Formation and Spread of Jazz Genre - Essay Example

Formation and Spread of Jazz Genre [Name of the Writer] [Name of the Institution] Formation and Spread of Jazz Genre Introduction As far back as the '305, when the pioneering works of jazz scholarship and criticism were being written, New Orleans already seemed like a long-ago place. Works like Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith's 1939 Jazzmen and Rudi Blesh's 1946 Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz presented a romanticized vision of the city in the wake of Reconstruction, with all its shifting roles, racial and ethnic ambiguities, and ruptured social and political axioms. Those tensions, and the ongoing effort to resolve or at least contain them, formed the atmospheric conditions that made jazz possible. Legendary characters and locales clung to the names of equally legendary streets like crystals to a string-Rampart Street and Perdido Street and Basin Street; Economy Hall and Storyville; the Great and Unrecorded Progenitors, like Buddy Bolden and Papa Jack Laine and Buddy Petit, spoken of by men a half generation younger in a voice usually reserved for the gods themselves. The very first jazz form sprang forth about 100 years ago as a direct result of social, historical, political, and musical developments affecting the unique African American population in and around New Orleans. The city's position as a leading port and music center, coupled with its traditional affinity for celebrations and dancing meant that music of all types [was] not merely present, but in constant demand....From the socially intense and evolving climate surrounding New Orleans in the 1890s, men like the legendary cornetist Charles "Buddy" Bolden and others began developing a new style that synthesised several musical influences and expressed in music the spirit and emotion of the collective black New Orleans experience. As elements of the popular marching brass bands and smaller string ensembles began merging for dances- and since parades were extremely common-a freer, more improvised emotional interpretation was given to the ragtime, blues, spirituals, marches, and dance music that existed in various forms throughout the South. European instruments, structures, and melodic concepts were now distinctly colored with new or altered themes, driving rhythms, growls, buzzes, shouts, falsetto and vibrato. This "vocalization" represented a transfer of African singing concepts to leading wind instruments such as cornets, clarinets, and trombones. Rather than direct transference of African cross rhythms, there was established a steady, often driving ground beat, which became the foundation for offbeat melodic devices. The solid rhythmic underpinning was the background for a polyrhythmic ensemble approach which blended "call and response" patterns and collectively improvised "conversations" based around particular melodies, often creating a sense of "swing." (White, "Evolution" 19-20) Jelly Roll Morton, jazz's first composer, one of its best early pianists, and its most potent storyteller, was a product of this time. Born sometime around 1885, he grew up in New Orleans and cut a broad swath through its red-light district, not just as a pianist but as a pool hustler, cardsharp, and pimp. Early on he began to travel, and he functioned as a sort of Johnny Appleseed of jazz, making his way through the Gulf Coast, the Mississippi Delta, California, Saint Louis, Memphis, and other locales before settling down for a while in Chicago. There, in 1926, he began a series of recordings under the name Jelly Roll Morton and His Red hot Peppers, in which his compositional and orchestrational skills came to their greatest flowering; the Peppers recordings are, along with those of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, the high-water mark of recorded New Orleans jazz. The obvious relevance of the assertion "jazz is art" is for us today: it explains and justifies the efforts made to pull jazz toward the center of official American artistic culture, whether on public television, at Lincoln Center, as a genre officially recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, or as a staple of the academic curriculum. That declaring jazz as Art might have a different, perhaps more political purpose, is indicated only in passing. In episode 4, for example, James T. Maher explains a powerful motivation for many early jazz critics: It was Depression era, mind you, and they were pretty much leftist in their feelings and their politics and so on, so they approached jazz with this in mind and that the black musician who after 300 years of maltreatment in America, it's time we open the doors and windows and recognize that they created a great art. Maher's comments point the discussion in a more historicist direction, reminding us that categories such as "art" are social constructions, not timeless realities. And in fact, the idea that jazz not only is art, but also always has been, is relatively recent. Throughout the period covered by the film, definitions of "jazz" were highly fluid and hotly contested. On its first appearance in popular discourse in the years immediately following World War I, the term was a free-floating signifier that did not necessarily even derive from the musicians' community (many early "jazz" musicians preferred to call what they played "ragtime"). It was a term so broadly and promiscuously associated