One Man’s Journey Through The History of Jazz as a Transformative Process
by
William Murray Allison
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in Transformative Studies
California Institute of Integral Studies
September 3, 2016
Abstract
This theoretical inquiry follows the development and history of jazz music from its earliest origins in the times of slavery here in the United States to the present, seeking to find and identify the effects of this African American tradition across time. Based on ancient pre-diaspora African cultures which used musical improvisation and call and answer to build and strengthen community, jazz has been a significant force for social change right up to modern times. The endurance, strength and nobility of the African American People, their uplifting and ennobling effects upon this society and the emerging global culture has been supported and expressed through jazz music and culture.
Using data from multiple disciplines and utilizing the Integral Theory of Ken Wilber to help track these transformational changes upon racial, economic, and social structures. Moving across time, and using the AQAL framework (all lines, all levels, all states) to create a structure upon which to place these progressively more highly developed status, this writer seeks to make the knowledge and power of the music and culture of collaborative jazz improvisation accessible for applications in many disciplines in new and exciting ways.
Keywords: AQAL, Lines, Levels, Stages, States, Rapport, Participatory, Expressive Voices, Interdependent, Racism.
Table of Contents
Abstract 2
New Introduction 5
A Brief Introduction to the use of AQAL in the Inquiry ……....................................................... 5 Use of the AQAL Model: All Quadrants, Levels, Stages and States .......................................... 11
Use of the AQAL Model: All Quadrants, Levels, Stages and States 18
Chapter One: Origins of jazz 1850s to 1919 22
Jazz as a transformative process 22
Origins of jazz, New Orleans 25
Jazz moves beyond New Orleans and the South 34
Early jazz innovators 38
African American placement on AQAL in the early days of Jazz 40
Defining the dual Afrological and Eurological origins of jazz 42
Duality of AQAL placement by race 45
Chapter Two: 1920-1930s 47
Defining core elements of jazz 47
Movement into white society………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..51
Gender, Female, Male, Queer and Jazz Culture 54
The rise of African American culture on the AQAL framework 57
Jazz as 1930s American culture 59
Drug addictions of many jazz greats 83
African American placement on AQAL in the 1940s 85
Chapter Four: The 1950s 88
The apprenticeship of new jazz musicians 92
Jazz’s contribution to civil rights 96
The diversity of jazz styles and their associations with race 101
Jazz around the world during the 1950s 102
African American placement on AQAL in the 1950s 107
Chapter Five: The 1960s 111
Jazz redefines the times 116
Social reactions to these messages of change 121
The changing expression of jazz as a reflection of the times 123
African American placement on AQAL in the 1970s 129
Chapter Six: The 1970s 132
Free Jazz and spontaneity in the 1970s 133
Political Status of African Americans in the 1970s 135
Importance of Jazz to the Critical Discourses of the 1970s 140
The Placement of African Americans on AQAL during the 1970s 147
Chapter Seven: The 1980s…………………………..………………………………………….152
Evolution of jazz beyond America…….……………………………………………………….154
Free jazz an European Musical Traditions.…………………………………………………….156
African American's Status in the United States….…………………………………………….161
The Hybridity of jazz…………………………………………………………………………..163
Institutionalized Segregation in the United States………………………………………….….165
Jazz andAcademia…………………………………………………………………………..….166
Placement of African Americans on AQAL in the 1980s 167
Chapter Eight: The 1990s 171
Multidisciplinary explorations for the Jazz rapport 176
Complexities of the American social structure 179
The further evolution of Jazz beyond commercial constraints 182
AQAL placement of African Americans in the 1990s 184
Chapter Nine 2000 and Forward 189
Disciplines which have incorporated jazz improvisation 197
Inadequacy of AQAL to cover the diversity of placements for all African Americans 201
References 204
New Introduction
First, the transformational powers of the jazz process developed by African Americans are evident over the course of time in both the culture and social structure of the United States. Second, the fact that the African American people have purposefully engaged their expressive voices in song not only to nurture unity, but also to push on the fabric of our society towards progressive racial and economic status for all Americans. The inclusion of jazz and spirituals helped the civil rights movement to stand on such a clearly united front. Thirdly, there are levels of communication beyond the constraints of language in the practice of jazz improvisation which continues to broaden the consciousness of both the performers and their listening audience with every soloist’s explorations. Fourth, by using the Integral Theory AQAL framework of Ken Wilber in this inquiry this writer has sought to expand the ability to examine the status and progress of not only the African American people but all people in our nation.
I draw considerably from the work of Ed Sarath whose book Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness is the first to appropriate integral principles to music, to explain the nature and scope of the Integral, AQAL system. AQAL stands for all quadrants, all lines, levels, states and stages. There are four quadrants in this map of cosmic wholeness, not in a judgmental sense but rather in an integrated overview of the sum total sum of human knowledge. The Upper Right pertains to exterior, objective reality; Lower Right to inter-objectivity, Lower Left to inter-subjectivity, and the Upper left to the interior subjective realms. These quadrants interpenetrate and contain each in all four, it is useful to think of them as they relate to one another. The Right-hand quadrants are about exteriors, the Left-hand are about interiors as in the collective interactions between individuals and groups of people , proceeding from the exterior domains of the two right quadrants to the more personal interior domains in the two left quadrants of transpersonal or transcendent experience. As such this system teaches us that the ultimate level of human development based on creativity and consciousness is only achieved by reaching a oneness with all four quadrants, the scope of the interior-exterior cosmic wholeness.
So, no one group is superior to any other, rather all are part of the complex interactions of the whole and moving together towards higher realms through their interactions. As an example of how people on different levels of development, as in this inquiry in a placement arbitrarily assigned by the white ruling class as a means of control over African Americans and other outsider groups, or as a natural part of the social world, very different perceptions guide and define those as being placed in a specific placement. Wilber, 1996, spoke of this saying;
A world view, as we were saying, is what the Kosmos looks like from a particular rung of consciousness. When you have only sensations and impulses, what does the Kosmos look like to you? We call that archaic. When you add images and symbols, what does the Kosmos look like then? Magic. When you add rules and roles what does the Kosmos see? A mythic world. When formal operational emerges, what do you see? A rational world. And so on (p. 258).
African Americans were forced to exist in such extreme and low levels as less than human, as chattel, and without even common language skills to define and move through the social world. As a result they responded by using their expressive voices to communicate complex and resistive concepts and emotions in their music. Moving forward in time in this inquiry their progress is reflected upon the AQAL framework in ever higher placements and their increasing freedom to be the truly evolved and powerful people African Americans have always been was portrayed in the music and culture of jazz. By participating, as musicians, dancing or as the listening audience, all those present were able to share states of higher consciousness which shifted the entire social structure creating momentum towards equity socially, economically and racially. Sarath, 2013, spoke about diversity arising from unity:
More recently, a quadrivium perspective has entered the integral conversation as a way of mapping the capacity for a given field, or developmental line, to achieve all-quadrants integration from a whole-to-parts angle. So whereas the quadratic pplication illustrates the diversity that arises from unity, the quadrivium illustrates how any given part of that diversity which in the present analysis will pertain to any given area of the knowledge base, serves as a pathway that connect with that wholeness to achieve all-quadrants integration (p.29).
In the study of jazz improvisation one of the important names that comes up is Ingrid Monson, whose work examines the many levels of resistance and creativity in jazz. She wrote in 2007:
The larger questions posed are what combinations of factors (and what combinations of combinations) made this music possible? What effects, direct and indirect, did the struggle for racial equality have on aesthetics, the sense of mission musicians brought to their art, the diversity of music played and composed, and the symbolic meanings attached to the art-form? (p. 4)
Monson falls short of an Integral analysis to further break-out the process of improvisational collaboration and the resulting changes in individual and group consciousness. Her work has been to investigate the ways jazz improvisation uses a variety of levels of communication to bring an ensemble of musicians together in the process of exploring creative new musical expressions.
Keith Sawyer, 2007, has taken the Peak Flow research of his mentor Mihaly Csikszentmihaly into the changes in perception and time sense that occur in those ‘Eureka’ moments of heightened creativity and took it further to coin the term Group Flow; “At any second during a performance, an almost visible musical exchange could take the piece in a new direction; later, no one could remember who was responsible for what. In jazz, the group has the ideas, not the individual (loc.75).” He does not use the AQAL system to locate the levels of development of the participants or to further break-out the processes involved as they have developed in an integral way.
Here it is important to acknowledge distinctions between Sawyer’s group flow and Sarath’s idea of an intersubjective field of consciousness. While superficially similar, Sarath—operating from the nondual Vedantic idea of consciousness as primary in the cosmos—views the collective consciousness enlivened in improvisation as an ontologically veridical stratum of cosmic wholeness. Sarath correlates this emergent social aesthetic principle with parallel findings involving large groups of meditators convening and radiating harmonizing effects in the social environment.
Sarath (2013) has used Integral Theory to correlate the jazz process scope with the deep meditational states of many eastern wisdom traditions. He quotes a study, by Hagelin, et al., in which 4,000 meditators from all over the nation gathered for a two-month experiment in the heat of summer in Washington, D. C. to enliven coherence and harmony in the environment resulting in reduced crime:
With the cooperation of public officials, several parameters of quality of life were measured during the length of the program, showing that not only reduced crime, but significantly reduced accidents and illness occurred during this period. When the program ended, and practitioners returned to their homes, the results lingered slightly, and then the numbers returned to normal. (p. 15)
These results would seem to show how whole communities and even entire regions are affected by group practices of transpersonal creativity like the meditation experiment. This inquiry follows the evolution of jazz to track equally significant social, economic, and racial progress, bringing people together to listen, dance and socialize freely as equal co-participants in the music and culture of this African American art-form. This is a new application of Integral Theory, though anticipated by Wilber, 2010:
What is required to even understand the genesis of these culture wars is a global framework that is comprehensive enough to include all of the major cultural worldviews___including their growth and development. Only an Integral framework can come anywhere close to such a task. (Loc. 5690)
Integral theory is therefor quite useful to this inquiry into the transformational practice of jazz as it does not value one level or stage of development by various groups over any other. The diversity and complexity is instead presented as equal in this Integral Theory of consciousness. Wilber went on to say:
But that is exactly what the Integral approach has done, in all those areas_ from environment to economic to cultural, to mention just a few. A truly Integral Methodological Pluralism has been able to map everything from forms of local knowledge to universal values and systems, and do so in a multicultural fashion not objected to by rational holders of the various cultures themselves. (Loc. 5690)
This inquiry is about the transformative changes across time between insider and outsider cultural groups in our American society through the practice of jazz. There are differences between transcendence and change through active and meditative modalities. In gaining a theoretical perspective for this play of the interplay of both parts-to-whole creativity, as in the music and culture of jazz, and whole-to-parts meditation practices, both of these consciousness process scopes must be done, as Sarath (2013) said:
Always bearing in mind that the entire process spectrum must be writ large____ (e.g., meditation as a continuum, improvisation as a continuum ) ____ that are central to the jazz-inspired, integral template for creativity-consciousness growth. From this enhanced conceptual awareness the prospects for implementation in educational and broader settings. (p.401)
That jazz has this collective consciousness which is enlivened experience of unity between the musicians, the listening audience and even the environment within a self-organizing and evolving state of being. Sarath examined this experience of participants as:
Not only a sense of interconnectedness, but as contact with an ontologically veridical, intersubjective field aspect of consciousness to which individual consciousness is linked. We have seen that an ever-growing body of empirical findings into nonlocal and intersubjective consciousness supports this understanding, which is also consistent with the accounts of consciousness posited by most if not all of the world’s wisdom traditions. (p. 401)
It is worth noting that the AQAL Model is a neutral framework – it doesn’t mandate what to think or believe and doesn’t exist constrained by the opinions of a given researcher– it is a framework that provides the space for everything in the human world to be examined in. Wilber stated:
Precisely because IOS [Integral Operating System] is a Neutral Framework it can be used to bring more clarity, care, and comprehensiveness to virtually any situation, making success much more likely, whether that success be measured in terms of personal transformation, social change, excellence in business, care for others, or simple happiness in life. (2005, p.45)
AQAL’s purpose is to allow us to take a more nuanced and in depth look at the complexity and sophisticated perspectives of development mentally, socially and intellectually. In this inquiry the goal is to track the changes in social, economic, racial equity and correlate these movements with the rise of the music and culture of jazz as an African American tradition. By following a historical development in this inquiry I hope to provide insights into using collaborative jazz improvisation to promote further social evolution towards racial, and socio-economic equality. “Integral Theory maps the inner-outer dimensions of human being and cosmic wholeness, the processes that promote navigation and integration of this wholeness, and the evolutionary dynamics by which systems evolve over time” (Sarath, 2103, p. 24). Combining these quadrants, each with a line of thirteen major stages, or levels proceeding from the simplest level one to the highest thirteen of development and complexity existing on a continuum each quadrant yields an important part of the integral theory of consciousness that is comprehensive in its nature and scope. This model is used to indicate how a general synthesis and integration of the most influential schools of consciousness studies can be affected (Wilber, 1997, p. 71).
The goal of using the AQAL framework is not to tie ourselves to particular placements on the grid but rather to use these perspectives as tools for our understanding and development. In the inquiry my placements of the African American people are not meant as either judgmental or restrictive but as reflections of an on-going history of resistance, survival and transformation in the face of racist and socio-economic oppression.
As shown in the following chart, Wilber’s Four Quadrants of consciousness provide the foundational basis of our experience and understanding of the world, and how they are present in each and every moment of life. Ranging from the shadow in the Upper-Left quadrant, to cultural values and relationships in the Lower-Left, to individual behaviors and physiological factors in the Upper-Right, to ecological and techno-economical systems in the Lower-Right – each of which interpenetrate giving rise to our awareness of the richness and complexity of each moment of life on this planet.
The beauty of the counterpoint between the quadrants is such that it allows this inquiry to step beyond the myriad of racially, culturally and religiously biased stories that have emerged from both whites and African American people. The AQAL framework, in this inquiry, is used to expand he dialogue between cultures and work toward a place of mutuality and understanding.
The Quadrants as shown on the following figure are Upper Left, I or Individual Interior; the Lower Left, We or the Collective Interior; Upper Right, It or Individual Exterior, and Lower Right, Its or Collective.
(Retrieved from http://mind.whole life whole world.com/the-aqal-integral-map-of-reality/quadrant/ Blacker, J. & Hawke, G.)
This brings two distinctions between the interior and the exterior, and between the individual and the collective. The interior referred to contains the intangible, inner representations, non-physical such as our individual thoughts, emotions, meditative states and shared meaning, values and cultural understanding in the collective. The exterior refers to the physical realm of things you can touch, including the body (and the brain), physical behaviors and actions and the physical world, systems and the social environment of the collective. These four quadrants are always present and cannot be reduced to serving any of the others as they interpenetrate and co-arise simultaneously as a tetra-arise (tetra meaning four).
Levels of consciousness and complexity, both individually and collectively, also known as Stages, or Waves, deal with developments of growth, complexity, capacity and depth forming the second basic element of the AQAL Integral Model. These levels of depth do not occur in isolation from the other quadrants appearing in all four quadrants occurring in each simultaneously as changes occur. As the individual or group advance to higher levels they retain the qualities of each previous level. Nobody is born at the highest most complex levels and each of us has to advance step by step. In this inquiry I found that the African American people advance together like a rising tide despite their social placement by dominant white ruling class using their collective expressive voices to foment their advancement.
Lines are achieved as part of the development of various, specific capacities also known as Developmental Lines. A level of development is always tracked on a specific line. These lines contain our needs, worldviews, morals, our self-identity, emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills in each of the four quadrants. The highest development is a global universal spiritual growth and transformation. In the case of this inquiry, the spiritual growth and development of the African America people is tracked as they have endured despite their social placement by the dominant white ruling class.
States are temporary and changing, exclusive to the moment like agreeable or disagreeable are mutually exclusive in a given moment. States are peek experiences which give us a sense of deeper or higher Stages of potential consciousness. In comparison with Stages, or Levels of development, it may be possible that a series of peak flow experiences over time may lead to the development of a permanently acquired capacity, or Stage. So States are temporary and fleeting not bound or defined by the Stages which are more long term.
Types complement and are components of the other aspects of Quadrants, Levels, Lines and States, and they are about Horizontal, or on a same plane differences like left handedness or righthandedness which have nothing whatever to do with different levels. This includes personal preferences like whether one likes redheads or brunettes, or classical music or heavy metal. The types include male and female as well as all gender variations without making any of these distinctions superior.
The Wilber-Combs lattice is the grid upon which the intersecting states of heightened awareness occur between not only people on different levels of development but also between members of outsider socio-racial-economic groups, like African Americans, Native Americans, Immigrants, and the Poor, and the ruling white upper class. Each occurrence has the potential of initiating lasting changes in awareness and perception beyond the original groups to which participants belong in their everyday lives. As seen on the following figure by Wilber, each quadrant begins in the center and is an undifferentiated primitive form which gradually evolves through tribal and individual consciousness towards global and universal levels of being.
(1996, p.112)
Integral theory offers a perspective from which to illustrate the first-second-third-person connecting realms wherein these powerful tendencies of collaborative jazz improvisation (CJI) are manifest as sociocultural patterns of perception and practice. Combs (2009) explained this further noting that by dividing consciousness into four separate and distinct quadrants, the two left-hand quadrants deal with our perceptions of inner experiences and the two-right hand quadrants deal with our perceptions of the outer world. The two upper quadrants also represent our perceptions of single objects and events while the lower two quadrants represent multiple objects or events. Each represents a broad category of knowledge as well as a basic dimension of the world as we perceive or experience it.
Use of the AQAL Model: All Quadrants, Levels, Stages and States
The Upper Left quadrant is “I” representing personal internal realities, inner subjective experiences and knowledge about these experiences, intentional and subjective. This is our very sense of self as well as knowledge of about psychological structures and dynamics. It contains aspects of psychology and philosophy as they pertain to the growth of our inner life, states of consciousness and underlying structures of these states. The “We’ in the Lower Left quadrant represents shared internal realities, shared knowledge and experiences, including intersubjective experiences, cultural values and norms. The problems of human communication, the sociology of cultural beliefs occupy this space.
The Right Hand quadrants contain the material realities of the world as they relate to conscious experience. The Upper Right quadrant’s “It” represents individual instances of objects or events, the brain as a single organism, behavioral and objective. The Lower Right “It’s” represents groups or collections of objects and events, the brain as a dynamically interacting set of nerve cells and neurochemicals, social and inter-objective awareness.
In the Wilber model of Integral Theory, there is the first-second-third-person condensed version of the quadratic concept, the third, the IT(and plural ITS), pertaining to the objective/physical realm, the second-person, WE, the intersubjective, and the first-person, I, interior-subjective; moving these “Big Three”, respectively, spirituality, art, and science. This is a quadratic vantage, a whole-to-parts perspective of the infinitely differentiated regions of the cosmos that have emerged form universal wholeness. The map of this begins with the Upper Left interior, subjective experience as being closest to cosmic wholeness-and proceeds in a counter-clockwise direction. The Lower Left integrates the Upper Left, the Lower Right integrates the Lower and Upper Left culminating with the Upper Right (Sarath, 2013, p. 29). So, the cosmic wholeness becomes integrated into a holistic individual consciousness.
Sarath (2013) has instead drawn from a quadrivium model:
beginning with the Upper Right and proceeding in a clockwise manner in the opposite direction, a parts-to-whole model of all quadrants integration. The neurophysiological and technical aspects of playing an instrument and stylistic norms of the idiom are examples of Upper Right, third-person, exterior-objective phenomenon. Lower Right (also third-person, but now inter-objective, exterior) phenomenon include the pitch systems, rhythmic languages, formal structures, and other factors of the broader musical world. As awareness opens up from discipline-specific to intradisciplinary musical conception, thus moving from the Upper Right confinement to the Lower Right grounding, it apprehends syntactic and nonsyntactic building blocks in more fluid and diverse forms and thus is more able to navigate the mosaic of possibilities in the broader musical world. (pp. 29-30)
To utilize this system for this inquiry we must ask the question of, “What do we call the base-line AQAL level of the African American people at the time of slavery?” Existing individually at multiple levels according to life experience and opportunities for development their base-line began as highly evolved from a precolonial African perspective. Yet from a white ruling class perspective which sought to perpetuate their hegemony, socially, racially, culturally and economically, these same people were placed at the lowest or beginning levels. The economics of owning a people’s labor was part of many cultures around the Mediterranean in both ancient and then contemporary times and in the new world this “principle that human beings could be owned as instruments of production was well established”(Fredrickson, 2002, Location 470). Slavery was based partially on the concept that Africans were not truly fully developed as human, being legally defined in our constitution as only 3/5 human, which would place them in the Upper Right quadrant as neocortex, or the primitive brain in the realm of other mammals. Neocortex in AQAL Upper Right is level 9, (see appendix). This was the rationalization for whites to own and use an entire people as beasts of burden, though clearly the diversity and antiquity of cultures in Africa belies this rationalization. In fact the extent of ancient Egyptian civilization which in very ancient times “included not only the islands of the Aegean Sea and Ionia, but also extended to the extremities of the East” (James, 2014, p. 16) and established its status as the true origin of philosophy falsely attributed to the Greeks. Newly arriving slaves were deliberately separated from groups of similar cultural origin so that they could not communicate easily, to create the appearance of them as preliterate. The maintenance of this myth made educating slaves, especially teaching them to read forbidden.
On the Lower Right quadrant slaves were popularly placed as tribal with foraging as the primary means of existence in their natural environment in Africa, tribal is level 9 in the Lower Right. Living as many African cultures did in complete balance with their ecosystem and practicing sustainable harvest horticulture did not fit the Eurocentric displacement of natural systems with a monoculture to produce goods for export.
Their Lower Left quadrant placement was typhonic, or body consciousness with their spirituality considered the result of their inability to discern internal images from external reality. Typhonic is level 8 on the Lower Left. African traditions of the divine being manifest in all things, rivers, animals, trees, the dead, and the community itself seemed to European whites as ignorant and primitive. The centrality of rhythm and dance in African cultures was also interpreted as a result of their body consciousness and lack of intellect, moving together as herds of animals. This ignored the complexity of African cultures based on community united in expressing and sustaining themselves through these complex improvisational rhythmic musical traditions.
Within the Upper Left framework, slavery placed Africans at the level of prehension, limiting their interaction with a subject, event, or entity to perception but not necessarily cognition or mental understanding. In the AQAL chart this places them at Upper Left level 1 or the very lowest developmental level. This placement discouraged humane treatment and abolished family groups as meaningless for animals and legitimized the brutality practiced daily to maintain control over slavery as an economic system. The assignment of group identity by the physical characteristic of skin color, “ the “ocular” criteria, have never the less generally facilitated imperial rule, “primitive accumulation’’, mass labor recruitment, and all the main practices of human subjugation on view throughout the modern world”(Omi & Winant, 1988, Location 710).
Combs (2009) took this further concept of multiple manifestations, explaining how innumerable variations arise when the lines and levels of development are intersected, resulting in as much developmental diversity in our societies as cultural diversity. Kezer (2014) explains the Wilber-Combs Lattice, as the resulting combinations of waking, dreaming and deep states (gross, subtle, and causal), meditative, altered states, and peak experiences. Any of these states can be accessed at any level of development. The resulting unique combinations which arise from these intersecting states and levels comprise the Wilber-Combs Lattice (Kezer, 2014). These social levels and stages of development are, for my inquiry, reflected in the historical development of CJI. Using Wilber’s Integral Theory as construed by Sarath (2013) and the Wilber-Combs-Lattice ( Combs, 2009) of states of shared consciousness, across all stages or levels of AQAL, this inquiry identifies and examines the historical origins and current status of jazz as a transformative practice.
Chapter One: Origins of jazz 1850s to 1919
This chapter begins the inquiry into the history of jazz as a transformative process. The origins of jazz in the time period from the 1850s to 1919 can be traced to New Orleans. Once the Civil War ended the music quickly spread with the great migration of African Americans to the cities of the North, and across the entire nation.
Jazz as a transformative process
This inquiry into the history of jazz through a review of historical, ethno-musicologial, and sociological literature reveals a transformative process of participatory improvisation based on a traditional African musical template and a creative bricolage of music from the cultural complexity and diversity of our American social reality (Lewis, 2008; Peretti, 1992; Barrett, 2012, Sarath, 2013). The core element of jazz is the rapport reached by the ensemble, the soloist and the listening audience which allows spontaneous performances with thematic material rising up from the unexpected and unrehearsed musical dialogue (Bennet, 2003; Barrett, 2012, Lewis, 2008; Sarath, 2013). The goal of this inquiry is to explore what it is to collaborate with others in a truly equal and interdependent way, and how these collaborations change individuals and the society within which they practice their collaboration. The jazz process has many possible applications as an experiential model of participatory change in a variety of disciplines including education, sociology, human organizational theory and both physical and psychological rehabilitation.
Speaking to the essence of jazz improvisation Pederson (2001) used the analogy of jazz ensembles exemplifying; “a kind of creativity that holds together the individual and community, freedom and constraint. Improvisation helps us deal with the ambiguities life presents because it helps us comfort the unfamiliar with the familiar, the chaotic with order” (p. 34).
Cultural relevance. Jazz has been a powerful medium through which African Americans have used their expressive voices to improvise and position themselves as a people seeking freedom and true equality in society. Their evolving social reality has interfaced through the popular use of jazz music and culture across time with those of other groups including the Eurocentric white ruling class creating shared states of heightened and transformative awareness. These shared states of improvisational musical rapport utilized mimesis, a highly evolved and fundamentally human process of creating an open reciprocal consciousness helping to move the national zeitgeist of racial and socio-economic class divisions towards a new paradigm where the diversity of our citizens could be embraced as a source of strength. African American resistance to constant attempts by white commerce to appropriate and commodify their rich, increasingly popular music and culture, beginning with the rise of White Dixieland music, continues to this day through their improvisation of ever new and vibrant waves of musical expression ( Evans, 2000).
American society has resisted the inclusion of all our people, especially those of color as equals over the course of our national history with the harsh focus of empire by the white ruling class set upon economic expansion at the expense of all else. Building a nation primarily on the labor of African Americans and other outsider groups, the ruling class defied the rising popular desire for a more even division of wealth and power. Jazz as a social art form raised the bar with each performance generating states of “enlivened intersubjective fields” (Sarath, 2013). This rising tide of interdependent consciousness of Americans across the spectrum of society is exemplified through the “Wilber-Combs-Lattice” of cultural diversity, and development. The consistent interweaving of states of consciousness through a jazz culture of socializing and dancing lowered racial and class boundaries during these interactions, incrementally altering the fabric of segregationist American society across time. Jazz culture of music and dancing grew organically from just such occurrences most often lead by the young as they eagerly redefined themselves as a new generation not defined or bound by traditions and social conventions (Evans, 2000).
In actuality African American cultural evolution was a mixture of influences beginning with the precolonial, the Afro-Diaspora of the global slave trade and their continuing struggles as freedmen to achieve equality against their oppressors’ narrow self-serving ethics. The Euro-centric rubric for civilization, music, arts, and society is not representative of the richness of our nation‘s complexity. Dividing people according to a false rubric of ‘whiteness’ was a new way for the ruling class to maintain their hegemony by naming those from Europe whether their origin was Catholic, Welsh, Jewish, Corsican they became tools for the “machinery of criminal power” ( Coates, 2015, p. 7). From the very beginning these imposed divisions between people were undermined by the music and culture of jazz. Each new form the music of jazz took from the blues to ragtime was greeted by the masses of America with joy as African American creative genius was displayed with improvisation as a central component. Collaboration in these bands and with the audiences themselves provided rich and fertile ground for the seeds of equality and freedom as integral parts of a new national culture to grow.
Origins of jazz, New Orleans
From the very first arrival of enslaved Africans to America in the 17th century, whites began to notice their unique musical abilities; they seemed to have melody in their very souls (Monson, 1992). There were work songs sung to add rhythm to their labor and thanks to evangelizing missionaries the tradition of spirituals was a common expression of their yearning for the divine. “It is an incontrovertible fact that African music and dance arrived in North America with enslaved Africans”(Kelly, 2012, p. 12).
The social background in the city of New Orleans in early years of jazz, the 1850s, was very complex. As a port city of international trade and commerce immigrants came from all over the world seeking a new life. The cultural mix included French, Spanish, Native Americans, Irish, Italian, Afro-Diaspora people from the West Indies and the Caribbean (Peretti, 1992, Evans, 2000). Creoles, being descendants of mixed racial heritage, primarily French, Spanish and African from pre-slavery times, were born as free citizens and added their distinct culture. ”No caste system in the United States has ever governed all black people; there have always been “free blacks” and black success stories, even during slavery and Jim Crow” (Alexander, 2010, p. 21). There was in early New Orleans an unavoidable mixing, of integration on all levels from workplaces, to residential areas of the city people lived close to one another. An open and erotic practice of prostitution was a famous and much celebrated part of the social structure with its own district called Storyville (Peretti, 1992, Evans, 2000). The centuries of cultural and racial mixing between Native Americans and African Americans, predating slavery, was rich with the practice of musical and spiritual traditions providing a universal way of connecting as diverse communities (Katz, 1986). These hybrid roots were part of the emerging jazz music, with African traditions of community improvisation and insult as competitive energies channeled into the new music.
Culturally the music scene in New Orleans featured three Opera Companies, two Symphony Orchestras, one white and one black, brass bands playing military marching music with bands representing all ethnic groups, and a rich tradition of Carnival which culminated in the annual Mardi Gras. As early as 1817 music was everywhere in the lives of African Americans, with work songs, plantation songs, spirituals, folksongs, and the call and answer musical forms of the Black Baptist Church. Sunday afternoons both slaves and freemen, gathered in Congo Square to dance and drum to ancient African rhythms. Voo Doo and Hoo Doo traditions of spirit and nature possession were celebrated openly in these gatherings (Ward, Burns, Burns, 2011; Peretti, 1992).
From the 1840s through the 1920s entertainment based musicals called Minstrel Shows, featured whites in black face, blacks in white face under makeup as blacks mimicking each other’s racial stereo types. These performances were so popular that they toured the nation offering a safe place for all participants and the audience to experience shared states of social consciousness. The dual AQAL of both whites and blacks in these performances created states of shared awareness and joy. On the Upper Right this was social activity of the complex neocortex with song, humor and acting reaching across racial divisions to delight the audience. The Lower Right joined participants at the level of tribal/village in a temporary community. On the Lower Left the performers ranged from the archaic to the mythic with insult and humorous characterizations of each other and the stereotypical roles of society. The Upper Left levels fluctuated from impulse to symbols with the emotions of laughter uniting their audiences in a participatory community.
During the origins of jazz in New Orleans in the 1850s much of American society was profoundly hostile towards African Americans. As slaves with no rights as human beings or as citizens these people were used as the engine of commerce to turn wilderness and raw materials into cash crops for international trade. Published in 1852 Harriot Beacher’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a voice against the status quo revealing the inhumanity of American slavery, advancing the cause of abolition nationally, especially in the northern states. Anti-slavery northerners organized to found the Republican Party in 1844-1845, this abolitionist movement was a counterpoint to the social and economic tradition of racial intolerance in the slave holding south. There was violent suppression of slave uprisings as well as a system of bounty hunters with legal rights to reclaim those who escaped to freedom in the northern states. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed incoming settlers in those regions to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery.
W. E. B. DuBois (1903) wrote about the internal force for change of the freedman before the war. Small in numbers and huddled in cities like Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans, the freedmen struggled against poverty and hopelessness. These early free Negro leaders shared the characteristic of intense earnestness and deep feelings against slavery. Freedom as a goal was a real force and changed their religion and ethics to bring a note of revenge with a day of reckoning close at hand. This new consciousness was spread by the forced return of fugitive slaves to the millions still seized by slavery and brought new songs of resistance and freedom. One such refrain cried;
”O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free.” (African American Traditional Spiritual)
As slavery was the source of Southern wealth the goal of undoing slavery gained added priority as Lincoln’s principal tool to cripple their economy. Part of the difficulty was that “the Constitution was designed so the federal government would be weak, not only its relationship to private property, but also in relationship to the rights of states to conduct their own affairs”(Alexander, 2010, p. 25). When on January 26th, 1861 Louisiana seceded from the United States to join the growing southern Confederacy, the Civil War formerly begins and rages across the nation with terrible loss of life and destruction of property and commerce. African Americans were scapegoated as the cause of this Northern aggression and brutality against them by Southerners was common.
The Northern Union Army occupied the city of New Orleans to control this important trade port. As regions of the south were conquered by the Union Army, slaves were freed to cripple the Confederacy. The task of dealing with the masses of newly freed slaves and the abandoned lands where they had toiled fell to the Treasury Department in 1861 with the Port Royal experiment of making workingmen out of freed slaves. As the numbers of freedmen grew rapidly to massive proportions, without any congressional support either logistical or financial, responsibility was given to the army. The masses of freedmen were gathering and forming crowded refugee camps at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New Orleans, Vicksburg, Corinth, Columbus, Kentucky, and Cairo, Illinois. The government began the practice of opening confiscated plantation lands to cultivation by these fugitive freedmen which promoted the founding of black farm villages. Each region was ruled over by the military leaving the freedmen as chattel working, paying taxes on their production and feeding the masses with their labor. Once again these African Americans were left to find community and it was their churches, social gatherings and the music they made together as a people which brought them together. As these masses were dispersed to specific regions their music and culture spread beyond the southern slave states. Wards of the federal government as freedmen, many whites, especially those dispossessed and impoverished by the war, resented the care and training of these African Americans (W.E.B. Dubois, 1903). This resentment has continued to the present day.
Abolition officially began in the North in 1862 on April 16, when Lincoln signed into law a bill prohibiting slavery in the District of Columbia. Responding to this on October 11, 1862 the Confederate Congress passed a bill exempting from army service anyone owning 20 or more slaves. Thus the stage is set for southern working poor to fight the war to preserve the social and economic structure of slavery. To counter this and to destroy the economic system of southern slavery on January 1, 1863 Lincoln signed into law the Emancipation Proclamation; “ purporting to free slaves held in Southern Confederate states, but not a single black slave was actually free to walk away from a master in those states as a result”(Alexander, 2010, p.20).
