Jazz/Culture/Violence

Where does jazz fit in the post-Newtown discussion about violence and popular culture? 

While not really in the mix now, jazz has historically played the role that hip hop, some kinds of rock and video games now play. This short overview will look at mainstream perceptions of the relationship between jazz and "violence" and how that perception changed through time. 

Jazz grabbed a lot of pieces of American culture to create itself: field shouts, preaching, spirituals, minstrelsy, blues, ragtime, parlor music, brass band music. Further, most of those were, themselves, hybrid strains. 

Some of those influences, like spirituals, preaching and parlor music, self-identified as "genteel," or "uplifting." Some, like field shouts and hollers and blues, were labeled "slave music;" and were, by implication, "low." Minstrelsy and ragtime were associated with shakier morality-more urban, apt to indulge in "sophisticated" humor and often associated with houses of ill repute. Brass band music was energetic and its association with circuses(entertainment) reduced its moral tone. However, many of the trappings of performance-the military, the village green-were less suspect. Call it somewhere in between.

Each of these genres was also associated with the relative presence of, or lack of, violence. It's easy to see which was which.

By the turn of the 20th century, a music we now see as incipient jazz was being played by Buddy Bolden's group, Jelly Roll Morton and others. While it contained many musical influences, both "high" and"low," and was played at benign venues like parades and picnics, it was more closely associated with Storyville gut bucket joints, or the rough parts of cities like St. Louis and Memphis. Often described as wild and uncontrolled, the music was acquiring a specifically disreputable image.

Musicians in various cities were able to work both sides of the fence, playing improvisational music in joints and waltzes and quadrilles at balls and cotillions. With the unusual exception of James Reese Europe and the Clef Club in New York City, there was a racialist system which relegated darker-skinned musicians to gin joints, parades and lower-paying gigs, while whites or lighter-skinned creoles (in New Orleans) were able to work anywhere.

As the teens proceeded, there was more mixing among musicians and bands were expected to play many different kinds of "high" or "low-down" music, but by this point, jazz had provoked a serious moral backlash. Crusaders from many cultural niches helped to position it solidly as an anti-establishment music, associated with the demi-monde.

King Oliver and co. in Chicago

With the onset of Prohibition in 1919, jazz became anthemic for people flouting bourgeois norms. Bootleggers and other prospering members of the criminal class moved into the nightclub business and jazz was the music of choice. While merely a bystander, jazz became more specifically linked to violence, and moralistic, anti-jazz campaigns were common.

The backlash against Prohibition and its eventual demise in 1933 coincided with the rise of "swing" music. The cultural perception of jazz shifted and the music became less something to epater le bourgeoisie and more something you'd play on the jukebox in the malt shop. During WWII, the music "played its part," helped to sell war bonds and became even less associated with violence (any irony there?). 

The Connection

Post-war, jazz ran into more trouble because of its association with narcotics.  Mainstream perception, subject to the paranoia of McCarthy-ism and the patina of Eisenhower-era placidity, magnified the connection between jazz and a violent underworld. Still, it was not a monolithic public response. Rock and Roll records were being burned and benign public beatniks like Maynard G. Krebs were, like, acceptable to the masses.

By the 1960's, jazz moved toward a more centrist moral/cultural position. A wave of spiritualism, spearheaded by John Coltrane and wider adoption of the Muslim religion by jazz musicians had defused the jazz-violence connection. Also, rock was now clearly the music of the counter-culture.

In the following decades, the common perception of jazz, to the extent it was thought about it at all, changed little. Rock musicians remained the bad boys until they were supplanted by hip hop artists. Video games then joined them under the public microscope.

Even though jazz always had one (sometimes small) foot in elite social circles, it also talked about things that gentility-or hypocrisy-precluded as part of the cultural dialogue and which, at the least, had overtones of violence. So, while there are "political" dimensions to any outsider-minority-generated art, mainstream moral codes, at least in America, have always exerted more of a sanctioning influence over jazz than has The State. Even during the 1950's, when the narcotics-jazz connection was widely noted, the State Department sent jazz musicians around the world to try and help win the Cold War. 