with all kinds of popular entertainment that "for most Americans it had no precise location or independent existence" (Hobsbawm 1993). Only when certain musical practices were seized upon by critics for special attention (whether first by Americans or Europeans is the subject of some debate) was any effort made to set jazz apart as distinctive, usually as "hot jazz" as opposed to other kinds of jazz (e.g., "sweet" or "symphonic"), or to define its aesthetic qualities. Jazz creates social organisation By playing on discourse, the performance of the jazz musicians draws attention to the historical specificity of truth rather than voicing another truth "good for all occasions." Matthew Treherne examines "how Jazz [. . .] highlights the difficulties of narration through [. . .] displacement, iteration, and negotiation" to problematize the politics of "alterity" and "freedom" (200), and finds that jazz "presents itself as unrepeatable, as something that takes place once and once only" (205). Conversely, the repetitions of racist stereotypes attempt, like a record, to guarantee what is always the same. But the proliferation of musical gestures playing upon savage blackness infuses the stereotype with an abundance that prevents its consolidation. Jazz not only is resistant but also offers an alternative kind of social organization, one of openness rather than confines. Jim Merod's "Jazz as a Cultural Archive" argues that the "accommodation to heterogeneity at the core of the jazz enterprise" (2) is part of its "resistant, essentially unassimilable cultural complex" (4), at odds with institutions (recording, radio, pedagogical) that permit preservation and appreciation at the same time that they freeze improvisation and decontextualize performance for profit. Rather than isolating music from its moment of performance via the score, or aspiring to an exemption from context, jazz demands that we confront the scene of human activity and relations. Craig Werner articulates the thesis that jazz-in its derivation from the "West African concept of 'iwa' [. . .] the unbreakable connection between the fate of the individual and of the community"-admits "diverse voices and [. . .] experiences, [supporting] a more inclusive critique than any individual analysis" (86). Jazz is like Felice's love of her mother's stealing-transgressive of discursive boundaries. What Jazz aims for is not a politics situated in absolutes separable from the temporal occasions they are applied to, but a politics capable of dealing with possibilities beyond those already considered. The racial hybridity of Golden Gray exemplifies this, recalling the supremacist "knowing" that, in maintaining atemporal categories, grants itself power over alterity. (Shipton, 2002) Jazz developed from the subordination of western musical tradition and material culture to meet the needs of West African cultural memory (Baraka 27), and history, too, furnishes material to riff on, not only to enact "rememories" (Beloved 112)-the revising of memory-but to recognize that the present has as much say in history as does the past. The needs of the moment affect how we remember history. As Nancy J. Peterson puts it, Morrison's "historicity [. . .] is directly linked to [. . .] improvisational exploration of alternative concepts and forms for reconstructing African-American history" (202). History is material practice, not an absolute record created by institutions. Morrison constructs "a history [. . .] faithful to the past but [. . .] not pre-determined" (209). Her writing enacts the heterogeneity of jazz-at once ironic and earnest-and offers a proliferation of possibilities, even irreconcilable or mutually exclusive ones. As Paquet-Deyris explains, the narrative allows its "single-voiced authority to be questioned and eventually superseded by multi-vocality" (219). The more voices on the past, on how things came to be, and on why we read history a certain way, the better. Elusive, evanescent, jazz is motion rather than a thing. Since it cannot be arrested as a subject, it can never be Law. As a series of occasions, each unlike the previous, it exists only as the time of its duration, and cannot therefore be represented apart from itself in a scriptural place. Morrison's jazz departs from scriptural economies, from universal and atemporal ethical positions, and offers a renegotiation of social practices through the irreducible peculiarity of existence. Temporal experience is not the substantiation of categories-either of being or experience, with the closure this entails-not noun but verb, a process of becoming never finalized into the definitive. This movement enacts a distinctly American selfhood: "Jazz reflects not the America that exists today [. . .] but the America as it was imagined by those who invented the idea, men like Thomas Jefferson. [. . .] America was the place where the individual could redefine himself according to his own terms, not those of the state or Church. This is exactly what jazz musicians have done throughout the history of their music. The idea of improvisation means that every night a musician plays he can redefine himself" (Nisenson 269). Improvisation implies that self is not the repetition manifested in categorical limits fixed by discourses of "state or Church," but is continual "redefinition," a malleable selfhood. Form is present, but it is ever changing, and acknowledged as such. Form cannot be dispensed