The History of Jazz (2 page)

Beyond its purely musicological impact, the Latin-Catholic culture, whose influence permeated nineteenth-century New Orleans, benignly fostered the development of jazz music. This culture, which bore its own scars of discrimination, was far more tolerant in accepting unorthodox social hybrids than the English-Protestant ethos that prevailed in other parts of the New World. Under Spanish law, slaves could be set free without official permission, could own property, and had the right of
coartación
, which allowed them to purchase their own freedom based on an adjudicated contract. This comparatively less rigid atmosphere helped shape attitudes and behavior patterns in New Orleans; indeed, it is hard to imagine the dances of Congo Square taking place in the more Anglicized colonies of the Americas.

Less than half a century after the city’s founding, in 1764, New Orleans was ceded by France to Spain. In 1800, Napoleon succeeded in forcing its return from Spain, but this renewed French control lasted only three years before possession passed to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. As a result, French and Spanish settlers played a decisive role in shaping the distinctive ambiance of New Orleans during the early nineteenth century, yet immigrants from Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, and Scotland also made substantial contributions to the local culture. The city’s black inhabitants were equally diverse: many had been transported directly from various parts of Africa, especially from Senegambia, in the early years of French settlement;
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some were native-born Americans; still others came to the United States via the Caribbean. Civil unrest in Hispaniola was especially influential in bringing new immigrants, both black and white, to New Orleans: in 1808 alone, as many as six thousand refugees fleeing the Haitian revolution arrived in the city, after being forced to leave Cuba. The resulting amalgam—an unprecedented mixture of European, Caribbean, African, and American elements—made Louisiana into perhaps the most seething ethnic melting pot that the nineteenth-century world could produce.

This cultural gumbo would serve as breeding ground for many of the great hybrid musics of modern times. Not just jazz, but also cajun, zydeco, blues, and other new styles flourished as a result of this laissez-faire environment. In New Orleans warm, moist atmosphere, sharp delineations between groups and customs gradually softened and ultimately gave way. Today, the city’s residents of Irish descent celebrate St Patrick’s Day by parading in a Second Line of their own. At Mardi Gras time, black celebrants still dress up as Native Americans, sometimes adopting costumes that cost thousands of dollars—a practice that dates back to the nineteenth century. Consider, as well, the distinctive culinary arts of the region, with their creative mixture of French, Spanish, African, Choctaw, German, and other traditions. Locals here are hardly surprised by fluid rituals that refuse to be limited by racial or ethnic categories. Indeed, the masquerades of Mardi Gras are a fitting symbol for this city, where the most familiar cultural artifacts appear in the strangest garb.

Yet the decisive creative currents in this society came from the African American underclass. Should this surprise us? The reputation of musicians, and other performing artists, as outsiders or pariahs, as practitioners who exist at the limits of the socially acceptable, has a long tradition dating back to ancient times. Just a few decades ago, many cultures still retained religious prohibitions asserting the “uncleanliness” of believers eating at the same table as musicians. And long before music became a consumer product, one more form of idle entertainment for the masses, it was the domain of mystics and magicians, the excluded and ostracized. The story of jazz moving into the center of society from a starting point at the fringes is but one more chapter in this ongoing saga.

Even so, the role of slave labor in the production of African American song makes for an especially sad interlude in this melancholy history. The presence of Africans in the New World, the first documented instance of which occurred in Jamestown in 1619, predated the arrival of the Pilgrims by one year. By 1807, some 400,000 native-born Africans had been brought to America,
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most of them transported from West Africa. Forcibly taken away from their homeland, deprived of their freedom, and torn from the social fabric that had given structure to their lives, these unwilling immigrants clung with even greater fervor to those elements of their culture that they could carry with them. Music and folktales were among the most resilient of these. Even after family, home, and possessions were taken away, they remained.

