Book Review: STEVE CANNON, Groove, Bang and Jive Around

 Steve Cannon, Groove, Bang and Jive Around  (Blank Forms Editions, 2023)

--Originally published in an overly-edited version in The NYC Jazz Record, 7/1/24--

Steve Cannon was a revolutionary poet many saw as the cultural heart of Black Liberation in another period when the struggle was a matter of life and death. This founder of Gathering of the Tribes was a mentor to countless New York poets, particularly the downtown contingent, starting with his days in the Society of Umbra alongside luminaries Akia Toure, Ishmael Reed, Calvin Hernton, Tom Dent and David Henderson, as well as free jazz leaders Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp. By the 1980s, his failing vision deteriorating to blindness, Cannon and his Tribes performance space and magazine remained a major underground voice of East Village poetry. His passing in July 2019 resulted in countless tributes including one at the Clemente Soto Center which this writer covered in the pages of this paper. One would be hard-pressed to find naysayers to Cannon’s vast inspiration; his legacy is profound. And yet, this review of his only novel was difficult in the writing.

Groove, Bang and Jive Around was published by the Parisian Ophelia Press in 1969, and largely lost since its original printing. Of its age, the story is filled with psychedelic, indeed, hallucinatory imagery within the context of the fight for Black power. Unfortunately, social justice drowns under the carnal imagery, and while the sexual revolution was a vital part of the day (and of women’s liberation), this series of prurient adventures reaches further than Lolita or Carnal Knowledge would have dared. To refer to Groove, Bang and Jive Around as “notorious” is an understatement. The brutally raw depiction of African American culture in the south is somewhat reminiscent of the protagonist in recent film American Fiction; told by his literary agent that he must “write more Black”, Jeffrey Wright’s character reluctantly complies with impassioned jailhouse zealousness. Some hardcore sections seem to be competing with Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, but what’s missing here is the legacy (Burroughs remained a novelist).

The story of fourteen-year-old Annette’s explicit coming of age starts with a shockingly graphic scene in an outhouse with a man twice her age, goes through exploits with the guy she believes to be her father, has a threesome with her boyfriend and an obese older woman, engages in ritualistic orgies, and is the main course in a violent mass gang bang. Related visions of her mother and brother’s lurid relations, as well as flashbacks of Annette’s first time, age 10, with her brother and his friend, do little to accent the politics Cannon held so dear.

Yet, the larger story carries Annette through an odyssey to a Black nirvana, Ooh-bla-dee, where people of color hold power and take vengeance on corrupt officials and their wives via public humiliation and bestiality. Along the way, a wonderful variety of jazz artists make cameos, Dizzy Gillespie presides over Ooh-bla-dee, and Count Basie’s band plays uproariously for the victors.

Though Cannon’s eyesight was intact in 1969, the work plays out more as classic storytelling than any of his literary work. A New Orleans native who moved to the Lower East Side in 1962, he carried the southern tradition of tall tales into the fertile mix of radical downtown and it’s easy to imagine the book as a series of spoken presentations. Groove is the motherlode of all chin music and this re-publication may just mark it as an invaluable vision of cruel, imposed poverty and the dissonant journey north. Tragically, Cannon never found his Ooh-bla-dee.