Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Part 1: The Roots
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| Louis Armstrong's Hot Five in the 1920s |
Well, I've listened to jazz nonstop for 50 years now, and I haven't come up with a definitive answer, I guess because there isn't one. The question being, of course: Is jazz black music? Wait, that's not quite right. Because it is. It is black in origination and the greatest figures in the evolution of the music are black as well. Maybe the better question is: To what extent is jazz white? That is to say: As a black art form is jazz immune to white influence? I would have to say no. Is this a contradiction? Yes and no. What I am saying is that when we talk about matters of origination, when we talk about influence across persons and groups, it can never be anything other than ambiguous. It's not like human life is a lab experiment in a controlled environment.
Let's go back to the roots. Even if we say that jazz is a black art form, it evolved in a dominant culture that was white. Or sort of white, a matter I'll discuss in a moment. So European harmony and modes and styles are part of the building blocks of the art form. When one engages with said elements, it's impossible to believe it wouldn't impact your musical conception somehow, no? The other main aspect was African in origination. Put them together, and voila, you have the blues, then jazz. And ragtime first. A relevant phenomenon is the black dance form called the cakewalk.* As I understand it, it started when the slaves wanted to mock or satirize what they perceived as the excess formality of the dances they witnessed in the plantation mansion. But they must have liked what they came up with, since no one is going to just keep doing something as a joke. A joke is a onetime thing. Since black people knew more about white culture than vice versa, they could take the lead in hybridizing.
Yet, after the Civil War, more and more mixing and coexistence across races began to occur, and white people could grow up in the south with daily contact with black culture, especially in places like New Orleans, the hybrid capital of America. In terms of racial mix there, we have the Creole people, to say nothing of all the many unclassifiable manifestations. Culturally speaking, the hybrids across races could be infinite. And let me just say here, if you grow up with something, and you love it, I really don't think it's fair to call that "appropriation."
Indeed, it was Ralph Ellison's famous contention "that most American whites are culturally part Negro American without even realizing it." He said this in part to reveal the absurdity of racism, which might contend that there is some pure white culture to uphold. But it cuts the other way, too. It's also absurd for black people to think that any expression at all of "blackness" in white culture is nefarious and malign. And further, as Stanley Crouch loved to point out in response to the Black Consciousness movement of the 60s and beyond, his identity will always be 100 times more American than African, for better or for worse.
The blackness of American white culture really jumped out at me recently when I was reading an article about Louis Armstrong’s encounter with a noted European singer, maybe during the 30s. Said white European singer was on hand to do a shared musical performance for TV with Pops. Anyway, she had no idea at all how to syncopate and place notes just off the beat to create momentum and body feeling -- swing if you will. Pops had to teach her. Even then, it would be preposterous to think that good white American musicians would have difficulty with that. Sure, some white people are better than others at swinging, but as the years have gone by fewer and fewer white people are strangers to this thing we used to call getting down.
* After posting this I came across a different origin story for the cakewalk. Let's call it a subject needing further research.
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