Jazz draws on the tradition of Signifyin’ and ring shouts, which are the combination of rhythm and melody in a collective ownership. As Jazz developed, like ring shouts, it relied on repetition, movement, and call-and-response interaction. Just as oral traditions are kept alive through repetition, Jazz is spread among communities as musicians build off of and borrow from each other. While this process is necessary for the development of Jazz, the exploitative companies and social climate at the time meant that many musicians, especially Black musicians, did not profit off of their hard work. Because the roots of Jazz come from Signifyin’, an action and verb rather than a product, there was no official way of claiming ownership of it. Arguably, this made appropriation inevitable. The many challenges and injustice musicians faced encouraged them to attempt to reclaim the ownership of Jazz from the material world, creating an explosion of new styles in Jazz. This essay is not meant to say whether such a change is good or bad, but an attempt to explain why it happened and how musicians reacted to the struggles they faced in their daily life.
Benny Green, a British Jazz saxophonist, describes Jazz as “an undefended treasure house”.1 This image is problematic because it disregards the musicians who should be making profit off of their hard work and instead are presented as magical, Jazz-making machines. Jazz as a career is difficult to navigate when the ownership of the music dictates who makes money off the interpretations and performances of the artists. Exploitative relationships between musicians and music producers usually left the musicians fortuneless, their work stolen from this open “treasure house”. Simultaneously, putting money value on Jazz pieces transformed it from a verb to a noun. Another jazz musician, LeRoi Jones, describes this phenomenon: “As it (music) was formalized, and the term and the music taken further out of context, swing became a noun that meant a commercial popular music in cheap imitation of a kind of Afro-American music.”2.
Famous jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams writes about her experience as a composer, arranger, and musician throughout her life. Williams notes that she never saw much of the money made off of her arrangements and performances, and while she said she got used to it, it also affected the quality of her art because she was thinking about her “share of the loot”.3 She recalls when working in the Theater Owners’ Booking Association (TOBA), that among black musicians it was known as “Tough on Black Artists”, a nickname that properly reflected the substandard working conditions and low wages.4 In the capitalist world of popular music, artists who needed to make a living were at the hands of the public. Recordings and fame often meant sacrificing their personal style to make sure they pleased their audiences and earned enough money to eat. Williams writes about how after a recording of their playing was made famous, they were expected to replicate the same solos in live performances.5 This is an example of LeRoi Jones’ claim about how Jazz, the product, would change to a stagnant performance. The advertising of Jazz through radio and recording made it into a mass commodity. A system in which musicians are forced to crank out pieces and replicate performances is counterintuitive to the ring shouts which Jazz comes from and therefore, harmful to the structure of the music.
Once musicians became tired of being exploited, they began using different methods to try to liberate themselves. According to Williams, it was from the theft of Jazz that bop was born. Williams writes of Thelonious Monk, a fellow jazz pianist with whom she often worked. Rather than negotiating with powerful music institutions, Monk was determined to completely remove himself and his music from existing structures. Williams recalls Monk saying, “We are going to get a big band started. We’re going to create something that they can’t steal, because they can’t play it.”.6 Monk promised to play something that had never before been heard and something so complicated that it could not be easily replicated by other players. Simultaneously, “Bop is the phrasing and accenting of the notes, as well as the harmonies used.” and comes directly from the musical tropings of Signifyin’.7 The musical tropings in bop would act as a lock on the treasure house of Jazz. It is natural for music to evolve from one style to another, but as soon as something is in the conscious mind, it rejects the previous ways of being and the consciousness is a catalyst to the variation and modification.
