Abstract

"Ensemble" is a reading of Amiri Baraka's work, especially that between 1961 and 1966 when Baraka was still known as LeRoi Jones, especially "The Burton Greene Affair," a review of a performance by Greene, a white pianist, and Marion Brown and Pharoah Sanders, two black saxophonists. "The Burton Greene Affair" is marked by the striking grammatical complexity of Baraka's representations of being in/and its relation to temporality and numerical/formal constituency and by the richness of Baraka's sound when it too would represent those concepts. These features reveal thinking suspended within something like the "ontological difference" Heidegger sees between Being and beings and within the questions that difference opens, questions framed by the simultaneously essentializing and differentiating discourses of race and spirit, origin and end. ;The conjunctions of temporality and being, identity and alterity, and materiality and spirit which are fundamental to Western philosophical discourse are also crucial to the discursive formulations and expressions of and within the complex and various fields of African-American aesthetics, particularly African-American improvised music. What is essential to these traditions is essential to Baraka's text and is found in the grammar of its language. A true reading---and a faithful listening---must relate Baraka's work to the specificities of these traditions and to the idea of tradition, particularly those theoretical and aesthetic formations which are somehow situated at the ends of traditions and at tradition's end. This leads to a critique of the thinking that is suspended not only between being and beings, but between tradition and traditions as well. ;If, though, my work were only an exploration of the Western philosophical tradition's echo and transformation in Baraka, it would be inadequate to the complexity, the danger and saving power, the ugly beauty of his text. At the very moments when it seems most embedded in what amounts to a metaphysical reaction, Baraka's work moves us toward another thinking, the thinking of ensemble. That thinking moves in and through the fundamental interinanimation of truth and improvisation, a consummation that must occur within and as the improvisation of totality and singularity, their relation and opposition