Sound of Freedom: Jazz as a Beacon of Expression and Equality
Ziqi Liu
2024
Introduction
Jazz, a genre that encapsulates the tumultuous yet vibrant soul of the African American experience, has undergone significant transformations since its inception in the late 19th century. Originating in the heart of New Orleans, jazz emerged from a confluence of African rhythms, European harmonies, and the American blues. During the 1920s, a decade of unprecedented economic growth and cultural change, jazz found its rhythm in nightclubs and dance halls in northern and Midwest cities, from Chicago to Kansas City and New York. It became an eponymous symbol of the age.
Though jazz captivated white Americans, the color line divided white society from Black society in the North and West no less than the Jim Crow South. As it developed, jazz became more than a musical genre; it became a social statement, a form of resistance, and a voice for the African American community, which struggled under the weight of segregation and discrimination. Musicians such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane transformed jazz into a medium that expresses different aspects of the Black experience, identity, genius, and virtuosity. While civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X fought for equal rights and freedom for all Black Americans in the 1950s to 1960s, there was a similar revolution taking place in the world of jazz since its introduction to the white American public in the 1920s.
Black musicians explored ways to express themselves freely and break chains imposed on them by persistent racist norms in America. They explored melodic and harmonic possibilities which gave them more freedom to express themselves. Jazz musicians went from strictly following chord changes, to exploring more complex harmonies, scales, and modes that gave them more notes or options to improvise, and then to abandoning chords or harmony to focus completely on melody. Socially and politically, jazz helped Black musicians to elevate their social status and even gain prominence in a white dominant society, and Black musicians who gained fame used their music and their platform to help the cause for social justice and equality.
Birth of Jazz
Jazz began in New Orleans, Louisiana, as a mix of blues and ragtime, two genres of Black music that developed after the Civil War. Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis connects an essential element of jazz, improvisation, with the life of enslaved Black people in the South: “The whole conception of improvisation is a part of all of American life. If you were a slave, you had to learn how to improvise. You came on the land, you couldn’t speak the language … You have another whole system to deal with. If you can’t improvise you’re going to be in a world of troubles.”1 New Orleans was a culturally and racially diverse southern city. White, Black, and Creole Americans lived with French, Spanish, and many other European immigrants. In the first episode of the documentary film Jazz, directed by Ken Burns, Danny Barker, a New Orleans jazz musician, describes, “People from all over the world came to New Orleans… and there was a whole lot of integrating going on.”2 The integration of all those people caused a fusion of their cultures in New Orleans, and jazz arose in that crucible.
Burns documents that since New Orleans was a center of the antebellum slave trade, slaves brought their songs here. They had work songs from the fields and spiritual songs from Black churches in the American South. There were also marching brass bands and European classical music that were accessible to the “Creoles,” who were mixed descendants of European men and their Black wives or mistresses, who were considered free. There was so much music and dancing in New Orleans that one northern visitor called it “One vast waltzing and galloping hall.”
The integration of all these cultures and races also produced racial tension. An expression of this tension was a racist art form called minstrelsy. Popular throughout the country in the late 19th century, minstrelsy mocked Black people by dressing white performers up in painted-black faces and acting out stereotypes along with lively music. A white man named “Daddy” Rice created the first big minstrel hit, called “Jim Crow.” Ragtime and the blues developed after the Civil War to counter minstrelsy’s degrading mockery. As Black American writer Gerald Early described, “Black people since the end of the Civil War are searching for an aesthetic. They’re searching for an aesthetic that will free them from minstrelsy, free them of the burden of minstrelsy, free them of the degradation of minstrelsy. What emerges from that is a form called the blues.”4 In the late 19th century, Black musicians had already begun using music to try to free themselves from racism.
The blues were brought to New Orleans by Black musicians from the Mississippi Delta who were escaping Jim Crow laws to the less-segregated New Orleans. The blues are spiritual and soulful, and they express the Black experience. The blues were similar to Black spiritual church music. A New Orleans musician noted about gospel music and the blues, “One was praying to God and one was praying to what was human. One was saying, ‘Oh God, let me go,’ and the other was saying, ‘Oh mister, let me be.’”
Ragtime became one of America's most popular music genres with its syncopated rhythm and mixed elements of marching songs, minstrel hits, slave work songs, spiritual songs, and European music. It reached New Orleans through traveling Black musicians who came from the Midwest.
The fusion of all those music genres happened just as Jim Crow took over New Orleans, which redefined Creoles as Black according to law. With the addition of the classical virtuosity of the Creole musicians, Creole and Black bands began to play a new style of music that combined ragtime, the blues, and spiritual songs. A young pioneer of jazz in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong, helped found the first type of jazz called Dixieland jazz, or “hot” jazz as Armstrong called it himself because he founded a band called the “Hot Five.”
Jazz gained immediate popularity within Black communities and even among some white folks. However, the initial reaction from Southerners was mixed. As historian Chadwick Hansen wrote, “It was, in the southerner’s disdainful and distasteful phrase, ‘nigger music.’” Some white musicians really enjoyed jazz and they even learned to perform it. The first white jazz group, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, became famous and produced some popular recordings like the Livery Stable Blues.
However, the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s fame caused some discontent and anger within the Black community as instead of “crediting the New Orleans African American musicians they learned from, these young musicians claimed to have ‘invented’ jazz,” as Stephanie Hall writes.8 Burn’s documentary quotes the famous trumpeter of the band, Nick LaRocca: “Many writers have attributed this rhythm that we introduced as something coming from the African jungles and crediting the negro race with it. My contention is that the negros learned to play this rhythm and music from the whites. The negro did not play any kind of music equal to white men at any time.”