In this context, the decision of the New Orleans City Council, in 1817, to establish an official site for slave dances stands out as an exemplary degree of tolerance. In other locales, African elements in the slaves’ music were discouraged or explicitly suppressed. During the Stono Rebellion of 1739, drums had been used to signal an attack on the white population. Anxious to prevent further uprisings, South Carolina banned any use of drums by slaves. The Georgia code went even further in prohibiting not only drums, but also horns or other loud instruments. Religious organizations assisted in the efforts to control the African elements of the slaves’ music. The
Hymns and Spiritual
Songs
of Dr. Isaac Watts, published in various colonial editions beginning in the early 1700s, was frequently used as a way of “converting” African Americans through more edifying examples of Western music.

We are fortunate that these attempts bore little success. Indeed, in many cases, the reverse of the intended effect took place: European idioms were transformed and enriched by the African tradition onto which they were grafted. Alan Lomax, the pioneering scholar and preserver of African American music, writes:

Blacks had Africanized the psalms to such an extent that many observers described black lining hymns as a mysterious African music. In the first place, they so prolonged and quavered the texts of the hymns that only a recording angel could make out what was being sung. Instead of performing in an individualized sort of unison or heterophony, however, they blended their voices in great unified streams of tone. There emerged a remarkable kind of harmony, in which every singer was performing variations on the melody at his or her pitch, yet all these ornaments contributed to a polyphony of many ever changing strands—surging altogether like seaweed swinging with the waves or a leafy tree responding to a strong wind. Experts have tried and failed to transcribe this river-like style of polyphony. It rises from a group in which all singers can improvise together, each one contributing something personal to an ongoing collective effect—a practice common in African and African-American tradition. The outcome is music as powerful and original as jazz, but profoundly melancholy, for it was sung into being by hard-pressed people.
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This ability of African performance arts to transform the European tradition of composition while assimilating some of its elements is perhaps the most striking and powerful evolutionary force in the history of modern music. The genres of music that bear the marks of this influence are legion. Let’s name a few: gospel, spirituals, soul, rap, minstrel songs, Broadway musicals, ragtime, jazz, blues, R&B, rock, samba, reggae, funk, salsa, calypso, even some contemporary operatic and symphonic music.

The history of jazz is closely intertwined with many of these other hybrid genres, and tracing the various genealogies can prove dauntingly complex. For example, minstrel shows, which developed in the decades before the Civil War, found white performers in blackface mimicking, and most often ridiculing, the music, dance, and culture of the slave population. Frequently the writer of minstrel songs worked with little actual knowledge of southern black music. A surprising number of these composers hailed from the Northeast, and the most celebrated writer of minstrel-inflected songs, Stephen Foster, created a powerful, romanticized image of southern folk life despite the most limited firsthand contact—his travels in the Deep South were restricted to a single trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
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Later generations of black entertainers, influenced by the popularity of these secondhand evocations of their own culture, imitated in turn the white stereotypes of African American behavior. Thus, in its impact on early jazz, minstrel music presents a rather convoluted lineage: a black imitation of a white caricature of black music exerts its influence on another hybrid form of African and European music.

The work song, another frequently cited predecessor to jazz, is more purely African in nature—so much so that some examples recorded in the southern United States in the last century show almost no European or American influence. Here, for once, brute economics served to preserve rather than eradicate African traditions, with even the most callous overseers encouraging music making when it contributed to the productivity of the laborer. This ritualized vocalizing of black American workers, with its proud disregard for Western systems of notation and scales, came in many variants: field hollers, levee camp hollers, prison work songs, street cries, and the like. This entire category of singing has all but disappeared in our day, yet the few surviving recordings documenting this time-honored tradition reveal a powerful, evocative, and comparatively undiluted form of African music in the Americas.
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Generalizations about African music are tricky at best. Many commentators have treated the culture of West Africa as though it were a homogenous and unified body of practices. In fact, many different elements contribute to the traditions of West Africa. Even so, a few shared characteristics stand out, amid this plurality, in any study of African music—with many of these same ingredients reappearing, in a somewhat different guise, in jazz. For example, call-and-response forms that predominate in African music figure as well in the work song, the blues, jazz, and other Americanized strains of African music; yet, in its original African form, call-and-response is as much a matter of social integration as a method of performing music. It reflects a culture in which the fundamental Western separation of audience from artists is transcended. This brings us to a second unifying element of African musical traditions: the integration of performance into the social fabric. In this light, African music takes on an aura of functionality, one that defies any “pure” aesthetic attempting to separate art from social needs. Yet, since these functions are often tied to rituals and other liminal experiences, music never falls into the mundane type of functionality— background music in the dentist’s office, accompaniment to a television commercial, and so on—that one sees increasingly in the West. Integrated into ritual occasions, music retains its otherworldliness for the African, its ability to rise above the here and now. The cross-fertilization between music and dance is a third unifying theme in traditional African cultures—so deeply ingrained that scholar John Miller Chernoff remarks that, for an African, “understanding” a certain type of music means, in its most fundamental sense, knowing what dance it accompanies.
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A fourth predominant feature of African music is the focus on sounds in instances where Western composers would rely on notes—one of the results of this profound shift in perspective is the use of instruments to emulate the subtle modulations of the human voice. This technique, which also plays a key role in early jazz music, even extends to percussion instruments, most notably in the
kalangu
, the remarkable talking drum of West Africa. An emphasis on improvisation and spontaneity is a further shared trait of different African musical cultures, and these too have figured prominently in—and, to some extent, have come to define—the later jazz tradition.

However, the most distinctive characteristic, the core element of African music, is its extraordinary richness of rhythmic content. It is here one discovers the essence of the African musical heritage, as well as the key to unlocking the mystery of its tremendous influence on so many disparate schools of twentieth-century music. The first Western scholars who attempted to come to grips with this rhythmic vitality, whether in its African or Americanized form, struggled merely to find a vocabulary and notational method to encompass it. Henry Edward Krehbiel, author of an early study of African American folk songs, conveys the frustration of these endeavors in describing the African musicians he encountered at the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893:

The players showed the most remarkable rhythmical sense and skill that ever came under my notice. Berlioz in his supremest effort with his army of drummers produced nothing to compare in artistic interest with the harmonious drumming of these savages. The fundamental effect was a combination of double and triple time, the former kept by the singers, the latter by the drummers, but it is impossible to convey the idea of the wealth of detail achieved by the drummers by means of the exchange of the rhythms, syncopations of both simultaneously, and dynamic devices.
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Krehbiel engaged the services of John Comfort Fillmore, an expert in Native American music, in an attempt to notate the playing of these musicians, but eventually they gave up in despair. “I was forced to the conclusion,” Krehbiel later recalled, in an account in which irritation and awe are present in equal doses, “that in their command of the [rhythmic] element, which in the musical art of the ancient Greeks stood higher than either melody or harmony, the best composers of today were the veriest tyros compared with these black savages.”

The vocabularies of certain Eskimo tribes, we are told, possess dozens of words for
snow
—where other cultures see only an undifferentiated substance, they perceive subtle differences and a plethora of significations. Similarly, for the African, virtually every object of day-to-day life could be a source of rhythm, an instrument of percussion, and an inspiration for the dance. The tools and implements with which the African subdued the often hostile surrounding environment may well have been the first sources of instrumental music on our planet. Here we perhaps come to realize the hidden truth in the double meaning of the word
instrument
, which signifies both a mechanism for altering the natural world and a device for creating sound. We begin with the given: shells, flints, animal hides, trees, stones, sticks. And we end up with a dazzling array of instruments, both implements used in day-to-day life—weapons, tools, wheels, building devices—and in music making—drums, rattles, scrapers, gongs, clappers, friction instruments, percussion boards, and the like. But even earlier, the human body itself must have served as a rich source of musical sound. “Despite the non-African’s conception of African music in terms of drums,” historian John Storm Roberts has pointed out, “the African instruments most often used by the greatest number of people in the greatest variety of societies are the human voice and the human hands, used for clapping.”
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Both approaches to music—one that reached out and found it in the external world, the second that drew it from the physiological characteristics of the human form—came with the African to America.