“94 - 7 the Wave.” “The Girl from Ipanema” playing in the elevator as the Blues Brothers take a quick break from their mad dash from the law.  These were the images evoked by the word jazz before my participation in this class.  Surely jazz was just a wine and cheese kind of a music, for serous listeners only.  Poetry might accompany a jazz performance, as a college-aged beatnik did his best to deal with the angst he held toward his parents, and the lack of hugs he received from his father.  Nothing meaningful was being said in the music, and musicians were just robots, reiterating standards without soul or emotion.  In this class I discovered that nothing, is further from the truth, because suddenly in the right context the music comes alive.  Never were my assumptions of jazz more radically altered than after discovering the genesis of bebop, and the musicians that were a part of it.  In today’s world of pitch perfect pop music, nothing less than perfection is acceptable, and any problems in life will be solved by the end of three minutes.  Yet unemployment remains high, the wealth gap is widening, and the political discourse is just short of violent and heated.  A similar irony existed during the swing era, with proud, patriotic faces on war time propaganda, displaying cultural norms that should be adhered to, and proclaiming the necessity to protect global democracy and freedom for all.  Yet at home, there was racial tension in the streets under harsh labor and living conditions, that was touted as freedom and progress(Stowe).  Swing music was content to provide background music to social dancing, with simple riffs, and accessible vocals(Gioia, 201).  Bebop sought to reinstate the hard edges that had been softened, insert a dissonance to reflect the social and racial tensions, and present a big middle finger to white appropriation of music by playing in a fast, attacking style that could not be copied.  The large dance halls of the big bands were now replaced by tiny clubs where “Slow dancers seeking a romantic interlude were now advised to keep their distance from the bandstand(Gioia, 209).”

Spatial environments have long been a part of jazz music.  Listening to early New Orleans jazz, like Louis Armstrong’s “Basin Street Blues,” you can almost feel the sweat begin to bead up on the back of your neck, as the tempo drags alongside the muggy bayous.  This spatial component, along with the economic, social and political dynamics that shaped the music and musicians was a new concept for me.  I had never even considered any influences on music other than other artists and genres.  Bebop embodies this influence from the spatial environment.  When Miles Davis first moved to New York to attend Juliard, he was immediately struck by the people.  The tall buildings, the noise, the pacing of the city, and the mobility that the subway provided all made their way into the music(Davis, 51).  They took on the form of fast paced music, and slick dressed musicians.  Minton’s, where many beboppers cut their teeth, was known  as a place where you might be beaten if you got on stage and did not perform up to standard(Davis, 54).  In the case of Thelonious Monk, he was able to procure a long term gig at the Five Spot Bar, where he could develop his individual voice.  If he had been out on the road traveling, he might not have had the same opportunity.  He also would have missed the support he received from his family and close friend that kept him from falling prey to the vices that destroyed many other jazz careers(Kelley).  All of this suggests that the musicians, and jazz as an art form, benefitted from the relationship it had with its surrounding community, which is in stark contrast to the genius theory of Ken Burns.

Through this class I have discovered the context in which jazz was created, which has provided a much better understanding of the genre.  You can hear so much more of what is being said when you put things into historical perspective.  By getting to know the personalities of Monk and Davis especially, I have developed a much greater appreciation for jazz, and I can now apply those same principles of critical thinking to other genres and contexts.

Let the Music Talk for You

     Freedom from want, and freedom from fear, fundamental freedoms that everyone ought enjoy.(Kennedy, David).  Franklin Roosevelt proposed the Allies were fighting for those in WWII, and later the U.S. would join the fight in a claim to protect those freedoms.  The conditions experienced in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of New York during that time, made this contradictory.  Fear and want were not in short supply, with the strong racial tensions and the dismal living conditions.  The tenements were like, “human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings ... no fresh breezes, only foul air carrying too often the germs of disease (Kelley, p16).”  Tensions between the Italians to the north, and the Irish to the south were fierce, and consistently produced race fights (Jazz in New York, New York Times).  Somehow Thelonious Monk was able to find beauty in the dissonance of this situation as the community of San Juan Hill fostered his creativity, and propelled him to a storied music career.  