The First Great Migration, a mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North and Midwest between the 1910s and 1940s, played a pivotal role in the evolution and spread of jazz. Escaping the oppressive conditions of the Jim Crow South and "opportunities for wages far beyond the reach of Black men and women before 1940 lured hundreds of thousands to industrial centers, completing the transformation, begun several decades before, of the Black population from a rural peasantry to an urban proletariat," writes Scott Knowles DeVeaux, a music professor, in his book The Birth of Bebop.10 Many African Americans brought their musical traditions with them, sowing the seeds of jazz in cities nationwide. This migration significantly altered the demographic landscape of the United States and, in turn, the course of its music.
The cities significantly affected by the migration were Chicago and New York, but it was New York City, with its vibrant Harlem neighborhood, that soon became the new epicenter of jazz. As Hansen notes, at first, Chicago replaced “New Orleans as the center of the jazz world,”11 but because of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural revival of African American art and music centered in the Harlem district in Manhattan, New York City became the hub of jazz since the Swing era (1930s - 1940s). The city's bustling nightclubs, like the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom, became the stages where jazz musicians showcased their talent. That era saw the rise of legendary figures like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday, who revolutionized jazz music and made significant cultural impacts.
Despite the musicians’ attempts to find a less oppressive environment in the North, they still faced much racism. During the Jim Crow era of the late 1870s through the mid-1960s, racial segregation was a stark reality that African-American musicians could not escape. Even in the North and Midwest, de facto segregation restricted Black people. Despite the absence of Jim Crow laws, schools were segregated in the North, and white business owners refused to serve Black customers. According to Joe Bubar, senior editor of The New York Times Upfront magazine, “Many landowners in cities in the North refused to rent or sell homes to African-Americans, restaurants frequently posted ‘whites only’ signs, and many entertainment venues admitted only white audience members—even if they hired black entertainers, like the famed Cotton Club in New York City.”12 As Bubar notes, Black musicians often performed in clubs they could not patronize. The irony was bitter; their art was celebrated, yet they were not afforded the basic dignities and rights due to the color of their skin. This discrimination extended to recording contracts, where record labels gave white musicians more favorable terms and Black musicians were underpaid and undervalued.
Moreover, touring was a hazardous endeavor for Black jazz bands. In many parts of the United States, particularly in the South, they faced the constant threat of racial violence and harassment. Finding accommodation and food while on the road was a significant challenge due to segregation laws, forcing many to rely on the “Green Book,” a guide that listed safe places for African Americans to eat and sleep.
In summary, jazz was not just a musical genre but it was becoming a powerful cultural force. It represented a fusion of African-American historical experiences, artistic expression, and social commentary—and increasingly white audiences and musicians.
Swing Era & Duke Ellington
Swing music, primarily thriving during the 1920s to World War II, is a genre of jazz. The birth of swing music can be traced back to the Harlem Renaissance. Swing was America’s dance music, attracting white and Black audiences during the Jazz Age (1920s - 1940s), a moniker coined by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. Swing gained popularity in the dance halls of Harlem during the Great Depression, which, during hard economic times ended up saving America’s recording industry. According to Burns's documentary, “In 1932, just 10 million records had been sold in the United States. By 1939, that number would grow to 50 million.”13 American writer Gerald Early further explains, “People needed dance music maybe more than ever in America because the country was in such doldrums. So I think people needed the escape of going to the Savoy and to those other places to dance … As an antidote to the depression, I think swing music did as much as MGM musicals to help America through.”14
The first man to bring swing to large white audiences was Benny Goodman, son of a poor Jewish family that emigrated from Russia to Chicago. Goodman would be named “King of Swing” and become the first man to perform jazz with his orchestra in Carnegie Hall. He would also contribute to integrating Black and white musicians in jazz bands.
For Black musicians, swing music was more than a genre; it was a means of breaking racial barriers in a segregated America. Swing bands led by Black musicians began to gain popularity among diverse audiences, challenging the existing norms of racial segregation. Many white-owned nightclubs began to allow Black bands to play for their white audiences, and they paid the Black musicians better wages, but the looming presence of segregation and racism was still felt. Duke Ellington, pianist, composer, and one of the premiere jazz musicians of the Harlem Renaissance, led his jazz orchestra as a mainstay in Harlem’s Cotton Club, a nightclub that advertised a “first-class, authentic Black entertainment to a wealthy, whites-only audience.” In the Cotton Club, Black people could only be servants or entertainers for the whites, and “the ‘plantation theme’ of the Cotton Club's decor played out for real in the club's strict segregation policy.”15 Being able to play for a whites-only audience in an established nightclub was a sign of the gradual acceptance of Black musicians. However, they were only treated as servants or entertainers for white people.
Unsurprisingly, it was not just in nightclubs where Duke Ellington and his band members faced overt racism. Historians Peter Rutkoff and William Scott noted that all Black jazz musicians of that era “traveled on segregated trains, stayed in segregated hotels, ate in segregated restaurants, and played in segregated bands.”16 Facing racism everywhere in the country, Edward Kennedy Ellington responded to racial issues through his gentleman-like manners, and that was how he earned the title “Duke.” Burns’s documentary showcases Ellington’s calm, relaxed, and well-tempered manners through his response to questions regarding race. When people asked him about not being able to stay in whites-only hotels, he did not directly respond to the question. Instead, Ellington said, “I took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” When asked about his opinion on Benny Goodman, the white band leader being hailed as the “King of Swing,” Ellington never publicly complained about it or the other popular white bands. Instead, he observed, “Jazz is music. Swing is business.”17
Ellington saw how the commercialization of swing attracted more white audiences, so he aimed to distinguish himself from swing and write and perform music that could better express his and his band members’ experiences, feelings, and individuality. Ellington’s trumpeter Rex Stewart praised, “He could stand above his contemporaries.” Monsignor John Sanders, who played trombone with Duke Ellington, recalled of Ellington, “He was not going to be carried away by a new trend … He wasn’t worried about whether he was number one or two or three. He wanted to be honest to himself, to what he wanted to do with that orchestra. And so he just swam through the whole thing and still comes out to be an immortal.”18 Ellington did not pander to the tastes of white audiences; he made music authentic to him.
