The Chelsea Standard
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
The importance of Jazz
Library's tribute to jazz ends this week
By John Harris-Behling, Guest Writer
PUBLISHED: March 8, 2007
The McKune Memorial Library and One World One Family has chosen "All That Jazz" as the theme for the 2007 "Chelsea Reads Together" program in order to explore and celebrate the music that has come to be called "America's legacy to the world."
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But how did this once-despised music of America's black minority – a music presumed to originate in the early 20th century vice districts New Orleans, Kansas City and Chicago, a music that accounted for only 1.8 percent of American CD sales in 2005, a music few have heard live, a music still thought of by some as noise – how did this music come to be celebrated and explored in Chelsea and other mainstream, quintessential small towns all over America?
Of course some people have always felt strongly about the cultural and artistic merits of jazz (though they didn't always agree about what those merits were). In 1924, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra performed a jazz concert of sorts in New York City's prestigious Aeolian Hall. In 1938, John Hammond brought the "Spirituals to Swing" concert to Carnegie Hall. In 1973, the Smithsonian Institution released a monumental set of recordings called the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. These performances and this official collection, along with other concerts and collections, placed jazz next to classical performers in recital halls and next to the massive collections like the Beethoven Gesamtausgabe on the shelves of university libraries.
In recent years the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts – home to the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic – has also become home to Jazz at Lincoln Center. Many have come to think of jazz as "America's classical music." In their epic documentary, Jazz, Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward go a step further calling jazz simply "America's music," presenting it as our defining heritage with its own royal pantheon - Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Duke Ellington - looming over jazz the way Bach, Beethoven and Mozart loom over European concert music.
Such official recognitions of jazz certainly bolster the status of the music and make it easier for jazz musicians to apply for arts funding and get jobs as college professors (though the fame and recording sales mostly affect musicians long dead).
Jazz was genuinely popular during the Swing Era, but for most of its history audiences and scholars alike (at least white audiences and scholars) regarded jazz in much the same way they regarded African Americans in general - only more so. The music was thought to be both primitive and a symptom of modern social unrest; people heard it as frantically chaotic yet simplistically repetitive. Many heard it as the mirror opposite of well-ordered, proper, and edifying concert music. Even as late as the 1970s, some jazz musicians recall being asked to leave conservatory practice rooms when they were heard practicing jazz.
Providing official recognition for jazz has increased our understanding of the music and cast it in a less prejudiced light. But some jazz musicians criticize this official recognition; they regard it as misrecognition. The late trumpeter Lester Bowie argued that some sanctioned understandings of "the jazz tradition" have reduced that tradition to a fixed collection of tunes and star performers. He maintained that the jazz tradition is not a particular repertory but a way of playing that emphasizes creativity, experimentation, and personal voice. Efforts to recreate jazz classics, according to Bowie, were in fact hindering the development of the art form.
The journey that brings jazz to Chelsea has not been a particularly smooth one. Jazz has traveled over most of the major racial and cultural bumps on the American highway. But consider a few other stops along the way. It is often said that jazz originated in the New Orleans vice district known as Storyville, but Johnny St. Cyr, Louis Armstrong's banjo player, told a different story, one of playing for parades, family fish fries, and picnics on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. Other musicians talk of learning jazz not in the smoky bars of New York's 52 Street, but under the guidance of talented and demanding high school band directors at places like Chicago's Du Sable High School and Detroit's Cass Technical High School.
Today festivals like the annual JazzFest Heritage Music Weekend on Chicago's South Side are still occasions for picnics and family reunions.
Yes, jazz has been a part of America's great debates about culture and race; it has also been a part of family and community celebrations and a way for adults to teach children about what it means to be part of a family, a community, and a nation. When it's heard as a part of this story, jazz doesn't seem so noisy; it sounds perfectly at home in Chelsea.
Harris-Behling is a jazz guitarist and a graduate student studying ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing his dissertation on contemporary jazz musicians in Chicago.
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