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