My View of Jazz: Past and Present

An issue that appears repeatedly in the Miles Davis biography is the appropriateness of jazz as an art form. When Miles was a child, his band teacher would prevent him and his classmates from playing jazz, instead restricting them to playing formal marches (Davis). When he was at Julliard, they frowned upon the jazz that was being played in the city all around them (Davis). Coming into the class, my knowledge of jazz consisted of what I had learned in my household growing up, where jazz was listed to in mass and appreciated as an art. This class shed light on not only the struggle of the Black jazz musician, but the struggle of jazz itself to gain appreciation as an art form.

Coming into the class, I associated jazz mostly with Chicago and Louis Armstrong. Being born in Chicago, I had heard stories of the great jazz musicians of the city and the legacy that they had supposedly started. My parents went to college on the South Side of the city and as such, I grew to have an appreciation of the music of the city. They would play some of the city’s classic artists, including the man who wrote their wedding song, Louis Armstrong. All of this contributed to my appreciation of jazz and the idea that it had always been appreciated this way. I was not naïve to jazz’s roots. I knew that it was a creation based in Black culture, and that this inevitably caused it to be viewed with some resistance. But based on my own childhood, I rationalized that the quality of the music would have primarily outweighed its origins, which as I found out, was not the case.

Even from its beginnings, jazz has been viewed as a lesser art, unfit for higher society. In New Orleans, jazz was associated with the brothels and nightclubs of Storyville (Stewart). Jelly Roll Morton’s grandmother threw him out of the house for playing jazz and associating with its’ perceived culture (Stewart). Jazz’s association with low-brow society would continue when it migrated to Chicago and New York, as most of the clubs that jazz was performed in were owned by the prominent gangsters of the day (Travis). And despite the fact that the Swing Era saw the proliferation of jazz into popular culture, it could not escape its’ roots and as such was still not considered an art form worthy of high class society.

This is the situation that Miles Davis found himself in. During the height of the Swing Era, Miles’ band teacher would not let him play jazz, and during the Bebop Era that followed, Julliard would reject the jazz music that it would one day be teaching (Davis). Davis’ struggle epitomizes how jazz as an art struggled to escape its past and gain acceptance as art. Even when it was the most popular music of the day, Davis could not convince his teachers that it was a style of music worth pursuing. Based on its origins on the streets and in Black culture, jazz had to fight for its place among the arts.

This class changed the way that I view the struggle that jazz as an art form had to go through to achieve acceptance. It turns out that my view of jazz coming into the class was skewed as a result of the household that I grew up in. I grew up in a household that appreciated jazz, but this class opened up my eyes to what jazz had to go through to gain acceptance as an art form, and for this I am grateful.

Comment: Sven Walderich  

Nature or Nurture: A City’s Effect on a Musical Genius

An ancient African proverb says that it takes a village to raise a child. While not actually a village, the San Juan Hill neighborhood in midtown Manhattan “was like a little village. Everybody knew everybody” (Kelley).  It was from this neighborhood that Thelonious Monk developed his unique and genius style of jazz. Much in the way that jazz was created as an eclectic mix of music from all of the different cultures of New Orleans, Monk’s distinct style of jazz drew from the unique and eclectic San Juan Hill neighborhood where he grew up.

            After moving from North Carolina, the Monk family took up residence in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of midtown New York City. The neighborhood boasted a large black population comprised of families from all over the world (Kelley). As a child, Thelonious would grow up with people from the South like himself, along with those from the Bahamas and West Indies among others (Kelley). One of the trademarks of this neighborhood was the music, as the “Black Bohemia” that San Juan Hill was encompassed in had the largest concentration of Black Musicians in the city prior to the Harlem Renaissance (Kelley). It felt like every household in the neighborhood had an instrument, inducing the Monk’s, who acquired a piano that Thelonious would learn to play on (Kelley). This neighborhood’s appreciation for the arts provided Thelonious with the support he needed to foster the creativity within. As such, “the most important influence on Monk’s early development as a musician and as a young man wasn’t a person but an institution— the Columbus Hill Neighborhood Center “(Kelley). This venue provided Thelonious a place to experiment and hone his genius. Additionally, it allowed him to see others play and be exposed to a variety of styles and backgrounds which greatly influenced his music.

