This music.
Playing Black American Music as a White American
Before the downbeat, a note…
This is a standard. Everything uttered here is made of ideas first shared by others who play, think about, and write about Black American Music, especially jazz, and about race and culture in the United States. If there is anything new it will be how I put things together and when. These juxtapositions sometimes create shapes for ideas that fit better in one ear or another. I hope others will recognize and appreciate, take note of and join in on what I am doing. There will be themes and repeats and refrains.
Ready? One, two…a one two three and
Head — Black American Music is a Gift
Nicholas Payton is a brilliant musician, writer, and the founder of a movement to replace “jazz” as a label for a variety of Black American Music with #BAM. BAM is not yet commonplace. But I hear players use it and also refer to “this music,” often in an explicit and good faith attempt to acknowledge Payton’s point. It is a simple and powerful one. Jazz is dead. Maybe it never existed at all as a coherent musical tradition in the way it is sometimes packaged for mainstream cultural consumption. Or maybe only, as Ta-Nehesi Coates and others remind us, perhaps to mark what was first a “secret” language and later, yet another in a string of sites of commercial plunder of Black culture and Black people.
Let me play a tune. A standard. I did not write it. And others play it better. It goes a little something like this: Jazz is and has always been Black American Music. What is sometimes not so widely acknowledged is the fact that music, generally, in the United States is Black music. Overwhelmingly so. Nicholas Payton asks why we make distinctions between the music of James Brown and John Coltrane when neither acknowledged or accepted the genre labels — jazz, soul — as relevant to their own work? Why indeed.
Jazz critic, culture and music historian Amiri Baracka gave a plausible answer in the 1960’s, and again and again throughout his long writing career. Baracka offered sharp critique of the relentless cultural appropriation — yes he called it precisely by that name those many years ago — by which any music understood to be American is made. Black music was and continues to be adopted, adapted, commercialized, served and re-served to new audiences as “American” music.
In his book Blues People, Baraka writes about the dilemma that Black musicians faced in the swing era
“…the only assimilation that American society provided was toward the disappearance of the most important things the black man possessed, without even the political and economic reimbursement afforded the white American. Swing demonstrates this again — that even at the expense of the most beautiful elements of the Afro-American musical tradition, to be a successful (rich) swing musician, one had to be white. Benny Goodman was the “King of Swing” not Fletcher Henderson, or Duke Ellington, or Count Basie. There was, indeed no way into the society on one’s own terms…”
When I read and listen to voices like Payton and Baraka, among many others, I understand that to come to this music as a white person requires a duty of care. This is true of any so-called American Music. Even those folk and roots styles for which we can undeniably trace Celtic origins deserve revisiting. After all, the banjo is an African instrument, a drum with strings. How did it become a central voice in a music we now think of as authentically American and mostly, if not exclusively, white?
To listen and enjoy the music called jazz, or rock and roll, rhythm & blues, country, hip hop…all of it, any of it, should begin with an acknowledgement of Black American culture and the specific art and language traditions that give it life.
To study this music? to learn it? to play it? to identify with it? Well that should require more than just an acknowledgement of its aesthetic value or even its unique cultural origins.
It should, and eventually MUST mean reckoning with Black history as American history. Certainly with slavery and oppression, with white supremacy and cultural hegemony. But with the even more controversial idea that much of what is American and nearly all that we share with pride as representing American Culture…is Black.
This reckoning is not some ultimate acknowledgement or act of penance. It is a beginning. Maybe the bare minimum.
From the downbeat, I want to give thanks for the gift of this music. Against the backdrop of American history, it is a gift unearned and unexpected. But growing up in the U.S., it is nonetheless all around me. So much so that all of the foregoing bears repeating, like a melodic figure in a catchy tune. There is no American music that is not Black music.
What is this duty of care those of us white people should bear? Those of us who have received this gift of music? Those of us who can hear with our ears and see with our eyes? Some of what we must do is made evident by the music itself.
I come to this as a learner and, recently, a bass player. That journey, the instrument and its history, has opened my ears and eyes. Not that I specifically set out to play jazz — my goal was more and less specific than that to begin — but that the bass guitar I picked up is itself a product of the story of Black Music in America, as is the musical language that issues forth from it. Learning to play the bass, learning its rhythmic and sonic role in American music, and coming around to playing the origins of those sounds in jazz teaches the most important lesson. The first obligation is to listen. And listen some more. To the sounds of players like James Jamerson and Ron Carter. And to voices of people like Payton and Keb Mo’ and Coates and Baraka. And many more.
I have learned too that if I am invited into a conversation, I might speak. And once I do there is more responsibility to carry. That is to see this music not as an abstraction, not as something (just another thing) I am somehow free to study and dissect on its own terms. But rather to understand the gift as a chance to know the very culture and world that is my own time, and see this thing — this music — perhaps for the first time for what it is and has always been: a struggle for freedom.
My goal in writing about this music is to bring into sharper focus what it means to play Black music as a white person in the U.S. To recast this opportunity, as it has come to me and as it may come to other white people, not as some inherent right but in this dual role of “gift” and “duty.” I hope to render coherent the idea that to accept the gift is to accept the responsibility.
This writing is a reckoning. Not an apology, as some white people who might feel challenged by what I’m saying will no doubt say. Those who do will say it in order to dismiss what I’m doing.
I find myself in quite a different place, though, than feeling like I need to apologize or express guilt. I acknowledge, here, a tremendous gift I’ve been given. What do I, what should I do with this gift? Acknowledge and accept it with care and with a responsibility to learn about where it comes from, what it means, and how it has been and can be a source of connection, of love, and healing.
But all of that only comes from understanding what has come before, cycles of exploitation and violence, of erasure and annihilation, of the explicit and implicit reinforcement of anti-Black racism.
This reckoning is an act I pursue not because I am recently enlightened. Or because it is politically expedient. It is instead an opportunity that has come to me as part of a journey I’ve been on for most of the years of my life. I accept the responsibility, knowing my own journey will never be over. Unfortunately, I do not see a lot of evidence that we are, collectively in the U.S., making a lot of progress. I wish I could say otherwise.
