Music and Magic

Music and Magic: CharlieParker, Trickster Lives!Frank A. SalamoneIona College and University of Phoenix

CONTENTS

FOREWORD iiiINTRODUCTION 1ONE CHARLIE PARKER—BIRD LIVES! 4TWO THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF JAZZ:

TRICKSTER AND HIS ROLE IN JAZZ 15THREE JAZZ IN ROCHESTER IN THE CONTEXT

OF THE WIDER SCENE 35FOUR AFRICA AS A METAPHOR OF AUTHENTICITY 49FIVE THE CULTURE OF JAZZ 65BIBLIOGRAPHY 86INDEX 92

FOREWORDCharlie Parker: Trickster Lives!

Frank Salamone’s monograph about Charlie Parkerand tricksters in Jazz music provides a new way ofseeing both Jazz and the trickster archetype inAmerican culture. I am honored to have been askedto write this forward, given his prolific researchhistory on this musical genre. The Trickster is afascinating topic and character transcending Jazzand American culture. It does have notablevariations, but something common across societiesand cultures persists. When asking what the natureof this archetype is, my first thoughts arewhether the trickster is a socially interactionalcreation implicitly suggesting a potential forbeing a trickster in many of us. Althoughinteractions are pivotal to its social recognitionby others, the trickster has to reach beyondloosely connected situations.

Do certain circumstances therefore correspondwith the displayed and patterned “doings” (Westand Zimmerman 1987) associated with the trickstercharacter or archetype? What are the potentialprocesses of becoming a trickster? Is there adefinable set of characteristics of being atrickster within jazz that differs from othercontexts, scenes, or subcultures? These aredifficult questions warranting more research andindicative of the depth of this engaging topic;however, good and sound research understands itslimitations of scope and purpose. This bookprovides a very thoughtful, rich, and empiricalengagement of Charlie Parker, tricksters and howthey pertain not only to jazz, but also to

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American culture and its historical inequalitiesand divisions related to African Americans.

I will not pretend to know jazz like FrankSalamone. I know Charlie Parker as a distanced fanof his amazing musical talent, importance to theinception of bebop, and having the posthumousability to scare a young high school musician withhis practice scales for bass clef instruments.That tuba player was me. On reflection, theexperience was a possible introduction to a“symbolic boundary” (Lamont and Fournier 1992),distinguishing a different and much higher musicalaptitude, education and subculture. As Salamonethoroughly discusses, the creation andconstruction of boundaries are an almost essentialprerequisite to this contentious character. It isthe trickster’s raison d’être to violate, challenge,and usurp not only symbolic, but also socialboundaries. Potentially, little is sacrosanct, anda “biting humor “with a notable reflexivity isalmost requirements for jazz musicians andtricksters.

For the sake of theoretical comparisons we mayconsider a few other relevant “character types” orsocial roles within the scope of unequal socialclass and racial relations. David Riesman spoke ofan “autonomous “person in his renowned, yetsomewhat forgotten book The Lonely Crowd, firstpublished in 1950. The autonomous type questionsand does not adjust to the predominant mode ofconformity and authority of their respective timeperiod. The autonomous type resists, including tothe preferences of their “peer group”, due atleast partially to their heightened “self-consciousness” (Riesman 2001: 255-259). From

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Salamone’s description, the Jazz trickster is alsosimilar to an “organic intellectual”. AntonioGramsci describes this role within the ongoingclass conflict and bourgeois domination incapitalism. These grassroots intellectuals areorganically born from the classes and groupsmarginalized, alienated and oppressed. Theseagents help mobilize “counter-hegemonic” forcesand collective actions to uproot and destabilizethe control and oppressive forms of authority.Much like these tricksters, they can use on theircharisma, musical talent, and deep understandingof the social circumstances to solidify theirimpact (Storey 2009: 88-91).

Frank Salamone’s tour of the jazz trickstermakes many fascinating stops. Charlie Parker isostensibly at the root of this book, but many ofthe famous and prolific jazz masters that “Bird”was connected to formed a dream-like socialnetwork. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie andCharles Mingus are a few of the major figuresSalamone discusses in terms of having influencedor played with Charlie Parker during hisshortened, but potent, life. These musicians inaddition to others, like Miles Davis, alsochallenged the status quo of the dominant whiteclass and culture. He retells a few stories whereDizzy Gillespie injects subversive humor to bothrecognize racial inequalities and the civil rightsissues of the time and places. The jazz tricksteracts with greater autonomy recklesslytransgressing and reconstructing throughdeconstruction. This also unavoidably teachesobservers by raising awareness and socialconsciousness.

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As the role of a teacher, there are manypossible lessons from the jazz tricksters. Thetrickster challenges the accepted definition ofthe situation or “frame” (Goffman 1986: 10) withthe help of humor. The arbitrariness oftraditionally accepted boundaries is illuminated.Much like the cultural jamming of today, thetrickster, teaches through challenging politicalpower structures. Ironically, the jazz “jamsession” (Cameron 1954) was an important sessionaltechnique and format within the jazz subculturewhere imagination and musical improvisation isparamount. Salamone recognizes the importance ofthe imagination for the trickster and his agency.Imaginative improvisation, as noted by Salamone,teaches through representation how jazz musiciansresponded to the racial oppression of the Jim Crowsouth.

