Jazz

JAZZ. Members of the jazz community have engaged in various forms of activism almost from the moment the art form was invented. Although the focus of most practitioners, regardless of political orientation, has been on making music, some musicians and their allies have sought to improve the conditions under which they labored and, at times, to use the music (whether they called it jazz or something else) as a vehicle for socio-political commentary and mobilization. Their efforts have inspired and been shaped by writers, visual artists, activists, and others who have seen jazz as a valuable form of protest, critique, or simply as an occasion for inspired thinking about human liberation.

Jazz developed in the United States during the early twentieth century in a context of migration, urbanization, and capitalist expansion. Musicians were also workers and some tried to assert their rights as such. In 1910 James Reese Europe founded the Clef Club in New York as a trade association for Black musicians who were unable to join the segregated Musicians’ Union within the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Several years later he helped establish a separate African American AFL local. It also did not take long for musicians and others to see jazz as a vehicle for or symbol of social advancement more broadly. In 1919 Europe, after a successful stint as a military bandleader, said that he had “come back from France more firmly convinced than ever that negroes should write negro music. . . . We won France by playing music which was ours and not a pale imitation of others, and if we are to develop in America we must develop along our own lines” The Chicago Defender that year said that because of his favorable impression on “white people,” “Europe and his band are worth more to our Race than a thousand speeches from so-called Race orators and uplifters”

African American political organizations promoted the music as a vehicle for community building in the 1910s and 1920s. Although early organizers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) generally frowned upon jazz and blues, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) sponsored musical performances and UNIA bands in various cities and published favorable articles on the music in its newspaper, Negro World. This institutional structure enabled politically-inclined musicians, such as vocalist/pianist Revella Hughes and band leader Arnold Ford, to merge aesthetics and politics as they devoted their talents to the Garvey movement. The socialist and black nationalist African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) also supported jazz. Through the impetus of its leader, Cyril Briggs, the ABB sponsored concerts, published music, and ran advertisements and articles about jazz and blues in its journal, the Crusader. Among the contributors to the Crusader was Andy Razaf, a well-known composer and lyricist for Fats Waller. Razaf was also a poet and street corner orator. Outside of formal political channels, women blues artists such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith cut records that voiced feminist critiques of conditions facing Black women during this era in the spheres of labor and gender relations.

As Briggs became a prominent black member of the Communist Party, his support for jazz diminished, as many members of Left organizations maintained an elitist disdain for popular music during the 1920s and 1930s. During the Popular Front, however, some left-wing intellectuals overcame their aversion to “popular” music and played a significant role in the cultural life of Harlem and other black communities. In 1937 the Daily Worker began publishing laudatory articles about jazz. In Harlem, this newfound respect for jazz was augmented with the Communist Party’s institutional support for black arts, which was part of the Party’s broader attempt to gain favor in African American communities.

Although the Party’s cultural politics during the Popular Front were by no means universally welcomed by Black artists and intellectuals, some did participate in Popular Front cultural projects on their own terms while others lent their names and talents to benefit concerts for progressive causes such as the Scottsboro case defense, Spanish Republicans, and Soviet war relief. Pianist Teddy Wilson was among the small cadre of politically active musicians on the left who publicly supported the Communist Party and other left causes at this moment. Beginning in 1940 Wilson began a long-running gig at Café Society, a Greenwich village club where an interracial crowd of left activists and intellectuals gathered. And it was here, in 1939, that Billie Holiday, with whom Wilson sometimes performed, first sang union activist Abel Meeropol’s anti lynching song “Strange Fruit,” which played a key role in jazz being heard and performed in more political ways in the decades that followed.

During World War II, jazz benefits and concerts expressed the rising political consciousnesses of African Americans and other communities of color, as well as the political demand of the “Double V” campaign. Duke Ellington presented his composition “Black Brown and Beige” at Carnegie Hall in 1943, intending this thematic exploration of African American life to be a vehicle for social change. On the West Coast, the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles in 1944 was a benefit for twelve Mexican American youths wrongly imprisoned in the Sleepy Lagoon case.

