Dialogue: My Thoughts on the Class and Bahktin

Coming into this class, I had only a vague idea about the history of jazz. I subscribed to the simplistic view mirrored in the early jazz documentary New Orleans that great musicians like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday single-handedly created jazz in New Orleans and brought it to Chicago and New York, where it automatically became America's music and came to define the 1920s (King Oliver, 37). From the start, this class challenged my original assumptions about jazz and gave me a new concept, dialogue, with which to interpret art.

One main assumption I held before taking this class was that jazz was immediately heralded as America's newest and greatest art form from its conception. I have since learned that it originated in the seedier districts of New Orleans at the turn of the 20^th century (Gioia, 34) and spread to Chicago and New York around the late 1910s and 1920s and remained a music played mainly for poorer black audiences. With the rise of radio, a few artists like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington became part of a “nationwide mass medium” (Gioia, 136) that created the flashy image of jazz as America's music that most people hold today. And jazz did not stop developing there; as I learned later, musicians like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis continued to push jazz in new directions with styles like bebop and cool jazz (Gioia, 201). Through this class, I have gained a much fuller understanding of the evolution and history of jazz.

Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogue as a catalyst for art is one of the biggest ideas that I have taken away from this class. As an example, jazz was a product of New Orleans' “commingling of Spanish, French and African influences” (Gioia, 6) with a splash of American individualism. It was not the product of a few gifted individuals, but rather was created in the context of the city's community. Players of early jazz in New Orleans and New York in the bordellos and rent parties were especially sensitive to the tastes of their listeners because if they failed to engage their audience, they would be tossed out on the street. As the communities who listened to jazz changed from poor Southern blacks to middle-class whites and finally to more artistically-bent Bohemian types, the sound of the music changed as well. Songs like “Carolina Shout” were “solid and groovy” (James P. Johnson, 29) enough to get the country people bouncing on the dance floor while Duke Ellington's pieces were more focused on creating moods and intricate melodic and harmonic structures (Gioia, 121). Bebop rebelled against both of these audiences in favor of a brasher, dissonant, hipper sound that caught the ears of coffeehouse patrons and starving artists. Each of these music styles were created by the dialogue between artist and community – jazz musicians would innovate and improvise and stuck with whatever meshed most with their peers and audience.

Beyond the bounds of this class, the dialogic theory can put any art into historical perspective. The simple religious imagery of many Medieval paintings reflected the desires of the main patrons of such art, churches and nobles. Then, when merchants in Italy began to get richer off of new trade routes, tastes changed and more sophisticated and less overtly religious art flourished. Michelangelo's masterpieces were both a product of his genius and the desires of his patrons, the Medicis. A more modern example is a show like How I Met Your Mother, which flourishes because it is easily relatable to the average American. Most people know a playboy Barney Stinson, or a hopelessly lovestruck Ted Mosby. Through the lens of dialogue, any form of art can be seen as a constant discussion between artist and consumer in order to create the ideal final product.

A Bohemian Monk: Thelonius and his Jazz Community

        San Juan Hill was one of the roughest neighborhoods in one of the roughest parts of the sprawling metropolis of New York. Its name, taken from a bloody battle in the Spanish-American War, underlines the violence and crime that ran rampant in the mostly-black neighborhood. However, just one street over was “another country” (Thelonius Monk, 19) populated by Italians, or Poles, and each group was constantly engaged in a battle for turf. Thelonius Monk lived and breathed this racially-charged environment, and learned how to handle himself in a fight. He walked to school in a pack in order to avoid the roving gangs of white boys. This is why he says there is “no reason” for him to do “that Black Power shit” – he had already lived it. However, the San Juan Hill community had many positive influences on Monk's developing musical style as well. The area was named “Black Bohemia” (19) for its huge number of black musicians and artists. The cultural and racial diversity was not always a source of conflict; many of Monk's unique styles (like his Latin tinge) come from a mixture of Southern black and West Indian cultural influences, and he received formal musical education from a Jewish Austrian. The local church helped Monk learn piano hymns and gave him an introduction to the energy of gospel while the nearby boy's club provided him with a positive social atmosphere to escape the danger of city life by making bands with other boys (29). Monk's virtuosic playing did not merely arise from his own genius – Monk's community helped shape the young man into a stellar musician and instilled in him an appreciation of music regardless of the player's race or culture.