In his book Stigma, Erving Goffman slyly andeloquently demonstrates how many people areseemingly normal, but secretly deviant, using theterm “normal deviants” to define this “feature ofsociety” (Goffman 1963: 130). The jazz tricksterembodies and uncovers these social and culturalcontradictions that comprise many of us. We arepotentially “hip” and “squares” (Becker 1963: 90),but some cultures and subcultures have a longhistory of producing these cultural characters asresponses to bigger societal injustices. Byshowing this arbitrariness, the jazz tricksterstaught their greatest lessons about societalinequalities and social and symbolic boundariesand structures, vis-à-vis transgression. Salamonebrings to life the relationships and influencesbetween Charlie Parker, other famous Jazzmen and

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the larger cultural characteristics symbolized inthe Black and African American experiences. Thisis a very worthwhile and enjoyable addition to thestudy of tricksters and Jazz music and subculture.

Marcus AldredgeAssistant Professor of SociologyIona CollegeNew Rochelle, NY

Works CitedBecker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the

Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Cameron, William Bruce. 1954. “Sociological

Notes on the Jam Session.” Social Forces, 33(2): 177-82.

Gofffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on theManagement of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon&Schuster.

Goffman, Erving. [1974] 1986. Frame Analysis: AnEssay on the Organization of Experience. Boston:Northeastern University Press.

Lamont, Michele and Marcel Fournier, eds. 1992.Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the making ofInequality. Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress.

Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney.[1950] 2001. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven, CT YaleUniversity Press.

Storey, John. 2009. “Rockin’Hegemony: WestCoast Rock and Amerika’s War in Vietnam.” Pp. 88-97 in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, edited by JohnStorey. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Ltd.

West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Gender& Society, 1(2): 125-151.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI wish to thank all those musicians who taught

me about jazz through taking the time to talk tome, including Hugh Lawson, Matty Ross, DizzyGillespie, Jimmy Heath, Larry Luger, Frank Foster,Kaef Ruzaden, Fela, Richard Schulman, BennyPowell, Ali Ryerson, Peter King, Danny Mixon, andso many more. These discussions took place in theUnited States, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom.Most thanks go to my wife who has patientlyaccompanied me on many occasions and listened tomy overheated rants on jazz, and how people do notproperly understand or appreciate it, and thenuances in the art of different musicians. Sheencouraged me to listen to how much wisdom andintelligence went into their comments and views onlife. Thanks, Virginia for being my muse.

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INTRODUCTIONI have been a jazz fan for over 60 years. My

Uncle Jake took me to pick up some relatives ofhis at a club in Rochester called the Golden Grillnear Lake Ontario one Sunday. I waited in theouter lobby while he went in. The moment he openedthe door I was in heaven. I remember asking himwhat that music was called. He laughed in usualway and said, “That’s jazz.” I was hooked. Ohsure, I had heard jazz since I was born in 1939.It was on the radio daily. It was in the moviesfrequently. Juke boxes were filled with it. I had,however, never heard “live jazz”. When that dooropened letting my uncle into the club, I felt asif the gates of heaven had opened and Gabriel wasplaying the horn. Surely, that music must be thesoundtrack of paradise. It was a moment thatchanged my life.

Later I realized that what I had heard wascalled Dixieland jazz or New Orleans jazz, maybeeven Chicago jazz, trad jazz, moldy fig or evenclassic jazz, depending on the time, place, orperson doing the classifying. As I grew older, Iknew that all kinds of jazz were simply jazz, andcame from Louis Armstrong, no matter what theywere called. Louis never tried to avoid the term,as some jazz greats did. Ellington, for example,who was a bit older than Louis, stated that therewas simply good music and the rest. The very goodwas beyond category. I know what the Duke ofEllington was saying, and I can dig it. However,he knew what he played was jazz whatever else heor someone else called it.

I knew that I wanted to play that music. Inever really could. Oh, there were two or three

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times I actually did. As jazz musicians say,something played my instrument through me on thoseoccasions. One was an impromptu school dance injunior high. The other was at a club as an adultwhen I started taking lessons again. That wasreally it. But it was enough to help give me aglimpse of what the transcendent realm of thespiritual is like, to be in the eternal now, andto be totally lost. Two or three brief moments ina long life may not seem like much, but they areenough.

Indeed the high E-flat on my alto sax thatbrought a crowd to its feet and turned the headsof professional musicians and the eighth and ninthgrade kids dancing and roaring their approval inthe early 1950s while I played music was somethingI could never again duplicate. Nevertheless, theywere enough for me to understand why CharlieParker, Dizzy Gillespie, Fela, Bill Evans, DukeEllington and many other jazz-based musiciansstated that jazz is spiritual. Parker went fartherthan anyone else and declared that jazz was hisreligion. Indeed, Coltrane also used jazz to getin touch with his own spirituality.

I had to distill my own spirituality fromlistening to jazz. Not all jazz brought me to theabsolute heights. Truly, some jazz was bad. Mostwas mediocre, like most of life itself. But eventhe mediocre had its surprises. The level of musicof the greats is indeed high. It goes beyondtechnical competence to a realm that is indeedfar, far away. Even when Bird Parker was not athis best, it was better than all but a few. In hisdeclining years Satchmo Armstrong could bring achill before the night was past. Coltrane, the

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great Trane, would thrill you even when playinghis squeaks and squawks in the mid to late 1960s.Dizzy, suffering from cancer of the jaw, wouldprove now and then that he was among the giants.Monk with his angular and strange music fought offhis inner demons to provide magical moments. Andon it went.