Another trend musicians had to face was the expectation that they play a certain sound. The happy, jolly sound expected of them, often propagated by racist stereotypes of black musicians, can be traced way back to the expectation slave-owners had for slaves to sing and praise the very house that oppressed them. Frederick Douglass, famous abolitionist, writes in From My Bondage and My Freedom, “Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as work” and “In all the songs of the slaves, there was ever some expression of praise of the great house farm; something which would flatter the pride of the owner”.8 However, there was hidden meaning behind the songs that slaves could sing in public, but only themselves would understand. Contrasting this cheery sound was something Billie Holiday did unconsciously, which made her music all the more powerful. Holiday took silly jingles and turned them into something serious, clever, and significant. Instead of diverting from all previous forms of music, she negotiated and transformed it to melancholy and profound. Holiday’s handling of lyrics made amazing performances even after her technical skill was close to zero due to physical limitations.9 As their fame grew, musicians were always under scrutiny, having to filter themselves. Similarly to the slaves whom Douglass wrote of, Holiday used Signifyin, to say one thing but to mean another to counteract and criticize the expectations of society.
Jazz players such as Thelonious Monk and LeRoi Jones urgently tried to reverse the commercialization of Jazz in a movement to resist the cliches that limited their creativity. The same way Jazz first changed to please the public, the very act of trying to preserve Jazz was what encouraged it to transform and evolve into something different. In the 1940s, there was a surge of new styles that actively avoided using the musical styles from the 1930s. LeRoi writes, “It was a cult of protection as well as rebellion”.10 It rebels against the expectations of society and protects the significance of Jazz. Previous formulas and patterns in music were cast out for modernist styles that Benny Green describes as “vainly ambitious, self-consciously revolutionary, and somehow nervously aware”.11 Perhaps this self-consciousness also limited improvisation by not letting musicians draw upon previous riffs and formulas. If so, it is understandable why this created the awkward jump in music styles Green describes, because building off of communal work, which comes so naturally to Jazz, is purposefully being avoided. Nevertheless, it was one of the ways players reacted to an unjust system. These artists saw themselves in a society that purified Jazz and drew upon the tool of Signifyin’ to liberate themselves from financial and creative bondage.
Notes:
1Benny Green, “The Reluctant Art”, in Reading Jazz, ed. by Robert Gottlieb, p. 933-959, (New York, Vintage Books, 1999), 937.
2LeRoi Jones, “Blues People” (1963) , in Reading Jazz, edited by Robert Gottlieb, p. 870-884. (New York, Vintage Books, 1999.), 879.
3Mary Lou Williams, “Melody Maker” (1954), in Reading Jazz, ed. by Robert Gottlieb, p. 87-116, (New York, Vintage Books, 1999), 106 and 109.
4Ibid., 90.
5Ibid. 109.
6Mary Lou Williams, “Melody Maker” (1954), in Reading Jazz, ed. by Robert Gottlieb, p. 87-116, (New York, Vintage Books, 1999), 112.
7Ibid., 114
8Frederick Douglass, “My Bondage and My Freedom” [1855], (New York, 1853) in Readings in Black American Music, 2nd edition, edited by Eileen Southern, p. 82-87. (New York, W.W. Norton and Company), 83.
9Benny Green, “The Reluctant Art”, in Reading Jazz, ed. by Robert Gottlieb, p. 933-959, (New York, Vintage Books, 1999), 953.
10LeRoi Jones, “Blues People” (1963) , in Reading Jazz, edited by Robert Gottlieb, p. 870-884. (New York, Vintage Books, 1999.), 871.
11Benny Green, “The Reluctant Art”, in Reading Jazz, ed. by Robert Gottlieb, p. 933-959, (New York, Vintage Books, 1999), 934.
Works Cited:
- Williams, Mary Lou, “Melody Maker” (1954), in Reading Jazz, edited by Robert Gottlieb, p. 87-116, New York, Vintage Books, 1999.
- Green, Benny, “The Reluctant Art”, in Reading Jazz, edited by Robert Gottlieb, p. 933-959, New York, Vintage Books, 1999.
- Douglass, Frederick, “My Bondage and My Freedom” [1855], (New York, 1853) in Readings in Black American Music, 2nd edition, edited by Eileen Southern, p. 82-87. New York, W.W. Norton and Company.
- Jones, LeRoi, “Blues People” (1963) , in Reading Jazz, edited by Robert Gottlieb, p. 870-884 . New York, Vintage Books, 1999.