Blood was historically shed by the African American people locked in slavery and in their uprisings against and resistance to it. As Coates (2015) wrote:
It is hard to face this. But all of our phrasing-race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy-serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. (p. 9)
When the war progressed and regions in the South were conquered the masses of newly freed slaves gathered to form actual communities. Many of these freedmen went to serve in the Union Army to fight their former masters and the repressive social-economic structure which had brought such suffering to their people (W.E.B. DuBois, 1903). After the Civil War their strife continued in the polarization between working poor and slavery as the freedman were seen as threatening the labor force. On July 13, 1863 50,000 people (mostly Irish) rioted in New York City in opposition to the draft, attacking and beating blacks (Ward, Burns & Burns, 2011). For a week in January 1919 what began as a railroad raised the cry on behalf of themselves and all yard workers to fire all black workers or they would strike. After being told that such a strike would be illegal. Over the next five days the strike spread to include some 650 white workers and it crippled transportation in Tennessee, Mississippi and Illinois (Roithmyer, 2014, p.25). Against this oppressive social status African Americans once again had only their traditions of community and music to nurture a sense of connection to one another, to sustain and empower themselves.
Socially, their skills were mostly agricultural and as house servants. Gathering in cities especially New Orleans these new communities had to learn how to sustain themselves. Again the churches and community offered a place to speak and sing together as a people separate and socially distinct from the dominant white culture. A truly African American social structure was nurtured by this segregation, including all aspects of culture and economics. Their growing awareness as a people utilized a mimetic system of community self-representation to develop their new self-identity. According to M. Donald (1991), mimesis includes, as a system;
Mime, play, games, skilled rehearsal, nonlinguistic gesticulation, toolmaking, other creative instrumental skills, many nonsymbolic expressive devices used in social control, and reproductive memory in general are all byproducts of the mimetic system, as it continuously models the episodic world. In effect, this means that the mimetic mind models in action, the outputs of the episodic mind. The mimetic system is thus a seminal hominid cognitive innovation, a mode of cognition that remains dissociable from language even in modern humans, and is the logical basis of the first truly human culture. (p.193)
In 1896 the Supreme Court created the law of separate but equal and the races were officially subject to another sixty years of segregation. There was also a ruling that no descendent of a grandparent who was a slave could vote, subjecting African American participation to a reduction from a robust 95% to a powerless 1%.
Those early New Orleans musicians who practiced jazz improvisation were most often regarded by academia and white culture as outsiders. Their creative influences were hidden behind hatred and fear, not only by the white ruling class, but also by their own diverse enclaves, each seeking to preserve their own social status and lines of development. Economics, hatred and prejudice have been part of the ongoing evolution of jazz (Peretti, 1992; Crouch, 1998; Lewis, 2008). It is analogous to the social and historical changes, occurring through just such complex interactions over time, from which new social sequences evolve (Becker & McCall, 1990; Combs, 2009).
The white Eurocentric ruling class justified their hegemony as being the representative race; employing a theory of social Darwinism, which portrayed the culture of “white Europeans and their direct relations as the pinnacle of a linear hierarchy of civilization”(Evans, 2000, p.28). This system was in accordance with the Roman precedent; only the Europeans were human. Their moral and political theory developed within the context of the Racial Contract, and they took their superiority was taken for granted (Mills, 1999, Location 441). As such their culture was positioned as the source of national identity and of universal art. This narrow focus misses the complexity, “diversity and fluidity of identity and cultural creativity.”(Evans, 2000, p. 27)
From the very beginning there was an effort to separate jazz into a white sound and a black sound, this spawned White Dixie which remains to this day the Racially Pure Jazz in the realm of prejudiced whites (Solis & Nettl, 2009). The truth was much more complex exemplified by Confederate Instruments played by Black Musicians in New Orleans brass bands, performing marching, as well as dance music (Peretti, 1992).
Building on a rich heritage of vibrant band culture from the French military, and musical entertainment traditions whites in New Orleans had far greater opportunities for musical education, paid touring, and comfortable venues with legitimate customers. The Dixieland style of white syncopated band music emerged next to the black jazz, both maintaining their connections to the working class, and folk practices. These Dixieland white bands, like their black jazz counterparts were the result of musicians starting at young ages using a culture of communality and experimentation. Early artists included Nick LaRocca whose Original Dixie Jazz Band (ODLB), was influenced by opera and the complex interweaving of melodies and countermelodies. The song Liberty Stable Blues had three distinct melodies which together formed the composition.
An outspoken white Dixieland bandleader Tom Brown argued that “the colored only played plantation music” (Peretti, 1992, p.80). He insisted that since the chord patterns on tunes like St. Louis Blues were not African in origin and that there was no black jazz till after Manuel Perez’s band and music had set the stage around 1900. Band leader Jack Laine claimed to have the first ragtime band. His telling of the origins came from common musical expressions of his people in the 1880s. The white-supremacist Democratic political machine was run by poorer white European immigrants; Dixieland was an expression of their identity and pride (Peretti, 1992; Evans, 2000). When faced with pressures between the Italian American community and the rest of the white coalition Dixieland was a safe place of refuge. Eventually these same Dixieland musicians took their music to Northern cities seeking new opportunities, making the first recordings of their jazz influenced music in 1910 which greatly fueled the dissemination of jazz both white and black.
Initially the rural and slower paced lives and the social reality of the newly freed blacks was heard in their music. The blues often sung and played slowly with much improvisational ornamentation, rose to become the music of the free African Americans struggling to find their way in an often hostile world. Their music was directly crying out from the human, personal experiences of life using the call and answer forms between instruments which were played as voices. In comparison to the sacred Black Baptist music, which was the source of the form, the blues were profane and gritty. It was still a music which sought to make people feel better, offering solace and hope for a better tomorrow despite the sorrows of the day.
African American expressive voices found new applications for ancient community musical traditions from Africa functioning beyond the constraints of everyday language. These traditions used drumming, singing, chanting, and dancing in pursuit of nature and spirit possession. In many African cultures rivers, trees, animals and the dead have presence, when in an ecstatic state practitioners of these ancient spiritual traditions believe they were possessed or occupied by these forces. As the African American churches also practiced similar ecstatic states of being blessed by the Holy Spirit, most often in group musical improvisations during worship, whites and other outsiders viewed this as primitive and evil (Scott, 1933; Peretti, 1992). These traditions of direct personal experience, of being transformed, exceeding their own definitions of themselves are infused in the essence of collaborative jazz improvisation (CJI). Highly evolved aspects of African culture were strong methodologies which greatly aided the evolution of African American Society (Lewis, 2008; Katz, 1986; Peretti, 1992).
Jazz moves beyond New Orleans and the South
As African Americans began to leave the Jim Crow South, so named for a popular minstrel show, from 1915 into the 1960s seeking work in the factories of the modern industrial revolution their music spread with them into the great cities of America (Peretti, 1992). Jazz became even more important as a living example of their cultural creativity and unity. The syncopated, rhythmic complexity and improvisational spontaneity reflected the rapidly increasing pace of life in the emerging industrial society (Borgo, 2005; Lewis, 2008; Evans, 2000; Priester, personal communication, 2011; Sarath, 2013). This Great Migration saw masses of African Americans leaving the old confederacy for the visions of freedom and equality to be found in the North, Eastern Seaboard and the West. In Chicago, Memphis, New York, and Los Angeles this dream was crushed by the confinement of these new arrivals into designated areas on the south and west sides of the city (Peretti, 1992; Lewis, 2008). This was replicated around the country as a means of enforced racial segregation. This migration was accelerated by the process called white capping, whereby southern whites drove African Americans from their homes and confiscated their properties, combined with the all too common lynchings placed these whites at a violent tribal level of development. These were common practices well into the 1930s (Lewis, 2008). American racism proved to be highly adaptable and white privilege was maintained (Alexander, 2010, p.20). That said there was work for the new arrivals in the factories, slaughter houses and the service industry. In those times, jazz musicians also had day jobs like young Louis Armstrong who hauled coal to earn his living (Peretti, 1992). This common everyday working class origin helped to keep collaborative jazz improvisation close to the community (Peretti, 1992; Solis; Nettl, 2009).
At the turn of the 20th century jazz was beginning to define itself through the popular dissemination of Gospel, Spirituals, Dixieland Jazz, Bluegrass, Country, Ragtime, and especially the Blues. Improvisation, individually and as ensemble members continued to fuel this blues expansion into the popular musical realm. Performing in diners, roadhouses, clubs, community dancehalls, brothels, parties in private homes, seasonal lodges and inns, musicians began to travel sustaining themselves with their music as professionals (Murray, 1985). These venues were still mainly segregated and there were multiple circuits of various economic levels in cities across the nation. In places with strong African American communities such as the Harlem District of New York, Kansas City and Chicago high-end night clubs hired the elite musicians and often people of all races would attend to hear the new music, dance and socialize. Each gathering occurred on diverse AQAL levels of all participants creating intersecting states of heightened awareness, promoting a gradual erosion of social/cultural boundaries. This undercurrent of diversity in the emerging culture of jazz music in a society still greatly exclusive to the primacy of the white Eurocentric ruling class offered a place where a new American culture was nurtured.
Once again the enforced segregation became a cultural energy used to improvise separate and authentic African American expressive voices with jazz uniquely exemplifying this. Ancient African community traditions of spirituality, improvisation and the use of complex rhythms to base this new music upon was strengthened as a direct result of the continued exclusion of African Americans from mainstream white society. “A moment of community, whether temporary or enduring, can be established in such moments through the simultaneous interaction of musical sounds, people, and their musical and cultural histories”(Monson, 1996, Location 60). The strength and resistance of these people are ingrained in the essence of collaborative jazz improvisation. Each musician whether soloist, ensemble member, or composer, became part of this emerging music, sharing the process with their audiences across time as an extended community (Lewis, 2008; Sacks, 2008; Feather, 1987).
A new generation, born after the times of Southern Slavery joined the small free born African American communities in the north. They became acculturated as a new work-force for America’s industrial revolution, again fueling the economic growth of the nation with their labor. Each Africa American community developed their own socio-economic systems with farmers, grocers, and as skilled laborers in support industries of all kinds, even developing their own banks. Able at last to buy homes, goods and necessities with their own labor the new affluence built strong community across generations on diverse economic levels.
Music was everywhere, played on pianos and other instruments in the homes across America as a daily practice, and many children took lessons. It was at local African American clubs, dancehalls, roadhouses and brothels that new musicians learned to ply their craft. As the music of jazz evolved, elements of ancient African traditions continued to guide the new culture. The openness and flexibility of jazz music allowed each musician to add their own reactions or response to the improvisational dialogue. This left the composition as a starting point for creative expression rather than the classical model of the composition as the perfect finished product which performers must reproduce consistently in each performance. The quality of loose play or conversational openness was dependent on the community of musicians to accomplish, resulting in elements of surprise and supportive collaboration which included the audience as part of this extended community effort (Benson, 2003).
What has often been overlooked by academia is the continuing cultural influence of the African American churches, whose improvisational and collective gospel music is an important central component in the on-going evolution of jazz. This spirituality brings a vertical aspect to the analysis of this tradition (Peretti, 1992; Sarath, 2013). As the congregation shouts and talks back to the preacher, jazz musicians and the audience speak and shout out encouragement and acknowledgement to the improviser. There is a fundamental musical trope in this conversational and inclusive aspect of jazz which keeps it alive and in the moment, spontaneous and unrepeatable. Language is mimicked by the instrumentalist as she makes the instrument speak, even creating non-European tones, squawks and shrieks as a human voice might to express the elation and power of the creative moment. Monson (1996) draws comparisons with the musical traditions of the African Yoruba tribal culture, elements in the music which continue to inform and guide the development of CJI.
The African Akan cultural traditions are also essential elements in jazz (Sehgal, 2008). The Akan people sang in a ring formation which included the performers and the listening audience as welcome participants in the call and answer, establishing a community of music making. This unpredictable nature of jazz is one which some in the Eurocentric academy have found most egregious, dismissing the resulting music as meaningless and random. In the times of slavery, community music making was a source of unity, and resistance, their dreams of freedom were nurtured. The African concept of deity is of an ever present, essential part of everything, everything is deity including community music. African American Christian churches have maintained this energetic participatory celebration. This spirituality has been of concern to the ruling class as they recognized the resistance and unity to underlying themes of power, ideology, economics, anti-corporate globalization, and historical practices of colonialism, sexism, race, and gender (Solis & Nettl, 2009).
This inquiry, as an academic work, leaves questions into the essence of spirituality as a component of jazz to the reader and future researchers. Any investigation into the specific nature of this music does, for this writer, bring a deeper recognition of the complex social and cultural awareness and practices of the African American people including a rich spiritual tradition.
Early jazz innovators. Trumpeter Buddy Bolden and his Big Noise musical virtuosity took the music to a new more intricate level. Beginning his performing career in 1896 the soon to be called “King Bolden’s” music reigned from 1900 to 1907 in the famous Storyville district of New Orleans. His non-musical laughs, grunts and squeals on the trumpet added a humorous edge which fascinated listeners. These sounds were connections to the lived experience of everyday life which the working class of all races reacted to with joyful exuberance.
Pianist Jelly Roll Morton, born as a Creole of color in the Fauburg Marigny district of downtown New Orleans began his performing career at age 14. He created the music called ragtime, combining French, Hatian, blues and minstrelry into this new hybrid sound. His addition of Latin rhythms which he termed Habanero Rhythms added even more energy to his music. He was the first to write out his compositions which was the precursor to white commodification with the print music industry. Morton took this new sound on the road shortly after this touring the American South in Minstrel Shows composing as he went. He arrived in Chicago in 1910, New York in 1912, and continued on to Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Memphis, and Los Angeles. Ragtime, a highly rhythmically syncopated music, became the youth of America’s favorite dance form. The technical complexity of the music required true virtuosity of the musicians and African Americans remained the masters despite white appropriation and commodification. Printed ragtime music was so popular it spawned and sustained an entire industry in New York’s Tin Pan Alley, encouraging many Americans to buy pianos and learning to play it.
These new Ragtime and Blues artists were segregated as “Black” whether they considered themselves as Creole, Caribbean, or of mixed race. Early musicians of this new music played venues that were initially racially distinct, as the bands and individual musicians themselves gained popularity other enclaves hired entertainment across these divisions. Creole musicians brought their often well studied classical skills to the music which again moved the form forward through collaboration towards more modern jazz.
Whites were divided by generations with the young embracing this exciting new dance music and the older fighting what they called the African-ization of American culture. Their fear of moral degradation was powerless to stop the youthful rejection of their strict historical Victorian Morality. Irene and Vernon Cassil were white high-society dancers who tamed and formalized the new dances creating a white moral way of enjoying the new music. They spoke out against the crude and animalistic black dance forms. Their musical accompaniment was performed live by the “All Black Orchestra”, led by James Reese Europe. The members of this group were highly proficient creoles and blacks, who would prepare for these performances by rehearsing new popular tunes, reading written charts and memorizing the compositions before playing live without sheet music. This maintained the myth that blacks couldn’t be taught to read music like whites, depending on their remarkable powers of imitation to accomplish their music.
Dubbed by music critics of the times as middle-brow the music of white composer and bandleader Paul Whiteman was viewed as a more refined American music that might well constitute national culture. All this against a WW1 background of popular music with songs like ”It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, Pack-up Your Troubles in an Old Kit Bag”, Army songs such as, “Oh How I Hate to get Up in the Morning, and Over There” there were songs reflecting the growing diversity of American culture. “Dark Town Strutter’s Ball, Pretty Baby, Me and My Gal, The Bugle Call Rag, Jada, Hindustan, and I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”(Murray, 1985, p. 31).
African American placement on AQAL in the early days of Jazz
By the end of WW1 the AQAL placement of African Americans had changed in many ways through the expansion of jazz music into the realm of dominant popular culture. The Upper Right had moved to complex neocortex, level 10, true human thought, as the music crept into common culture from symphonies to the new moving pictures. Many whites still saw African American musicians as only capable of wild primitive music and that the white society elevated the form by their patronage. This misinterpretation of the virtuosity and collaboration required to master jazz was often intentionally fostered by the musicians themselves to maintain the highly marketable attraction of jazz as primitive music to revitalize an exhausted white citizenry (Evans, 2000). This misrepresentation was a continuation of the white supremacist belief that people of African descendent were bestial and that all they suffered in slavery and since emancipation was for their own good (Alexander, 2010, p. 26).
The African American Lower Right quadrant moved to early state, level 11 which, from the perspective of the rest of world, came to represent their connection to the American nation/state, level 12. This association with the mechanistic rhythmic intensity of an expanding industrial society was promoted by the music and entertainment industry fostering connections of patriotism and their product as American music. The rise of a distinct national African American urban culture alongside the increasing global rise of America as an economic and military power reinforced this new AQAL placement.
On the Lower Left the placement was magic, level 10 the popular belief in the revitalizing and energizing powers of jazz music, dance, and social culture. Still not viewed as being truly rational, African American identity as seen through the lens of jazz was elevated with the recognition of the creative power of the composers, soloists and bands that America danced to. Combined these beliefs became strong evidence of a mysterious African American tradition that could bring new vitality to outsiders through participation.
Upper Left placement ranged from sensation, level 5 considered by whites as the source of African American jazz performance, through impulse and emotions, levels 6 and 7. Seen by the rest of the world as living symbols, level 9, of the American experience, African American musicians raised their people’s status to these higher levels with each performance.
Ironically the Eurocentric lone artist model was used to promote this new music. From the blues, ragtime to early swing the composer, the bandleader or soloist was the focus and the essential collaboration required was not recognized. The result was to deemphasize the African American traditions of collaborative group improvisation making the white masses more comfortable with these exceptional talented few rather than dealing with the entire scope of group creativity inherent in the African American Community. The creative energies of African Americans continued to move the music from restrictive and definable styles or genres which kept their sense of propriety ownership as a people over their music intact.
Defining the dual Afrological and Eurological origins of jazz
The distinction between composer and improviser is not a clear or confining one, each performance was new and added original expression (Lewis, 2008; Benson, 2003). These new improvisational additions often became part of the compositions being repeated by subsequent performers as core thematic elements. In this way the composers’ initial role as creator is in the jazz tradition one of co-creator with each new improviser equally creating the ever new composition. For many Eurocentric Academics the results were random and meaningless when compared to the classical model of the composer as architect of the complete and final product (Lewis, 2008).
Construing Lewis’s definitions of the dual Afro and Euro-centric elements of jazz Sarath defined these as the;
Afrological Stream. Process: Improvisation, particularly in collective formats, is the predominant creative process. Structure: Pitch, modality. Rhythm: Unmetered pulse, time sense. Form: Cyclic, or structurally open, improvised time feel. Constituent styles: Jazz (and its various types), Blues, Rhythm and Blues, Hip-Hop, Rap, Funk, Salsa, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, innumerable other genres and subgenres. Other features: Dissolution of division between performer and creator, performer and listener. Core archetypal impulse: Cyclic conception of time and change; freedom and creativity, spontaneity.
Eurological Stream. Process: Composition is the predominant primary creative process, interpretive performance of compositions the predominant secondary and overall creative process. Structure: Pitch, tonality. Rhythm: Pulse, meter, multi-meter. Form: Architectural. Constituent styles: Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, Neoclassical, Serial, Postmodern concert music. Other features: Division of labor between creator (composer) and performer. Clear division between musician and listener in music making events. Core archetypal impulse: Linear, teleological conception of time and change, architectural form. (Sarath, 2013, pp. 250-251)
The problem of talking about jazz as an African American musical form and acknowledging the hybridization and cultural borrowing from many traditions without minimizing or dismissing the history of racial oppression and the inherent African essence is central to this inquiry. Monson offers these four points when considering jazz;
1. The importance of the blues and what Olly Wilson calls a vocalization of sound in melodic sensibility. Of particular importance is timbral contrast and inflection in both singing and instrumental music. Included here are the blue note, the moan, the shout, and the imperative of making a horn talk.
2. Swing or groove, a sensibility that emerges from rhythmic organization at multiple levels, including rhythm section-soloists relationships, call and response, and riffs, and other repeating patterns of various periodicities.
3. The interplay between the sacred and secular, and the sense that even secular music when performed at its highest level is concerned with the spiritual.
4. Embodiment, that music is closely connected to dance, motion, and participation (p. 21)
Gradually the music picked up commercial momentum and more whites joined both as audience and as musicians helping to disseminate this new awareness of improvisation and identity. Commerce required a fixed and saleable product, this became easier as technology was developed to record specific performances and sell those as finished products in a growing and increasingly diverse public market place. Writing to address this point Avanti (2008) said:
The appropriation of blackness and its manipulation by whites as an assumed right (individual, collective, institutional), and a mechanism of power to define and police difference channeled ‘black music’ into and through social, political, and cultural struggles of white American supremacism, shaping the ways blackness was perceived and African American musicks were produced and heard. African American expressive voices, to achieve subjective voice, and (perhaps) success, have had to negotiate the appropriated spaces, come to terms with the terms of the social politics of Euro-American racial representation and racist practice, or be consumed by them. (p.188)
Ironically the appropriation and commodification of this music has created a welcome pathway for African American musicians out of poverty and cultural isolation. Working as a professional jazz musician created a whole new economic class, an elite and expanding new demographic. When the music began to take on commercial and popular momentum across racial lines it was given added strength from the resistance and nobility of these same oppressed Americans. Somewhat like the Chinese Yin and Yang symbol, each side creates the space for the other allowing new hybrid states and levels to arise (Combs, 2009). Jazz, as music made by specific communities, functioned to unite members, to support political resistance, to embody their kinship and common social historic journey. The pressures of turning this into a commodity to be sold and replicated by outsiders were complex (Berliner, 1994; Peretti, 1994).
At dances in ethnically mixed venues the races could interact freely, the combined economics and strengths of all participants empowered such up-wellings of creative genius as New York’s Harlem Renaissance, 1918-1937. The world, including some of the first modern day African and African American drum and dance groups, (Kelley,2012, p.13) came to participate in this astounding genius, benefitting not only musicians and other creative artists, but all the support industries such as restaurants, bars, hotels, and the laborers whose work maintained these businesses (Peretti, 1992).
Duality of AQAL placement by race
It is important to distinguish the artificial duality of the externally imposed status of African Americans by whites, especially the ruling class elders, and their expanding, independent national culture. From this perspective, on the AQAL Upper Right the African American people functioned as SF 1, level 11 formally operating within restrictive social systems to advance through concrete actions collaborating to engage their creative intelligence as an extended community. Once again the restrictive confinement to the racially segregated west and south sides of northern cities actually fueled this growth as a distinct people within the dominant white society.
The Lower Right finds African Americans surviving the social division of labor, building a separate early state which spread from coast to coast. Their industrious communities were vibrant attracting economic and social participation by whites, especially the young.
While ruling class whites mostly viewed African Americans in the Lower Left as typhonic level 8, and primitive, it was the white youth themselves who viewed the dominant ruling culture as archaic level 9, and out of date. Their attraction and adoption of the music, dance and culture of jazz as their own transcended Eurocentric social and racial restrictions.
Existing for whites as symbols of their own primal energies lost in antiquity, African American musicians channeled the emotions, and impulsive behaviors of white society to advance socially embracing and exploiting these racist concepts. This placed their Upper Left AQAL at concepts and rules, levels 10 and 11. Functioning at these higher levels as a people beyond the socially accepted perceptions of African Americans as lesser than and primitive truly became a blessing as it reinforced their independence as a distinct and vibrant culture. Those individual jazz artists who were recognized by whites for their exceptional virtuosity became the representing members, the embodiment of the higher levels to which their people were moving.
Chapter Two: 1920-1930s
Defining core elements of jazz
Looking deeper into the hybridity of jazz in the 1920s the writing of Evans (2000) reveals 3 tropes whose overlapping meanings offer a more clear understanding of the tradition’s origins. First the term satura whose literal meaning is mixed-dish, gumbo, or medley, also has connotations of illicit sexuality or lusty cross-fertilization. Implications of miscegenation apply here and many associated it with a second home for jazz in a culturally mongrel New York.
The second trope rapsody refers to the performing process through which jazz acquires its gumbo-like quality as a spontaneous improvisatory creation. The emotional intensity of this improvisation is especially true of the allegedly primitive black-jazz. The frenzied intermingling of musical elements continues through time with the music eternally unfinished with no single style defining the authentic shape of jazz. By extension there was a strong implication that this rapsodic nature questions the concept of a single authentic origin of jazz.
The third trope is charivari, a hubbub or loud noise, like the beating of pans and kettles outside the homes of newly married folks of vastly different ages or who had been divorced, this definition of jazz as noise functioned as a counter-discourse of the prescribed social order reflecting the way 1920s moralists received the music and culture of jazz. In 1920s, New Orleans Audley ‘Queen Mother’ Moore organized a crowd of armed African Americans to circle the local Longshoreman”s Hall to protect Marcus Garvey as he spoke to the city (Fischlin, Heble & Lipsitz, 2013, p. 141). By the mid-twenties the music became even more directly associated with significations ranging from (im)migration, mechanism, and neurasthenic illnesses. Racially and culturally jazz came to be regarded as the symbol of barbarism, savagery, animalism, with exotic lineages not only of African or Eastern European but also Chinese origins. The tempos were openly compared to mechanistic industrialization, almost inhuman. Neurologists focused on the rhythms as possessing the narcotic power of the motor both engendering and stimulating neurotics, leading to crime, insanity, feeble-mindedness, physical collapse and other social ills as a co-symbol of the degradation of the nation (Evans, 2000).
White bourgeois attraction to ragtime, jazz and dancing based on racial primitivism was promoted by the perception of the music’s ability to energize the masculinity of middle-class white men. These minority groups were viewed as working class, savage and primitive with the upper-class domination of these groups in their patronage perpetuating this system of privilege. The now formalized fear of jazz as being the harbinger of revolution, social unrest, race riots, and ethnic/immigrant labor activism was promoted by the white moralists as a Bolshevik element of protest against law and order expressed in musical form (Evans, 2000).
It was the powerful rhythmic bases of the music which brought the masses to their feet and excited their bodies to follow these patterns. African Americans recognized this and freely added fuel to this fire. Addressing this new power for African Americans to promote the commercialization of their music Peretti (1992) uses the lyrics of one popular song from this era which said;
“All the world wants rhythm bad,
Colored folks are mighty glad,
‘Cause they’ve got rhythm for sale…
Up in Harlem they are doing swell
Nature gave them something they can sell
Since the emancipation came
Jungle rhythm has made a name
But the terms ain’t quite the same
‘Cause we’ve got rhythm for sale”. (p. 54)
Addressing the centrality of rhythm in jazz, Seghal (2008) wrote:
The seeming importance of rhythm in African American music invited the scorn of Westerners who wanted melody first, then rhythm. One of my professors commented that his first impression of African drumming was purely irksome noise. Moreover, Africans used drums to communicate complex ideas and phrases. Differing timbre of drums, higher inflections or lower pitches, imperceptible to Europeans, made communication via drumming more complex. (Chapter 1: The jazz grid, para. 7)
The essential African tradition of the body being the vessel and the music moving the body rhythmically has caused much concern among some academics. It would seem that for African Americans to have their music accepted and recognized as legitimate culture, they too must view this deep physiological rhythmic connection as a stumbling block (McClary & Walser, 1996).
The hegemonic presupposition by the western (European) musical establishment that their classical music could stand for all music was resistant to the reality that African American music had an equal scope and prevalence in modern American culture. This mirrors the social resistance to accepting the equality of all people, especially African Americans, ignoring the broader interconnections.
There was an entire music industry network serving people of color, a string of independent venues including the old Lincoln Theatre in Harlem, the Howard in Washington, Bailey’s 81 in Atlanta, the Lyric in New Orleans, the Place in Memphis, the Booker T. Washington in St. Louis, and others under the umbrella of TOBA, the Theatre Owners Booking Association (Murray, 1985).
In the north jazz was performed in three venues, the dance hall maintained its New Orleans tradition as the major place for jazz culture with dancing to the most rhythmic forms of jazz, the theatre, and the nightclub. The owners of the dance halls often had political and underworld connections and their businesses thrived by “commercializing black musical culture” (Peretti, 1992, p.50). Some of the most famous venues like the Cotton Club in New York only admitted African Americans as performers, catering to wealthy whites whose sophisticated slumming was only tolerated for their financial impact on the community (Feather, 1987).
In every large city of the north there were regions featuring black musical entertainment. From the perspective of the newly migrant blacks in the audience in those venues which admitted them, these musical emporia were symbols of their hopes and ambitions for freedom. Inside these performances were messages of resistance and strength expressed with joyful improvisation and the opportunity to participate in the process.
“Black community and culture were preserved in elite looking surroundings that presented visions of the good life embodied in music, dance and elegant dress. The performers themselves realized what their eminence signified for migrants” (Peretti, 1992, p. 53).
Movement into white high society. It was a white writer, critic and salonnier Carl Van Vechten who brought America’s attention to jazz as art, being the most outspoken go-between connecting black performers and writers to the New York press. In the 1920s it was still radical to even propose that black culture or popular culture had any artistic value or that there was any contribution to the national culture by these elements. He helped to launch the careers of Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes in the mid-20s and was instrumental in bringing the rhythm of the blues to American high culture. Van Vechten also helped many African American musical artists like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday to span the gap from the cultural margins directly to the center of high society introducing them to publishers and entertainment-industry executives. This opened the way for readers of the Times and Vanity Fair to join in the forum to recognize black art. In the 1920s Van Vechten’s apartment at 150 West 55th Street became the cabaret where he suspended what he termed the byzantine rules of the racial division of the outside world. Bootleg whiskey and dances like the Charleston filled the nights with people freely crossing the color lines. He famously wrote in 1925 that, “Jazz may not be the last hope of American music, nor yet the best hope. At present, I am convinced, it is the only hope” (Jackson, 2014). This was analogous to W. E. B. Du Bois’ view of black folk music as high art, truly representative of America.
Despised by the ruling whites as a single monolithic group, African Americans initially found it difficult to form unified communities. Freeborn African Americans as longtime residents in the north resented the new arrivals while the migrants used both old and new measurements of social status creating hierarchies of their own. In those early days self-delusion was a part of trying to redefine the African American experience beyond the historical horror of captivity and slavery. It was a topic barely mentioned in schools and rarely discussed by descendants who had made their way North (Bell, 1992, p. 1). Jazz was shaped and molded by these tensions much as it had been in New Orleans. Eventually these diverse groups were able to blend and form a truly national urban African American culture which had the resilience to absorb the blows against it. Jazz as an art form was shaped by the continuous cultural reconciliations and compromises as an ongoing representation of this new culture (Perretti, 1992).
The essential hybridity of jazz beyond the black-white dichotomy became more pronounced with bourgeois whites in the 1920s likely to associate jazz with Jews as often as with African Americans. Success by composers like George Gershwin, Aaron Copeland, and conductor Leopold Stowkowski brought African American Jazz into the realm of high culture penning symphonies and sound tracks for the first moving pictures. This was reinforced by an effort by many Jewish performers to transform their racial status to make it more proximal to whiteness than distant blackness. The movement towards the essential hybridity of jazz created a bridge between the categories of American culture allowing many to cross over and join in celebration of the music (Evans, 2000). In 1920, Prince Odak from Nigeria, a master drummer moved to Harlem and started a small studio teaching African music and dance ( Fischlin, Heble & Lipsitz, 2013, p. 13). As more Nigerians came to the city he expanded the troupe of all African drummers and played regularly. White Yankee composers wrote minstrel like operas that used African American sounds and rhythms as bits of the nation’s exotic heritage. Typically they placed this music as servant to or even as the slave of the Anglo-Saxon concert master in the Eurocentric tradition.
As adolescent white jazz players began to embrace the African American jazz process of an autodidactic, experiential learning model they rejected not only formal musical instruction but the entire Eurocentric paradigm. This contrasted with the conscientious efforts by many African American jazz musicians to find musical training. This oppositional dual approach reflected the social divisions of these two groups and the paths they took to create jazz.
Now famous white jazz musicians including Bud Freeman, Hoagy Carmichael, and Eddie Condon were transformed by their first exposure to live jazz. They spoke of a whole new awareness, a deeper and broader musical educational experience in listening, a hypnotic effect, a personal transformation and the beginning of a new way of life itself. Embracing jazz music and its culture they began new lives as professional jazz musicians. As Peretti (1992) said in reference to this;
Without minimizing the typicality of their socialization in the suburbs, it is fair to conclude that no other identifiable group of white Americans of this era approached black culture with such openness and repaid it with comparable gratitude, praise and emulation. (p. 88)
Nowhere was this new and unprecedented interaction between Anglo-Saxons, immigrants and minorities more prominent than in New York, earning the name of Mongrol Manhattan by conservative whites. This hybridization was reflected in the writings of New York jazz critics Carl Van Vechten and Gilbert Seldes which combined previously incompatible racial, cultural and aesthetic influences. Seeking to unsettle their artistic forbearers through discursive representation jazz black dialect was postured to oppose genteel art and language. Important as these writers were for promoting jazz their use of such categories as savage, primitive, civilized, low, middle and high art only confirmed those categories for racists (Evans, 2000).
Van Vechten interpreted black jazz as low or folk art and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue as jazz-based fine art, truly American music. This directly represented the binary of black-low and white-high cultures with his self-professed Negrophilia ironically serving to keep blackness in its place. There was a correlation with his ambivalence towards African American intellectuals whom he believed should create fine art by embracing the primitivistic imagery and heritage of their race climbing to fame by exploiting the folk art (Evans, 2000).
Despite this harsh and repressive demeanor, without Van Vechten we as a nation might never have heard of many important African American jazz artists. It was his introduction of these artists to publishers and entertainment industry executives as well as to his readership which helped them to span the gap from the margins of society into the center of American culture (Lawrence Jackson, 2014, p.92). Remember that for the average white American, both those of privilege and power on a material level, and those of the working class on a psychic or mental level there was little incentive for society to eradicate it( Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 7).
