The Music of Jazz As a Stimulant to Musical Acculturation: The Music With a Democracy.

Music in the Historical Mix

Black people in the southern States of America and those blacks living elsewhere in America, through slavery, have adopted some of the many values as whites, but their African music style reflects mostly the inherent dichotomies blacks have faced in being "Americans" in the US. Slave music was for blacks a distinctive cultural form. There was no clear distinction, for blacks, between secular and sacred music, and like their ancestors from West Africa, they sang a variety of songs for work and spirituals. This music of black people had its musical origins from the 'hollers of plantation laborers and black city street peddler cries. It is from the haunting spirituals of slaves that such gospel singers like Blind Gary and Mahalia Jacksonthat we witness the phenomena, The role played by whites, creole and blacks in the musical amalgamation in the end creating Jazz was a very important element if this genre. Black music style has never been limited to a single style of musical tradition. Although today, we tend to view African American musical styles in terms of all types of genre, for example, ragtime, blues, classical jazz, fusion, Afro-Jazz, spirituals, R&B, Soul, Funk, some are not informed the fact that black musicians still treat their music as oral rather than written art form, because the culture of black folks is still an oral culture throughout the United States, akin to that of African culture and oral traditions in Africa. It is also true that black musicians, living in a culture that is overtly and covertly hostile against them, had to try and accommodate overall different cultures, fitting into them very well with their own music, leading them to learn and incorporate these new repertoires that would also be acceptable as part of their music in the early stages of the formation of jazz music.

In the 1920s and 1930s many producers were marketing the blues, then called race records because these enabled them to target the black audience and they were also likely to make more money from it. In their musical variety, blacks played music that was blues influenced performed by French speaking creoles. They also played music brought from Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica gotten to be known as Afro-Caribbean music. This also included many ethnic styles as perform by Cajun, Germans, French and Spanish creole. Then there was a situation wherein African Americans played Folk music and Jazz, and they shared a repertoire of this type of music with white Americans. In 1940 many cities in New Orleans had growing numbers of foreign born citizens. In these cities,in the 1840s brasswind ensembles like the Richmond Light Infantry Blues got to be enlisted in the South, along with the Allen's Brass Band. Some states at this time had were a slave-free society some freemen and slaves were earning good reputation as performers and musicians in the nineteenth century; thatis why we had Legends such a s "Klondike," "John the Baptist," Ferdinand "Jelly roll" Morton and Anthony Jackson. We had some southern such as William Grant Still, Mahalia Jackson, Roland Hayes ; also, rural blues singers like Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind lemon Jackson, to female performers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Chieppie Hill and all the way to the modern urban Blues of the Mississippi Delta, with musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King. We also had the reels and buck dancers of slave fiddlers and banjo pickers evolving through fife drum bands of Northern Mississippi, jug band of Memphis and Charleston and brass bands of New Orleans into early Jazz. All these musical performers contributed to the world of music and realized their dreams of international recognition for their artistic talents.

There were three major forms of African Americans that were associated with the blues in the twentieth century south: blues, ragtime piano and the music of Scott Joplin, James Scott and Joseph Lamb. There were two types of blues forms,urban and rural blues. This music functions as a vehicle enabling people to share hardships, complaints, exorcising sorrow, laughing at the world's absurdities, mocking whites and maintaining the integrity of black culture. Dixieland jazz is one other form of ensemble jazz, which was not totally an exclusive preserve for blacks, but it brought together the Afro-American and the Creole cultures together. It is worth noting that Louis Armstrong is totally linked with the birth of jazz. The true strength of southern black music is its ability and diversity to capture tensions as well as the achievements of blacks, and how much this music is indebted and was contributed to by southern music; also, its heritage of preserving older performances even to this day is the hallmark and the quality music jazz is. The history of jazz, that amalgam of African musical traditions and European instruments was evolving, and was more often heard at picnics, parades, dances throughout the cities. Jazz musicians also played in brothels in New Orleans and Pearl Primus's 'Strange Fruit', dealing with the lynchings of blacks in the sun were featured and sung by Billy Holiday, too. There was also another peculiar institutions called the 'Jook' or 'Juke house'... Jook came to mean a negro pleasure house: either a bawdy house or a house for dancing, drinking and gambling. It is in these Jooks that negro dances that circulated over the world. These dances, before they made their rounds around the country and the world, started inside the Jooks.

