Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
The Prehistory of Jazz
The Africanization of American Music
An elderly black man sits astride a large cylindrical drum. Using his
fingers and the edge of his hand, he jabs repeatedly at the drum
head--which is around a foot in diameter and probably made from an animal
skin--evoking a throbbing pulsation with rapid, sharp strokes. A second
drummer, holding his instrument between his knees, joins in, playing with
the same staccato attack. A third black man, seated on the ground, plucks
at a string instrument, the body of which is roughly fashioned from a
calabash. Another calabash has been made into a drum, and a woman heats at
it with two short sticks. One voice, then other voices join in. A dance of
seeming contradictions accompanies this musical give-and-take, a moving
hieroglyph that appears, on the one hand, informal and spontaneous yet, on
closer inspection, ritualized and precise. It is a dance of massive
proportions. A dense crowd of dark bodies forms into circular
groups--perhaps five or six hundred individuals moving in time to the
pulsations of the music, some swaying gently, others aggressively stomping
their feet. A number of women in the group begin chanting.
The scene could be Africa. In fact, it is nineteenth-century New
Orleans. Scattered firsthand accounts provide us with tantalizing details
of these slave dances that took place in the open area then known as Congo
Square--today Louis Armstrong Park stands on roughly the same ground--and
there are perhaps no more intriguing documents in the history of
African-American music. Benjamin Latrobe, the noted architect, witnessed
one of these collective dances on February 21, 1819, and not only left a
vivid written account of the event, but made several sketches of the
instruments used. These drawings confirm that the musicians of Congo
Square, circa 1819, were playing percussion and string instruments
virtually identical to those characteristic of indigenous African music.
Later documents add to our knowledge of the public slave dances in New
Orleans but still leave many questions unanswered--some of which, in time,
historical research may be able to cast light on while others may never be
answered. One thing, however, is clear. Although we are inclined these
days to view the intersection of European-American and African currents in
music as a theoretical, almost metaphysical issue, these storied accounts
of the Congo Square dances provide us with a real time and place, an
actual transfer of totally African ritual to the native soil of the New
World.
The dance itself, with its clusters of individuals moving in a circular
pattern--the largest less than ten feet in diameter--harkens back to one
of the most pervasive ritual ceremonies of Africa. This rotating,
counterclockwise movement has been noted by ethnographers under many
guises in various parts of the continent. In the Americas, the dance
became known as the ring shout, and its appearance in New Orleans is only
one of many documented instances. This tradition persisted well into the
twentieth century: John and Alan Lomax recorded a ring shout in Louisiana
for the Library of Congress in 1934 and attended others in Texas, Georgia,
and the Bahamas. As late as the 1950s, jazz scholar Marshall Stearns
witnessed unmistakable examples of the ring shout in South Carolina.
The Congo Square dances were hardly so long-lived. Traditional accounts
indicate that they continued, except for an interruption during the Civil
War, until around 1885. Such a chronology implies that their
disappearance almost coincided with the emergence of the first jazz bands
in New Orleans. More recent research argues for an earlier cutoff date for
the practice, probably before 1870, although the dances may have continued
for some time in private gatherings. In any event, this transplanted
African ritual lived on as part of the collective memory and oral history
of the city's black community, even among those too young to have
participated in it. These memories shaped, in turn, the jazz performers'
self-image, their sense of what it meant to be an African-American
musician. "My grandfather, that's about the furthest I can remember back,"
wrote the renowned New Orleans reed player Sidney Bechet in his
autobiography, Treat It Gentle. "Sundays when the slaves would meet--that
was their free day--he beat out rhythms on the drums at the square--Congo
Square they called it.... He was a musician. No one had to explain notes
or feeling or rhythm to him. It was all there inside him, something he
was always sure of."