Many jazz musicians were thrust into the spotlight while they weighed in on uneasy relationships between blacks and whites.  Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis both approached the subject with angst and reproach.  Gillespie even suggested that he might mistake white soldiers for the enemy if given and gun and sent to fight in the war (Fraser, p120).  Thelonious Monk on the other hand, avoided the traditional politics of race.  In an interview for Down Beat magazine Monk was quoted as saying, “My music is not a social comment on discrimination or poverty or the like.  I would have written the same way even if I had not been a Negro (Kelley, p249).”  He did his best to either avoid the subject or put a positive spin to it, telling his friend Larry Ridley, “Ain’t no drag, Larry because everybody wants to be young,” after Larry complained of whites calling them “boys” (Kelley, p417).  When discussing the violence endured by young people in San Juan Hill, Monk addressed the diverse black population of Caribbeans, West Indians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and blacks from the American South, the influence of which is later heard in compositions such as “Bye-ya” and “Bemsha Swing” (Kelley, p19).  He tried to point out that there was more to America’s troubles than just the black and white tensions.  Monk’s experiences in the community of San Juan Hill led him to approach the subject of social justice and the black freedom movement differently than other jazz musicians during the era.

Throughout his life in New York, Thelonious Monk was continually supported by his family, his friends, his peers, and his community.  As Europeans came to New York to escape WWII, Monk had a Jewish-Austrian as his piano teacher.  The neighborhood was filled with influential professional and amateur jazz musicians.  His mother, Barbara, allowed for open discussions at the dinner table, and raised him on church hymns, although she was a stickler when it came to learning music.  His close friend Baroness Pannonica outfitted her house in New Jersey with a piano upstairs and a ping pong table in the basement with Thelonious in mind.  His manager, Harry Colomby, often drove him to performances and was able to procure his most important job at The Five Spot bar.  Monk was able to play at the Termini’s Five Spot Bar, night after night versus being out on the road.  He was able to bring his children and family up on stage, and avoid the vices that most other musicians fell prey to.  The Termini’s threw him birthday parties, and he was home for family birthdays, that he would not have other wise been there for had he been on the road.  In the small club he experimented, and developed an individual sound that expressed the dissonance of the community through dissonance in the music.  Monk found beauty in the reality, and ugliness of the living conditions and racial tensions in San Juan Hill (Kelley).

As the community supported Thelonious, through his music Monk fostered a community of artist, poets and musicians.  They all rallied around their collective rebellion against the conformity to middle class norms.  He tried to avoid racial politics, but it was inevitable when a white woman refused to serve him during a road trip.  He could no longer remain well behaved and cooperative, and the rage that had been simmering in the dark, boiled out into the open (Kelley).  His cabaret card was revoked for a third time after he resisted arrest by police, and he could avoid the subject no more.  When he returned to his music, though, he continued to transcend the race conflict he considered a given, and chose instead let the music do the talking.

From the Basement to the Penthouse

Jazz, as soon as it emerged as an art form was immediately associated with the dregs of society.  It was born in the Red Light District of Storyville in New Orleans, moved north to the dance halls and speakeasies controlled by the mob in the south side of Chicago, accompanied rent parties in the slums of Harlem, and kept the patrons spending money in the brothels and casinos of Kansas City.  Since the genre was considered simply the music of the criminal, the young, or the black, it was largely dismissed which left musicians to struggle for legitimacy, regardless of color.  The Charleston, the shimmy, the Black Bottom, and the jitterbug, inseparable from the music that accompanied these dances, brought jazz from the margins to the mainstream(Gioia).  This exposure to popular culture created financial opportunities that had not existed before.  With the potential for economic advancement, came fierce competition between bandleaders and musicians.  Agents, publicists, and record companies all sought to profit as jazz was nationalized in visual arts, theater, movies, and music.  With more at stake bandleaders attempted to keep others from profiting from their creativity, and the differences in reward structure between black musicians and white musicians created a discourse of racial tension.  This new hot version of jazz, swing, created an environment of social miscegenation which made many in the older white community incredibly uncomfortable(p53, Stowe).

