What makes "jazz" the revolutionary music of the 20th century, and will it be revolutionary for the 21st century?

I do not use the term "jazz," as I do not use such terms as Negro, Oriental, or Hispanic. Oppressed peoples suffer when their history, identity, and culture are defined, (mis)represented, and explicated by our oppressors. The struggle to redefine and re-image our existence involves the struggle to reject the stereotyping, distortions, and devaluation embodied in the classifications of conquerors and racists. The struggle over how to describe past and present reality is the struggle to change reality, and the continued usage of the term "jazz" persists in marginalizing, obfuscating, and denying the fact that this music is quintessentially American music. However, it is the music of an American oppressed nationality and not the music of the dominant, American, white, European heritage. It is white-supremacist racism that will not properly and justly accept both the music and its creators in a position of equality.

As a result of the movements of oppressed peoples that exploded in the 1960s, we have replaced terms such as Negro with Black or African American, and Oriental with Asian or Asian American. More problematical are Hispanic (literally, of or belonging to Spain) and Latino (emphasizing, again, the Latin or European) - I personally use "Spanish-speaking oppressed nationalities" when referring to Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Chicanos, Central and South Americans, and Caribbean peoples in the U.S.A. whose only commonality is that they speak Spanish (and even that Spanish has national particularities). However, a satisfactory replacement for "jazz" has yet to emerge, and continues to be part of the ongoing struggle to dismantle white supremacy and Eurocentrism in American culture and society. At times, certain descriptors have gained some currency, such as Rahsaan Roland Kirk's "Great Black Music," or Archie Shepp's "African American Instrumental Music," or Max Roach's preference: "The music of Louis Armstrong, the music of Charles Parker, etc." Billy Taylor simply said "20th-century American music." Some might argue that "jazz" should be reclaimed and that its meaning should be transformed from a pejorative term and usage to a statement of celebratory, "in-your-face" defiance - as militant gays and lesbians have reappropriated the once-derogatory and insulting queer and fag. Black was once a term loaded with negativity which the Black Liberation Movement transformed to symbolize pride and self-respect.

It took a movement of oppressed peoples to adopt new terms and meanings for self-determination and to replace reactionary and oppressive ones. 19th-century racist blood quantum legislation in the U.S. had determined anyone with "one drop" of African blood to be "black." Yet African Americans are a hybrid: neither mainly "African" nor "American" (in its dominant, mainstream understanding and context). They have a "kreolized"(2) identity - a revolutionary new cultural and social identity, forged in struggle against an oppressive society that still largely excludes, denies, and denigrates (i.e., "niggerizes" or "chinkifies" or "spicifies") entire peoples. Indeed, the struggle of oppressed nationalities in the U.S. is to transform the very concept of "American" to its multicultural, multinational, multilingual reality. That struggle is inherently revolutionary: More than a proclamation of multiculturalism or integration into the dominant mainstream, it aims to dismantle the entire institutional power of white supremacy and Eurocentrism. Only when that happens will "jazz" become American music.

Yet, as the 20th-century comes to an end, we find a curious phenomenon: "Jazz" has become accepted into the halls of American (white, mainstream) cultural citadels. We find "Classical Jazz at Lincoln Center." We find a black artistic director criticizing other black musicians for not playing "black music." We find the internecine war over what is and isn't "jazz" and who should define it. I will argue in this essay that, ironically, it is those most bent on defining and essentializing "jazz" who are indeed its greatest enemies, because they contradict the revolutionary essence of the music.

Defining and representing "jazz" is highly and inescapably political, and it seems to me that the politics of music must be understood both sociologically and musicologically - in a dialectical, interdependent, and interactive manner. Yet much of the literature has focused on socio-history (e.g., LeRoi Jones's Blues People, which argues that black music changed as black people changed), ideology (e.g., Frank Kofsky's Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, which assesses the music's sociopolitical content via the consciousness/attitudes of the musicians), or political economy (a lot of writing on the profiteering and exploitation of black music and artists). Only the work of Christopher Small (Music of the Common Tongue [London: River Run P, 1987]), a British musicologist, systematically attempts to examine "jazz" or African American music primarily from a musical/aesthetical perspective.

