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