Looking back at a competition he lost as a child that would have provided him witha scholarship to Julliard, Monk replied that, “I’m glad I didn’t go to the conservatory. Probably would’ve ruined me!” (Kelley). This helps to explain what is meant by the saying “Jazz is New York, man!” Jazz was created in New Orleans as a product of the variety of cultures and ethnicities that lived there, much in the same way that New York is a creation of all of the different ethnicities who moved there and created the city’s distinct neighborhoods. Additionally, jazz is not formal, at least not in Monk’s mind. Jazz is creative, distinct, and rough around the edges; just like the neighborhood he grew up in.

 The film Leimert Park describes jazz’s relationship with the community in the same way as Kelley. For both, jazz is used as a way for the musicians to express what is going on around them. Jazz, and art as a whole, can serve as a tool that brings a neighborhood together and turns it into a community. The Columbus Hill Neighborhood Center was to San Juan Hill what the World Stage is to Leimert Park, providing a space for artistic expression and ethnic collaboration. While both communities experienced a tremendous amount of violence, both found that jazz and art can serve as means to foster relationships and build a sense of community.

Overall, jazz musicians, like most people, derive a great deal of who they are based on where they are from. Our homes are more than where we live. They represent what we are exposed to, who we interact with, what ideas we are exposed to, and this all works to forge who an individual is, and who they become.

Comment: Phil Coren

Let’s Talk About It: The Emergence of the Racial Dialogue of the 1930s

While jazz was undoubtedly a Black creation, by the end of the 1920s and through the 1930s, it had made its way into mainstream White popular culture. As a result, conversations began to surface about it origins and the culture that created it, spurring conversations about race, ethnicity, and value. However, as Black culture was being appreciated for its creation, there was a second debate raging about who should control the industry and the revenue associated with it. It was as a result of this integration of jazz into mainstream popular culture and increased monetization and control of the industry by a few individuals that caused race and ethnicity became an explicit part of the conversation during the 1930s ‘Swing Era’.

            Back in the days of Storyville, jazz was seen as a rough, underground, unsavory form of music. Coming from some of the seedier parts of Black New Orleans, jazz had this rough stigma attached to it and even as it moved up to Chicago and New York, it was still mostly played in Black neighborhoods or in gangster run concert halls. However, all of this started to change in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the proliferation of radio and recorded music further worked to entrench jazz into mainstream culture. This expansion of jazz into popular culture throughout the 1930s, highlighted by Benny Goodman’s Palomar performance in 1935, sparked a conversation about the origins and meaning of this type of music that many people were hearing for the first time. Compared with the prominent 1920s view jazz was a lower class, criminal form of expression, by the 1930s jazz stood for the leftist ideas of race integration and creativity of African Americans (Swing Changes, 53). Benny Goodman’s band employed many talented Blacks including Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Gene Krupa (Stewart). John Hammond travelled the country discovering jazz musicians, including Fletcher Henderson and Billie Holiday, and lauding Blacks for their creativity and intelligence, even going to fair as to say that Duke Ellington didn’t do enough to stand up for Black culture and rights (Swing Changes, 51 & Stewart). The credit to Black culture for creating jazz sparked a conversation about race, ethnicity, and value that can be viewed as a precursor for the Civil Rights movement (Section).

            However, while the conversation about the creation of jazz led to an increased appreciation for Black intelligence and creativity, when it came to who would control this new industry, many of the same race relation problems that had existed for decades once again appeared, and the hegemonic role of Whites remained (Stewart). Due to the consolidation of power in the industry as a result of radio and record sales, there was a need for far less musicians to entertain the masses (Gioia, 127). As a result, only the few artists who could get radio play and record distribution were able to make a decent living and obtain a level of stardom. More often than not, it took a partnership with a White manager or business partner in order for a Black musician to get this airtime and distribution, such as was the case with Duke Ellington and Irving Mills (Stewart). This type of arrangement spurred discussion about the return to what had been the norm of exploitation of Blacks and Black culture by the White elite (Stewart).

            Stemming from the streets of New Orleans, jazz was created as a way for the Black residents of the city to express themselves and their unique culture. By the 1930s, while Blacks were getting credit for its creation and some bands were becoming integrated, there were those who were questioning the control that White managers and businessmen had over the industry. This two sided debate, while starting in the 1930s, would rage for decades and lead straight into the Civil Rights Movement.

Splitting Hairs: Choosing the most important city to jazz in the 1920s.

How can one really choose which city, either Chicago or New York, was more important to jazz in the 1920s? As Ted Gioia so eloquently states when describing the spread of jazz in the United States, “Drawing its ebb and flow on a map, we seem to find ourselves staring at a sharply articulated triangle formed by three urban centers: the starting point is New Orleans, next comes Chicago, finally New York” (Gioia, 66). However, to look gauge importance simply chronologically would be incredibly shortsighted. The integration of the stride piano and evolution of jazz as a performance art worked to ensure New York’s place in the annals of jazz history (Gioia, 91 & Henderson). And yet, when examining all of the evidence and the fact that only importance in the 1920s is up for debate, Chicago appears to come out ahead in this debate due to the musical integration that took place and the proliferation of white jazz and their musicians into popular culture.

Of all the ways that the city of Chicago impacted the evolution of jazz music, one could argue that the most important way involved people watching and listening to jazz, instead of performing it themselves. Situated on the South Side of Chicago, the Lincoln Gardens was an immense concert hall that in the early 1920s, provided a home for King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band (Gioia, 44). Coming from all over the Midwest and sometimes from farther, musicians would fight their way to the front of the crowd to listen to the revolutionary compositions of King Oliver and his young trumpet player, Louis Armstrong. Often, these young musicians clamoring near the front of the stage would be White musicians who had already finished their gigs on the other side of town, and would then come to the Lincoln Gardens to hear what the Black musicians were performing, hoping to take certain aspects and use them in their own performances (Stewart). Groups such as the Austin High School Gang would head to the Lincoln Gardens on Saturday nights to see King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band up close, and Bix Beiderbecke’s perpetuance for sneaking out of boarding school to visit Chicago clubs eventually led to his expulsion: all so they could learn the skills of improvisation and Black musicianship to go with their more classical musical training (Gioia, 68 & 75).

With skills and appreciation acquired from their Black counterparts, 1920s Chicago saw the proliferation of some of the most prominent White musicians of the era and the evolution of jazz into popular culture. Simply looking at those associated in one way or another with the Austin High School Gang, including Benny Goodman and Eddie Condon, reads like list of jazz royalty (Gioia, 74-75). It may have been this proliferation of jazz into white culture that led to its shift in the style in the 1920s. Leaving behind the blues and multitheme ragtime structures that were so prominent in New Orleans Jazz, thirty-two bar forms and popular songs were increasingly used by Chicago jazz musicians in the 1920s (Gioia, 73). Many stylistic musical devices, including the flare up and the shuffle rhythm, are seen as signature elements of these White Chicago musicians (Gioia, 72). In terms of representing the culture and community of Chicago, perhaps no one did it better than the previously mentioned Benny Goodman. While Louis Armstrong’s time spent playing in Chicago has led to an association between him and the city, he grew up playing a New Orleans style of jazz and did not emerge as a renowned soloist until years after his stint at the Lincoln Gardens with King Oliver (Gioia, 48). Goodman, in comparison, was born and raised in the city of Chicago and not only embodies the proliferation of White jazz, but represents the integration of musical styles, with his assured execution and smooth phrasing inspired by the playing of Jimmie Noone out of Chicago’s Apex Club (Gioia, 62).