In his first appearance at Carnegie Hall, Ellington presented the audience with “Black, Brown, and Beige.”19 In the July 8, 1944, issue of The New Yorker, he quipped, “You can say anything you want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words.”20 Yet, he introduced “Black, Brown, and Beige” to the white audience with a bit of politics mixed in: “We thought we wouldn't play it in its entirety tonight because it represents an awfully long and important story and that I don't think too many people are familiar with the story. This is the one we dedicate to the 700 Negroes who came from Haiti to save Savannah during the Revolutionary War.”21 Ellington wrote this piece to commemorate African-American history; the song has three parts: “Black,” “Brown,” and “Beige,” and each tells the story of Black people in America from when they were enslaved, to their emancipation, and to their present circumstances in the 20th century.
The Carnegie Hall concert was also significant to achieving racial equality, as an integrated audience came to watch Ellington perform. Musicologist Scott Knowles DeVeaux writes, “Duke Ellington's highly publicized appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1943 underscored the extent to which Black achievement could gain the attention, if not the wholehearted embrace, of the establishment.”22
Despite the prevailing racism in the country, some white people advocated for racial equality and justice. Rutkoff and Scott provide an example of a white man who made significant contributions to Black musicians during the Swing era: John Hammond, a record producer, and a civil-rights activist who scouted some of the best jazz musicians such as Lester Young, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Christian. He also helped many Black jazz musicians find employment in big bands. For example, he once asked Benny Goodman to hire Black musicians such as the guitarist Charlie Christian.23 Hiring Black musicians into white big bands was one of the first steps to integrating the music industry, and the collaboration of Black and white geniuses augmented the complexity of jazz.
Billie Holiday, one of the most famous female jazz singers, also used her music to break through racial barriers and push the limits of self expression. In 1939, Holiday released what would be her most famous and important recording, “Strange Fruit.” The song immediately caused controversy among Americans because it concerned lynching. The first verse of the haunting lyrics reads:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees24
By confronting the extra-judicial lynchings common in the Jim Crow South, Holiday turned her jazz recording into explicit commentary against the horrors of American racism.
In 1938, after Holiday had left the swing dance bands for a small club called Cafe Society in New York City on December 30th, 1938, a Jewish leftist high school teacher came to her with the poem and music for “Strange Fruit.” Holiday recalled, “I was scared people would hate it…and the first time I sang it, I thought it was a mistake.”25 It was rare for Black musicians to perform such an overtly political protest song at that time. Early says, “A song like that would have been unthinkable in the twenties. But the thirties had brought about a new kind of political consciousness.”26 Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” marked the beginning of Black musicians creating music with more political meaning to protest racial injustice.
One concern that arose during the Swing Era was the commercialization of swing. Hansen, in his article, explains this phenomenon. He states that in the North, the Black musician had “the possibility of suppressing the traits of his own subculture and acquiring the traits of the dominant white middle class,” which resulted in “a series of social pressures on the jazz musician” that changed jazz as “many of its own traditions had been abandoned and were replaced by elements adapted from the popular music of the white middle class.”27
Black and white musicians have always faced this dilemma. What should be the priority, making money or pursuing their artistic visions and passion? Money and fame often lured swing band leaders to create more commercialized music as it could gain them a larger audience. However, many musicians grew tired of playing simple and predictable melodies and rhythms and being restricted by tightly arranged music that had almost no room for personal expression. One musician told Burns, "Many a big-time commercial sideman likes to get away from all the phony music he plays for a living. When you’re playing for yourself, you discover the really good ideas that are inside of you.”28 Duke Ellington criticized commercialized swing in Down Beat magazine in 1939: “Nothing of importance, nothing new, nothing either original or creative has occurred in the swing field during the last two years,” Ellington complained, adding , “It is the repetition and monotony of present-day Swing arrangements which bode ill for the future.”29 Black musicians’ weariness of sacrificing their voices to express themselves for the band leader’s commercial success ultimately led to a revolution that opened dozens of possibilities for personal expression.
But the political and economic climate was changing. When the United States entered World War II in the 1940s, the music industry experienced an economic downturn as musicians were drafted into the war. DeVeaux states, “As the war machine got into high gear, eligible musicians were continuously siphoned off into the military. Bandleaders struggled to keep their ranks constant.”30 Another wartime issue was a ban on recording, which “had left jazz performers without a mass audience. Denied access to recording and radio, jazz musicians scratched out livings, playing in small clubs and for each other. The emergence of bebop was, in part, a consequence of the commercial exile of jazz during World War II.”31
Without enough musicians, orchestras, and recording opportunities, there were fewer big band performances, which pushed the musicians to start performing in smaller groups in small nightclubs. One famous playground for these musicians was Minton’s Playhouse in New York City, where there would be jam sessions every night where musicians could freely express themselves and participate in cutting contests, which is a contest between musicians to see who can improvise the best solo. A bartender at Minton’s recalled that saxophonists Lester Young and Ben Webster “used to tie up in battle like dogs in the road. They’d fight on those saxophones until they were tired out. Then they’d call their mothers and tell them about it.”32 This new way of playing jazz paved the way for a new style, “Bebop.”
Swing marked the first nationwide and even worldwide success of a Black music genre. This was the first time America and even Europe heard the virtuosity and artistry of African Americans, who had never before had such an opportunity to express and showcase themselves. Socially, swing helped elevate the status and the recognition of Black people in America; politically, it provided Black people a way to deliver their political messages. Despite experiencing a downfall during the mid-1940s, jazz still remained popular with the American public and it continued to influence many other music genres like pop, R&B, and rock.
Charlie Parker and Bebop: The Beginning of Modern Jazz
Bebop was an important response to the commercialization of jazz during the Swing era. Young Black musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie wanted to bring jazz back to its roots, the blues and spiritual songs, and use them as the basis for all the improvisation techniques and harmonic devices they would invent and use to express themselves. Critic Gary Giddins comments on Parker’s improvised style: “He could fly right out of the conventional chord changes … and so it brought everybody alive because he was basically wiping the slate clear of all the cliches of the Swing era.”33 Parker, Gillespie, and others like them wanted to make jazz a “musicians’ music;” they wanted to be called artists, not entertainers.