Musical Splinters from the Democracy of Jazz

Jazz as musical genre has helped spawn many other styles of music. In its own democratic way, jazz, for many generations and years has assimilated into its form and structure different cultural and musical expressions and realities of other people. Black Gospel music, Catholic and protestant hymns, Cajun songs, ragtime piano music, the blues, big bands, Afro Caribbean, African Jazz,and so on, all these forms of music merged together to form what we call jazz. When African Americans moved from the South to the North, the religious music, jazz and blues they had created evolved and splintered into other forms of music. Jazz has many meanings today to many people. The following are the different kinds of classification of Jazz we know of today:

Ragtime:

This type of music is not exactly jazz, but has had a telling and profound impact on Jazz music as we know it today. It has got a highly rhythmic and syncopated style. Form the start it has always been written and performed from the score. It also had no improvisation to it. As already noted above, Scott Joplin was one of the many known to be identified with it and some of its origins. It became popular in Chicago in the 1920s. associated Lewis Armstrong was closely associated with Dixieland Jazz. This style, with a funeral type of dirges steeped within a collective improvisation with a freewheeling party feel all around it.

Swing:

This is the domain of the Big Bands which was very poplar and rocking the 1930s and 1940s. This was music for dance and it was made with complex arrangements and allowed for improvisation by many band members within its musical score. Duke Ellington, Count Bassie, Tom Dorsey and Glenn Miller were all band leaders and active players. There were many other bands of their which were in full swing throughout their existence.

Bebop:

Musicians like Dizzy Gillepsie, Parker, Max roach, Bud Powell and Theolinous Monk were part of the new generation of musicians who played a different style form that of the swing era. They worked hard on rapid tempos and played in small groups of combos rather than in large band group styles. Their long range forms of improvisations they depended on the underlying cord changes than on the melodies of the tune.

HardBop/Post Bop:

This genre had a much more funkier and blusier feel and tone which was an evolution away form the bop arrangement and formula. The musician here were Horace silver, Jackie McLean, Lee Morgan, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and miles Davis, and all of the known for the soulful styles. We now have the post-boppers like Branford and Wynton Marsalis, Wallace Rodney and others.

Avant-Garde Free Jazz:

This was a style that parted company with Swing, Bebop, Hard Bop/Post-Bop. This style came about in the 1950s and 1960s, which was at the time when Coltrane and Miles were recording modal compositions, or payed songs that did not use traditional chord. The people who were at the forefront of this genre in which the first initial statement in their music presentation was followed by music that followed no chord structure, allowing for unencumbered improvisation. This sound system was later refined by Sun Ra teaming with Coltrane and introduced freer music in their compositions was their structure than straight free jazz.

Fusion:

This was originally explained as a combination of jazz, rock and electric. The artists connected to this type of music were men like Miles , Herbie Hancock and Pat Metheney, chick Korea, along with super bands like Return to Forever and Weather Report. These artist and bands were designated as the icons of fusion. The section even include band like Fred Ho's Afro-Asian ensemble and Rudresh Mahanthappa's Dakshina ensemble.

Smooth Jazz:

This genre is an offshoot of fusion, and is characterized by repetitive computer rhythms and smooth keyboard sound and melodies. Good and great improvisors are not attracted to this form, but we have great artists like the Yellow Jackets, Groover Washington ,Jr., and Spyro -Gyra within this musical style.

Latin Jazz:

The category includes Cuban,Brazilian, Caribbean and Latin American musicians. This musical genre incorporates the Portuguese chords, Afro-Latin American drum and percussion rhythms. Dizzy Gillepsie gave prominence when he recorded with the Cuban Chano that made the connection real and permanent. Within this musical sound system, we find artists like Arturo Sandoval, Tito Puente, Paquito D'Rivera, David Sachez, Claudio Roditi, Paulo Moura, Hermeto Pascoal, Hilton Ruiz, Monty Alexander, Michel Camilo and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. These musician s used their intimate knowledge of Jazz to create and form their unique sound.

Hip-hop Jazz:

Rap musicians began discovering jazz on the 1990s, and likewise, jazz musicians were becoming and discovering young hi[p-hop poets. Early hip hop was rebellious just like Bebop, hard-bop and avant-garde sound systems and their intellectual and improvisational skills. In this case we had producers-emcees like Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad(of a Tribe called Quest) Guru of Gangstarr, Pete Rock, C.L. Smooth and Prince Paul began incorporating jazz samples into their music. Musicians like Miles, Ron Carter, Quincy Jones, Greg Osby, and Herbie Hancock all collaborated with rappers and hip-hop producers, this enabled two different traditions of African Americans to come together.