Gender, Female, Male, Queer and Jazz Culture
The new jazz culture was predominately male from its beginnings in New Orleans and even more so in its expansion into the North. Women were first confined to the roles of blues vocalists and a few exceptional musicians as pianists. An early pioneer Cora ‘Lovie’ Austin from Chattanooga became the music director at Chicago’s Monogram Theater. Her profile here inspired generations of young women like the ten year old Mary Lou Williams who upon seeing Cora working at her craft began her own productive career in emulation. Restricted by social norms associating women with the home, their music as befitting the family parlor these early jazz artists were mostly ignored by the music industry and their music has been lost. Estella Harris’s Ladies Jass Band, and other groups led by Garvinia Dickerson, Dolly Hutchinson, Lottie Hightower, Marie Lucas ,and Annie Harris played throughout the Chicago region in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Blues women adopted a much more aggressive personae, with Alberta Hunter and Bessie Smith testing the social limits behaving and speaking out of turn to the discomfort of the men around them. African- and European-American taboos against females playing guitar and wind instruments made even the bold few in the industry invisible behind social convention. In participating in the blues and jazz community as equals, these women became pioneers living lives beyond the narrow scope of traditional gender roles, they were redefining themselves outside of that paradigm.
The very legacies of these blues women was to offer a new voice, a different model of being free in the world which had been closed to African Americans, especially women were addressed by Pederson (2001):
Freedom arises from resiliency, from a passion to be immersed in the raw reality of this world. The heart of the gospel is about being free. Slavery captures people when they become trapped by traditions and cultural images that limit their humanity. The power of the blues is found in its use of sacred themes and secular voices to challenge the real demons of the world-abuse, slavery, dehumanization. These new priests remind us that the church is in a world that “has come of age.” (p. 96)
While the blues are rooted in the experiences of suffering and evil during and after slavery, they should be seen as a stylized art form beyond raw emotion in a mastery of aesthetics foundational to African American music. As such continued suffering was not a requirement for African Americans to create good music, rather the blues resist suffering. It is a communal art, created by the ensemble, transforming individual experience into the art of being humans in the world at large. (Pederson, 2001, p. 98)
Contributions to African American music education came from within their own community often with church based fundraising, to provide funds for lessons and instruments to young students donated by mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts. Many mothers studied music themselves and taught their young children, performing with them in church services and at family gatherings (Lewis, 2008, p. 9).
For many jazz men their relationships to women in the professional music world were often formed by exposure to prostitutes, dancing girls and the waitresses and hostesses who functioned as commodified sex objects. Long nights away from their female partners on tours in new towns and hotels, hours spent daily in the union halls and nightly in their performing and social lives created a highly homosocial environment (Peretti, 1992). Homosexuality itself was rarely mentioned with a few notable exceptions like pianist Dick Voynow, Ellington’s future arranger Billy Strayhorn and socialite Gene Berton whose brother was a drummer in a popular band. Generally speaking the early jazz scene wasn’t overly welcoming or supportive of experimentation nor any more tolerant than urban America at the time. It was believed by the African American middle-class in Harlem that the spread of homosexuality in their community was a threat to the Negro family which was the very foundation of their social stability. Homosexuality was viewed as contrary to a manly commitment to their race (Evans, 2000).
An iconic figure in the Harlem scene poet Langston Hughes began his use of the syncopated rhythms of jazz after hearing African Americans performing in Paris. His work created a place where black gays and lesbians sought true reflection and affirmation. This was a first in the history of African American gay men and lesbians and secured their legitimate place in history. There were speakeasies in Harlem catering to a same-gender clientele and these were some of the earliest documentation of this emerging social identity. Hughes promoted sexual liberation with the primal sensuality of the drums and the dancing girls providing a race-based imagery beyond the Freudian civilized superego. These speakeasies and cabarets became known as places where there were no prohibitions or inhibitions (Evans, 2000). As Bell (1992) lamented in reference to how early black culture had become commodified; “ If Langston Hughes were now writing his famous poem, whose first line is,’You’ve taken my blues and gone’, he’d have to include black voices as well as black music-both shamelessly employed by whites for the same reason: profit”(p. 109).
The rise of African American culture on the AQAL framework
Predicated by social and corporate images of African Americans as bestial and primitive, and not as individual human beings existing across the spectrum of development like whites, media continued to hold them down as a people. Socially segregated from white society African Americans struggled to assert their true Upper Right placement of development towards SF 1, level 11, structural functions, SF 2, level 12, formal operations, and the synthesizing regions of SF 3, level 13 the very highest in this quadrant. White society remained invested in holding them as a people to the complex neocortex or below to the neocortex triune brain only slightly higher than other mammals, in a total denial of the progressive changes initiated by African Americans in the face of an oppressive and racist society.
On the Lower Right their segregation promoted whites to see African Americans as still tribal with their communities functioning as villages. Engines of economic expansion, their labor marginalized them to lesser than the whites who benefitted from this economy. Truly African Americans were at least early state/empire, level 11 status. Without the modern industrial society to provide employment it was believed African Americans would not be able to sustain themselves as a people. This was despite the evidence of the rich and vibrant African American communities in cities across the nation.
The growing number of African American writers and artists were beginning to change the status of their Lower Left placement to that of an interior collective of truly rational beings, level 12. As whites adopted the music and culture of jazz this placement was accepted by a progressively larger proportion of society, and especially by the international community of nations.
Once again whites were blind to the contradictions of viewing African Americans as a monolithic group at the fringes of society. Their Upper Left levels continued to be limited in popular white culture to sensation and the very lowest level of perception. Negatively stereotyped as being the unconscious embodiment of impulse and emotion their development was held by the white ruling class at barely capable of true thought. The art and music of African Americans clearly placed them at the higher level of concepts, level 10. In the face of a social history of repression and hatred the strength and nobility of both individuals representing African Americans and as a whole this level of development had become much more readily accepted.
Jazz as 1930s American culture
America danced to live swing jazz dance bands and listened to radio broadcasts. Some early radio stations were granted what was called a clear channel, their broadcasts were heard nationwide. Time zones were crossed and music fans could listen to their big band favorites from the actual live performances at select venues across the country. This was not a modern jazz venue rather popular, unsponsored air-shots of dance music for the people (Faulkner & Becker, 2009). Musicians could make a living touring, keeping a common American songbook alive.
By the 1930s jazz had spread to cities across America and even to the great cities of Europe as the music of the common people. Jazz was a fixture in Paris with Willie Lewis’s orchestra the leading band of colour at the Chez Florence nightclub. In 1936 British jazz fan and critic Leonard Feather began a campaign to lure Benny Carter away from the Lewis orchestra to go to London where he worked as an arranger for Henry Hall’s BBC Dance Orchestra, the top group in the UK. Shortly after this success Feather got involved in starting a new record label reissuing some early recordings of Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday, Artie Shaw, and others which had been in short supply in the UK (Feather, 1987, p. 32). Against a rising tide of international fascism, venues featuring jazz music provided a gathering place for a community of dancing and socializing, promoting an important international dialogue across national boundaries and the status of race and class.
Another manifestation of the internationally was the addition of the ¾ or waltz time signature. Stemming from a letter written to Benny Carter by Feather in 1933 the composition and recording of “Waltzing the Blues” brought an international uproar with British composer Spike Hughes commenting “Waltzing the Blues” has as much prospect of posterity as a mule”(Feather, 1987, p. 34). The music academy and popular critics dismissed this and other recordings endeavoring to break the metre barrior like Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz, Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige”, Mary Lou Williams’ “Waltz Boogie” as meaningless.
In reference to how the rest of the world responded to jazz as America’s music, Sehgal (2008) said:
Many countries saw America through the kaleidoscope of jazz; polychromatic, unhinged, improvisational and desperately alive. For a singular music to represent an entire country speaks to the potency of jazz during the early twentieth century. Foreign listeners heard more than just America in the music; jazz represented liberty and equality; it was the juxtaposed and syncopated marriage of primitivism and modernity. It was perhaps the first time in history that a particular type of music had such a global following. With the rise of broadcast technology and the improvisational nature of the music, jazz became the world’s liberty bell. (Chapter 2, para. 6)
Resistance to this new popular jazz music in the United States was still based by locating it on a spectrum with African American music as lowbrow, primitive, the Anglo-Saxon as middle-brow, and the Jewish style as high-brow. This perpetuated an imperialist cultural hierarchy based on racist and classist models of society with a white Eurocentric ruling class ensconced at the top (Evans, 2000). This was taken to extremes as the belief that white superiority to surpass the ‘negro’ depends on the absorption and productive use their greater intensity. Many whites took it further with the belief that whites appreciate jazz better than African Americans do because of its incorporation into a more varied and more intelligent life.
As the Great Depression of the 1930s descended upon America, the migration of African Americans to northern cities in a desperate search for work increased. Upon arriving in these centers of commerce like Chicago many were shocked to see the squalor of the “Black-belt” on the south and west sides where they were forced to live. At least in the rural South they had their own homes and were not crowded into a single room. Due to the economic collapse flats once designed to hold single families were radically subdivided to gather in the burgeoning population, often converted to two and three households. With hot running water a luxury and usually one bathroom per floor their lives were desperate, even central heating during the famously frigid windy winters was all too often missing (Lewis, 2008).
American society in the 1930s was still very much a divided house racially. The Great Depression brought economic struggles to the forefront with fear and hatred fueling dissent and unrest. Lynchings were a common occurrence and routinely received back page coverage. Our cities existed in a dual segregated status on the one hand as a white society, and on the other hand and as a black society (Feather, 1987, p.14). Segregation in New York was more pervasive in the 1930s than it is today in Mississippi. Even in the heart of Harlem segregation ruled with African Americans socializing primarily at the Apollo Theater or the Savoy where they danced in stark contrast to the staid and formal white ballroom tradition. Whites still frequented the mob-owned Cotton Club which was a specially prepared presentation of performance representing Harlem, and African Americans (Feather, 1987, p.18).
African Americans were firm believers in the American Dream and continued to pull themselves up by their own efforts in the face of a national economic collapse. This hit the African American community in Chicago very hard with close to half receiving some form of public relief in the 1930s. Their children went to all-black grammar schools where they as a people became invisible in a curriculum without any mention of Africa, her art, history or the richness and diversity of her people. While impressed with education for children to learn the basics, going to college seemed fruitless as even the highly educated teachers returned to the neighborhood to work. Public figures like Duke Ellington, Jackie Robinson and Louis Armstrong were seen from within the national African American community as going much further and were held in much higher esteem (Lewis, 2008, p.7).
Jazz as played by African Americans was in danger of becoming the art music of a civilization confined to northern ghettos, reflecting the severe limits placed on racial advancements across the country. In effect the creative expressive voices of African Americans were confined to a musical ghetto within the social and economic dictates of the music and entertainment industries. The creative energies of the 1920s which had been expressed in their music and art became important as seeds of powerful new thoughts and strategies that bore fruit in the coming decades. An important part of these changes was the growing numbers of whites who also claimed jazz as their own and how this new paradigm expanded the range of the music beyond the walls of segregation (Peretti, 1992).
Collaborative jazz improvisation was a way for diverse individuals and communities to model the use of propositional, transactional, and participatory knowledge to expand the existing dominant social paradigm. As a lens CJI offers us a look at the underlying historical and philosophical traditions which continue to fuel resistance to accepting jazz as America’s classical music, rather defining it as derivative of and lesser than the Eurocentric musical traditions. This denial of the essential hybridity of jazz excludes a perception of the other as contained in a true understanding of self to combine cultural and conceptual binaries into a true “diversity and fluidity of identity and cultural creativity” (Evans, 2000, p.27).
In trying to understand how jazz music actually functions as a collaborative improvisation it is important to examine the rapport achieved by practitioners. The development of this rapport, progressing from the initial efforts of novice improvisers to mimic their musical elders through the study of live and recorded performance, begins with entrainment such as a flock of birds moving in synchronous flight. During the repetition of rhythmic and tonal patterns in the music, the brain will synchronize itself to these cycles (Huang & Charyton, 2008). Mirror neurons fire as the entrainment begins the transformative rapport where practicing CJI musicians allow themselves to enter a state of flow (Rizzolatti & Singaglia, 2008). As psychologist Csikszentmihaly (1997) has pointed out, there are characteristic changes in temporal and cognitive perception during peak flow consciousness which allow creative aha moments to emerge. When the state deepens there is the possibility for new musical utterances to arise in the individual soloist’s performance. Gradually, once these new skills are refined, the entire ensemble through collaborative jazz improvisation may reach a state of ‘group flow’ which includes the listening audience in this experience of the jazz community (Sawyer, 2007).
During these popular performances community was formed through the aural legacy of jazz and African American music. Monson spoke of these performances and their effect upon listeners referring to their ability to say something;
Since saying something-or “sayin' something:’’ as it's usually pronounced-requires soloists who can play, accompanists who can respond, and audiences who can hear within the context of the richly textured aural legacy of jazz and African American music, this verbal aesthetic image underscores the collaborative and communicative quality of improvisation. (Monson, 1996, p. 2)
So it was in those moments when the music was speaking through and to those in attendance that working class African American culture was increasingly viewed as equal to Anglo-Saxon white working class culture. The language of the blues and jazz no longer represented the base savagery of an outsider group, becoming the embodiment of their negotiation of the complex socioeconomic conditions they faced every day (Evans, 2000, p. 273). Learning to tune in to each other, the musicians and the audiences created a temporary space where the tensions of race and class balanced and true musical dialogue was possible. A kind of positive freedom for genuine dialogue was from the earliest days of jazz an integral part of the jazz experience (Benson, 2003, p.171).
Improvisation in ensembles of all sizes was more commonly a part of jazz performance as the 1930s progressed. In both settings jazz continued to evolve, by 1935 both big band and small ensembles featured more improvisation and shared the new designation as swing music. (Feather, 1987, p. 20) A significant factor in this evolution was the recording of live performances which allowed other musicians to incorporate new improvisation as part of the original composition. Performers began to interface with compositions and improvisations across time and space adding new dimensions to the art and practice of jazz. Once again the jazz community expanded beyond society’s boundaries in spontaneous collaborations (Benson, 2003, p.25).
The jazz community came to expect this level of what Benson (2003) termed, “premeditated spontaneity” (p. 133), responding as dancers and audience with excitement. Anything could happen at any minute. As Belgrad (1994) wrote in regards to artistic production, in this case jazz, it is; “through artistic production that a culture was continually recreated, it might be possible to precipitate a change in the social structure through a change in consciousness, arrived at through experimental art” (p.21).
This American musical culture of dancing to live large swing ensembles was the defining feature of an era for both white and black audiences across the nation and overseas for U.S. service men and women (Belgrad, 1994, p. 180). Even the act of listening has the potential for behavioral activity, including dance, hand clapping, and or foot tapping which are primary physiological responses to the rhythmic content underlying melody and harmony (Sloboda, 1985, p. 151). The devotion of jazz fans brought increasing awareness and participation with live and recorded performance. These connections to internal structures occurring over time kept the music fresh and rich for the fans who spent time on task listening to discern the deep harmonic and thematic content as personal discoveries (Sloboda, 1985, p. 154).
African American placement on AQAL in the 1930s
By the end of the 1930s the placement of African Americans and the white ruling class had become intertwined and from an international perspective often united as representing the true hybridity of American culture. Beyond the economics both groups were at Upper Right SF 1 and SF 2 levels 11 and 12 with high-functioning members exercising concrete operations to advance both socially and economically. Here in the United States the divisions of segregation remained intact but with added energies gathering to reform these foundational structures. As a process of participation the jazz community moved this placement incrementally forward towards equality for all.
The Lower Right placements ranged from segregated divisions of labor and community through nation/state and even the beginnings of a planetary culture. Technology brought the newest American music and images with recordings and movies to wherever our military and corporate forces were engaged. So cultures whose distance from America had enforced social isolation were under pressure from afar to adapt and participate in these evolutionary energies and changes. It is important to note the official U.S. policy of disseminating our national identity globally, it represented a new legitimization of this American art form.
For African Americans to be assessed on the Lower Left requires an acknowledgement of the diversity of developmental levels found in their national culture. While the masses of Americans struggled to survive during such economically depressed conditions, African Americans had even less opportunity. By their reasoned and rational navigation of a repressive and often hostile dominant culture they were able to leverage social change and empowerment through their creative voices, especially jazz’s popularity as swing dance music. In view of this cohesive movement internationally there is the centuaric level 13, of AQAL development, or beyond verbal-ego-mind consciousness like that modelled in collaborative jazz improvisation.
The Upper Left is a combination of sensation both the frustrations and joys of African Americans in the United States, the impulse to advance to equality, emotion based on the integrity and depth of their struggle, symbols of creativity and community through the expression of their creative voices as a people, concepts beyond the mundane and the emergence of challenges to discriminatory rules, level 11.
American society had begun to revolve around the fulcrum of change and transformation with jazz swing music and culture adding a counterbalance to the traditions of white ruling class control and hegemony. Like it was in 1920s society, the 1930s was led by a new generation of America’s youth continuing to find their participation in the music, dance and culture of jazz essential to the pursuit of change and rebellion against conservative race-based social traditions.
As the 1930s drew to close there was a form of jazz emerging which would change the very nature of the music. Having been the center of mass popular culture based on being music of the everyman African Americans had crafted their creative improvisations within that framework. Swing was the music of large ensembles and dancehalls crowded with devoted fans across the country. Called Be Bop this new high velocity musical form with its unique melodic and harmonic languages left the large swing bands behind to explore a much more intellectually based improvisation by small ensembles of powerful soloists. This step away from the center of society’s swing dance orientation began in 1939 and everything changed as a result.
Chapter Three: The 1940s
As the 1940s began, war was raging in Europe, and America was drawn in to fight against the fascistic Nazi forces of Germany. Swing, a dance music form of jazz from the 1930s, continued to be at the center of popular culture in which Americans immersed themselves. Recognizing the power of the music as American popular culture, the government adopted swing style jazz to promote this united image around the world. Called command performances for the armed services, live government sponsored performances were broadcast to troops in more than thirty-two countries. There were Hollywood figures like Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Dinah Shore and Carmen Miranda on these State Department sponsored performances further legitimizing jazz as American culture (Murray, 1985, p. 160). This direct connection to the popular realm of Hollywood as a tool to portray American culture now featured African American jazz musicians and composers; this was a direct insult to the Nazi racist propaganda. African American jazz, without the intermediary use of Jewish American composers writing jazz inspired scores, as discussed in chapter two, was recognized for its importance, and became a milestone for African American status.
Jazz was forbidden by dictators and fascist regimes like the Nazis and the Soviets, because they feared the messages of equality and freedom encoded in the tradition (Sehgal, 2008). During WWII secret jazz clubs sprang up in Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. These were safe community places where freedom of speech and thought were practiced as part of the jazz experience. Their governments feared and repressed this Americanized threat using racial and cultural myths of this Negro-Jewish music to spread distrust. Seeing how the rest of the world viewed us through the lens of jazz made the push for civil rights here in America that much clearer, the promise of an integrated society matching the integrated jazz experience needed to be fulfilled (Sehgal, 2008). Jazz infused the literature, the visual arts as well as the common culture upping the game of free expression and democratic tendencies (Sehgal, 2008; Marsalis & Day O’Conner, 2009).
The emergence of bebop
Jazz artists began to improvise a new and more intellectual, non-dance form of the music which drew the best and brightest into its emergence. As early as 1939-1941 Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young along with a core of other innovative jazz musicians began this next wave of creative expression (Peretti, 1992). Reflecting what came to be referred to as the binary nature of jazz, as folk culture-refined culture, art-commerce, and the endless black- white, bebop was a high velocity music of complex rhythms, and large jagged intervals which contrasted with America’s fascination with swing, Dixieland and other early forms (Evans, 2000, p. 283). This new music seemed inherently non-commercial, as its improvisational nature resisted pressures to conform to popular tastes in music. Compositions were often improvised from popular tunes, Honeysuckle Rose became the template for Scrapple from the Apple when Charlie Parker played, In Walked Bud was Thelonious Monk’s response to Blue Skies, or in other words, art from folk or popular sources (Benson, 2003, pp. 48 & 51).
This new music rose at the same time that swing musicians like Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Bennie Goodman and many others continued to produce and perform large ensemble popular music for commercial purposes. There were more integrated bands with Count Basie’s group featuring musicians Buddy De Franco, Don Rader, and Neal Hefti arranging hit after hit (Murray, 1985). Bebop players were in these swing groups like Don Bias who played with both Basie and Ellington’s groups even as the musicians themselves began to branch out into new concepts.
Gathering in Harlem at after-hours jam sessions in night clubs like Monroe’s Uptown House and Minton’s Playhouse to improvise together in small ensembles, musicians enjoyed camaraderie as new techniques and concepts were improvised. This was a return to an African American legacy of musical polyrhythm, timbre and the call and response form from ancient African traditions, along with a “ healthy separatism and autonomy on the part of black culture, after the commercialized assimilationism of swing”(Belgrad, 1998, p. 180). Latin American jazz musicians like Chano Pozo a renowned Cuban drummer, composer and dancer being an initiated practioner brought the sacred Lucomo, or Santeria rhythms of the Yoruba religion from West Africa into the mix and this spawned a resurgence of authentic improvisations of a complex nature to the music (Kelley, 2012, p.15). Bebop emerged as a distinctly African American expression of their deliberate desire to find their own innovations outside of either the commercial or dominant white culture’s definitions of music.
At the same time, in response to the importance of opposition to racial oppression and segregation, this creative movement became part of African Americans’ explorations of resistance, agency, and self-determination. “For the first time, African American history began to take on a life of its own, as black people became actors rather than pawns in the nation’s history” (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, p. 3). Continuing this new evolution of African American self-definiton as a people Murray added:
Negro American life in this nation is not one unrelenting humiliation after another, not the perpetual feeling of inferiority in face of the white people, not a condition of anger ever threatening to make someone a bloody mess. This is why the writer rejects theories in which Negroes are described as no more than victims of “cultural deprivation,” misshapen by prejudice, and existing as nearly human in an abominable situation. (Crouch citing Murray, 2010, loc. 2099)
In January 1941, in response to President Roosevelt’s signing of the 1940 Selective Service Act into law, which segregated black men in the armed forces confining them to menial services and excluding them from the Marines, a March on Washington D.C. was proposed to bring pressure on the government. Scheduled for July 1st, the estimated 100,000 attendees recruited by black fraternal, labor, civic, and social organizations the march was promoted by the black press. This real activism caused New York Mayor Fiorella H. LaGuardia and President Roosevelt to negotiate directly with organizers A. Philip Randolph, Frank Crosswaith and Layle Lane resulting in the signing of Executive Order 8802 on June 25th . This order banned discrimination in employment by defense industries and the government, establishing the Fair Employment Committee to enforce compliance. The march was called off and a coalition of African American organizations was formed to keep pressure on the government to enforce this directive. It had been since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that an American President had signed a decree expanding racial equality as national policy ( Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, pp. 14 & 15).
Healthy competition and direct experiential learning were promoted through the competitive jam or cutting session which had been a part of jazz musical culture since the very earliest days in New Orleans. In addition to pitting individual musicians against one another in a competitive format, those early bands would ride and play on wagons, facing off musically in competitions resulting in the crowds choosing the winner and following them to their dance performances. The losers would find their wagon chained in place, and were left behind (Peretti, 1992). During the swing years of the 1930s, the cutting session had been done as band against band. It now returned as a test of skill and creativity between individual musicians, moving beyond the performance culture of swing.
In 1943 Duke Ellington recorded an eight LP collection of music named “Black, Brown, and Beige”, which he referred to as a tone parallel to the history of the American Negro. This collection was only performed in its entirety three times. First, in a premiere performance at the Rye High School in Westchester County, New York, on January 22, 1943, its official premiere at Carnegie Hall the following night, and a subsequent performance at Boston's Symphony Hall on January 28. These are the only known performances of the complete set of compositions (Solois & Nettl, 2009, p. 92). Telling stories of African Americans’ roles at pivotal junctures in our nation’s history using music, both with and without lyrics, to communicate this hidden truth, that without their contributions our nation would never have developed into the multifaceted reality we know today.
The desire of elite jazz musicians and their community to define their music through bebop’s constant improvisation amongst participants mirrored a new Afrocentricity as African Americans proudly saw themselves with a central and formative role in American history. This new awareness of their true cultural heritage as African Americans was a balance of perspectives between the integrationist, which focused on freedom, civil rights and true racial equality verses the nationalist, emphasizing group solidarity, self-help, and separatism (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, pp. 4-5).
In 1944, as the war ended, bebop became a national phenomenon moving from Harlem to predominately white clubs in midtown Manhattan including The Three Deuces, The Onyx, The Downbeat Club, The Spotlight, The Famous Door, The Yacht Club and Kelly’s Stable. Ending the war time restrictions on materials and a recording boycott by the American Federation of Musicians over royalties, the recording industry produced the first bebop record on the Apollo label, Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bu-Dee-Daht”. In the next few years the production and distribution of bebop records brought national recognition to the music and the musicians, especially Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
Spreading to the war-swollen metropolises of St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, this music quickly became associated with the new “rising urban black consciousness demanding recognition for African American contributions to American society”(Belgrad, 1998, p. 181). Attracted by employment in the war industries more than a million and a half African Americans had migrated from the South to the North and West. By the end of WWII the majority of the African American populace was urban and competed with white residents for their rightful share of opportunities. Race riots became all too common in cities like Detroit where twenty-five African Americans (seventeen at the hands of the police) and nine whites lost their lives. Only the arrival of federal troops ended the riot. Similar riots in Harlem and Los Angeles brought a new awareness of the powerful tensions of America’s racial inequality (Harris & Terborg, 2006, p. 17).
Saxophonist and legendary jazz innovator Dexter Gordon spoke to this point, recalling:
In a sense the cats were thinking this music was so great and was so wonderful and putting all their hearts and souls into it, talking about a new and better world, and more colorful, more interesting, offering all this... I really think it was the start of the revolution, the civil rights movement, in that sense, because that’s what the music is talking about. This is all the young generation, a new generation at that time. And they’re not satisfied with the shit that’s going down. Because they know there should be changes being made. And it was a time of change because it was wartime and people were moving back and forth all over the United States and constantly traveling__armies, war jobs, defense jobs. It was a time of great flux and the music was reflecting this. And we were putting our voice into what we thought was about to be the thing. (Belgrad citing Dexter Gordon, 1998, pp. 181 - 182)
The social significance of bebop
The profound social meaning encoded in this new music, by its originators, lead to musicians comporting themselves onstage less as entertainers and more as serious musicians. The intentional avoidance of the traditional image of Tomming, or Clowning for the audience could lead to a social isolation by other musicians. Charlie Parker held a lasting ire for Dizzy’s antics onstage which made him more accessible and acceptable for white audiences (Belgrad, 1998).
In a war ravaged Europe in cities like Paris, American jazz music filled the emerging social consciousness. For African American troops, especially those talented and fortunate few in the Army Bands, this was a transformative time as they found themselves accepted, and embraced as liberators and avatars of a new culture. Master Sergeant Jones, a jazz trombonist joined in with a few other African American soldiers to open a jazz club in the still smoking rubble and ruin of war. Parisians flocked to join in this celebration of freedom allowing Master Sergeant Jones to amass enough of a windfall to return from the war to Fort Ord in California, and together with another African American, Sergeant Taylor, to pool their resources to buy a small mountainside outside of Monterey. Dubbed Boogie Hollow, they carried on the tradition of their jazz lives hosting musicians from around the region and many world famous African American musicians to outdoor jazz parties of performance, dancing and feasting on BBQ and fresh local foods for decades to come (Personal communication from Sgt. Jones, 1982). Many African American jazz musicians returned to Europe after the war, touring and living in an environment where their musical genius was recognized and respected beyond America’s focus on their racial status.
The first generation of bebop musicians
New leaders rose to teach this music to the next generation. In Chicago, two legendary high school band directors, Major N. Clarke Smith at Phillips High School and Captain Walter Dyett at Dusable High School, taught an autocratic pedagogy reflecting their military experiences. The list of now famous musicians who came up under their tutelage included Lionel Hampton, Milt Hinton, Martha Davis, John Young, Dinah Washington, Nat “King” Cole, Richard Davis, Dorothy Donegan, Gene Ammons, Clifford Jordan, Eddie Harris, Leroy Jenkins, and Julian Priester. These musicians went on to perform in and often to lead bands at the creative edge of jazz for decades to come. The musical education of most African American students often ended after high school giving a well-earned respect and recognition to the power of these and other African American teachers. Many of these students were inspired to pursue postsecondary education and become teachers themselves. Jazz music was a practice which helped to transform and shape a new generation coming of age in an urban African American culture. The significance of African Americans uniting across generations to build and preserve this tradition of jazz music as central to expressing and maintaining their creativity and genius as a people cannot be overstated.
While jazz rose up in America on a distinctly African template as discussed in the previous chapters, the cross fertilization of music from both America and Europe was a key component of bebop. These war time connections shed profound and formative effects on jazz’s development in both Europe and America (Heffley, 2005, p.29). Charlie Parker famously listened carefully to the works of modern European composers Bela Bartok, Richard Wagner, and especially Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and the Rite of Spring. The classical European tradition of using set harmonic patterns known as functional tonality, establish a tonal center, destabilizing it with dissonance and composing a melodic and harmonic resolution had seemingly run its course, become outmoded. Stravinsky developed an alternative neotonality system of composition which used sometimes violent rhythms and accents of symmetrical, shifting patterns which gained power and significance through the interweaving juxtaposition of metrical improvisation (Belgrad, 1998, P. 183). Stravinsky often started with improvising rhythmic units on a provisional row of notes creating structure from these improvisations upon which to compose the next piece ( Benson, 2003, p.55). The African tradition of rhythmic complexity, already a key component of jazz, incorporated this new system seamlessly moving beyond swing’s classical practices (Belgrad, 1998, p. 183).
This revolutionary use of neotonality was combined with bebop’s modern changes, which specifically utilized those tones of the twelve-tone diatonic scale deemed by academia as most dissonant and to be avoided: the minor 2nd, the major 7th, the major 2nd as the raised or harmonic 9th, the minor 7th and the flat 5/ harmonic 11th. Soloists often ended on these tones in complete defiance of tradition which greatly offended both middlebrow and highbrow culture, including commercial mass media and those established intellectuals who opposed the very culture of spontaneity embraced by bebop. Polytonality was reinforced by playing chords which used these same tones, blurring the line between harmony and dissonance. While polytonality had been a part of jazz before bebop, listening to these European composers only reaffirmed its power and utility. Spontaneous improvising by these early bebop musicians became a process of integrating aural intuition with their intellectual grasp of harmonic structure. This required a more American democratic participation in which the musicians spoke for themselves, not the composer, and each soloist was passed the authority of the creative moment (Belgrad, 1998, p. 185).
A dual track of jazz was created, swing on the one hand and bebop on the other, pitting commercial popular culture and intellectual improvisational explorations against one another. The popularity of swing provided a steady economic flow for the musicians, their venues, and the recording and print industries. At the same time, the recording industry stepped up to market this exciting new bebop music, once again creating a commodity based on African American expressive voices and intellectual explorations. This time, however, it was a deliberate rejection of the commercial market-place for the new music by African American musicians already at the top of their field. Both the polyrhythmic complexity and the irregular length of the musical phrases in bebop defined it as music for listening, not dancing. There was a sense of swing as controlled by the conductor or the arranger while bebop was in the moment of each soloist’s explorations. This required the beboppers to be constantly picking up on the voicings and improvisations of the other ensemble members and to offer tonal, harmonic and rhythmic comments and encouragements during solos. This intersubjective quality of the soloist and the back-up players was often cited by critics as insincere, detached and even solipsistic, resulting in a random wandering music (Belgrad, 1998).
In late 1943, a panel of seventeen judges deemed by jazz critic and composer Leonard Feather, to be truly proficient in their knowledge and love of jazz voted on a poll of jazz’s greatest musicians. The list of judges consisted of Arnold Gingrich editor of Esquire Magazine, David Smart publisher of Esquire Magazine, and Robert Goffin attorney and author of important early jazz history. Tied to a benefit by the Navy League and the government’s fourth War Loans Drive, the winners appeared in a first ever jazz concert performance at the Metropolitan Opera House. The winners were First Choice (Gold Award) Louis Armstrong, trumpet; Jack Teagarden, trombone; Coleman Hawkins, saxophone; Art Tatum, piano; Al Casey, guitar; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Sid Catlett, bass; Red Norvo and Lionel Hampton for miscellaneous instrument; Louis Armstrong, male vocalist; Billie Holiday, female vocalist; Artie Shaw, best musician in the armed forces. The session was recorded on Commodore Records and became amongst the most successful ever to appear on that label (Feather, 1987, pp.80 & 81).
The Negro press were very supportive running a four-column headline in the New York Amsterdam News reading: “20 of 26 Winning Musicians in Esquire Band Poll are Negroes; Winners at Met. Opera house January 18” (Feather citing press release, 1987, p. 81). This was the first impartial poll to skip the familiar list of white, primarily Dixieland musicians while listing the greatest as their actual performances and compositions deserved. The furor from those who espoused those omitted lasted for years with attacks on the critics, the magazine, and the winners whose race became the actual focus of this rage. They raged with articles like that penned by Jake Truassell Jr. in the magazine Jazz Record, breaking it down by the actual votes given by the judges by race. He found only one had awarded more than 42.9% of total points to white musicians, a second had voted fifteen of a possible thirty-five points to whites. “Feather, Harry Lim and Timme Rosenkrantz were low men, with all awarding less than seven points…to white players. If this isn’t inverted Jim Crow, what on earth is it” (Feather, 1987, p. 82)?
In 1947, due to a series of efforts by this opposition, Esquire published the Esquire Jazz Book. The author Ernest Anderson was known for his devotion to Eddie Condon and that group of white jazz musicians whose very names were an affront to the modernists. The reaction of the Amsterdam News was vehement:
The book carries thirty-seven photos of white musicians with only seventeen of Negro musicians…at least twenty of the pictures are of the musicians…with the Eddie Condon outfit…There is a series of about twenty pictures of the Condon group in an eight page spread and not a single Negro face appears among them. It reeks of ‘Dixieland’ and ‘white supremacy’ music. (Feather citing Amsterdam News release, 1987, p. 90)
Feather continued to describe the response to this publication:
Standing up for themselves and against the Esquire Jazz Book, a letter of protest was collectively penned detailing a point by point critique of the entire book, its narrow and racist focus, and total failure to even acknowledge African American jazz greats, and the whites who played with them. The signatories included Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Red Norvo, Buddy Rich, Charlie Shavers, Dizzy Gillespie, Willie Smith, Boyd Raeburn, Charlie Ventura, Miles Davis, Al Casey, Flip Phillips, Pete Candoli, Shadow Wilson, Trummy Young, Tad Dameron, Sarah Vaughan, Aaron Sachs, Billie Holiday, Buck Clayton, Big Sid Catlett, Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Oscar Pettiford, Cootie Williams, Teddy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Ray Nance, Nat King Cole, Chubby Johnson, and J. C. Heard. (Feather, 1997, p. 92)
This was a powerful list of popular jazz greats across racial lines and, ironically, mostly known for their work in swing big bands. Coming at a time when African Americans were consciously redefining their history, their culture, and their music this public letter of protest brought the voices of these jazz greats speaking truth to power against racism and the lie of strictly white Dixieland as true jazz.
