The Social Effects of Jazz

“Where words fail, music speaks,” says the poet Hans Christian Andersen. This
message is profoundly expressed in jazz music. In the 1920s, jazz experienced a
rise in popularity when the music began to spread through recordings. Some black
jazz musicians believe that they were ripped off financially and that they did not get
full recognition and compensation for being the inventors of jazz as African
American culture. Furthermore, some people oppose the idea that jazz was
invented by blacks. Jazz music as such became more of a commodity than an art
and the highest achievers were white.

Music is essential to the African American experience in the United States. Faced
with racism, discrimination, and segregation, blacks have always found comfort
and a sense of peace in their music. Today, the social conditions facing American
popular music, especially rap, are analogous to those faced by jazz music, and
many musicians have similar experiences. Despite the fact that jazz music has
created some positive social effects, it has created more negative ones for black
jazz musicians, such as exploitation and jazz appropriation, some of which are still
occurring today.

In order to understand the social effects of jazz music, there must be an

understanding of how this music came into existence. I will then discuss the
positive and the negative effects jazz had on black jazz musicians. Jazz developed
from Afro-American music which included: Work songs, spiritual music, minstrelsy
(a stage entertainment usually performed by whites with blackened faces who
performed songs, dances and comedy ostensibly of black American origin), and
other forms (Wheaton, 1994). Dorsey (2001) believes that black music and black
musical accomplishments have been rooted in the continent of Africa. Jazz’s
relationship to African music can be demonstrated in “the dominance of percussion
in African American music…and bending the notes expressed in improvisation”
(p. 36). The same way Africans were able to spontaneously invent a piece of music
or beat, sometimes without any instruments, black jazz musicians are able to
incorporate some of these features in their music. The improvisational style of the
latter is very much influenced by the former, and is a unique feature of jazz music.

Furthermore, jazz is considered an integral part of African American culture.

Though there has been great debate about a standard definition of jazz, Wheaton
(1994) believes it “can be defined as a combination of improvisatory styles with
western European form and harmony” (p. 90). In other words, despite jazz’s
African roots, it also has many European features such as composition, internal
structure, and harmony. Peretti (1992) too states that jazz obtained its musical
identity from the African and European traditions. Jazz music emerged out of “hot
music” from New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century and some of the
structures were inherited from Africa and passed down to blacks from slavery to
freedom (Dorsey, 2001). Jazz categories include Dixieland, swing, bop, cool jazz,
hard bop, free jazz, Third Stream, jazz-rock, and fusion (Wheaton, 1994). The first
jazz-style to receive recognition as a fine art was bebop, which is mainly
instrumental and was formed by serious black jazz musicians who experimented
with new ideas in the late night jam sessions (Wheaton, 1994). Bebop evolved in
the 1940s and was said to have been created by blacks in a way that whites could
not copy (Gerard, 1998).

The history of jazz proves that black musicians are the inventors and innovators of
jazz, and that has been a major accomplishment of blacks. According to Wheaton
(1994), an innovator’s “job is not to entertain, but rather, to make the listener aware
and to force the audience to confront often disturbing realities and hidden truths
about themselves, their society and their world” (p. 143). Jazz is often referred to
as “Black classical music.” Gerard (1998) cites Amiri Baraka, who first argued that
jazz is an African American music in his book Blues People (1963), and also called
jazz “Black music” in books he wrote later. In fact, one of the first musicians to label
his music “Negro music” was Duke Ellington, who made it a priority to express the
African American culture profoundly in it (Gerard, 1998). Mackey (1992) believes
that blacks were cheated out of their invention of jazz music. In other words,
commercial success was only obtained by whites. Blacks were basically locked out
of it. Yet most white jazz musicians did not have the improvisational skills or
originality that the black musicians displayed in their music. Malcolm X says that
whites simply replicate what they heard in the past, whereas blacks “could
spontaneously invent.” He states:

I’ve seen black musicians when they’d be jamming at a jam session with white
musicians—a whole lot of difference. The white musician can jam if he’s got some
sheet music in front of him…But that black musician, he picks up his horn and
starts blowing some sounds that he never thought of before. He improvises, he
creates. (qtd. in Gerard, 1998, p. 78)