Because of my dad, I first heard not just Ellington and Armstrong, but the rough velvet of Billie Holiday’s voice and the vermouth smoothness of Ella Fitzgerald, the incomparably cool trumpet of Miles Davis on Kind of Blue and the ecstatic, sacred keening of John Coltrane’s alto sax on A Love Supreme, the blessed quantum cacophony of Charlie Parker’s saxophone on “The Bird” and the jittery puffed-cheek caffeination of a Gilespie trumpet solo from “Salt Peanuts,” the mathematical precision of Dave Brubeck’s piano from Time Out and the apophatic transcendence of Thelonious Sphere Monk’s on Misterioso, Charles Mingus’s strangely raucous bass and Art Blakey with his jazz messengers pounding out the avant-garde drum. And, throughout it all, no matter how sophisticated or complicated, how abstract or difficult, that human message which Nina Simone sung out in her deep, wide, prophetic voice: “The world is big / Big and bright and round / And it’s full of folks like me.”
Born from the main branch of the 12-bar blues (also the progenitor of soul and rock, funk, and hip-hop), jazz was first an amalgamation of ragtime and spirituals, marching band music and Dixieland, performed in democratic collaboration and mediated through the still remarkably experimental method of improvisation. This is the potted-history that sees jazz as a mélange of Africa and Europe. “America is a land of synthesis in which every ethnic or religious group tends, over time, to become a part of every other,” writes critic Stanley Crouch in Considering Jazz: Writings on Genius. Despite Crouch’s tendency to smooth over jazz history so as to make it palatable to his own pet theories, there’s much that’s factual here. It’s true that no nation other than the U.S. could have created jazz for the simple reason that the historical traumas and ruptures that brought disparate groups together happened most acutely here. If jazz is the sound of modernism, it’s because it was born from the fertile but bloody soil of the American continent. In this context, the Vivaldi of jazz was Armstrong, which is to say the genius at the beginnings of the genre, but Ellington was its Bach, the polymath who supplied a rigor that most fully marks a before and after.
At Ellington’s Carnegie Hall debut, where audiences listened to weekly concerts of Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Mahler, Ellington and his musicians performed a 45-minute symphony dedicated to Black America, expressing the history of his people from enslavement to emancipation, the talented tenths of the Harlem Renaissance and into the future. The music itself is as uncompromising as Ellington, relentlessly forward-pushing and soaring, grounded in history, but hopeful. The shape is classical, but the sound is jazz. The critics—classist, racist—were not effusive. Douglass Watt at the Daily News wrote about “the concert, if that’s what you’d call it,” while Paul Bowles at the New-York Herald Tribune called Ellington’s composition “formless and meaningless.” Duke, with his slicked back hair and pencil-thin mustache, simply responded to the pans by saying, “Well, I guess they didn’t dig it.” Ellington would perform 20 more times at Carnegie Hall, until a few years before his death, and he’d repurpose large portions of Black, Brown and Beige in a 1958 collaboration with Mahalia Jackson, but he’d never again conduct the entirety of the symphony.
There are two irrefutable axioms that can be made about jazz. The first is that jazz is America’s most significant cultural contribution to the world; the second is that jazz was mostly, though not entirely, a contribution born from the experience and brilliance of America’s Black populace who have rarely been treated as full citizens. Regarding the first claim, if the genre is not America’s “classical music,” for there is a bit of a category mistake in Wynton Marsalis’s contention which judges the music by such standards, then jazz is certainly the most indispensable and quintessential of American creations, surpassing in significance other novelties, from comic books to Hollywood films. Crouch describes Ellington, and by proxy jazz, as “maybe the most American of Americans,” even while the conservative critic was long an advocate for the music as being fundamentally our native “classical” (a role for which he was influential as Marsalis’s adviser as director of jazz at Lincoln Center). The desire to transform jazz into classical music—even my own comparison of Ellington to Bach—is an insulting reduction of the music’s innovation. Jazz doesn’t need to be classical music, it’s already jazz.
At Ellington’s Carnegie Hall debut, where audiences listened to weekly concerts of Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Mahler, Ellington and his musicians performed a 45-minute symphony dedicated to Black America, expressing the history of his people from enslavement to emancipation, the talented tenths of the Harlem Renaissance and into the future. The music itself is as uncompromising as Ellington, relentlessly forward-pushing and soaring, grounded in history, but hopeful. The shape is classical, but the sound is jazz. The critics—classist, racist—were not effusive. Douglass Watt at the Daily News wrote about “the concert, if that’s what you’d call it,” while Paul Bowles at the New-York Herald Tribune called Ellington’s composition “formless and meaningless.” Duke, with his slicked back hair and pencil-thin mustache, simply responded to the pans by saying, “Well, I guess they didn’t dig it.” Ellington would perform 20 more times at Carnegie Hall, until a few years before his death, and he’d repurpose large portions of Black, Brown and Beige in a 1958 collaboration with Mahalia Jackson, but he’d never again conduct the entirety of the symphony.
There are two irrefutable axioms that can be made about jazz. The first is that jazz is America’s most significant cultural contribution to the world; the second is that jazz was mostly, though not entirely, a contribution born from the experience and brilliance of America’s Black populace who have rarely been treated as full citizens. Regarding the first claim, if the genre is not America’s “classical music,” for there is a bit of a category mistake in Wynton Marsalis’s contention which judges the music by such standards, then jazz is certainly the most indispensable and quintessential of American creations, surpassing in significance other novelties, from comic books to Hollywood films. Crouch describes Ellington, and by proxy jazz, as “maybe the most American of Americans,” even while the conservative critic was long an advocate for the music as being fundamentally our native “classical” (a role for which he was influential as Marsalis’s adviser as director of jazz at Lincoln Center). The desire to transform jazz into classical music—even my own comparison of Ellington to Bach—is an insulting reduction of the music’s innovation. Jazz doesn’t need to be classical music, it’s already jazz.
by Ed Simon, The Millions | Read more:
Image: uncredited