Bebop style is fast, intense, and technically demanding. According to Burns, Parker and Gillespie set a high bar for musicians to play with them because they were calling tunes in frantic tempos and unusual keys. When Gillespie first came to New York and played at Minton’s, “only the most talented and inventive were able to keep up with [him].”34 Some examples of other talented and inventive Bebop musicians were pianists Thelonious Monk and drummer Kenny Clarke. Along with Parker and Gillespie, they invented this new and very different jazz style distinguished from swing, attracting many young musicians who found this new, complex, and innovative way of playing “hip.” The rise of bebop also marked the ending of swing as the most popular music in America because the general audiences couldn’t dance to bebop, and it was not easy to listen to, but this was essentially the goal of the beboppers. They were not making dance music anymore; instead, their music required close attention from the listeners because every soloist was telling a story or expressing something through their improvisation. Swing and dance music was a thing of the past, and bebop became the new normal.
A famous recording session in 1945 demonstrates the virtuosity and genius of bebop and the Black musicians who pioneered it. Parker, Gillespie, and Max Roach headlined the Black musicians recording, “Ko-Ko,” which Rutkoff and Scott describe as follows: “‘Ko-Ko,’ whose jagged melody Parker constructed over the harmonic structure of another tune, ‘Cherokee,’ would become Parker's great contribution to the bebop revolution. Energetic, sometimes frantic, and bluesy, bebop's incendiary style, pulsing rhythm, and intensity contrasted with the melodic, linear, and commercial qualities of swing. Yet the innovators of bop schooled themselves in the jazz of the 1930s, and as they pushed swing to its limits they discovered a new music, one which they could begin to call their own.”35
In the recording, to mock the white music business, Parker used the “pasted scrap” of “Tea for Two,” composed by white composer Vincent Youmans.36 Rutkoff and Scott also describe the musicians' performance in the recording, especially Parker’s: “Parker's solo became legendary for its intensity and its facility, and remarkable for its combination of tempo and lyricism… Parker played one of the ‘greatest solos in the history of jazz.’”37 They note that Miles Davis, just nineteen years old then, dropped out of Julliard to play jazz full time, but he opted out of the recording session because he had difficulty soloing on the tune. “Bird was a fast motherfucker,” Davis said of Parker, calling him by his nickname.38 Davis later became one of the legends of jazz as well, and his compliment to Parker and struggle to play bebop with him demonstrates the contrast between bebop and Swing. One music showed Black musicians’ genius and artistic excellence, and the other was heavily commercialized for white audiences.
Parker and Gillespie’s blazing fast, complex, but still lyrical solos became the specimens of study by many generations of musicians after them. Max Roach and Kenny Clarke’s innovative method of using cymbals became the new standard way to keep time. Rutkoff and Scott conclude, “Bebop's liberation of jazz from show business, however, represented more than a musical revolution. By asserting its artistic identity and drawing on African American blues, bebop enabled Black jazz musicians to liberate themselves from white control as they revitalized a jazz that had become stagnant and formulaic.”39 Parker and his fellow musicians redefined jazz in terms derived from the Black American experience.
However, the popularity of those bebop stars, especially Charlie Parker, exposed another problem that troubled many Black Americans, which was drug addiction. Many famous jazz musicians were addicted to drugs at some point in their lives; some overcame the addiction, and some failed, like Parker. Famous clarinetist Artie Shaw said, “Jazz was born in a whiskey barrel, grew up on marijuana, and is about to expire on heroin.”40 Jazz music grew up alongside alcohol and drugs because these substances helped musicians to take a break from the stressful life of traveling and playing in different clubs every night. Musicians also felt particularly creative when high.
Black musicians’ predicament in a racist society made them more vulnerable to public life as well. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis comments on the lives of jazz musicians: “When you have that type of extreme relationship to the world that’s around you, it’s very difficult not to need stimulation.” Marsalis adds that when musicians are playing, “The world that you’re in is perfect. Well, now as soon as that music is over, that too is over. But that dope is always there for you.”41 Black musicians faced substantial social, political, and economic pressures outside of music due to racism, so heroin was a way for them to escape reality. As Ken Burns says, “Soon it seemed to be everywhere. Dumped into Black neighborhoods by organized crime. Heroin’s effect was devastating.”42 Heroin became a massive problem in Black communities, and it enhanced racism and stereotypes that would trouble them even nowadays.
Louis Armstrong and “Uncle Tom”
Louis Armstrong, the most famous jazz musician in American history, was born in New Orleans on August 4th, 1901. His humorous, entertaining, and vaudeville-like stage presence helped push him into national and worldwide prominence. But, of course, he was a great trumpeter and singer who innovated improvisation that influenced instrumentalists and singers, and many critics and scholars called him the first great jazz soloist. Armstrong also brought jazz back to the spotlight after it was overshadowed by rock and R&B. Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly!” managed to beat the Beatles for the number one song on the Billboard chart. Armstrong was also a strong advocator for social justice and equality and he saw no difference in color of people’s skin.
Despite gaining international fame and a huge white audience throughout his career, Armstrong famously received an “Uncle Tom” reputation, derived from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Uncle Tom is a term for a Black man who acts subservient to gain the approval of whites. Journalist Andrew Kopkind said of Armstrong, “Among Negroes across the country he occupies a special position as success symbol, cultural hero, and racial cop-out.”43 Many Black people, especially younger adults involved in politics at the time, were unhappy with Armstrong’s lack of participation in the Civil Rights Movement, his smiling and humorous stage presence, and the white audience attracted to his commercialized music.