Within eyesight of Congo Square, Buddy Bolden--who legend and scattered
first-person accounts credit as the earliest jazz musician--performed with
his pioneering band at Globe Hall. The geographical proximity is
misleading. The cultural gap between these two types of music is
dauntingly wide. By the time Bolden and Bechet began playing jazz, the
Americanization of African music had already begun, and with it came the
Africanization of American music--a synergistic process that we will study
repeatedly and at close quarters in the pages that follow. Anthropologists
call this process "syncretism"--the blending together of cultural elements
that previously existed separately. This dynamic, so essential to the
history of jazz, remains powerful even in the present day, when
African-American styles of performance blend seamlessly with other musics
of other cultures, European, Asian, Latin, and, coming full circle,
African.
The mixture of African and European culture began, of course, long
before the slave dances in Congo Square--in fact, at least one thousand
years prior to the founding of New Orleans in 1718. The question of
African influence on ancient Western culture has become a matter of heated
debate in recent years--with much of the dispute centering on arcane
methodological and theoretical issues. But once again, careful students of
history need not rely on abstract analysis to discover early cultural
mergings of African and European currents. The North African conquest of
the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century left a tangible impact on
Europe--evident even today in the distinctive qualities of Spanish
architecture, painting, and music. Had not Charles Martel repelled the
Moorish forces in the south of France at the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D.,
this stylized cultural syncretism might have become a pan-European force.
If not for "the genius and fortune" of this one man, historian Gibbon
would declare in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Moorish
fleet "might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the
Thames" and "the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford."
As it turned out, the spread of African currents into the broader
streams of Western culture took far longer to unfold, spurred in large
part by defeat rather than conquest--not by triumphant naval fleets
toppling the continental powers, but by the dismal commerce of slave ships
headed for the New World. Yet the traces of the early Moorish incursion
may have laid the groundwork for the blossoming of African-American jazz
more than a millennium later. Can it be mere coincidence that this same
commingling of Spanish, French, and African influences was present in New
Orleans at the birth of jazz? Perhaps because of this marked Moorish
legacy, Latin cultures have always seemed receptive to fresh influences
from Africa. Indeed, in the area of music alone, the number of successful
African and Latin hybrids (including salsa, calypso, samba, and cumbia, to
name only a few) is so great that one can only speculate that these two
cultures retain a residual magnetic attraction, a lingering affinity due
to this original cross-fertilization. Perhaps this convoluted chapter of
Western history also provides us with the key for unlocking that enigmatic
claim by Jelly Roll Morton, the pioneering New Orleans jazz musician, who
asserted that "if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes,
you will never he able to act the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz."
Around the time of Morton's birth, a massive Mexican cavalry band
performed daily in free concerts at the Mexican Pavilion as part of the
1884-85 World's Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. Hart's music
store on Canal Street published over eighty Mexican compositions during
this period, influencing local instrumentalists and providing one more
link in the complex history of interlocking Latin and African-American
musical styles. Beyond its purely musicological impact, the Latin-Catholic
culture, whose influence permeated nineteenth-century New Orleans,
benignly fostered the development of jazz music. This culture, which bore
its own scars of discrimination, was far more tolerant in accepting
unorthodox social hybrids than the English-Protestant ethos that prevailed
in other parts of the New World. Put simply, the music and dances of Congo
Square would not have been allowed in the more Anglicized colonies of the
Americas.
Less than a half century after the city's founding, in 1764, New
Orleans was ceded by France to Spain. In 1800, Napoleon succeeded in
forcing its return from Spain, but this renewed French control lasted only
three years before possession passed to the United States as part of the
Louisiana Purchase. As a result, French and Spanish settlers played a
decisive role in shaping the distinctive ambiance of New Orleans during
the early nineteenth century, but settlers from Germany, Italy, England,
Ireland, and Scotland also made substantial contributions to the local
culture. The city's black inhabitants were equally diverse: many were
brought directly from various parts of Africa, some were native-born
Americans, still others came to the United States via the Caribbean. Civil
unrest in Hispaniola was an especially powerful force in bringing new
immigrants, both black and white, to New Orleans: in 1805, alone, as many
as six thousand refugees fleeing the Haitian revolution arrived in the
city, after being forced to leave Cuba. The resulting amalgam--an exotic
mixture of European, Caribbean, African, and American elements--made
Louisiana into perhaps the most seething ethnic melting pot that the
nineteenth-century world could produce. This cultural gumbo would serve as
breeding ground for many of the great hybrid musics of modern times; not
just jazz, but also cajun, zydeco, blues, and other new styles flourished
as a result of this laissez-faire environment. In this warm, moist
atmosphere, sharp delineations between cultures gradually softened and
ultimately disappeared. Today, New Orleans residents of Irish descent
celebrate St. Patrick's Day by parading in a traditional African-American
"second line"--and none of the locals are at all surprised. The
masquerades of Mardi Gras are a fitting symbol for this city, where the
most familiar cultural artifacts appear in the strangest garb.