I found that most musicians—indeed, all but one—would talk freely about their mysticalexperience. The Yoruba Trickster himself, FelaAnakulapi Kuti, the man who carried death in hispocket, spoke freely to me in Lagos at his club,The Shrine, about the spirituality of Black Music.As he puffed on his marijuana joint, he waxedeloquent about the spirituality of his music. Itwas his sacred calling, his destiny. I couldmultiply the examples but the point is clear, thatthe music is sacred and spiritual.

It also, like Fela, speaks truth to power, tothe squares that control the world and pile uptheir unfair share of its goods. Louis Armstrongput his career on the line to oppose segregationand call out the President of the United States onhis failure to enforce the law equally. He calledon Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower to go with him toSelma, Alabama, and take the first little blackchild he saw by the hand and walk into the schoolhouse. Dizzy sang about segregation and fought itwith humor. He sang, “I’ll never go back toGeorgia. No, I’ll never go back to Georgia”,putting that line in the middle of “Swing Low,Sweet Cadillac”, itself a parody of “Swing Low,Sweet Chariot”. That song was based on a Yorubasong. And so it goes.

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The music is one that refers to anything andeverything in one’s life. Nothing human is foreignto it. The juxtaposition of the incongruous, thesign of the trickster, is the meat of jazz,especially among those who are more than themerely great, as Jeff Goldblum’s character in themovie “Lush Life”, noted. Biting humor is anearmark of jazz. Musicians make themselves thebutt of jokes. It gets them past their pain,through their long nights before uncomprehendingand rude fans. It gets them past their bitternessat seeing lesser musicians making more moneyplaying square and simple tunes. They will tellyou the joke about the fool who played jazz forthe money.

For every Miles Davis or Dave Brubeck, thereare many outstanding jazz musicians who barelymake their car payments. There are too many whodie in poverty. I hung around for many years withgreat musicians. I have kept in touch with a few.Jimmy Heath still greets me, as does Gary Smulyan.Others nod to me. A number want me to be theiragent. Indeed, I did so with one musician, LarryLuger, a fine guitarist. He said I was the onlyone who kept my promises. I got him gigs and wrotearticles about him, as promised. I stopped workingfor him when I went to Nigeria on a Fulbright.

Almost nothing else in life, except my parents,my wife, my kids and grandkids, and great-grandson, has given me so much joy and pleasure.Every time I play Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, and,of course, Bird, Satchmo and Diz, I am no longerin this world. I see things more clearly, withgreater perspective. Only Mozart gives me as muchpure joy and pleasure among composers. I wish

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there had been some means of recording hisimprovisations. I think if he were alive, he wouldbe going to a gig tonight, bitching about thecrappy out of tune piano he would have to playtonight, but he would do so with a smile andimpish gleam in his eye.

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CHAPTER ONECHARLIE PARKER—BIRD LIVES!

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, yourwisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out ofyour horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line tomusic. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

As quoted in Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (1977),

By Robert George Reisner, p.27“Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker.”Miles Davis summarizing the history of jazz

IntroductionCharles Mingus, the legendary and troubled

genius of the bass and composition, issued analbum in 1957 entitled “The Clown”. Jean Shepherd

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CHARLIE PARKER—BIRD LIVES!

did the narration for the title song. In it,Mingus’s meaning is clarified. The clown of thetitle is none other than the jazz performerhimself. Certainly, Mingus had himself in mind buthe also meant to apply it to others, and certainlyto Charlie Parker whom Mingus idolized, writing“Reincarnation of a Lovebird” for “for this album.Shepherd’s narration includes a section indicatingthat only when the clown accidentally falls andinjures himself does he achieve great popularity.He cashes in on that popularity, inserting hismessage behind the tricks, an apt metaphor for thetricksters in jazz. Indeed, it is no accident thatthe two major tricksters in jazz, Louis Armstrongand Charlie Parker, were trickster, and both notso incidentally were influences on Mingus.

TricksterIn mythology and religion, the trickster deity

breaks the rules of the gods or nature, sometimesmaliciously but usually, albeit unintentionally,with ultimately positive effects. Often, thebending/breaking of rules takes the form of tricksor thievery. Tricksters can be cunning or foolishor both; they are often funny even when consideredsacred or performing important cultural tasks.1

Although Trickster is found in many differentcultures, the first full anthropologicaldescription of a trickster figure was found inPaul Radin’s study of Native Americans, The Trickster:A Study in American Indian Mythology (1987, originally

1 TV Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheTrickster?from=Main.Trickstes.

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1955). Subsequently, many other studies ofTrickster followed. Lewis Hyde’s tour de force,Trickster Makes the World, comes closest to what I amtrying to convey here. The Kirkus Review notes thatHyde “delineates some of their common themes:voracious appetite, ingenious theft, deceit,opportunism, and shamelessness. Through suchthemes trickster tales dramatize a mythicconsciousness of accident and contingency(supplementing fate), moral ambiguity,foolishness, and transgression—in other words, theworld as it is, rather than the way it mayoriginally have been intended by the more seniorgods”. Trickster in art is a mighty force forcreativity through change of the status quo.

Additionally, note the common themes ofTrickster. Trickster has an incredible appetite,whether it is food, sex, or mind-alteringsubstances. He is a shameless thief, crafty in hisdeceit but albeit loveable and creative. He isnoted for mocking these gods, jumping on accidentand opportunity to come up with something new,maybe better than what came before, and maybe not.In sum, Trickster is a boundary crosser. Heapparently is unable to resist finding out what ison the other side. Trickster seemingly mustsubvert boundaries and present the moral ambiguitypresent in the world. The Kirkus Review article ofHyde’s work uses Stephen Douglass as a model.Douglass certainly is an apt model for AfricanAmerican tricksters like Parker, who defied manyseemingly rigid ethnic, artistic, marital,conventional moral and segregationist boundaries,dying in the New York apartment of the Jazz

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Baroness, Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild deKoenigswarter (known as “Nica”).