So I make this gesture of reckoning with humility and with feelings of vulnerability similar to how it feels to step out and play a solo. I am striving to understand the way this music provides a chance to come to a new place. Dare I say to inhabit a more enlightened, humble and reverential existence as a musician and human being? I will dare. What else can we do?
First A section — I got rhythm: Black language and Black music
Dr. Geneva Smitherman’s book Talkin’ & Testifyin’ makes the linguistic case for Black language —sometimes formally called African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or as I prefer African-American Language (AAL) as it is not only/always “vernacular”— as a distinct variant of English with clear linguistic and rhetorical features that reflect its African and African American origins. Dr. Smitherman calls our attention to such formal features of AAL as the preference for “bare stem” verb forms, an efficient innovation (you heard that right) in English usage that drops the “helping verbs” and simplifies irregular conjugations in contexts where tense is clearly implied.
We see an example of the bare stem verb “got” in the title of George & Ira Gershwin’s song I Got Rhythm. This tune is no ordinary song in the world of jazz. It is an important part of jazz history because it establishes a common form consisting of an AABA song structure with accompanying chord changes that provide a reusable and often-reused palette for players and composers to invent new songs. Some of the most famous charts by Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk are variations on what cats call “rhythm changes,” tunes like Cottontail, Anthropology, Oleo, and Rhythm-a-Ning.
And so it is often claimed that jazz has its foundation(s) in music written by white people, with exhibits including show tunes like I Got Rhythm among others collectively known as “The American Songbook.”
But wait a minute. Look at that title: I Got Rhythm.
That phrase is not considered a grammatical sentence in White American English. It wasn’t when Ira Gershwin wrote it in 1932 and it is not today. “Got” is past tense for one thing. This singer is counting her blessings in the present, making a list: rhythm, music, her man. (Who could ask for anything more?).
And even if we are ok with “got” as marking present tense, do we really want it all alone…in it’s “bare” form or is it more in keeping with the Queen’s English to say I’ve got? or even I have got? Yes. We can perhaps see and hear that as the more “correct” if cumbersome form, do we not?
So what gives? In his career retrospective book Lyrics on Several Occasions, Ira Gershwin is quite clear that he thought carefully about this, and even cringed when he would hear singers use “I’ve” rather than the bare stem “I Got” noting that the latter was more in keeping with the syncopation that George had written in the melody. That syncopation to make the tune more, uh, jazzy.
Who is borrowing from whom here, then? Let’s review. George and Ira Gershwin, attempting to sound cool and hip, writing a tune for a saucy lass to sing in a musical called Girl Trouble, work extra hard to get the language to feel right, to sound as Ira noted, like it had more of an edge. More controversy.
More Black.
That syncopation, that swing. The exciting feeling of rhythmic contrast that comes from either shifting the stress (syncopation) or shifting the feel of time, generally, to the off-beat (swing). That’s what George was going for. That’s what Ira was trying to reinforce with his lyrical choices. They used Black music and Black language in what we can now recognize as a persistent, even pernicious pattern of appropriation. Those words, that rhythm, delivered with the equally surprising force of a blues shouter gave 18 year old Ethel Merman her big break on the Broadway stage. It built the careers of George and Ira. It was a hit. A transformation of Black cultural expression into a product eagerly consumed by white audiences. All without any acknowledgement of where the swing came from or whose words Merman was belting.
To reckon: the lack of acknowledgement is bad enough. To benefit commercially from it compounds the wrong. But beyond those two, I have to come back to the most egregious harm.
We are asked to believe that Black musicians used I Got Rhythm to make their careers. That they borrowed or repurposed or “stole.” Or somewhat more charitably, that, by their creative adaptations, they joined with their white counterparts who had made these popular songs so beloved to create from them the American form of music known as jazz. That somehow Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus were the ones re(appropriating) while George and Ira were, like their European forebears, crafting a legacy akin to the great Classical composers. The, uh, Great American Songbook.
I Got Rhythm not only appropriates Black culture expression for profit, but those 32 bars became and remain today reinforcing members of a blatant lie that strengthens white cultural supremacy. If you think I’m exaggerating, I can understand why. We need a lot of default racial habits working all at once to pull off such a breathtaking reversal of the truth, beginning with Black exoticism and then erasure, continuing with appropriation and then finished with the glossy sheen of white supremacy. A finish that explains how a white Broadway ingenue flanked by established stars like Ginger Rogers could sing Black music and Black language in a score by the hottest writing team on TinPan Alley and transform Black culture instantly into “American” culture.
You recognize the name of Ethel Merman, no doubt. You can likely even hear her voice in your head, along with that chorus “…who could ask for anything more?” But do you know the name Mary Lou Williams? She was a contemporary of artists like Duke Ellington who she worked with as an arranger. A prolific performer, composer, arranger, and band leader, she mentored artists like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. And she kept the big bands led by folks like Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey swinging with her arrangements. Her body of work includes more than 300 published scores, many still played today, including both secular and sacred music, and works like the Zodiac suite, performed at Carnegie Hall in 1946 by the New York Philharmonic.
Can you hear Mary Lou Williams’ musical voice as a composer or arranger or performer in your head? Can you hum the tune “Roll ‘Em,” the swing hit she wrote and arranged for Benny Goodman? I couldn’t until recently. It takes work to get there, let me tell you. Thankfully, scholars like Daphne Brooks have given us important accounts of the life of Williams, along with other women musicians, in her book Liner Notes for the Revolution, a work that draws on Brooks’ expertise across many disciplines including African American Studies, Women & Gender Studies, American History, and Musicology.
Williams is by any measure a towering figure in the history of American music. The Kennedy Center hosts an annual festival in her honor and has for the last 25 years. And still it is uncommon to find her name on playlists or on music stands today. She faced adversity in her own time, throughout her career, and not only the struggle to be recognized and rewarded adequately for her groundbreaking work. She was also subject to violence and the oppressive forces of sexism and racism. In an interview about the motivation for her scholarly work to tell Williams’ story as one of intellectual innovation in the face of resistance, Daphne Brooks reminds us
Mary Lou Williams was actually assaulted, sexually assaulted in transit to get to the space of being able to record again. And she went ahead with the recordings. There’s the everyday perils that Black women faced, in terms of being able to protect the right to their own bodies. It’s the kind of material catastrophe that hangs over the conditions of which they make their art. And so, the book is also an invitation to think about how we ethically care for those stories and incorporate them into how we think about and theorize the music as well.
To know Mary Lou Williams’ today and to understand her contributions to this music, takes work. The reason is that both active and passive forces of racism and sexism combine, even today, to erase her and many others names — who can offer even one more woman in this music who played, composed, or arranged in the swing or bebop eras? — from our cultural history. This, too, is violence. But if we work to remember, we can counter it. So we get to work.
Second A section — So What? Jazz as a Search for Freedom?
Jazz and the blues and funk and hip hop emerge from and evoke the Black American experience because the originators, the composers and players and vocalists, were and are Black people. White people like George and Ira Gershwin learned to write and play these forms of music and even managed to make a living at it. Of course, this continues to be the case today. White musicians play jazz and many white folks love the music too. I am one.
That white people write and play and appreciate jazz doesn’t change the origins of jazz in Black experience. But as the example of I Got Rhythm illustrates, in a social order like the U.S. in 1930 that clearly valued white creativity more than Black creativity, the jazz origin story can get turned around. And when it doesn’t get all the way turned around, it can still get twisted. And when that happens, it takes deliberate effort to straighten things out. To tell the whole truth.
What is widely agreed upon, from a variety of perspectives inside and outside of the jazz scene is that this music, as art, represents a search and a struggle to be free. At the heart of this idea is perhaps the defining feature of jazz: improvisation. The act and the ability to simply play, to speak, to sing with a sense of freedom in response to the immediate moment. To give oneself over to free expression and to be actualized in that same moment of invention. It is a wondrous thing to those who observe it and even to those who are themselves able to summon it on the bandstand.
In an oft-quoted passage in a speech on the founding of the Organization for Afro-American Unity, Malcom X says of this signature element of Black American Music:
“I’ve seen black musicians when they’d be jamming at a jam session with white musicians — a whole lot of difference. The white musician can jam if he’s got some sheet music in front of him. He can jam on something that he’s heard jammed before. If he’s heard it, then he can duplicate it or he can imitate it or he can read it. But that black musician, he picks up his horn and starts blowing some sounds that he never thought of before. He improvises, he creates, it comes from within. It’s his soul, it’s that soul music. It’s the only area on the American scene where the black man has been free to create. And he has mastered it.”
Improvisation is not an arbitrary feature of jazz, nor is it a value-free exuberance that equates to “spontaneity.” It is born of necessity. As the music was, like all aspects of Black cultural expression in America, subject to severe constraint including outright oppression. How else can a music develop that cannot be shared except illicitly? in places and with instruments that are, themselves like the music itself, repurposed, transient, temporary as they occur in the broader context of white-dominated property? Improvisation is the way.
I learned this idea about the relationships between the origins of Black American Music and improvisation from musician, composer, scholar, and jazz activist Billy Taylor. Taylor is perhaps best well known for making the case for jazz as “America’s Classical Music.” His account of the origins of the jazz idiom is one that, alongside his work to institutionalize jazz as a cultural treasure, largely defines our understanding of the art and its development in the present day. He notes that it is not only African American syntax and semantics of jazz that make it distinctive, but also its “kinesethetics” — the physical and social circumstance under which the music gets made and has developed over time.
Writing in 1986, he offered this account of origin and motivation:
“People who came to this country as free people brought with them the songs, customs, and attitudes of the various places of their origin. They also brought musical instruments and other artifacts with them. They were transplanted people, free to express them- selves in ways which were traditional to them, so they were able to sustain and maintain their musical heritage without external need to change.
The transplanted Africans who were enslaved did not have the same freedom to maintain their cultural identity, so their musical traditions had to change…
…In Africa, music had been used to accompany and define all the activities of life, so the slaves used well-established techniques to restructure the music they needed for survival tools in the hostile atmosphere of the “land of the free.”
African-Americans endured indescribable hardships while they were surviving slavery and other forms of racism in America, but by retaining the cultural supports that worked and or discarding those that did not, black Americans thing of beauty from the ugliest of situations. They created a new idiom-Afro-American music. This new music was the trunk of the tree from which another truly American music would grow-a classical music in every sense of the word-jazz.”
Billy Taylor’s words and actions served to create an institutional foundation for this history of jazz, one that squares more properly with fact and honors the musical tradition of Black Culture. It is a move that places this music on equal ground to other revered musical traditions. Taylor, who passed in 2010, was an institutionalist. He founded the Jazz Foundation of America and served as the artistic director of jazz at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.
Whether liberty requires institutions to secure its blessings, for ourselves and our posterity, was a settled question for Billy Taylor. We better. Others, like Wynton Marsalis, seem to agree. More on this point, with some spicier changes, will come after the bridge section of this essay. But our pedal tone here, for now, is freedom.
If jazz is “American Classical Music” as Taylor argued, then Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis are its Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. This is not a stylistic comparison between these six composers. I am not qualified to offer that sort of comparison. I make it to capture the way each artist had an effect on the music that came after.
How do these important figures advance the idea of jazz as a quest to be (more) free? Unlike Billy Taylor’s work solidifying the cultural legacy of jazz music through activism and education, the legacy of those who are primarily artists like Parker, Coltrane, and Davis is something one hears rather than something we can see. But each of these important players are in fact associated with advancing the art as a search for freedom.
Parker’s great legacy in jazz is bebop, a form widely recognized as taking a deliberate artistic turn away from the dance-oriented popular music commonly played by big bands in the swing era. Bebop was faster, busier to the ear, more rhythmically and harmonically complex. Music for listening and not so much dancing. Parker is said to have felt liberated when he discovered he could explore melodies using substitutions and upper extensions of the chord progressions in swing tunes, opening up possibilities and musical territory that had not been explored before.