Many beboppers criticized Armstrong. In a New Yorker article, linguist and professor John McWhorter reported that bebop trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis disapproved of Armstrong: “To Dizzy Gillespie, Armstrong was a ‘plantation character,’” McWhorter wrote. Miles Davis, who admired Armstrong’s musicianship, regretted that “his personality was developed by white people wanting black people to entertain by smiling and jumping around.”44 Young Black musicians trying to separate themselves from the commercialized side of jazz believed Armstrong’s performances were almost minstrelsy-like because he focused on entertaining a white-dominant audience. The Guardian commented that “Armstrong no longer is a vital force in hot jazz … [and] has chosen to play exclusively for the box-office.” The article quotes Bob O’Meally, the head of jazz studies at Columbia University, who said that he was “offended by [Armstrong’s] presentations … At the time of the rise of Malcolm X, the authority of Martin Luther King, examples in the popular media like Muhammad Ali and others, there was Armstrong – a kind of throwback from another era, with this borderline minstrelsy role that he played. I cringed as a Black American.”45
Armstrong’s first appearance in films was in A Rhapsody in Black and Blue, and this performance is an example of what O’Meally called a “borderline minstrelsy role.”46 In the film, Armstrong wears a leopard skin cloak, a pair of fur pants, and a tall hat made of feathers.47 All this clothing contains themes of African primitiveness, which was common in minstrelsy. However, there were different interpretations of Armstrong’s performance in this film. In Burns’ documentary, critic Gary Giddins says, “You’re seeing a very powerful, charismatic Black man … singing the tune ‘Shine’ which itself is a minstrel number, in such a way that it loses whatever minstrel or negative qualities it has.” Giddins acknowledges the minstrel elements of this film, but he believes that many people were embarrassed by it because the “Armstrong effect” was too complicated. Giddins explains that Armstrong was “breaking the chains right and left” despite the stereotypes that were put on him.48
Yet Armstrong’s “Uncle Tom” reputation belied his contribution to racial justice and equality. Armstrong was discreet about when and where he spoke out against racism because he worried about being targeted. He once said, “My life is my music. They would beat me on the mouth if I marched, and without my mouth I wouldn’t be able to blow my horn … they would beat Jesus if he was Black and marched.” As writer Ben Schwartz noted, “Armstrong’s more political views were rarely heard publicly. To the country at large, he insisted on remaining a breezy entertainer with all the gravitas of a Jimmy Durante or Dean Martin.”49
Armstrong even criticized Josephine Baker, a French singer and dancer born in the United States, when she publicly complained about racism in New York clubs and persuaded the Copa City night club in Miami to desegregate her shows. Schwartz quoted Ricky Riccardi’s “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years” (2012), in which Armstrong said of Baker, “But she’s going to come over here and stir up the nation, get all them ofays—people that think a lot of us—against us, because you take a lot of narrow minded spades following up that jive she’s pulling—you understand?—then she go back with all that loot and everything and we’re over here dangling. I don’t dig her.”50 Armstrong believed that public criticism or complaints about racist institutions would create more chaos and racism, which explains why Armstrong chose to be silent most of the time.
However, when it came to white resistance to the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (US, 1954) ruling against racially segregated public schools, Armstrong decided to speak out, and he spoke out furiously. During the Little Rock Crisis in 1957-1958, Armstrong called Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who attempted to stop the integration, a “no-good motherfucker.” McWhorter noted that he also called President Eisenhower “gutless and ‘two-faced’ for failing to intervene.”51 A few days later, Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to ensure the Black students integrated into the school safely. It was not often that people would see Armstrong put down his always smiling and jolly act and speak this furiously and critically. This moment was when the Uncle Tom reputation began to fade away, and Armstrong would subsequently take more actions to promote racial integration.
Armstrong promoted integration in the music industry, collaborating with and hiring talented white musicians. He worked with a talented white trombonist, Jack Teagarden, for a New York City Hall performance on May 15, 1947. Teagarden was worried that his presence would cause trouble because Americans were not used to seeing Blacks and whites playing music together. Their performance was a success, however, and Teagarden became a member of Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars for a few years.52 Predictably, Armstrong’s racially integrated band caused issues. New Orleans invited Armstrong to give a concert with his popular All-Stars, but when the city fathers found out that Teagarden was in Armstrong’s band, they refused to let them play. Armstrong, furious with his hometown, said, “I don’t care if I never see that city again. Jazz was born there, and I remember when it wasn’t no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow.” Armstrong was hurt that the city he grew up in did not accept integrated bands, and he even refused to be buried there.53
Armstrong’s efforts to integrate Black and white musicians were often ignored, forgotten, or misinterpreted by young Black people who called him Uncle Tom. Louis Armstrong is a jazz legend who “did not distinguish between an artist and being an entertainer,” says Giddins.54 He made great music and spread joy with his art; the joy, the smiling, and the jokes were his ways of displaying strength and resilience. McWhorter says, “What Gillespie’s and Davis’s judgments miss is that jollity can be a form of strength.” McWhorter quotes Ralph Ellison, who said that Armstrong was wearing a “defensive ‘mask,’ with ‘sophistication and taste hiding behind clowning and crude manners.’”55 Uncle Tom or not, Armstrong’s influential music and protests against segregation were undoubtedly significant in the progression of civil rights.
