More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an
unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural
politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlic offers an
unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life,
writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the
lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B.
Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished
manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet's skill in close
listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James
Baldwin's work and life. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin's
passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his
constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and
musicians.
Presented in three books -- or movements -- the first listens to
Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May
1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. It introduces the key
terms of his lyrical aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of
Baldwin's career from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning
journals in the 1940s to his last published and unpublished works from
the mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the
recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, singers
whose message and methods were closely related to his developing world
view. It concludes with the first detailed account of "The Hallelujah
Chorus," a performance from July 1, 1973, in which Baldwin shared the
stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles. Finally, in Book III, Pavlic
reverses our musically inflected reconsideration of Baldwin's voice,
projecting it into the contemporary moment and reading its impact on
everything from the music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances
of Turf Feinz, and the fire of racial oppression and militarization
against black Americans in the 21st century.
Always with an ear close to the music, and avoiding the safe box of
celebration, Who Can Afford to Improvise? enables a new kind of "lyrical
travel" with the instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery
Baldwin's work invokes into the world.