As a young Chinese (Asian) American growing up in the 1970s, I was profoundly drawn to and inspired by African American music as the expression of an oppressed nationality, because of its social role as protest and resistance to national oppression, and for its musical energy and revolutionary aesthetic qualities. I identified with its pro-oppressed, anti-oppressor character: with the militancy the musicians displayed, with its social history of rebellion and revolt, and with its musical defiance to not kow-tow to, but to challenge and contest, Western European "classical" music and co-opted, diluted, eviscerated commercialized forms that became American pop music.

"Jazz" or African American music is the revolutionary music of the 20th century - not just for America, but for the planet as well. It is the music that embodies and expresses the contradiction of the century, fundamentally rooted to the world's division between oppressor, imperialist nations and the liberation struggle of the oppressed nations and nationalities. Its historical emergence and development parallel the rise and development of imperialism - the globalization of finance capital - at the turn of the century. Its musical and stylistic innovations reflect the changes in the 20th-century life of the African American oppressed nationality.

"Jazz" is the music of the emerging African American proletariat or urban, industrial working class. Its predecessor, blues, was the music of post-Reconstruction. Just as old socioeconomic formations persist while new ones supplant them, so also do musical forms overlap. One exception is the persistence of pre-20th-century Western European "classical" music today - a result of the continual institutional/cultural expression of white settler-colonialism in North America.

"Jazz" emerged as formerly rural African American laborers traveled north to the urban industrial and commercial centers of Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia. A new music arose with a new class of urban workers grafting the rich and unique African American music of formerly enslaved plantation laborers, rural tenant farmers, and migratory workers onto a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, industrial, and multiethnic urban culture of growing capitalist America.

No longer Southern, blues, or field songs, the music draws on all these cultural precedents and transforms them. All of the characteristics of African American music that are distinctive and transformative of Western European concert music are retained but intensified: The Western European concert tradition of metronomic sense of time and general singularity of rhythm vis-a-vis the grafting of West African multiple and layered rhythms produces the polyrhythmicality of African American 20th-century music; the fixed pitch and fixed diatonic temperament of Western European concert music vis-a-vis West and Central African modalism and non-fixed pitch produce the blue notes of African American music; the primacy of written notation in Western European concert music vis-a-vis West and Central African oral tradition produces a revolutionary unity of composition and improvisation for 20th-century African American music; and the primacy of the conductor and composer for Western European concert music vis-a-vis call and response/soloist-leader and group leads to the player-as-leader-as-soloist-as-virtuoso improviser/performer/composer.

The music develops a high degree of sophistication and complexity, utilizing and combining features of both the compositional/notational and improvisational/oral traditions. Yet, due to national oppression, "jazz" was, ironically, spared the canonization and institutionalization that the concert music of Western Europe underwent as part of the establishment of white-supremacist settler-colonialism in U.S. society. Thus, the music became both a folk/popular music and an art/classical music that could be performed and enjoyed in not only the "lowest" of venues but also the "highest" concert halls. Until recently, the music, by virtue of its very position as the creative expression of an oppressed nationality excluded from most of American mainstream society (except when acceptably "covered" by white artists), resisted the calcification and ossification that "classical" music had undergone. For the most part, "jazz" has never looked back to the past as "classical" music has - fixated upon finer and finer degrees of perfection in the interpretation of past, "classic" treasures. Rather, "jazz" has been about the present ("Now Is the Time") and the future ("Space Is the Place").

It's entire history has been the freeing of time, pitch, and harmony from fixed, regulated, predictable standards. Every major innovation in the history of the music has been from the struggle of musicians to attain greater and greater levels of expressive freedom through liberating the two basic fundamentals of music: time (meter) and sound (pitch/temperament/harmony). I shall briefly discuss the basic changes that have resulted from this process of music making.