Also expressing changes in thinking and political orientations was the musically complex modern jazz known as bebop. Although the radical intentions of its innovators have often been overstated, Dizzy Gillespie recalled that several of his contemporaries had close ties to the Communist Party and that he participated in a few demonstrations himself. Bebop itself was important as a self-consciously Black expression that rejected the conformity of commercialized jazz. The musical and sartorial styles of its practitioners provided the codes for the creation of a rebellious subculture, and in the end, the sonic force of bebop inscribed additional political meanings onto jazz for musicians and commentators alike.

White cultural-critic Sidney Finkelstein was among the observers influenced by the politicizing impact of modern jazz. He wrote glowingly of the music in Masses and Mainstream, and in Jazz: A People’s Music (1948), he sketched a book-length history of jazz and a program for its advancement. Eschewing both the “folk” purism and elitism of other commentators on the Left, Finkelstein rejected the boundary between jazz and European concert music, arguing that it was artistically limiting and indicative of the music industry’s discrimination against black musicians. Jazz, he argued, would not reach its fullest expression until a “democratic change” in American musical culture allowed musicians to incorporate jazz elements into orchestral compositions and create a more universal expression.

From today’s perspective, Finkelstein’s aesthetic philosophy may strike some as insufficiently celebratory of African American cultural practices. At the time, however, his ideas were consistent with those of many politicized black musicians. In the early 1950s, saxophonist Buddy Collette and other Black members of the segregated musicians’ local in Los Angeles fought for union amalgamation. One weapon in this struggle was the Community Symphony Orchestra, wherein Black and white musicians, classical and jazz players alike, presented public rehearsals to promote the cause of integration. Bassist Charles Mingus, who was also from Los Angeles and a participant in the local amalgamation movement, began his forays into public discourse by putting forth a similar philosophy in a 1951 letter to Down Beat magazine.

Shortly after the publication of his letter, Mingus moved to New York and began working with drummer Max Roach and other bebop veterans. During the civil rights era, Mingus’s and Roach’s activities were symbolic of the ways that a growing number of jazz musicians, working across styles, were increasingly performing politically-themed music and speaking out about social inequalities, including those that defined their working lives as performers. In 1952 Mingus and Roach formed record and publishing companies in an attempt to achieve some measure of economic and artistic autonomy. Mingus gained notoriety for the parodic protest song “Fables of Faubus” (1959), but perhaps the most important political jazz albums of this period were Roach’s album We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite (1960) and vocalist Abbey Lincoln’s Straight Ahead (1961). Lincoln and Roach performed on each other’s sessions and were later married. They subsequently articulated their dissatisfaction with injustice in the jazz world and the broader society in a roundtable discussion, organized by Down Beat in 1962 after fallout from a negative review of Lincoln’s album by one of its critics. Lincoln also became actively involved in working toward the fair treatment and visibility of African American women in the arts.

Musicians continued to lend their talents to national political causes. Ellington supported and played benefit shows for the NAACP and other causes during the 1950s and 1960s. At one concert in 1956, he appeared with Harry Belafonte and Coretta Scott King to help victims of racist violence in the southern United States. Mingus raised money for the NAACP at a concert at Town Hall in 1964, where he expressed his own contempt for the situation in the South between songs. In 1965 Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor played a fundraiser for the Congress of Racial Equality at the Five Spot, and Cannonball Adderly performed at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference benefit in Chicago in 1969.

One of the more important and interesting developments in the jazz community during the heightened political moment of the 1960s and 1970s was the formation of collective organizations by musicians. Some groups were interracial, including the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild, which was formed in 1964 after a successful free jazz festival called “The October Revolution.” Other organizations were predominantly or entirely Black. A few jazz collectives were founded on a commitment to a free jazz aesthetic, while others were formed around more general principles of artistic expression, economic self-determination, and community activism.

Among the most prominent of these collectives were the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, which was founded by Muhal Richard Abrams and featured members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago as early members; Reggie Workman’s Collective Black Artists in New York; and Horace Tapscott’s Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension in Los Angeles, which performed as the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. Ideologically, these groups were united by Black nationalist, communitarian, and Utopian visions. Members of these organizations were in dialogue with other black arts groups and activists in their communities. They involved themselves in youth education programs and local struggles for justice and community uplift while simultaneously working toward bettering their own lives as musicians. Some members of these organizations, such as the AACM’s Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith, wrote aesthetic analyses/manifestos that theorized the ways improvised music was a socially transformative force.