with, but its properties are plastic because they coincide with temporal occasions offering unexpected possibilities, with a "real" that, as Certeau notes, is "oceanic," too fluid to be contained, always swamping Law with more than it can account for. Subjectivity is thus being-as-contingency, its parameters always shifting. Morrison observes a music that "violates" and reconstitutes not only Law, but also the nature of Law itself. Jazz (as music and novel) recovers what is lost in the transformation of temporality into Law by demonstrating lexical failure-the very medium of Law-to contain, synthesize, and reconcile the occasions it speaks for, the real it attempts to regulate. Besides, in Jazz the cultural/political narrative doesn't necessarily displace the aesthetic one. Often the two run side by side. A good example is Louis Armstrong's 1928 "West End Blues," one of the few performances accorded the honor of being played without interruption. (Shipton, 2002) "West End Blues" is introduced simultaneously as an aesthetic gem-"the most perfect three minutes in music," according to an astonished music professor -and as an emanation of an American ethos: "a perfect reflection of the country in the moments before the Great Depression." All this perfection is then adduced to a single heroic figure. "West End Blues" is the piece that "would once and for all establish Louis Armstrong as the first great solo genius of the music." (Shipton, 2002) Anyone with a serious interest in jazz needs that lesson. To the extent that Jazz situates its subject within the tangled history of American racial politics (as it often does, and very effectively), it lives up to its advance billing. The problem, rather, is that all this piling on of rhetoric does little to help us understand jazz as we know it today. Conclusion The modern notion of a jazz tradition, with "jazz" now not just referring to dance music of the 1920s but reconfigured as an overarching genre embracing a succession of deeply interrelated styles, did not emerge until mid-century. At first, the dominant ideology for the jazz tradition was colorblind. While acknowledging the "Negroid" origins of the music, the consensus among (predominantly white) critics and historians was that jazz, in becoming”universal" art music, had necessarily transcended limiting racial categories. A further modification, then, came in the wake of the Civil Rights movement: the jazz tradition became celebrated as black music, a crucial cornerstone in the conception of a multicultural America. (Sampson, 1980) And this is the point, more or less, where Burns and Ward come in. They heartily subscribe to the idea that jazz is a continuous, uninterrupted tradition and that it is, in some basic sense, African American. To this they add a heavy overlay of nationalism-or rather, they put a different spin on an already heavily Americanist discourse. In the cliche "jazz is America's classical music," America is usually invoked to bolster the prestige of jazz. Burns reverses this, using jazz (as he did with baseball) as a way of articulating what is great-or, with a liberal's sense of self-critique, what may be great-about this country. "Though it is a look backwards into the 20th century," he has said, "[Jazz] is in a way a look at the redemptive future promise of America [italics in original], because embedded in the perfection of jazz is all that we might become as Americans" (Pult 1999). And for Burns, the strongest hints of a perfectly realized America are to be found in the big band style known as swing. For hundreds of years painting was representational. Round the turn of the century, at the height of the impressionist era it got into a sort of modern thing . . . there's fauvism, there's pointillism, all this sort of stuff. Hugely energetic. Picasso is leading the way, right? And the equivalent of Picasso is Louis Armstrong. The ultimate-and Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein and the Wright Brothers. You're dealing with the essence of modernism and jazz is born out of that tradition. References Baraka, Amiri. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Harper, 2002. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U California P, 1984. Merod, Jim. "Jazz as a Cultural Archive." Boundary 2 22.2 (1995): 1-18. Shipton, A. (Jazz Makers: Vanguards of Sound). Oxford University Press, 2002. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004. Morrison. Jazz. New York: Plume, 1993. Nisenson, Eric. Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest. New York: De Capo, 1995. Paquet-Deyris, Anne-Marie. "Toni Morrison's Jazz and the City." African American Review 35.2 (2001): 219-31. Peterson, Nancy J. "'Say Make Me, Remake Me': Toni Morrison and the Reconstruction of African- American History." Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Ed. Peterson. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1997. 201-21. Pult, Jon. 1999. Backtalk with Ken Burns. OffBeat: New Orleans' and Louisiana's Music Magazine (May), http://www.offbeat.com/ob2005/backtalk.html Sampson, Henry T. Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980. Treherne, Matthew. "Figuring In, Figuring Out: Narration and Negotiation in Toni Morrison's Jazz." Narrative 11.2 (2003): 199-212. White, Michael G. "Evolution of a Cultural Tradition." Cultural Vistas: Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Winter (1991): 19-20. Read More

The obvious relevance of the assertion "jazz is art" is for us today: it explains and justifies the efforts made to pull jazz toward the center of official American artistic culture, whether on public television, at Lincoln Center, as a genre officially recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, or as a staple of the academic curriculum. That declaring jazz as Art might have a different, perhaps more political purpose, is indicated only in passing. In episode 4, for example, James T.

Maher explains a powerful motivation for many early jazz critics: It was Depression era, mind you, and they were pretty much leftist in their feelings and their politics and so on, so they approached jazz with this in mind and that the black musician who after 300 years of maltreatment in America, it's time we open the doors and windows and recognize that they created a great art. Maher's comments point the discussion in a more historicist direction, reminding us that categories such as "art" are social constructions, not timeless realities.

And in fact, the idea that jazz not only is art, but also always has been, is relatively recent. Throughout the period covered by the film, definitions of "jazz" were highly fluid and hotly contested. On its first appearance in popular discourse in the years immediately following World War I, the term was a free-floating signifier that did not necessarily even derive from the musicians' community (many early "jazz" musicians preferred to call what they played "ragtime").

It was a term so broadly and promiscuously associated with all kinds of popular entertainment that "for most Americans it had no precise location or independent existence" (Hobsbawm 1993). Only when certain musical practices were seized upon by critics for special attention (whether first by Americans or Europeans is the subject of some debate) was any effort made to set jazz apart as distinctive, usually as "hot jazz" as opposed to other kinds of jazz (e.g., "sweet" or "symphonic"), or to define its aesthetic qualities.

Jazz creates social organisation By playing on discourse, the performance of the jazz musicians draws attention to the historical specificity of truth rather than voicing another truth "good for all occasions." Matthew Treherne examines "how Jazz [. . .] highlights the difficulties of narration through [. . .] displacement, iteration, and negotiation" to problematize the politics of "alterity" and "freedom" (200), and finds that jazz "presents itself as unrepeatable, as something that takes place once and once only" (205).

Conversely, the repetitions of racist stereotypes attempt, like a record, to guarantee what is always the same. But the proliferation of musical gestures playing upon savage blackness infuses the stereotype with an abundance that prevents its consolidation. Jazz not only is resistant but also offers an alternative kind of social organization, one of openness rather than confines. Jim Merod's "Jazz as a Cultural Archive" argues that the "accommodation to heterogeneity at the core of the jazz enterprise" (2) is part of its "resistant, essentially unassimilable cultural complex" (4), at odds with institutions (recording, radio, pedagogical) that permit preservation and appreciation at the same time that they freeze improvisation and decontextualize performance for profit.

Rather than isolating music from its moment of performance via the score, or aspiring to an exemption from context, jazz demands that we confront the scene of human activity and relations. Craig Werner articulates the thesis that jazz-in its derivation from the "West African concept of 'iwa' [. . .] the unbreakable connection between the fate of the individual and of the community"-admits "diverse voices and [. . .] experiences, [supporting] a more inclusive critique than any individual analysis" (86).

Jazz is like Felice's love of her mother's stealing-transgressive of discursive boundaries. What Jazz aims for is not a politics situated in absolutes separable from the temporal occasions they are applied to, but a politics capable of dealing with possibilities beyond those already considered.

Read More