BirdWhen Charlie Parker died the phrase “Bird

Lives!” was found scrawled on walls all over NewYork City. March 12, 1955 was a sad day for thosewho loved bebop, modern jazz, or just plain greatart. The phrase captured both the sadness and therealization that in some way Charlie Parker, knownas Bird, would live on. While there may have beenthose who refused to believe the fact of hisphysical death, there were many more who knew hismusic would continue into the future, breakingboundaries along the way. It is, after all, theobligation of tricksters to shatter boundaries andbring about change, to be beyond category, and tolive their own idiosyncratic lives.

African American culture is marked bytricksterism, and black music has had no lack ofTricksters. Arguably, Parker and Louis Armstronghave been the greatest of them all. Parker paidhis tribute to Armstrong in memorizing many of hissolos note for note and then performing themwithin his own improvisations, although usually atgreater speeds. Both, however, shared a knack fortransforming other music into new music with apersonal stamp on it.

In his article, “The Years with Yard”, DizzyGillespie (2009:82-84) notes both his trickster-like quality and his ability to transform musicinto something beyond the ordinary while revealingits essence. He notes that Parker had the abilityto play rapidly but also melodiously, because hisdeep knowledge of harmony allowed him always to

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find the melody in the harmony. He says that inhis opinion Parker may not have been aware oftwenty-five per cent of what he played; it justcame out of his being and fell under his fingers.That view may have come from Parker’s own saying,“Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.”Parker had also stated that the secret of playingwas to learn all you could about your instrumentand then forgot all that and just play.

There is something almost mystical andcertainly nearly Zen-like in these statements.Parker often took both sides of various issues,sometimes in the same interview, often indifferent interviews.2

Did he have influences from earlier jazzmusicians? Is be-bop part of jazz? Did he knowthat what he was playing was something new? It alldepends on which interview you read or listen to.In all his interviews, he was deferential to afault. It is not hard to know that he was puttin’on old Massa. Now and then he would addresssomething head on, but by then there was so muchsmoke it was hard to tell. To be sure, one has togo to Dizzy Gillespie’s writings and interviews(for example, Gillespie 2009a and b, amongothers). There, Dizzy lays out the connections ofbe-bop to earlier jazz and the influences ofvarious players on Bird. In his Blindfold Testwith Leonard Feather, Bird reveals his vastknowledge of earlier styles as well as his love2 See Michael Levin and John S. Wilson 2009: 32-36;Leonard Featherhttp://www.melmartin.com/html_pages/interviews.html.

Paul Desmond 1954:http://www.melmartin.com/html_pages/interviews.html.

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for them (Leonard Feather: A Bird’s-ear View ofMusic. Nobody gets the bird from Bird asbroadminded Parker takes the blindfold test, inMetronome, 64/8 (Aug.1948), p.14, 21-22).

There is no doubt that Bird inhaled the work ofLouis Armstrong. Kevin Young has much to say aboutboth men and their relationship to each other interms of being tricksters. He says this aboutArmstrong: “… for innovators like Louis Armstrongwho also saw themselves as showmen, entertainer isno less a mask than cool is for those who camelater” (2012: 198).

In a broader context, Armstrong’s tricksterrole can be tied to the jazz musical genre that heso transformed. Both were subject to—and respondedto—unavoidable social realities, expressing painand anger in reaction to a debilitating racism.Both also employed secret musical codes, employingprotective masks that gave space to individualfreedom and collective empowerment. Furthermore,both recognized humor as the license thatpermitted their liberationist expressions ofthinly veiled social commentary. Jazz, likeArmstrong, offered a language, the subtleties ofwhich spoke to the in-crowd (the “hip”)and about the outsiders (the “squares”).Invariably, it would privately mock either orboth. Iain Ellis (October 2005) refers to one ofmy writings to summarize this point:

Critic Frank A. Salamone adeptly analyzed thetrickster humor at work in Armstrong’s popularsong, “Laughin’ Louie”. Firstly, the “squares” areouted in the title itself, which parodies thecommon misinterpretation of his name in mainstream

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culture and mocks the one-dimensional stereotypewith which he was regarded (and sometimesdismissed). From Armstrong’s point-of-view, thetitle’s humor might also allude to his habitualpot-smoking habits, this further underscored bythe name of his accompanying band, the Vipers, aslang term for marijuana. The song’s musicfluctuates throughout, between the “hot” sound“hip” critics encouraged from Armstrong, and the“sweet” sounds he always had such affection for,but for which he was criticized as compromising tomainstream tastes. Here, the trickster celebrateshis own creative choices (laughing for himself),and satirically dismisses the imposing judgment ofhis critics (laughing at them). This is achievedthrough the humorous method of incongruity, theshock of the juxtaposed styles surprisinglisteners into recognition and appreciation.

We can safely say that both Armstrong andParker are exemplars of the trickster in jazz,even if they are so in different ways. However, weneed to delve more deeply into what we mean byTrickster and what role he plays in AfricanAmerican culture, particularly jazz.