Miles Davis’ legacy in jazz transcends one era or style of the music, a fact that along with his enigmatic manner only adds to his mystique even among fellow musicians. One of his innovations captivated players and broadened the range of jazz listeners alike. Perhaps appropriately it goes by more than one name. Modal jazz or “cool jazz” is stylistically distinct from the challenging, angular sounds of bebop. Cool jazz is bluesy and soulful, and more melodic. But less obvious to those not schooled in music theory perhaps is the way that modal jazz also expands the territory of the music, (almost) literally adding a new dimension to explore. A new dimension? sounds mystical. It isn’t. We are talking about the X axis to Charlie Parker’s expansion of the Y.
Jazz players say that bop is vertical and modal jazz is horizontal. By vertical they refer to the harmonic heights that Parker was so excited to reach in his solo lines. The ability to stack intervals to build the kinds of complex sounds we can now associate with jazz tonality almost from the very first chord that sounds. But building spicy chords also meant that chord progressions became more complicated, and with the sometimes feverish pace of bebop lines, that meant more changes flying by faster and faster. Playing changes at 300bpm on Cherokee might feel exhilarating, but adding more changes doesn’t necessarily make a player feel more free, even if the language of bop means there are more options for notes in each.
Modal jazz, by contrast, builds melodic lines using scales — variations of the major scale known as “the modes,” which is where the term “modal” comes from — rather than requiring the soloist to follow chord changes as the guiding heuristic. This leads to more fluid lines that can linger in one place for a longer time to build drama and also move, with pace, toward a different, satisfying tonal space. This can happen without the clear harmonic or rhythmic resolutions of swing or bebop which act as guardrails to keep players on the same track while they improvise. Modal jazz allows for improvisation using textures and sound qualities that fit into a particular mode — there are still clear signals to send and receive — but otherwise frees players up to change rhythm and break free from the 4, 8, 16, 32 bar patterns common to swing and bebop.
John Coltrane played bop and modal jazz in Miles Davis’ band in his formative years before recording as a leader of his own ensembles. Coltrane’s innovative composing and improvisational technique unfolded in his career as the result of sustained, deliberate, and self-reflexive study and experimentation. Along with his recorded music, we have his own words that convey his intent in this regard. Melding the influences of bop and modal jazz, Coltrane’s work offers another example of searching for more opportunities and a broader range of expression. Writing in collaboration with Don DeMichael in Downbeat, Coltrane said
“I want to broaden my outlook in order to come out with a fuller means of expression. I want to be more flexible where rhythm is concerned. I feel I have to study rhythm some more. I haven’t experimented too much with time; most of my experimenting has been in a harmonic form. I put time and rhythms to one side, in the past.”
Coltrane found a new form of freedom in his experimentation with what we now call “Coltrane changes,” an approach to tonality that means songs are not just in one key. Coltrane changes implement a system of three rotating key centers that create a loop with no clear beginning or end, as we more often hear in progressions that change chords within a particular key. There’s no top of the progression or turn around. The harmonic changes built on the root notes moving by a third means that the progression is always turning. The extensions and substitutions of Parker are in evidence here along with the horizontal, scalar approach of Davis. The result is something like a higher-plane of thinking about improvisational music in which both dimensions — the X and Y axes are recurved to form something more helical.
Players who admire Coltrane, Davis, and Parker talk about learning the language(s) they developed as part of a journey to play, to be, more free. How is it that people make that connection between this language of jazz and freedom? Let’s go to the bridge and find out.
B Section — The Cadential Language of Jazz
Learning jazz, the where and how of it, is fraught. Whether it wants to be or not, and maybe mostly when it doesn’t try to be, jazz education is political.
What do you learn when you learn jazz? The most common metaphors refer to language. Jazz is about being in conversation. About using a particular rhythmic and harmonic vocabulary. In the interplay, on the bandstand, it transcends the elements of harmony, melody, rhythm, and technique. And its embodied in but not contained by the repertoire, which nevertheless is always growing and changing.
So what do you learn? My own disciplinary background in Rhetoric gives me a name for it. Sparing you all the fancy terms my academic colleagues use: you learn moves and how to make them.
Language moves. Things to do on certain occasions. Things to do when someone else has done something. Or when you want to invite someone or provoke them to do something. Moves are things like statements or questions that call for a response. And there are moves to respond, and moves to reference someone else’s moves that were made at another time like citations.
Jazz as a language is cadential. It is made up of sequences of moves. Now the word “cadence” in music is used to mean something pretty close to moves, though it is most often used to refer to the kinds of moves that come at the end of a musical phrase. I want to use it a little more loosely to mean moves and sequences of moves wherever they occur and recur. But because they are distinctive and easy to hear, it can indeed be useful to think about the moves that come at the end of phrases. You don’t have to be a musician to know these moves. Let’s try a little thinking exercise.
Consider the blues. The most common blues form consists of a twelve bar sequence which has a particular set of moves. There’s one that comes at the end of the twelve bars called a “turnaround.” Stop a second and see if you can sing it in your head. If you are lost, try just singing the very end of any blues song. Got it? (Still need some help? listen to the end of this track of by BB King playing the 12 bar blues on Lucille ).
Now take that same ending phrase, that cadence, that goes with the END of a blues song and see if you can sing a version of it that fits in the middle, at the end of the 12 bar progression. (The first time we hear the turnaround on Lucille in this recording is about :38-:40).
Can you hear that there is a special way we play the turn when we are ending the song? A way that nobody mistakes for the middle?
There are a few other important moves you might recognize too. The blues progression almost always goes to the IV chord in bar five. You don’t have to know what that actually means to hear it or recognize it or associate it with playing the blues. And, just as importantly, if you are playing with other people and you DON’T go to the IV at the right time…you are not playing the blues!
And look this isn’t some kind of rule-bound system. There aren’t referees to blow a whistle. But if you miss that change it can confuse people depending on what you do. It’s like the first four bars set up a question, an expectation for a certain kind of response, and then the fifth bar is a time for a response.
“Would you like something to drink?” asks the waiter.
If you answer “Green” what does the waiter do? Looks at you, confused! The same would be true if you played a Major VII in bar five when the band expected the IV chord. The response is… huh?