As bebop emerged as the new wave of jazz, there was a resistance from those invested with the racially divided white recorded and print music industries and their list of true jazz innovators. By holding fast to their story of lone white heroes who made up the music of true jazz the African American artists whose historical collaborations had founded the music and culture of jazz were once again dismissed as meaningless. These critics had not yet acknowledged swing as jazz and were totally resistant to bebop on every level being considered jazz’s new and legitimate form, and that African Americans were once again moving the music forward through their improvisations.
The importance of group creativity became a hallmark of bebop with luminaries like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Kenny Clarke pushing the envelope to include new roles for each instrument. Trumpets were played in extreme high registers, saxophonists used their ten fingers and keys to play at tremendously rapid tempos, bassists moved beyond their orchestral roles to a new dexterity and expressiveness, and the drums no longer kept time on the bass drum, switching to the symbols and the entire drum set to move around and through time. Everyone in the ensemble responded to the musical moment and expressed themselves freely. This was an African way of making music which often offended those with a Eurocentric orchestral orientation.
The essence of bebop is the open communication and exchanges between soloists and the ensemble. It is music composed through face to face interaction, not a text written ahead of time and rendered strictly as written. Monson (1996) spoke about this:
In jazz improvisation, as we have seen, all of the musicians are constantly making decisions regarding what to play and when to play it, all within the framework of a musical groove, which may or may not be organized around a chorus structure. The musicians are compositional participants who may "say" unexpected things or elicit responses from other musicians. Musical intensification is open-ended rather than predetermined and highly interpersonal in character-structurally far more similar to a conversation than to a text. (p. 81)
Good jazz has a conversational sociability, and interactive communication between players which transform the practiced riffs and ideas into unexpected new utterances which in turn lead to new musical conversations (Monson, 1998, p. 84). During live performances the audience members are drawn into this conversation and often call out acknowledgement and encouragement as the music progresses into new territory. This practice of audience participation is connected to the African American Church group musical traditions which in turn reflect ancient African cultural practices. There is a fundamental musical trope in this conversational and inclusive aspect of jazz which keeps it alive and in the moment, spontaneous and unrepeatable. This spirituality brings a vertical aspect to the analysis of this tradition (Peretti, 1994; Sarath, 2013).
Time, as perceived in the bebop rhythms was a flexible human creation, an event occurring outside of scheduled seconds, minutes or hours. When experienced through the body time as rhythm becomes an intersubjective reality which is entered leading to a body-mind holism. This complex of associations in the spontaneous rhythmic and harmonic realm of bebop has been compared by many ethnologists to oral culture which is in direct contrast to the western industrial society. By basing the experiential realm of bebop beyond the dominant social reality of the rational and definable, predetermined nature of reality, there was an extension of prosody, the essence of oral culture’s values in the very midst of industrial America (Belgrad, 1998, pp. 192-193).
Jazz as an expression of African Americans’ social heritage maintained over time evolved the bebop model of prosody, a post-literacy, and asserted the values of an oral experiential culture within the larger culture already conditioned to perceive through writing and rational definitions of reality. This dual sense of living in another realm spread from the jazz clubs through performance and recordings nurtured an inverse African social realm in defiance of a modernized industrial America. In this cross-cultural dialogue, a middle- ground, a zone where no single dominant culture was created and maintained by intentional participation (Belgrad, 1998, p. 193).
Without the separate but equal tradition of racial segregation in American society perhaps the energy and need for this bebop realm would have been subverted to the dominant social paradigm. The strength and power of elements of ancient African social practices within which African Americans were forced to live as a forcibly segregated people were manifest in their expressive voices once again as bebop. Sensing this many Eurocentric academics turned their energies to debunking any creative musical relevance to the music disregarding the aforementioned correlations to then contemporary European composers’ innovations, many of which were already longstanding components of jazz. There was once again a considerable resistance by academia and the popular media to accepting the importance and primacy of African American musicians as the innovators of the new bebop.
Drug addictions of many jazz greats
Since the very beginning of jazz culture there have been associations with alcohol and illicit drug abuse. Many of the early venues were in brothels and, during prohibition, in illegal nightclubs with infamous drug and alcohol abuse, this was a sad but true phenomenon. Some famous musicians, almost too numerous to list, found solace, refuge and succor in the thralls of addiction (Tolson & Cuyjet, 2005). Speaking with students at Seattle’s Cornish College in 1988 bebop saxophonist Hadley Calimen rolled up his sleeves to show heroin train tracks. His veins had collapsed and he spoke of even shooting up between his toes to hide the use. Hadley grew up in the 1940s jazz bebop music scene, he studied at the Jefferson High School in Los Angeles along with trumpeter Art Farmer and saxophonist Dexter Gordon. He spoke about own his addiction:
When I grew up in L.A. my auntie’s home was a rooming house where many famous musicians would stay when performing in the region. I used to sneak downstairs and watch them socialize and listen to them play all-night sessions in the drawing room. It was a common thing for some to shoot heroin as part of their daily routine. I thought it was the drugs that gave them the music they played. So at 15 I began to shoot up too. It took decades to realize these guys were great musicians in spite of their drug abuse, not because of it. (Personal communication, 1988)
It seemed to be an accepted part of the jazz life for too many, a sort of badge of membership and often lead to legal and health problems. Bebop had more than its share of addicts, including one of the primary innovators of the form Charlie Parker. Parker’s infamous self-medication with heroin to deal with his ulcer pain, and the many others who for their own needs and proclivities used drugs to deal with the stark contrast of being a creative genius while scorned by a white society that neither recognized, valued or understood the depth and complexities of their lived experiences (Tolson & Cuyjet, 2005). There are still too many jazz musicians who have on-off abuse problems and for some it has been the stopping block that obscured their talent, sometimes even from themselves. They chased the same performance high of a great musical session in their abuse and all too often forget the true source of their musical associations with this heightened or altered state of consciousness. The distortion of time and the ecstatic states induced with these drugs had, for many, similarities with the jazz improvisational process especially as practiced in live performance. Spontaneous and often surprising musical utterances can be extremely exhilarating experiences for the musician(s) and have a compelling essence which can lead to a lifetime of seeking their original inspiration through rehearsal and performance recreating these states of interconnectedness, often referred to as bright moments. For many the come down afterwards became a depressing and disappointing experience of disconnected loneliness the impact of which the drugs mellowed, or softened. White society used this relationship between predominately African American bebop musicians and illicit drugs to demonize and to marginalize their creative genius (Tolson & Cuyjet, 2005).
African American placement on AQAL in the 1940s
The dual levels of African Americans in relation to the dominant white culture became even further differentiated in the 1940s. While still an oppressed and segregated people African Americans had established a momentum towards a future of diversity and equality. Showing consistent leadership with their creative expressive voices through literature, art, music and the esthetically oriented nature of African Americans across socially and legally imposed restrictions, the nations of the world recognized the true essence of the America’s greatness as a nation, a place where anything can happen.
This bright light of acceptance was happening in a nation where such atrocities as the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, begun in 1931 to study the effects of funding cuts on black men with syphilis continued for 40 years, right through the war and into the early 1970s. Even when penicillin was identified as an effective treatment these 399 infected men were monitored and the ravages their diseased bodies suffered studied to document the effects. They were examined and told they were being treated, with no effort made to actually cure their condition. Beginning in 1947 a 127 African American medical students were rotated through the unit doing this experiment upon their own people, knowing the horror of being considered as test subjects with no more rights than lab rats (CDC, Tuskegee Timeline, 2013).
In response to the need for housing in the cities and a more equal share of the American Dream the government’s response was to build enormous projects within the Black-belt to warehouse African Americans. Whites were able to buy low cost housing built under this same program of creating new housing at this same time and build equity as a newly empowered segment of the population. African Americans were not permitted to buy into this project, even those who could afford to were forbidden because of their race. This continued marginalization , separate but not equal treatment as policy set the stage for deep poverty as these facilities degraded and only the desperation of a people who had endured so much brought so many into these developments (Katznelson, 2005).
Master Sergeant Jones mentioned earlier eventually died as a result of complications due to his mandatory participation in military experiments. His unit of mostly African Americans were ordered into trenches in the Nevada desert where they were told to lean into the blast force of atomic bomb tests. Their health was studied over the years and the cancers and other problems resulting from their exposure to extreme levels of radiation added to research data as a matter of standard operating procedure.
In the Upper Right quadrant African Americans had positioned themselves at the very highest levels of SF1, concrete actions like standing up to the federal government’s policies of restricting them to menial service jobs and SF 2, organizing the Walk on Washington as a national movement. This level of sophisticated opposition caused the government to change the laws in favor of fair and equal employment in all defense industries, the armed forces and all federal employment. SF 3 was engaged by their synthesis of the social world and creating new ways of proactively opposing racism and white supremacy with a newly united front. This was done despite the continued assertions by whites of African Americans as at best in the neocortex, still caught up in those aspects of the limbic system that deal with emotion and autonomic systems. By this their racial status was held at barely above animals, in complete denial of the diversity and complexity of African American creative voices in art, literature, music and their influence on the dominant culture.
On the Lower Right, WWII had spread jazz music and a culture of diversity into the consciousness of the entire world. By the use of their music and culture by the American government to negate Nazi racial propaganda, African Americans had inadvertently been moved to a planetary level. The flagrant contradiction of this country’s opposition to atrocities against Jews by the Nazi regime and the continued racial caste system severely damaged the nation’s credibility internationally (Alexander, 2010, p. 35). Jazz as American culture had many lasting effects around the world including nurturing resistance against fascism, revolutionaries gathering and organizing in secret jazz clubs in defiance of governments that officially denounced these practices.
The Lower Left placement became rational, reasoned, lucid, and reflected their concrete resistance to long outdated typhonic placement by white supremacists. A great new wave of African American cultural growth and expressiveness, done for themselves as a people in defiance of commercial constraints was exemplified by bebop and moved them towards centauric. Transcending the verbal ego-mind in this new and innovative, high velocity improvisational music, the very fabric of society was expanded and complexified. All the changes in society were not unconnected to the development of bebop, they were manifestations of the same unfolding. Originally innovated by a creative few in Harlem in after hour jam sessions, the unraveling of the entire fabric of a repressive social reality was set in motion.
For their Upper Left placement African Americans were striving to transcend symbols, rules, and formally rejecting previous definitions and restrictions by external forces. Their vision as a people was gaining a powerful clarity finding expression in integrationist and nationalistic movements, both of which allowed African Americans to define themselves as individuals and as a people beyond the constraints of America’s racist heritage. Their vision and logic became their new placement on this quadrant.
The 1940s were years of complex new movement in racial relations with African Americans progressively gaining ground and demanding an equal share of opportunity and freedom in the United States. Speaking to the centrality and power of African American expressive voices Fischlin; Heble; Lipsitz, (2013) spoke:
Activists, artists, and intellectuals have long recognized affinities between art and social activism. In societies where access to deliberative talk and democratic face-to-face decision-making is blocked, participation in expressive culture plays an especially important role in prefiguring new and better social relations. (pp 147&148)
Bebop music was both a reflection of the times and a causative force for African Americans to express themselves through collaborative jazz improvisation. Done initially outside of commerce and popular culture, bebop was a deliberate rejection of what had been done before and an embrace of the unknown future. Tempered by the collective genius of an entire people jazz music was central to the transformations going on in the social world. Each step taken by African Americans towards an evolving definition of themselves moved the entire nation towards a more inclusive diversity and as such the stage was set for the 1950s and the rise of the civil rights movement.
Chapter Four: The 1950s
The new generation of African Americans in the early days of the 1950s often faced a nation where their history was obscured which prevented an accurate view of the social world they lived within. White Americans saw no true diversity in their own neighborhoods except for delivery people and service workers, while on the media scene there were no African American movie stars. There were no African American television hosts, members of the studio bands, or news commentators and except for popular figures in the Jazz realm most whites had little awareness of the lives lived by this new generation (Feather, 1987).
There were a few powerful white advocates whose affirmative action brought changes such as adding African Americans to the all-white TV studio bands with Jerry Fielding bringing Buddy Collette into the band of the Groucho Marx show, and helping to desegregate the musician’s unions combing the all-black Local 767 with the all-white Local 47 in 1953. This was an important shift in America’s unionized music industry because members of Local 47 were paid more for work at the same clubs than members of Local 767 and had a six-day work week instead of Local 767’s seven-day week. The Local 47 also worked exclusively with the white contractors who controlled studio work in the motion picture industry and discriminated against African American musicians, often using as an excuse the same old racist (and untrue) presumption that black musicians could not read music. In addition, Local 47 controlled the hiring of the major theaters in Los Angeles, such as the Million Dollar Theatre; Local 767 members had little opportunity to compete fairly for the best jobs in Los Angeles (Monson, 2007, Location 908). Band leader and bassist/composer Charles Mingus was instrumental in bringing the issue of merger up at the Local 767. Some African American musicians resisted because they felt pride in having their own place, their own building and affiliation with the American Federation of Musicians, AFM, others, eventually the majority believed their affiliation would be more effective as equal members.
Band leaders Milt Hinton, George Kast, Nelson Riddle and John Parker hired across racial lines while many others resisted this integrative change (Feather, 1987). Making headway into the public’s image of African Americans was still met with difficulty even by whites who felt themselves free of prejudice. “Meeting a Freddie Hubbard, or Wayne Shorter, they will not see in him the great-grandson of a slave who was owned by someone named Hubbard or Shorter”(Feather, 1987, p. 119). This myopic vision did little to mitigate the highly racist society within which even the very most successful African American jazz artists had grown up and continued to live. Some of these musicians, like Benny Carter and Buddy Collette, were able to cope with the realities of American life with happy, relatively normal lives as did white musicians; while others, including Miles Davis, Max Roach and Charles Mingus found themselves unable to heal from these old wounds of oppression and resistance and lived in a separate reality (Feather, 1987). Together these two polarized African American groups brought pressure to bear on civil rights stressing the need to change things officially.
In 1951, the NAACP combined four separate cases of discrimination in school assignments and transportation provided under the name Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas with Thurgood Marshall as the lead attorney. They took this opportunity seeking to have the Supreme Court void its 1886 Plessy v. Ferguson decision of sanctioning separate but equal. Citing not only lower wages and restricted opportunities for African American teachers, lower funding and inadequate facilities for non-white schools, but perhaps most importantly the damage to the development and self-esteem of African American students forced to grow up under this racist system. In a unanimous decision on May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal essentially had no place in education. Speaking for the court Chief Justice Earl Warren stated:
To separate them (black children) from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to the status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way likely to be undone. (Harris & Terborg-Penn citing Warren, 2006, p. 26)
How does jazz fit into this process as a central component of social change? To answer this, the concept of social interactionism has been proposed. Becker and McCall (1990) spoke of artworlds created by the collective activity which then become redistributed into the greater social world (p. 148). The social interaction perspective promotes analysis into the realm of the lifeworld, where structure, social forces, symbols, and ideas have no lives of their own, but come into play as proximate realities (Becker & McCall, 1990, p. 17). So as jazz musicians moved the music ahead to ever new expressions of their collaborative creativity the greater social world was impacted on many levels setting powerful forces for change in motion.
How did musicians actually move outside of the dominant society and its historical perspectives to create this important momentum? Becker and McCall offered this explanation:
In the subjectivist critique, objective time is simply an observers' convention for mapping events, while historical processes themselves may involve discontinuous leaps across objective time and decisively different subjective and social orientations toward the temporal flux of events. Time, in short, is subjectively and socially constructed, and it is meaningful action and interaction that give time its shape. (1990, pp. 18-19)
This process of musical innovation and expression was done on a continuum which welcomed a chosen few into the inner circle to learn the methods of jazz improvisation and develop their own individual voices. Historically speaking, the musics commonly labeled “blues” and “jazz” were created by African American musicians to meet the needs of their people and community as members of the community and shared common experiences as black Americans. Serving as cultural pioneers, they collectively conceptualized and created the performance and stylistic approaches based on black cultural aesthetics. Much of this music was rooted in practices of their African ancestors, often reflecting adaptations and innovations resulting from black American life experiences, themes of “perseverance,” “resilience,” “hope,” and “freedom” can be found in much of this music. These were oral and aural traditions passed on through mentoring and apprenticeship, the musicians had the responsibility of determining to whom, when, and where this knowledge would be passed. There were no “jazz studies” programs at this time. The musicians were the keepers of musical knowledge and controlled its dissemination (Brown, 2010 pp. 3-4).
African Americans wanted music that made them laugh, dance, shout and cry out against the struggles they faced daily in a society which oppressed and persecuted them as a people. The music expressed their collective dreams, aspirations and hopes for a better tomorrow where they could truly be free. The sound and energy required by the musicians to accomplish these goals were directly derived from ancient and historical sources of pre-diaspora Africa; sorrow songs, work songs, spirituals, and encoded the lived experiences of the millions of African Americans moving north in the twentieth century (Brown, 2010, p. 6).
The apprenticeship of new jazz musicians
John Coltrane came of age as a musician during the 1940s, and learned these traditions, especially the importance of developing his own original voice as demanded by the African American community, which valued sound and feeling over dry technique. To be invited into the apprenticeship of jazz, an aspiring musician such as Coltrane had to exhibit specific qualities. They had to have sincere desire to be a musician, exhibit a high level of instrumental proficiency, and develop a thorough understanding of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic performance practices. These aspiring musicians needed a strong understanding of improvisational approaches while showing their potential for continued development and contribution. The older professional musicians were looking for the “right” attitude: including a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to learn based on respect for previous and existing performance aesthetics and an openness to exploring new realms of possibilities. These new musicians needed knowledge and command of the blues and jazz repertoire of the time, good practice habits, and show creativity in solos. They had to show an ability to memorize songs through their focused listening ability, have an ability to get along with others in the ensemble. They needed to be “saying something” on the horn with the ability to communicate with the listeners using the aesthetic vernacular of African American culture, and demonstrate courage to perform in front of others (Brown, 2010, pp. 6-7).
Coltrane learned and applied these things in live performance in the African American community, not in a classroom from recordings and books of music as performed by chosen artists; it was direct personal experiential learning which honed his gifts into a unique expression. Part of this education was the life of musicians on the road, the trials and struggles they faced in a society which still practiced segregation, including in the performance venues where they worked. At no time was there a distinction or separation between the life of a professional jazz musician and the greater social world, as Coltrane developed his improvisational expressive voice these factors all became elements in his musical and performance vocabulary.
Before reaching the point of expertise where they might be noticed by professional musicians and invited to become apprenticed, young musicians typically found points of entry into the jazz community within the intersecting domains of neighborhood and public school where they sought out knowledgeable peers to share in the development of their musical passion. Aficionados who recognized the inclinations of prospective artists invited them into the fold by encouraging them to participate in the community’s tradition of oral and aural learning. For almost a century, the jazz community has functioned as a large educational system for producing, preserving, and transmitting musical knowledge, and preparing students for the artistic demands of a jazz career through its particularized methods and forums. Even non-musician community members could hear the promise in new players’ efforts and would encourage them to seek out opportunities to work directly with accomplished jazz musicians to actually master their instrument.
As in a reflection of ancient precolonial times, oral and aural teaching were the only ways to truly acquire the skills to become a professional and join in the social interaction of collaborative jazz improvisation. The encoded resistance and the push for civil rights in jazz music spread to new young musicians as part of their learning. These apprenticeships included transient musicians passing through the region as well as neighborhood jazz greats taking younger players under their wings to pass the music along to the next generation. Berliner (2009) quoted musician Don Sickler to illustrate this:
Many jazz players grew up with other great players in their neighborhoods. Jackie McLean was telling me not long ago about how, when he was a young kid, Bud Powell was always dropping by the house and playing with him, encouraging him to develop, and inviting him along on gigs. (Locations 1095-1098)
The American society was still rife with racial hatred with even many of the white band leaders who hired across racial lines maintaining this status quo of segregation. Stan Kenton had hired many African American musicians and the singer Jean Turner over the years and yet expressed the quintessential WASP attitude. Responding to the 1956 Down Beat Critic’s Poll he wrote an open letter to the editor which read:
“To the editor: Just saw your fourth jazz critics’ poll. It’s obvious there is a new minority group, the white jazz musicians. The only thing I gained from studying the opinions of your literary geniuses of jazz is complete and total disgust” (Feather quoting Kenton, 1987, p.122).
In his response as editor of Down Beat Leonard Feather quoted a previous racial statement made to another Down Beat editor by Kenton:
It seems the Kenton band means more in Europe than any other band- more than Basie, Duke, Dizzy…It would appear that the reason is that we had taken Negro jazz and put it in European terms. The harmonic structure of Negro jazz was not enough to satisfy Europeans… We have played music more advanced in melodic and harmonic content than Duke’s…Our tour proved to Europeans that white musicians can play jazz, too. (Feather quoting Kenton, 1987, p.122)
Despite his own lived experiences of performing with African American musicians, Kenton spoke words highly reminiscent of the old Dixie White Supremacists four decades prior. Though there existed an economic and social spectrum of African Americans’ lived experiences, many whites still clung to oppressive and hateful beliefs. Part of what made jazz so powerful was the resistance and aspiration of an entire race being expressed and evolved through their music, this has been a constant factor with which many Africa Americans still identify.
Some jazz musicians like singer and pianist Hazel Scott, lead lives which clearly combined the jazz and social realms. In addition to her talents as a performer and early successes beginning at the age of five, she had her own radio show at sixteen, was featured in a Broadway show at eighteen, and her beauty lead to a fling with the motion picture industry. In 1945, she had married the flamboyant and powerful Congressman Rev. Adam Clayton Powell which led to her sidelining her career to spend time supporting her husband’s. In 1955, Charles Mingus recorded his debut album with Hazel and Max Roach featured in the ensemble. Her creative life was accomplished in spite of racism, sexism and the social status of African Americans which placed her well ahead of the curve on many levels. Song was considered in the African American community as crucial for the full development of an individual. Running sound through the body by singing, and including traditional “black sacred music” were part of the jazz learning process.
Jazz’s contribution to civil rights
At this same time many African Americans found a new solidarity in actively resisting racism. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama and secretary of her local NAACP, refused to obey the law of giving up her bus seat to a white passenger. The law stressed the second class level of African Americans which she found untenable. Based on a successful bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which had lasted for only a week, the Montgomery bus boycott continued for nearly a year. It was supported by weekly mass-meetings held on a rotating basis at black churches and the inspirational leadership of a young Martin Luther King Jr. as the elected leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, MIA. African Americans, young, old, middle-class, poor, religious or not, resolved to defeat this racial segregation. Two months into the boycott a stick of dynamite was thrown onto the porch of King’s home. He rushed home to find a huge crowd of angry African Americans, some with weapons, gathered on his lawn. After comforting his family, King began his embrace of Gandhi’s non-violent resistance campaign, counseling these people to love their enemies. Following the bombings, the MIA filed a lawsuit in federal court against segregation on the buses in Montgomery. Responding on June 5th, 1956 in the case known as Browder v. Gayle, the court ruled segregation as violating the equal protection under the law clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The city of Montgomery appealed this and on December 20th, 1956 the court gave its final ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Members of the white community including the Ku Klux Klan went on a rampage bombing several black churches and homes. The Klan drove through black neighborhoods in a forty-car caravan. African Americans didn’t run away or hide in fear, bravely standing on their porches and waving at their would-be tormentors. The death of Jim Crow as the controlling social order was begun in Montgomery and over the following decade spread throughout the South (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, pp. 33-34).
The spirit of resistance spread from this boycott with young African American ministers in many cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and Tallahassee holding similar protests. Encouraged by leaders including Ella Baker, who was a veteran of the civil rights movement and worked with both the NAACP and the New York Urban League; Stanley Levison, a white New York attorney, businessman and former Communist Party member; Bayard Rustin, was a member of the Young Communist League as a youth, a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which was a Christian pacifist organization devoted to non-violent social change, and was openly a homosexual; Martin Luther King Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, to disseminate these techniques of the Montgomery boycott. These new leaders with such diverse and socially progressive histories set a new and more deliberate focus on civil rights.
The jazz musician’s role in these times was to both understand and express all of this social and political turmoil and the movement for change through and in their music. Jazz was music that freed people from America’s segregated practices and expressed the lives of African Americans. As an outsider group existing beyond the white social world African Americans had moved through a difficult history to reach this point of change and of the rise in support for civil rights. Patience, grace, rhythm, humor, along with the discipline found in their culture were the essence of the true American spirit and it was society’s identification with the aspirations for a better tomorrow which had also shaped the very formation of our democracy (Crouch, 1998, Location 1099). Exclusion of these people as a race was no longer possible if the American people wanted the nation to grow and prosper, especially in a progressively post-colonial world where people of the Afro-Diaspora were finding their way to freedom.
Brown (2010) described the nature of jazz music in the African American community, explaining that it was music that expressed the full range of African American life experiences. The process of transmission of musical knowledge and practices within the African American culture in both rural and urban situations had its own belief system, which guided and established rules for music making. One of the principal aesthetics of this belief system was to play with a sound and energy that deeply touched the people; to play in ways that connected and communicated (pp. 5-6).
The music was performed across the nation, for predominately urban Africa American audiences living in mostly segregated communities. During Coltrane’s apprenticeship in the 1940s, he traveled throughout the Midwest and South experiencing directly the distinct regional dialect of the black Chicago sound, the black New York sound, the black New Orleans sound, the black Baltimore sound, the black Detroit sound, and the black Kansas City sound (Brown, 2010, p. 7). Jazz musicians processed and spread these sounds beyond their geographic origins connecting African Americans with the richness of their own cultural diversity and providing real-time connections across time and space.
These connections did much to mitigate the spatial confinement of Africa Americans within the newly constructed ghettos of urban America. Beginning in 1939 and accelerating into the 1950s, government programs promoted the clearance of slums, (African American neighborhoods), and relocation of these residents to multi-story, high-density housing projects (Massey & Denton, 1993, p. 83). This hypersegregation had five distinct dimensions of geographic variation:
Africa Americans can be distributed to areas where they are overrepresented; 2) to areas where they are underrepresented, resulting in different degrees of unevenness and isolation; 3) these communities might be tightly clustered to form one contiguous enclave or scattered about in checkerboard fashion; 4) they may be concentrated within a small area or settled sparsely throughout the urban environment; 5) or spatially centralized around the urban core or spread out along the periphery. (Massey & Denton, 1993, p.74)
Jazz music and culture brought these people together in an intentional community not bound by geography or society’s rules of control allowing a united cultural front to exist. “Culture, counterposed to society and social action, may be understood stood as the (1) "knowledge" and recipes, (2) humanly fabricated tools, and (3) products of social action that in turn may be drawn upon in the further conduct of social life” (Becker & McCall, 1990, p. 2).
Without the culture of jazz music and performance there may well have been a civil rights movement in our nation, but the unity and single-mindedness required to stand against centuries of systematic oppression was strengthened by jazz’s constant and consistent nurturing. This support and consistent attention helped to spread melodic invention, rhythmic variations, and mastery of vertical approaches to improvisation and sophisticated harmonic variations, this multifaceted consciousness across the continent. “Bebop musicians and civil rights activists mobilized the language of merit, universal justice, and transcendence to demand entrée and recognition in mainstream American society, one in the language of art, the other in the language of politics” (Monson, 2007, Location 1427).
The practice of jazz music was centered around a sense of spirituality and has been a continuing source of concern to the ruling class as they recognized the resistance and unity to underlying themes of power, ideology, economics, anti-corporate globalization, historical practices of colonialism, sexism, race, and gender (Solis & Nettl, 2009). When the civil rights movement became the center of American social evolution in the 1950s and 1960s, jazz was there. In the BBC program 1959 the year that changed the world, African American scholar Stanley Crouch spoke to this connection, “Jazz musicians didn’t actually join the civil rights movement; the civil rights movement joined them” (Ferguson, citing Crouch, 2011).
The diversity of jazz styles and their associations with race
There are distinct styles or genres of 1950s jazz with standard associations of being color-coded as blackness or whiteness. Cool, West Coast and Third Stream are referred to as white jazz. The tempos are more relaxed and their lyrical melodic development is the core of these styles, with Third Stream often associated with European classical music. Hard Bop, and Soul Jazz with their focus of heavy timbres, bluesy inflections and hard driving rhythms became associated with black musicians. Versions of these categories have long bothered historians who often asked how the breadth of artists like Miles Davis, Milt Jackson, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Grey, Stan Getz, and Hampton Hawes fit into such narrow, limiting descriptions. Monson (2007) spoke to this saying:
Since African American musicians have expressed themselves in styles ranging from the lusciously smooth tone of Johnny Hodges playing “Day Dream” to the ear-splitting intensity of John Coltrane on” Ascension”, from the passionate blues of Charlie Parker on “Parker’s Mood” to Duke Ellington’s hauntingly relaxed feel on “Reminiscing in Tempo”, it is difficult to accept an aesthetic framework that requires evaluating the performances with a greater preponderance of blues elements as always blacker. (Locations 1463-1467)
Regardless of specific artists’ and their location on the spectrum of white and black jazz, white musicians enjoyed the benefits of society’s structural white privilege, while African Americans experienced structural racism. Even those African American jazz musicians whose acceptance by white audiences, sometimes earning them the title of “Uncle Tom”, still lived in America’s social structure of de facto racial discrimination (Monson, 2007, Location 1488). We are fortunate as a nation that some of jazz’s greatest artists rejected these definitions as Ellington declared in 1959:
I don’t want to feel obliged to play something with the same styling that we became identified with at some specific period … I don’t want anyone to challenge my right to sound completely mad, to screech like a wild man, to create the mauve melody of a simpering idiot, or to write a song that praises God. I only want what any other American artist wants— and that is freedom of expression and of communication with our audience. (Crouch citing Ellington, 2010, Locations 1048-1051)
Jazz around the world during the 1950s
In Europe, jazz as discussed by Heffley (2005), found itself based on a spectrum of Afro-improvisatory, or hot; to Euro-schooled, or legit styles of black and Creole musicians in the early days of New Orleans jazz. Not strictly based on race or color jazz was hot vs. sweet; authentic traditional vs. commercial swing; moldy fig vs. bop vs. cool, to out (free) vs. inside (mainstream) jazz, these descriptions equated with the power-of black (and some white) and power-over white (and some black) bodies (p.18).
Being the cradle of American civilization, Europe was a rich field upon which the embedded messages of resistance, freedom and equality found in jazz music and culture took root. In the 1950s, jazz was the Klauser, or student’s comprehensive exam, and as each nation embraced and participated in this exam the path to a freedom as progression, freedom to grow was the answer each found in its own way (Heffley, 2005, p. 26). These shifts were similar in scope to the compositional development of Schoenberg, a pioneering German composer who migrated to America in 1906 and began a new tradition of Twentieth Century American Composition. With his Emancipation of Dissonance, the randomized pitches in the octave became the Twelve Tone Row, providing over 5 million possible melodic and harmonic combinations.
Addressing comparisons to Bach, Stravinsky and other European composers, Ellington spoke about his concepts as an African American jazz composer and improviser:
If I seem a little shy about being displayed on a critical platform with the classical big shots, let me also dispel the notion that I hesitate to place the jazz medium in a top musical category. Jazz, swing, jive and every other musical phenomenon of American musical life are as much an art medium as are the most profound works of the famous classical composers. To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him this rightful share of originality. Let us remember that many “long-hair” composers (still current) freely admit that they have been influenced by the jazz idiom.… Music, like any other art form, reflects the mood, temperament and environment of its creators. (Monson citing Ellington, 2007, Locations 1774-1779)
It was in 1956 that both the State Department and the American media took jazz to the world. The connections with African People the world over were reaffirmed and celebrated by such jazz luminaries as Louis Armstrong. Having been hired by a television program entitled See it Now produced by Murrow & Friendly, Armstrong was in Ghana to play for the people, greeted by a crowd of ten thousand, and a band playing a High-Life piece “All for you Louis” written in his honor. He played for the Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, who within a year would become an independent Ghana’s first president (Monson, 2007, Location 2546).
His performance that afternoon was to one hundred thousand fans. This was followed by performances by some seventy ethnic tribal groups. Led by their chiefs, these drummers and dancers displayed the rich diversity of the Ghana people. Later Armstrong was so moved he had to comment:
“every time I listened to these cats beat it out on them tribal drums I kept saying to myself, ‘Satch, you’re hearing the real stuff.’ ” An Ewe woman dancing before him reminded him strongly of his mother, Mary Ann. “She danced and sang like my mother, and when I went over to talk to her she even held her head like Mama used to hold hers and before long I was calling her ‘Mama.’ ” Armstrong, it seems, experienced a newfound sense of membership in an African diaspora. “After all, my ancestors came from here, and I still have African blood in me.”(Monson citing Armstrong, 2007, Locations 2554-2558)
In 1955, several African, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations wished to remain neutral with respect to the Cold War and organized an Afro-Asian conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia. The linking of Africa and Asia as newly emerging powers was essential in the diasporic sensibilities in the 1950s. Fostered in part by Islam and in part by an anticolonialist perspective there was a new effort to connect the fates of these black, brown, and yellow people from around the diasporic world in the minds of free people everywhere. Many African Americans were interested in this meeting of Africa and Asia, including Adam Clayton Powell Jr. This landmark show of strength by people of color around the world had made State Department officials sufficiently nervous that they refused Powell’s request to attend as an official observer even making it difficult for him to obtain a visa and travel as a private citizen (Monson, 2007, Location 2862).
