Table of Contents

Introduction BOOK I The Uses of the Blues: James Baldwin's Lyrical Quest 1. "Not the country we're sitting in now": Amputation/Gangrene Past and Present 2. Blues Constants, Jazz Changes: Toward a Writing Immune to Bullshit 3. "Making words do something": Retracing James Baldwin's Career BOOK II The Uses of the Lyric: Billie's Quest, Dinah's Blues, Jimmy's Amen, and Brother Ray's Hallelujah 4. Billie Holiday: Radical Lyricist 5. Dinah Washington's Blues and the Trans- Digressive Ocean 6. "But Amen is the price": James Baldwin and Ray Charles in "The Hallelujah Chorus" BOOK III "For you I was a flame": Baldwin's Lyrical Lens on Contemporary Culture 7. On Camden Row: Amy Winehouse's Lyric Lines in a Living Inheritance 8. Speechless in San Francisco. "A somewhat better place to lie about": An Inter-View 9. "In a way they must ...": Turf Feinz and Black Style in an Age of Sights for the Speechless 10. "Shades cannot be fixed": On Privilege, Blindness, and Second Sight Conclusion: The Brilliance of Children, the Duty of Citizens Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author

Ed Pavlić is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Reviews

"While Pavlic is to be commended for choosing such an important subject in the first place, what is more important is the fact that he has addressed it with a great deal of stylistic finesse and analytical clarity." -- -Kevin Le Gendre Jazzwize Magazine "In Who Can Afford to Improvise?, Ed Pavlic unearths James Baldwin's epic song-one shaped and honed by sacred and popular music. This rumination of intricate details celebrates Baldwin's vision of democratic conscience. Pavlic gives us a flesh-and-blood subject formed through a lyrical determinism of deep feeling. Through turn of thought and juxtaposition of historical and personal evidence, he embraces Baldwin's need for justice and truth." -- -Yusef Komunyakaa "Ed Pavlic's words have always heard the music and with Who Can Afford to Improvise?, he shows the exquisite ways that James Baldwin's words both heard the music and was the music itself." -- -Mark Anthony Neal Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities "... Who Can Afford to Improvise plays in the pocket between actual musical performances, interpretations of the lyrical mode in Baldwin's poetics, and intricate historical detail." -Tsitsi Jaji, Los Angeles Review of Books "Who Can Afford to Improvise is a tour de force from one of our premier Baldwin scholars. Ed Pavlic's brilliantly insightful meditation on black music and culture and Baldwin's centrality to that tradition is a must-read." -- -Peniel E. Joseph author of Dark Days, Bright Nights "If you read books, sometimes or all the time, for the quality of their sentences (and what writer doesn't? why else would anyone want to be a writer?), Who Can Afford to Improvise is even more essential. Ed Pavlic is f*cking fearless about how he goes about it, as fearless as any contemporary musician I can think of, as fearless as some of the greats. It's definitely a book, but music is where its soul is, if you ask me." -Dave Marsh, Counterpunch "Ed Pavlic's strikingly original meditations reveal a James Baldwin swaddled in Black music whose masterful ear heard the overtones, the changes, echoes of memory, cries of agony and joy. By excavating experience from song and turning social critique into lyric, Baldwin produced a deeper, more dangerous truth." -- -Robin D. G. Kelley author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original "Ed Pavlic's Who Can Afford to Improvise? is remarkably present in how it sings-in all that it does for Baldwin, for his mediums, and for the book's listeners." -The Georgia Review