Knowing the moves to do at the right time and recognizing them when others make them is how players who have never met each other can meet and play together without a chart. Without a melody even!
To learn to play Jazz is to learn a distinctive rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic repertoire that is used to play improvisationally in much the same way we use language(s) to improvise conversations. Each utterance has a history behind it that allows others to understand what it might mean. And while combinations of utterances can be relatively unique, communication and understanding actually depends on repetition of similar sequences of utterances in similar situations.
In my field of study, that last bit is a key part of what we offer as the definition of a genre. The scholar Carolyn Miller notes that a genre is not a system of structural features but is the repeated behaviors in relatively similar situations that *results* in relatively stable structural features. I like to tell my students that the stabilities themselves that we can associate with a genre — those formal, stylistic features which we can often name as characterizing a type of music or a type of text — are really just the “fossil record,” the traces of repeated behaviors over time.
And there is another important implication of genre theory here for understanding jazz. A genre is only discernible as a social, historical phenomenon. Or to put that another way: an individual cannot make a genre. Not a new one, anyway. Even performing one is really tricky too because every little formal (and here I mean “related to the form”) choice you make could send a signal of conforming with the genre OR departing from it. You can make the folks on the bandstand nod in recognition, or you can cause a train wreck by crossing them up…with every note and every rhythm you play!
Genre is not a fossil, it’s a living breathing dinosaur and its hard to control.
So how do we do it? We monitor and send genre signals. (n.b. that’s a rabbit hole and it points to my scholarly contribution(s) to genre theory, so I’ll save it for later. I think it could be worthwhile for some, but don’t go now. Keep reading!)
In jazz, the signals are usually cadences. Little bits of phrases made up of rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic content that come at the right times to be meaningful. They’ve acquired meaning over time because others have done them, again and again, in similar but not exactly the same situations (and not in exactly the same ways).
This is why you can hear a blues turnaround and associate it with the blues even if you don’t know anything especially technical about it in musical terms. But let’s talk about this move a little more. Because I want to stress that learning moves and what they are is not just a matter of hearing them, but also of doing them.
So what is a turnaround? One thing that flies under the radar for many people — listeners and players alike is the rhythmic signal of the turn. A turnaround is usually a two bar phrase signaled rhythmically with a change in how far apart the chord changes are. Spoiler: they are closer together than in the rest of the progression! And that’s really important because it gives the rhythmic structure of the 12 bar blues a consistent sense of increased momentum and a sense of urgency without needing any changes in tempo.
During the turnaround, the band plays two changes per measure at the end of the 12 bar phrase. Sonically, it serves as a kind of “overview” or reprise of the changes they have just done (sometimes with one or more thrown in). Repeating for emphasis something said in the conversation. In a jazz blues, that repeated emphasis includes a ii V, often the last part of a I vi ii V
turnaround. In those last two bars, alone, we might have more changes than in the first eight. This is what helps to give the otherwise steady tempo blues progression a feeling of momentum.
Learning to play the blues is learning turnarounds and where they go. It is learning what to do when we come to bar five and bar nine as well. And the blues form with its signature cadential features is just one form, albeit a foundational one, that makes up jazz as a cultural language. There are other well established forms in the idiom. One is rhythm changes, a 32 bar pattern that has its own song structure, rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic conventions based on Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm. Some don’t have names but are associated with well-known tunes like Billy Strayhorn’s Take the A Train. Girl from Ipanema by Antônio Carlos Jobim uses the same form and changes as A Train over a Bossa Nova rhythm. I am a bass player who has studied some of this lanaguage. And because I knew one of those songs, when I first sat down to play the other, I could do it pretty easily too.
One of the amazing things about a language of moves experienced as a kind of conversation is that for players the moves become a flexible repertoire all their own after a while. “Learning the repertoire” in jazz is not just learning a bunch of tunes. It is learning what the important moves are that make these tunes unique and special, and when and how those moves might be substituted or when they might fit into some other tune.
Having a repertoire of moves, knowing the cadential language of jazz, means that any cat can play with anyone else who calls a tune, even if they have never played together before. If they make the important moves together, they can get in the groove. Then they might start making other moves, ones that introduce a little surprise but still fit. Maybe those moves are borrowed from other songs but with similar functions or done at similar moments. Or maybe they were made by another player in the band just a few seconds before! This kind of spontaneity, this freedom, comes from sharing a language of jazz music, knowing its history, listening to what others have to say and knowing what to say back.
Final A section — What Kind of Freedom Does Jazz Seek?
Wynton Marsalis is a jazz master. He is another composer of this standard that I’m playing here. Jazz is Black music. Mr. Marsalis, like Billy Taylor, is an institutionalist. For Mr. Marsalis, not everything is jazz.
As I was working on this essay, I heard a podcast conversation about Marsalis’ efforts at reforming the institutionalization of jazz and jazz education via his writing, his composing, and especially Jazz at Lincoln Center. That work has restored a Black cultural frame to jazz music in many ways, a topic that the podcast interlocutors — all writers, jazz fans, one of whom is acclaimed jazz player and educator, pianist Ethan Iverson — discuss in some depth. A fascinating thread of the conversation, for me, was the focus on Marsalis’ deliberate institutional efforts. One need look no further to see deliberate intent than the URL for Jazz at Lincoln Center: jazz.org.
Marsalis has received criticism for his stance and his focus on institutionalizing jazz. It just seems stodgy to some. Conservative. For others, the critique is that he has been exclusionary. Dismissive. I understand where some of that critique comes from as Marsalis has made sharp distinctions between jazz and other forms of Black American Music such as hip hop. Some would say positing a hierarchy, with jazz at the top.
As a white guy, I am inclined to pay careful attention when Marsalis and others draw distinctions and be wary of reducing any of these to absolutes. What I hear from Marsalis is not, on the whole, dismissal but rather dismay. Frustration at times. It comes from a link that I see Mr. Marsalis making time and again between jazz as an art and the motivations that those recognized to be among the greatest jazz artists feel. He wants that link intact. This too is jazz as a search for freedom, but of a particular kind.
