Last Class of '05

Tomorrow night is the last class for this semester of my Jazz History class. This is the opening lecture I prepared.

Listening – Wynton Marsalis playing "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?"


We’re back where we started the semester. In New Orleans, listening to a young trumpet virtuoso. We’ve traversed Louis Armstrong to Wynton Marsalis. What have we explored this semester?

College should be savored. It’s been said that it’s the last time you’ll have the opportunity to learn just for the sake of learning. Ideally, you’re broadening your perspective on the world.

Why study jazz? Because it’s uniquely American music. Because it is American culture.

What is it that I hope you learned? A little about music. A lot about how to listen to music. Something about history – music history, American history, African-American history, about the way that art reflects the world and the time when it’s created. In his book of 1956 "The Story of Jazz" Marshall W. Stearns writes:

The only group of social scientists who have attempted a partial explanation of the appeal of jazz are the psychiatrists. In 1951, Dr. Aaron H. Esman outlined the basic theory and, in 1954, Dr. Norman M. Margolis enlarged upon it. Their hypothesis: ‘Jazz is essentially a protest music’, and they support it with careful and lengthy arguments. Stripped of technical terms, the main point of their theory is that, just because jazz is looked down upon by the general public, people who love this music choose jazz – in part – as a way of expressing resentment toward the world in general.

America was born on the backs of slaves – this is the harsh reality of our birth as a nation. Understanding this is key to coming to grips with the Black experience in America. Understanding the impact the fact of slavery had on generations, and its enduring legacy still has – and it has and does endure in the form of lynchings, Jim Crow, discrimination – is key to understanding the America we live in. And until the Black experience is seen not as a sidebar to the American experience, but integral to it, and until we as a nation have come to terms with that fact, all the Equal Rights Amendments in the world will not help us to become a truly integrated society.

Jazz has been the voice for those marginalized by society – black and white alike. Music that is at once both a serious art music that is worthy of study and intellectualization, and a true folk music that only survives in its purest, most vital forms through its oral traditions, it embraces the great dichotomies of American life.

A country that holds nothing more dear than freedom wouldn’t have been able to come into being or survive economically or socially without the ugly fact of slavery. Our very existence is a dichotomy. At the time the Constitution was written slavery was specifically taken off the table as a topic to be addressed so that Southern states would stay a part of the fledgling union. This came to a head first obviously in the Civil War, and again during the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s.

Clearly, however, there’s more work that needs to be done. How the general populace of this country can allow themselves to become so distracted only a few months after the most devastating natural disaster we have ever faced (remember, we’re back in New Orleans again) – and forget about the displaced, the homeless, the unemployed, the people who not only lost everything they owned but lost the very city they called home – shows that there is still work to be done.

Because of this state of affairs jazz is still vital, and will remain so. Voices of dissent, voices of protest are needed, are always needed. Too often criticism is (intentionally) confused with disloyalty. It’s not a contradiction to say "America is the greatest country the world has ever known" and "America can do better". Those positions are not mutually exclusive.

Jazz calls us on our bullshit. Jazz is a mirror. Jazz tells the truth because it has to. It isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always difficult, either. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, serious, fun (and funny), ironic, self-righteous, passionate, too cool for its own good – often in the same song! - it embraces contradiction. But it always seeks to be one thing – cathartic. It tries to take us and make us honestly face the world, often saying things in notes that we would be afraid to say ourselves in words. Revealing aspects of ourselves we know about but may chose to keep hidden away. It seeks to change us by making us face things honestly.

Jazz is a call to action. Cornel West has a beautiful phrase, "jazz freedom fighters". He says in his book "Race Matters":

I use the term "jazz" here not so much as a term for a musical art form, as for a mode of being in the world, an improvisational mode of protean, fluid, flexible dispositions toward reality suspicious of "either/or" viewpoints, dogmatic pronouncements, or supremacist ideologies. To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension with the group – a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project.

This is serious, important music, with serious, important things to say. If you’ll listen.