Jazz: An Origin Story

In 2020, I published A Map of Jazz: Crossroads of Music and Human Rights (WS Publishing), a book that looks at the culture of jazz on a timeline with cultures of the world. At more than 500 pages, the book is incomplete by necessity; there is no well-marked path, and the history is sometimes nebulous. However, as a map and as jazz music, it leads to unfamiliar places. The series Backstories will dive deeper into people and places along the genre's blue highways.

What (and Where) in the World

In 2014, Tropy (Fortuna), an album from the Polish trumpet/piano duo Maciej Fortuna and Krzysztof Dys crossed my desk for review. Researching Polish jazz revealed a history that coincided with the early jazz era in America. As early as pre-occupation Poland, in the 1920s, jazz venues were present in Warsaw, Kraków, and Poznań. The notion behind A Map of Jazz centered on a more accurate account of the origins of jazz, but the research took it in a different direction. The book followed those paths and became a story of how this composite art form came together and was disseminated into the U.S. culture and beyond.

The history of jazz music parallels that of the United States. The music, like the country's behavior, is complex and sometimes ugly. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Jazz Age, political corruption, organized crime, war, Civil Rights, international diplomacy, gender inequality, and income disparity have been movements in an evolving soundtrack. The history is equal parts fairy tale and reality.

In five-plus years of research and dozens of interviews with musicians, composers, academics, curators, archivists, and writers, no two people have agreed on an identical definition of jazz. The book's purpose was not to explain those inconsistencies or to rework jazz's development. The intent, in part, was to let the art form breathe and go where it would. The broader purpose was to look at jazz as a pointer on the timeline of events. As a map—like the music—it leads to some unfamiliar places.

Henry O. Osgood's So This Is Jazz (Little Brown & Company, 1926) was the first jazz music book written. Osgood cites research to support the term "jazz," or some derivative, originating in an unspecified region of Africa; its meaning is "to speed up" or "energize." The Mississippi Delta blues musician Jazbo Brown has also been credited with coining the word around 1904. When the stage-frightened multi-instrumentalist/singer bolstered his confidence with shots of gin, the audience would encourage him with calls to "jaz" it up. Some academics have perceived the word's roots to be from Arabia, and others believe that it was based on the French verb "jaser," meaning "to chatter." There are numerous slang attributions of the word; the most common was its association with the jasmine-scented bordellos of Storyville. Duke Ellington believed that the word itself accounted for a public aversion to the music. A New York University researcher claims that the word first appeared in print in a 1912 Los Angeles Times article "Ben's Jazz Curve," concerning a minor league baseball pitcher's style of throwing. The word did not appear in print as a musical term until the 1915 Chicago Tribune article "Blues Is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues." More than one hundred years later, the etymology of "jazz" remains uncertain.

In their book Jazz (Norton, 2009), Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux relate the now-familiar 1950s Miles Davis line to Columbia Records executive Clive Davis: "Jazz is dead." Davis was not referring to the music but, like Ellington, to the terminology. He believed that he could sell more recordings if they were not linked to a genre that had declined steadily since the end of the Swing Era in the 1940s.

Common definitions of the music often include shared elements of rhythm—typically with an emphasis on swing—syncopation, and improvisation. Improvisation and "swing feel" are frequently considered the most important features of jazz though there is jazz that does not include either. Non-Western music, such as that of the Dom people of Jordan, Iranian Kayhan Kalhor's kamancheh, and music from India and sub-Saharan Africa, freely utilize improvisation. Highlife music of the West African Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) is rooted in the rhythmic structures and melodies of traditional Akan music but—since the 1950s—has sometimes incorporated Western swing elements. None of these styles is commonly considered a form of jazz.