The government has been too concerned with monitoring domestic political dissent and with its own overseas military campaigns, to pay much attention to the relationship of culture to violence on the home front. Even well-positioned crusaders like Tipper Gore have had a limited influence on government action. 

The debate has been dominated by the people with the loudest voice and the most money (the NRA, if you haven't figured it out), who have successfully reinforced archaic myths of rugged individualism and the right to the untrammeled arming of our populace.

Jazz Makes a Standard

Pianist Robert Glasper said, in reference to The Great American Songbook: "It's time for a new standard. We can't do the old thing forever." Given the many attempts to bring jazz into hip hop or hip hop into jazz, I then posed the question: How far can you bend a standard before it breaks?  

Sung to the tune of Melancholy Baby: "Come to me my broken metatarsal"

Jazz has always been in the business of bending tunes. In fact, it seems completely reasonable to think that the Great American Songbook would be a much smaller part of American musical culture if these now "standard" tunes had not been plucked from their original Broadway or Hollywood context by jazz performers, who dug out and actualized their rhythmic, harmonic and melodic implications.

Going back to the 1920's, there were both vocal and instrumental jazz/pop versions of tunes originally used on stage and in film. Working alone, neither sung versions or instrumental versions could have done the job, but together they showed how a tune could be transmuted into a musical entity that transcended its initial conception and performance.

To see if this process unfolded in a way that is comparable to current cross-fertilization efforts between hip hop and jazz, let's look at how the process traditionally happened, using one of the great jazz war horses: "All the Things You Are."


With music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, Jr. this song originally came from a show called "Very Warm For May." The history of the relationship between this tune and jazz is long and deep and also a little perplexing. All sources say the show opened on November 17, 1939, but according to Dr. Chalfen, there were two jazz-inflected versions recorded before that date: Tommy Dorsey's on October 20, '39 and Artie Shaw's, on Oct. 26. The sheet music says the song wasn't copyrighted until 1940, so maybe someone heard it in previews in Boston or New London and rushed out arrangements before the legal profession could stick its oar in. Sheer speculation.


In any case, this is the way Kern and Hammerstein conceived it to be performed in 1939 (as produced in a later re-creation):


The song was lovely in its fashion, but completely rooted in one particular era and style: Broadway Musical-shading-toward Light Opera. Kern marked the chorus a "Burthen," and "cantabile," (singable). These are archaic and/or fancified terms, reflecting Kern's roots in 1910's musical theatre. Withal, given its sophisticated harmony, it was clearly a song worth the attention of jazz people.


As noted above, in 1939, before the show actually opened, Artie Shaw recorded it with Helen Forrest. The first part (verse) was eliminated. There is a "classy" intro (big brass chords) before the low-down-ish piano slides in. Then, Shaw's clarinet chorus is a great illustration of how jazz claims source material and makes it its own. Forrest's vocal follows Shaw's lead. 

Although we're focusing on vocal transformations, we need to have an instrumental version, done in a style that would have been formative for any jazz vocalist. Here's Charlie Parker, with Red Rodney, Al Haig, Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes in 1949. 


This is Ella Fitzgerald in 1963, long after the song had been enfolded by jazz into its protean bosom. The tempo is up a bit, the background is more overtly jazz-like and Ella inflects the song all the way through. Even though Ella could handle a soprano range, the key has been brought down to take the gleam off and give it a darker feeling. When she picks it up after the instrumental, she completely alters the melody, then takes it home.


Through the years, various jazzmen wrote new melodies for the song's chord changes, including "Bird of Paradise" by Charlie Parker, "Prince Albert" by Kenny Dorham and "Boston Bernie" by Dexter Gordon. Charles Mingus retitled it "All the Things You Could Be By Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife was Your Mother." 

Addendum: Who first came up with what became the classic jazz intro for "All the Things You Are?" It's completely unlike the Kern verse. I'm thinking that Dizzy wrote it, but would love to hear from anyone who can spec this out. Thanks, Steve.

