that Bland’s White peers—filmmakers, musicians, intellectuals-could talk about. “We’d hang out a lot at a bar called Jimmy’s, and get in these arguments with all these jazz-critics-to-be. They were mostly White, and I felt there was a racial angle too; I felt they were trying to, shall we say, wipe the Blackness out of jazz. And they wouldn’t listen to us, so we decided to put it in stone,” he laughs.

The “us” was a motley crew consisting of Ed and three other Black friends: Mark Kennedy, Nelam Hill, and Eugene Titus—a novelist, city planner, and mathematician respectively—and though it would take several years for the seeds to sprout into script, then a few more into celluloid, The Cry of Jazz would prove singularly iconoclastic. KHTB
Productions (an acronym of each principal’s last name) was born. Ed, himself now a postal worker, would direct, cowrite and score the film, funded when “every two weeks or so, money came from one of our four paychecks. And of course we knew nothing about making a film.”

Relying on dozens of volunteers to pull it off, the short, shot on 16 mm for a cost of roughly $3500 and first screened in ’59, is a monumental literal and figurative black-and white dialectic that uses jazz as both lens and springboard for interpreting America’s past, present, and future ills (and possibilities.) Black life is seen as a reflection of jazz and jazz as a reflection of Black life, all broken down by Black men who are not only their White peers’ equals but clearly
are schoolin’ them. The blunt, didactic style pushes a jungle fever tinged (hey, kickin’ that knowledge is sexy!) history lesson that not only peeks into ghetto life on Chicago’s South Side—from the streets to the church to the pool halls and jazz clubs—but also presages, among many things, the popularity of rock and roll, the rapturous embrace of jazz by other countries, the American race riots of the late ’60s, as well as, believe it or not, the evolution of hip-hop. True, no rappers, but the science of the loop is in full effect. Not to mention the rare live footage of Bland’s good friend, SunRa and his Arkestra, featuring John Gilmore and Julian Priester, throughout.

“When the film came out, the response was hideous,”
Bland says. “Very few liked it. The Marxists hated it ’cause it was independent of how they thought Blacks should think. But aside from me being called a Black fascist or whatever,

84 waxpoetics

a few people thought it quite unique.” One of these people
was NYC filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who, in the beginning
of ’60, organized a roundtable discussion that included
Bland, Nat Hentoff, Marshall Stearns, and Ralph Ellison.
“NYC was beckoning, ’cause I couldn’t get any real music
work in Chicago; the unions were segregated. So, shortly
after I moved, there was this screening. Ellison hated it. I
didn’t realize he was interested in music. But I never knew
it, ’cause he seemed to know nothing of music, and I told
him that on stage. People got upset and called the police.
That was the beginning of my life in New York.” Bland was
interested in pursuing film, but his second screenplay, The
American Hero, “went out to about 109 production companies and I got 109 rejections,” he laughs. “So I thought I better get back to writing my own music.”

“Jazz is dead because the Negro needs more room to
tell his story!”

Bland, now with a young family himself, began hustling
to pay the bills, taking union and non-union cash dates,
whoever the artist. One client was Audio Fidelity Records
and Ray Charles. “Well, when we were shooting Cry of Jazz, we were in Holy Roller Baptist Pentecostal churches, and I was standing there just so moved, and I said, ‘What the fuck am I doing fucking around with all this atonal Schoenberg stuff when this feeling is here? Have I fucked up my whole life going the wrong way musically?’ I knew that wasn’t the case, but I had to look into this and see just what the fuck they’re doing so I could incorporate it, and, lo and behold, the first gig I get are arrangements on some Ray Charles stuff. So I had to learn the gospel harmonies, ’cause I’d paid no attention to that shit. Oh, it failed, believe me. But it opened up that whole world of funk to me.”

The essence of that funk--the church--also inspired Bland via a Ray Charles cover by a musician using a church instrument in a more directly funky way. “When McGriff came out with ‘I’ve Got a Woman’ with that Hammond organ, a sound that—because of the timbre of the instrument—is as funky as possibly can be, I knew there was a whole area to mine here.” Thus, Bland enlisted his funky pal Sun Ra. “He was a bit different musically but very solid, versatile. I used Sun Ra and his men on a lot of rock-and roll dates.” One of those dates would be for an obscure
children’s record company out of New Jersey who wanted
to put out a surfer-inspired LP of Batman and Robin tunes.
So Bland slapped Sun Ra’s Arkestra (including Sun Ra on
keyboards) with the popular all-White outfit, the Blues
Project, who Ed had also been employing. “I’d often use
people from the Blues Project, ’cause they were able to get
a ‘Blacker’ feeling than the so-called jazz musicians when it
had to be rough. Well, I said to myself, ‘Oh wow, it simply
gets weirder and weirder!’ ”

One jazz musician who was doing his best to stay hip
with both Black and White audiences at the time was
Lionel Hampton. One day, Bland, who had also been writing
off and on for the King of Swing, brought him a chart
he’d been working on called “Greasy Greens.” Bland says,

Museum of Modern Art promo for Ed Bland, 1971. Photograph by Helen Levitt. Background: Sheet music for “Skunk Juice,” composed by Ed Bland