Part 1: Where and How Did Jazz Start? Some Notes on Musical Origins, Though I Personally Do Not Believe The Answer is New Orleans.

“New Orleans is not where jazz started but they do have an effective Chamber of Commerce” – Jazz historian and expert on early jazz Larry Gushee

This is going to be a somewhat random series of posts – in more than one part – with some very interesting historic musical examples. It may or may not be controversial; I don’t know any more as I can never seem to predict how people will react to the crazy things I appear to say. But I do believe that when you hear or read certain common comments on jazz, like the following, you should be wary:

1) Jazz started in New Orleans

2) Jazz is America’s only original music

3) Jazz is America’s classical music

The first is (almost) the subject of this post; the second is racialist nonsense – not racist, mind you, but based on an over-consciousness of race. Jazz at its essence is, yes, black music. But it exists alongside other original and sometimes multi-racial forms like hillbilly and country music, ragtime, hip hop, rock and roll…(and probably other styles like the blues, but I don’t want, at least right now, to get into that argument, especially about whether or not THE BLUES is a necessary component of jazz. I don’t think it is, and my reasons are complicated, but that is, maybe, if I live long enough, another column). And I believe that the co-existence, of jazz with myriad styles of other American music, is why number 3 is obsolete.

So, here are some of my scattered thoughts on jazz’s origins:

Does it Mean Anything If It Fails To Swing?

I ask that question as formally as I can; I am hoping that some tenured academic notices this and installs me in a chair (I think that’s what it’s called, though I have been using chairs – and couches – for many year). They key to academic success is writing as though a pool cue has been inserted into…well, into a part of the body where the sun rarely, if ever, shines.

But first let us define swing, which is thought of as an essential component of jazz. I am not sure I can, but that has never stopped me – and a lot of other people – from trying. Swing, I believe, is a certain kind of rhythmic momentum created by working in front of, on top of, and behind the basic beat in ways that imply a disjointed continuity. Swing is also characterized by an emphasis on so-called weak beats and a kind of floating, triplet-rhythm feel. With someone like Louis Armstrong, it is often in his broader and more open (and early, say 1930s) improvisations, in the use of the quarter note triplet, which creates a sense of free-floating melodic and rhythmic (I won’t separate the two) paraphrase.

And the classic case for jazz swing - the way, in many cases, eight notes are phrased - is made by what I call the African triplet, which I name in that way because it emerges in black music of the Diaspora out of the subdivision of notes housed by the clave rhythm, which itself varies; but there is a good definition of that rhythm here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clave_(rhythm)

The clave rhythm (there are other kinds as well) that I think of in these terms (jazz swing) goes: 3/3/2, or: “one two three, one TWO three, ONE two.”

But back to the African triplet: the dotted eight/sixteenth rhythmic feeling of jazz, which does vary by era, from Swing to Bebop, can be mounted on the eighth note triplet. This is essential to the way in which jazz musicians swing eighth notes, with the implication of a slight extension of certain of those notes which attaches one part of the phrase to another in a way that creates swing, that gives it a quirky momentum. To get to the phrasing (though in an inexact way) count an eight-note triplet (one-two-three) and then sing one note for one-two and the next note on three. That’s the basic count of jazz eighth notes (for other values consult an academic).

As I try to answer the question of “what is swing?” I immediately think of the old saw, “well, if you gotta ask then you won’t understand,” but I don’t think that’s fair. I am here, after all, to indoctrinate into my own theories and beliefs, so I do want you to at least understand what I am trying to theorize; a quick trip to YouTube for musical examples of things like the clave might well be helpful to you at this point.

And I should add that I am not dogmatic about what constitutes “swing.” I think Lenny Tristano swings, though he was often accused otherwise. And many other avant gardists who may have discarded certain established jazz essences also swing, I believe. It’s just another way of doing it.

But back to my original question: Where did jazz begin? I have some unorthodox views, some origin theories that are not really origin theories but rather general statements about those musical elements which would, as they coalesced into a particular rhythmic and melodic style, lead to the development of the music that many of us now call – did call in early New Orleans – jazz.

So; was it New Orleans where jazz started? I would say no, though there were many musical and rhythmic ideas codified in that city that led to the creation of the idiom of improvised music called jazz. But jazz doesn’t have to have improvisation to be jazz. The idea of jazz is as much related to rhythmic displacement and dispersement, phrase and paraphrase, as it is to improvisation. Think of the melodic statements made by Duke Ellington’s orchestra or anything by one of Gil Evans’ groups. Remove the solos and what do you have? Jazz, yes jazz, in the phrasing, the tone, the rhythm and texture of the notes, even the way the harmony is applied as it relates to certain 20^th century pop song constructions by way of progression and interval. Jazz also means variation of phrase; for singers, I would say, as a general statement, the rhythmic phrase – or really paraphrase - shapes the lyric more than the lyric shapes the phrase. Think Louis Armstrong who, though contrary to myth did NOT sing like he played (they were two very different things), revolutionized the way all singers and instrumentalists sang and/or played. Was he improvising as he sang? Well, yes and no; once he developed a basic vocal routine he seems to have retained many of the same elements of “surprise” in future performances, though this is, of course, based on only what I have heard; Armstrong made thousands of appearances so there is no way to confirm this. But I suspect it is true.