His (Hyde’s) choice of the fiery nineteenthcentury African American orator Frederick Douglassmay at first seem puzzling in this regard. But inlight of the real-life gravity of the “boundaries“Douglass crossed, and the ingenuity with which hedid so”, Hyde’s example makes sense. Indeed, withhis clever interpretive skills and his eye for themeaning-rich detail, Hyde brightly illuminates theways in which his examples struggled to subvertsuch seemingly intractable elements as thedefinition of art or slavery and segregation(Kirkus Reviews. LXV, November 1, 1997, p. 1623).

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Trickster, then, is a boundary-crosser,subverting conventional boundaries. Trickster’svery subversion of conventional boundaries opensup new vistas, new ways of seeing and thinking.Once thought and shown, these new ways seem“right”, almost obvious, and equivalent to Kuhn’sconcept of paradigm shift (Thomas S. Kuhn, TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions 1996).

In an interview with Paul Desmond and JohnMcLellan, Parker was asked about his revolutionarychange in music. After responding that he did notknow that he was doing anything that muchdifferent from others, he elaborated on what hefundamentally was doing:

But I mean, ever since I’ve ever heard music I’vethought it should be very clean, very precise—asclean as possible anyway, you know. And more orless to the people, you know something they couldunderstand. Something that was beautiful, youknow. There’s definitely stories and stories andstories that can be told in the musical idiom, youknow. You wouldn’t say idiom but it’s so hard todescribe music other than the basic way todescribe it—music is basically melody, harmony,and rhythm. But, I mean people can do much morewith music than that. It can be very descriptivein all kinds of ways, you know, all walks of life(Paul Desmond interviews Charlie Parker 1954).

Parker clearly sees his music as crossingboundaries and having clear implications for “allwalks of life”. He has stories to tell. Thetechnical trappings of music are there to help onetell stories, to comment on life, and to breakthrough restrictions.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions


CHAPTER ONE

Gerry Mulligan notes how he, and by extensionhis generation of players experienced Bird’smusic:

… when Bird played it was like a new country hadbeen heard from. It just was an altogetherdifferent atmosphere and it was really strikingbecause he played with such clarity …3

For some people that was not a good thing. Manyolder jazz musicians termed the music “Chinese”,by which slur they meant that it was dissonant insound and that there was no clarity of cohesion init. While that may have been true of some of thebop musicians, it was not true of Parker. Hismusic was always tonal, logical, steeped in theblues and clear. It was simply telling a differentstory than most other musicians, even than that ofhis close collaborators, like Dizzy Gillespie.

The strong negative reaction to his music bymany older people and others who preferred morepop oriented music is not surprising. That in noway lessened his impact. His influence was felteven in Dixieland bands, or more accurately in NewOrleans and Swing music. Jon Hendricks, the poetlaureate of jazz, poked fun at the moldy figs. Hewrote in his lyrics to Everybody’s Boppin’:

Bop ain’t dead, that’s a line o’ jive, Dixieland bands done kept it alive. Tell that square to take a dive,

3 Autobiography: http://lcweb4.loc.gov/natlib/ihas/service/mulligan/100010952/0001.pdf.

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’Cause everybody’s boppin’. (Columbia: 1989, reissue)There is a close relationship between the deep

structure of both musics. It took the genius of aCharlie Parker to bring it out in the open andshow it in a new light. Perhaps that only added tothe strong negative reaction Bird faced among manyestablished older musicians. I mean his ability totransform even the great solos of Louis Armstronginto something rediscovered. Armstrong, usuallygenerous toward other musicians, took some timewarming up to Dizzy Gillespie, who became a closefriend and frequent visitor at Louis’s home.Interestingly, Armstrong never did say anythinggood about Bird that I have found. Rather, hedelighted in telling a story about how CharlieParker had to be dragged on the stage at afestival in France after Sidney Bechet hadfinished playing. It sounds very close to thestory told of how Lester Young had to be pushedonstage after Bird’s solo at a Jazz at thePhilharmonic concert. I do not believe eitherstory.

Thus, like most tricksters, Parker rearrangedthe world while challenging people’s understandingof what they had taken for granted. He recombinedmaterial from the past, made it new, and sawothers rework his material. He could play witholder and younger musicians with ease. He wasnever easy to pin down, as interviews with himdemonstrate very clearly. His personal life wasrarely as orderly as his art. Chaotic is the

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best word to describe it. It was filled withunresolved contradictions. Bird was a man of greatappetites, which finally led to his demise. And

yet, as the graffiti on the walls of New Yorkbuildings proclaimed, Bird Lives.

ConclusionEverywhere one looks among premodern peoples,

there are tricky mythical beings alike enough toentice any human mind to create a category forthem once it had met two or three. They are beingsof the beginning, working in some complexrelationship with the High God; transformers,helping to bring the present human world intobeing; performers of heroic acts on behalf of men,yet in their original form. Or in some later form,foolish, obscene, laughable, yet indomitable(Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa 15).

Do the times make the man, or does the man makethe times? Bird came along at a time jazz wassounding tired. The World War helped bring blackprotest into the open again, after it had diedaway during the Depression and general hard times,or at least went underground, and a new generationof African Americans began to express themselves,

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exploiting the contradictions in American liferevealed by the war. These two forces cametogether and provided the soil from which bebopsprang. Charlie Parker grew up in the twin KansasCities. That the Twin Cities music was steeped inblues provided a link between swing and bop andfostered many types of fusion in jazz.