Dizzy Gillespie and his band were on an official State Department tour of the Middle East and were also moving the crowds and making new connections to African Diaspora people everywhere they went. These actions of reaching for connections globally were also underway back in the United States. In March of 1957, Martin Luther King, his wife Coretta Scott King, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and A. Philip Randolph with a few others flew to Ghana at the invitation of the newly independent country’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, to attend the nation’s independence ceremonies. The Kings also visited Nigeria and Europe, where while in London they lunched with a Trinidad born Pan-Africanist, C.L.R. James, whose book on the Haitian revolution “ Black Jacobins” had aroused international attention. Recognizing that both colonialism and racial segregation were part of the international white supremacists King noted: “The oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed…Freedom comes only through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil” ( Harris & Terborg Penn citing King, 2006, p. 37).
New York connected to these realms of creativity and spontaneity as the cultural center of the nation. Nurturing experimentation by artists in genres such as Dizzy Gillespie’s use of Afro-Cuban rhythms, the innovations of free jazz musicians, and free improvisation, indeterminancy, the musical New York School added the energies of other art forms. The Beat poets generated spontaneous bop prosody, modern experimental dance and new theater, as well as the paintings of Jackson Pollack were directly connected to jazz. In the jazz world many artists were pushing the creative limits of music and society with compositions like Fables of Faustus by Mingus directly calling out the practitioners of status quo, institutionalized racism.
In the spring of 1957, John Coltrane had a personal epiphany, and with the support of his family and friends, quit using drugs. His spiritual awakening brought great resiliency, new energy and purpose to his life and music. He decided he wanted to use his music as a “force for good”. He joined Thelonius Monk’s band and explored new compositional and improvisational methodologies including melodic invention, rhythmic variations, and mastery of vertical approaches to improvisation and sophisticated harmonic variations (Brown, 2010, p. 9). Coltrane returned for another stint with the new Miles Davis Sextet, which put these new skills to creative use until his departure to begin his solo-band leader career in the 1960s. The spiritual essence of Monk’s, Miles’ and Coltrane’s work added a new and vibrant transformative power to jazz music the world over. Having begun his life in the rural segregated South of the 1930s, the death of his father at an early age, his rooting in the southern black Christian tradition of service, and moving to the urban North, Coltrane’s life experience helped to process his musical contributions into what has been referred to as an epistemology of black freedom (Brown, editor, Herman Grey, 2010, p. 34).
African American placement on AQAL in the 1950s
In the Upper Right, American society’s stubborn fixation on racism and stereotypes of African Americans was weakening. The civil rights movement had numerous successes which placed at least the leadership of African Americans in the highest SF-1, structural functions, concrete operations, and actions. The organizations mentioned in this chapter which supported the civil unrest and protests had become formal operations, SF-2, with powerful new leaders stepping up to direct the movement towards freedom and equality. Synthesizing regions, SF-3, allowed the various organizations to network and support multiple actions across the country working towards similar conclusions. All Americans of good will and like minds began to understand the complexity and pervasiveness of racism and oppression which strengthened the civil rights movement.
On the Lower Right quadrant the African American people ranged from high functioning level 12, or nation/state, and with the information through art, music and political action placed their leadership on the highest level 13, termed planetary. As always, when gauging placement of a community, there is representation on all levels of the quadrant, and connections in higher states, especially during jazz performances by people on all levels.
The Lower Left saw the power of jazz music with its encoded messages of freedom and equality as a cultural awakening spreading across the European continent. The social awareness of jazz found fertile ground as Europe began to move away from an historical past of violence and exploitive colonization. Centauric leadership in the African American community transcended the ego-mind and the ration of hatred and segregation shifted towards freedom and equality. The world turned its attention to the American civil rights movement, and as changes unfolded one step at a time, the desire for change and freedom in the nations of Europe were strengthened. African American jazz musicians who toured in Europe were greeted with respect and appreciation for their genius and the encoded messages of the jazz tradition were eagerly absorbed into the social fabric of post-war Europe.
The Upper Left placement of African Americans was that of vision, with a growing network of leaders and organizations dedicated to change. The intentional rejection of formal rules protecting racism and segregation by individuals collectively united for change was supported with rulings by the Supreme Court which showed a consistent logic against racial segregation. The consistent and focused efforts to confront racism was exemplified, when after the ruling against bus segregation in Montgomery, the Ku Klux Klan drove through the black community to be greeted by individuals gathered together to smile and wave at them instead of an angry mob to be engaged through violence. This highly evolved non-violent approach was the death knell for Jim Crow and spread across the South as the power of intentionally choosing this unity ended the racist’s hold on their spirits.
In the 1950s America progressively embraced the civil rights movement, and it was jazz music that spread the message with its encoded essence of resistance and nobility. As Ellington rejected being compared to historical European composers and techniques and demanding that the world see the ways “long-haired’ European composers had been and continued to be influenced by jazz music and the culture of change embraced by the jazz community. Mingus’s direct challenges to racists in power with compositions like Fables of Faubus had the attention of the entire world. Miles’ explorations into new hybrid realms of composition and improvisation opened the way for more depth and complexity beyond preconceived classifications. Coltrane’s growth beyond drug addiction, and his desire to use his music for good, set the stage for a renewed spirituality in jazz which added techniques from around the world to the foundations of African American sacred music. Many white musicians had now played jazz and passed it on to new generations. The Beat generation used jazz to create their Beat-Prosody which expanded society’s awareness to new realms.
No one definition covered the complexity of the jazz social world as it intersected with a myriad of others. The system developed by Combs (2009), the Wilber-Combs Lattice, with its diverse connections on multiple levels is quite useful as a reference to the actual American social world. As Kezer (2014) explained the Wilber-Combs Lattice, the resulting combinations of waking, dreaming and deep states (gross, subtle, and causal), meditative, altered states, and peak experiences. Reaching any of these states was possible at any level of development, in all quadrants. The resulting unique combinations which arose from these intersecting states and levels comprised the Wilber-Combs Lattice on a national and an international setting.
These interconnections between events and individuals were connected through intentional actions by participants with jazz, providing a potent source of continuity across time and distance. Becker & McCall (1990) addressed this complexity saying that these interactions: “raises questions about whether-and how-cultural history in the interaction perspective can deal with events as something greater than the sum of individual actions and interactions. These issues involve questions of sociological and historical causation”(p.30).
They continued by citing Weber:
empirical social actors give meaning to their actions in unfolding, improvisational, and intentionally or unintentionally ambiguous ways. How to analyze social life in a way that respects its existential and emergent nature? Ideal types offer a way of working out unambiguous and coherent sociological models that differ from functionalist and abstract variable approaches by their capacity to reflect subjective and social temporality, and hence, meaning and meaningfully patterned social organization. (Becker & McCall citing Weber, 1990, p. 37)
The lives of jazz musicians, both famous and those who were sidemen or regional artists, held the truth of our nation’s awakening racial consciousness. The importance of learning how they experienced America in their musical and social lives tells us much about the greater social realms of the times. How and what we learn from the stories of African American jazz musicians was explained by Becker & McCall, (1990):
Because they depend less on concepts grounded in the experiences of socially dominant groups and classes, life histories deepen the critique of existing knowledge. They force us to examine our assumptions, incorporate more actors into our models, and generate more inclusive concepts for understanding the actual complexities of social institutions and the processes of social change. (p. 46)
Changes in America’s social and racial structure were happening and gaining momentum at the close of the 1950s, which propelled the nation and world into the 1960s where things accelerated. Based on the combined lived histories of African Americans, jazz music was central connecting element to this new awareness and desire.
Chapter Five: The 1960s
As the 1960s began, forces for social change which had been set in motion over the course of decades were heating up. A new generation of African Americans had come of age and their push for civil rights gained strength and a renewed vigor. With the use of direct action four black freshmen from the historically black college, North Carolina A & T in Greensboro, began a sit-in at the lunch counter of their local Woolworth store. While African Americans could shop in the store and even order take-out food, they were not allowed to actually sit and eat in the diner. These four male students were neatly dressed and refused to vacate their seats after being refused service, remaining until the store closed for the day. Classmates and students from local colleges, both black and white, joined them, and the sit-in continued, spreading to other cities in North Carolina. From there students in the North picketed Woolworth stores in support of this sit-in in a national chain store (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, pp. 41-42).
By adopting this tactic from the labor movement of the 1930s, African Americans quickly spread the awareness of segregation in a powerful way. White supremacists were angered by this direct action pouring ketchup and bowls of sugar on their heads, attempting to engage them with anger and violence. The students remained disciplined and continued their non-violent action. In several cities, police arrested students who were holding supporting sit-ins, which only lead to more students joining the efforts. Picketing and boycotting added new fuel to the protest and soon Woolworth and Kress ended their policy of racial segregation at their lunch counters. These brave young students, both black and white, were seeking to rid America of the institution of racial segregation, not only at these stores but in every aspect of life (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, p. 42).
Many of these student activists met in March at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee at the Annual Leadership Workshop for College Students. Run by a white couple, Myles and Zilphia Horton, this school had been established initially to promote worker education and labor organization in the 1930s. As their awareness of the centrality of systemic racism grew, these two educators developed a series of workshops to empower community organizers to promote adult education, voter registration, and civic participation. Herself an member of the NAACP, Zilphia helped to bring the traditional black spirituals like “We Shall Overcome” into the focus where they became anthems to the movement, spreading worldwide to be used in countries as far away as Poland and China (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p. 42). African American music was once again a uniting force for change, this time on a global level.
In the world of jazz new voices were rising to communicate an essential spirituality which could lead the way towards equality and freedom. John Coltrane stepped into this moment with a mixture of artistic innovation and a certain therapeutic, redemptive spirituality which was popular to both musicians and the general public. At a time when Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking about sacrifice and redemptive love, the nation was eager to find new ways to positively express the zeitgeist of those turbulent times (Brown, 2010, pp. 43-44). In the practice of jazz there is a movement towards the new, of improving the musical world, and by this the greater world within which we all live, through improvisation. In the music of many of the jazz pioneers of the 1960s, including Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Joe Henderson, Tony Williams, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor, there are novel concepts, schemas, and instrumental techniques expressed creative and intellectual freedom (Lewis, 2008, p.37). The term free jazz was used to describe music not based on the functional tonality in the classical European sense or the traditional jazz use of 12-bar blues, or rhythm changes to structure or order the new music. Instead there were no strict boundaries, each musician could explore their own expressive voices, and collaborate with others in ever new improvisations.
Free jazz became a global phenomenon expressing the essence of social life through musical explorations. Not bound to the specific religions of Judaism, Christianity, both Black and White, Islam, the various sectarian, or the traditions of the occult, these mostly African American free jazz pioneers sought to give voice to that essential holiness in nature as pure potential (Heffley, 2005, p.28). Unity and transformation in this music world offered a door into new possibilities for both musicians and their listening audience.
On the 15th of April 1960, 142 students from the South and 30 from the North gathered to attend the Student Leadership Conference on Non-Violent Resistance to Segregation at Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh, North Carolina. Having received council to remain independent and to practice “group-centered leadership”, the students decided to form the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a loose federation of their local student protest groups. They selected a graduate student attending Fisk University, Marion Barry, a future mayor of Washington, D. C. as chairman. Not limiting the membership to solely African Americans, their belief was that in the fight against injustice, freedom meant freedom for all Americans. Within a year they had set up headquarters in Atlanta and were actively working against desegregation, voting rights, grassroots organizing, community empowerment, and were represented by full-time field representatives (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p.43).
African Americans were still living in highly segregated communities in cities across the country. In Boston the percentage of non-whites living in structured segregated housing in 1960 was 83.9, in New York it was 97.9, Los Angeles 81.8, for Chicago 92.6, Miami was at 97.9, and Atlanta 93.6 (Massey & Denton, 1993, pp. 46-47). Without the music and culture of jazz this enforced segregation might well have kept society from united movement. Because of this connecting fabric of jazz culture, direct action became the tool of choice to push for changes in cities across the nation.
The SNCC became the front line activists in the civil rights movement maintaining their nonviolent principles to travel engaging in direct action as participatory democracy. By taking a direct role in the furtherance of racial equality these brave young students set their goals on testing the recent Supreme Court decision of Boynton v. Virginia, which banned the practice of separate terminals for interstate passengers. The freedom riders would travel the Deep South to challenge the lack of compliance in cities from Washington D. C. to New Orleans, dedicated to use the action as a demonstration of the extent of racial segregation still in use in these places of public business. They were severely beaten in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where John Lewis, a future chairman of the SNCC, and John Bigelow, a white, tried to enter the white waiting room of the Greyhound bus terminal. As CORE called an end to the freedom ride as their way of showing the nation the illegal racist practices, the SNCC took over with students filling the ranks. All the region’s historically African American colleges including, Fisk University, Meharry Medical School, the American Baptist Theological Seminary, and Tennessee State College, were represented by students under the leadership of James Lawson.
Lawson was a member of the Fellowship of reconciliation, and had served a year of a three-year sentence for refusing to register for the draft in 1951 in protest against the Korean War. Having been paroled to the Methodist Board of Missions, he was sent to India on mission for three years. While there he became closely acquainted with the nonviolent philosophy of direct action as practiced by Gandhi, upon his return to the United States Lawson attended Oberlin College for graduate study. At Oberlin he met a young Martin Luther King Jr. who encouraged him to move to the South and work for civil rights. This connection to the direct civil actions of India’s Gandhi had a powerful effect on the African American community’s leadership and the civil rights movement as a whole. The government saw these connections and the influence of the communist party as threatening to their hegemony and the need to resolve the issues of civil rights and ending racism took on a new urgency.
The continued social isolation and economic disinvestment by the federal government and regional municipalities yielded a deep anger, spawning violent urban riots during the 1960s. The summer of 1963 was filled with the news and energy of the Birmingham, Alabama riots. In August 1965, the Los Angeles riots destroyed an estimated $35,000,000.00 worth of damage, left 4,000 injured and 34 dead. Sporadic incidences of violence in Cleveland and Chicago in the summer of 1966 kept the pressure up for radical changes in civil rights and an end of racial segregation. Black ghettos erupted in rage and destruction the following summer of 1967 in more than sixty cities across the nation, especially Detroit, Newark and Milwaukee. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 1968, Chicago became an inferno. As destructive and violent as these riots were, the targets were properties and businesses, located in the African American community but owned by outsiders. Except for confrontations with guardsmen and the police, there were few incidents of black-on-white violence, instead the destruction was mainly in the ghetto and targeted white property, institutions and/or authority symbols (Massy & Denton, 1993, p. 59). Once again the negative popular view of the African American community as dangerous to whites and randomly violent remained in the realm of disinformation used by the ruling class to cause fear and allow the suppression of rioters without proper scrutiny by the American People.
Jazz redefines the times
Many African American Jazz musicians in the 1960s turned their energies towards redefining themselves beyond the official media hype. Ornette Coleman’s discography for the period included such titles as, Free Jazz, Change of the Century, The Art of the Improviser, This is Our Music, The Great London Concert, At the Golden Circle in Stockholm Volumes 1 & 2, and 1969’s Crisis. Ornette had begun his exploration of melodic invention as the source of his highly improvisational music in the 1950s and by this time had shaken things up in the musical world. His bands always featured brilliant musicians, playing ever changing melodies, even on their treatment of standards the music was unrepeatable virtuosity.
Miles Davis’ releases for the same period include, Sketches of Spain (an extensive classical/jazz improvisation), Seven Steps to Heaven, E.S.P., Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and In a Silent Way. At least five times in his musical life Miles’ musical evolution changed the definition and practice of jazz. His music ranged from bebop, cool, the almost orchestral improvisational works filled with large symphonic themes, post-bop, fusion and his final works featuring full orchestras on a body of compositions which he said were the un-played internal themes from which he had been innovating for the course of his career. Miles’ band members often said he never stopped teaching, even in performance.
John Coltrane’s post-drug abuse musical explorations were in three phases. First, his exploration and expansion of blues, swing, R&B, and bebop took the music to new levels of complexity and virtuosity. Second his rhythmic and melodic explorations which reflected his tutelage with Miles and Monk. Third, his deliberate turn towards Africa and the Third World for new elements. His titles and subjects and most explicitly his focus on Africa brought his political perspective to the forefront, attracting a new generation of African Americans. These connections to the powerful emergent forces for change in Africa and the Third World were expressed in titles including Giant Steps, Africa/Brass, Ole’ Coltrane, Transcendence, Believer, A Love Supreme, The New Wave in Jazz, Om, Meditations, Steller Regions, Intersteller Space and The Olantunji Concert: The Last Live Recording. As these titles suggest their explorations became global in scope promoting a musical meeting place where his genius sought to speak truth to a nation and world in turmoil.
Charles Mingus’ titles in the 1960s added to these new perspectives with releases like Mysterious Blues, Reincarnation of a Lovebird, Tonight at Noon, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and Right Now: Live at the Jazz Workshop. This new effort to reach out for connections to the music, traditions and musicians of the post Diaspora world was a central component of the 1960s jazz experience. This conscious step away from the commercial jazz image of love songs and dance tempos was part of a deliberate effort to broaden the understanding of what it meant to be an African American jazz musician in the 1960s. Charles Mingus maintained his leadership role as a jazz composer and improviser as a fearless innovative spirit was his strength, these recordings firmly pushed jazz’s boundaries further and added new instrumental combinations, and his use of extended, often rhythm cycled song forms in odd, complex meters have enriched the music world.
McCoy Tyner released an important series of recordings which display the evolution of his exciting quartal harmonic concepts. Most Western music is constructed of harmonies based on intervals of thirds with the root, 3rd, 5th & 7th degrees of the major scale establishing the tonal landscape. Tyner instead builds larger polyphonic tonal and harmonic structures with the root, 4th, flat7th, 11th, which greatly expanded the range and complexity of his music to new realms. His titles reflected his originality such as Inception, Reading Fourth, The Real McCoy, and Expansive. Many of his bands have been large ensembles with new instruments brought into the jazz realm through performances of his compositions.
Drummer, composer and band leader Art Blakey was a powerful force for expanding the rhythmic and harmonic interaction. His 1960s releases included Live in Stockholm, Pisces, Roots and Herbs, The Witch Doctor, The Freedom Rider, The African Beat, Buhania’s Delight, Ugetsu, and Soul Finger all of which took new chances pushed tempos faster and added new complexities to the musical interactions. The complexity and interwoven rhythmic force Blakely brought to jazz was steps ahead of everyone else. His band always wore tuxedos and spoke of the sessions they performed as high church. He created a timeless sense of wonder and surprise in his arrangements that communicated his life as a master of his craft. Once again Art Blakey was not as well known outside the jazz world as his talent and body of innovative work would suggest. His list of band members over the decade reads like a who’s who of contemporary jazz.
An important force on the West Coast Jazz Scene in the 1960s was saxophonist and composer Joe Henderson. His work as a sideman on many groundbreaking projects also led to leading his own ensembles on recordings which infused a sophisticated Latin rhythmic structure with very advanced fusions of jazz/rock and belied the Cool Jazz label often placed on West Coast players. These included Our Thing, Inner Urge, In & Out, The Kicker and Power to the People. Spoken of as a big wind that blew through the West Coast by jazz musicians, his personal drive to push the boundaries, and to mix elements of many cultures kept him out of sight for the followers of the larger commercial music industry.
Present as a sideman and composer on many of the aforementioned recordings Wayne Shorter’s own 1960s releases were at the front of this jazz evolution revolution. Their titles Second Genesis, Free Form, Wayning Moments, Speak No Evil, Ju Ju, The Soothsayer, The All Seeing Eye, Schizophrenic, and Supernova brought novel spiritual images to his splendid compositions and improvisations. Wayne Shorter’s breadth of compositions is perhaps among the very broadest in the music of jazz. In each new musical evolution his fearless and direct approach to engaging his band and the audience in the performance and improvisation communicated his inner growth and hunger for truth and beauty.
Herbie Hancock, who was also an alumni of many powerful ensembles, released his work on a series of innovative compositions and performances with improvising instrumentalists including Takin’ Off, My Point of View, Inventions & Dimensions, Empyrean Isles, Maiden Voyage, Blow-up, Speak like a Child, Hear O Israel, and the Prisoner. On his song Watermellon Man, Hancock used the tones of a neighborhood vender calling out his wares and clients calling back “hey…watermelon man”. This musical depiction of a scene from his own life gave us all a peek into a world where music is everywhere people gather. With their calls and answers, as in the African tradition of community music making, this tradition has been maintained in the modern African American community.
Early in 1965, Chicago jazz musicians who were looking to transcend previous styles and genres to create new music formed the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM). Their original founding members, Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Phil Cochran, and Steve McCall wanted found an organization that would be good for African American musicians who were just starting out, who were struggling to get their music heard. Operating on the courage of their convictions, that they could do this for themselves, the goal was to establish an organization where the intention was to foster new improvisational music and to perform these works together. Their inspiration has been tagged to a particular quotation by Malcolm X near the end of his life:
The white musician can jam if he’s got some sheet music in front of him. He can jam on something he’s heard before. But the black musician, he picks up his horn and starts blowing some sounds that he never thought of before. He improvises, he creates, it comes from within. It’s his soul: it’s that soul music…He will improvise; he’ll bring it from within himself. And this is what you and I want. You and I want to create an organization that will give us so much power we can sit and do as we please. (Lewis, 2009, citing Malcom X, p. 97)
Over the years, a truly important series of associations between musicians and performances of new music, beginning locally, and eventually touring the world fostered just such a collective organization. Musicians came and went from the area like trombonist-composer-improviser Julian Priester who worked with the Sun Ra Arkestra, and while on a break from touring with Art Blakey, attended the first official meeting of the AACM on May 15th, 1965 (Lewis, 2009, pp. 105&106). Right from the inception the goal was to awaken the spirit of improvisation and composition in the membership and to spread this awakening to the listening public. For African American jazz musicians this breaking free from established and commercialized genres was the essence of their musical expression. The AACM brought community into the process which provided a supportive and challenging source of collegial collaboration in a laboratory setting where innovation and improvisation were nourished.
From the mold of previous compositions and improvisations, African Americans in the 1960s created a new richness of breadth in their music. This is the period in which Coltrane turned his attention decidedly to Africa and the Third World for source influences, producing song titles and arrangements that explicitly gesture to Africa. Reflected in his song titles and subjects, most of which were explicitly political, he referenced the racial strife of the time. This move on the part of Coltrane and among many young black intellectuals, writers, and artists was part of a very powerful yearning for African American expression. They sought to participate in change and to dialogue with powerful emergent forces in the Third World and the African Diaspora (Brown, 2010, p.
Social reactions to these messages of change
These movements towards intellectual and improvisational excellence, racial equality and civil rights met with continued resistance, especially in the Old South. In 1962, Federal Marshalls tried to enroll James Meredith in the University of Mississippi while the state governor, Ross Barnett, actually stood in the doorway of the registrar’s office. A riot broke out which injured 150 Marshalls, 25 of whom were shot. President Kennedy had to federalize the Mississippi National Guard to restore order and enroll Meredith who graduated a year later. The next year, then Governor of Alabama George Wallace, backed up his campaign pledge of “ Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”; by blocking the entry for enrollment of African American students to the University of Alabama. It again took the federalization of the Alabama National Guard to admit them to the University. With his segregationist stance Wallace went on to post significant 3rd party numbers in the 1964 and 1968 presidential primaries (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p. 45).
The old time jazz musicians were still playing their repertoire and there was a greater incidence of mixed race bands. Perhaps the most important American composer, Duke Ellington pushed the boundaries in his own way by composing suites, orchestral movements and collaborating with many of jazz’s greats. His LP titles reflect the range of his work. Blues in Orbit, Three Suites, First Time! The Count Meets the Duke, Paris Blues/Anatomy of a Murder, Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington’s Violin Sessions, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, My People, Afro-Bossa, Orchestral Wails, Sacred Music, Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite, and the Second Sacred Concert. With his explorations of orchestral instrumentation and larger classically oriented forms he stepped into the unique role of one of America’s most prolific and important composers as well as remaining an industry stalwart with significant sales and concert attendance. At the time of his death on May 24th, 1974, Ellington had more than 2,200 compositions in his library encompassing a wide variety of styles, genres and ensembles.
Count Basie had a productive decade with more than 45 releases including some of jazz’s most popular singers. His titles reflect a man in his musical prime, Not Now, I’ll Tell You When, Basie Swings, Bennett Sings, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie at Newport, String Along With Basie, Sinatra-Basie: An Historical Musical First, Ella and Basie, Frankly Basie: Basie Plays the Music of Frank Sinatra, Count Basie with Arthur Prysock and Hollywood…Basie’s Way. America loved Count Basie and his popularity continued to grow in the 1960s with the industry spotlight showcasing him with many stars and lifting him to celebrity status.
Dizzy Gillespie had been on the popular jazz scene for decades and had grown into his own musical vocabulary in the 1960s. His hybrid blending of African and Cuban rhythms and musical forms opened the door for many other jazz greats to the compatibility and mutually supportive aspects of each tradition to build his own. Around the world his State Department sponsored tours spread his global consciousness to the African Diaspora world. His titles during the 1960s included, Dizzy and Count Basie at Newport, Dizzy Gillespie Big Band( featuring Afro-Cubano-Bop & World Fusion), A Musical Safari, Gillespione, The New continent, Dizzy on the French Riviera, New Wave, Dizzy and the Double Six of Paris, Dizzy goes Hollywood, Jambo Caribe, and Soul and Salvation. His use of themes from around the African Diaspora, yielding a true ’World Fusion’, was at least forty years ahead of the popular music scene.
In 1962, jazz was still the dominant music industry focus, with literary critic Dwight MacDonald remarking that it was, “the only art form that appeals to both the intelligentsia and the common people (Peretti, 1994, citing Macdonald, p. 176). So as these and other jazz musicians issued recordings with rhythms and instruments from around the African Diaspora world and titles that brought attention to Africa, the struggle for freedom, alternative socio-historical narratives, and sponsored resistance. Americans became more aware of the scope and severity of the need for civil rights and an end to racial oppression. The popular culture took on the images of Miles and Dizzy in their bright African clothing as they performed and joined them in the joyous community of jazz.
The changing expression of jazz as a reflection of the times
The importance of expanding the picture of what it meant to be an African American helped to empower a new generation move away from the narrow stereotypes held by previous generations. Black speech patterns, which had languished in the enforced ghetto isolation of America, were not recognized by white society for the adaptive intelligence it evidenced. With roots in West Indian creole, and Scots-Irish dialects of the eighteenth century, it is not a degenerate or illogical replacement for Standard English; instead it constitutes a complex, expressive richness in its own right. Having been separated from whites historically by caste, African Americans had moved away from Standard English due to their enforced segregation since early in the twentieth century. White English had become regionally divergent while, due to urban segregation across the nation, Black English had become standardized. Many college educated African Americans suffered scorn from their community for ‘speaking white’ (Massey& Denton, 1993, pp. 162 & 163). For many it was the fluidity and creativity of jazz’s musicians and composers whose titles and expressive language helped to mitigate these tensions. This new free, experimental jazz was happening in a historical setting where so much white art, particularly that made by the Abstract Expressionists, became ‘progressive’ due to its nonrepresentational qualities. In contrast the insistence of musicians ‘saying something’ in their jazz music became part of the long history of resistance to the silencing of the African American creative voice (Lewis, 2009, p. 41).
In 1962, the State Department commissioned Benny Goodman and his orchestra to tour the USSR with his Seattle World’s Fair band. The reception by the soviet people was very positive with Premier Nikita Khrushchev and his entourage in attendance. There was none of the wild abandon by the audience which had been feared if Louis Armstrong had been the artist, which supposedly was the reason Armstrong never played the Soviet Union, he was just too popular (Feather, 1987, p. 217).
In Europe, jazz was moving along with German trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff releasing an album titled Tensions in 1963, which was primarily comprised of improvisation. His remarks about jazz remain quite clear and relevant:
Every art form is an expression of its time and a reflection of its world. The jazz musicians of Europe should therefore not play forever like a black musician in New York or Chicago, he shouldn’t try to and one shouldn’t expect him to, because his problems are simply different and his life’s sphere subject to different forces…I believe that many European jazz musicians don’t make use of jazz’s freedom enough to express themselves, their personalities-they are in awe of the musical models of their idols…{But}what most American jazz musicians have that we Europeans don’t is simply originality…too few European Musicians think to develop their own creative personality, to really break free from the mold and use the freedom jazz offers them.”(Heffley, 2005, citing Mangelsdorff, p.32)
President Lyndon Johnson began his time in office after the 1964 elections promising to deliver the Great Society, his war on poverty was soon overwhelmed by the war in Viet Nam. He signed both the Civil Rights Act and the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964, establishing the national Head Start Program to provide preschool education for poor children in preparation for kindergarten, Upward Bound to prepare poor teenagers for college, Volunteers for Service in America (VISTA) to assist poor communities as a type of domestic peace corps, the Legal Services Corporation to give legal assistance to indigent clients, and the Community Action Program to help the poor access federally mandated antipoverty agencies. There were other programs including food stamps, free school lunches, Medicare (health care for the elderly), Medicaid (health care for the poor) and funding for aid to education (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p.69). These programs were most successful for whites and the elderly, leaving disproportionate gaps for most African Americans.
America’s war in Viet Nam escalated between 1965 and 1968 as the troops of South Viet Nam failed and our nation stepped in to take over the fighting. Due to being statistically less likely to have student deferments, medical disabilities, or declaring conscientious objector status, the military drafted African American youth at twice the rate of white youth. Even though African Americans represented only 12 % of the population, they suffered close to one-quarter of all American casualties in the war. America spent close to $140 billion on the war and only $10 billion on the war on poverty. As Martin Luther King Jr. calculated it in his opposition to the war in Viet Nam, the cost to kill one single enemy soldier was almost $500,000.00 at a time when the nation spent only $35.00 a person to relieve poverty (Harris & Terborg-Penn 2010, pp. 69&70).
Malcom X broke with the Nation of Islam in 1964 establishing the Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which was fashioned after the Organization for African Unity on the African Continent. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, the holiest of Muslim religious sites, Malcom saw people of all colors and nationalities on pilgrimage, worshiping together as Muslims. He returned to America a changed man and spoke against racism even louder and against the official Nation of Islam’s racist policies, which lead to his assassination by rival Nation of Islam members who shot him on February 21, 1965 while he spoke to a rally of his organization. These deep divisions in the African American community illustrate the complexity of their status in the nation and their stand against discrimination and racism.
Other public figures in the Africa American community also took a stance against this foreign war of aggression. Mohammad Ali, formerly known as Cassius Clay before his conversion to the Nation of Islam, refused to be inducted into a war in which he felt African Americans had no true interest. He was sentenced to 5 years but the sentence was overturned on appeal, yet for 3 years Ali was forbidden to box though he was the heavy weight champion of the boxing world (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p. 70). As dissent grew from many factions to the war effort in Viet Nam, African American direct actions like those mentioned above provided leadership and moral superiority, which pushed the racial tension in the nation to new levels.
President Johnson stopped the bombing of North Viet Nam after the vicious Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese in March 1968, and began official peace talks. Resentments in the United States against the war on poverty, white-backlash against civil rights advances and declining poverty levels, led Johnson to not seek his party’s nomination and Richard Nixon became the next president. His administration began a program of benign neglect for civil rights, gauging that it was false raised expectations that things would continue to improve which was at the base of African American unrest. The stance of the government was that there was something intrinsically wrong with African Americans themselves and that the problems they faced could be explained away without dealing with racial discrimination, poverty and unequal educational opportunities.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist named James Earl Ray while King stood on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee. The nation was shattered and violent riots broke out across the country. African Americans vented their rage and frustrations in acts of violent civil disobedience. The national Advisory Commission on Civil Rights, appointed by still president Johnson, concluded it was the historical repression and exclusion of African Americans in the economic progress which had lifted so many whites out of poverty into the middle class during the post-war years of expansion that lay at the root of the situation.
We had become two nations, one white the other black. For many urban rioters it was a form of, as Harris & Terborg-Penn, (2010) said:
political insurgency, of collective violence, releasing pent-up resentment over economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and police brutality. Despite civil rights legislation, executive orders, and court decisions, African Americans especially in the North believed they had experienced little positive change in their lives.(pp. 68 & 69)
Across America the Africa American people organized and together set an agenda for change. The 1967 Black Power Conference, held in Newark cited the need for greater self-determination in education, community services and the election of black political officials to represent their interests. The Black Power Manifesto was created which compared the black population of the United States to a neocolonial people and issued a call for African Americans to unite seeking liberation. Some even called for the country to be divided into separate black and white nations as the only way to assure the end of white domination and racial oppression. This was an idea which had connections to the Nation of Islam’s declaration that if the United States would not give African Americans their rights a citizens then it should set aside lands for them to live separately and to take care of themselves. Some saw Black Power as a form of black capitalism and thought economic freedom would push changes to the foreground (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, pp. 72&73).
The violence and dissent lead to white flight from the cities to the surrounding suburbs, which shifted demographics and helped to elect the nation’s first black mayors. In 1967, Carl Stokes of Cleveland became the first elected black mayor of a major American city with Richard Hatcher following close behind being elected mayor of Gary, Indiana that same year.
African American placement on AQAL in the 1960s
As a result of the struggle to provide a united front for social change the African American community’s leadership guided the masses of their people into SF 1 where concrete actions became powerful forces for raising awareness in white America. The actions of formal operations by the many organizations across the civil rights movement brought pressure on the ruling class to make the laws and executive orders reality. Their SF 2 placement allowed the leadership to provide a pathway upwards towards freedom and equality for the masses of not only African Americans but all the many communities in the United States. Around the African Diaspora world post-colonial nations were breaking down and the feelings of connections as a people despite their countries of origin African people were demanding control of their nations. SF 3 were the creative spaces of the arts, literature, and jazz where the constant evolution of the African American people gave form to expressive voices to speak their truth to power. These synthesizing regions allowed the improvisation of time and space to communicate truth of segregation, racism and the systematic maintenance of the underclass as a means of control.
On the Lower Right the history of repression and oppression led many African Americans to feel a lack of connection or investment in the United States. Finding themselves to be closer to the rest of the Pan African Diaspora around the world caused a new way of seeing and being in society. The key here was the amount of information being disseminated and getting the word out about these connections to a history of economic exploitation and oppression. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about tyrants not giving power away without continued struggle by the oppressed he was speaking on a planetary level, not just to America. His cost analysis of the Viet Nam War brought a new scrutiny by the people of the world. Each riot was a test for the nation, and the world watched to see if we would find and implement the answers to save and strengthen our democracy.