Path to Freedom: the 1950s to the 1960s
The racial tension in America grew as more incidents of racial attacks on Black people broke out during the 1950s and 1960s. Jazz then evolved again as young Black musicians felt the social, political, and economic pressures, and the so-called cool jazz of the previous generation did not fit with their struggles. Saxophonist Jackie McLean recalled, “There was a lot of violence in the sixties … and so the music went that way. John Coltrane … you know, some of Trane’s solos sound like a child being whipped in a city.”56 Drummer Max Roach released an album, Freedom Now Suite, in 1960, featuring only singer Abbey Lincoln and himself. Lincoln screams and yells on the album, accompanied by Roach’s aggressive and loud drumming, reflecting the pain of Black people and their cries for reforms. Black musicians were also then battling with white musicians in the jazz market. Music critic Nat Hentoff says, “This was a time when there was a great deal of fierce rejection among some younger Black musicians of the idea A, that whites could play the music, but more to the point that whites shouldn’t be taking away jobs from jazz musicians.”57
The product that Black musicians created in the 1950s and 1960s to counter cool jazz was “Hard Bop.” Robert Bennett, professor of English and Cultural Studies, agrees with historian Scott Saul’s characterization of “hard bop’s dual Afro-centric, experimentalist aesthetics as an attempt to reinvent ‘roots music so that it could address the urgencies of the present and suggest a future beyond the crisis that the civil rights movement had so effectively dramatized.’” Bennett adds, “Saul argues that hard bop turned ‘away from the ironic hipsterism that infused bebop’ to embrace instead a more overtly political and more international ‘global surge in black consciousness and solidarity.’” This time, the response to cool jazz, which Black musicians considered too classical or too white, was to return to their roots. However, it was less intense and complex than bebop, and musicians emphasized the rhythm and the blues, giving it a groovier feel. Charles Mingus and John Coltrane epitomize the hard bop movement, and they became legendary jazz artists. Their works are more edgy and political, exemplified by Bassist Charles Mingus's “Original Faubus Fables” and saxophonist John Coltrane’s “Alabama.”58
Mingus was an angry, ill-tempered man. Having experienced a vicious racism that hindered his development as a musician, Mingus wrote compositions in the 1950s that reflected his angry discontent with the inequality and injustice Black people experienced in America. Mingus’s “Faubus Fables” protested racist resistance to the Little Rock Central High School in 1957-1958. Traces of Mingus’s experience with racism are in almost all of his compositions, and one that must be mentioned is his masterpiece “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.” Interestingly, Mingus asked his psychotherapist, Dr. Edmund Pollock, to write a set of liner notes for the album.
Pollock wrote:
To me this particular composition contains Mr. Mingus' personal and also a social message. He feels intensively. He tries to tell people he is in great pain and anguish because he loves. He cannot accept that he is alone, all by himself; he wants to love and be loved. His music is a call for acceptance, respect, love, understanding, fellowship, freedom - a plea to change the evil in man and to end hatred. The titles of this composition suggest the plight of the Black man and a plea to the white man to be aware.59
Many moments in the album have intense, chaotic, and violent moments that Dr. Pollock describes as “mounting restless agitation and anguish as if there is tremendous conflict between love and hate. This is climaxed by the piercing cries of the trombone and answering saxophones as if saying the ‘I’ of personal identity must be achieved and accepted.”60 Mingus used his musical genius to express the pain, despair, and loneliness he had felt throughout his life. Even though his music is angry and intense, there are moments that show joy and happiness, such as the beginning of track B, which starts with Mingus’s solo piano. By the end of the album, according to Dr. Pollock, one is “left with a feeling of hope and even a promise of future joy.”61
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was praised by critics as one of the best albums in jazz history. The Penguin Guide to Jazz awarded the album the “crown” token.62 It wasn’t overtly political, but it is filled with Mingus’ rage and struggles as a Black man in mid-20th century America.
John Coltrane, arguably the best and most influential tenor saxophonist in jazz history, infused jazz with his own experiences and interpretations of life. Coltrane’s career was short (ending with his death at age 40 in 1967) but highly influential. He pushed the boundaries of harmony, compositions, and saxophone techniques, such as with his composition “Giant Steps,” which is considered the most challenging song to improvise.
Coltrane became famous when he joined Miles Davis’s First Great Quintet, and they created one of the best jazz albums of all time, Kind of Blue. It was a unique album because it introduced “Modal jazz,” yet another way expanding the freedom of improvisation. It uses unique modes and scales, with their distinct melodic and harmonic characteristics, when improvising instead of using standard chord progressions. This invention gave musicians more freedom to improvise because the tunes usually stayed in one key or chord for a few measures before changing. Giddins explains, “This opened up the world for improvisers because they could get away from almost the gymnastics of popping through all of these complicated harmonic labyrinths.”63 John Coltrane took the idea of modal jazz and ran with it.
The Avant-Garde movement also arose alongside hard bop. This movement saw some Black musicians push the freedom of expression in jazz to a whole different level. Free jazz was born when Ornette Coleman, a saxophonist, created the album The Shape of Jazz to Come. Coleman raised a question after seeing the risks and adventures taken by older trailblazing musicians such as Charlie Parker. As Giddins says, “At some point, if you go far enough out of the chords, the question arises: Why use the chords at all? What would happen if we get rid of the chords and we don’t have a harmonic contour? Why don’t we just improvise melodically?” Coleman explored new possibilities to express himself even more freely, and the result was a groundbreaking album that raised many different reactions. Composers such as Leonard Bernstein called it genius, while others frowned upon its lack of structure, abstract melodies, and extreme ways of playing instruments. However, some musicians favored it and began to experiment with Avant-Garde sounds because they enjoyed the lack of constraints and rules so that they could freely express themselves. When John Coltrane played with Coleman during his gig at the Five Spot in New York City, “Bird [Parker] would have understood us. He would have approved of our aspiring to something beyond what we inherited.”64 Like Parker, Coleman and the Avant-Gardists composed music to the beat of the Black American experience of their time.
Coleman’s creation sparked criticism. Writer Albert Murray said, “Ornette Coleman came up and says, ‘This is free jazz.’ But what is freer than jazz? As soon as you say jazz, you’re talking about freedom of improvisation. The whole thing is about freedom.” Murray believes “the whole idea of art is to create a form that is a bulwark against entropy,” and he scorned Coleman’s work as formless and chaotic.65 Yet, the Avant-Garde movement attracted many musicians, including Mingus and Coltrane, who embraced this even freer form of expression.