Bird himself was a charismatic person, filledwith contradictions. He was erudite, but could actin childish ways. He longed for recognition from“serious” musicians, playing with a string sectionon recordings and at clubs, most notably Birdland,a club named after him but from which he wasultimately barred. He was innocently surprisedwhen someone asked him if he was paid for the useof his name. Like Trickster, Bird was filled withcontradictions. This description of Trickstercould be a description of Charlie Parker.

Trickster is the mythic embodiment ofambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness andduplicity, contradiction and paradox” (7), and canthus be seen as the archetypal boundary-crosser,although here Hyde notes that “there are alsocases in which trickster creates a boundary, orbrings to the surface a distinction previouslyhidden from sight” (7).

Bird indeed crossed numerous boundaries. Bebopmay at first sound dissonant, but it really is notwhen one analyses the chords, especially theirhigher intervals. It is a new way of looking atmusic. It is deeply rooted in jazz in spite ofearly criticism, and even goes back to early NewOrleans jazz in ways swing usually did not. Itprovided a bridge to later forms of jazz, which inmy view do not have its verve or depth. Wynton

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Marsalis has said many times that it is thehardest type of jazz to play. Bird stated manytimes that he wanted to study with Hindemith, andthat Hindemith had agreed to take him on as astudent. While many of his followers derided LouisArmstrong and classical music, not the better ofthem to be sure, Bird slipped in solos based onThe Firebird and improvisation on Satchmo’s West EndBlues. According to Dizzy Gillespie (Salamone1990a) Bird was at home with African music whoserhythms suited his tastes.

Not only was he an embodiment of Trickster inhis professional and personal life, he was thepersonification of Walt Whitman’s American(Whitman’s Song of Myself). He did indeed contradicthimself, and did contain multitudes. The timescould not and did not tolerate him. The harassmentof New York’s finest and their drug buststargeting bop musicians, the virulent racism ofthe times, the slurs of many, not all, establishedmusicians, the copy-cats singled out in CharlieMingus’s musical tributes to Bird, all helped leadto his death. They also served to make him amartyr and to help perpetuate his music. CharlieParker, the Trickster, did indeed cross manyboundaries and people are still working out hischanges.

Coda I saw Charlie Parker once. It was at a Jazz at

the Philharmonic concert in Rochester, NY, in 1954or 1955. I was a young teen, in love with jazz andawed by the stories I had read of Bird. I hadheard some of his music, but not a lot. Still, itwas enough to whet my appetite. I was surprised

18


when Bird came on stage. He did not have his owngroup but was backed, so my memory tells me, bythe Oscar Peterson Trio. Despite its name, therewas also a drummer with the trio: with Bird, thatmade it a quintet.

That was not the main surprise. Bird wasdisheveled and seemed disoriented. He had a baggysuit on, was overweight, and his horn lookedshopworn. However, when he put the horn to hislips, closed his eyes and blew, the surprise wasthat a “gentleman bum”, in George Shearing’swords, could make such music (Salamone 1990b). Ihad taken sax and clarinet lessons, but knew verylittle music theory at that time. I only knew thatI was witnessing a force of nature. Music thatdown-to-earth but also ethereal could only comefrom a complicated individual.

Shearing had told me that Bird, looking like a“gentleman bum”, was the only musician whoapproached him in Birdland, asking if Shearingwanted to go outside for a walk. He helped Georgeon with his coat and unobtrusively guided him outthe door. Shearing said that Bird frequently madelittle gestures like that, which contradicted thestories that made him out to be unaware of othersand totally self-absorbed (cf, for example, MilesDavis, 1990). There are, of course, other storiesof Bird’s kindness, such as his giving Davis afree place to stay, and sponsoring his career whenmany other musicians wondered why he bothered withthe rich kid from East St Louis.

When all these stories are put together, thecontradictions, the wit, charm, intelligence,excesses and appetite with a skill that seems tohave come from nowhere and influenced the future

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CHAPTER ONE

of the music as only Louis Armstrong had done, wehave a portrait of a consummate tricksters. Hisuntimely death adds to the legend, as do storiesof bird feathers floating from the heavens on theday he died. I have spoken with some of his veryclose friends about him—Dizzy Gillespie, who saidBird was the other beat of his heart, and BobRedcross, for whom Bird wrote a song of the samename and who was a general factotum and who sworethat Bird could pick up any wind instrument andplay it perfectly the first time. They all notehis contradictory nature and his charm. He wasindeed the personification of Trickster, and, likeTrickster, he self-destructed.

ReferencesCharlie Parker – Koko

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okrNwE6GI70&feature=related

Davis, Miles. Miles: The Autobiography. Simon &Schuster; 1rst Preston Edition. 1990

Desmond, Paul PAUL DESMOND Interviews CHARLIEPARKER. This is a radio broadcast from early 1954(probably March) in Boston, Mass. with announcerJohn McLellan.

Ellis, Iain. Laughin’ Louie.http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/

ellis051013/ Accessed May 3, 2012Feather, Leonard: A Bird’s-ear View of Music.

Nobody gets the bird from bird as broadmindedparker takes the blindfold test, in: Metronome,64/8 (Aug.1948), p. 14, 21-22

Harrison, Paul Carter, Victor Leo Walker II,Gus Edward Black Theater: Ritual Performance inthe African Diaspora. Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press, 2002

Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World:Mischief, Myth, and Art. Berkeley: North PointPress, 1997.

Kirkus Reviews. LXV, November 1, 1997, p. 1623. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,1996 (3rd Ed.)

