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As with so many of the Inferno’s spectacles, Dante describes the procession by way of a failed simile or negative description. Hell’s music is, at the same time, both similar and dissimilar to that of Earth – the poet evokes the sounds and movements of the Aretine army band, only to tell us that Malacoda’s bugle is far stranger than any earthly trumpet, and the demonic march it signals far rowdier. Pointing to the many instances of distorted sacred songs found in the first cantica, Francesco Ciabattoni has noted that the cacophonous music of the Inferno “expresses the perversion of the human dimension and of the cosmic order... [t]he distortion of the musical order itself becomes a means of punishment for the souls: instrumentum musicalis punitionis.” In the case of the demonic musicians, though, it is not sacred music that is being distorted, but a trumpet’s fanfare, crudely rendered as a blaring fart.
“The trumpet,” according to the musicologist Don Smithers, “is more than a musical instrument: it is an idea, a concept, with deeper allegorical associations.” Think, for instance, of the seven heavenly trumpets sounded by an angelic brass band in the book of Revelation, meant to rouse sinners to repentance, or the two silver chazozra Moses is commanded to fashion in order to sound the gathering of the Hebrew tribes. In both cases, the blaring of a trumpet sounds out a divine command. Presumably such an allegorical association between the trumpet and heavenly might lies at the symbolic root of military brass bands, Aretine or otherwise, whose blaring music, as John Wallace and Alexander McGrattan put it, embodies an association between “the trumpet’s tone quality” and “absolute power.” What makes Malacoda’s ass-trumpet both shocking and hilarious is the way it subverts such allegorical associations, making the trumpet a sign of bodily frailty (farting) instead of celestial might, and a form of punishment rather than salvation. And yet, in spite of this demonic displacement of the trumpet’s “allegorical association,” Malacoda’s trumpet still signals the will of the divine. Hearing the demonic fanfare, the damned plunge themselves “beneath the boiling pitch,” acquiescing to their punishment if not quite accepting it. Such is the trumpet’s “absolute power” that it is able to, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “blow a chorus so heavenly sweet and so hellishly hot” at the same time. Ellison is thinking of the music of Louis Armstrong, whose exuberant phrasing and powerful tone marked, in Wallace and McGrattan’s words, “the re-emergence of the trumpet as a viable solo instrument after a gap of over a century.” Nowhere is Armstrong’s ability to
“blow a chorus so heavenly sweet and hellishly hot” more audible than in the opening cadenza to his 1928 recording of the “West End Blues,” one of the most seminal moments – arguably the most seminal moment – in the history of recorded jazz. Reminiscent of the same military fanfares that Malacoda’s trumpet mocks, Armstrong’s “clarion call,” in Gunther Schuller’s words, “served notice that jazz had the potential capacity to compete with the highest order of previously known musical expression... The way [Armstrong] attacks each note, the quality and exact duration of each pitch, the manner in which he releases the note, and the subsequent split second silence before the next note – in other words, the entire acoustical pattern – present in capsule form all the essential characteristics of jazz inflection.” There were jazz recordings before this one. Indeed, there were even recordings of the “West End Blues,” which was written by Armstrong’s mentor King Oliver (Armstrong is himself featured on Oliver’s original 1923 recording). But Armstrong’s pyrotechnic fanfare in the later recording heralds something new, a transformation of jazz from, in Ted Gioia’s terms, a “balanced team sport” into a “platform for extroverted individual soloists.” The opening trumpet blast of the “West End Blues” signals not just the emergence of Armstrong as jazz’s first true virtuoso, but the rebirth of the form as an improvisatory art. Armstrong’s track is both like and unlike King Oliver’s – it is the same tune, but transformed into something new and strange.
In so crudely bringing Malacoda and Armstrong’s trumpet blasts together, I am not trying to suggest any direct comparison. While the two “strange bugles” may share an essential dissimilarity to the military clarion they are both evoking and departing from, this is where the similarities end. Malacoda is no virtuoso, and Armstrong is, most definitely, not playing out of his ass. Malacoda degrades music into scatology; in the “West End Blues,” a previously arranged tune is transformed into “scat” (in addition to his trumpet playing, the track features one of the first recorded instance of the vocal improvisations that would become a hallmark of Armstrong’s style). Although it may be divinely charged, Malacoda’s playing is more on the side of the “hellishly hot;” Armstrong’s leans towards the “heavenly sweet.” Rather than force Malacoda and Armstrong into some kind of lunatic chorus, my aim here is to bring out a certain “resonance” between Dante and jazz – and improvisation, in particular – that can be heard most prominently in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, as well as in works by the poet and novelist Amiri Baraka and the saxophonist Sherman Irby.
The influence of Dante on African American literature and culture has already been well noted, most notably by Dennis Looney, who has admirably charted how Dante was “more than merely a literary source for [Toni] Morrison and other African American authors,” but a “lens through which these artists approach and take measure of European culture.” Dante, as Looney puts it, “served as a marker that signals admittance to European culture and, paradoxically at the same time, enabled some form of rejection of it.” Considering his own wariness of “aspects of the dominant culture in his own day,” Dante, according to Looney, was “invaluable to authors themselves leery of certain aspects of western culture as a canonical author himself critical of much of what he subsumes and of much of which he is taken to represent.” While Looney’s work provides great insight into how Dante acted, for African American writers, as both a way into, and away from, the white European canon, in evoking the term “resonance,” I mean to articulate a relationship between distinct cultural phenomenon that looks beyond questions of influence, reception, and appropriation.
(excerpted from chapter 11)