Jazz musicians, however, are searching for the freedom of ascendance. This is why they practice. Musicians like Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Sweets Edison and Betty Carter are rebelling against the idea that they should be excluded from choosing what they want to do or think, against being forced into someone else’s mold, whether it be the social agendas of the conservative establishment or the new fake liberal establishment of which many well-meaning jazz observers are part. They feel knowledge gives them choice; that ignorance is bondage.
As Iverson points out often in his writing and as Billy Taylor noted in his piece on Jazz as America’s Classical music, the first jazz education programs established at schools like North Texas, Berklee College of Music, were led by white men, publishing and distributing music arranged and composed mostly by white men, and that same music was overwhelmingly what showed up on music stands in the high school jazz bands that were formed beginning in the 70’s and 80’s. This, too, is institutional activism at work, although it works in that apparently benign, banal way that hegemony functions. It need not be pernicious to be persistent. These programs were functioning without malice for the most part, but within institutional spaces in which there were very few Black people. Not on the faculty, not in the publishing houses.
That kind of institutional activity threatened to erase the Black cultural experience and Black history as the central creative energy in jazz music, installing in its place an abstract idea that this music is just another thing one could choose from a catalogue to study or play.
Indeed, this echoes my own introduction to jazz. A saxophone player in school, I aspired to play in jazz ensemble when I got to North High School not because I had any meaningful connection to the style or immersion in its language, but because jazz band was where the best musicians were. I wanted to be counted among them, so I auditioned. I grew up in a house that couldn’t afford private lessons, so I didn’t make the cut the first few times. I also had never heard the audition pieces we were asked to prepare. Can you imagine trying to play the soli line from Spain by Return to Forever by reading it cold?
Eventually I made it. And what I saw on my music stand was a lot of music that the machine of white institutionalization had already made most readily available for K-12 teachers and administrators: charts by Stan Kenton, Gary Burton, etc.
Now our director was a hip guy and a gigging musician. He went out of his way to put challenging music in front of us. And I don’t think for a minute he was part of any conspiracy to decenter Black American culture from this music. At the same time, I don’t recall having one discussion about the origins of the songs or who composed them. Even charts made famous by the Count Basie band that we played showed up with the name of his arranger, the undeniably great Sammy Nestico, rather than Bill Basie’s own name. Jazz band at my school was a bunch of white kids — and, honestly, mostly the ones from privileged enough backgrounds to afford music lessons — led by a white teacher and musician. Our director’s love for the music was genuine and undeniable. I acknowledge and will be forever grateful for what he did to help me, a kid who didn’t have access to a great horn or a private teacher, make the band. But as a teacher myself, in hindsight I would say the educational experience I had…wasn’t enough.
Thanks to Marsalis’ institutional activism that experience may be changing. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s activities are part of an intentional response to the institutional forces that, by the time Marsalis and the other “Young Lions” of his generation had become leading voices for jazz in the ’80s, had begun to make jazz education, if not jazz music, an overwhelmingly white phenomenon. Against the strong current of structural racism, a force that does not need individual intent to enact a hegemonic “rebranding” of jazz as a largely esoteric, mostly white, academic enterprise, Marsalis sought to establish the fundamentals of jazz — its rhythm, its melodic and harmonic language, and the material gestures and circumstances of its performance — as fundamentally Black and American.
So what could be conservative about such a project? To answer that, we need one more chorus about freedom. And we need to talk about artists like Ornette Coleman. Coleman’s contribution to this music is “free jazz.” Free, as in, all improvisational, all the time, from the downbeat to the final fermata (if there were such a thing). Free jazz emerged as something of an outsider art movement in jazz, initially. Coleman’s fearless performance style also blended well with similar anti-establishment movements in other genres like punk rock as well as art. Both contemporaneous critics and scholars today recognized Coleman’s work as explicitly political, as an attempt escape from and comment on the repeating cycles of appropriation of Black innovation.
Here is Amiri Baraka, writing in 1963 about the the work of Coleman and pianist Cecil Taylor:
The implications of this music are extraordinarily profound, and the music itself, deeply and wildly exciting. Music and musicians have been brought, in a manner of speaking, face to face, without the strict and often grim hindrances of overused Western musical concepts; it is only the overall musical intelligence of the musician which is responsible for shaping the music. It is, for many musicians, a terrifying freedom.
And here are French scholars Phillipe Carles & Jean Louis Comolli writing in 1971:
Free jazz resists this expropriation, rejects the musical and extra-musical
values of dominant ideology — which in the United States is capitalist and
white — and attempts to achieve cultural freedom, echoing the struggles of
black Americans for their political and economic freedom. It endeavors to
regain and build a specifically Afro-American culture. “Free” in free jazz does
not simply indicate the rejection and/or sublimation of certain musical norms
that once were jazz’s; it also confronts a colonized music with a music and a
culture involved in, and produced by, anti-imperialist and revolutionary culture.
and…
Analyzing and assessing only the musical transformations performed by free jazz would amount to obfuscating what determined them at the political level, and thus ultimately obfuscating the political itself.
Making the political work about the music, as Marsalis insists that we must do to begin, seems for some too dismissive of the political project that must be at the heart of any struggle for freedom. For others like Nicholas Payton it seems at once too integrationist in its impulse to reclaim styles already colonized and commodified by white culture, AND too divisive for those who see new hope in Black solidarity built on a coalitional view of Black aesthetics inclusive of funk and rock and hip hop.
Writing a response to well-known saxophone player and band leader Branford Marsalis, Wynton’s older brother, Payton explains why he chooses Black American Music over jazz:
Black American music is not a replacement for the term “Jazz”. It is the umbrella under which all manner of the Black American musical aesthetic lives. Gospel, Blues, so-called Jazz, Bebop, R&B, Soul, and Hip Hop are the same communal expression of the same people. The only things that differ are the eras and the individuals who created it.
Payton’s is a political and inclusive view. A view that I understand he intends to honor the experience of being Black in America as a generative place from which the music comes and to which it speaks. No more or no less. It is a view of the music as it has evolved and is evolving, as a living form of expression rather than an institution or an exhibit.
