Briefly, citing written academic articles in a post so entrenched in audiovisual mediums didn’t seem ‘hip’ as the Jazz cats would say, so I’ve also referred to various documentary clips of musicians performing and speaking about their music. Also I’d recommend reading this blog post with this song playing in the background, as a reference for the energy levels of the music (and for an amazing tenor sax solo)!
What do you get if you combine all the swing of a big band, energy of a bustling New York in the late 30s, and thousands of hours of practice? Bebop! Originating deep in the swing bands popular in most every dance club in the USA, bebop quickly had to fight its own war in establishing itself as the eminent genre of music for the Jazz musician. To give a brief overview
of Bebop I’ll hand it over to renowned trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who describes the ‘small group setting’, ‘bringing back the blues’, but most significantly, the importance of improvisation (inventing your solo entirely on the spot, instead of reciting pre-composed lines). This ‘improv’ allowed musicians, previously constrained by the uniform nature of big bands to truly sing free, drawing on whatever their influences may be to create fantastically innovative recordings.
So how does the battle of Bebop vs traditional Swing relate to our classical idea of war? In more ways than you’d think! Due to its strong roots in African rhythms and musicians, the Nazis – and later the Japanese quickly moved to ban all from listening to Jazz music, how Jazz was just another ‘Jewish plot against German culture’, and the ‘art of the subhuman’ (NPR, 2012). Propaganda posters (like the one pictured) were put up to combat the devilish Jazz music, and the Nazis even resorted to arresting children who dared listen to classics like Charlie Parker ripping a sax solo over Anthropology (Fackler, 1996).
The American military quickly realised the power that Jazz could have as a morale-booster for the troops, using big names like Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman to raise funds for the war effort through concerts and radio shows. There are even examples of these broadcasts being “sent into enemy territories” in order to gain more sympathy for the American forces (Erenberg, Lewis A, 1998).
This use of ‘Jazz diplomacy’ continued well after the war ended, with small Bebop bands sent – often fully funded by the US government – into Soviet countries to win the local people over as “ideological allies” (Guardian, 2014). Upon the first concert by Dave Brubeck’s famous quartet (from ‘Take Five’ fame), reportedly the cheers of the crowd represented “a whole era of propaganda and demonization just evaporat[ing] in seconds” (Time, 2017).
Jazz. While the name might suggest smooth elevator music to some, to many it represents a history of conflict; between musicians, genres, and even nations. As I listen to John Coltrane’s goosebump-inducing spiritual epic ‘A Love Supreme’, for me, Jazz signifies the things that can both start wars and end them: competition, power, free expression, unpredictability, and togetherness.
For every musician mentioned I’ve put my favourite song of theirs as links in the bottom, in case you want to hear some more!
Dizzy Gillespie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09BB1pci8_o
Charlie Parker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmroWIcCNUI
Louis Armstrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWzrABouyeE
Benny Goodman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2S1I_ien6A
Dave Brubeck Quartet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHdU5sHigYQ
John Coltrane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zyr0IDaRXQ
Bibliography:
Interviews with Dizzy Gillespie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftsjNiqwhSc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30LDSn5uioA
Interview with Louis Armstrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc3Vs3q6tiU
https://www.npr.org/2012/03/26/149394949/jazz-race-collide-with-war-in-1930s-europe).
http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/jazz-under-the-nazis/).
Erenberg, Lewis A.. Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1097&context=curcp_13
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/07/how-jazz-became-voice-of-freedom-in-poland
I think Jazz is an interesting context because so much of it is rooted in conflict. Slavery played a huge role in its development in the US. The forced migration and oppression of hundreds of thousands of Africans to America was barbaric and left them both physically and spiritually dislocated and oppressed. Through this immense conflict and persecution, music remained an integral part of their identity.
In his lecture, Hirini discussed how Māori adopted Christianity and adapted it to their cultural identity in a different way from Pākehā. In a similar way, African slaves adopted and adapted other aspects of Western culture. James Lincoln Collier explains how the “emotional or functional significance” of African music and culture was combined with the form of European music such as their instruments, scales, and song forms. As we’ve seen throughout the course, conflict can change and develop technology, and it can also change and develop culture. Hip-hop, another musical genre developed by African Americans, has many of its roots in Jazz. Similarly, hip-hop came from a merging of cultures from people who felt subjugated and used music to express this.
