Jazz isn't dead, it's underground
- jeancar6
- Aug 14
- 3 min read
A Trumpet in the Tomb
Invisible reader, step back onto my Portland rooftop. I am Jean Carlo (JC), a queer Puerto Rican hip-hop head, sketchbook addict, husband to Gary, and late-night companion to every MAX train rumbling past our apartment. Class asked whether jazz is dead or just playing possum, so I opened Henry Dumas’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and let its pages wrestle with two heavyweight thinkers: Frank Wilderson’s Afro pessimism and Fred Moten’s Black Optimism.
The club with no windows
Dumas places his story in the Sound Barrier Club, a hidden room where the door policy is simple: no cops, no whiteness, no outside noise. Inside, horns bend gravity. Outside, the block swears the place never existed. This is nonrelationality in surround sound. The music breathes only for ears that know how to listen. Everyone else files a missing-art report and stamps “dead” on the style.
Wilderson’s funeral program
Frank Wilderson says Black life lives in social death, excluded from the category of human. Jazz, forged in Black creativity, inherits the same label. Capitalism can sell Louis Armstrong mugs in airport shops yet push the living art to the margins. A crate of Blue Note vinyl for five dollars at an antique mall is social death pressed on wax.
Moten’s resurrection chorus
Fred Moten answers that even a tagged corpse can hum. Jazz refuses museum glass by jamming in basements, sampling itself into hip hop beats, and filling Tuesday open mics where nobody leaves rich but everybody leaves warm. What looks dead to the market grows fresh lungs at one in the morning.
Miles, the gravedigger who loved the ghost
Miles Davis once snapped that jazz “was never meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.” He was not burying the music. He mocked anyone who embalmed it in nostalgia. Bolt a body to a pedestal and do not act surprised when it stops dancing.
Three snapshots
1. Vinyl yard sale
A Coltrane record marked five dollars. The world labels it retro decor. Wilderson calls it proof of social death.
2. Basement CPR
A Portland jam after midnight. The first horn squeaks then soars. Moten points and says the art is building new organs out of sweat and feedback.
3. Circle remix
A producer chops an Ellington lick into a drill beat. The circle breaks, twists, and spins again. Dumas’s question about the unbroken circle gets answered with each remix that refuses a quiet grave.
My take from the roof
Jazz is not a corpse. Jazz is refusal. It dodges the boardroom and chooses basements where solos mutate nightly, safe from price tags. That refusal echoes Black life: declared dead by power yet pulsing with after-hours resilience. Jazz hums in frequencies capitalism cannot chart, and that hum is its pulse.
The city hum dips. A lone trumpet tries a note, sours it, sweetens it, then lets it float away. Maybe jazz is dead only to ears addicted to perfection. Up here, the horn still talks.
JC (He/Him)
tuning words to the key of late night Portland…love.
Sources
1. Miles Davis quote on jazz as a museum piece – AZQuotes
2. Henry Dumas, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” – Oxford American, Aug 31 2021
3. Frank B Wilderson III, Afropessimism review – The New Yorker, Jul 20 2020
4. Fred Moten, “Black Optimism Black Operation” – PDF
Comments