Mulligan, Gerry. Autobiography.http://lcweb4.loc.gov/natlib/ihas/service/

mulligan/100010952/0001.pdf 1995.Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American

Indian Mythology. New York: Schocken. 1985,original 1955.

Pelton, Robert D. The Trickster in West Africa.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

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Salamone, Frank A. The Force Primeval: An Imageof Jazz in American Literature.” Play & Culture.3(3): 256-266, 1990a

Salamone, Frank A. “George Shearing:Interview.” Cadence. 16(4): 5-8, 24, 1990b

Salamone, Frank A. “Laughin’ Louie: An Analysisof Louis Armstrong’s Record and its Relationshipto African-American Musical Humor.” HUMOR:International Journal of Humor Research 15.1(2002): 47-64.

TV Tropeshttp://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/

TheTrickster?from=Main.Tricksters first AccessedMay 5, 2012

Whitman, Walt. Whitman’s Song of Myself.http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm

first Accessed October 25, 2012

22

CHAPTER TWOTHE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF JAZZ:TRICKSTER AND HIS ROLE IN JAZZ

“I think his sense of humor lets him get away withthings the rest of us wouldn’t have the nerve totry”.

Attributed to Phil Woods and Gene Lees.

“I am too famous to die.”Dizzy Gillespie on his deathbed.

[The trickster] is a forerunner of thesaviour . . . . He is both subhuman and superhuman, abestial and divine being, whose chief and mostalarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.

(“On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure,”Carl Jung CW 9i, par. 472.)

The role of the trickster in African culture iswell-known (Frederick-Malanson 2012; Badejo 1988;Ugorji 1991; Gates 1988; Hyde 1998; Jung; Davis1991). He is a dangerous character, one whochanges and transforms reality. Seemingly off-handedly he creates and recreates the world. If hewere not filled with humor, it is debatablewhether anyone would ever approach him. Certainly,there have been figures in African and WestAfrican culture that fulfill the role ofTrickster. Musicians come quite easily to mind. Iwill name two, one African and one AfricanAmerican; namely, Fela, the Nigerian rebelmusician, and Dizzy Gillespie, one of the creatorsof be-bop who also used humor to makes dangerouspoints, points that upset the status quo.

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However, the proper place for trickster figuresis religion. Indeed, both Fela and Gillespie sawtheir music as spiritual, as each man told me(Salamone 2008). Shamans and priests in WestAfrica often partake of trickster characteristics.In mythology and religion, the trickster deitybreaks the rules of the gods or nature, sometimesmaliciously but usually, albeit unintentionally,with ultimately positive effects. Often, thebending/breaking of rules takes the form of tricksor thievery. Tricksters can be cunning or foolishor both; they are often funny even when consideredsacred or performing important cultural tasks.4

Charles Mingus, the legendary and troubledgenius of the bass and composition, issued analbum in 1957 entitled “The Clown”. Jean Shepherddid the narration for the title song. In it,Mingus’s meaning is clarified. The title clown isnone other than the jazz performer himself.Certainly, Mingus had himself in mind but he alsomeant to apply it to others, and certainly toCharlie Parker, whom Mingus idolized, writing“Reincarnation of a Lovebird” for “for this album.Shepherd’s narration includes a section indicatingthat only when the clown accidentally falls andinjures himself does he achieve great popularity.He cashes in on that popularity, inserting hismessage behind the tricks, an apt metaphor for thetricksters in jazz. Indeed, it is no accident thatthe two major tricksters in jazz, Louis Armstrong

4 TV Tropes:http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheTrickster?from=Main.Tricksters.

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THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF JAZZ

and Charlie Parker, were trickster, and both notso incidentally were influences on Mingus.

In mythology and religion, the trickster deitybreaks the rules of the gods or nature, sometimesmaliciously but usually, albeit unintentionally,with ultimately positive effects. Often, thebending/breaking of rules takes the form of tricksor thievery. Tricksters can be cunning or foolishor both; they are often funny even when consideredsacred or performing important cultural tasks.5

African American culture is marked bytricksterism, and black music has had no lack oftricksters. Arguably, Parker and Louis Armstronghave been the greatest of them all. Parker paidhis tribute to Armstrong in memorizing many of hissolos note for note and then performing themwithin his own improvisations, although usually atgreater speeds. Both, however, shared a knack fortransforming other music into new music with apersonal stamp on it.

The Diz and TrickstersTrickster myth is found in clearly recognizable

form among both aboriginal tribes and modernsocieties. We encounter it among the ancientGreeks, Chinese, and the Japanese and in theSemitic world as well. Many of the trickster’straits were perpetuated in the figure of themedieval jester, and survived right up to thepresent day in the Punch and Judy plays and in the

5 TV Tropes:http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheTrickster?from=Main.Tricksters.

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clown. Although repeatedly combined with othermyths and frequently drastically reorganized andreinterpreted, its basic plot seems always to havesucceeded in reasserting itself (Radin 1955: ix).

We have a fundamental figure here, which isboth general and specific. There appears a generalneed for the trickster, but a need clothed inspecific features of a culture. The trickster canbe creator and destroyer, one who gives and onewho takes, one who tricks and is tricked. Thetrickster inspires awe and affection at the sametime. Seemingly, the trickster is one who givesinto primal impulses without thinking; but I wouldargue that he is sly as a fox, who does, at leastat times, clearly see the results of his behavior,but who can get away with much because of hishumor.