By the 1960s African Americans tired of waiting for some magical force to change society. Their Lower Left quadrant placement rose as their leadership brought new rational techniques like the Freedom Riders, the sit-ins and boycotts to bear. Provoking the ruling class whose power lay in their assertion of hegemony with civil disobedience brought the scrutiny of the world to bear. The jazz community took concepts and lifted them into the realm of the centauric, transcending the verbal ego-mind with musical innovations. As the titles of their 1960s compositions evidenced there was an urgency to the push for real change. People around the world were excited by this new leadership and embraced the music as well as the actions expressly, hoping to model their resistance on them.
The Upper Left transcendence of concepts and rules which supported and maintained the status quo African Americans followed a vision of equality and the end of racial discrimination and class oppression. Their logic grew stronger with each successive action and progressively more and more people of all America’s diversity could see where our nation had fallen short of its constitution and its dreams for a better tomorrow for all her people. Formal definitions by the ruling class were starkly out of touch with the nation and quickly became obsolete as the means of controlling society. African Americans had served as the engines of commerce creating the modern global economic culture with their labor. Historically unpaid, under-paid and disempowered by design, these children and grandchildren of former slaves had reached the end of their tolerance. Around the world people looked to their vision and waited to see how things would progress.
America was a nation unravelling itself along racial, economic, and class lines. White college students joined the rioting and protesting communities in a show of solidarity. The resistance to the Viet Nam War became a generational expression of dissent as the nation struggled to turn away from violence as our primary tool to control and influence global affairs.
Despite the many new laws and executive orders to the contrary segregation and racial discrimination remained strongly entrenched. Africa Americans were still forced to live in urban ghettos across the nation and to be excluded from access to either capitol or the means of accessing housing loans for which only whites were eligible. Each time racists reacted with violence their intended victims’ use of sophisticated non-violence techniques showed the true horror of hatred and oppression. Of all the violence and destruction wrought during a decade of massive civil disobedience there was a profound lack of black against white violence. Despite the official line that African Americans were dangerous and should be avoided, especially in their communities, American saw the lie for what it was, racist propaganda.
Around the world jazz was continuing to gain popularity and ever new musical cultures were embraced for the unique strength and beauty each added to the tradition of jazz. Jazz musicians were reaching new heights of creative expression beyond the constraints of an economics based on the narrow commercial music industry. America’s jazz elite had become statesmen and the American State Department an official governmental agency deployed these emissaries around the world to serve as ambassadors. There was still fear in high places that these jazz musicians would do something wrong and foment violent change, though the overwhelmingly positive reactions belied this. America watched as this new elite emerged to represent them with jazz music.
Jazz was becoming stratified as dance and popular music on one end of the spectrum and as elite experimentation on the other end. The new music of Rock & Roll was being pushed by the industry as it was easier to control and cheaper to produce and sustain artists in 4 and 5 piece guitar bands.
Chapter Six: The 1970s
The course of events and the civil rights movement as a whole, which had been the focus of the 1960s, began in the 1970s to both yield significant changes and to run afoul of federal programs which maintained the status quo. The American Apartheid of African Americans still saw very high percentages living in segregated communities in the inner cities across the nation. By refusing funding for housing outside of the segregated communities to African Americans, society sustained their ghetto isolation as an underclass in government housing projects. Even with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, resistance to integration was fueled by greedy realtors. By bringing in African Americans to a neighborhood, whites would become frightened and leave, selling their homes for much less that market value. Then the realtors would buy up these houses and resell them creating another segregated community. The great white flight to the suburbs accelerated in the 1970s leaving the inner cities to become even more segregated African American communities.
In the jazz realm a variety of new forms had risen from the free jazz movement. African Americans jazz musicians were free to define themselves in their own improvisations and compositions beyond commercialized genres. The co-opting of the new forms of jazz was in-progress but due to the non-dance orientation not hugely successful.
The new African American Soul Music emerged on the popular commercial scene to become the sound of the 1970s. Based on R&B this highly danceable music filled the airwaves and many working jazz musicians joined in to make a living. These artists included James Brown, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind and Fire, Aretha Franklin, Prince, Ohio Players, The Isely Brothers, Al Green, Gladys Knight, Chic, The O’Jays, and Rufus featuring Chaka Khan. Their music often included horns and improvised solo passages, which along with a blues orientated chord and harmonic structure and a heavy backbeat on the second and fourth beats of the measure maintained elements of previous African American musical forms.
Free Jazz and spontaneity in the 1970s
Each performance of the new free jazz music re-defined, or actualized the composition, “that actualization itself is itself open to being revised by subsequent performances” (Benson, 2003, p. 153). Ornette Coleman went even further telling his musicians to listen to his own improvisation before trying to play the new composition, and to base their interpretation on their own improvisations. This open and free way of engaging with the music left many traditional jazz fans behind, it was too hard to let go of their favorite songs as played by their established jazz artists. Driven by chromatic melodic invention, Coleman’s music was fueled by inspiration and emotional self-expression. He advised his musicians to use his tunes to ignite their feelings, and to follow these feelings instead of the rational plan of the composition to inform their improvisation. His music systematically allowed for the phenomenon of group improvisation and interaction in the process of performance, which often lead to the group’s power and strengths to exceed his own compositional parameters (Heffley, 2005, p. 43).
This system was meant to force spontaneity assuming that the improvising body has sources to draw upon more powerful, more providential, and even more orderly than a rational religiously adhered to script. It was “freedom from, in, and to form—form in this case being Coleman’s own system, clearly Western, and just as clearly effecting and serving black liberation and identity, on both personal and collective levels—converge, balance together dynamically” (Heffley, 2005, p.44).
Speaking to the nature of spontaneity as an alternative to the rational progress of Western civilization, Belgrad (1998) said:
Finally, spontaneity was a means for challenging the cultural hegemony of privileged Anglo-American “insiders”, giving voice to artists and writers from ethnic and social backgrounds remote from the traditional channels of authority. In all these ways, the spontaneous aesthetic was rooted in a search for social influence outside political channels. (p. 15)
Spontaneity’s challenge to the existing American social order was founded on the belief of the inherent value of the unconscious mind as the source of possibilities, which had been denied legitimacy by the prevailing ideology. As writers, artists, and musicians practiced spontaneity their work promoted access to the open realm of the collective unconscious beyond the restrictions of the ideological consciousness. Emphasizing openness, honesty, awareness, and an authentic mastery beyond the traditional forms and techniques of the established high culture; spontaneity provided a true alternative cultural authority accessible to those from immigrant, working-class, and minority backgrounds (Belgrad, 1998, p. 16).
The release of Miles’ Bitches Brew in 1970 brought an important follow up to his In a Silent Way from 1969. The combination of styles and musicians brought the label jazz-rock into the global lexicon. It was also the first time live and studio recordings were combined to produce a finished product. Miles, having composed the tunes Bitches Brew, Spanish Key, and Miles Runs Down the Voo Doo, while his bandmates Zawinul wrote Pharaoh’s Dance, and Shorter wrote Sanctuary. The results were blended into a sonic landscape mixing the best elements of rock and roll with highly improvisational electronic jazz. This technique was repeated on the 1970 recording A Tribute to Jack Johnson, again featuring guitarist John McLaughlin and young drummer Billy Cobham playing at a very high level in a style of rock and funk that again reset the bar for what it meant to play jazz (Scaruffi, 2002, loc. 1339).
Political Status of African Americans in the 1970s
In 1971, there were only thirteen African American members of Congress, with five of these elected that year; On June 18th, 1971 they formally organized as the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). This organization was instrumental in sponsoring the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana which successfully drew in over eight thousand attendees. Questions addressed included political empowerment, coalition building, and the possibility of a black independent political party. There were disagreements over whether African Americans should be members of established labor unions or form their own, and despite dissenting opinions, they passed a landmark resolution against Israel for their racist exploitation of the Palestinian People. Making these moves outside the traditional halls of power African Americans demonstrated their ability to employ spontaneity to creatively address issues affecting the world. In 1977, the CBC promoted the creation of Trans-Africa as a lobby for issues related to American policies towards Africa and the Caribbean, and as an organization they made a stand for the average man against South African Apartheid (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, p. 73).
For the white American the perceptions of social events, class-status, individual situations, social relations, roles and how to behave towards one-another were in keeping with their conceptual structures of language, privilege and entitlement (Stewart & Bennett, 1991, p. 49). This use is predicated on the existence of extreme dichotomies in their language, in this case, dichotomies of race, class and social structures, white on the one hand, and black on the other. Because of this Americans in general use evaluations in their questions and descriptions, finding it easier to be critical in their judgements rather than positive or even neutral (Stewart & Bennett, 1991, p. 52). In light of this orientation to their own cultural group, they are comfortable with the allocation of privilege, responsibilities and status which align with their interests as fundamentally correct. “People’s perceptions of social events and situations, social relations, roles, and even their own behavior are distinctively in keeping with the different conceptual structures of their languages” (Stewart & Bennett, 1991, citing Fisher, p. 49).
Because of this linguistic filter inherent in the American consciousness, it took consistent and unrelenting efforts to undo the status quo of institutionalized racism. When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed the practice of racial prioritization and hiring continued under the label of unplanned discrimination through the use of recruitment methods and hiring tests which were unfair to or eliminated African Americans. It took the Nixon administration’s 1971 case of Griggs v. Duke Power Company before the application of a standard of “underutilization” was used to identify the fact of a mismatch of availability of minority workers and their presence in the work force to more than 300,000 in firms doing business with the Federal Government. Even when the companies claimed their de facto discrimination was unplanned and unanticipated, the government declared these practices to be illegal. The burden of proof had been shifted from the individual to the corporation. What counted, as Justice Warren Burger put it, was “the consequences of employment practices, not simply the motivation” (Katznelson, 2006, citing Warren Burger, p. 148).
Affirmative actions of this kind were meant to, as President Johnson said, “end the one great wrong of the American nation” (Katznelson, 2006, citing Johnson, p. 149). Performing acts of “corrective justice”, affirmative action is used to compensate members of a deprived or unfairly discriminated group for their prior losses as well as for gains unfairly achieved by other groups that resulted from illegal prior governmental action. Corrective justice as such, is different from a fair allocation of goods in the present tense, rather, it identifies the need for interventions which remedy previously unjust decisions. Seeing that these interventions would benefit African Americans and other outsider groups, whites resisted addressing patterns of power distribution that made existing patterns of distribution even more unfair than they otherwise would have been. Once again for the average white American, the balancing was done at the expense of the working-class not the ruling-class, which served to foment old animosities towards African Americans because of the government’s historical and modern mis-handling of racism and discrimination. Over the decades since affirmative action was established conservatives have honed their opposition while the forces for change through affirmative action have remained silent. Without the articulation of the premises and supporting theories behind affirmative action, supporters have failed to enlist the American People in the effort.
In the political arena the desire for greater black political power lead Shirley Chisholm, who was the first African American woman ever elected to Congress, to declare her candidacy for president in January, 1972. Upon declaring her candidacy Chisholm said,
I stand before you today as a candidate for Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States. I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and I am proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and I am equally proud of that. I am not the candidate for any political bosses or special interests. I am the candidate for the people. (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, citing Chisholm, p. 74)
Despite her history of trying to improve conditions for African Americans while a member of the New York State Legislature, this was outweighed by her identification with the women’s movement. Perhaps due to having been a co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) she failed to rally support from African Americans. She once spoke before the U. S. House of Representatives of her personal history of experiencing prejudice, “As a black person, I am no stranger to race prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black” (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, citing Chisholm, p. 74).
Here was a powerful African American woman defining herself beyond these identifiers as an individual candidate of the people, all the people. Self-definition by African Americans at this level was new phenomenon in the social world of the United States. The rise of the black middle class, the continuing existence of the large black underclass, the growing strength of expressive voices of black women, the movement of African Americans into mainstream politics, and a greater diversification of the black population with immigration from abroad, the perception of African Americans had become more multidimensional. The civil rights and Black Power movements each provided a new resistance to amelioration through the use of strategies, not of the past, but of a modern resistance (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p.74). African Americans were emerging as individuals and not as stereotypes from the past, nameless, unlearned and subservient to the power elite.
On the balance of changes sought by the African American community for freedom, justice, and equality there was on one side the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, which sought fundamental structural changes in American society to accomplish these goals. On the other side was Maulana Karenga who founded the US Organization to help rescue and rebuild African American communities across the country, such as Watts, which had been devastated by the urban uprisings. While the Panthers primarily took their focus from leftist ideologies, US was greatly influenced by Pan-Africanism, which maintained that African Americans’ best strategy for change was to embrace the reconstruction of their African heritage. These goals were based on Kawaida, a Swahili term for tradition , which in turn was based on seven principles, the Nguzo Saba; 1) Umoja (Unity), 2) Kujichagulia (Self-determination), 3) Ujima (Collective work and responsibility, 4) Ujamaa (Cooperative economics), 5) Nia (Purpose), 6) Kuumba (Creativity), 7) Imani (Faith). Karenga founded the holiday of Kwanza, also in 1966, which wasn’t based on the crass materialism and commerciality of Christmas. This holiday has become an opportunity for African Americans and people of African heritage around the world to focus on friends, family and communal values.
This balance underlying social actions for changes has importance for this inquiry as for the first time African Americans were discussing, strategizing and working for positive changes on multiple autonomous fronts. In 1971, the Nation of Islam sent George X, one of their most powerful ministers, to speak at Harvard, representing the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, attracting many of the African American students to attend including a young sophomore named Cornel West. During the speech the minister referred to the late Malcolm X as a dog three times. In his youthful indignation Cornel rose up to set off the following exchange asking:
Who gives you the authority to call someone who loved black people so deeply a dog? You better explain yourself.
Young man you best be careful. You’re being highly disrespectful and impudent.
Being disrespectful of character assassination is nothing I’m ashamed of.
I Demand you apologize.
For what? Ain’t nothing to apologize about.
Young brother you’ll be lucky to get out of this building alive. And if you do slip out, you’ll be gone in five days. (West, 2009, p. 68)
Importance of Jazz to the Critical Discourses of the 1970s
In a similar way, the jazz community was divided by their understanding and awareness of the complexities of the artists they listened to. Without this understanding of the powerful role critical discourses— jazz in particular— played in setting the terms within which this movement, interpretation, response, and improvisation occurs, they had fallen into the same morass of the affirmative action debate. Even as each situation addressed by affirmative action had both an historical and modern basis for action and change, each jazz artist was shaped as much by her/his, development and work within a community of practitioners as by the limiting and often narrow readings of their work by the jazz press, jazz scholars, and nationalists (Brown 2010, p. 51). Brown goes on to expand this point drawing a comparison to the importance of Coltrane’s development in the 1960s as precedence for new musicians:
By stressing these two social factors, the theme of Coltrane’s pursuit of freedom takes on more concrete meanings and can be understood as social and cultural practices involving rules, judgments, conventions, and interpretive communities. In such a context, different discursive communities including musicians, journalists, nationalists, and popular audiences have stakes, make claims, and exercise judgments of all sorts on the practices and expressions within a discernible social and cultural field. (Brown, 2010, p. 51)
The importance of each jazz musician being expected to define themselves through their musical compositions and improvisations is a reflection of the newly emerging African American consciousness. Resisting previous roles and definitions of who a jazz musician is and how they interact with the social world offered a new level of creative freedom. Jazz music as a practice, in all its varieties, nurtured and supported those willing to explore the possibilities.
This level of division and complexity in the African American community was the negative side to the new diversity available as a result of the many organizations working for change for decades. In the jazz realm there were also multiple streams of creative expression which had solidified in the 1970s from the pioneering compositions, schemas, and improvisations of the 1950s and 1960s listed in the previous chapters. From a list of recordings considered the best of the 1970s, excerpted from the book A History of Jazz Music 1900-2000, by music historian Piero Scaruffi, we see artists representing the many schools, nations and cultures which reflect the decade’s diversity by the author’s order of importance:
Anthony Braxton: Saxophone Improvisations (1972), Carla Bley: Escalator Over The Hill (1971), Keith Jarrett: Survivors Suite (1976), Sam Rivers: Streams (1973), Paul Bley: Improvisie (1970), Marion Brown: Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (1970), Leo Smith: Mass on the World (1978), Sam Rivers: Crystals (1974), Cecil Taylor: Silent Tongues (1974), Steve Lacy: Saxophone Special (1974), Rova Saxophone Quartet: Removal of Secrecy (1979), George Lewis: Solo Trombone Record (1976), Roland Kirk: Prepare Thyself To Deal With A Miracle (1973), George Lewis: Chicago Slow Dance (1977), Alice Coltrane: Ptah The El Daoud (1970), McCoy Tyner: Extensions (1970), Roscoe Mitchell: LRG-Maze-S II Examples (1978), Leroy Jenkins: Legend of Ai Glatson (1978), Dave Holland: Conference of the Birds (1972), Charles Mingus: Let My Children Hear Music (1971), McCoy Tyner: Sahara (1972), Art Ensemble of Chicago: Les Stances A Sophie (1970), Jeanne Lee: Conspiracy (1974), Keith Jarrett: The Koeln Concert (1975), Revolutionary Ensemble: The Psyche (1975), Miles Davis: Pangaea (1975), Evan Parker: Saxophone Solos (1975), Leroy Jenkins: For Players Only (1975), Air: Air Time (1977), Paul Bley: Dual Unity (1971), Air: Air Raid (1976), George Lewis: Shadowgraph (1977), Leo Smith: Reflectativity (1974), Art Ensemble of Chicago: Phase One (1971), Joe McPhee: Graphics (1977), Rova Saxophone Quartet: Cinema Rovate (1978), Air: Air Song (1975), Gerry Hemingway: Kwambe (1978), David Murray: Flowers for Albert (1976), Roland Kirk: Natural Black Inventions - Root Strata (1971), Oliver Lake: Heavy Spirits (1975), Weather Report: I Sing the Body Electric (1972), Kenny Wheeler: Gnu High (1975), Derek Bailey: Company 1 (1976), Jan Garbarek: Dis (1976), Jean-Luc Ponty: Sonata Erotica (1972), James Ulmer: Revealing (1977), Pat Metheny: Watercolors (1977), Sonny Sharrock: Monkey-Pockie-Boo (1970), Irene Schweizer: Wilde Senoritas (1976), London Jazz Composers Orchestra: Ode (1972), and Toshiko Akiyoshi: Road Time (1976).
Given that Scaruffi’s background is in mathematics, physics, artificial intelligence, rock music, classical music and avant-garde music, it becomes more clear that these artists had each explored and codified through performance their own dialect or school of jazz which transcended race and even country of origin. The freedom to do such an amazing variety of explorations based on the African American tradition of jazz music brought the world’s cultural diversity into the jazz fold, embracing each new source of inspiration to enrich the art form (Scaruffi, 2007). Even as the blues resonates in the architectural structure and sophistication of jazz music, the compositional and improvisational work of Coleman, Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, and Braxton pushed the very perform-ability of their work to new virtuoso heights (Heffley, 2005, p. 49). Socially this new transnational community of jazz offered an international stage for creative voices to speak to and with one another as equals on an improvisational platform. Together these pioneers embraced the challenges of cultural and intellectual complexity to share the experiential awareness of the music’s growth as creators, in turn enriching us all with the process.
Miles Davis’ contributions to jazz, though limited in the second half of the decade due to illness, included not only his own compositions and improvisations, but new artists playing instruments previously unknown to the jazz world and often to western music entirely. This list of soon to be jazz greats who passed through a tutelage with Miles added new dimensions in their own light includes John McLaughlin’s high velocity electric guitar, Billy Cobham’s equally rapid tempo double bass drum virtuosity, Jack Dejohnette’s free style improvisational drumming. Bassist Dave Holland brought a distinctly European component to improvisation, Airto Moriera’s use of hand percussion instruments especially the South American berimbau added new rhythmic-tonal complexity, Kieth Jarrett on electric keyboards kept the music fluid and unfinished, flautist Dave Liebman’s improvisational range raised the bar for woodwinds, as did Wayne Shorter’s ceaseless stream of brilliant compositions and improvisational power, Chic Corea’s pianistic virtuosity became a finely textured net to bring cohesion to the new forms, the electric guitar of Pete Cosey brought a Hendrixian influence to the forefront. Bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin added depth and resonance new to the jazz format, Gary Bartz on saxophone added his harmonic explorations, and keyboardist and composer Joseph Zawinul brought a truly global orientation which he later explored in his own band Weather Report that truly became a world-wide success.
These musicians all experimented with music from around the world as source materials and the resulting creations opened new collaborative dimensions of improvisational consciousness. On a cultural level there are strong correlations with similar interactive issues: cultural heterogeneity, intracultural and intercultural borrowing for the purpose of creating new paradigms, the construction of cultural and social communities through music, the effects of musical production by the mass media, “and the relationship of music, economics, politics, and identity in a postcolonial world” (Monson, 1996, p. 192).
Monson (1996) continued to say:
One of the most remarkable things about African American music in general and jazz in particular is the way in which they have re-invented the deeply participatory, interactive, active, heterogeneous, and socially constitutive musical processes of West Africa in a vastly different context and with very different musical content. African American musicians have taken these processes and transformed them with new rhythms, new songs, new instruments, new harmonic and melodic concepts, and new spiritual symbols. They have invented genres that articulate particularly American social contradictions and have had a very powerful effect on American culture, despite every effort to control or eradicate what is African in America. (p.195)
New Opportunities for African Americans
Culturally, during the 1970s, there began an extended period of expanding opportunities for African Americans coinciding with the nation’s economic growth. Many found employment in middle-income positions of municipal, state, or federal government agencies. While this offered a new financial stability upon which to expand the African American middle-class, in general these same skilled workers were not employed by the private sector where wages were considerately higher. For those few who actually made the transition to the private sector they were much more likely to be found in ‘soft positions’ in the personnel and public relations departments than in ‘line’ authority positions in planning and production. This lower level of opportunity made the corporate ladder of earned promotion inaccessible for most African Americans in the private sector (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p. 76).
For the average African American the 1970s were most clearly defined by the failure to end segregation in residential housing. No matter what other considerations come into the discussion, employment, family and personal wealth, family stability, education, crime, the most clearly predominant factor remained race (Massey & Denton, 1993, p.85). Despite efforts to the contrary, America still maintained segregation in housing most stringently for the African American population. The Hispanic population in 1979 showed a segregation index of 64% for those earning under $2,500.00, declining to 50% for those earning $50,000.00 or more. For the Asian population the rates for those under $2,500.00 were 64% while those earning $50,000.00 or more saw that fall to 52%. For black-white indices the rates were 86% and 79%. Even when African Americans earned more financially, their rate of segregation remained significantly higher (Massey & Denton, 1993, p. 87).
The percentage of Africa Americans attending college increased dramatically during the 1970s and they demanded a curriculum which was relevant to their lived experiences These students were also instrumental in demanding black faculty to teach these courses in the colleges they were attending. By 1973 there were over two hundred black studies programs and departments, and in 1975 The National Council for Black Studies was formed to promote further development across the nation (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p. 67). The Students for a Democratic Society was an organization where white allies joined these efforts with strikes and other direct action acting collectively with African American students. It was also this union of organizations like the SDS and African American students which became the rallying ground for civil disobedience, of direct actions which ended the United Sates’ role in the Vietnam War. The fact that multiple organizations representing a broad spectrum the American People were beginning to join forces standing on common ground truly brought a change in awareness of the many issues African Americans and other outsider groups had in common. Power being wielded by the people and winning against the forces of the status quo military industrial complex brought a significant conservative backlash which eventually placed a neoconservative republican government to power by the end of the decade.
The Placement of African Americans on AQAL during the 1970s
In using the AQAL model for the 1970s it is again vital to understand that the full spectrum of development of the African American people existed, with the upper levels of each quadrant not only represented but working to move the social paradigm ever higher for the masses. In the Upper Right the highest levels of number eleven SF 1, structural functions, twelve SF2, formal operations, and thirteen SF 3, synthesizing regions levels, are all active portions of the African American community’s efforts to advance their social standing as equal citizens. The founding of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 was a powerful example of these higher levels in action. From their vantage point and position of growing political acumen African Americans were working to keep the pressure on the government to actually follow through on the civil rights laws of the 1960s. Organizations working for change faced incredible opposition from the government which viewed these as dangerous subversive groups. The FBI initiated the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) , focused on destroying the Black Panther Party by filing a steady stream of legal charges, which though mostly dismissed through acquittals drained the party’s resources contributing to their demise by the late 1970s. While active the Black Panther Party created programs in the black community like free breakfasts, sickle cell anemia clinics, prison visitation access with transportation to often quite remote locations and many day-care and educational projects (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p.64). Urban segregation and isolation continued to stifle African Americans’ efforts to push for social changes like ending racism and achieving equality through civil rights legislation. For those caught up in the ghettos of inner cities across the nation, everyday life was such a struggle that these Americans continued to be occupied and excluded from the political processes of change. The creolization of elements of both the dominant and minority cultures rearticulated the symbolic meaning of each to create new critical dialogues between and within particular communities (Lewis, 2008,, p. 208). With increased black mobility there was a certain fragmenting of the unified African American national community maintained by segregation. This new articulation of diaspora with a greater breadth along positions of geography, economics, class, gender, country of origin, language, educational levels prepared the realization that there were now many ways to be an African American. Not just a blues people but an improvising and evolving jazz people’s multi-cultural diversity had emerged and was gaining strength as a result of these synthesis (Lewis, 2009, p. 209).
In the Lower Right quadrant many of those African Americans in positions of power were operating on a planetary level number thirteen. Defining themselves as members of the African Diaspora brought deep and lasting recognition around the world of the need to move beyond the segregation and racism of a colonial culture. This collective stance allowed the strengths of each individual and each cultural enclave in the African American community to express themselves creating a new social criteria for the movement. The Black Arts movement beginning in the mid-1960s continued well into the mid-1970s with dance, drama, literature, music, painting and poetry creating expressions in the art world of this evolving ethos of blackness as a positive attribute in American society. This movement drew from the improvisational essence of jazz and the patterns and rhythms of black speech, their self-determination and attitude brought un-straightened natural Afro hairstyles, bright African inspired clothing such as the dashikis, and a trend towards choosing Muslim, African or African sounding new names for themselves not based on the names of the slave owners. The base of this movement was still the African American community, and essentially the family, the need for change and caused a demand for an increased availability of black studies programs to be accessible to educate the young (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, p. 66)
As listed previously in this chapter, jazz artists, black, white and many others were also adopting and expressing a global as well as an African perspective in their compositions and improvisations as reflected by their song titles and the addition of instruments from around the African diaspora, once again creating the space for change and evolution in the art world which supported and empowered similar changes and growth in the social world (Scaruffi, 2007, Locations 1351-1362).
From the perspective of the Lower Left African Americans were clearly influenced by leaders on level 12, the rational, using reason and higher judgements on the ways the United States still fell short of the constitutional promises of freedom and equality for all. Despite the legislative, judicial and presidential actions of the 1960s and 1970s, segregation, racism and discrimination were still part of the daily lives experienced by African Americans. For those few able to transcend these obstacles and rise to the highest level 13, centauric, their pursuit of personal, intellectual and professional excellence paved the way for future generations. African American writers, musicians and artists were both inspired by and inspirational to the accelerating movements for African American Freedom, and African liberation. The quality and diversity of their work challenged prevailing racial stereotypes existing in the media and deepened the previously unquestioned Anglocentric standards which remained as obstacles for black self-determination (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2010, pp. 155-156). Editor Hoyt Fuller’s journal Black World was a primary outlet emerging artists and intellectual discourse. Powerful individuals’ centauric journeys opened pathways for a new generation.
As Karenga the founder of Kwanza expressed it:
Black art, irregardless of any technical requirements, must have three basic characteristics which make it revolutionary. In brief, it must be functional, collective and committing…So what, then, is the use of art-----our art, Black art? Black art must expose the enemy, praise the people and support the revolution. (Lewis, 2008, citing Karenga, p. 210)
The Upper Left quadrant was a study in movement beyond society’s rules, level 11, through the formal level 12 to logic/vision, level 13. By keeping their eyes on the prize of freedom and equality, those individuals who made it to these higher realms of intentionality lived beyond the concepts of the past. By living their truth new avenues opened as others followed their example. The symbols of racism were slowly losing their power being replaced by the new diversity and complexity of American society. Incorporating concepts of a postcolonial world where each individual of every culture could pursue the life they wanted and living in these concepts established a momentum for change.
As a nation the United States seemed to resist changes, requiring judicial and presidential actions and judgements to accomplish each step of the journey. The continued segregation of the African American community was still enforced by covert policies limiting access to loans and housing outside their ghettos of government housing projects. In education African Americans were graduating from colleges around the country in progressively larger numbers and entering the workforce more prepared to compete for employment in their fields of choice. Here they also met with a nation resistant to a truly integrated workforce requiring executive action to open the way for his new generation. America was still blind to the diversity in the African American community beyond stereotypes and only slowly willing to embrace their fellow citizens as equals.
Language remained a unique expression of African American culture, a source of connection and continuity. “Ultimately, the survival of the minority language is closely bound up with the preservation or affirmation of a distinct ethnic identity and culture”(Montgomery, 1986, p.97). Isolation from whites and other ethnic groups through segregation in cities across the nation strengthened their identification as a people developing connections cross culturally with popular appropriation by American speech of the times. “African-Caribbean speakers, as a group, probably have as distinct a sense of ethnic separateness as at any time since the 1950s” (Montgomery, 1986, p. 97). This distinct use of language was in the songs of the popular Soul Music and remained in the jazz music of the times.
In the earliest days of 1980s the backlash to the many progressive changes of the previous three decades from the neoconservative wing of the republican party, brought a new governmental focus on undoing the advances gained from the civil rights movement, social justice, racism, and for women. Only the inherent strengths of the African American people kept the momentum of change alive and again their leadership for civil rights and equality was an inspiration for all Americans. By the continuance of efforts to advance through multiple organizations on many fronts the struggle survived. It was the essence of the jazz ensemble, with each organization functioning as members of the larger ensemble improvising together to create new collaborations of unity in the face of oppression.
Chapter Seven: The 1980s
By the 1980s, the plight of African Americans had become solidified on many levels. The same social, racial and economic disparities of the past remained as barriers. On a fiscal or monetary level, the average white family in 1984 had a net worth of $39,134.00 mainly due to the maturing of GI Bill mortgages denied to African American Veterans, as a result the average black family had a net worth of $3,397.00, or 9%. This systemic creation of wealth for whites and the continuance of a deliberate underclass status for blacks had taken decades to play out, yet, empirically the results spoke for themselves (Katznelson, 2006, p.163). This ongoing marginalization of the nation’s most politically and economically disadvantaged community was accomplished at the same time that the New Deal, the War on Poverty and the whole list of Federal programs put on a public face of concern and righteous action. The continuing problems of black America, not only in the South but also in the growing urban settlements in the North, were distinctly worse after more than two decades of fiercely discriminatory public policy. Ironically, African American migration northward and the beginning of desegregation in education served to erode patterns of insulation wherein segregation into inner city ghettos had historically protected the jobs of some members of the black middle class,(Katznelson, 2006, p165).
Katznelson (2006) went on to explain:
There were lags in training, and a mismatch between the acquisition of skills by blacks and the characteristics of new middle-class jobs. Discrimination by employers, banks, landlords, and other purveyors of economic opportunity persisted. What is striking, however, is how the hallmark social policy innovations of the New Deal and the Fair Deal themselves operated more as brakes than as accelerators in incorporating African Americans into the country’s rapidly expanding postwar middle class. (p. 165)
It must be seriously considered as direct social policy that there was at this time an assault on unions, new immigration quotas, the rise of the prison industrial complex, and the loss of service and manufacturing jobs through outsourcing all of which had a crippling effect on racial reform (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 25).
On November 2nd 1983, then President Ronald Reagan signed the legislation to create an official holiday to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. on the third weekend of January. At the same time Reagan’s agenda was to unravel Johnson’s Great Society on the pretense of economic reform and premise that the goals of the legislation had been achieved. In response to these untrue assertions by the Reagan Administration political opposition by black activists from differing ideologies formed the National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP) attracting close to 2,000 like-minded activists from black communities. A step ahead of the times, this unfortunately short-lived organization included mechanisms in its charter to ensure gender equality at all levels of leadership. In many ways the ground work for progressive coalitions focusing on issues of common merit prepared the way for another famous coalition. In the face of the Reagan policies, and to help motivate African Americans to register and vote in greater numbers, Jesse Jackson deiced to enter the Democratic presidential primary also in 1983. His goals were to influence the Democratic Party platform, to elect more black and progressive white candidates with a newly created Rainbow Coalition across racial, ethnic, and gender lines (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, pp. 78&79). Having met with Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1979, and subsequently referring to New York as Hymietown, Jackson alienated the American Jewish community. Despite having no experience in elected office and foreign affairs Jackson won an impressive one-quarter of the party votes. He ran again in 1987 garnering one-third of the party votes, while not enough to become the Democratic Party nominee, his efforts had greatly increased the numbers and participation of African American voters (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, pp. 79 & 111).
Evolution of Jazz beyond America
Against this background jazz was undergoing a national and international evolution gaining increasing recognition as a legitimate art form. The Art Ensemble of Chicago had made serious inroads into the European art/music world. Being performed with costumes, dancers and unusual instrumentation, their free jazz formed a montage of modern and historical stylistic sources and had become, as Lester Bowie summarized, the foreshortening of the distance between art and the everyday world. “ It’s a music free and improvised, but difficult…like your life”( Lewis, 2008 , citing Bowie, p.223). Bowie was adamant about the need for jazz fans and critics to rethink or retool their concepts to fit new times and the new music they generated. For the Art Ensemble of Chicago, musically speaking, everything could become part of the desired outcome of free expression. Formerly bound by past performances most jazz musicians became boxed-in and their fans were often guilty of this esthetic narrowness. Speaking to an interviewer Bowie continued:
Basically, the jazz press needs to reevaluate what’s happening now in the music…We want people like you to go deeper into their way of writing about music. You need to invent a new way of talking about things, to discover all this life in its originality…For you also, that will be beneficial because it’s life itself that this is about. (Lewis, 2008, citing Bowie, p. 232)
From a multidisciplinary perspective, African Americans continued to use their singing voices as an expressive modality which exchanged a Eurocentric idea of the singing voice through which exclusive definitions and descriptions of humanity have been rendered, for an expanded empowered role which allowed them to challenge and subvert, symbolic, legal and exploitive social orders. Their physicality and various vocal techniques upset the systems of social order and initiated an on-going re-scripting. Their voices brought a new scrutiny to black social and creative presence in the American culture expanding the concepts of human value beyond Eurocentric whiteness (Heble & Wallace editors, 2013, Porter, p. 93).