Coltrane’s drug additional also propelled his style of free jazz. In 1957, Miles Davis fired him for being unreliable. According to Ashley Kahn’s book on Coltrane, in October 1956, Davis was furious with Coltrane’s “slovenly appearance and tardiness.” He even slapped Coltrane in the head and hit him in the stomach.66 Fortunately, Thelonious Monk invited Coltrane to work with him for the remainder of 1957, and Coltrane eventually quit his addiction by 1958. During his efforts to battle addiction, Coltrane resorted to religion for spiritual support. He claimed a spiritual awakening that helped him live a better life, which kindled Coltrane’s interest in free jazz. Kahn quotes Coltrane’s liner notes on A Love Supreme in his book, “During the year 1957, I experienced by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.”67 Coltrane would then use his faith in God and exploration of religion as his voice to express himself.
He found his freedom of expression through religion and spirituality, which he brought into the Avant-Garde movement. Early claims, “The Avant-Garde movement got its high priest with John Coltrane.” Burns states, "John Coltrane insisted that jazz could speak to people’s souls, could help heal a corrupt and tortured world.” As Coltrane himself said, “The main thing a musician would like to do, is to give the listener a picture of the wonderful thing he senses in the universe.”68 Coltrane was pursuing spiritual freedom, and he wanted to share that freedom with his audiences, especially in a turbulent time, because it helped him escape the chains of drugs and succeed in his career.
A Love Supreme, the pinnacle of Coltrane’s career after years of innovation and spiritual awakening, symbolizes Black spiritual freedom. Joshua Redman, a saxophonist, calls that album “one of the purest forms of expression you’re ever going to hear.”69 The album is a tribute to God because Coltrane received his spiritual awakening from God, and he expressed his love for God without letting anything restrict him. Coltrane broke the conventional ways of playing the saxophone, overblowing his horn, playing unconventional high notes, and using multiphonics, a technique to play chords on a saxophone. He also added a chant—"A love supreme”—repeated at the end of the first part of the suite to emphasize the themes and the message he was conveying. His use of chanted lyrics was innovative and unconventional.
Many people could not understand Coltrane’s playing in his later works when he took 15-minute solos and screamed in the upper register of the saxophone when he was actually exploring every possibility on the saxophone that could help him express himself earnestly and freely. “He was clearly asking a lot of the audience. I mean, some people were just offended. It was noisy and loud and relentless,” says Giddins, “but there was something about the force, and the sincerity, and the drive. This music just seemed to just take you out of the conventional world, and it defined the period.”70 Mingus and Coltrane’s music represented Black Americans' different stances during the Civil Rights Movement. Mingus’s music was more politically aggressive and militant, while Coltrane believed that spirituality and religion could heal the broken world.
Conclusion
The journey of jazz, from its origins in the melting pot of New Orleans to its status as a global art form, reflects African Americans’ tumultuous history and enduring spirit. Born from a blend of African rhythms, blues, and ragtime, jazz evolved into a dynamic vehicle for expressing the African American experience.
Significant milestones and challenges mark jazz’s evolution. Pioneering artists like Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane expanded the boundaries of music, using jazz to articulate the nuances of Black life and struggle and demonstrate Black genius and virtuosity. The evolution also provides insights into the relationship between Black and white musicians and racial inequality. The emergence of bebop, cool jazz, and hard bop shows the resilience of Black musicians against white musicians and capitalists who attempted to take a uniquely Black art form and use it for their profit through commercialization, like during the Swing era. The resilience and creativity of these artists, in the face of systemic racism and segregation, underscore the transformative power of jazz as a form of protest and an assertion of human dignity.
Jazz’s story is intertwined with America's narrative, reflecting struggles, achievements, and the ongoing pursuit of equality. It stands as a vibrant and essential component of the nation's cultural landscape, a testament to the unyielding spirit and creativity of the African American community. With its rich legacy and capacity for reinvention, jazz continues to inspire, challenge, and remind us of the power of art to transcend barriers and articulate profound truths. Dr. King said in his address for the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964, “Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them to music, only to come out with some new hope and sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.”71 Jazz is the soundtrack to the struggle for racial equality and justice in America.
Even after a hundred years of evolution, jazz is still changing and adapting, trying to survive in a music industry dominated by other genres. All those changes raised the question: “What is jazz? How can we define jazz?” Some Black musicians were not very happy with white musicians imitating and playing their style of music, and they dismissed what the whites played as “white” jazz. So, what is real, authentic jazz?
Wynton Marsalis, who helped establish jazz at Lincoln Center in 1996, offered a definition of jazz with music critic Stanley Crouch and Ken Burns in 1992. They said that to be jazz, a song must swing, have the blues, and have improvisation.72 Marsalis is known to be a traditionalist, meaning that his jazz views are more conservative and that he believes jazz strictly follows those three rules. The definition excludes many jazz subgenres, such as Latin jazz and jazz fusion, because these styles usually have straight rhythms instead of swing. Marsalis’s conservative stance isn’t necessarily harmful because he wanted to establish jazz as a uniquely Black art form and retain the Black cultural elements that gave it its power. However, many modern jazz musicians tend to disagree with Marsalis’s definition of jazz and have conducted many successful experiments on jazz. They believe that jazz is inherently free, and the bebop revolutionaries, the Avant-Garde movement, and the emergence of other subgenres of jazz that infused foreign music, such as Bossa Nova, showed them that jazz is forever progressing and absorbing elements that are not in the jazz tradition.
Jazz musicians can be from any race or ethnicity and be as different as possible, but they are all risk takers. Risk taking is the most fundamental part of jazz, along with the blues. The most famous jazz musicians in history are the ones who took the most risks among their peers. Those musicians and many others will forever be heralded as legends because their innovations changed the landscape of jazz. Jazz also demonstrates that only risk-takers can lead themselves and a community of people to freedom.
Endnotes
1. Jazz, episode 1, "Gumbo," directed by Ken Burns, aired January 8, 2001, on PBS.
2. Jazz, "Gumbo."
3. Jazz, "Gumbo."
4. Jazz, "Gumbo."
5. Jazz, "Gumbo."
6. Jazz, "Gumbo."
7. Chadwick Hansen, "Social Influences on Jazz Style: Chicago, 1920-30," American Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1960): 493, https://doi.org/10.2307/2710331.