        This attitude of acceptance and friendliness is integral to Monk's music and his persona. He turned away from the race politics espoused by many artists like Miles Davis and instead focused purely on his music. However, this is not to say that race was not important to his musical expressions. Norman Miller characterizes Monk as a “emotionally driven, uninhibited, strong black [man]” (232) who offered an alternative masculine identity for the black man, one centered on style and free expression. This is reflected in his playing, which while influenced by traditional jazz, West Indian/Latin music and classical music was still a completely unique sound that could only be defined as “Monk's style”. He had his own music, molded through his childhood community in San Juan Hill and refined by the jazz community in New York. The avant-garde/Bohemian community that formed around his music also transcended racial and gender boundaries, drawing whites, blacks, men and women. The Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter was the most illustrious of his fans and exemplified the diversity of Monk's musical community. The patronage of such highly influential (white) individuals proved invaluable whenever Monk did suffer from racism and discrimination. Nica first helped Monk regain his cabaret card after it was revoked following a narcotics charge reeking of racism where two white police officers approached Monk's car without provocation and found his friend's heroin between his feet. Another time in Delaware, she was driving with Monk and one of his friends when police officers pulled her over, beat Monk's fingers with blackjacks and found marijuana in a suitcase. She claimed the case in order to save Monk from losing his card again, as the officers would be more lenient to a pretty white lady than to a black man. The devotion of such fans to Monk helps add credence to his image as a genuine, friendly, truly skilled musician who inspired a community of free-living Bohemian artists and garnered fans from all walks of life with his truly unique sound.

Black and White: The Rising Role of Race in Jazz

 Jazz had always been a music form intrinsically linked with the African American identity – its originators (James P. Johnson, Buddy Bolden) and famous figures (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington) were black, and many of its basic elements such as call-and-response and syncopation are rooted in African song and dance. However, with the dispersal of jazz from New Orleans to New York and especially Chicago, white Americans became increasingly more involved in the hot new music form. White “students” went to music clubs to watch King Oliver and his band, and white musicians such as the Austin High School Gang and Bix Beiderbecke began making names for themselves in the scene. With this swell of support for jazz came increased commercial interest, and with more money involved the jazz artist soon came to need agents to book shows and critics to evaluate their musicality. The vast majority of these third-party players were rich, white and socially savvy entrepreneurs. John Hammond gained fame and notoriety as a supporter of jazz and became one of the most well-respected critics of swing. This catalyzed a conversation over race that had been taboo before due to the relative exclusivity of the jazz world to the black individual. Comparisons between black and white artists, spurred on by the pseudo-academic critics like Hammond, soon took center stage in the world of swing.

Jazz in New Orleans was an almost exclusively African American enterprise, played by black artists and consumed by black dance-hall and bordello patrons. Rooted to mostly black musical traditions such as African song and dance, the blues and ragtime, the biggest influence from the white world on the music was the Latin-Catholic emphasis on spirituals and the Creole assimilation of many European musical styles. Jazz only reached Chicago and New York after the Great Migration, along with the millions of black migrants leaving their fields for the Northern metropolises. Race had always played an integral role in the genesis and spread of jazz – its color just tended to be darker. However, the introduction of jazz to the North, especially Chicago and New York, added a new dimension to the role of race in swing.

The spread of jazz to Chicago and New York changed jazz into a multiracial phenomenon, with white players such as Bix Beiderbecke, white critics like John Hammond and all-white clubs with black performers like the Cotton Club. The rise of white players of jazz had a profound effect on the dialogue over race, creating debates over whether they could ever compete with their black counterparts. This was spurred on by jazz critics, especially the staunchly pro-African American John Hammond. Duke Ellington, his professional adversary, asserted that Hammond “consistently identified himself with the interests of... the Negro people” (Swing Changes). Hammond even went so far as to censure artists like Ellington, who he accused of “shut[ting] his eyes to the abuses being heaped upon his race” (Swing Changes). The issue of loyalty to one's race became especially salient with the advent of locales like the Cotton Club, where all-white patrons listened to jazz music played by black musicians while being served by a black waiting staff. Even just the name Cotton Club conjures negative images of slavery and racism, and the décor – which included pictures of slaves in their fields – did little to dispel these impressions (Gioia, 125). However, by exposing white patrons to jazz, these clubs spurred on the increasingly insatiable desire for danceable swing music held by members of all races. These interactions between white and black members of the jazz community are a main cause of the increased importance of race in the dialogue of swing.

New York: Jazz Capital

The 1920's are called the Jazz Age for a reason – they were boisterous, loud, hot, economically bullish and defined by the jazz music emanating from the instruments of greats such as Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington.  However, while both cities were integral to the growth of jazz, I believe that New York contributed more to the tradition through the development of the Harlem Stride piano style and the popularization of big bands such as Duke Ellington's at venues like the Cotton Club, where the artists and the consumers of art formed a rapport and entered into a dialogue with one another.