It was through the recurrent and recursive interactions of these new free jazz musicians that both the individual and the social relationships of African Americans became source materials for improvisation. This social interaction across time and space helped to provide a momentum for change through collaborative improvisation, with the inclusion of the emotional substrate of an oppressed people struggling for equality. Bringing forth new relationships between collaborators and the white social world through such creative interactions, free jazz reinvigorated the political processes of changes not part of the media agenda. Rather, this interaction was on a direct and personal level for those collaborating and for the community of listeners (Becker & McCall editors, 1990, Boden, p. 246). In these musical discourses the actual notes do not define the finer elements being communicated between the musicians. The iconic representations of musical collaborators have an interaction which communicates and expands their understanding and commonality of lived experiences through the relatively non-notable timbral and dynamic inflections produced by the players (Monson, 1996, p. 208-209) .
Monson (1996) went on to explain this concept further:
The phenomenology of sound, in other words, is extremely important to the way in which music signifies and cannot be bracketed off as irrelevant to processes of social construction. While the physical aspects of sound are nonlinguistic, they very quickly become implicated in relational discursive processes, such as intermusicality, and may in turn be commented upon by audience members with words. There is a constant interplay among sound, discursivity, language, and representations thereof that takes place when human beings make and listen to music that must be considered with its own particularities in mind. (p.209)
Free Jazz and European Musical Traditions. Free jazz had matured into a musical rainbow coalition of bands and musical styles that broke the aesthetic and social boundaries of what was acceptable in jazz, while maintaining the centrality of African American traditions” (Heble & Wallace, 2013, p. 119). R&B, Rock and Roll, and Soul music, being African American in origin, continued this process and also contained improvisation and flexibility in live performance reflecting free jazz. The British band Pink Floyd, a very successful psychedelic multimedia ensemble, drew connections to free jazz, specifically to the work of Sun Ra, from the founder of Two-Tone Records, Jerry Dammers who stated:
You’re not going to tell me that Pink Floyd weren’t influenced by Sun Ra…all that spacey imagery they came up with, I’m sure...they got it from him. …They probably weren’t letting on too much, but I’m sure that…I mean, psychedelic music was invented in jazz, definitely, and then a sort of bastardized version was taken out in rock. (Heble & Wallace, 2013, editors citing Dammers, p.123)
Ornette Coleman has been heralded by musicologists as the Bach of free jazz, not only for his importance as an originator but also for his musical strategies. His free jazz marked a departure from the Western paradigm as a source for improvisational basis and an assertion of black over white identity in his music. His harmelodic system of multiple instruments freely soloing at the same time resonates synchronistically with the work of Bach and the German Baroque period, and as such greatly influenced European free jazz (Heffley, 2005, p.38). In comparing these two important composers, Bach and Coleman, we see that for the Baroque, from the Portuguese term barocco, defined as a deformed pearl and baroca a scholastic term for a tortured argument in logic, or the earlier Gothic period these terms were derogatory and used by the Romanic civilization to reflect their view of the German, or Goth people as savages. It was the use of polyphony, or all 12 of the tones of the octave before it had been adopted by the rest of Europe which brought disdain upon this music as being grotesque, or deformed. Coleman allowed himself the use of any tone in the chromatic scale for a root, or tonal center, as well as for any melodies composed or improvised against it, essentially the same expansion beyond traditional musical practices. Traditional jazz fans and the music academy maintained a similar opinion of Coleman’s free jazz as being random and meaningless noise (Heffley, 2005, p. 44).
Hefley lists the religious and social backgrounds of both to reveal some startling similarities:
Bach/Baroque Coleman/Free Jazz
Lutheran chorale Black church (Protestant) spiritual, gospel, blues
Post-Thirty Year War, German post-slavery, segregation, Civil Rights movement
Reconstruction
Death of Roman Catholic, birth of Death of blackness-as-second-class whiteness,
Northern Protestant, identity birth of new black identity as definitive
Rise from German local to global rise from African-American local to global
(European/Western) cultural (American) cultural power
Power (2005, p. 44)
For the first time, Europeans in the 1980s had reached a certain parity in the on-going creation of jazz, as Heffley (2005) put it:
Music doesn’t know any race, music doesn’t know any jealousy; there may be some caught up in those things, but not the best. Also, as black as it is, jazz has very much the European influence. When you analyze Bach, for example…it’s just like pure jazz, what he did, even down to some of the improvisations. (p. 41)
The jazz greats of the past continued on playing their forms of swinging jazz with Basie working till shortly before his death in 1984. He enjoyed even more recognition and popularity around the world than in the United States where the music industry had moved away from jazz as its financial focus. New venues were being developed to suit the hunger around the world for American jazz. In 1982, there was a tremendously successful festival in Israel featuring a moving series of venues around the country where jazz fans filled the clubs for a celebration of America’s Jazz music and culture. Les McCann, Billy Cobham, Jon Hendricks, Larry Coryell, Airto, Joe Farrell and a supporting group of ensemble players performed to enthusiastic audiences (Feather, 1987, p. 247-249).
The Norwegian Caribbean Lines booked a two consecutive week jazz cruise in 1984, with a total of thirty-five hundred passengers booked for the two weeks. Jazz greats from oldsters like Doc Cheatham near eighty years of age joining new players like Scott Hamilton at just thirty years old filling a schedule of afternoon jam sessions with unusual combinations of artists working out together and an evening of multiple venues going simultaneously. In addition, there was the usual cruise ship show entertainment with My Fair Lady and a Las Vegas style revue titled Sea Legs. There were celebrity surprise artists including Maxine Sullivan, Woody Herman, Benny Carter and others joining to sing Happy Birthday to Dizzy to the tune of Night in Tunisia. Mel Torme, Joe Williams, George Shearing, Zoot Sims, and a host of lesser known sidemen kept the music going and the success of their venture brought more cruise opportunities for jazz in the future. The Norwegian Cruise Line doubled their booking creating four consecutive weeks of jazz the very next year (Feather, 1987, p. 244).
Basie and other jazz oldsters had become heroic visions of our collective past. We could gauge our progress as a nation from their heydays to the 1980s by seeing the experiences of their lives. The self-amending individual determinism of our American jazz compositional, improvisational heroes does not remove them from the myths of yore. These jazz pioneers did not confuse the fickleness of narrative with the deeper meaning of core belief. They were recognized as living symbols of the tradition of America’s democracy and the beauty of cultural liberalism, they functioned as fossils of survival. Part of our coping mechanisms of a troubled past, their lives and music are strains of our mythology which have survived, fossils congealed in an era of optimism and self-amendment (Sehgal, 2008, Locations 2124-2128). Something essentially American and shared is reprised when we hear those great jazz artists from the past.
Another unique and important addition to jazz in the 1980s was the Young Lions, a new group of young African American musicians who embraced the core foundations of black swinging jazz. The list includes Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Kenny Garret, Marcus Roberts, Kenny Kirkland, Ralph Peterson, Donald Brown, Cyrus Chestnut, and Terrance Blanchard. Their devotion to rhythm and a blues-oriented chord structure brought 1980s jazz an injection of strength and authenticity from a traditional perspective. Though some critics viewed them as throwbacks, their lasting influence and success have proven the worth and importance of these new jazz artists. Initially there was a divide between these players, especially Wynton and contemporary white jazz musicians active on the scene at the same time. The list of white and Hispanic musicians doing significant innovative jazz in the 1980s included Charlie Haden, Paul Bley, Paul Motion, Michael Brecker, Lee Konitz, Eddie Gomez and others, who though not brand new to jazz were still playing and improvising successfully.
Jazz has a richness and diversity within its history which is a reflection of America at its best. In his introduction to Invisible Man, Ellison wrote about how literature and art represent our American democracy:
So if the ideal of achieving a true political equality eludes in reality…there is still available that fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white….are combined to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities such as those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the raft…a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope. (Sehgal, 2008, citing Ellison, Location 2252)
So it is with jazz, each session whether a casual jam among friends or a performance at a major venue, offers a chance to embrace our history as a people united by the experience of improvisation. Differences and boundaries between individuals melt away in the improvisation of jazz. Musicians who cannot even speak the same language can play jazz together creating an art world of beauty unbound, uncontainable where everyone is welcome to share in the moment as participants in this process (Sehgal, 2008, Location 2252).
African Americans’ Status in the United States
As a nation, the United States in the 1980s still had serious problems with race relations. Even though a higher percentage of blacks had moved from strictly segregated ghettos in the inner cities, whites still saw any significant increase in the percentage of integration in their neighborhoods as a threat. The white flight from neighborhoods within five miles of an established black area increased exponentially, even extending this pattern to the suburbs which had formerly been a whites only escape zone. In 1980, the probability of whites leaving a city tract located within five miles of a black neighborhood was .85 when the black percentage became 0%-5%, it rose to .92 when the black percentage rose to 30%-40%. The respective rates of probability for whites leaving the suburbs was, .74 and .86. Even at distances of twenty-five miles from a black community the rate was .16 at 0%-5% integration and increased to .30 for integration rates of 30%-40% (Massey & Denton, 1993, p. 80)
The importance of the jazz session model of integration and tolerance cannot be overstated, nowhere else was there such a co-mingling of people in as peaceful and creative atmosphere of acceptance. The jazz process brings the African American culture of resistive solidarity, fused over centuries, sometimes through direct collective political mobilization, but always through the creativity and capability communicated through networks of apprenticeship and instruction in the music of an improvisational culture (Fischlin, Heble, & Lipsitz, 2013, p. 158).
The discrimination in housing and a significant change in white attitudes towards the principle of open housing had done little to diminish the ghettoization of African Americans. Even the rise of the black middle class with the economic means to escape the ghetto and integrate, and a series of court decisions forbidding the use of public housing to perpetuate racial segregation had not significantly changed the demographics of housing for most African Americans. Only blacks experienced this pattern of continuing high segregation that remained unchanged even with socio-economic influences improving for many. Race in the United States has “served as a template for both difference and inequality. The establishment and reproduction of race has established supposedly fundamental distinctions among human beings (“othering”), ranking and hierarchizing them for purposes of domination and exploitation” (OMI & Winant, 1986, Location 6307) .
There were fears on both sides of the color line, especially realistic from the black side. In Chicago during the years 1985-1990 there were 1,129 reported hate crimes, half of these were committed in the ten community areas undergoing racial demographic changes. In 1989, Los Angeles had a rate of 167 hate crimes with 60% against blacks with a staggering 70% of these occurring at the victim’s residence. In Philadelphia an integrated couple moved into a white working-class neighbor in 1985, they were welcomed by an angry mob and fire bombs. In New York City, an Italian American resident talked about his neighborhood’s reaction to blacks moving in, “we got them out of Canarsie. We ran into the house and kicked the shit out of every one of them” (Massey & Denton, 1993, citing Rieder, p. 91). In a 1985 study of white voters commissioned by the Michigan State Democratic Party, working class whites expressed a:
profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics…Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong with their lives; not being black is what constitutes being middle class; not living with blacks is what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live. (Massey & Denton, 1993, p.94)
In a survey by researcher Lou Harris, whites were asked to give an evaluation of blacks. 36% thought that blacks had less ambition than whites, 17% said they were less intelligent, 21% thought blacks were more likely to commit crimes, and 26% said blacks were unable to receive equal pay due to a lack of adequate work ethics (Massey & Denton, 1993, p.95). Is it any wonder that the new black Young Lions of Jazz saw themselves as being the true carriers of an essentially African American art form and that they primarily focused on black rather that white musicians as being directly connected to the music?
The Hybridity of Jazz
Ironically, as jazz has progressed through time, it is fairly clear that it is a profoundly multi-ethnic music. Having been founded by African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and Latinas, and otherwise Creole people (Creole meaning anyone born in the Americas, regardless of skin color), they had all been originally relegated to a social caste of artists automatically separated from their nation, creatively diverse and innovative to be sure, yet essentially separate and unequal. Those early musicians of color, whether they were Creole or Negroes, were by law classed as second-class citizens by a white-supremacist United States (Heble & Wallace, 2013, p. 7).
Duke Ellington spoke about the confusion of categorizing jazz music, saying:
Jazz continues the pattern of barrier breaking and emerges as the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz means simply the freedom to have many forms. (Heble & Wallace, 2013, editors, Szwed citing Ellington)
Once again jazz became useful as a range of improvisational practices within a general format using varied cultural sources to gauge or chart the meaningful new pathways of extended social interactions on a national and global scale (Becker & McCall, 1990, p.32). By learning to listen to one another and to critically evaluate each performance the jazz community continued to grow and diversify (Berliner, 1994, Location 5728). There is a certain new sophistication and maturity in this jazz way of learning to hear new forms and to incorporate them into an ever evolving milieu of creative components from which to expand upon in their own improvisations. To hear beyond what is played and to incorporate the many levels of organization above and below the form adds to the possibilities for improvisation. The social and political dimensions of any given sonic system, creates new, differing or even conflicting modes of expression (Goddard, Halligan, & Hegarty, 2012, pp. 3-4). Jazz at this time offered a new way to participate in the growing diversity of America in a mutually respectable process where everything became part of the on-going synthesis of the jazz musical society. Transforming the other into a non- adversarial co-creator modeled a new acceptance and embracing of complexity and the resulting diversity of these collaborations.
Institutionalized Segregation in the United States
In cities across the nation, new immigrant groups became enmeshed within communities of mixed ethnicities, and in return for their political support for the status quo, these ethnic groups were awarded a share of public services, government contracts and jobs roughly proportional to their numbers as voters. This allowed an upward mobility based on an increasingly secure social and economic base. For African Americans segregation stopped them from participating in this process. When a government contract was awarded to build new infrastructure in neighborhoods labeled as Italian, Polish or other ethnic enclaves there was a serendipitous flow to all the other groups which added momentum to their upward mobility. Contrary to this for African American communities the concept was that any resources allocated to their segregated community diminished the funds available for white ethnic groups. Again, an entire people were systemically excluded from the benefits of society and destined to remain disconnected from the benefits of political power to provide an avenue for upward mobility. This historical segregation of blacks to ghettos kept the majority of African Americans from participating in the American Dream, leaving them as second class citizens in terms of their access to representational political power (Massey & Denton, 1993, pp.154-155).
In 1987 the Democratic Party regained control of the Senate and began a major push to enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Despite resistance from the Reagan Administration and their continued efforts to weaken civil rights and maintain segregation, the Fair Housing Amendment Act passed both houses of congress and a reluctant President signed the amendment on March 12, 1989. The Attorney General was now required to prosecute those who violated the act whenever defendants chose to have their trial in a U. S. district court rather than going before an administrative law judge (Massey & Denton, 1993, pp. 209-211). Even though 88% of white Americans believed that blacks had a right to live wherever they could afford to buy a home, only 43% polled said they would be comfortable with an integration level of 30% in their neighborhood. An even smaller margin favored a law that would prevent a white homeowner to sell only to other whites, a truly conflicted state of affairs. This was compounded by those self-interested black politicians and business owners whose power lay in the perpetuation of the segregated ghetto. This separate and unequal division of American society and the subsequent economic disinvestment drastically slowed the progress afforded by the Fair Housing Amendment Act (Massey & Denton, 1993, p.213).
Jazz and Academia
It was in the 1980s that some American colleges began to develop academic jazz music programs. This was both a step forward as academia’s interests and acceptance added a new sense of legitimacy to jazz, yet there were elements of the jazz learning process not truly suited to an academic approach. Musicians not learning their craft on stage, rather getting their training and developing their initial skills, or chops in scholastic settings missed the breadth and complexity in the history, community and repertoire of jazz. Codification and selections of tunes for an academic repertoire changed the musical culture from populist to more elitist; the vocabulary of these new musicians became standardized. Learning jazz outside the African American and diverse American social environment, without dancing and celebration leaves a void. These students’ music was filled with improvisational quotes from now famous recordings by a handful of accepted jazz musicians, recognized by the academy, as artists. It is the process of imitation and not improvisation, of pre-rehearsed accompanying behind solos and not collaborative innovation. The range of music played for these new scholastic venues became segregated and many younger scholastic musicians did not have the background and constant active crosspollination to participate (Faulkner & Becker, 2009). Public spaces as places where jazz music was performed, and the American people socialized together, had almost disappeared diminishing our collective musical heritage and greatly limiting the learning process of student musicians. This delimitation of the lower right quadrant, the social aspect, reduced opportunities for culturally diverse interactions, segregating rather than acculturating our nation to reflect the complexity of modern America.
Placement of African Americans on AQAL in the 1980s
The Upper Right Quadrant placement for African Americans was divided between those who had succeeded in reaching the very highest SF1,2,&3 and those who continued to be confined within segregated inner city environments where schools remained substandard, unemployment levels were many times that of the white suburbanites and where desperation and violence were daily experiences. For the highest functioning, concrete operations in the political realm had helped to bring changes and elect more African Americans to positions of power. Their persistence in the face of efforts by industry and society in general to dismiss the illegality of unfair educational, housing and employment opportunities moved the nation ahead towards a more accepted and functional diversity. Using formal operations to engage with the political system began to gain momentum as more African Americans both registered and participated in the voting process, and new leaders rose up from the community to positions of leadership. These leaders worked from synthesizing the elements and conditions against which African Americans struggled, to improvise new policies and programs to fulfill the promises of the American Constitution for all citizens. Building on the work of past decades for an end to racism and segregation was a step by step process and each gain often took follow up legislation from congress, executive orders from the president and even legal rulings from the Supreme Court to enforce the changes mandated.
The Lower Right placement was similarly mixed as those at the top built upon associations with leaders and communities around the African Diaspora world. For these people at the level of planetary consciousness their actions and activities were expanding the range of choice and opportunity for a new generation. The pathway to power in the industrial nation/state was narrow, with most African Americans forced to operate from the isolation of the American Apartheid of inner city ghettos. Not actually participating in the national economy as equals and not having the traditional practices of foraging, horticulture, and self-sufficiency of tribal or village members, maintained a disadvantaged underclass status for the majority of African Americans across the nation. The appropriation and commodification of art, literature and music made by African Americans took their inherent wealth and the benefits therein and moved it into white ruling class hands. Redirecting music as a commodity towards Rock and Roll, R&B and commercial Soul played by small ensembles on records and in corporate concert venues accelerated the erosion of the community within which jazz, in all its varieties, had evolved and redistributed its members into demographic groups for marketing purposes. This worked against the movement of African Americans upwards on the AQAL Lower Right.
For the Lower Left placement emerging from the mythic regions of our national culture, the promises of the constitution rang truer for whites in the middle and upper classes than for African Americans and other outsider groups. The dominant culture elected Ronald Reagan as president and accepted his administration’s policies to un-fund social programs. Civil rights programs, which had been hard won came under examination as unneeded, and of having accomplished their goals. Only the rational engagement of those African Americans in positions of leadership kept the nation focused and engaged on the need to continue existing programs for social change. The interior collective consciousness of the African American people was ironically strengthened and reinforced by the continued segregation into distinct and unequal ghettos. If these conditions had not existed or were in the process of being disassembled, the ruling class would not have faced such a united effort against their hegemony. Reaching for the highest placement of the centauric level allowed African American leadership to transcend the empirical reality they faced daily. Their words and actions had effects beyond the verbal or ego-mind and spoke to issues faced both nationally and globally by members of the African Diaspora. These issues provided a gathering place for an interior collective of like-minded people around the world to unite.
When people act together in pursuit of a common goal, their default social mechanism is negotiation. The resulting compromises are the product of an on-going negotiation based on the diversity and strengths of the constituent members. It is their common as well as their unique individual experiences which yield areas of understanding and strategizing. The jazz ensemble model of group improvisation continued to inform the African American community in its struggle for equality and an end of racism. By embracing this template for improvisational transformation other outsider groups in our society have from the earliest days added their genius and cultural diversity to this rising tide of freedom.
The Upper Left placement for individuals in the African American community moved from the concepts, level 10, of freedom and equality transcending the rules, level 11, of oppression. In defiance of the rules society’s ruling class used to hide behind, individuals took steps towards establishing formal, level 12, laws and traditions for the future not based on a system of racial segregation, oppression and exploitation of the African American working class. The model of change through individual growth empowered all Americans to look beyond the status quo and seek new opportunities to make real and lasting social and political changes. Logic and vision, level 13, grew to reach beyond those individuals at the highest level and to model personal change and growth. For the ruling class, this process threatened to take their power away and redistribute it among those from whom they had originally extorted their power through slavery and the subsequent programs of the American Apartheid. With a history of assassination and imprisonment for many of those African Americans who rose up to positions of leadership, resistance had become the lonely work of individuals. Like musicians in a jazz ensemble being united through like-minded efforts, each had to develop their awareness and skill sets on their own before their efforts could be useful in performance. It was these individual direct actions which took the movement against racism and equality through the conservative politics of the 1980s.
Jazz musicians had taken off in many directions creatively in the 1980s with each developing their own systems of composition and improvisation. Elements from musical traditions around the world with new instruments and artists from beyond the United States brought jazz once again to the forefront as a music of the future.
As the 1980s drew to close, the model of the African American community functioning in similar ways to the jazz improvisational ensemble began to be noticed and studied by the 1990s academia, business, the mental health community, and in education.
Chapter Eight: The 1990s
Evans (2000) made this initial claim “to talk about jazz in the 1990s is, directly or indirectly, to talk about issues of race and U.S. national culture” (p. 2). Despite the continuing segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans in the 1990s, there were some important advances in the balance. In the year 1990 many important advances happened to change the status of African Diaspora people around the world. Nelson Mandela was released from his twenty-seven year imprisonment in South Africa. This was more than a symbolic gesture by the government of South Africa as Mandela was an international symbol of Apartheid whose leadership potential had only been strengthened by the imprisonment and the quiet nobility with which he endured. The United States was a source of financial investment for the economy of South Africa with many organizations investing their retirement funds in there, including the Los Angeles Police force, many of whose squad cars had South African flags painted on their tops.
On the political side here in the United States, there were also important advances towards progressive change during the 1990s. In 1990, Douglas Wilder was elected as the first African American governor of Virginia and Sharon Pratt Kelly was elected mayor of Washington D.C. as not only an African American, but also as the first woman to hold that office. There were six African Americans elected to the U.S. House of Representatives: William J. Jefferson was elected to represent Louisiana, Craig Washington is elected to represent texas’ 18th district, Maxine Waters is elected to represent California, Barbara Rose-Collins is elected to represent Michigan; Gary Franks is elected as a Republican to represent Connecticut, and Elaenor Holmes Norton is elected as delegate for the District of Columbia to the U. S. House of Representatives (Harris & Terborg-Penn, 2006, pp. 232-233). To have solid advances in the political realm was a source of both pride and hope for the African American People, most of whom remained suffering the indignation of segregation and racism.
In the public domain important advances included Marguerite Ross Barnett becoming president of the University of Houston, Carole Gist being crowned as Miss U.S.A., the first time an African American had been crowned to represent the nation’s ideal of beauty, Debbye Turner is also named as Miss America. Richard Parsons became chief executive officer of the Dime Savings Bank in N.Y., the first black executive of a nonminority savings bank, Denzel Washington won an Academy award for best supporting actor in the movie Glory, Charles Johnson became the first black male to win the coveted National Book Award since Ralph Ellison for the novel Middle Passage, August Wilson won a second Pulitzer Prize for drama with his play The Piano Lesson. Each increase of well-earned status and power by members of the African American community was a vindication of their past exclusion from such recognition and an inspiration to find ways to participate as equals in the American Society of which they had always been an important part.
Jazz becomes an international art-form
Like the status and recognition gained by African Americans during the 1990s, jazz also made important advances as a legitimate and evolving art-form internationally. The year 1992 saw the release of two double CDs from trumpeter, composer and improvising free jazz artist Bill Dixon, Vade Mecum and Vade Mecum II, featuring a quartette with two bassists, Barry Guy and William Parker, with a British drummer, Tony Oxley, collaborating to produce recordings eclipsing the scene with works that rivaled those of Cecil Taylor and, Charles Mingus. They followed with the release of The Enchanted Messenger in 1994, featuring the Tony Oxley Celebration Orchestra and Dixon improvising an extensive session with nineteen sections. The vocabulary Dixon developed was beyond the confines of Western music, utilizing his quiet and cryptic trumpeting to send subliminal messages of universal truth often hinting at melody rather than beginning with a pre-composed melody and improvising from that structure (Scaruffi, 2007, Location 2868).
In late 1989, T. S. Monk the son of Thelonius Monk, himself a professional drummer of critical renown formed the Thelonious Monk Institute which has been presenting Jazz in the Classroom programs for young people throughout the United States and abroad. The Jazz in the Classroom series began with trumpeter Clark Terry as teacher, who took a group of gifted American and European music students to Dolo, Italy, where they were part of an intensive educational summer program. By taking on the preservation of jazz as America’s heritage, T. S. and his fellow jazz musicians have nurtured many hundreds of youthful musicians in the art and performance of jazz. This was another example of an African American not waiting for the government, or society in general, to do the right thing by doing it themselves. This direct access to established artists offered a bridge across time for a new generation to learn through direct contact with those a lifetime closer to the source (Jazz in the Classroom, 2014, Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz website).
In the California coastal community of Monterrey, an important project was underway in the 1990s. The region had a wide spectrum of wealth ranging from the 1% people in the exclusive Pebble Beach community, to the regional tourism industry owners and employees, and the enlisted soldiers at Fort Ord. Two musicians, drummer Eric Tonn, and vocalist and trumpeter Bill Allison, took the idea of getting the jazz musicians in the region to form a non-profit based on the members of a big band to promote and support jazz as America’s classical music to the leaders of the community. Working with an international booking agency they recruited one-third from the retired studio musicians who had moved to area from New York, Hollywood and the Vegas/Reno/Hawaii circuit. Next came one-third American Federation of Musicians who played the clubs and events as working professionals. The final one-third were school teachers, many of whom had grown up in the area. These three groups rarely interacted and had never joined together to promote jazz music and to serve the community. They worked to write the articles of incorporation and were fortunate enough to land a weekly venue at Mr. Clint Eastwood’s Mission Inn’s Dance Hall, a converted barn with a beautiful view of the Carmel River Headlands. The project was granted Pilot Project status by the IRS as a 501C3 Public Education Non-Profit Organization, formed a board with leaders from the community, and began what would become a two and a half year series of Monday night concerts featuring the newly formed twenty-five piece Monterrey Peninsula Jazz Orchestra (MPJO). The first set each week was a live reading session with resident and visiting composers presenting new material, something which usually only happened behind closed studio doors. Many soldiers in the Army Band serving at Fort Ord became first call substitutes getting the chance to work with professionals and others from the region, an uncommon opportunity. The MPJO worked hard to serve the community doing outreach to both the public and private schools to speak about jazz as America’s classical music, demonstrate, give tutoring, concerts and even raising donations of instruments for children. No part of the community was left unserved including the base schools, city and county schools and even the prestigious Robert Louis Stevens Preparatory School. Due to this new model other communities around the nation formed big bands from their region and the precedent of jazz as a teaching medium gained an important foot hold (personal knowledge).
Also on the West Coast, pianist Horace Tapscott released four important LPs featuring large ensembles beginning with the 1995 release Aiee! The Phantom, with haunting complex melodies on tunes like Drunken Mary/Mary on Sunday, the 1997 release Thoughts of Dar Es Saloam, the 1998 release Dissent or Descent; and a final quartet session in 1999 Among Friends. Tapscott founded the Pan African People’s Arkestra in 1959 featuring a multi-media methodology with two pianos, six reeds, two trombones, tuba, cello, two basses, and two percussionists, the ensemble remained an underground phenomenon not recording until 1978. In 1961, he was central force in founding the Underground Musician’s Association (UGMA), a place where new artists could try out their ideas with the support of the free jazz community (Scaruffi, 2007, Location3069). African American expressive voices were not silent in the 1990s, and the influence of leaders like Dixon and Tapscott whose careers remained obscured by the commercial music industry, nonetheless provided a forum for free speech and creative collaboration the importance of which cannot be overstated.
Multidisciplinary explorations for the Jazz rapport
In 1990, an important trend of exploring the nature and functions of the jazz creative rapport was supported by Stephen Nachmanovitch whose book, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, examined correlations with Eastern Wisdom traditions. In Sanskrit there is a concept of lila which translates as free or divine play. It is the play of creation, destruction and re-creation, the forming and un-forming of the cosmos. Lila is the deep enjoyment of the moment, of love and the divine play of God. The core of improvisation is “the free play of consciousness as it draws, writes, and plays the raw material emerging from the unconscious”(Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 9). It requires the improviser to approach the moment with a child-like abandon and to trust the process as it unfolds to manifest new order from the infinite. As Michelangelo’s theory of sculpture being that the form for each sculpture existed in the stone for eternity waiting to be freed, improvising releases the musical forms waiting to be expressed only in the moment of creation. In the lila of free jazz, spontaneity and following the muse as the improvisation unfolds, placing the artist after the creation rather than as the designer or architect of a preconceived structure. For African American jazz musicians through time it took great courage to stand in the face of oppression and improvise a music which changed the world, it also took a personal connection to the inner joy and creative play of a child. Nachmanovitch (1990) lists the following interreflecting criteria for creative play saying,
The prerequisite of creation are, playfulness, love, concentration, practice, skill, using the
power of limits, using the power of mistakes, risk, surrender, patience, courage, and trust. Creativity is a harmony of opposite tensions, as encapsulated in our opening idea of lila, or divine play. (p.12)
In jazz the music moves in a time beyond the moment of inspiration, the time it takes to write down the idea and into the time of performance. In the performance improvisation occurs in a separate combined time where the moment of inspiration, the formal writing and structuring of the inspiration into a composition, and the spontaneous expressions of the musician combine into a single time (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p.18). The African American jazz musician has sustained this transtemporal or extemporaneous state since the very beginnings of jazz. It is from this timeless improvisation of music that the jazz community occupies that changes in society emanate. Play as improvisation flies in the face of social hierarchies (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 43). The novel sequences of the improviser bring ever new potential realities into the creative moment, and it is these very potentials which give hope and strength to carry on and to move ahead in trust that change happens and can be experienced joyfully in the doing itself.
This freedom from strict time and definitive correct results allows the improvising jazz musician to use everything, including ‘wrong notes’ as source materials for new creations (Slobada, 1985, p. 148). In society, this ability was central to the African American community’s continued efforts to find new ways forward beyond the wrong notes and constraints of segregation, racism, and the political mechanisms of the past which continued to function and manifest as boundaries. Montouri (1997) called this social creativity, an important precedent for applications of the jazz improvisational process. This recognition of the model for group creativity was the beginning of human organizational theorists’ development of business, education and community guiding participants to embrace interdependency and utilize diversity to enrich and empower rather than to divide and marginalize. Hatch (1997) compares the open flow organizational model to the improvising jazz ensemble, “Symbolic-interpretive, Culture, a pattern of meanings created and maintained by human association through shared values, traditions, and customs’’( p. 52).
Further insights draw comparisons showing that like improvising jazz musicians, we constantly improvise ourselves to meet the internal and external demands of our daily lives. Each of us has a theme that is our identity and a repertoire of being, which we use to adapt biologically and existentially. Music therapy can facilitate this improvisational adaptation of each individual's repertoire to meet life's challenges. Aldridge (1998) proposes that creatively improvising music is one way to develop individual responses to life-threatening illnesses including AIDS, breast cancer, and in the development of spirituality. Music therapy, with its emphasis on personal contact and the value of the patient as a co-creative, productive human being, has a significant role to play in the fostering of hope. Reaching for ever new improvisational spaces the jazz musician is the essence of social creativity. It is an active search for ways to destabilize and reorder our reality, a constant movement beyond our personal patterns to push beyond our comfort zone of assumptions and beliefs into newly restructured ways of being in and responding to our social environments.
The difficulties of teaching Jazz to non-Americans
For aspiring jazz musicians in Europe, specifically the UK, there was a challenge to go beyond the recordings of American jazz and to search for an original voice. Given that America has had over a century to develop the music, and the reality that the social history and conditions which lead to African Americans o create jazz don’t exist in European, it took a significant effort to both school up on what had been done and to find one’s original voice. Improvisation can be broke into three phases, choosing a master, absorbing their skills through imitation, and searching for something authentic to say (Bailey, 1992, p. 53). Jazz as “Black Classical Music”(Bailey, 1992, p. 56) has entered modern times around the world with each derivation uniquely adding elements from diverse musical cultures. It does not, in this writer’s opinion, diminish or alter the core African American essence of improvisational jazz, rather reflecting the adaptability and resilience of an oppressed people moving through time towards freedom and equality.
When pressed for a response to questions of whether jazz innovators have used up the genre and left today’s jazz as a reflection or a distortion, Max Roach ignored it and pointed out the perceived advantages and wealth of the legacy available. He went on to say:
This music which has been developing throughout the twentieth century really excites me. Especially when I know I can go all the way back with, say New Orleans music and on up to Cecil Taylor and enjoy it all and get so much out of it. And it all stems from improvisation. (Bailey quoting Roach, 1992, p. 57)
Complexities of the American social structure
Society in the 1990s, with respect to community and communication, was not structured to initiate creative flow. The social disorganization was most apparent in the marginalized groups, especially for African Americans. On an economic level, the official policies that had denied equal opportunity to participate in the growth of the nation’s economy had become obvious and were also moving from the black ghetto into other groups. The sub-culture of gangsta, though not truly representative of the majority of Africa Americans, had become a raw festering wound in the nation’s heart. One symptom was a rate of illegitimate births to single mothers which had reached 80 % for blacks and 22 % for whites. The rate had increased in the 1980s by 40 % for blacks and a huge 85 % for whites (Brown, 1995, p. 11). The very structure of the family was failing under the pressure of segregation, racism, and economic exclusion.