Yet the most forceful creative currents in this society came from the
African-American underclass. Should this surprise us? The musician's
"special" role as slave or lunatic, outsider or pariah, hats a long
tradition dating back to ancient times. As recently as the twentieth
century, some cultures retained religious prohibitions asserting the
"uncleanliness" of believers eating at the same table as musicians. Yet
the role of slave labor in the production of African-American song makes
for an especially sad chapter in this melancholy history. The presence of
Africans in the New World, the first documented instance of which took
place in Jamestown in 1619, predated the arrival of the Pilgrims by one
year. By 1807, some 400,000 native-born Africans had been brought to
America, most of them transported from West Africa. Forcibly taken away
from their homeland, deprived of their freedom, and torn from the social
fabric that had given structure to their lives, these transplanted
Americans clung with even greater fervor to those elements of their
culture that they could carry with them from Africa. Music and folk tales
were among the most resilient of these. Even after family, home, and
possessions were taken away, they remained.
In this context, the decision of the New Orleans City Council, in 1817,
to establish an official site for slave dances stands out as an exemplary
degree of tolerance. In other locales, African elements in the slaves'
music were discouraged or explicitly suppressed. During the Stono
Rebellion of 1739, drums had been used to signal an attack on the white
population. Anxious to prevent further uprisings, South Carolina banned
any use of drums by slaves. The Georgia slave code went even further in
prohibiting not only drums, but also horns or loud instruments. Religious
organizations also participated in the attempt to control the African
elements of the slaves' music. The Hymns and Spiritual Songs of Dr. Isaac
Watts, published in various colonial editions beginning in the early
1700s, was frequently used as a way of "converting" African Americans to
more edifying examples of Western music.
We are fortunate that these attempts bore little success. Indeed, in
many cases, the reverse of the intended effect took place: European idioms
were transformed
and enriched by the African tradition on which they were grafted. Alan
Lomax, the pioneering scholar and preserver of African-American music,
writes:
Blacks had Africanized the psalms to such an extent that many observers
described black lining hymns as a mysterious African music. In the
first place, they so prolonged and quavered the texts of the hymns that
only a recording angel could make out what was being sung. Instead of
performing in an individualized sort of unison or heterophony, however,
they blended their voices in great unified streams of tone. There
emerged a remarkable kind of harmony, in which every singer was
performing variations on the melody at his or her pitch, yet all these
ornaments contributed to a polyphony of many ever changing
strands--surging altogether like seaweed swinging with the waves or a
leafy tree responding to a strong wind. Experts have tried and failed
to transcribe this river-like style of polyphony. It rises from a group
in which all singers can improvise together, each one contributing
something personal to an ongoing collective effect--a practice common
in African and African-American tradition. The outcome is music as
powerful and original as jazz, but profoundly melancholy, for it was
sung into being by hard-pressed people.
This ability of African performance arts to transform the European
tradition of composition while assimilating some of its elements is
perhaps the most striking and powerful evolutionary force in the history
of modern music. The genres of music that bear the marks of this influence
are legion. Let's name a few: gospel, spirituals, soul, rap, minstrel
songs, Broadway musicals, ragtime, jazz, blues, R&B, rock, samba, reggae,
salsa, cumbia, calypso, even some contemporary operatic and symphonic
music.