And before I forget, let us not recoil from the word JAZZ, much as so many musicians have attempted to reject it and replace it with dull substitutes like “black classical music” (see above). BORING. This goes along with somber young men standing on stage in suits and ties and grimacing as they solo just to make it clear they are serious musicians. Yes, jazz is a serious music, but it is also fun and also often comments on itself in the form of compositional expression and even ironic distancing. Not that there’s anything wrong with those tailored suits; some of my best friends own (and on occasion wear) them. But that’s surface and does not, by itself, make the music and the musician into a respectable example of Black Classical Music. As I have made clear in other posts, I do believe that this is a music that does not need to be dressed up in order to be presented as a serious thing.

I just recently walked into the middle of a discussion on Instagram about the term jazz, a discussion which was filled with fear and loathing for the racist past which the word supposedly represents. Two things I would say: the true etymology of “jazz” as a word is somewhat obscure, but the great pianist and jazz scholar Lewis Porter has done the best – and practically the only – serious research bent on getting at the truth of where the word comes from and what it means. But the early New Orleans musicians, black and white, had no fear of the term, which they also used as a descriptor and verb for speeding up the music, shaking it up into different units of swing with points of emphatic phrasing to emphasize the music’s philosophical idea of freedom and self-liberation (as George Clinton said, “free your mind and your ass will follow”). We hear this in almost all the music I will label, in these columns, as early jazz. And while I tend to fanatically avoid reducing such things to glib socio-babble, it is of course important that not only were black musicians the originators of the form but that it was one aspect of the way – though not the only one - in which black culture overcame white resistance, in everything from music to dance to verbal expression to singing. But to simply attach this to white oppression – as a response to white folks’ racism – is to, as Zora Neale Hurston said, give white people too much credit for black achievement. Improvisation was an active characteristic of post-Diaspora African expression in every place to which slaves were imported. The method and means of improvisation varied according to the way in which Africans adjusted to, adapted to, and overthrew the local culture, but certain African rhythmic and tonal aspects were retained (and for a real understanding of African music in the Diaspora I yield to those with far greater expertise like Royal Hartigan and Gerard Kubik; it is worth your while to explore their work).

In a prior discussion I made the point that yes, jazz as a term and a form has some disreputable and even vulgar sexual reference – but listen to Jelly Roll Morton’s Library of Congress interview (the unexpurgated version). He was proud of the many explicit sexual assertions of older black songs, of songs that were clearly, by certain community standards (see Lenny Bruce)* obscene in their bluntly sexual lyrics. Or listen to the original and unexpurgated Shave ‘em Dry by the blues singer Lucille Bogan; in many available versions the one issued is the clean one, but the expression means sex without foreplay and there is one version that is so explicit my CD player began to blush (this was issued on the Columbia/Legacy reissue collection of her work).

Earlt black musicians, of different musical styles, not only accepted these things but they embraced them, for better or worse, as part of a lifestyle that was distinctly non-white, as an alternate history and culture that they lived and breathed; they didn’t give a damn about white standards of propriety (though of course this changed through the years with the rise of, first, the Harlem Renaissance’s New Negro, and the growing nationalist pride of the Marcus Garvey movement and later the emergence of modern jazz and the accomplishments of a new generation of black musicians; after World War II many of these younger players became more and more politically self aware and began to question many of the colloquialized and sexualized means of identifying black culture. But that is the point, that difficulty with the term was a matter of a certain kind of growing intellectual and social self-awareness that coincided, in particular, with the post-World War II acceleration of black consciousness and then the Civil Rights movement).

Yes, things have changed, but it does us no good, in my opinion, to pretend a whole way of life, a whole lifestyle and black counterculture that reveled in sexualized language and image, never existed. I personally (and yes, I do recall that I am white) am happy to embrace jazz as JAZZ, to declare it publicly as a great and honorable tradition and a rich intellectual/emotional discipline, as an historical accomplishment of great depth and beauty. I too believe in Great Black Music Ancient to the Future; I just happen to call a lot of that music, without fear of contradiction (I am not saying there won’t be contradiction, only that I don’t fear it) jazz.

(And here is an article by Lewis Porter, on Substack, on the origin of the term jazz:)

The Word "Jazz," 1 of 7: Its True Origins

There is more coming as I continue to mumble a few words in Esperanto (given how everyone who writes about jazz origins seems to be speaking in a different language) in the hopes of breaking through the glass ceiling of America’s highly racialized linguistic and cultural definitions. I want to see if there is, indeed, in this world of the racial barriers that now confine us (is that the wall Trump was talking about?) any possibility of common consensus. And though I doubt that that there is, I go on.

I will see you next week, but I leave you here with a very early recording that I, possibly alone among many historians, regard as jazz; from 1913, James Reese Europe’s recording of the W.C. Handy composition Down Home Rag. What is it? It is ragtime busting out all over, a rare early black recording that violates certain norms of proper rhythmic and dynamic etiquette. Listen to the intensity of it, on a recording that is more than 111 years old! Play it loud; these musicians, all black, are pulling on a leash of propriety which has been imposed upon them (yes, by some white folks, but not only white folks). I am running out of metaphors, but this is jazz in perhaps its earliest recorded form; it swings and it plays like a musical roller coaster and hall of mirrors all in one, repeating itself in that way of some early black song and language, desperately swirling and twisting itself in odd directions, as though looking for some kind of escape from conventional manners and mannerisms: