Early jazz drew on marches, ragtime, French quadrilles, blues, and minstrel and vocal group traditions. But jazz is a way of approaching any musical material. Just as you could “rag” any tune, you could make jazz out of anything that got in your way, including popular tunes of all description. So what is the jazz way? Here I will expand on some key aspects of West African and African-American music mentioned earlier.
Jazz is characterized by syncopation: rhythmic emphasis on the backbeat and a slight anticipation of the beat, playing around the beat instead of always on it, so that the listener is kept guessing how the player will relate to the basic rhythm. The very basis of this playing around and guessing is, again, the division of a two or four-beat measure into three parts. This jostles the music into that swing, in which “the feeling of relaxation does not follow a feeling of tension but is present at the same moment.”[i] For the dot readers among us: it turns 4/4 into 12/8, and can be felt, played and written a number of ways. Try counting a typical 4/4 like this:
ONE two three four
and a 12/8 like so:
ONE two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve
Feel it? It gives later rhythm and blues, soul, and some of rock and roll that flavor called funk. It’s that particular rhythmic universe about which Louis Armstrong said, “If you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”[ii] The best way to get to know is to dance to it. But think about Marshall Stearns’ explanation of “complicating the rhythm”:
By means of ‘rhythmic suspensions’, that is, by subdividing the usual stresses into many unusual accents that carry over, around, and about the basic beat…The analogy of stepping stones across a brook is helpful here—the more stepping stones there are, the easier it is to cross the brook in your own style.[iii]
As mentioned before, this syncopation derives from a process of compromise between African polyrhythm and rhythmically simpler European forms. It had already been heard on the plantation, in minstrel shows and barbershops, in blues and ragtime.
The Caribbean location of New Orleans encouraged an infusion of diverse European and Afro-European rhythmic influences, especially what Jelly Roll Morton called the “Spanish tinge.” “In fact,” said Morton, “if you can’t put tinges of Spanish into your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.”[iv]
Jazz is also known for its blue notes, tones “in between” the European’s standard seven-note scale tones, as discussed earlier under Blues. These notes appear to be an adaptive strategy, just as syncopation works to fit African rhythm into European forms.
Jazz has become known for its sophisticated harmony—the use of elaborate chords with more notes in them than other kinds of music tend to favor. The chords became increasingly complex as jazz progressed through swing and bebop. West African cultures, like the Celtic tradition, often use pentatonic (five-note) scales; the complicated ninths and thirteenths and the innovative progressions used don’t show up in African or European folk traditions. Their development seems to have resulted from the combining of cultures, including the classical training of some of the early jazz pioneers, notably the “creoles of color.” In general the harmonies of jazz are more likely to be from European than African sources.[v]
A fundamental feature of early jazz was collective improvisation, which must have sounded like noise to some non-African-Americans, what with everyone blowing at once. This is a direct continuation of West African tradition. You hear it in the old New Orleans discs, but in the twenties it gave way to individual solos. The use of the break, a short solo improvisation between group passages, was expanded into the longer solos that came to dominate jazz.
Improvisation was, and remains, a key element. In 1908 Freddie Keppard took his Original Creole Band on the first national tour of a jazz band. They were the first to be heard coast to coast improvising on a theme: play it straight once, then bend it six ways from Sunday in each succeeding chorus. James Europe commented on trying to corral the energies of his Black military bands:
I have to call a daily rehearsal of my band to prevent the musicians from adding to their music more than I wish them to. Whenever possible they embroider their parts in order to produce new, peculiar sounds.[vi]
Today we take this for granted, but it was then an innovation in the nation. And not just by way of embroidery, but with the very uses of the instruments. Europe recounted that
With the brass instruments we put in mutes and made a whirling motion with the tongue, at the same time blowing full pressure. With wind instruments we pinch the mouthpiece and blow hard. This produces the peculiar sound which you all know. To us it is not discordant…[vii]
Jazz also integrated the African/African-American tradition of call and response. In a possible echo of West African leader-chorus singing, the New Orleans trumpet sometimes acted as the leader, with the clarinet and trombone replacing the female and male voices. In later, bigger bands, entire instrument sections conversed. Call and response existed in some western European church music, but never to the extent of its African cousins.
Also important to jazz is the highly individualized tone of the players, as compared with the western classical or folk traditions. Classical musicians cultivate an individual excellence within the ensemble, while jazz emphasizes personal inflection over perfection. There are certainly classical virtuosi known for their own styles, but the range of style is much more important in jazz, where individuality is the rule rather than the exception.[viii]
There is also the inclusion of a distinctive set of tone qualities particular to the African-American experience, especially derived from the South, described by Wynton Marsalis as “Southern shouts and moans, those slides and growls and cries and screams.”[ix] The varying of tonal qualities within a single sustained note, and the wiggling around of the melody in relation to the rhythm, now ahead and now behind it, are also peculiar ways of playing with the tune that are noted in Africa. Sometimes players will change the tone in the middle of a note; often they glide down from the note and back up—singers too (think Billie Holiday). As the note decays, they may allow the pitch to fall—a kind of speech-like technique uncommon elsewhere.[1] Ernest Borneman compares these particular approaches to rhythm and pitch to the African language practices cited earlier:
The same tendency towards obliquity and ellipsis…no note is attacked straight; the voice or instrument always approaches it from above or below, plays around the implied pitch without ever remaining on it for any length of time…[x]
[1] There may be a relation between this pitch practice and
the use of varying pitch in speech in some African languages
to denote different meanings.
See Gridley and Rave, 52, and Lipsitz 1994, 306.
Another notable Africanism is the use of roughly textured sounds like rasping, buzzing, and sizzling achieved through alteration of instruments or bending their playing methods. [xi] Trumpeters resorted to a dizzying array of mutes: toilet plungers, drinking glasses, cups and bottles. And of course vocalists imitated instruments, and instrumental imitations of voices.
Jazz can be seen, as it was by Harlem Renaissance figure Alain Locke, as a return to the essence of African-American music, which had suffered from being parodied by the minstrels, who were just trying to make a living but managed to distort a culture in the process. Jazz was based on the collective improvisation that had “generations of experience back of it; it is derived from the voice tricks and vocal habits characteristic of Negro choral singing.” [xii]
There are other musics formatted around a series of improvised solos, including certain Arabic and Indian traditions, and of course flamenco, with its strong Arabic and also sub-Saharan African influences.[xiii] Forms of scat singing can be found in Gaelic and Hungarian Romani tradition (“mouth music”). Even European classical music included improv, when composers stepped up or sat down to play their own works. And let us not overlook taxims (taqsims), improvisatory breaks in everything from Arabic and Turkish classical music to Greek, Macedonian, and Serbian brass bands (especially Romani).
Each of these cultures gave a different role to improvisation. Many of these traditions interacted through migration, trade, and conquest, the study of which would take longer than you or I can spare this week. Many musics have some of the characteristics of jazz, but none of them has all of them. Flamenco is not jazz, blues are not corridos, and the samba is not the tango. BUT, all these pairs are related, and without relations, we don’t exist.
[i] Hodeir 1956, 196, 200.
[ii] Collier 1978, 4.
[iii] Stearns, 273.
[iv] Quoted in Rublowsky, 126.
[v] Gridley and Rave, 49.
[vi] Southern, 1971, 365.
[vii] Europe, 1919, 12-14
[viii] Schuller 1968, 57.
[ix] Marsalis, 1995, 72.
[x] Borneman, “Roots of Jazz,” 17.
[xi] Gridley and Rave, 48.
[xii] Locke 1969, 78.
[xiii] See film Gurumbe: Afro-Andalousian Memories, dir. M. Angel Rosale. Intermedia Productions, 2016.