While riding on a train in Scottsboro, Alabama a white woman, when faced with a potential prostitution charge, accused several black boys of rape.  The Communist Party of the United States came to their aid and eventually led to their conviction being overturned by the Supreme Court in 1931.  A transition toward political radicalism was ushered in as white organizations criticized black organizations for taking too many concessions from the whites that were in power.  The 1936 competition between Benny Goodman, a white bandleader, and Chick Webb, a black bandleader, at the Savoy further exemplified the racial tensions of the times.  The Savoy was a racially integrated theater in Harlem, where the audience expected a certain level of professionalism and creativity.  If this level was not met, the audience would speak their minds and the performer would pulled from the stage.  Goodman and his all white band were no match for Webb and his all black band.  The performers were in conversation with the audience, and the audience felt that Webb had emerged triumphant that evening(Lecture 2/24).  

Goodman would later become vital in making a jazz a legitimate voice with his performance at Carnegie Hall in 1938.  Carnegie Hall was a venue of high culture, where people would dress in their fanciest of attire, listen to European classical music, and get cultured.  While Goodman, being white, only further strengthened the racial tensions, he realized he was profiting from what was considered a black art form.  He created moments of inclusiveness during the performance when black pianist Teddy Wilson, and black vibraphonist Lionel Hampton performed.  Duke Ellington would take a very different approach from his peers at the time.  In order to further penetrate the mainstream and achieve commercial and economic success he conceded his beliefs on segregation and politics.  He took a job at the whites only Cotton Club and hired an agent(Gioia).  While he was much more successful with the access to a broader, higher paying audience, the experience was a racial sting to his pride.  This exposure also opened him and other black artists up to criticism from white music critics.  John Hammond a white, well to do socialite, felt compelled to critique Ellington after he covered the Scottsboro case for a newspaper.  He said Ellington was insensitive to the troubles of his people and shut his eyes to the abuse put on his race(Stowe).  Ellington tried to ignore the critique saying it was laughable, but it altered his willingness to discuss politics and his approach to music further along in his career. During the 1930s swing broke down segregation and led the overall trend towards more integration.  

At the onset of the 20th century, America underwent an enormous change in the overall social structure, as well as the geographical layout of communities and their respective cultures.  With the initiation of World War I, soldiers traveled overseas to fight, and vacated a large number of jobs in the industrial sector in the northern United States.  What followed was the Great Migration, as thousands of African-Americans migrated north to fill these vacated jobs, and pursue the American Dream (Gioia).  A unique environment developed, a middle ground between high brow, middle class attempts to assimilate, and the low brow, working class struggles to survive in the gutter.  While similar environments existed in both Chicago and New York in the 1920s, New York became an important center for jazz.  The middle and low classes interacted with each, unlike in the deeply divided north and south sides of Chicago.  A creative ground was established that would push the musical medium while it maintained a conversation with its audience and their surroundings(Lyttelton).

Jazz in New York began with James P. Johnson around 1912, before the Old Dixieland Jazz Band had formed, and before King Oliver and Louis Armstrong had moved to Chicago.  Johnson developed what was called the Harlem stride piano style, where the left hand would keep a rhythm and the right hand would play a melody.  It was a continuation of ragtime, but it further advanced the style by increasing the tempo, picking up the intensity, and allowing for more improvisation.  This reflected the living situation at the time in Harlem.  The influx of African-Americans from the south brought together a diverse group.  While they were all of African descent, there cultures were very different.  Many wanted to hold on to some of their roots, but they had very little nostalgia for the oppressive Jim Crow laws they were hoping to escape.  There were two sides to this developing area of Harlem.  An artistic, middle class black society that was part of the Harlem Renaissance movement in art and literature, and a working class society where multiple families lived in tight quarters and struggled to pay rent.  Both groups sought out a proud existence in this new, more free setting.  During the Harlem Renaissance, blacks began to participate in the high culture that was to match that of Europe.  They were hoping to be looked at as a productive human race as opposed to the more animalistic treatment they had received in the south.  The flip side was that at the same time, families were piling in on top of each other struggling to pay rent.  Rooms were rented out in shifts, and parties were held to try and cover the expense that was a much higher percentage, relative to their salaries than in other areas(Gioia).  

Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington followed Johnson, as they tried to respond to the environment that existed in Harlem during the 1920s.  They brought a largeness to jazz, with the beginning of the big band which reflected their urban surroundings as they played in places like the Cotton Club, and Club Alabam(Gioia).  The audience wanted a place to dance and let loose, and in order to keep their jobs band leaders were willing to give the audience what they wanted.  Russian philosopher Mikhail Bhaktin’s proposed that literary works are affected by works from the past as well as works in the future.  Similarly jazz bands used the stage as an outlet to communicate the struggles of working for white club owners and never quite feeling free.  This was shared by working class that simply punched the clock.  As the audience responded artists were pushed to explore those feelings further.  The instruments were described as sounding human which resonated with the audience, both black and white, bringing down walls of segregation and opening up the genre to a broader audience.

The Love Child of Ragtime and Blues

The humidity was almost suffocating, as breeding grounds for vectors of disease pooled in the swamps and marshes.  In the underbelly of a fading metropolitan city, known as New Orleans, emotions poured out of back alleys and through city streets in the sounds of music.  As cultures from around the world whisked together with their respective genres of music, a thickening agent was created.  That binding would define and express the oppressive living conditions of the time in the music of jazz.

New Orleans was the vessel, a simmering Dutch oven, with all the ingredients needed for a shift that would change the face of American musical expression.  It was a city where bustling commerce forced together unlikely mixtures of European, African, Native American, and Asian cultures.  They would offload their goods, drink, eat, and fulfill their carnal desires, forced together in close proximity.  This mixture of cultures, combined with a local passion for brass bands, a deep religious background, and the necessity for an oppressed group of people to have a cathartic musical outlet, were precursors that would contribute to the emergence of jazz in the twentieth century.

Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, New Orleans became a trading hub as the United States lifted trade restrictions.  The steamboat made New Orleans a prosperous, metropolitan city, with global influences.  Economic prosperity would not last long, as the introduction of the railroad made the steamboat irrelevant, the Civil War put its geographical location on the losing side, and a Yellow Fever epidemic in 1878 wiped out two percent of the population (Gioia, 28).  Before the decline of the city, the progressive treatment of slaves would allow African traditions of performance to survive.  While the rest of the United States enforced strict Puritanical control over the behavior of the human currency of West Africa, New Orleans, with its European Catholic ideology, provided a more liberal atmosphere.  Slaves were allowed to gather in a place called Congo Square, on Sundays, beginning around 1817.  They used this opportunity to keep the spirit of their homeland alive.  The importance of a seamless blending between audience and performer, and the requirement of music to only exist in congruence with movement of the body and art, persisted in stark contrast to the stiffness of European performance(Thompson, pp 5-28).  While other cities, like New York and San Francisco had similar elements of cultural blending, and a population under harsh conditions(Jones, pp 95-97), several suggested sources of jazz were unique to New Orleans.  One of those sources were the Creoles of Color.  The offspring of Spanish and French masters and their African wives and mistresses, Creoles prided themselves on their ability to assimilate to European culture.  Many Creoles were classically trained European musicians, but after the Louisiana Legislative Code of 1894 classified them as African, they were forced to confront the ethnicity they had distanced themselves from.  This began a blending of European and African music that would be attributed to the emergence of jazz.  Storyville, a one time red light district of New Orleans, is suggested as one of the environs where this blending took place.  A more likely stage would have been the fish fries, lawn parties, and many social engagements where brass bands ruled the stage from sun up to sun down.  These brass bands seemed to express emotion in much the same way that the spiritual songs of the church, the work songs of the fields, and the blues music of the rural south.  There was an attempt to deal with the harsh living conditions of the times by forcing out raw emotions, giving a human voice to the instruments they played.  

It is hard to imagine jazz coming together without all the historical elements coming together.  The brass bands of the social gatherings, though, seem to be one of the most important factors that caused New Orleans to be the birthplace of jazz.  It was something that was uniquely local to the area and it permeated every aspect of life.  Whether a celebration, a somber funeral, or a gathering to raise money these brass bands were there to entertain, but also to provide a release and speak to the inner soul that longed for freedom and equality.