White jazz critics attacked politicized Black musicians as separatists

Evidence

Between the Village Gate and Jazz Gallery gigs, Lincoln recorded her own LP, Straight Ahead, produced by Hentoff and employing many of the musicians who had performed on We Insist! From the opening title song, which Lincoln co-wrote, to the final track, “Retribution,” on which she also collaborated, the album was outspoken and assertive: “Just let the retribution match the contribution.” Where We Insist! had been respectfully reviewed in Down Beat, Straight Ahead received a notoriously hostile review from the magazine’s New York editor, Ira Gitler, who characterized Lincoln as “a professional Negro,” writing that “pride in one’s heritage is one thing, but we don’t need the Elijah Muhammed [sic] type of thinking in jazz.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 326

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s graft of how moral panics over cultural expression (immodesty, etc.) encode class/identity signaling — here anti-nationalist policing of Black art by white critics.