Jazz has reached all corners of the world and is known and appreciated by people from all walks of life. There is a democratic togetherness and independence that comes form the music of Jazz. This is one genre that is a true stimulant to musical acculturation. You can listen to all the artists and different musical styles discussed above from FASTTRACKS Internet Radio on Live365.com/stations/djtot12. This is one type of music that transcends gender race , culture and embraces all of humanity

Music: The Sound and Sense of it All

Music is the motion of rising and changing, as thought given form, feeling as an object, the living reflection of material life, the thoughts I see, I hear, sonographics, drama itself. In terms of of word music, the African, when he arrived here(US), now Afro-American, Black Americans, people who think that Africans remain Africans in the US are unrealistic. When tony Williams, a drummer who used to play with Miles Davis arrived on the African shores, where he set up his drum set and started booming and banging on the hide, he waited a minute without playing. A minute later he heard from across the way drums. The African people were saying, "We heard you, but we don't understand what you are saying." The Africans continued and said, "Not only did we hear, but we heard you plural. The Africans heard Tony Williams became he plays he was playing an industrial instrument. It got levers, a little motor, and on hearing this instruments, the africans thought it was 10 or 15 people, when it was actually Tony Williams. This was because this had more to do with the mixture of African, European and native mixtures which gave rise the audio of plurality when heard by African. One cannot speak an American sentence without going from Europe to Native America and to Africa. In America, people are one, even tough the social this keeps us separated and sometimes hateful and not understanding each other, we are one people. We should go to Jazz Festivals not only in Europe, but Africa, Asia and so on.

Whilst we are looking at Jazz as a music with a democracy, we recall what Melville J. Herskovits asked in the pages of the the New Republic : "What has Africa given America?" In his answer, a radical response for the time, he briefly mentioned the influence of Africans on American Music, language, manners, and foodways. He found most of his examples, however, in the South. Much of what people of African descent brought to the United States since 1619 has become so familiar to the general population, particularly in the South, that the African origins of specific customs and forms of expression have become blurred or forgotten altogether. Consider, for example, the banjo . Not only is the instrument itself of African origin, but so is its name. Although the banjo is encountered today chiefly in bluegrass ensembles where it is considered an instrument of the Appalachians, it was first played by slaves on the Tidewater Plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was only taken up into the Piedmont and mountains during the 19th century by Africans working on the railroad gangs.. Although the contemporary banjo is physically quite different from its afro American folk antecedent, it retains nonetheless the unique sound of its ringing high drone string and its drum beat. These are the acoustic reminders of the instrument's African origins.

Linguists have noted that southern speech carries a remarkable load of African vocabulary. This assertion is all the more remarkable when we recall that white southerners have often claimed to have little interaction with African slaves or free Africans. Some regional words have murky origins, but there is no controversy for such terms as: Boogie, gumbo, tote, benne goober, cooter, okra, jazz,mumbo-jumbo, hoodoo, mojo, cush and the affirmative and negative expressions uh-huh , and unh-uh. All are traceable to to African languages and usages. African Music in the Americas was never limited to a single style or musical tradition. Black musicians created in a variety of forms, from art songs to zydeco music(blues-influenced dance music performed by French-speaking creole blacks). Many African musicians were musically bilingual, capable of absorbing and mastering )1) the Afro-Caribbean rhythms and dance forms brought to the Gulf Coast by emigrants from Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba.; (2) the many ethnic musical styles practiced by Cajun, German, French and Spanish Creole, Mexican and French performers; and, after emancipation, (3) the new styles of the American and European art and popular music from the North. Studies of the Afro-American style tend to emphasize folk music and jazz, but Southern Blacks also had a repertoire of material, which had a common heritage with whites and was known widely throughout the United States.