Despite the fact that early Chicago jazz is almost always associated with the city’s White musicians, it should also include a lengthy narrative about how the rise of its’ distinct musical style has a tremendous amount to do with the integration of ideas between the Black and White musicians of the city. It is the results of these interactions, along with the rise of White jazz and musicians, that made Chicago the most important city to jazz in the 1920s.

Comment- Jason Ortenberg

Why New Orleans? The Emergence of Jazz in America

To look at the creation of jazz is to look at the sum of many incredibly vibrant and different people and cultures. As a cosmopolitan city matched by few in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (Stewart), New Orleans was an ideal city for jazz to emerge out of the "the rhythms of ragtime, the bent notes and chord patterns of the blues, and... brass bands and string ensembles" (Gioia, 4). Just like the how city itself had been created as a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities, jazz was a creation of the musical and cultural freedom of the city from which it came.

Starting as early as 1817, when the New Orleans City Council established an official site for slave gathering and dances (Gioia, 7), New Orleans came to represent a place where musical and artistic culture would be celebrated, often looking beyond the traditional stigmas of the day. Much of this can likely be attributed to the inhabitants of early New Orleans, who came from many different cultures and set forth much looser standards of ethnic interaction compared to other Anglicized colonies. Included in this was a class of free Blacks and Creoles, who had both European and Black ancestry (Gioia, 6). This freedom of interaction in New Orleans allowed for syncretism, or "the blending together of cultural elements that previously existed separately (Gioia, 5)." According to jazz historian Ted Gioia, this blending of different cultural arts “is perhaps the most striking and powerful evolutionary force in the history of modern music (Gioia, 8)." While this inter-cultural freedom would diminish significantly in the late 19^th Century after all people of African descent were classified as Black by Louisiana Legislative Code No. 111(Gioia, 24), Blacks and Creoles took with them many elements of traditional European music and mixed in their own style and stories. Adding elements of New Orleans’ underbelly, specifically of all the happenings in Storyville or the District (Gioia,32), to these more European elements, created a new sound that up until recently was thought to be solely a Black experience.

However, to fully examine the rise of jazz in New Orleans, one must look beyond Black culture and take into account the impact of another non-European ethnicity: Mexicans. Originally coming to New Orleans for the 1884 Cotton Exposition but choosing to remain in the city afterwards, Mexican musicians played a large role in the development of New Orleans’ musical culture that up until recently was virtually unknown (Johnson, 226). Mexican musicians, most notably the Eighth Regimental Band, brought with them from Mexico a classical training that their Black counterparts did not possess. By the early 1900s, some of the most promising jazz musicians in city were receiving classical training from these Mexican musicians (Johnson, 226). In addition to their training, the Mexicans introduced their Black counterparts to woodwind instruments (Johnson, 229).  With the inclusion of instruments such as the clarinet and the saxophone into their ensembles, along with their new found classical training, the first jazz bands now had a greater range of sounds and ideas they could explore and develop, all as a result of the Mexican influence.

After examining all of the factors leading to the emergence of jazz in New Orleans, the one that truly stands out is how the freedom of inter-cultural relationships was critical in blending all of the sounds and styles that became jazz. Music is more than sounds for the audience to listen to and be entertained by; it is also provides the artist with a way to express himself. Jazz became a way for the multicultural people of New Orleans to take parts of different types of music, and thus different pieces of artistic and cultural expression, and tie it all together into one new form of music that truly represented New Orleans. That is what was truly distinct about New Orleans jazz: music was no longer African, or Mexican, or Spanish, or French. New Orleans jazz, while it contained pieces of all of those, was new, it was abstract (Gioia, 37), and it was their own.


Comment: Michelle Kaplan  

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