New and Reconfigured Instrumentation

A new instrument was introduced to the world of music during the 1890s and early 1900s in the U.S.A.: the drum kit (see royal hartigan's essay in this issue, 234-236). The multiple, layered rhythms of both West African and New Orleans drum ensembles merged into a kit played by one person instead of several players. For the first time, one individual using all four limbs played several percussion parts simultaneously.

European instruments such as the piano and bass violin (string bass) were transformed both in their role and in their manner of playing. In the Western European orchestra, their roles were primarily melodic. But in the African American music ensemble, both instruments became part of the "rhythm section." The piano's role is both rhythmic and harmonic. The string bass, now rarely played in its traditionally Western European arco or bowed manner, is played primarily pizzicato or plucked, supplying rhythm, keeping time, and providing a harmonic foundation. Piano playing (especially in "comping" - from the word "accompaniment") now involves a rhythmic approach to harmony - supplying chordal/harmonic percussion-like rhythms. By the 1960s, as musicians sought more boldly to escape from fixed, Western temperament, the piano was either left out entirely or played without regard to conventional harmony. Pulse and some establishment of tonality were left to the bass. Even the drum kit no longer was confined to keeping time or to meter. Certainly Max Roach since the 1940s has demonstrated the melodic artistry of the drum kit.

Probably the most characteristically "jazz" instrument is still the saxophone. Created by a Belgian, Adolphe Sax, in the mid-19th century (see Al Rose's essay in this issue, 233) the saxophone would have become an obsolete, novelty instrument, archived in some works by French and Belgian composers, if it were not for its role in 20th-century African American music. Replacing the clarinet, the saxophone became the "voice" of the "jazz band." Heretofore, popular music had been predominantly a vocal music. But with the saxophone, an instrumental popular music has emerged. Much has been made of the saxophone's vocal qualifies. In the clearest examples of the dialectical nature of African American 20th-century music, horns perform like voices (from the cries, shouts, screams, hollers, and talkin' to its yakety-yak, burlesquey humor and caricature) and voices perform like horns (from the inflection and phrasing of the human voice to "scat" soloing, etc.).

Indeed, every feature of the music is an expression of revolutionary dialectics. Demarcations are dissolved between soloist and ensemble; among the elements of melody, time, and harmony; between composition and improvisation; between "traditional" and "avant-garde"; between "artist" and "audience"; between "art" and "politics"; between "Western" and "Eastern"; etc. If there is any "tradition," it is the continual exploding of time and pitch in quest of greater human expressiveness and a deeper spiritualizing of the music that is fundamentally rooted in the struggle to end all forms of exploitation and oppression and to seek a basic "oneness" with life and nature.(3)

Much ballyhoo has been made about essentializing "jazz" as basically blues, swing, and improvisation: If these are lacking, then the music ain't "jazz." Interestingly, the proponents of this dogma can range across the ideological and political spectrum from black cultural nationalists to black and white neo-conservatives. Let's look more closely at what is meant by blues and swing.

Blues

In my view, blues is not simply a "style," or a 12-bar, AAB form, or a certain chordal progression. Musically, blues is first and foremost a unique expression of temperament - African American temperament! It is not, as Eurocentric musicology may attempt to codify, flatted or lowered thirds, sevenths, and fifths (notated in Western musical theory as sharp or raised seconds, dominant sevenths, or sharp or raised elevenths). Blue notes can be played on Western instruments without fingering minor thirds, dominant (flatted) sevenths, and flatted fifths if the player has the African American conception of temperament. The African American system of blues temperament is the synthesis of the Western European fixed, diatonic temperament with an amalgam of West and Central African pitch and modal systems. With this new temperament system, the distinction between major and minor is lost.(4)