The real Strength of Jazz music and other genres of African American musical compositions and production, is its diversity. The tendency to view the style in terms of its various genres - spirituals,s blues, ragtime,gospel songs - sometime obscures the fact that black musicians still treat music as an oral rather than a written art because black culture is still largely an oral culture in both North and South. Without Southern culture as a stimulant to music acculturation, the Afro-America would not have produced the unique fusion of traditions that have made it a potent force in the past 20th century and still going on in the 21st century. There are a lot of people who contributed to Jazz in many ways and one of the is Paul Robeson. Amiri Baraka wrote: "FIrst,if you read Paul Robson's work, not his work as a singer, he was a great artist, but he was also and aesthetic theorist? His work on backgrounds of Afro-Americans music was very interesting and important. You can see that in his selected works. He talks about the pentatonic scale, the blues, the balck notes. That's why the blues singers could play that easy, because theywere the black notes. But What robeson said, and this was interesting, was that you can trace the development of the pentatonic, whether you listening to the Volga boatmen in Russia and the Ukraine or Deep river in the South. It's essentially the same scale, the same chords. Robeson goes through the whole technical music thing. This is what Paul Robeson has to say Afro-American Jazz and its relation to World Music

Some Aspects of Afro-American Music- by Paul Robeson

How and Why Jazz Is A Music With A Democracy

Mr. Harold Courlander, well-known authority on folk lore, made an extensive field trip into the rural South some years ago in search of authentic Afro-American music. He recorded this music on the spot where he found it. some of his music is now available in several Folkways albums of records, under the title Negro Folk Music of Alabama. This Folkways collection was reviewed recently by the New York Times music critic "J.B.," in the Sunday Times of August 19, 1956. The review was an extremely interesting and challenging discussion and analysis of the musical material. However, several of the statements made by the critic sent me off into months of fascinating and very rewarding research. for example. "J.B." wrote that "some authorities believe the European element to be more important in Negro music than the African." That of course I could not accept, so I went in search of documentation to support my resistance. I found an enormous volume of support which I will try to sum up briefly.

There is no more evidence that Afro-America music is based on European music, than that European music is based on African music. There is however, extensive evidence that nearly all music in the world today stems from an ancient world body of original folk music-music created, sung, and handed down through the ages by the people in all parts of the world. The people brought this wealth of folk music with them into the early churches when they were established, and here it was preserved, modified and eventually formalized in various ways, according to the, according to the developments and changes which took place in the Church itself. This ancient body of wold fold music, and much of the early Church music based on the "Pentatonic" 5-tone) scale, which is preserved today in folk songs all over the world. Victor Belaiev, noted authority on early music, is positive about the folk base of all European Plain Chant, , and Joseph Yasser, distinguished musicologist, points out in his book The Theory of EvolvingTonality, that this medieval Plain Chant had a Pentatonic 5-tone modal base. Music in ancient times all over the world, and much of the music in Europe up to 1500, was based on the Pentatonic 5-tone scale.

Our own J. Rosamond Johnson points out that most of our Afro-American melodies, religious and secular, are alos in Pentatonic moe. Our musicians see an obvious Pentatonic scale on the 'black keys' of the piano: F sharp. G sharp, A sharp (B), C sharp, D sharp (F), F (B) C, with the F and the B (or E and B flat, etc.) used as the two auxiliary tones. There is also a Pentatonic scale with half-tones in use in Africa, Japan and other places. We have a Pentatonic scale on the black keys, with F sharp as do, or the tonic; and another on the white keys with C as do or tonic. Of course there are many variations of the Pentatonic. so, as Johnson points out, we in Afro-American life see the piano as having TWO CENTERS: an F sharp center and a C center. Johnson and Yasser also point out that it is most important to recognize that sometimes not used. They are auxiliary, not substantive tones to the main Pentatonic scale. Note that the F sharp and C, or F and B, are three whole tones or a "raised" or sharp 4th apart-a most important feature of the cross relations between the two Pentatonics.

A very interesting and helpful way to look at the piano, especially for those with "Pentatonic ears," is to see the tones as an interaction between the two Pentatonics-a kind of extension of major and minor interaction and contrast. Yasser explains that he would characterize the Diatonic scale (do, re, mi, fa sol, la , ti do) which every child learns in school and which we all sing, as SEVEN TONES plus FIVE CHROMATICS, 7+5, seven white keys plus five black keys. and he characterized it as FIVE TONES plus TWO. So,in seeing the piano in terms of the two Pentatonics, we could characterize it as TWO FIVES, 5 black keys above, 5 white keys below. with TWO white keys in between and common to both FIVES:

