Jazz and American modernism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Early in the 20th century, jazz evolved from the blues tradition, but also incorporated many other musical and cultural elements. In New Orleans, often considered to be the birth place of jazz, musicians benefited from the influx of Spanish and French colonial influences. In this city, a unique ethnic cultural mix and looser racial prohibitions allowed African Americans more influence than in other regions of the South. The Spanish American War brought Northern soldiers to the region with their bands. The resulting music adopted sounds from the new brass instruments. During the Great Migration, jazz spread from New Orleans to New York, Chicago, and other cities, incorporating new sounds along the way. Harlem, New York City, became the new center for the jazz age.
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Jazz – music of integration
Jazz music, as a central element of American culture, has its roots in Black slave culture. The music combined elements from African call and response patterns into its instrumentation and riffs. In its early beginnings jazz was looked critically upon by parts of the white population, who considered jazz and ragtime rhythms to be "savage crash and bang" and denigrated the genre as a product "not of innovators, but of incompetents." Its expressive and pulsating style initially served racial stereotypes in the public mind and was widely encountered with skeptical rejection. Despite this phenomenon of animosity towards a rising Black cultural significance, American writer Lawrence W. Levine interprets the role of jazz as a catalyst of a shifting national consciousness:
Culturally, we remained to a much larger extent than we have yet recognized, a colonized people attempting to define itself in the shadow of the former imperial power. Jazz was an expression of that other side of ourselves that strove to recognize the positive aspects of our newness and our heterogeneity; that learned to be comfortable with the fact that a significant part of our heritage derived from Africa and other non-European sources; and that recognized in the various syncretized cultures that became so characteristic of the United States an embarrassing weakness but a dynamic source of strength.
After all, it was in the nature of jazz to strive for cultural convergence between Blacks and Whites; according to saxophonist Sonny Rollins, "Jazz has always been a music of integration". During the 1920s and 1930s jazz gained considerably in popularity and aroused increasing interest in young whites who were attracted by the artistic, personal as well as cultural freedom of expression this new musical form had to offer. Well-known white musicians such as Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Milton Mezzrow, Muggsy Spanier or Joe Sullivan were inspired by Afro-American icons like Louis Armstrong. The acceptance of jazz soon spread across the Atlantic and, by the mid-20th century, made it international. Today, jazz music is regarded as an integral and vibrant part of American culture, the unique native music of America, a worldwide representative of Afro-American culture.
Jazz as American
A compilation article appearing in the New York Times in 1923 proclaimed jazz to be "A contribution of America to the arts. It is recognized the world over as part of a musical folk lore of this country: it is as thoroughly and typically American as the Monroe Doctrine or the Fourth of July, or baseball."
Jazz’s American-ness begins with its roots. Jazz was a product of the African Americans, a cultural group distinct to America. Though the early blues sang distinctly of the sorrows of a displaced people, jazz was something else. The African American labor class who gave birth to jazz were not subject to the education of other white musicians; black minstrels were able to escape the pressure to "Europeanize" their art. Culture (with a capital C) essentially demanded that Americans prefer, commend, and reiterate all things European. Free from these constraints, jazz progressed in an uncharted manner. In 1925, Irving Berlin called jazz "American folk music" and cited influences ranging from "old Southern Songs" and the "Negro spirituals," to a "tinge of the Russian and Italian folk songs," but Berlin concluded that it was "typically American above all." Like the nation where it was created, jazz blended separate ethnic and cultural influences into a new and different product, combining elements from Black identity with other immigrant influences. It incorporated the sounds of the South and the modern, and adapted elements from urban skylines. Jazz was distinctly American in that it blended the character of different peoples, but still let the individual have his chance to express himself in an improvisational solo, and therefore asserted the "rugged individualism"that already characterized the nation. Furthermore, jazz began to break down the barrier between performer and audience. It "democratized" culture, making it accessible to the common person.
Jazz as modern
Jazz is distinctly modern in sound and manner. According to Lawrence Levine, "Jazz was, or seemed to be the product of a new age…raucous, discordant…accessible, spontaneous…openly an interactive, participatory music." Daniel Gregory Mason charged that jazz "is so perfectly adapted to robots that the one could be deduced from the other. Jazz is thus the exact musical reflection of modernist industrial capitalism," and jazz has also been likened to the sound of rivetingIrving Berlin called jazz the "music of the machine agePlayers drew influences from everyday street talk in Harlem, as well as from French Impressionist paintings. The improvised nature begs the player to dismantle and examine pre-existing structure within the music. As tribute to the modernity of jazz, one only needs to examine the various media that drew influences from the music. The musical Shuffle Along is one of the earliest and most successful jazz adaptation to the stage, jazz ballets appeared in New York City’s Metropolitan Theatre, Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown drew poetry from the Jazz music they experienced, and jazz music colored the paintings of Aaron Douglas, Miguel Covarrubias, and many others.
See also
For a wider, more formal account, please see Jazz, Jazz Age