"Stereotypes in Black Music" by Alan Kurtz, reviewed by Steve Provizer

Author Alan Kurtz's thesis is: since at least the turn of the 20th century, African-American performers have been fulfilling and/or re-inforcing stereotypes of the naturally-rhythmic primitive savage-i.e., sustaining "white ethnocentric fantasies"-to advance their careers. Episodes include: Minstrelsy, the "coon song" craze, vaudeville, popular black theater ("In Dahomey," Shuffle Along," etc), Ellington's "Jungle Music," Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, bebop, R&B, the jazz avant-garde of the 60's, disco and rap/hip hop.

Mr. Kurtz says he wants the book to "rankle" and just to make sure-unlike Monty Python's Inquisitioners-he never bothers with the comfy chair. Instead, he wields the weapons of sarcasm and innuendo. The rhetorical bombast doesn't fully negate the credibility of his thesis, but it does make reasoned argument and subtle analysis seem less important to the author than the need to vent.

Mr. Kurtz would like to re-write the book on many musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane. He calls Dizzy the "Carmen Miranda of Bebop," whose interest in Latin rhythms was calculated solely to take advantage of pop trends and broaden his popularity. It's interesting that Dizzy kept up that charade for another 50 years.

Mr. Kurtz sucks all the spirituality out of Coltrane's life and music and simply reduces him to being one of the purveyors of "New Black Music" of the 60's. "...the New Black Music," he says, "represented no one and nothing beyond the lacerated ulcerations of a few pathologically dyspeptic outpatients with saxophones."

Almost half the book is given over to an analysis of hip hop lyrics. It is a wearisome litany for several reasons. First, for little-old bourgeois me the lyrics themselves are pretty vile. They speak for themselves, but Mr. Kurtz won't let them. A biting and incessant sarcasm accompanies us through the journey. Was hip hop's lifestyle and music simply a play for more market share, a reversion to savagery or might there be some other social elements at play? The author does attempt to provide a cultural context, but the parameters of his context consist only of censorship-crazed prigs, calculating records execs and gagstas. Any other approach to hip hop gets not short shrift-it gets no shrift.

Mr. Kurtz chooses to look at episodes like Louis Armstrong wearing a jungle costume in a Hollywood movie not in the light of the pervasive racism of the time, nor does he leave room for the possibility of Armstrong's transcending the trappings of the part. In this book, character is one-dimensional, motivations base and deeds irreversible. This is why Abbey Lincoln's posing for an early processed-hair ad means her future political activity can't be taken seriously.

Does he occasionally sweep away some race-based cant? Yes. For example, his analysis of the difference between Joe Turner and Bill Haley's version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" seems on the money: it was energy that elevated Haley over Turner, not racism. His explanation of why and how some black R&B artists were able to cross over without compromise is well reasoned.

Mr. Kurtz's breezy style often seems out of place, but is easy to read and sometimes good for a laugh, as when he calls a Life magazine round table on modern art "..an overlong exhalation of hot air by Fifteen Distinguished Windbags."

There's an occasional hint that the author sees more layers than he lets on, saying that the goal of  "Enacting totems of their own debasement," may perhaps be "...to defuse the totem's power by, in effect, beating your enemy to the punch–-even if it means punching yourself in the face." Then, he adds: "Or it may betray a deeper sense of collective inferiority."

He puts a disclaimer in the first chapter: "This is not an indictment of African Americans as a whole or of their music generally[his bold], but rather a critical look at one microscopic slice of black culture." That seems to be an invitation to judge his ideas on their own merit, but the author's narrow perspective undermines that effort.

Once in a while, it would have been nice for Mr. Kurtz to step back, take a deep breath and enjoy the music of an ocean vista. As it is, he chooses to relentlessly scrutinize a single drop of water trapped on a microscope slide, and everything he sees looks like it escaped from a horror movie.

For another perspective on this book, there's an excellent analysis done by Ed Leimbacher at his blog Eye Witness.

I also suggest reading the various, contentious blog postings about Randy Sandke's book "Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythol­ogy, Pol­i­tics, and Busi­ness of Jazz."