Some jazz artists espoused explicitly Marxist ideas through their music and public statements. Saxophonist and playwright Archie Shepp, for example, was politicized in Greenwich Village intellectual circles in the early 1960s, where he was in frequent dialogue with LeRoi Jones. By the late 1960s, Shepp publicly articulated a political perspective attuned to African American and Third World struggles as he critiqued the business practices of the jazz industry and capitalism in general. Shepp later wrote a play called The Communist, and in 1976 he recorded an album with Max Roach called Force, dedicated to Mao Zedong.

Bassist Charlie Haden also articulated a radical perspective through his musical projects. In 1969 he founded the Liberation Music Orchestra and recorded an album in collaboration with Carla Bley. The session included three folk songs from the Spanish Civil War and a Haden composition called “Song for Che.” Haden received international attention in 1971 when he was arrested and briefly detained in Portugal after dedicating a performance of “Song for Che” to the liberation struggles in Portuguese-held Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea. Haden resurrected the Liberation Music Orchestra in the 1980s and 1990s to record political folk songs from around the globe. Saxophonist Fred Ho was perhaps the most vocal of a group of radical Asian American musicians who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with music that simultaneously expressed Afro-Asian solidarity and articulated cultural affinities and critique rooted in Asian Americans’ own struggles.

The political upheavals within and outside the jazz world—as well as the ideas of Shepp and other musicians and the Socialist Workers Party’s assessment of Black nationalism—were the inspiration for Frank Kofsky’s Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (1970). This Marxist analysis of jazz aesthetics and industry practices, which was also influenced by Thomas Kuhn’s theory of shifts in scientific paradigms, celebrated “revolutionary” black musicians and condemned white critics, who Kofsky claimed were mouthpieces of the “class” that controlled the jazz business. Although its model of the politics of race and economics in jazz was somewhat reductionist, Kofsky’s book provided an important critique of industry practices and, along with later work, inspired many observers to pay more attention to the political economy of jazz.

Kofsky built upon the early jazz writing of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Although Blues People (1963) and several essays in Black Music (1967) employed a class analysis in their discussion of the production and consumption of jazz, Baraka took an increasingly cultural nationalist position through the 1960s. This changed in the 1970s, when Baraka rejected elements of black nationalism and adopted a Marxist perspective. By the time of the publication of The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987), which he wrote in collaboration with Amina Baraka, the warring ideals of the black working class and petite bourgeoisie were even more central to these aesthetic formulations.

In the early 1970s Duke Ellington famously said about the range of musical styles and approaches described as jazz, “I don’t know how such great extremes as now exist can be contained under the one heading.” Something similar might be said about jazz and the left, as writing about the music has proliferated and musicians across jazz subgenres have used their music to comment on society and express visions for social transformations in a multiplicity of ways. Even today, at a moment when jazz is considered by many as safe and respectable and has achieved a certain high-cultural legitimacy that comes with its institutional entrenchment in universities and cultural centers, it remains a vehicle for and an object of vibrant political expression.

In the twenty-first century musicians have visibly commented, through their music and otherwise, about 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terrorism,” post-Katrina government neglect in New Orleans, and #Black Lives Matter, just to name a few phenomena. The AACM continued to operate, and other collectives intermittently emerged to voice a similar commitment to artistic freedom, social change and bettering social conditions. Flautist, composer, professor, and AACM member Nicole Mitchell, for example, was among the jazz musicians who were front and center in We Have Voice, a collective that in late 2017 began organizing in opposition to sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the performing arts. Drummer, composer, and professor Terri Lyne Carrington, another member of the collective, subsequently established the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice with a mission of studying jazz “with gender and racial equity as a guiding principle.”

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), and Amina Baraka. The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. New York: William Morrow, 1987.

Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, https://www.berklee.edu/jazz-gender-justice

Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Finkelstein, Sidney. Jazz: A People’s Music. New York: Citadel Press, 1948.

Gennari, John. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. New York: The Free Press, 2001.

Ho, Fred, with Diane C. Fujino, ed. Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Kofsky, Frank. Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970.

Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Monson, Ingrid. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Porter, Eric. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Vincent, Ted. Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age. London: Pluto Press, 1995.

Wilmer, Valerie. As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. London: Pluto Press, 1987.

We Have Voice, http://wehavevoice.org/english