The history of jazz is closely intertwined with many of these other
hybrid genres, and tracing the various genealogies can prove dauntingly
complex. For example, minstrel shows, which developed in the decades
before the Civil War, found white performers in blackface mimicking, and
most often ridiculing, the music, dance, and culture of the slave
population. Often the writer of minstrel songs worked with little actual
knowledge of southern black music. A surprising number of these composers
hailed from the Northeast, and the most celebrated writer of
minstrel-inflected songs, Stephen Foster, created a powerful, romanticized
image of southern folk life, yet his experience with the South was
restricted to a brief interlude spent in Kentucky and a single trip down
the Mississippi to New Orleans. Later generations of black entertainers,
influenced by the popularity of these secondhand evocations of their own
culture, imitated in turn the white stereotypes of African-American
behavior. Thus, in its impact on early jazz, minstrel music presents a
rather convoluted situation: a black imitation of a white caricature of
black music exerts its influence on another hybrid form of African and
European music.
The work song, another frequently cited predecessor to jazz, is more
purely African in nature--so much so, that some examples recorded in the
southern United States earlier this century seem to show almost no
European or American influence. This ritualized vocalizing of black
American workers, with its proud disregard for Western systems of notation
and scales, comes in many variants: field hollers, levee camp hollers,
prison work songs, street cries, and the like. This entire category of
singing has all but disappeared in our day, yet the few recordings extant
reveal a powerful, evocative, and comparatively undiluted form of African
music in the Americas.
Generalizations about African music are tricky at best. Many
commentators have treated the culture of West Africa as though it were a
homogenous and unified body of practices. In fact, many different cultures
contribute to the traditions of West Africa. However, a few shared
characteristics stand out, amid this plurality, in any study of African
music--with many of these same elements reappearing, in a somewhat
different guise, in jazz. For example, call-and-response forms that
predominate in African music figure as well in the work song, the blues,
jazz, and other Americanized strains of African music; yet, in its
original African form, the call-and-response format is as much a matter of
social integration as an issue of musical structure. It reflects a culture
in which the fundamental Western separation of audience from performers is
transcended. This brings us to a second unifying element of African
musical traditions: the integration of performance into the social fabric.
In this light, African music takes on an aura of functionality, one that
defies any "pure" aesthetic attempting to separate art from social needs.
Yet, since these functions are often tied to rituals and other liminal
experiences, music never falls into the mundane type of
functionality--background music in the dentist's office, accompaniment to
a television commercial, and so on--that one sees increasingly in the
West. Integrated into ritual occasions, music retains its otherworldliness
for the African, its ability to transcend the here and now. The
cross-fertilization between music and dance is a third unifying theme in
the traditional African cultures--so deeply ingrained that scholar John
Miller Chernoff remarks that, for an African, "understanding" a certain
type of music means, in its most fundamental sense, knowing what dance it
accompanies. A fourth predominant feature of African music is the use of
instruments to emulate the human voice; this technique, which also plays a
key role in jazz music, even extends to percussion instruments, most
notably in the kalangu, the remarkable talking drum of West Africa. An
emphasis on improvisation and spontaneity is a further shared trait of
different African musical cultures, and these too have figured prominently
in--and, to some extent, have come to define--the later jazz tradition.
However, the most prominent characteristic, the core element of African
music, is its extraordinary richness of rhythmic content. It is here one
discovers the essence of the African musical heritage, as well as the key
to unlocking the mystery of its tremendous influence on so many disparate
schools of twentieth-century Western music. The first Western scholars who
attempted to come to grips with this rhythmic vitality, whether in its
African or Americanized form, struggled merely to find a vocabulary and
notational method to encompass it. Henry Edward Krehbiel, author of an
early study of African-American folk songs, conveys the frustration of
these endeavors in describing the African musicians he encountered at the
World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893:
The players showed the most remarkable rhythmical sense and skill that
ever came under my notice. Berlioz in his supremest effort with his
army of drummers produced nothing to compare in artistic interest with
the harmonious drumming of these savages. The fundamental effect was a
combination of double and triple time, the former kept by the singers,
the latter by the drummers, but it is impossible to convey the idea of
the wealth of detail achieved by the drummers by means of the exchange
of the rhythms, syncopations of both simultaneously, and dynamic
devices.
Krehbiel engaged the services of John C. Fillmore, an expert in Indian
music, in an attempt to notate the playing of these musicians, but
eventually they gave up in despair. "I was forced to the conclusion,"
Krehbiel later recalled, in an account in which irritation and awe are
present in equal doses, "that in their command of the [rhythmic] element,
which in the musical art of the ancient Greeks stood higher than either
melody or harmony, the best composers of today were the veriest tyros
compared with these black savages."
The language of certain Eskimo tribes, we are told, has dozens of words
for "snow"--where other cultures see only an undifferentiated substance,
they perceive subtle differences and a plethora of significations.
Similarly, for the African, virtually every object of day-to-day life
could be a source of rhythm, an instrument of percussion, and an
inspiration for the dance. The tools and implements with which the African
subdued the often hostile surrounding environment may well have been the
first sources of instrumental music on our planet. Here we perhaps come to
realize the hidden truth in the double meaning of the word "instrument,"
which signifies both a mechanism for subduing nature and a device for
creating sound. We begin with the given: shells, flints, animal hides,
trees, stones, sticks. And we end up with a dazzling array of instruments,
both implements used in day-to-day life--weapons, tools, wheels, building
devices--and in music-making--drums, rattles, scrapers, gongs, clappers,
friction instruments, percussion boards, and the like. But even earlier,
the human body itself must have served as a rich source of musical sound.
"Despite the non-African's conception of African music in terms of drums,"
historian John Storm Roberts points out, "the African instruments most
often used by the greatest number of people in the greatest variety of
societies are the human voice and the human hands, used for clapping."
Both approaches to music--one that reached out and found it in the
external world, the second that drew it from the physiological
characteristics of the human form came with the African to America.
In the 1930s, researchers working for the Federal Writers' Project
undertook a comprehensive program of recording the memoirs of former
slaves. This collection, housed today at the Archive of Folksong at the
Library of Congress, provides telling insight into this distinctive
African-American ability--strikingly similar to native African
practices--to extract music from the detritus of day-to-day life. "There
wasn't no music instruments," reads the oral history of former slave Wash
Wilson, Drums were fashioned out of a variety of discarded items: "pieces
of sheep's rib or cow's jaw or a piece of iron, with an old kettle, or a
hollow gourd and some horsehairs."
Sometimes they'd get a piece of tree trunk and hollow it out and
stretch a goat's or sheep's skin over it for the drum. They'd be one to
four foot high and a foot up to six foot across. . . . They'd take the
buffalo horn and scrape it out to make the flute. That sho' be heard a
long ways off. Then they'd take a mule's jawbone and rattle the stick
across its teeth. They'd take a barrel and stretch an ox's hide across
one end and a man sat astride the barrel and beat on that hide with his
hands and his feet and if he got to feel the music in his bones, he'd
beat on that barrel with his head. Another man beat on wooden sides
with sticks.
In African music, in both its original and its various Americanized forms,
different beats are frequently superimposed, creating powerful polyrhythms
that are perhaps the most striking and moving element of African music. In
the same way that Bach might intermingle different but interrelated
melodies in creating a fugue, an African ensemble would construct layer
upon layer of rhythmic patterns, forging a counterpoint of time
signatures, a polyphony of percussion. We will encounter this multiplicity
of rhythm again and again in our study of African-American music, from the
lilting syncopations of ragtime, to the diverse of offbeat accents of the
bebop drummer, to the jarring cross-rhythms of the jazz avant-garde.
Theorists of rhythm often dwell on its liberating and Dionysian
element, but the history of rhythm as a source of social control and power
has yet to be written. The historian Johan Huizinga hypothesized that the
introduction of drums into the ranks of soldiers marked the end of the
feudal age of chivalry and signaled the beginning of modern warfare, with
its coordinated regiments and precise military discipline. Perhaps the
subdued and steady rhythms of modern office music--and is not Muzak the
work song of our own age?--serve today to exert a subtle control over the
white-collar worker of post-industrialized society In any event, both
aspects of rhythm--on the one hand, as a source of liberation and, on the
other, as a force of discipline and control--make their presence felt in
African-American music. The work song was the melody of disciplined labor,
and even here its source could be traced back to Africa. "The African
tradition, like the European peasant tradition, stressed hard work and
derided laziness in any form," writes historian Eugene D. Genovese in his
seminal study of slave society Roll, Jordan, Roll. The celebration of
labor, inherent in the African-American work song, must otherwise seem
strangely out of place coming from an oppressed race consigned to the
indignities of slavery. But as soon as one sees the song of work as part
of an inherently African approach to day-to-day life, one that integrates
music into the occupations of here and now, this paradox disappears
entirely.
If the work song reflects rhythm as a source of discipline, the blues
represents the other side of African rhythms, the Dionysian side that
offered release. More than any of the other forms of early
African-American music, the blues allowed the performer to present an
individual statement of pain, oppression, poverty, longing, and desire.
Yet it achieved all this without falling into self-pity and
recriminations. Instead the idiom offered a catharsis, an idealization of
the individual's plight, and, in some strange way, an uplifting sense of
mastery over the melancholy circumstances recounted in the context of the
blues song. In this regard, the blues offers us a psychological enigma as
profound as any posed by classical tragedy. How art finds fulfillment--for
both artist and audience--by dwelling on the oppressive and the tragic has
been an issue for speculation at least since the time of Aristotle. Simply
substitute the word "blues" for "tragedy" in most of these discussions,
and we find ourselves addressing the same questions, only now in the
context of African-American music.
Country Blues and Classic Blues
The early accounts of slave music are strangely silent about the blues.
But should this be any cause of surprise, especially when one considers
the use of this idiom to articulate personal statements against oppression
and injustice? Although the blues dates back to the nineteenth century,
our best sense of what the earliest blues songs sounded like comes
primarily from country blues recordings made in the 1920s and after. Many
historians of African-American music have invested much effort into
finding even more primitive roots to the blues, into unlocking the hidden
unwritten, unrecorded history of this fascinating music. Some, such as
Samuel Charters, have even journeyed to West Africa in an attempt to
discover surviving traces of the pre-slave origins of this music. The
theories of such researchers, discussed in more detail below, are
compelling as quasi-mythic interpretations of the origin of the blues.
Yet in presenting an actual lineage of influence, they remain speculative
at best. Given our deep ignorance of the true "birth" of the blues, we
perhaps do best by focusing on the comparatively modern recordings, by
musicians such as Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charlie Patton,
Son House, and Leadbelly, among others.
The term "blues" is often used to refer to any sad or mournful song. As
such, it is one of the most frequently misused terms in music. For a
contemporary musician, the term "blues" refers to a precise twelve-bar
form that relies heavily on tonic, dominant, and subdominant harmonies.
The blues are further characterized by the prevalence of "blue" notes:
often described as the use, in the earliest blues, of both the major and
minor third in the vocal line, along with the flatted seventh; the flatted
fifth, most accounts indicate, later became equally prominent as a blue
note. In fact, this stock description is also somewhat misleading. In
country blues, the major and minor thirds were not used interchangeably;
instead the musician might often employ a "bent" note that would slide
between these two tonal centers, or create a tension by emphasizing the
minor third in a context in which the harmony implied a major tone. Much
speculation has been offered as to the historical origin of this powerful
and unique melodic device--some commentators, for example, have suggested
that this technique originated when the newly arrived slaves tried to
reconcile an African pentatonic scale with the Western diatonic scale,
with the result being two areas of tonal ambiguity, around the third and
seventh intervals, that evolved into the modern "blue" notes. In any
event, this effect, which is impossible to notate, is one of the most
gut-wrenching sounds in twentieth-century music. Given its visceral
impact, it is little cause for surprise that the device soon spread beyond
the blues idiom into jazz and many other forms of popular music.
When sung, as it usually was in its earliest form, the blues employs a
specific stanza form for its lyrics in which an initial line is stated,
then repeated, and then followed with a rhyming line. For example, Robert
Johnson sings in his blues "Drunken Hearted Man":
My father died and left me, my poor mother done the best that she could.
My father died and left me, my poor mother done the best she could.
Every man likes that game you call love, but it don't mean no man no good.
