A feature by Brent Hayes Edwards

Eclectic and captivating, Joseph Jarman’s 1977 Black Case is perhaps the most extraordinary of an efflorescence of literary publications by jazz musicians in the 1970s. Although it includes a selection of Jarman’s verse, the book is more capacious and variegated than a poetry collection. It is equally a spiritual Baedeker, a compendium of “old new prayers” that opens with a repeated supplication (“we pray o God / for the ego / death / and that the power / of the evil vibration / be taken / from our presence”) that Jarman kept taped on the wall above his desk for decades. At the same time, it can be described as an organizational statement: Black Case includes some of the earliest declarations of the aspirations of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the influential collective founded in 1965 in Chicago by Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, and Phil Cohran. As such, Black Case is also a manifesto, the “theme song of a new breed. . .”