As you mention in your post, there has been a lot of conflict within Jazz and I found it interesting to learn about the role the American military had in promoting Jazz. Another aspect to the internal conflict in Jazz is the way that seem people have seen it to be appropriated and taken away from African Americans. Minstrel shows which reinforced racist stereotypes played a significant role in popularising Jazz in the US. Although this meant that African American music was seen and appreciated by a wider audience, it also continued to oppress African Americans without giving credit to them. Racial conflict has played an immense role in the development of Jazz.
Jazz’s history is one full of conflict. It was used initially to try and deal with horrific conflict, and later became a site of conflict itself. We should appreciate Jazz but should also recognise some of its horrific origins.
Sources:
James Lincoln Collier, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
https://morningsidereview.org/essay/black-rhythm-white-power/
As a small-time jazz musician myself, this article is a nice reminder that music’s history (especially more recently) is a lot wider and far reaching than I tend to think of it being. The fact that jazz music was banned under the Nazi Germany and Japan just shows how powerful music is. Music pushes boundaries not just within its own world, but also in the wider political culture it belongs to – style, attitude, and the people behind the music can all be used as a force for subversion of social norms, quite aside from just creating a unique and memorable groove. Your mention on conflict inside the jazz music world is also a fun topic – not only was conflict a central theme of jazz’s very inception, but new genres are always popping up and competing against each other in a common quest for self-realization and perfection.
I also think its interesting to consider the way jazz (and its blues and ragtime predecessors) functioned as the voice of the oppressed in America, facilitating the gradual changing of attitudes and equality that African American activists and their allies fought so hard to achieve (although there’s still a ways to go on that front). In that sense, jazz was intrinsically linked to conflicts within the US as well as abroad.
The use of jazz as a sort of culture bombing was pretty amusing too, but in retrospect it doesn’t seem so surprising! When people you thought to be the enemy produce music that resonates across borders, it humanizes them and also gives the impression that they must have things sorted. While I hesitate a little to take an American paper reporting on American Cold War diplomacy at its word, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. Not much propaganda can stand up to the power of Dave Brubeck and co.
First of all, thank you for the jazz recommendations. I’ll be sure to add them to my Spotify playlist : ). To me, music is transcendent. Music is taught all around the globe. However if musicians from different cultures gather in a jazz bar one night they can make music that melts away the differences we perceive in other people and instead crafts a beautiful, shared, human experience like none other. Regardless of age, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, music is able to create the feeling like we’re all connected, all one and the same regardless of petty wars and conflicts.
However, on the back of the idea that music bridges gaps, especially how you mentioned that America sent over Jazz musicians to the soviet union to essentially brag about the freedom of the west, it’s impossible to ignore the glaring racial issues America was dealing with back home. Where Duke Ellington was praised in the 1930’s, it was only in 1960 where the first Black kid was enrolled in a White elementary school. The student, Ruby Bridges, is 65 and still alive. This dichotomy is alarming to me and prompts some questions. Music is great and it bridges gaps, but I doubt it can bridge the giant scar of hundreds of years of slavery and racism in America. Why were the Black Jazz musicians accepted so easily in American society? (‘Easily’ being relative).
I read up some more and discovered that the Jazz Greats hardly spoke out about the Civil Rights (and MLK movement further down the line); perhaps out of fear of being “cancelled?” But this isn’t without giving these musicians credit, it’s difficult to speak out about these issues without being framed in racist stereotypes, and some musicians wrote about the impact their skin colour has on their life. Louis Armstrong’s “MY only sin Is in my skin What did I do To be so black and blue?” Billie Holiday talking about the 1930 lynching of two black men. And that’s another thing; the last reported lynching was 1981. Men were still being lynched at the time these Jazz greats had the peak of their career… These Jazz greats were BRAVE. For their style of music to be paraded around the world, FUNDED by the US government as the symbol for Western Freedom? My blood would boil, I could never. Gosh.
Applying this to the age we live in now, the first comment had mentioned hip-hop and rap, and this raised a really interesting comparison from hip-hop to jazz. F*ck Tha Police by N.W.A, Changes by Tupac, highlight police brutality, racism, discrimination all similarly talk to the same struggles African-Americans deal with, in the same way Holiday and Armstrong sang about their struggles as African-Americans in a white society.
I believe it was Tyler The Creator who commented on the ‘urban’ category in the Grammy’s, saying it was a politically correct version of the n-word; similar to the way America would send out the Jazz artists, it’s The Grammy’s way of seeming inclusive when in reality, Black artists like Tyler The Creator are trailblazers who are repetitively under-recognised, shoved to the side.
Am I surprised? no at this point and it’s kinda sad.