For Wynton Marsalis, writing in his What Jazz is and What it Isn’t Op Ed, the threat to the legacy of jazz is that it may be lost as a unique art, washed over and eroded over time by the tide of white dominance in American Culture. He had watched that start to happen already and knew it could happen again. Unless there are breakwaters. I think Mr. Marsalis believes deeply that jazz is special. And I also get the idea that he hopes that if we can keep what is special about it in mind, it might even be…universal. Here he writes about a connection he feels with one of the first white jazz stars, Bix Beiderbecke, in his memoir Moving to Higher Ground:
Ironically, I was in the same position Bix Beiderbecke found himself in when he first heard jazz music as a teenager in Davenport, Iowa, in 1917. Most of the people around him thought jazz was some kind of hokum, a gimmicky fad that — to make matters worse — was created by black people who werenʼt worth anything, anyway. But through intense listening, Bix could hear past all that ignorance and racism and learn to hear the differences among black groups, white hokum groups, and white groups like the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, who could really play. He could recognize artistic objectives, too, and set out to become an artist himself, even though pursuing those objectives would drive him farther and farther away from the world in which he grew up.
Like Beiderbecke, I wanted to figure out what separated jazz from what we were being told was jazz.
Head out — Standards, old and new
The gift of Black American Music is something that gives me joy, that sparks admiration and empathy, wonder and, at times, disbelief. Like the music itself, the ways it ought best be honored and preserved are not mine to invent. But they have been offered up for me and others to listen to and to learn and to look after as I am able.
So, coming to the top of the form: this is a standard. Black American Music is American Music. American Music is Black American Music. The improvisational style of BAM sometimes called jazz is old enough to have a history and young enough for some of those whose artistry created that history are still be with us today. Others we have lost. Including too many in 2021.
Rock and Roll? R&B? Hip-Hop? these BAM forms are younger yet. Two still drive creative energy in the culture today, while the jury is out on Rock and Roll. But each of those musical forms, if we pause to listen and reflect, shares a story arc that, like jazz, tends to make genre distinctions fade. This makes both Payton and Marsalis right. Jazz is alive and is dead. It is and is not worth saving.
On Twitter, I complimented Ethan Iverson and the podcast host(s) for their nuanced insight on Marsalis’ institutional activism. Catching the progression, I offered a response, noting that institutions like Jazz at Lincoln Center are counter-revisionist. Given the legacy of racial inequity in the U.S., what else is there to do if we are to ensure this music and its story are told true?
Coda: Playing the Changes
Playing these changes in this piece, I know there is a risk that my lines sound too cliche, naive, both for what I’ve put in and what I’ve left out. I am still learning, so some of that is inevitable. Only by repetition can I get anywhere close to uttering something new or interesting. And in any case, this standard needs playing over and over. We haven’t heard it nearly enough. Most people in America don’t know this tune at all.
Another thing I have risked here is being a white writer making moves that critics and historians and others before me have made. Coming from outside of the jazz scene — of any jazz scene, my years of practicing this music to get it into my head and hands and heart notwithstanding, I risk what Wynton Marsalis feared in his memoir — of telling about jazz something that the music is not.
I don’t worry that I’ve misled. Or that I’ve made earnest differences among learned people like Payton and the Marsalis brothers into inflated controversies. I worry, rather, that I have made another partial rendering in words of an otherwise experiential phenomenon. Of doing what sociologist and scholar of race and media Herman Grey calls out as building two versions of transformative artists like John Coltrane: one John Coltrane the man and the other, Trane, the mythic figure. If we are not careful, we confine the lessons to be learned from the work of Coltrane to the achievements ascribed to Trane. And when we do, we miss a real opportunity to learn from jazz artists as people engaged in what Grey calls the practice of freedom.
This practice of freedom, this way of being free in a world of social, political, cultural, and aesthetic constraint and injustice is evident too in the work of Coltrane’s contemporaries and influences including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Muhal Richard Abrams, Cecil Taylor, Abbey Lincoln, Sun Ra, John Gilmore, Sonny Rollins, and James Brown. These artists used music to negotiate and reimagine their time and to make a better, more beautiful life; in doing so they left the means for us to take the measure of their contribution to what Monk’s biographer Robin Kelley calls a surreal conception of the good society and a just world.
I’m fortunate to have encountered amazing musicians and human beings who met me with enthusiasm, grace, and generosity on my own journey in this music. Victor Wooten and his brothers Regi and Roy espouse and embody a melding of Black American Music styles that leave me with no doubt that they can be one language. It is helpful, of course, that Victor’s undeniable virtuosity cannot be neatly contained by the genres he has visited in his storied career.
But I’ve been lucky to see the language come to life, minute to minute, invited on the stage with him and other players, making lasting bonds using only our instruments to communicate. Victor is as capacious a musician and human being as I have ever met. But he does not cede ground, does not deny or render abstract the cultural legacy of Black music. Rather, he invites others to it. To feel it. To play and to learn. And to acknowledge what the gift of this music means and what it demands.
My words here are part of my own practice of freedom. That includes practicing the music and putting myself in those conversational moments when I may, at the right moment, be invited to speak. If I get that gift, I want to be ready. That honors the gift. As does making space for others to learn and share this music. That is part of my practice too.
Last week, mid-January 2022, I was invited to participate in a virtual Town Hall conversation sponsored by SiriusXM Radio with jazz bassist Christian McBride. The conversation was to be moderated by musicologist and Real Jazz channel host Mark Ruffin. As a bass player, I could not say no. I asked Mr. McBride a question about how he thought about the many band and recording projects he has going, and the range of styles of music they represent. Did those ever feel at odds with one another?
His answer resonated with me, like just about all of his responses, as that of a quintessential bass player, someone who enjoys the role of supporting others so they can shine. He said it comes down to this: he only ever wanted to work! Playing straight ahead, composing avant garde work for big band and symphony, playing fusion or funk or even getting on the ones and twos as his nom de platter D.J. Brother Mister. It is all about wanting to be in the mix, on the gig, in time and in rhythm, in the places where the practice of jazz and the practice of freedom happen.