Many authentic blues performers will actually retune their instruments to be more "in tune" with being bluesy. Conversely, inauthentic players who attempt to perform the mechanics of the blue notes by fingering minor thirds, etc., may sound unblue. The key aspect is not a fixed style (Jones/Baraka's "noun") but a process or approach to music making (Jones/Baraka's "verb"): the highly African blurring of pitch to reach an emotive and spiritual catharsis - in West Africa, literally, to "allow the gods to descend" - and thereby affirm both personal and communal humanity in the face of inhumanity.(5)

Secondarily, blues is a "form." The 12-bar, AAB form has become, in the analogy made by Jones/Baraka, another case of the verb-to-noun syndrome. It has been so thoroughly appropriated by (white, mainstream) "American" music in rock, country and western, disco, etc. that the "standard" blues form has practically ceased to be the blues! Historically, blues "form" has been expressed in 12 bars, 10 bars, 8 bars, 11 1/2 bars, 12 1/2 bars, 13 bars, 16 bars, etc. There have been blues based on three or more chords, blues based on one chord, and blues based on no chords!

Although a discussion of the "blues sensibility and aesthetic" significantly and meaningfully aids an understanding of the blues both socially and culturally, in my view, the blues musical form is best understood as a musical representation of African American poetry. Blues pre-dates "jazz" as a sung, vocal genre - a griot tradition that has become secularized and existentialized (through individual self-expressionism). In "jazz," blues is metamorphosized: once sung, now instrumental; once performed by an individual, now by an ensemble; once literal, now nonliteral. The blues form cannot be reduced simply to a number of bars and type of chord progression or phrase structure. To do so would be to oppress and suffocate the music's essence and creative, dynamic being as an expression of an African American oppressed nationality.

The music, thus, has no wrong notes, no wrong progression or fixed number of bars, so long as it has the feel, the expressiveness of African American life and culture. Once it has been thoroughly codified and appropriated by the mainstream, dominant oppressor culture, then it ceases to be.

Swing

African American "swing" is not, as some Eurocentric musicologists would try to characterize in Western musical paradigms, syncopation,(6) nor does it have a "tripleted feel." Rather, it is a hybrid concept of time/pulse and rhythm: the result of the miscegenation between West African triple meter and multiple rhythmic layering with Western European duple meter and singular rhythm. This "3 inside 2" is fundamentally a West African-descended phenomenon, found in all African diasporic musics where more than one time and more than one rhythm coexist. Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora developed unique types of "swing" - in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Brazil, etc. In African America, where drums were banned by the oppressors, a unique type of "swing" developed; time and rhythm were conveyed through singing, instrument playing, and a collective, internal "feel" expressed in body movement, dance, "pattin' juba," language, and vocal inflections. Since drums and drumming were illegal, West African percussion and rhythmic traditions came through in everything else - musical and extramusical. Some have characterized African American swing as a rhythmic energy and life force - a far greater influence than the simple role meter and rhythm play in Western European music - indeed, a form of African-based kinetics, a multiple rhythmic perspective, a shared communal bond of time, motion, and energy. It is simultaneously both exciting and relaxing (what Archie Shepp has characterized as the tension and beauty of being both on the front and back edge of the beat - its forward and laid back quality). The beat can swing whether it be in units of three or two, in metrical patterns of 2, 3, the common 4, or 7, 7 1/2, 11, 15, 9, 13, etc. Swing can be in time, in different time, and in no time! From Baby Dodds and Sid Catlett swinging in 4/4, to odd meters done by Max Roach, to polyrhythms of Elvin Jones, to the free, no time of Sunny Murray.

Improvisation

Finally, let me address the issue of composition/notation and improvisation. Some have argued that once the composition is heavily notated and improvisation is necessarily diminished, the music becomes more "European" and less "African American." Initially, Western European music also relied on improvisation; player/composers under economic pressure were required to come up quickly with new works to entertain and satisfy their aristocratic employers. Though these musicians were "literate," improvisation satisfied both economic expediency and their own creative desire to avoid the repetitive boredom of performing the same hits the same way all the time. As solo and small-group works expanded to large ensembles and extended compositions, and as paying audiences began to demand faithful replication of their favorites, notation assumed increasingly greater dominance.

African American music has never, until recently, had to face the prospect of institutionalization, canonization, standardization, and codification by a ruling class (presently, bourgeois). Paradoxically, the music of an oppressed nationality was free to be free. Duke Ellington's orchestra could play the same show music every night for years and still retain spontaneity and freshness, no matter how much notation, choreography, and staging was set. As "jazz" became more of an "art" music (i.e., primarily listened to and not danced to), and the "jazz" composer (who still could be a player/leader) began to pen extended works such as suites, ballets, theater and film scores, etc., the best and strongest writing always allowed for an enhanced spontaneity and for improvised contributions from the players. Ideally these written compositions are memorized and internalized until the written page is no longer looked at and the players play from understanding and interaction. The essence of African American music is a whole which is greater than the sum of its inseparable and mutually dependent parts - player and composer, notation and performance, composition and improvisation.

Notation is not the enslaver, the oppressor of spontaneity and improvisation. Calcification, de-African Americanization, co-option is not caused by musical deviations and practices, but, in my view, by ethical violations. Clearly, in Ellington's large-scale works, the essence of African American spontaneity is reflected in a highly composed music. And there are players who play "correct jazz" which is sterile and reactionary.

As a non-African American, but a person of color (oppressed nationality in the U.S.), I was drawn to and inspired and revolutionized by the music's musical and - possibly more profoundly - extramusical qualities. Many years later, after becoming a professional musician, I came across a statement by V. I. Lenin which crystallized this confluence: "Ethics will be the aesthetics of the future." 20th-century African American music is part of an extramusical ethical/spiritual/sociopolitical revolution - the commitment, attitude, resistance, perseverance, celebration, love and joy opposing oppression, brutality, poverty, persecution, and exclusion. Archie Shepp expressed it in poetic language: "Jazz is the lily in spite of the swamp." It is the triumph of the human spirit, of spirituality and ethicality in the midst of cannibalistic and corrupting capitalism.

The carrier of the music (the musician) must not violate the ethical bond between the music and the people (i.e., a bond of merit, of excellence, of meaning, of purpose, of significance in the people's aspirations and efforts to be free). The musician bears a responsibility that transcends careers, critical praise, conservatory training, and cash to affirm the music's fundamental celebration of humanity, and to remain committed to the liberation of an oppressed nationality - African Americans - in an age of internationalized commodity production and exchange.

"Jazz" was born amidst the contradictions of our epoch. The music changes just as the people, the society, the world change. African Americans in the 20th century have been the largest and leading oppressed nationality of U.S. society. Their political, social, and cultural impact has been revolutionary. By the 21st century, Spanish-speaking oppressed nationalities will become numerically the largest group of oppressed nationalities. Asian/Pacific Islanders are proportionally the fastest growing oppressed nationalities. And indigenous peoples facing the most extreme and desperate conditions are resorting increasingly to armed struggle (c.f., Chiapas, Mexico) to defend their land and way of life. In the years to come - it has already begun - a new music will arise, rooted in all that has come before, yet moving with greater volatility, altering and exploding time and sound, and thereby changing music itself.

The petty machinations which attempt to "institutionalize jazz," the reactionary "back to the tradition" (tradition is not something one can or should go back to, but move from), the business-suited corporate and government recognition which legitimizes "jazz"and makes it acceptable - all of these violate the spirit, the sacred bond between culture and people, the ethics of the aesthetics. The appropriation of oppressed peoples' culture and history for the service of Yankee imperialism is antithetical and inimical to creative development. Whether "jazz" comes to be the vital, transformative, revolutionary music of the 21st century that it has been in the 20th century depends on how this struggle plays out. A new "jazz" - maybe something that won't use this term because it has become so co-opted and reactionary - will affirm and attest to the revolutionary heritage that began in the 20th century: that the music of all oppressed peoples fighting imperialism is indeed Jazz.