8. Stephanie Hall, "The Painful Birth of Blues and Jazz," Library of Congress Blogs, last modified February 24, 2017, accessed January 29, 2024, https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/02/birth-of-blues-and-jazz/.
9. Jazz, "Gumbo."
10. Scott Knowles DeVeaux, "Wartime Highs-and Lows," in The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, 6th ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 2009), 236.
11. Hansen, "Social Influences," 493.
12. Joe Bubar, "The Jim Crow North," The New York Times Upfront, last modified March 9, 2020, accessed March 15, 2024, https://upfront.scholastic.com/issues/2019-20/030920/the-jim-crow-north.html?language=english#1300L.
13. Jazz, episode 5, "Swing: Pure Pleasure," directed by Ken Burns, aired January 17, 2001, on PBS.
14. Jazz, "Swing: Pure."
15. Margaret Moos Pick, "A Night at the Cotton Club: Music of Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen & Cab Calloway," Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, last modified 1997, https://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/night-cotton-club-music-duke-ellington-harold-arlen-cab-calloway.
16. Peter Rutkoff and William Scott, "Bebop: Modern New York Jazz," The Kenyon Review 18, no. 2 (1996): 96, JSTOR.
17. Jazz, "Swing: Pure."
18. Jazz, "Swing: Pure."
19. DeVeaux, "Wartime Highs-and," 238.
20. Richard O. Boyer, "The Hot Bach - III," The New Yorker, July 8, 1944, 26.
21. "The A to Z of Carnegie Hall: E is for Ellington," Carnegie Hall, accessed February 1, 2024, https://www.carnegiehall.org/Blog/2012/07/The-A-to-Z-of-Carnegie-Hall-E-is-for-Ellington#:~:text=Debut,movies%20as%20early%20as%201929.
22. DeVeaux, "Wartime Highs-and," 238.
23. Peter Rutkoff and Scott, "Bebop: Modern," 96.
24. Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit," by Abel Meeropol, recorded April 1939, Commodore Records, vinyl.
25. Jazz, episode 6, "Swing: The Velocity of Celebration," directed by Ken Burns, aired January 22, 2001, on PBS.
26. Jazz, "Swing: The Velocity."
27. Hansen, "Social Influences," 493.
28. Jazz, episode 7, "Dedicated to Chaos," directed by Ken Burns, aired January 23, 2001, on PBS.
29. Duke Ellington, "Duke Says Swing Is Stagnant!" Down Beat, February 1939, 2-16.
30. DeVeaux, "Wartime Highs-and," 241-242.
31. Peter Rutkoff and Scott, "Bebop: Modern," 93.
32. Jazz, "Dedicated to Chaos."
33. Jazz, "Dedicated to Chaos."
34. Jazz, "Dedicated to Chaos."
35. Peter Rutkoff and Scott, "Bebop: Modern," 91.
36. Peter Rutkoff and Scott, "Bebop: Modern," 93.
37. Peter Rutkoff and Scott, "Bebop: Modern," 92.
38. Peter Rutkoff and Scott, "Bebop: Modern," 92.
39. Peter Rutkoff and Scott, "Bebop: Modern," 95.
40. Jazz, episode 8, "Risk," directed by Ken Burns, aired January 24, 2001, on PBS.
41. Jazz, "Risk."
42. Jazz, "Risk."
43. Ben Schwartz, "What Louis Armstrong Really Thinks," The New Yorker, last modified February 25, 2014, accessed April 12, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-louis-armstrong-really-thinks.
44. John McWhorter, "The Entertainer," The New Yorker, last modified December 6, 2009, accessed April 13, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/the-entertainer.
45. Ed Prideaux, "Not a wonderful world: why Louis Armstrong was hated by so many," The Guardian, last modified December 17, 2020, accessed April 13, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/dec/17/not-a-wonderful-world-louis-armstrong-was-hated-by-so-many#:~:text=It%20was%20harsher%2C%20more%20cerebral,would%20soon%20come%20to%20bear.
46. Prideaux, "Not a wonderful," The Guardian.
47. Louis Armstrong, A Rhapsody in Black and Blue, directed by Aubrey Scotto, 1932.
48. Jazz, "Swing: Pure."
49. Schwartz, "What Louis," The New Yorker.
50. Schwartz, "What Louis," The New Yorker.
51. McWhorter, "The Entertainer," The New Yorker.
52. Jazz, "Risk."
53. Jazz, "Risk."
54. Jazz, episode 9, "The Adventure," directed by Ken Burns, aired January 29, 2001, on PBS.
55. McWhorter, "The Entertainer," The New Yorker.
56. Jazz, episode 10, "A Masterpiece by Midnight," directed by Ken Burns, aired January 31, 2001, on PBS.
57. Jazz, "The Adventure."
58. Robert Bennett, "Songs of Freedom: The Politics and Geopolitics of Modern Jazz," Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 42, no. 1 (2009): 42, JSTOR.
59. Edmund Pollock, liner notes for The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady by Charles Mingus, recorded January 20, 1963, Impulse A-35, 1963, vinyl.
60. Pollock, The Black Saint
61. Pollock, The Black Saint
62. Brian Morton and Richard Cook, The Penguin Guide to Jazz, Penguin Guide (London, United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 1992)
63. Jazz, "The Adventure."
64. Jazz, "The Adventure."
65. Jazz, "The Adventure."
66. Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album (New York, United States: Penguin Group (USA), 2002), 24.
67. Kahn, A Love, 25.
68. Jazz, "A Masterpiece."
69. Jazz, "A Masterpiece."
70. Jazz, "The Adventure."
71. Martin Luther King, Jr, "Opening Address to the Berlin Jazz Festival" (speech, Berlin, Germany, 1964).
72. Charlie Rose Show, "Wynton on Charlie Rose Show," hosted by Charlie Rose, performed by Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and Marcus Roberts, aired September 9, 1992.
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