New York was a fertile spawning ground of jazz music due to the European musical and social sensibilities of the richer, more established black Harlemites and the Southern swing and blues brought by former sharecroppers during the Great Migration. These two communities were simultaneously at odds and intrinsically linked together. The richer Harlem, famous for the Harlem Renaissance,  attempted to distance itself from the more rough-and-tumble Harlem of “racy music and racier dancing, of cabarets famous or notorious according to their king, of amusement in which abandon and sophistication are cheek by jowl” (Survey Graphic). In the poorer sections of Harlem, festivities thrown to help cover the cost of lodging (known as rent parties) used the musical acrobatics of skillful pianists to attract dancers (Gioia, 96). This gave rise to a very competitive yet mutually respectful community of musicians who, as with Bahktin's theory, in turn interacted with their audience to create the most mutually compatible sound.

Their most famous prodigy was James P. Johnson, who first popularized the usage of a percussive beat with a “single note on the first and third beats and a chord of three or four notes on the second and fourth beats” (John S. Wilson, The New York Times). His style is one of the first styles of jazz piano, giving credence to the importance of New York as a center of jazz; Chicago's style, meanwhile, remained fairly derivative of the New Orleans sound. Of all of the New York composers, it was Duke Ellington's compositions that really put the Big Apple on the map.

Duke Ellington rose to prominence after jazz had already became a major force in America's cultural identity. He represented a new breed of artists, highly educated, socialized and stylized in order to match the increasing popularity of jazz. The new jazz consumer was more high-class and was predominantly white and upper-middle class, a stark change from the predominantly poor, black audience of the rent parties. His compositions reflected this increased sophistication, and he became famous for his ability to create moods through a sparse aesthetic (Gioia, 121). Through this maturation, Ellington pushed jazz into the realm of fine art. Such professionalism was not as visible in Chicago at the time. Ellington's skillfully crafted persona and compositions that reflected the intense knowledge he had of his artists' strengths and weaknesses contributed to the modern vision of jazz that exists today and cements New York as the center of innovation in the 1920's.

Jazz: A New Orleans Fusion

New Orleans was one of the biggest cultural crossroads in the entire world, comparable to the great cities of Timbuktu and Constantinople in its cultural diversity, mass of trade and ethnic commingling. Placed in the delta of the Mississippi River, it became a haven for traders from Spain, France and America. After the Louisiana Purchase, slaves began to pour into the markets as well, adding more ingredients to the great musical stew that would eventually ferment into jazz. The Catholic Spanish and French roots of the city favored music and dance as parts of religious expression, contributing to the Latin swing that made jazz so distinct from contemporary American music. These Latin cultures also gave New Orleans a different slave code – the Latin Code – which differed greatly from the much stricter code used by American colonies. The result was a more free-form approach to slavery, where African slaves have the possibility of freeing themselves, intermarrying and owning property, giving them more ability to retain their traditional African culture and music. The drums and dance of the Congo Square would have been banned in any part of America besides New Orleans. Finally, as a part of the United States, the American values of individuality and personal expression came to the forefront as well. Jazz emerged from all of these intermingling cultures as a mixture of Latin swing, African syncopation and vitality and American individuality. Other American cities lacked this great variety of cultural influences, or the tolerance to express non-English cultures.

Different styles of music resulted from this mixture of peoples, with jazz only coming later in the history of New Orleans. The blues, a musical style exemplified by artists such as Mamie Smith and the famous Leadbelly, was a personal expression of pain and conflict that resonated with many of the black citizens who felt alienated by the racism and poverty that afflicted them on a daily basis. While it had its basis in the call-and-response and beats of African music and the individuality of American expression, the music itself was a totally unique sound. Ragtime (short for “ragged time”) was another music style made famous in New Orleans that was favored more by the richer Creole population, identified by the syncopation of classic European piano lines, giving the traditionally stiff compositions more flair and interest. These two musical styles, colliding after segregation was reinforced by the one-drop laws passed across the South in the late 1800's, both contributed to the emergence of jazz. Jazz incorporates the emotion and call-and-response of blues and the syncopation and energy of ragtime, creating a new music defined by intense emotional expression, musical skill and raw sex appeal.

Of all these factors, I personally believe that the numerous cultural influences are one of the main contributing factors to the rise of jazz. Without the Latin-Catholic focus on music and dance, slave dance and music would not have been permitted; without the slave dance and music, syncopation and call-and-response styles would not have been major influences; without syncopation, there would be no ragtime, and without call-and-response, blues would be missing a vital component. This same line of thought can be applied to the American and African influences as well. At the roots of most of the other contributing factors to jazz are the cultural influences that defined New Orleans, creating a beautiful, raw, emotional and altogether unique sound that has captivated audiences of all cultures around the world.