Theoretically, Ragtime (~1890-1920) falls into the category of pre-jazz. However, the style ran concurrent with early New Orleans jazz, with an innocuous gradation of improvisation in the cornet/trumpet, clarinet, and trombone-led front line. Primarily dance music, New Orleans jazz had multiple names, including Hot Jazz and the racially charged Dixieland. The syncopated variation on marching music came from the African American neighborhoods of St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, and other major metropolitan areas. Scott Joplin, Ernest Hogan, Bert Williams, Jelly Roll Morton, W.C. Handy, and James Reese Europe were among the notable black developers of the style. One of the best-known bands of the era, the all-white Tom Brown's Band from Dixieland (1921), exacerbated racial tensions when their leader insisted that whites created Ragtime, and popular black musicians such as Buddy Bolden, Morten, and Handy had plagiarized his work. Brown, like other white Ragtime composers/players such as Johnny Stein, Albert Brunies, and Nick LaRocca (Original Dixieland Jass Band), had all come out of the New Orleans-based Reliance Brass Band led by early pioneer George "Papa Jack" Laine.

Musician, composer, and author Gunther Schuller in Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford University Press, 1968), indicates that improvisation, an African concept, was quickly abandoned in the early days of jazz; replaced by white-influenced "arrangements" that kept the music tightly in check; this remained the case until the 1940s. However, what Louis Armstrong formulated in the 1920s—the push away from collective improvisation—was quickly replaced by institutional racism in the form of safe, popular music for the masses, i.e., white audiences.

In the early 1930s, new rhythmic ideas, changing instrumentation, and larger ensembles shepherded the Swing era, peaking from 1935 to 1940 when the growing popularity of solo vocalists sped its decline. The most profound variation in jazz came with the development of Bebop in the early 1940s, breaking from generally popular dance music to an art form. The least popular innovation in the genre to date, Bebop's sidestepping melodies and harmonic improvisations were the foundation for the most innovative future jazz.

No style of jazz created its own social geography more than Free Jazz. The father of the sub-genre, Ornette Coleman (1930-2015), released the seminal album Free Jazz (Atlantic, 1961) to polarizing reviews; two Downbeat critics separately rated it five stars and zero stars. Its Jackson Pollack cover spoke to something profound below the disorder. Avant-garde jazz, with its unique approach to form, melody, and rhythm, was less a rejection of Bebop than a discounting of regimented frameworks; it was a shift from modern to post-modern jazz. Free Jazz was a reaction and a refutation of everything in Western music that had gone before. Classic albums of early Free Jazz—Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity (ESP-Disk, 1965), Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures (Blue Note, 1966), and John Coltrane's Ascension in (Impulse!, 1966) drew mixed reactions from critics and musicians with little middle ground. Between Coleman's release and Ascension, racial unrest inundated the U.S., with riots taking place in over one hundred fifty cities in every part of the country and with hundreds of deaths. Free Jazz came to be seen as the music of black people fighting back against social and institutional racism. The music—and the musicians—threatened the jazz establishment, and their creations were—and remain—marginalized by traditional jazz media outlets.

The English jazz critic Stanley Dance (1910-1999) wrote for a half-dozen prominent publications. He was a friend and biographer of Duke Ellington, consulted Ken Burns for his PBS series Jazz (2001), and was a prolific album producer. Dance coined the phrase "mainstream jazz" in the 1950s to describe what constituted "acceptable" jazz, specifically swing-era music—danceable music. The influential critic did not hide his dislike for the Bebop style and believed that avant-garde jazz and non-Western influences diminished the genre. Ken Burns inflicted widespread damage with his popular and myopic ten-part documentary, essentially cutting out any relevance after the 1950s and crediting a handful of the most flamboyant and familiar names with creating or influencing the entire genre.

Jazz survives the incompatible dogma that encircles everything, including art. In his now rare book, The Appeal of Jazz (Philip Allan, 1927), Robert Mendl writes: "There is in truth no definable borderline between jazz music and the classics. To be frightened of the one is as unnecessary as to be contemptuous of the other." Composer/pianist Satoko Fujii told me this: "My grandmother who died a long time ago, told me that she heard beautiful music all the time after she had lost her hearing. I asked her to explain, but she couldn't... I would like to make music like that." With that premise, Fujii gives us a wide-open starting point on the map.

The next article will look at pre-jazz influences, including the work of James Reese Europe and the Castles.

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