An Ethical Mandate Among the Music, the Musician, and the People

1. Speak to the People. The music has to and will embody messages, either explicitly (in the form of lyrics and/or song titles) or implicitly (in the sound and in its spirit). Some examples have been, but are certainly not limited to, "Strange Fruit" (composed by Lewis Allen, and popularized by Billie Holiday), "A Tone Parallel to Harlem" (Duke Ellington), "A Love Supreme" (John Coltrane), "Things Have Got to Change" (composed by Calvin Massey, and performed by Archie Shepp), "Remember Rockefeller at Attica" (Charles Mingus), etc.

2. Go to the People. The music must be performed where people can enjoy it. Rather than expect the people to come to the music (an approach which depends more on marketing hype and advertisement dollars than on artistry or quality), bring the music to the people. Often, artists have very little control over how their music is distributed, promoted, and presented. In many ways, the musician and the music have left the community in which both were spawned. The parallel to "underdevelopment" is striking: A people's cultural and natural resources are drained off for the benefit of corporate plunderers and not the people. Activists, managers, cultural presenters and producers, and artists need to work together to build a community base to support the music.

3. Involve the People. Just as we need environmentally sustainable development for natural resources, we need culturally sustainable development for the arts. We need to bridge the separation between artist and audience, between professional and amateur. The essence of cultural democracy is true popular culture - culture and the arts created by and for the common people and not by and for an elite. The rationalization of corporate entertainment is to "give the people what they want." Unfortunately, the truth is really "give the people what the corporations want them to want."

4. Change the People. Ultimately, the music and culture of oppressed peoples, if it is to have value and meaning, must revolutionize the consciousness, values, aesthetics, and actions of the people. This is the music's "spiritualizing" quality: to fortify and prepare us to continue the struggle until liberation.

Notes

1. Several etymologies have been asserted for the word "jazz." The less credible ones assert an African derivation, but these words are from languages not spoken south of the Sahara and therefore were not commonly used among the West and Central African, sub-Saharan peoples enslaved and brought to the Americas. More likely, "jazz" comes from either jass or jizz, which means 'semen' (the original piano music was common to houses of prostitution). Another explanation is that "jazz" comes from the French verb - New Orleans, the birthplace of the music, was a French colonial territory - jasser, meaning 'to chatter nonsensically.' In either case, "jazz" has a pejorative context, as do many terms from the legacy of colonialism and oppression.

2. Spelled with a k, "kreolization" is a concept advanced by Dorothy Desir-Davis, to be distinguished from "creolization" of M. Herskovits, et. al., pertaining to the intermixing in the Caribbean. Kreolization refers to cultural and social cross-fertilization as a process that leads to the formation of entirely new identities and cultures, often - in the case of oppressed-oppressor relations - selectively appropriated by dominant social groups into the dominant identity and culture, but de-politicized and deracinated.

3. Musicians' various ideological/spiritual pronouncements reflect this quest and struggle.

4. royal hartigan has described this phenomenon as African Americans trying to get the Western seven-note scale back to the five notes common to many West African pentatonic systems (although he also recognizes that there are seven-note African scales).

5. I am interpreting LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka here.

6. Extensive syncopation (the emphasis on "off" or "weak" beats) is very prevalent in the musical cultures of the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. But none of these musics "swing" in the African American sense, even though it can be asserted that they are their own forms of "swing."

Fred Wei-han Ho is a Chinese American baritone saxophonist, composer/arranger, leader of the Afro Asian Music Ensemble and Monkey Orchestra, and activist. His most recent CD is The Underground Railroad to My Heart (Soul Note), and his book Sounding Off!: Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution, co-edited with Ron Sakolsky, is forthcoming from Artonomedia/Semiotext.