Hosting a screening and conversation about Keeping Time feels to us like a homecoming. And not simply in the Beyoncé way but in the Michele Prettyman way: that’s how she described the 10-year anniversary of liquid blackness.

Homecomings and reunions are both longstanding traditions that commemorate […] “the power of the return.” As we come home, reunite and return, we revisit those significant spaces, memories, and people in our lives. We are reminded of our journeys and of the formative, sometimes painful, challenges and turning points that made us, nurtured us, and stretched us. 

With Keeping Time we return to black music in cinema as a model for our scholarly and pedagogical practice, which began with Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977), the first in a lineage of films inspired by Tapscott and The Ark, followed by Barbara McCullough’s Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot (2017). We feel affirmed by a recent presentation by the Mellon foundation about the role of Jazz in American Culture which championed the expansiveness of the artform– an offering, a collective mission that eschews personal ownership and hinges on a practice of reciprocity. As Mellon President Elizabeth Alexander put it, jazz is also profoundly imbricated with the other arts– a “liquid” relationship (as we call it, following Toni Morrison’s insights about Romare Bearden’s collages), which the artist expressed so: “I can’t do it, unless I get with the music.”[1] We are not musicians, but we have been posing a similar question through the black visual arts: how do they “get with the music”?

Passing Through was the first to tussle with the challenge of maintaining a legacy without, or in rejection of, the terms within which a proper archive might be established, or of the very terms of securing it, by mirroring Tapscott’s refusal to record for an extractive music industry and becoming instead the music’s maroon archive: a musical record in film form. In Keeping Time–another liquid record if you will, of the same extended ensemble although several decades later— a challenge to the possibility of maintaining archives of radical praxis pivots around missing charts: the score, the sheet music. The musicians agree that charts are vital part of the archive insofar as they are a means to spread the music and allow new people to join; yet they also know that they were occasionally withheld by Tapscott himself so that band members would feel their way through the music.

On the one hand, the charts are the other side of the record; not as scores, but as maps to follow: secret histories, as Chip Linscott has shown, from an earlier covenant.[2] And Passing Through teaches us that cinema can function as one of these maps. Indeed, Tapscott showed Passing Through to his band members all the way to his death in 1999. At the same time, as Fumi Okiji points out, the record is an archive for pedagogy—thus also a mode of initiation as Michael Session explains when he says that, when he heard Coltrane on a record it was as if he had said, “Michael, get a horn.” That is, the record is an archive of/for the practice, but also a futural archive of black intentionality. On the other hand, Keeping Time knows that, as institutional archive, the record simultaneously reproduces the disappearance of the ensemble as such—of its praxis, of the means of staying together. So, what, then, secures its futurity?

Passing Through taught us that if we approach black art through “study” we’ll see the way it images “lineages to come,” the musicians of the future who will continue the same visionary project. This is what The Ark’s musicians describe as “the call.” One might be beckoned by the music –hearing Coltrane on a record—or interpellated by a band leader (“Hey, you, with the horn case”), yet here the Althusserian script is put to a different service: the summon to a collectivity, a study group, a future self. Not the police. 

Ultimately, in Keeping Time the charts remain maroon because they chart a knowledge of freedom (Moten), as an invitation into an intergenerational family to come, kinships from/of the future one is called into. The challenge, Keeping Time reminds us so-called scholars, is how to practice collaboratively; that is, how to study, whereby, as Stefano Harney and Valentina Desideri put it, “knowledge is not just social but a way to make the social, not just collective but a way to experiment with collectivity itself, not just a debt to the past but an activation of debt as a way to enter the future together.”[3]