5 + 2 + 5, 5-F Sharp 5-F Sharp or G (2) (F 2 B) 5 C 5 C

and these two Pentatonics used simultaneously, one contrasting against the other, give some clue to much of modern music. Note for example the Mikokosmos of Bartok, and some of the Pentatonic usages of Debussy. Authorities agree that the early world body or mainstream of music was polyphonic, contrapuntal in character-that is to say, that several or may singers carried the melody in parallel lines, sometimes some starting at different times or at different points, sometimes with a leader and an answering or emphasizing chorus or congregation (which our musicians and nearly all our people would find entirely familiar). Marius Schneider, one of the most distinguished of musicologists, studied the music of the people of Africa, Asia, south America and established that "the highly developed sphere of certain African clans contains 'symphonious' forms very similar to those of the early Middle Ages. There is no question here of African music influencing medieval composers; it is rather that the development of polyphony seems spontaneously to have followed very similar paths i all parts of the world."

"J.B." aso comments in his review on some other characteristics of this folk music of Alabama: "The most striking fact out Negro group singing is that it is contrapuntal in character ... no less striking is the prominence of the "African tetrachord" which is merely the familiar "blues chord" of American Jazz ... Grove's Dictionary traces this tetrachord to the West Coast of Africa, whence it has spread not to the United States but to Latin America."

This contrapuntal singing, and characteristic "Fourth" or tetrachord, are not only characteristic of early medieval Plain Chant, but also of much of the modern music of Mussorgsky, Bartok, Janacek, Vaughn Williams, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and others, and also Chinese, Indonesian, African, Hebraic. Byzantine, Ethiopian music, as well as Scotch Hebridean, Welsh and Irish music; that is to say it is characteristic of Pentatonic modal music. It would seem then, that Afro-American music is based primarily upon our African heritage and has been influenced not only by European but by many other musics of East and West Africa; this is true lso of Afro-Cuban, Afro-Haitian.Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian music; and our music has also influenced other music. It is extraordinarily interesting to note that in recent years many Western composers have turned to their old Pentatonic modal folk music, finding new inspiration in tis wealth, and basing many of their new compositions upon it, just as Bach based much of his music on the ancient modal folk chorales. these composers have found richness in Pentatonic modal melodies because, as Yasser conclusively demonstrates, there is also a pentatonic harmony which has long existed and been developed in China, Africa, Indonesia, Siam, etc., and in Europe up to 1500. That is to say, there is a Pentatonic system of music which preceded and co-exists with the better know Diatonic or 7-tone system-the one in general use in the classic music of Europe after 1700. However, this Pentatonic system has always continued in folk music. My dear friend and colleague Lawrence Brown has drawn upon this richness, and made many beautiful arrangements of our own folk music(trombonist for Duke, and Johnny Hodges). so, today we are flowing back into the mainstream of world music, which includes the music of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the americas, with a future potential of immense richness-all giving to and taking from each other, through this wonderful bank of music" (Paul Robeson's Excerpt, 1956).

Paul Robeson, although technical as noted by Amiri Baraka, gives us a sense and history of why this article is written based on the fact that Jazz is a music with a democracy. Robeson helps makes clear the basis of most forms of music all over the world, and it is with this understanding that I reiterate: Jazz Music is a music with a Democracy: All people are playing it all over the world in whatever format they decide to improvise -on.

Titbits on the Jazz Ensemble

In an article called the Jazz Ensemble: Introducing the band, the site, "A Passion For Jazz! on the Web, this is how they go about it:

Piano:

Pianists are intellectual and know-it-alls since they studied theory, harmony and composition in college. Most are riddled with self-doubt and are usually bald(but Monk for me is the epitome of a Pianist and Jazzman who never sold out- my two cents, and are usually bald. They should have big hands, but often don't. They were social rejects as adolescents. They go home after the gig and play with toy soldiers(if they had them and not poor- my addition) Pianists have a special love-hate relationship with singers. If you talk to the piano player during break, he will condescend

Guitar:

Jazz guitarists are never very happy. Deep inside they want to be rock stars, but thy're old and overwight. In protest, they wear teir hair long, prowl for groupies, drink a lot and play too loud. Guitarists hate piano players because they can voice ten notes at once, but guitarists mak up for it by playing as fast as they can. the more a guitarist drinks, the higher he turns his amp. Then the drummer starts to play harder an the trumpeteer

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