Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity

[mke]

Very interesting, long and detailled article based on the book of the same name over at NewMusicBox.

Race is a big part of the article and is intelligently discussed. I don't agree 100%, but maybe 90%.

[mke]

Some excerpts:

Percussionist Milford Graves maintains that the music he plays is "directly linked to African music." But he also proclaims, "I do not deal with music that has any ethnic classification. I deal with human music." Such positions are not uncommon: African American jazz players often assert black ownership of their art while declaring that it is universal or promoting it as a generically North American form. Pianist Billy Taylor, for example, espouses the idea that jazz is "America's music" but also champions its provenance in African American culture. And while Duke Ellington said that he played "Negro music," he also insisted that his art is "international." The fluidity of these perspectives evince a nuanced vision, a high comfort level with the natural complexity of our multifarious world: the major innovators of jazz have been black, but the music is played and enjoyed by U.S. citizens of all backgrounds, and indeed, by people the world over.

...

Focusing on the ethnographic documentation of music, ethnomusicology interprets musical styles in their cultural contexts, looking at "music as culture." The task of an ethnomusicological study is to describe and document a musical type in its context, to interpret a music culture. What is the music culture of jazz? Is it the U.S. mainstream or the African American in-group? Of course, it is both. Moreover, because jazz is now performed by people of all ethnicities all over the world, its lessons have become relevant to people everywhere. I thus use the term jazz consciousness to situate the music in the overlapping contexts of the United States, the African diaspora, and the larger world.

...

But American creolization is played out on an unequal playing field. A fundamental difference between whites and blacks in American music is that while whites have played what they wish, segregation kept black musicians behind fences. Today, it is easy to forget that African Americans did not have the choice of joining (all-white) symphony orchestras or Broadway pit bands for most of this country's history. One great trumpeter, a child prodigy adept in classical music, aced his audition for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as a teenager. Afterward, the conductor asked him to play "I Got Rhythm." He complied, playing brilliantly. The conductor informed him that while his Euro-classical music abilities were top-shelf, he should not pursue this field because, as a black man, he would face racial discrimination. The conductor felt that he was doing the teen musician a favor by providing realistic vocational counseling. While this musician acknowledges that the conductor's intentions were good, he remembers this as an experience of bitter racism.

...

Jazz Consciousness

The Third Stream musical movement, initiated in the 1950s by the composer Gunther Schuller, was an effort to wed jazz with the European classical idiom. While the attempt was laudable, the results, at times, were stilted. After all, jazz has always been based in both black aesthetics and European influences. The blending of various "streams" is thus the norm in African American culture. Distinguishing his stance from both the Third Stream approach and nationalist exclusionism, John Coltrane expressed interest in African, European, and all world cultures in an interview with the (white) black nationalist ideologue Frank Kofsky:

KOFSKY: Do the musicians who play in these newer styles look to Africa and Asia for some of their musical inspiration?
COLTRANE: I think so; I think they look all over. And inside...
KOFSKY: Do you think that the musicians are more interested in Africa and Asia than in Europe, as far as the music goes?
COLTRANE: Well, the musicians have been exposed to Europe, you see. So it's the other parts that they haven't been exposed to. Speaking for myself, at least, I'm trying to have a rounded education.

...

Black music in the United States shares many characteristics with other African-influenced musics. These include a kinesthetically based aurality, call-and-response patterning, and vocal inflections. Black Americans have improvised upon their African roots, blending them with European influences in an unabashedly inclusive way.

...

He also noted that North American Africanisms are less acute than those in the Caribbean and Brazil. In the United States, however, an African-based style survived even when languages and cosmologies were not passed down.

...

Of course, the inclusiveness of jazz consciousness is not absolute. During most of its history, for example, the jazz community was not inclusive in terms of gender; until recently, female musicians were marginalized. And as we saw, some black nationalist musical organizations admitted only African Americans. And while some African Americans espoused black nationalism, others, especially members of the middle class, embraced European—derived culture so fully that they lost touch with their own vernacular traditions. Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier argued that the black bourgeoisie is "without cultural roots either in the Negro world with which it refused to identify, or the white world which refuses to permit the black bourgeoisie to share its life." Even W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw black spirituals as a cultural treasure, considered jazz and blues "degraded" music.

...

While some bourgeois blacks were happy in this Europhilic world, others were not. Significantly, while many black jazz musicians have been middle class, on the whole, they have represented exceptions to Frazier's valid point and successfully united their variegated influences: jazz players have mastered Euro-classical musical techniques within an African-influenced, creole aesthetic. Many of them played Euro-classical music at home or at school even if it was difficult or impossible to gain employment doing so during the period of legally mandated segregation. In response to the narrowness of white vision, these African American musicians developed a kind of musical "second sight," a sense for how to put something—music—back together that, perhaps, had never really been broken. For all the excellence of his forays into the realm of extended works composed for concert performance, Duke Ellington believed that for him, the path to creativity was not in the Euro-classical tradition. He asserted:

I'm not the offspring of a conservatory. I've avoided music schools and conservatories. I didn't want to be influenced away from what I felt inside. Back in 1915, 1920 when I was getting started in Washington, there were two schools of jazz. There were the disciplined jazz musicians who played exactly what was written. They had all the work. I got kicked out of a couple of those bands.

Then there was another group of musicians that didn't know music. Some of them could only play in one key. But they played precious things. I was in between...I wouldn't have been a good musician if I had gone to a conservatory and studied in the usual way.

...

One night in the winter of 1951, opening a set at Birdland, the New York jazz club named after him, Charlie Parker saw Igor Stravinsky sitting in the audience. Parker responded by playing "Koko," a virtuosic tour de force customarily performed at breakneck speed. As he began his second chorus, Parker quoted the beginning of Stravinsky's Firebird ballet ''as though it had always been there, a perfect fit," as an eyewitness put it. Stravinsky "roared in delight," spilling his drink. While some critics, however, might laud jazz's aesthetic "integration" as an epitome of "American democracy," I argue that the inclusiveness of jazz is atypical of dominant trends in the United States, that it developed as a counterforce to racial polarization.

...

In a Downbeat interview, saxophonist Greg Osby and trumpeter Lester Bowie take the great trumpeter Wynton Marsalis to task. They point out that there is nothing new about jazz musicians playing Euro-classical music, as Marsalis does, but that black musicians have traditionally approached European traditions from a holistic perspective, combining them with African American vernacular traditions. If Marsalis were to meld his jazz and Euro-classical selves, if he brought his expertise as an improviser to bear on his mastery of the Baroque repertoire, for example, he would be innovating in the tradition of Ellington and Parker. Marsalis's forays into Euro-classical music are important for their powerful implied critique of the historical exclusion of African Americans from professional activity in the world of Euro-classical music. Marsalis is remarkable for being able to build a successful recording career in this field as well as in jazz, and for legitimizing jazz and consequently winning it greater resources. Yet he is replicating the European tendency to exclude and categorize, to keep music in separate piece that could have remained one whole. In this respect, he may exemplify holistic jazz consciousness less than does a figure like Eric Dolphy.

[groover]

Originally Posted by mke

Yet he is replicating the European tendency to exclude and categorize, to keep music in separate piece that could have remained one whole. In this respect, he may exemplify holistic jazz consciousness less than does a figure like Eric Dolphy.

Worth repeating!

[mke]

Interesting thoughts in the accompanying interview as well.

Originally Posted by Paul Austerlitz

I think that Finnish musicians have used jazz in their own ways and have done things with it that could only happen in Finland. I was actually born in Finland but I grew up here in the U.S. I went as a grad student to get at my roots. I wanted to find a traditional folk music that I could study there, but I really didn't find that. I had kind of an exotic idea—I was looking for rural authenticity and roots—and I really didn't find that because it's a very modern country. But what I did find were musicians of my generation who had started out as jazz musicians, but who, like me, had moved from jazz to traditional Finnish music and were actually reinterpreting Finnish music through the lens of jazz. They were inspired by African American musicians who had been going to Africa for their inspiration. Then they thought, well, I'm not African American, but I'm inspired by these musicians who are looking for their roots in Africa. Let me still keep playing jazz but look for my roots in Finnish traditional music and blend that with jazz. In that sense the result belongs to Finland without divorcing it from its African American source and its generically American sources.

[John P. Cooper]

Nothing like a dull treatise by yet another dull academic of non-American birth to put one right to sleep.

[Gary Sisco]

Yes, by all means, ignore based on nationality, content being meaningless. "non-American." Oh my gosh! A furrinner! :-0

[John P. Cooper]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Yes, by all means, ignore based on nationality, content being meaningless. "non-American."

And as could have been foretold, you have nothing at all to say about the thread, just about my comment on the thread.

Go tap a tree, Zeke.

[mke]

Originally Posted by John P. Cooper

Nothing like a dull treatise by yet another dull academic of non-American birth to put one right to sleep.

"Non-American"? Did you actually read past the first sentence?

[chuckyd4]

Originally Posted by John P. Cooper

Nothing like a dull treatise by yet another dull academic of non-American birth to put one right to sleep.

so let's just pretend the author was born in the United States. what would you have to say about the article's content?

i, for one, think he brings up some interesting points in those excerpts. I'm gonna sit down with it when i have some more free time.

[John P. Cooper]

Originally Posted by mke

"Non-American"? Did you actually read past the first sentence?

Yes...as dull as it was...yes.

[John P. Cooper]

Originally Posted by chuckyd4

so let's just pretend the author was born in the United States. what would you have to say about the article's content?

i, for one, think he brings up some interesting points in those excerpts. I'm gonna sit down with it when i have some more free time.

I would have not mentioned his non-American birth.

If you have the time to wade thru yet another musician/academic tome published by a university press, have at it.

[John P. Cooper]

Originally Posted by mke

"Non-American"? Did you actually read past the first sentence?

"of Non-American birth" was the phrase I used. Don't just quote the parts you 'need' if it changes the meaning of the original POV.

".....you actually read...?"

[John P. Cooper]

Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity

Even the title reeks of pomposity.

[mke]

Originally Posted by John P. Cooper

"of Non-American birth" was the phrase I used.

Fine, but why did you use it? Of what importance is it?

[John P. Cooper]

Because past experience has proven to me that many non-American jazz writers / observers simply 'don't get it'. They've used mega filters to look at American society and I have simply grown weary of it. Even many of the Brits are way off base.

[mke]

Originally Posted by John P. Cooper

Because past experience has proven to me that many non-American jazz writers / observers simply 'don't get it'. They've used mega filters to look at American society and I have simply grown weary of it. Even many of the Brits are way off base.

Well, the writer in question is American and fully aware of the difficulties he faces, which are a bit more subtle than what's written on his passport.