Greg Tate Wins a Posthumous Pulitzer Prize
Just a month ago, in his popular appearance on Straight Ahead: The Omni-American Podcast, Henry Louis Gates Jr. mentioned “our mutual affection for Greg Tate, whose loss is unfathomable. He didn’t have enough time, not enough people have read him.” Yet it’s clear that Tate’s impact as one of the most influential music critics of the post-civil rights era is apparent to many among the cultural cognoscenti. Case in point: last week, in a special citation, he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
A week after Greg died on Dec. 7, 2021, I penned the following words in his memory and shared an excerpt of an epistolary exchange.
Honoring Greg Tate, a singular sui generis stylist of Afro-English-language criticism calibrated through an all-embracing Black sensibility, is bittersweet. Unlike the loss of Stanley Crouch, Tate’s colleague at the Village Voice, which I knew was coming due to a long illness, Tate's sudden and unexpected death last week at the age of 64 was a total shock, leaving us all reeling from the loss.
We last spoke on October 29, discussing music, a recent performance of his Burnt Sugar band in Connecticut, his commencement address this past May at the Yale School of Art, and the project we were working on together.
Similar to the many critics and academics whose flood of appreciation and remembrances of the man I called “my fellow GT,” as a writer and critic of music, I was influenced by his example, by his freestyling versifyin’, by his range of reference and depth of insight, by his infinite love of the souls and art of Black folk.
As he’d boom-de-bap converse about the verities and limits of Afro-Futurism to Afro-Pessimism, he’d have one foot in modernist and post-modernist canons of literature, visual art, film, music, and criticism, and the other in the streets of Harlem to Greenwich Village, SoCal to Paris, tracking and chronicling what’s hattenin’ with the soulful verve the vernacular kulcha deserved.
But since my fellow GT was a friend, my feelings for him aren’t just professional. I loved Greg Tate as a person and as a man. His loss is deeply personal and profound, leaving a void that can never be filled.
I first met him in Harlem in the late 1990s, having moved to 153rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. He lived on Edgecombe Avenue, several blocks up the street. Before we ever spoke, I recall him attending the Jazz Study Group meetings at Columbia University, which became the Center of Jazz Studies. Once we spoke, his cool ease, warmth, poise, and soulful humor were added to my impressions of him on the page.
But we nurtured what had been a casual acquaintance in the past seven years after agreeing to a public debate. Greg was inspired to become a writer in part through the influence and example of Amiri Baraka; I, on the other hand, was more inspired by Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray as filtered through the writing of Stanley Crouch. On Facebook, circa 2014, Greg and I were engaging in some repartee and call-and-response about the virtues of Baraka in comparison and contrast to Ellison.
So I called Greg and suggested we take such jewels beyond the wasteland of Facebook and plan a public debate. We decided to write a series of letters to one another, him representing Baraka and Blues People and me, the position of Ellison critiquing Baraka and his first nonfiction book. My alma mater, Hamilton College, was the first place we engaged one another; then, with the imprimatur of Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, we shared our series of letters at the Hip Hop Archives at Harvard in 2016.
Go to the original post and scroll down to check out excerpts of the letters we each wrote for our exchange, in which we—as Greg described it—“reanimated” a debate that could have happened between Ellison and Baraka but never did.