In my short conversation with McBride and in my time meeting and learning from Victor Wooten and his family, I got another gift. Their example and its realness. They invited me to see that there is no more important practice of freedom than what unfolds day to day, minute to minute, with each other. This music gives us a language and creates opportunity for us to express our humanity. And for each of us to hear one another in authentic ways, if we choose. If we think like bass players, and if we practice hard enough, we can be there for one another and not just with one another. We can create those opportunities with our hands and our breath.
And what happens if we don’t? if voices like Professors Billy Taylor and Daphne Brooks and Herman Grey didn’t speak and call for us to remember? What happens if all of us who listen and play this music don’t also know its history and work to keep the truth in focus?
What will grow in our garden if we do not tend it? Best tend it.
So…should we run it down one more time from the top?
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my colleague and band mate Ben Lauren for his generous feedback and advice on this piece, and for his inspiration in composing both music and scholarship in the last few years. Without our conversations and writing and playing together, this piece would not have emerged for me as it has.
I want to thank Tom Jones, an amazing musician, band leader and musical director, and teacher for his generous leadership and mentorship. He has given me that rare blend of invitation and challenge to reach beyond my capability and understanding to grow as a musician and a human being and I am deeply grateful for it. My work here is offered in the spirit of his gift to me and in honor of his career sharing artistry and musical knowledge with folks like me.
Thanks to my wife, designer, author, mentor, media mogul, and entrepreneur Leslie Hart-Davidson who has supported my practice as a bass player and a writer and who is my first audience for all of it, often subject to the out of rhythm, out of key first versions of everything. Her feedback and support is part of my every word and every note.
References
(linked above where a good link exists, listed here in order of appearance in the text)
Nicholas Payton. nicholaspayton.com. accessed 2022.
Ta-Nehesi Coates. Between the World & Me. NY: Penguin. 2015.
Wesley Morris & Nikole Hannah Jones. Episode 3: The Birth of American Music. The 1619 Project Podcast. New York Times. 2019.
Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones). Blues People. NY: William Morrow. 1963.
Bill Hart-Davidson. Our Debt to the Future. Medium. 2016. https://billhd.medium.com/our-debt-to-the-future-ef6546ca1722
Jessica Xalxo. Keb’ Mo’ on Four Decades of the Blues, Remembering African American History, Activism in Music and More. Rolling Stone. Feb 5, 2020.
Nicholas Payton. On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore. nicholaspayton.com. 2011.
Bill Hart-Davidson. An End to the Era of Bad Faith? Medium. 2020. https://billhd.medium.com/an-end-to-the-era-of-bad-faith-2c7f6eec0438
Geneva Smitherman. Talkin’ & Testifyin’. WSU Press. 1986.
Ira Gershwin. Lyrics on Several Occasions. NY: Limelight Editions. 1959.
Blues Shouter. American Heritage. Accessed 2022. https://www.americanheritage.com/blues-shouter
Wynton Marsalis. What Jazz Is — and Isn’t. The New York Times. 1988. https://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/music-what-jazz-is-and-isnt
Billy Taylor. Jazz is America’s Classical Music. The Black Perspective in Music 14.1. 1986. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1214726?refreqid=excelsior%3A972810a713faf6ce5b9d2e46c4a2cca5
Daphne Brooks. Liner Notes for the Revolution. Harvard UP. 2021.
The Kennedy Center. Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival. https://www.kennedy-center.org/whats-on/explore-by-genre/jazz/2019-2020/mary-lou-williams-jazz-festival-70413/ Accessed 2022.
Janell Hobson. Black Feminist in Public: Daphne Brooks Documents a Legacy of “Black Feminist Sound.” Ms. Magazine, June 2021. https://msmagazine.com/2021/06/29/black-feminist-in-public-daphne-brooks-documents-a-legacy-of-black-feminist-sound/ Accessed 2022.
Malcom X. Speech to Organization of Afro-American Unity. 1964. (See Malcolm X speaks : selected speeches and statements, edited by George Breitman). NY: Grove. 1969.
Charlie Parker in Nat Shapiro & Nat Hentoff. Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by The Men Who Made It. Mineola, NY: 1955.
John Coltrane. Coltrane on Coltrane. In collaboration with Don DeMichael. Downbeat. 1960.
Carolyn Miller. Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70.2. 1984.
Bill Hart-Davidson & Ryan Omizo. Genre Signals in Textual Topologies. In Topologies as Techniques in Post-Critical Rhetorics. Eds. Linda Walsh & Casey Boyle. Springer. 2017.
Phillipe Carles & Jean-Louis Comolli. Free Jazz/Black Power. UP of Mississippi. 1971.
Wynton Marsalis. Moving to Higher Ground. Random House. 2008.
Nicholas Payton. An Open Letter to Branford Marsalis. nicholaspayton.com. 2012. https://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/an-open-letter-to-branford-marsalis/
Jazz at Lincoln Center. jazz.org. Accessed 2022.
Jacob Siegel, Phil Klay, Ethan Iverson. What Jazz Is & Isn’t. Manifesto! Podcast, 39. https://manifesto.fireside.fm/39
Ethan Iverson. The J Word. Do the Math. https://ethaniverson.com/the-j-word/
Equity and Inclusion Initiative. Jazz Academy. Jazz at Lincoln Center. https://academy.jazz.org/ee/participate/equity-and-inclusion-initiative/ Accessed 2022.
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Christian McBride. Musician — Christian Mcbride. christianmcbride.com/musician. Acessed 2022.
Victor Wooten. The Music Lesson. Berkley UP. 2010.
Songs
Cottontail. Duke Ellington.
Ornithology. Charlie Parker.
Rhythm-a-Ning. Thelonious Monk.
Oleo. Sonny Rollins.
I Got Rhythm. George & Ira Gershwin.
Mingus Fingers. Charles Mingus.
Roll ’Em. Mary Lou Williams.
Lucille. B.B. King.
Cherokee. Ray Noble.
Take the A Train. Billy Strayhorn.
Girl from Ipanema. Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Spain. Chick Corea.
