A conversation with James Blood Ulmer April, 1991/Washington, D.C. ©1997 by Thomas Stanley

Six years ago I sat down for a forty-minute conversation with an artist who has done as much as any to meld the aesthetics of jazz, blues, and funk into a united republic of sonic possibilities. James Blood Ulmer is proud to be a student of Ornette Coleman's "harmolodic" school of musical theory. In the same way that Bill Monroe can unambiguously be declared the father of bluegrass, Coleman should be seen as the founding blast of furry in the epic saga of so-called free jazz. Ulmer is more down-home than downtown. Wheezing a laugh that breaks into a spasm, he dissects the tightly plaited contradictions of black life in America through a bluesman's
muddy cipher. Creative improvised music -- the free jazz -- ain't hardly free. It is very expensive as Baba
Blood reveals ...

Thomas Stanley: Why does James Blood Ulmer play the guitar?

James Blood Ulmer: Out of vengeance. I wish I didn't have to play it. (erupts with laughter) That's it. That's it vengeance, but of course, you can't avenge anything. I think that Black culture ought to, we need some representatives in the arts to represent how deep and even to represent how shallow is our feeling for ourself. The only problem with that is it's so obsolete because I don't think anybody's really thinking about it. Maybe so, but it seem very lonely being out there. Just like when I was at CBS and was playing that music. I played all over America and then all of a sudden one day it just stopped. Not the people. But the establishment that was representing that kind of energy, they all of a sudden closed down... The way music has been going in this country, I think America is trying to ban creativity in music. The young musicians who are coming up playing, they don't really have to deal with the music on a creative level...They can just, they more or less created another kind of culture. (laughs) They create non-culture. The less they know how to play, the more money they make...They want to ban the idea of creativity because whoever's in a particular form of art he might try to represent himself and no one wants you to represent yourself. They want you to represent them. Believe me. No one wants you out there representing you, they want you to represent them. In other words this system wants you to represent this system...

My belief, my only belief I have is in Islam. I'm a Muslim. I have worked everything out of that. I proceed with what that is knowing I haven't reached the Utopia of what that is. I think that coming from the heart is where, how I relate to, try to justify what I do...I'm like this, I have for the last, say maybe five years -- ever since '87, I've refused to work in New York or make my music in New York. I just decided this year or the end of last year that I would give up that idea, that I would not be exiled from this country. No country if possible, especially this one. I want to be able to do whatever I feel in this country as long as it's in the way of Islam. I refuse to let this society make me feel I (laughs hard) got to go somewhere else. Even though I goes somewhere else simply because I can't take the state of condition that this country's in...I will not be ran out of this country because of their ideas. Then they would really be successful if they ran us out. (laughs) If they ran us out of here they would be totally successful. I will not let them be totally successful.