What does Bearden's work have in common with jazz, in aesthetic terms?

His use of collage, which is a kind of improvisation. The collages, especially the late ones, are so fluid. You don't get the sense he spent two years on one painting. He'd put some things down and look at them and then build on them. Collage was meant for him. I especially love The Apprenticeship of Jelly Roll Morton, a collage painting of a man playing in front of a naked woman, because Jelly Roll used to play in all the brothels in New Orleans--it's funny and it's beautiful.

And then there is Bearden's interest in black life. He came from Charlotte, and he was part of the black migration from South to North. And even though he was from North Carolina, I get the sense that he was more into the Mississippi Delta blues--you know, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins--than the Piedmont Sound, the Carolina-Virginia sound, which is less of a slide sound and more of a picked sound.

Is there something musical about his use of color that has echoes in the use of timbre?

I don't know if it's musical. It's obvious that the black Americans are the descendants of Africans, and Africans wear very colorful clothing. Now, because I am very successfully colonized, I can't go around wearing no yellow suit. There was a time when I came to New York and I was less colonized and I could wear a blue suit and red shoes, but if you understand culturally the role that color plays in African society, Romare's colors make perfect sense. They express a relationship to a culture, and Romare naturally understood that.

If you had to compare Bearden's work to that of a jazz composer, who would it be? Ellington? Monk? Mingus?

It would have to be Duke. Monk's compositions were brilliant, and Mingus's were too, but that was mainly the group interplay, which is why his compositions don't usually come off when they're covered by other musicians. But Duke had such a worldview. Monk had a worldview too, and when you listen from song to song, the melodies are genius. But when you listen to Duke, the stuff he wrote in the 1920s was so different from what he wrote in the '40s and from he wrote in the '50s, and that's what he shares with Romare, that emphasis on process over product.

One of the things that strikes me about Bearden's work is that even when he's depicting people who live in difficult conditions, there's nothing bleak or fatalistic about his vision. It's very affirmative of the African-American experience in all its rich diversity, alternately sorrowful and joyful. Do you see a connection here with black American music?

I think that's life in general. In the last five or ten years I've gravitated more to German classical music more than anything else, because composers like Brahms and Mahler have been able to illuminate the beauty of melancholy, even when they're writing in a major key. And Mahler has the double whammy of being Jewish, and Jewish music also has that beautiful sense of melancholy. It was only when I heard Uri Caine's Mahler record [Urlicht/Primal Light] that I realized how uniquely Jewish Mahler's music is. Even Wagner's crazy ass has that same thing, and there's Schubert and Schumann--particularly the lieder, simple melodies that are so melancholic and so beautiful. What the German composers and philosophers understood--and what Bearden also understood--is that one cannot be a complete human being without embracing the melancholy in oneself. Bearden had some rough times. He had a nervous breakdown, he stopped painting and started writing songs. He had a crisis of conscience. And then he got on the other side of it and said this is what I am.

Albert Murray said Bearden's work was the visual equivalent of the blues. Do you agree?

I don't think so. Bearden's paintings are the visual equivalent of a combination of things, and once you start talking about Bearden's work being the equivalent of the blues you start pigeonholing him as a black painter, and I don't accept that. When I first saw the show at the National Gallery, a woman came up to me and said, "Don't you think it's time the National Gallery gave some space to black artists? Isn't this overdue?" And I said no, because this show isn't about Bearden's blackness, which I find ironic in the first place because he was damned near white in his appearance, although he wasn't in his persona. Bearden belongs here because of his work as an artist. This is not the National Gallery's version of affirmative action. He was a student of painting, period. He wasn't just a Negro historian, he was a student of the world. And so the blues was captured in his work, but so was the experience of European art. He was a polyglot and absorbed everything around him and didn't limit himself, and that makes him exceptional in a world that too often prizes limitation.

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