What is Jazz?

Jazz grew out of the African-American community in the turn of the 20th century New Orleans. It is a mingling of the musical expressions of all the people who came to the United States by choice or by force—people from Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean—as well as those already living in America. Jazz musicians brought their traditions together (with special emphasis on the blues, church spirituals and ragtime) in a new, universal language. Through the blues, jazz musicians showed that the sorrows common to us all could be overcome with optimism and humor.

Through improvisation they celebrated newfound expressive freedom. And through the joyous rhythms of swing, they taught the many different people of New Orleans that they could work together with feeling and style.

Jazz spoke to all Americans and quickly spread upriver to St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, New York, and beyond. In the 1920s new technologies like radio, the phonograph and talking motion pictures made it possible for millions to hear jazz across America and around the world. The propulsive rhythms of swing invited these new listeners to tell their stories too.

As new generations of musicians filled the music with the depth of their personality, jazz evolved from small groups of early jazz to the brassy big bands of the swing era, the flashy virtuosity of bebop, to laid-back cool jazz, to fusion, free jazz and far beyond. Jazz has since become a part of every American’s birthright, a timeless symbol of individualism and ingenuity, democracy and inclusiveness. At its very core, this music affirms our belief in community, in love, and in the dignity of human life. And if we let it, jazz can teach us—in ways beyond our imagination—exactly who we are, where we have been, and where we should be going

The U.S. Constitution & George Washington

Jazz and Democracy

American democracy was designed from the very beginning around the idea of personal freedom. These key phrases from early American history—“We the People,” “E Pluribus Unum” and “A More Perfect Union”—have served as important themes for our nation since its founding.

“We the People” are the first three words of the United States Constitution and highlight the truly revolutionary nature of the American historical enterprise in placing unprecedented faith in the ability of its citizens to establish a republic:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

“E Pluribus Unum” (Latin for “Out of Many, One,”) was inscribed in 1776 on the face of the Seal of the United States. Long considered the official motto of the United States, “E Pluribus Unum” was as important in the 18th century as it is today in establishing an ideal for the nation—that many, different peoples could come together to form one society. “A More Perfect Union” is a phrase that appears in the first section of the U.S. Constitution. This idea captures the aspirations of the early republic to continue to improve over time, a difficult and challenging project, both then and now.

These ideas are relevant to the world of jazz as well: a group of diverse musicians negotiating in time to create a collective expression that reflects the unique personalities and values of each individual for the good of everyone. The traditions of experimentation and improvisation in jazz resemble the innovative approach of America’s democracy in placing so much faith in its people and in striving to invent something new, different, and perhaps, even better.

Duke Ellington and His Washingtonians

What is the Great Migration?

The largest human migration in American history began in 1915. Over the next half-century, nearly six million African Americans packed their belongings, left their homes in the Jim Crow South, and set out for the big cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom. Known as the “Great Migration,” the poet Alain Locke wrote, this mass movement was “a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.”

City life in the North was immeasurably enriched by the arrival of so many strangers from the South. But American culture was transformed forever because jazz was part of the newcomers’ baggage. Wherever they settled it found eager new audiences. New York’s Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, the wide-open streets of Kansas City Missouri, the Paradise Valley neighborhood in Detroit, Central Avenue in Los Angeles, and many other new jazz-rich big-city enclaves all across the country became proving grounds for America’s music.

Zora Neale Hurston & Langston Hughes

The Harlem Renaissance

Each city was important to the music’s development, and each added its own unique flavor to the mix. Still, as Duke Ellington remembered, "Harlem in our minds had the world’s most glamorous atmosphere. We had to go there." Ellington moved from Washington, D.C. to Harlem in 1923. Other eager young musicians flocked there, too. Harlem was then the cultural capital of black America, home to the Harlem Renaissance, a remarkable coalescing of African American artists, that included activists W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, and the writers James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Huston.

All kinds of jazz flourished in its cabarets and nightclubs and dance halls but in the 1920’s, one solo piano style seemed especially well suited to the city’s fast-paced, competitive spirit. Harlem stride or “eastern ragtime” is “orchestral piano,” one practitioner said: While the left hand “strides,” establishing a steady rhythm by alternating between bass notes at the end of the keyboard and chords around its middle, the right hand is free to play swinging, intricate melodies as if it were a horn. Two stride-masters stood out above the rest, James P. Johnson and his friendly rival, Willie “The Lion” Smith.

“Sometimes we got carving battles going that would last four or five hours,” the Lion remembered. Rent parties were their specialty—all-night dances held in crowded apartments where the price of admission helped keep the landlord at bay. “They would crowd a hundred people … into a seven-room railroad flat,” the Lion recalled, “and the walls would bulge—some of the parties spread to the halls and all over the building.” He and Johnson usually fought to a draw, Duke Ellington remembered. “It was never to the blood. With those two guys it was always a sporting event. Neither cut the other. They had too much respect for that."

Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra

Jazz and Civil Rights

“Jazz,” Duke Ellington once said is a “barometer of democracy.“ All through the years jazz has exemplified all that is most admirable about the country that created it –freedom, inclusiveness, individualism and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own interests for the greater good. But from time to time, musicians have also felt the need to use their art to protest when the United States fails to live up to its promises.

It started early. In 1929, Louis Armstrong turned a simple Broadway ditty called Black and Blue, into a searing indictment of racism. In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, Duke Ellington presented Black, Brown, and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America in part to remind his countrymen that while fighting for freedom abroad, Americans should not forget those denied freedom at home. “I contend,” he said, that “it was a happy day when the first unhappy slave was landed on America’s shores. We stirred in our shackles, and our unrest awakened justice in the hearts of a courageous few, and we recreated in America the desire for true democracy, freedom for all, the brotherhood of man, principles on which the country had been founded.”

Jazz found ways to echo both the inspiration and the turbulence of the Civil Rights Era of the 1950’s and 60’s, as well. In 1956, when Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus sought to block integration of his state’s schools, the bassist Charles Mingus responded with a scathing piece called “Fables of Faubus.” That same year, when the State Department asked Louis Armstrong to represent the best of America behind the Iron Curtain, he said he wouldn’t go till they “straighten out that mess down south… They’ve been ignoring the Constitution."

Malcom X & Martin Luther King Jr.

Victories and Anguish

Nineteen-sixty saw student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters all across the South. When Duke Ellington learned that black students had been turned away from a whites-only restaurant, he made sure he, too, was turned away and made headlines across the country. The drummer Max Roach, his then wife, the singer Abbey Lincoln, and the tenor saxophone master Coleman Hawkins combined forces to record We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, a torrent of anger and anguish that perfectly mirrored the rising tide of protest.

The Civil Rights movement won two great victories—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But they came at a fearful cost: civil rights workers murdered, marchers beaten, neighborhoods destroyed, the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

Amid the anguish, some African American musicians for a time abandoned the dream of an integrated art form. Other musicians, despairing at the chaos and turned inward, rejecting musical conventions in search of new forms of personal expression.

It is of course impossible to predict the future, either for jazz or for the United States. But however history unfolds, jazz musicians will be there, mirroring the country’s best traditions and pointing things out when things go wrong.