The problem of illicit drugs was rampant with 60 % of the world’s drug trade going to the United States which had only 4 % of the world’s population. Without the desperate isolated poverty in the ghetto, the drug networks would not have had a safe haven within which to thrive. Brown (1995) spoke to this issue:
America’s socioeconomic crisis is primarily visible as a Black predicament today, but I predict that it will be___ just as drugs today____ a national dilemma within the next decade as the middle class is hit with shrinking employment due to technological displacement. Traditional inner-city problems____ crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, homelessness, welfare dependency, illegitimacy, school and domestic violence, unemployment, school dropouts, gang activity____ are all headed for the White middle class. By the year 2000, we may well have a large White underclass with social pathologies identical to those of today’s Black and Hispanic underclasses. (p. 13)
The pressures of the inner city were once again reaching a boiling point, in 1991 the Los Angeles police were filmed beating motorist Rodney King, eventually setting off a violent riot in East L.A. The eyes of the nation were fixed on the TV coverage and old divisions once again placed blame and nothing really changed. Once again the official response was violent suppression of the riots which began on April 29, 1992. Before the rioters were quelled a few days later, 53 people were dead, 4,000 injured and a staggering $1 billion in damages were incurred during the unrest (Grey, 2007, @Time).
Politically there were more important advances with an additional 17 African Americans elected to the House of Representatives in 1992, and the first African American woman, Carol Mosely Braun, was elected to the Senate. Scaruffi (2007) spoke about the role of jazz musicians and their instruments as evolving beyond previous applications:
In the free jazz movement the role of the drums became much broader than in the past. Instead of being the primary time keeper of the ensemble, free drummers offered new melodically orientated improvisations accenting the explorations of the other ensemble members. Early pioneers such as Elvin Jones whose work with Miles and Coltrane raised the bar for drummers had set the time keeping role equally on each musician. Ed Blackwell, whose work with the Ornette Coleman group, and later with Don Cherry’s projects, was the natural link between the bebop drumming of Kenny Clarke, the hard-bop drumming of Art Blakey, the proto-free drumming of Elvin Jones and folk drumming from rhythm'n'blues to African and Asian music. Blackwell was a key personality in transforming the drums into a versatile instrument, away from the purely tempo-keeping role and back to the primordial all-encompassing function. (Location 3123)
This was another reflection of African Americans in the 1990s, with so many reaching for new opportunities and making their own way through the times at their own pace. Diversity once again had become the rule for drummers, rather than serving the staid role of time keeper, these new musicians allowed themselves freedom to use their expressive voices and improvise along with the other ensemble members, sharing the time(s).
The further evolution of Jazz beyond commercial constraints
Vocalists like Patty Waters, Jay Clayton, Ursela Dudziak, Jeanne Lee, Bobby McFerrin, Laura Newton, and others no longer limited their song to words or set structures joining as improvisers who used their expressive voices to transcend the constraints of spoken language. This new intimacy in performance encouraged the listeners to script their own stories and to liberate the role of vocalist beyond that of storytelling in the strictest sense. Each listener could identify with these vocalists as the creative moment unfolded in real-time.
There was a similar musical evolution across racial, instrumental, international and creative boundaries during the 1990s. In 1996, Cecil Taylor headed up a band of ten American and European Musicians who began their Total Music Meeting performance by emerging onto the darkened stage one at a time and making sounds to indicate their presence. Wandering around sounding like a variety of wild creatures until finding their instruments and after a flurry of rough unmusical sounds began to perform a series of solos, duos and free unprescribed improvisations (Heffley, 2005, p. 63). Drawing connections to the European tradition from the 1960s called the fluxus movement, popular in Germany, Holland and Korea from the 1960s, and to the Japanese butoh dance movement from the 1950s, these early pioneers were beginning to surface again and their new collaborations continued to explore an aesthetic of the ugly and the archaic. Heffley (2005) described their work as:
Conceived in reaction against cultures felt to be so refined, mannered, “beautified,” and ritualized as to be intolerably repressive of healthy personal and social bodies. Both were also reactions against the imposition to Western(American) culture through war and occupation; and both professed and evinced a conscious quest to reconnect with a primal animistic-shamanic identity that preceded the rise of civilization’s great religious and secular systems, namely the Confucianism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, Capitalism, and Communism most pertinent to their respective situations.(p. 64)
Some Europeans reacted negatively to this music and to Taylor in particular. They saw him as the embodiment of evil, corrupting the younger white musicians, and they even explained the issue being the connections of all white Americans as descendants of losers and outcasts from European countries. Dividing of their demonizations into ‘civilized holy” and “barbaric unholy”, they missed the cathartic release and resolution also offered in the music. This reaction and polarization into God’s People and Satan’s People, white v. black, lower class to upper class reflected the unhealthy states of the personal and social bodies in the United States and Europe (Heffley, 2005, p. 65). So even in the often more accepting audiences of Europe there was a strong undercurrent of the same racism and hatred which poisoned the American Social Body. The hegemonic presupposition by the western (European) musical establishment that their classical music can stand for all music is resistant to the reality that African American music has an equal scope and prevalence in modern American culture. This mirrors the social resistance to accepting the equality of all people, especially African Americans, and ignoring the broader interconnections.
The Italian jazz pianist Giorgio Gaslini’s music in the 1990s had become recognized as a bridge between American Jazz and the European art music tradition. Italian jazz historian Luca Cerchiari divided improvisation into conscious and unconscious. He considered Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, George Russell, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and Anthony Braxton as African American masters consciously challenging and changing traditional aesthetics. Those new artists practicing the still-derivative, imitative European jazz stylists, were stuck playing with a lack of balance in regards to elements of their own cultures (Heffley, 2005, p. 69).
Here in America, despite legislation and increased public awareness, people of African descent remained segregated into lower-class communities, to experience poverty and unequal access to the resources and benefits of society, especially in regards to education and employment. Factors like the transition from a manufacturing economy with lots of opportunities for unskilled laborers to a service economy which needed an educated workforce, divided the African American community into a new, small black middle-class with high paying jobs in government and industry, and an underemployed, underpaid lower-class. This was compounded by official policies of welfare benefits rewarding unmarried, poor women and an increase in out-of-wedlock babies as a source of income for these displaced people (Massey & Denton, 1993, p. 219). Even though Jim Crow was dead, and blacks were accepted in unions, college, professional sports, the entertainment industry, journalism, the political arena, administration, and education, residential segregation remained a reality for African Americans.
AQAL placement of African Americans in the 1990s
Upper Right Quadrant, the exterior-individual-behavioral-quadrant, placement for African Americans in the 1990s had become stratified, ranging from those caught up in the inner city ghettos to those who had succeeded in moving into the middle and upper classes. On the ghetto end, poor schools and unequal access to employment had kept a disproportionate segment of African Americans from moving above the complex neocortex, where they worked full time to survive social and economic isolation. Behaviorally, these people had to deal with high rates of violence and the loss of the higher-end functioning individuals, who due to increased social mobility and higher income levels, had moved out of the ghetto, leaving natural leadership structures failed to function. Those who found work as professionals, in sports, government or the private sector, continued to raise the forces aimed at change from SF1, concrete functions, SF2, formal operations, and into SF3, the synthesizing regions. It was only the continued efforts of the ruling and elite economic classes which held back the forces of change. The United States had remained stuck in the past socially, leaving many marginalized people, especially African Americans, with unequal access to the American dream.
On the Lower Right, the exterior-collective-social-quadrant, African Americans struggled to maintain positive community relations. Due to the proliferation of the gang culture, the ensuing violence, and the media focus on this sub-culture as news and entertainment, the positive potentials of the segregated ghetto for unity and direct action were greatly diminished. In real terms many African Americans existed in a society divided by labor opportunities, level five, surviving only through the strength of family, level seven. For those at the top levels of nation state, level twelve, and the planetary, level thirteen, making their way into the larger cultural milieu of the United States through their talents, efforts and increased opportunities in employment brought hope to those still caught-up in the ghetto. Around the world many black jazz musicians travelled and spread the music and culture to new artists, and formed creative fusions of music from the traditions of a great diversity of countries. The increased number of African Americans in high political office helped to bring an urgency to issues facing their communities, and the resistance continued.
In the Lower Left, the interior-collective-quadrant, segregation divided the nation’s people and helped to maintain archaic, level nine perceptions of African Americans from the days of Jim Crow and even of slavery. Rap had gone from a new urban art from of African American expressive voices, to what had become a modern day minstrel show of bravado and senseless violence as a way of life. Neighborhoods became mythic, level eleven, war zones and through the magic level ten of Hollywood and the music media, the nation was enthralled by the images. During this same time there were important advances in the political realm with the numbers of African Americans coming to power as mayors of major cities, members of both houses of congress, and as heads of government agencies and social organizations the rational, level twelve, interior collective continued the effort to end segregation, racism and the evils of a system based on the exploitation and enslavement of an entire people. As the black middle class grew in numbers, the base of power expanded to lift the messages of resistance and the need for change spread beyond the nation’s borders to become centauric, level thirteen, forces for global pan diaspora changes. Feeling their roles deeply as individuals representing a culture in great duress these new global leaders moved into the corporate world to head organizations like Times Warner, Inc., the American Medical Association, bringing a new image of African Americans’ potential strengths. The Million Man March in Washington, D.C. in 1995, and the Million Women march in Philadelphia, each drew over a million participants in peaceful demonstrations of unity and collective strength.
The Upper Left, the interior-individual-intentional quadrant, those people caught in the ghetto system remained powerless as symbols, level nine, of the evils and inequalities of the past poisoning the present. Concepts, level ten, of individual action and intention offering a pathway out of the despair and social isolation of the ghetto motivated many African Americans to transcend their realities and set new marks of excellence. Bernard A. Harris became the first African American to walk in space, J. Paul Reason became the first black four-star admiral in U. S, Naval history, Cuba Gooding won an Academy Award, Tiger Woods is the first black and the youngest golfer ever to win the Master’s Tournament. All of these accomplishments followed the rules, level eleven, of their respective fields, required formal, level twelve, actions to advance and each demonstrated a personal devotion to an interior vision-logic beyond their own lived experience and beyond the social reality of the times. By seeking and attaining their personal best through their efforts these individuals brought a new generation awareness of the opportunities available for those whose intention and individual devotion drive them to the top of their field.
It becomes more obvious at this juncture for this writer that many of the people of power in the United States remained committed to segregation and the continuance of second class status for African Americans. It is also this writer’s observation that there are direct connections in our society to the foundations of our economy as based and dependent upon slavery, or in the modern times, an impoverished minority willing to work for very low wages to produce the wealth of the minority at the top of the white ruling class. Imprisoning such a highly disproportionate proportion of the African American community and forcing them to do industrial labor while serving their sentences for pennies an hour is a blatant example of this oppressive slavery as the tool of wealth mentality. Whether the images of gangsta rap with which the media feeds America was done in collusion or not the effect was to dehumanize and vilify African Americans and to build fear along with fascination. It’s the same thinking from the past, i.e. the essential savagery of African Americans will strengthen or tonify white Americans which brought 1920s America in droves into the jazz music and culture.
By dehumanizing and othering these Americans due to skin color and race to serve corporate and socio-political goals the entire nation becomes complicit in the continuance of the segregation and biases of those whites in positions of power. The same forces that had African American jazz musicians touring the world for the State Department for decades to promote the American Way, were, at the very least, allowing these practices.
In any comprehensive plan to balance the wrongs of the past and end segregation and unequal access to opportunities in education, employment and economics the nation needed to use unusual and innovative methodologies. Those programs which provide access to mortgages and the accumulation of wealth for the white middle class could be expanded to address these same needs in the African American community. By providing subsidized mortgages; generous grants for education and training; small business loans; and active job searching and placement many wrongs could be set right and there would be a real chance to end the nation’s racial strife in this generation (Katznelson, 2006, p. 171). Injuries done as a result of governmental policies would go to the front of the line and society would be the beneficiary of increased wealth and economic investment power.
As the 1900s drew to a close such concrete though difficult were becoming the only clear path to a better society. Even measuring the progress of African Americans with the AQAL becomes difficult as so much of the uneven development continued to be imposed from without and as such could not be an accurate unbiased measurement tool. Ironically as more African Americans attained the higher global levels of development their effects for change were more effective in other countries than here in the United States. As the 21st century began many disciplines were beginning to embrace jazz and improvisational music as applicable to their work, adding new levels of complexity for jazz to move into the new century.
Chapter Nine 2000 and Forward
The turn of the century marked an important era of examination and applications for the jazz improvisational process by many disciplines. This change from excluding and or minimizing the value and depth of the improvising jazz ensemble in regards to human development by the academic community added a new appreciation and respect for this African American tradition. This inquiry has examined jazz as a transformative improvisational musical process innovated by black Americans based on ancient African traditions, utilizing a hybridized European musical instrumentation and harmonic schema. Creating in the jazz improvisational process a transpersonal rapport for call & answer, and improvisation by individuals and the larger community, this music conveyed deep and powerful messages of resistance and freedom.
By following the development of jazz historically we see the effects of this African American musical tradition socially, economically and geopolitically. For decades, beginning in the 1920s and continuing through the 1950s, America and the nations of Western Europe gathered together in their communities to dance and socialize to swing jazz. The fact that the United States 0f 2016 still languishes in the thrall of racial prejudice, segregation and hatred, does not in this inquiry’s examination diminish jazz’s transformational power. The ruling white upper class has always maintained its hegemony with oppressive and divisive policies carried out by the hands of an economic and judicial system which continues to resist change. Jazz escaped the United States during WWII times and never fully returned to the confines of American commercial dance music. While African Americans and others continued to compose, perform and improvise new genres of jazz, the primary focus was not to confine their expressive voices to strictly defined dance forms. Instead, in the new forms of bebop and free jazz, the focus was to create unique new music not bound by conventions of the past, or the physical borders of the United States. In this internationalization the greater Afro-diaspora world became the new home of jazz music. In every nation there are regional hybridized forms of the music, connecting traditions and cultures. Back when Louis, Duke, Basie and Dizzy took their bands on the road to Europe, Africa and the Middle East, during the 1940s and 1950s, the world fell in love with jazz. It was a music associated with free speech and racial equality and African Americans were the heart and soul of the tradition. Black jazz musicians were greeted with respect, recognition and acceptance around the post WWII world, especially in Europe causing many to move there to experience greater freedom. The United States by comparison has remained a nation of racial inequality and hatred with a progressively less aware population, historically and politically, caught up in the struggle for economic security.
As colonialism began to fall apart in Africa, new nations grew up to represent the people whose ancestors had lived and flourished in ancient civilizations and everywhere the United States State Department desired good relations, jazz ambassadors were sent to build new alliances. Jazz music and culture was the very best of American society and the world joined in to celebrate the joy and power of this community process.
The music media in the United States in the 1960s moved into promoting less creative genres which had as few as 4 members in the groups instead of the 12-20 in a jazz big band. There were no restrictions from the musician’s union as these rock and rollers were not members and as a result were more willing to work for less with little or no contractual certainty.
Free jazz in the 1950s and 1960s caused a multitude of artists to develop their own unique musical languages and the days of a united jazz music were over. There had always been a wide spectrum of African American musical forms and genres from the blues, R&B, Rock, soul, funk, swing and many Latin rhythmic styles but the Avant Gard of jazz were not concerned with dance-ability or record sales. As the United States grew weary of the Viet Nam War and demanded socio-political changes here at home, jazz and spirituals were integral parts of the movement. Now in the 2000s jazz has become a splintered niche market here in the United States with 2-3% of the American listening public claiming to be fans, In the 2000s researchers from many disciplines began to examine the jazz improvisational process to understand the underlying mechanisms. Montuori’s research questions had to do with group creativity and his experience as a professional jazz musician led him to draw correlations between western organizational structures and the jazz improvisational process. Montuori (1997) points out the problems of only using the academic approach of presenting the completed work rather than engaging in open-ended creative collaborations:
This arrangement leaves out of the picture the fertile ground of creative process, the opportunities of not-knowing, and the potential for a generative dialogue rather than an embattled argument. Academia downplays and even inhibits the social creativity of knowledge in conversation and collaboration by focusing on, and rewarding, the claims of individual knowers and at times actively penalizing collaboration. (p. 34)
This hits the crux of the matter, jazz musicians use uncertainty and spontaneity as integral parts of their improvisations and collaborate creatively each time they perform together. Mistakes are not feared, rather embraced as the source of unexpected potentially new musical utterances. Barrett (2012) emphasized this aspect of cooperative leadership, or team culture, saying, “Failure, after all, is an inevitable part of risk and experimentation” (p. 42). It’s important to include failure, mistakes and problems as source material for further innovation. Managers in business who embrace an aesthetic of imperfection persevere by using the inevitable mistakes and glitches as points of creative departure just as jazz musicians take bad notes and improvise new and unexpected music. Other examples of accidents that became unexpected opportunities abound: Pyrex cookware, Jello, Popsicles, the Walkman, Lifesavers, Coca-Cola, Sticky or Post-it notes, Silly Putty, Kleenex, Levi jeans, Band-Aids, corn flakes, penicillin and the cardiac-pacemaker (Barrett, 2012, p. 47).
Interestingly enough the cardiac pacemaker was actually not the result of a planned research project, rather as Barrett (2012) described, “Like so much great jazz, Greatbatch’s pacemaker is a story of bricolage, of tinkering, combining disparate material (radios and hearts), iterations of errors that accumulate into a hunch that has lasting value” (p. 48).
In asking the question about how errors could lead to new discoveries, Barrett’s use of jazz offers an answer. The improvising jazz musician tries to initiate musical errors as points of creative departure, the beginning of something new and potentially unique. As organizations embrace this practice of errors being crucial for innovations to emerge this core component of the jazz creative process expands the potential for human creativity. Hatch (2011) compared the uncertainty of organizations in the process of controlling each moment into knowable data. Using the Heisenberg Principle from modern physics to illustrate this uncertainty, which briefly stated says that, “you cannot know with equal certainty a particle‘s position and velocity; the more you know about where it is, the less you can know about where it is going” (Location 356-357).
The jazz process has evolved here in the United States as an integral part of the systems of social, economic and creative arts and by extension all the systems of human organizations emerging therein. Whether or not it has been generally recognized, this inquiry has found many ways in which improvisational jazz music and culture have been fundamental to the larger American culture. The many genres of jazz music as with rag-time jazz in the Roaring Twenties, swing dance jazz music in WWII, the blues, rock and roll and R&B in the 1950s and 1960s . African Americans’ creative music have been a reflection of the times.
Other core components of jazz include the actual organizational skills needed to connect and perform with others in an ensemble, or intentional community. To be open and receptive to the creative input of the other ensemble members as source material and as points of improvisational departure is a highly useful skill which turns diversity into a core strength. Hatch (2011) spoke to this essential element:
One of my favorite metaphors for bringing the artistry of organizing into the open is jazz. Not just as a form of improvisation, but also in the way jazz players, like other musicians, make music through a complex and multi-layered use of organizing skills. Like all musicians, those who play jazz not only perform technically on their instruments, they must also train themselves in the complex language of music, and learn how to put a band of musicians together. (Locations 1868-1871)
Each time an ensemble is hired to perform their negotiation skills are the glue which holds the musicians together. Given that most jazz performance opportunities are short term and the available musician’s pool of proficient talent limited it most often results in ensembles being composed of different musicians for each engagement. Faulkner and Becker (2009) researched the way jazz musicians communicate and use their common knowledge and experience to negotiate the organization of the evening’s performing ensemble:
So, instead of being the routine execution of a program all participants know perfectly well, constructing an evening's performance requires constant attention from every participant. Everyone has to be alert to what the others are doing, and continually adjust what he does in the light of what he hears (and, occasionally, sees) them doing. (p. 185)
These participatory skills modeled in the music and culture of jazz have enormous potential for training members of all organizations, social, political, or economic to learn, incorporate and utilize them in a community of social creativity. The same powerful community building elements of ancient African cultures embedded in the jazz call and answer and group improvisation are available in modern times to reshape the ways in which we organize and work together. This can be accomplished by utilizing the diversity of individual and cultural intelligences in modern society, both here in the United States and globally in the emerging planetary community in an inclusive way.
Fischlin, Heble & Lipsitz (2013) use a quote by African American jazz great Archie Shepp to establish the premise of their research:
We're all connected; we're all one. I'm concerned about my world— I'm concerned with the Africans in Rwanda, and I'm concerned with what happens in Ireland. Any artist should be. I've seen the suffering of my people, the murder of Palestinians in the Middle East, the murder of Iraqis. Look at America today. There are more and more homeless, and George Bush wants $ 87 billion for [the war in] Iraq. You don't have to be a musician to be sensitive to these things. Politics is about people. I don't think that it's unusual that I am committed to this. As an artist, I feel obliged to do this, it is part of my destiny to do this… Music doesn't change things, but in my own small way, it makes a statement. (p. 1)
Here is an example of the international connections now possible between jazz and the greater social world of the entire planet. It is an intentional connection based on an evolving history of jazz as an African American art form moving out from its community of origin first here in the United States and progressively since WWII, into the emerging and rapidly expanding global community. Important western twentieth century composers including Stravinsky and Stokowski spoke openly of the influence American jazz music had on their creative process, and jazz artists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie practiced playing very sophisticated modern classical music, often doing so on their breaks at live performances. In addition, as discussed earlier in this inquiry, both the jazz and orchestral composers developed the same new systems of tonality and structural freedom to express the times within which they all lived and composed. The movement to intentionally recognize and develop connections between music and the greater world community has spawned such organizations as the World Conference on Music and Censorship held in Copenhagen in November of 1998, and which established its secretariat in 2000, Freemuse: The World Forum on Music and Censorship. Their mission was to advocate for freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide. The organization tracks and reports incidents of censorship and oppression of musical expression around the world, tying them to key human rights as contained in the Universal Declaration Human Rights formulated in 1948 (Fischlin, Heble & Lipstiz, p. 3-4).
Among those rights affected by musical censorship are the freedom of expression, the freedom to assemble, and the freedom to access divergent forms of thinking. Those governments which practice censorship do so out of fear of the power of music to , “challenge state power— as in the case of Jimi Hendrix's infamous rewriting of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” via improvised feedback imitating the bombs falling in Vietnam”( Fischlen, Heble & Lipsitz, 2013, p. 3). A common essential trope of these human rights situations is improvisation, “improvisation as a means to speak free of constraint; improvisation as a means to assemble alternative forms of community; and improvisation as a critique of dominant structures of thought” (Fischlin, Heble & Lipsitz, 2013, p. 3).
From its earliest days in the time of slavery here in the United States, African American music has served many functions within and without that community. The music grew from pre-diaspora African Sacred traditions which used call and answer and group improvisation to build and strengthen community. For slaves who had very little else to affirm their own cultural histories and who were deliberately separated into seemingly random groups with no similar language or cultural traditions music quickly became the process with which to build new connections and community. Together in the music those early African Americans sang freedom songs, spirituals and early forms of the blues to work, worship and live as a people united in the struggle for survival and eventually for racial and socio-economic equality. The essence of this was the improvisation of new musical utterances which conveyed deep and varied meaning beyond the work crews, spreading these messages among the larger slave community. Researchers Fischlin, Heble and Lipstiz (2013) spoke about this centrality of improvisation, saying: “The situational fluidity of improvisation as a sociomusical practice gave it great power in bridging difference, even as it articulated radical alternatives to how narratives of traditional encounter were thought to function” (p. 70).
By uniting in the music these people created a separate African American art world of shared lived experience. Faulkner and Becker (1990) used the lens of symbolic interaction to talk about the importance of this organization of a shared world through collective activity explaining that, “it can, in principle, come into use anywhere people are connected through their joint involvement in a task or event of a repetitive kind. Wherever social events happen routinely, we can expect to find a world” (p. 9). This process of working and improvising together began the creation and development of a separate and living African American social world and it was upon this powerful origin of unity in the face of a cruel, inhuman and terrible culture of slavery that these people began their journey towards freedom and equality. Moving through time this geist, or spirit of the African American people, was an influential force in the social evolution of the nation strengthened through meaningful action and interactions (Faulkner & Becker, 1990, p. 18).
In the America of 2016 there are few opportunities for people to gather together and socialize as equals as did citizens of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s with swinging dance jazz. This current state of affairs has only accelerated its pervasiveness with the development of technologies which isolate and divide us into demographic groups for the purposes of social and economic control and exploitation. These divisive changes are happening in this time of great and rapid change on many levels socially, politically, economically and ecologically, and greatly limits the coordinated input from our nation’s rich and increasing diversity.
Disciplines which have incorporated jazz improvisation
In view of the neuro-stimulation and the resulting neural synaptic pathway formations in both improvising musicians and their community of listeners, as discussed previously in this inquiry, it should come as no surprise that the development of the discipline of music therapy has applied these elements to both medical and psychological rehabilitation (Carrus, Kuelish, Bhattachar, 2011; Okazaki, 2011). Just as musicians practice and perform jazz music, we are constantly improvising ourselves to meet the internal and external demands found in our daily lives. Each of us has a theme that is our identity and a repertoire of being that we use to adapt biologically and existentially. Music therapy facilitates this improvisation by extending an individual's repertoire to meet life's challenges creatively improvising music to develop individual responses to life-threatening illnesses such as AIDS, and breast cancer. Music therapy, with its emphasis on personal contact and the value of the patient’s active participation has a significant role to play in the fostering of hope in the individual (Aldridge, 1998). Other conditions for which jazz improvisation has been applied as a core therapeutic component and studied include, rehabilitation of damaged limbs, post-surgical rehabilitation, Parkinson’s, amnesia, dementia (Sachs, 2007), dealing with long-term mental illness (Grock & Bloch, 2009), stroke rehabilitation, communication disorders such as aphasia (Sachs, 2007), and in psychoanalysis (Raeburn, 2004).
In the social sciences there are also a variety of applications of the jazz creative process for helping diverse communities, whether therapeutic, judicially imposed incarceration or in our sprawling cities, to learn how to communicate and to evolve into healthy stabile sustainable systems. This new paradigm is based on the very diversity and complexity of our modern society as integral components including rather than diminishing the role and participation of outsider groups and or excluding them all together (Balara, 2000; Borgo, 2007; Kenny, and Gellrich, 2002; Solis, Nettl, 2009).
Sarath (2013) has focused on the jazz process, improvisation, creativity and consciousness and the similarities to states of deep meditation as practiced by many Eastern Wisdom traditions. Calling meditation a self-mediated transpersonal process, and free improvisation, self-referential awareness in activity, Sarath’s work presents both as “different forms of self-referral consciousness that, based on the very sequential unfolding of creation on a cosmic scale” (p. 109). This is reminiscent of the classic Greek definition of the ecstatic state as being reached during the theatrical performances wherein the actor seems to step aside from them self and observe the performance. Applying the depth of the jazz-inspired scope, Sarath (2013) pointed out the need to look beyond the musical realm as the only place to utilize these qualities:
The time has come to harness this process breath and engage in robust parts-to-whole and whole-to-parts swinging that can render this inquiry optimally dynamic, self-critical, joyous, and productive; to deploy the heightened inventive, interactive, individuative, transcendent, and self-critical faculties that are enlivened in ways that open up new vistas for imagining and transforming our world. (p. 120)
Sarath notes a unique combination of both fluidity and integrity inherent in the jazz structural scope, which together form a conduit which is receptive to the whole-to-parts flow of transcendent archetypal impulses encouraging important new developments in both jazz and the greater musical and social worlds (p. 252). The failure of the traditional western academy to recognize and embrace the jazz process as meaningful and as a tool for promoting innovation in education is example the pervasiveness of their Eurocentric bias. As an African American art form jazz has been marginalized as lesser than and not as the central influence in the development of modern American music. Taking this further Sarath (2013) stated:
Accordingly, advocacy of jazz as an integral transformational agent is based not only in its immediately evident, and clearly unmatched, process scope, but its process-structure scope. This underscores the significance of African American music in overall American musical culture and the global musical landscape. (p. 117)
The power of jazz ensemble performance is to build bridges to unite participants in the social creativity of live improvisation, everything each musician does and how the audience responds to each new musical utterance combine as source materials. In their study on social creativity editors Montuori and Purser (1999) included an article by Bateson who addresses the ways these improvisations reset the very context of our social dimensions:
Many performances are necessarily joint, including the “performances” of work and family life and governance. More recently I have been interested in studying improvisation in societies like our own where rapid change or diversity means that individuals must improvise performances shared with others from different backgrounds who arrive with different repertoires and conventions. (Montuori & Purser, p. 155)
Considering the social aspect of improvisation Said (2002) spoke of creating a shared sound universe in the performance through the willingness of the musicians and the listeners to attach themselves to each moment, each sound. “On the one hand, music exists in isolation and, on the other, it mirrors or often anticipates social development” (p. 41). Referencing the evolution of European composer’s from Haydn to Wagner, he concluded his reflections on this ability to transcend the everyday world and experience this sound universe saying:
The hierarchy of tonality __which accepted the greater importance of certain chords__ is beginning to be dissected and suddenly undermined. In other words, it’s not the hierarchy of God anymore. There’s not even the hierarchy of the social classes in the kingdom. Now you have a republic, with tonic, dominant, subdominant, and all these musical terminologies, which show order and hierarchy, until you end with the atonality, where all twelve tones are equal. (p. 41)
Given that jazz has been an integral part of the American social world since its inception as our own classical music, with its imbedded messages of resistance and the quest for freedom of both the individual artists and the African American people, the nation and the global musical community have been historical participants in the transmission of these messages across time. We have all been invested in the social changes necessary for racial and economic equality and freedom and through our patronage have added to these energies for change. Listening to African American music, especially improvisational jazz, brings ever new energy to bear on those forces which benefit from the oppression and inequality that supports their hegemony.
Inadequacy of AQAL to cover the diversity of placements for all African Americans
In this inquiry the AQAL (All Quadrants All Levels) system developed by Ken Wilber has been a useful tool in the effort to track the social and economic developmental level of the African American people as they progressed through time. Correlating this with their use of jazz as a transformative system that allowed progressively greater acceptance and identification with African American music, especially jazz, as our nation’s classical music offers window into the mechanisms of these changes. Initially a folk art form jazz has become high culture recognized around the world as the very heart and soul of the American people. This development has preceded the actual status of all Americans as equal, especially African Americans who, even with a Black president, continue to struggle against a system designed to marginalize and disempower them as a people. As discussed in the last few chapters measuring and assigning a single level of development in each of the four quadrants of the AQAL system fails to account for the savagery and comprehensive nature of the ruling class in its efforts to continue their hegemony.
Progress has been nonlinear through shared states of heightened awareness across all stages and levels, fostered in the music and culture of jazz, with the popular media only gradually showing African Americans in diverse roles alongside whites, as equals. Each triumph along the path to freedom whether in sports, entertainment, politics, economically or socially has been against a negative system designed to disempower and exclude African Americans. Shown as criminals, living by choice in impoverished and violent communities in the inner cities across the nation, African American’s true status continues to be revealed by daily examples of police violence up to and including murder as standard operating procedure. Only rarely are there any repercussions for those police who beat, shoot and otherwise oppress, imprison and kill African Americans, leading to the formation of the movement and resistive battle cry of “Black Lives Matter”.
In view of these realities it seems to this writer that to continue to define African Americans by placing them on the AQAL system as a monolithic group is no longer adequate. In much the same way that jazz musicians since the rise of free jazz in the 1950s through the 1970s have each found their own creative voice, the diversity of socio-economic levels in this community speaks to the complexity of trying to define all African Americans by a single rubric. Addressing the double consciousness as described by W.E.B. Du Bois, wherein the African American must constantly view both the stereotypical racist viewpoint and develop an individual identity not bound by these negative qualities, Samuels (2001) an important contemporary African American scholar wrote:
In fact for Du Bois, the African American wished “to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” though not at the expense of his older (African ) self, nor would he “Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa.” Ultimately important, Du Bois chauvinistically advocates: “the Negro blood has a message for the world” (p. 63)
In using the AQAL system this inquiry progressively found evidence that jazz music and culture functioned as the bridge from a desperate past of slavery and a possible bright future where the measure of the individual won’t be based on race, ethnicity or country of origin. Like the rise of international jazz itself there is a growing global awareness of the need to see the worth of an individual beyond the constraints of historical practices of racial and socio-economic exclusion and oppression. This recognition and appreciation of the primarily African American musicians who created and spread the music and culture of jazz as ambassadors to the world has helped to foster the global community and rising global consciousness. Seeing the very best of the United States as a society expressed in this improvisational and interdependent music and culture the world has joined in the rapport of performance. This is a powerful and inclusive participatory experiential learning process which has an enormous potential to model the creation of new coalitions.
Jazz as a process has taken powerful ancient African traditions of improvisation and community and transmitted them into modern times. Using these aspects of the music has brought people together to dance and socialize, nurturing our social evolution as a nation and progressively as a global community. In this improvisational process both the old and new realities are conjoined and it is this essential fusion which sustains the social world, even as it is transformed. The process of our maturity’s neocortical Erotic fusion with the ever new youthful limbic allows this War between these polarities to process or incorporate old with new layers of being. This ontological recapitulation of the phylogeny of the social mind contains the older layers within the evolutionary newest layers. Heffley (2005) asked an important question in regards to this, “Are those three layers at war within us, or are we governing their peaceful cooperation” (p. 294)?
Jazz musicians and fans have direct personal knowledge of past eras and genres of jazz music and are conversant in new as well as traditional patterns and practices. Embedded within the evolution of the music are all the experiences of our collective histories, and the improvisational jazz process nurtures our ability to create new and beautiful music with others in an interdependent way. Through the process of teaching this music to new generations and increased opportunities to share the experience of live improvisational jazz performances there is a realistic expectation that this tradition will survive in modern times and continue to enrich us all. Learning to truly listen to each other and to incorporate the complexity and diversity of the nation and the world is perhaps our best opportunity to adapt to the necessary changes and transitions inevitable and to strive together to create a sustain
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JAZZ AS A TRANSFORMATIVE PROCESS 206
Running head: JAZZ AS A TRANSFORMATIVE PROCESS 1