From the Plantation to the Penitentiary recalls the Black Arts era in African-American culture—particularly poetry and jazz, when it seemed figures such as Amiri Baraka and Rahsaan Roland Kirk borrowed from almost every form they saw as useful to address the political and social world they lived in. The artistic ambition was almost impossibly large, but the art that resulted was high-minded yet still free-swinging in every sense of the phrase. They and their contemporaries put brilliant thoughts next to tired commonplaces, but the individual pieces were bigger than their parts, and collected, the work is an impressive body of political art that’s exciting as a whole even if individual pieces can be picked at.

 

Here, “Doin’ (Y)Our Thing” is on one hand the most completely satisfying piece, but it’s also the slightest by comparison to the rest of the album. It features Marsalis’ generally young quintet at its most swinging—with an impressive solo by pianist Dan Nimmer—but the instrumental track is conventional. It’s a pleasant tonic between songs that address the modern world, and particularly the place of African Americans in it. It’s probably no surprise that Marsalis finds a lot of targets, whether it’s greedy

 

“Supercapitalists” or gangsta rappers, who he dismisses as “modern day minstrels” with “songless tunes.”

 

Jennifer Sanon finds the music in Marsalis’ words, which some times takes work. While the album is composed with Marsalis’ usual intelligence and provocative inventiveness, his lyrics find rhythms and phrasings in church, in common speech, in hipster jive and his own self-conscious profundity. That leads—as it did for Kirk—to clunky lines that rip easy targets next to lines that speak with deceptive elegance to real issues. Marsalis underlines the invisibility of damaged souls in “Find Me” when he writes, “I see shattered people / running the streets night and day / say can you see?” He echoes Barbra Streisand and “The Star-Spangled Banner” while borrowing a thought from Richard Wright in the language of the Beats, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

 

Hip-hop has come to dominate the public imagination to such a degree that critics have focused on his attempt at rapping when Marsalis sing-speaks the closing “Where Y’all At?” The piece is firmly in the tradition of “Volunteered Slavery” and the work of Gil-Scott Heron, making agitprop art with common language in the dance modes they know best—in Marsalis’ case, a second line swing. It’s art as party and party as art, and if anything, the story is that so few other recordings exist like this these days. Perhaps it’s a comment on business—that only an artist as bulletproof as Marsalis can make one—or the lack of courage on the part of other jazz musicians, but really, how can jazz artists complain about hip-hop if they leave the business of social criticism to them?