April was jazz appreciation month, with the centennial anniversary of Queen of Jazz Ella Fitzgerald just a few days ago, and International Jazz Sunday crowning our long May Day weekend. Hope you had a nice one…

…And All That Jazz

I think jazz is a beautiful, democratic music. It encourages musicians with very strong, and many times, very different points of view to work together as a team while, at the same time, giving them the space to express their individuality. It’s a very important art form and can be used as a model for different cultures to work together.

– Marcus Miller

In 1987 the U.S. passed a bill stating that “jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and promulgated.”

Jazz truly is a rare and valuable American cultural heritage, especially as it is so honestly American, if under ‘American’ we mean the post-Indian melting pot culture of European, Asian, African immigrants and slaves. To preserve it means preserving a socio-historical milestone and a musical expression that is timeless. To promulgate it means spreading the clearest message it carries, the principles of freedom. To understand it, well…

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

– Louis Armstrong

You definitely need certain ‘jazzgredients’ – some bitter, less sweet, some rebellious, some blue, some chains, some christ, and roaring of course. Shake, not stir, and leave it to ripen under the New Orleans sun. In no time, as F. Scott Fitzgerald says, you’ll get:

The voluptuous chords of the wedding march done in blasphemous syncopation issued in a delirious blend from the trombones and saxophones–and.

Slavery was abolished in 1865. By that time the Atlantic slave trade had forced about 400,000 African slaves to North America, along with their strong musical traditions.

“Many of the musical principles of jazz — The call-response patterns, variable intonation, pervasive rhythmic contrast, the use of repetition, the integration of music and dance, and the”percussive attack”reflect the incorporation of European elements into the ‘African mold’ — can be traced all the way back to Africa.” – Jazz specialist Scott Deveaux

If we also consider Louis Armstrong’s words, “what we play is life,” it is clear how expressive jazz really is of the African-American journey towards freedom. A journey that led from the tribal sounds of West Africa, through the hymns of a new world’s churches, work songs, plantation field hollers, cakewalks, sorrow and pain, transforming it all into spiritual liberation, when another kind was missing. The folk songs of early blues evolved into a modern mythology about survival and the basic facts of life in a post-slavery world. But even though African Americans had been ‘freed’, struggling to realize their chainless freedom and express themselves, emancipation did not exactly mean equality. They could have education, could find work, mostly in entertainment, but with hardships. Segregation is a difficult habit to beat.

Music became the means of true empowerment, the expression and experience of the freedom of spontaneity and improvisation, jazz, came riding in on the syncopated rhythms of St.Louis-sprung ragtime, gospel, folk blues and European marching bands. Jazz, where there are no limitations. Just pure intoxicating power. Frightening for some… The Klu Klux Klan reached its peak by the 1920’s with over 4 million members nationwide. Addictive for others. Freedom is one of the most addictive things out there and, as Duke Ellington said,

Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.

When the new ideas and new world order of political, economic and social changes hit America after WWI, they brought a wave of modernism, where slaves were free and women could vote, a new era, the promisee of the ‘American Dream’ with an ‘anything goes’ flamboyant lifestyle casting aside old social conventions, propped by the mass culture phenomena. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners, the rise of automobiles, white collar realities, the first commercial radio station kicked off in Pittsburg and large-scale radio broadcasts entered American homes. As African Americans headed from the South to the North, jazz arrived in Chicago and New York with the Great Migration and became the musical voice of the African-American artistic and literary movement of the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz was ‘music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions’, as Johnny Griffin said, and it typified the nonconformist aspirations of youth, black and white, roaring throughout the 1920’s, the Jazz Age.

The Chicago Mafia with Al ‘Scarface’ Capone, the prohibition of alcohol, moonshine and speakeasies, sexually emancipated free-spirited flapper girls, The Cotton Club craze, Charleston, Black Bottom, Tango, Shimmies and the Trot, all went hand in hand with this jazz-heralded age.

Flapper: “The term flapper originated in Great Britain, where there was a short fad among young women to wear rubber galoshes (an overshoe worn in the rain or snow) left open to flap when they walked. Women at this period also had the right to vote finally.”

Speakeasy: An “unlicensed saloon,” 1889 (in New York “Voice”), from speak + easy; so called from the practice of speaking quietly about such a place in public, or when inside it, so as not to alert the police and neighbors during the Prohibition (1920-1932).”

So understandably, for many African Americans jazz was a source of pride, their contribution to all-American society. For others, the term ‘jazz’ was a reminder of an oppressive and racist society, the label prejudiced white people gave to what they saw as the morally questionable anti-Christian musical expression of ex-slaves.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

– Nina Simone

The word ‘jazz’ is believed to come from a 1860 slang term ‘jasm’ meaning ‘pep, energy’ and a 1912 article mentioning a ‘jazz ball’ in baseball meant “it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it”. Some scholars also think it is a variation on the slang ‘jism’, which meant ‘spirit, energy, spunk’ in 1842, but it also means semen and sperm. Eubie Blake elaborated on this shadier slang connotation:

When Broadway picked it up, they called it ‘J-A-Z-Z.’ It wasn’t called that. It was spelled ‘J-A-S-S.’ That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn’t say it in front of ladies.

Whatever its origins, however deeply rooted it is in African American history and poor, black, urban society, jazz music was at its peak all the way until the Great Depression, gaining a large audience among white Americans too, and elsewhere around the world.

New Orleans jazz branched into 1930’s swing big bands and Kansas City jazz, and waltzy Gypsy jazz. Then Bebop appeared in the 1940’s with less danceable faster tempos and chord-based improvisation, a ‘musician’s music’, and Cool jazz to balance it out. The next decade brought free jazz and hard bop, modal jazz, leading to jazz-rock fusion in the late 1960’s and the commercial smooth jazz fusion of the 1980’s, Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz in the 2000’s, leaving its imprint on funk, rock and roll and hip hop as well.

Jazz was born from an energetic, raw expression of freedom and became the voice of a generation of African American youth, who did not want to repeat history, but make history. And so they have. And all that jazz.

Check out the Internet Guide to Jazz Age Slang