First off, in LaBas' story he tells there are all kinds of things about Moses and music. When Moses begins to learn about Jes Grew he learns from Jethro, a man who plays his instrument (guitar?) like no one else. He plays it with deep loud powerful resonance--the way Jes Grew intends music to be played. So Moses wants to play that kind of music. He learns some, and then wants to learn the better, older music, in the Book of Thoth. He goes to ISIS, but Jethro warns him that he will not gain the true music. So Moses goes and gets the music and comes back and plays it but it is flat and weak. It is here that Reed does some interesting stuff. Moses says that he would revitalize the Black Mud Sound, which is dying. He becomes a soloist, "music wouldn't just be used as a background to dancing but he would be a soloist and no 1 would be allowed to play a whistle or bead a drum", and he plays and he uses an "applause sign" (Reed 182-3). What this does is it shows Moses becoming what we might think of as a classical musician. The idea of a virtuoso is a classical music idea, and while Jazz had solo's it didn't discourage dancing. He becomes a white musician, who get's angry when the crowd is rowdy (which happened, Beethoven once walked out of a concert because the crowd wouldn't shut up). He put's up an applause sign, making it not real music, but rather like old white radio music. These are examples of Moses as a white musician, selling out, not being a true Jes Grew artist.
There are also subtler things going on. When Moses is first learning music from Jethro he would "write it all down", which is a dig at white musicians writing Jazz. Jazz is often not written out. There are jazz "charts" not "scores", with chords and some rhythms and ideas, but nothing written out on sheet music with perfect traditional accuracy. White jazz is often written out completely, like Bill Evans who is an excellent jazz musician but someone who wrote it out. To drive home the point of Moses as the equivalent of a white man stealing black music, Reed gives us the description of Moses "gyrating his hips", which was a movement associated with Elvis, who was a white man who stole “RocknRoll” from Chuck Berry a black musician (whom I believe Ishmael Reed probably prefers to Elvis), just as Moses stole Jes Grew’s music but performed it worse. So in all this, not only is Reed outright stating how Moses is failing at Jes Grew music, he is using very specific ideas about white music, and white appropriation of black music.
That's it. Just a lot of observations. The last one I'll leave you with is the quote "distinguished musicologist Fats Waller was to comment later". He then proceeds to quote Fats Waller. Now Fats Waller was an early jazz musician and comedic entertainer. So this is just a way of taking white academia and forcing it to acknowledge someone who is incredibly knowledgeable about music, but not academically trained about music. This part didn't fit with everything else, but i thought it was interesting.