I have argued that powerful, sacred Africanfigures require humor so that the audience canapproach them (Salamone 1995: 3-7; Salamone 1976:08-210). The informality prevalent in mostAmerican jazz allows the royalty to temper the aweinherent in their status in order to permityoungsters to approach them. I suggest that muchthe same practice can be found in Nigeria. Forexample, I worked with a traditional priest whowas one of the more powerful “doctors” in Nigeria.However, in order to encourage clients he appearedin a somewhat worn robe and acted the clown. WhenI asked him about the meaning of jazz, he repliedwith his usual arch wit that it was spiritualbecause it makes the other fellow sound good.Additionally, there is an African tradition whichholds that the musician has a sacred duty to standup to oppression and speak the truth to power. In

26


that task, Gillespie followed a long tradition ofAfrican musicians. It is no accident, I think,that the Yoruba musician Fela Anakulapi-Kutistudied and worked with Gillespie early in hiscareer. Even Fela’s claim to be the BlackPresident has traces of Gillespie’s half-humorouspresidential candidacy. Fela combined variousaspects of African-based music into his style.Interestingly, its foundation was the jazz ofGillespie and Charlie Parker, which he heard as ayoung man and which he used to create somethingdifferent for Nigerian music, something he deemedwould be revolutionary. He put on a mask of thetrickster to perform, mocking those whom he deemedhad betrayed Africa, the colonialists and theirAfrican collaborators.

The Humor of SubversionDizzy would often open his performances by

saying he would like to introduce the band. Bandmembers would then tum to one another and shakehands, giving their names to each other whilesmiling and nodding. The routine, which I sawrepeated many times, never got stale. Diz wouldsometimes stand aside and raise his eyebrowsbemusedly at the audience. Eventually, he wouldget to introduce the musicians in the band, forDiz was a fair man who gave each person his due.

I remember one night in 1957-58 when he arrivedin the middle of a blizzard to perform inRochester, NY. He was late, something unusual forhim. The audience, however, waited for him,knowing that somehow he’d make it through thestorm. In those days, Diz traveled by car aroundthe Birdland Circuit, and he was coming in from

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Detroit. As the band scrambled to take off theirheavy, snow-laden coats and assemble theirinstruments, Diz began to play solo trumpet.

The audience laughed as they recognized acurrent hit, “Tequila”, by the Champs. Theystopped laughing when they realized Diz had bestedthem again because he was playing it straight. Hetook the novelty tune and reimagined it as alovely, then torrid, Latin tune. One by one theband members joined in as they assembled theirinstruments.

After ten minutes or so, Diz then began hisspiel. He apologized for being late: “I wasplaying a benefit for the Ku Klux Klan at theWhite Citizens’ Hall in Montgomery Alabama.” Asthe crowd broke up with laughter, he launched into“Manteca” (Grease) with his new opening chant,“I’ll never go back to Georgia. No, I’ll never goback to Georgia”. Again, as the crowd—and it was acrowd despite the snow—roared with laughter, helaunched into a brilliant high-note solo, completewith all the pyrotechnics of which he was capablein his prime.

I reminded Diz of this performance thirty yearslater when he was performing at Elizabeth SetonCollege. He remembered it with a smile and vocallyrepeated the opening of his solo for me. It wasthen that he talked about humor and thespirituality of music, among many other topics.Diz took his role as a teacher/musician seriously,reminding me of Chaucer’s scholar: “Gladly wouldhe learn and gladly teach”.

There was another routine he had when doing“Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac”, his version of “SwingLow, Sweet Chariot”. The song is not just an

28


American spiritual, but comes from an Africanreligious song. Diz began his version with aYoruba chant from Chano Pozo, a Cuban Santeria (amember of an Afro-Cuban religious group based onYoruba religious principles). The chant often drewbefuddled laughs from the audience, and Diz playedit up big. For him, humor and spirituality werenot polar opposites but complementary principles.Humor was a means of leading people to thespiritual.

As he told me, “When Chano Pozo came, the musicall came together.” Again, once Diz finished hischanting, also setting the cross-rhythms of histempo, he started the song, in the midst of whichhe took a brilliant solo. When the tenor saxplayer James Moody was present, there would be twobrilliant solos. Then the piece would end withDizzy’s tag line, “Old Cadillacs never die. Thefinance company just tows them away!”

The examples could continue. Just what was thisonce wild bad boy of jazz getting at? What did hisgreat dancing in front of his band mean? Hismugging with his frog-like cheeks? His tilted bellon his horn? His African robes later in life? Hispointedly supercilious vocabulary? His outrageoustwists and turns, with his deeply serious playingon frivolous tunes and his humor on serious ones?What was he telling the audience? And just whichaudience was he addressing?

The following vignette displays most of thecharacteristics I have discussed.

One night in Texas in the mid-1950s (Kliment1988:75-76), the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald wassitting backstage eating a sandwich and watchingthe band members playing dice, a group that

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included renowned trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.Fitzgerald was terrified by the sudden arrival oflocal law officials, who arrested the entire groupfor gambling. The officers, upset because thegroup was performing in an all-white theater, tookthem to the police station where they were bookedand jailed—Fitzgerald still in her ball gown.During the booking process, an officer askedGillespie for his name. He replied, “LouisArmstrong.”

And that is what the officer wrote down.Several hours later, after the band’s whitemanager paid the $50 bail, an arresting officerasked Ella Fitzgerald for her autograph. The nextday, local papers reported that she was the best-dressed prisoner the jail ever held. (Iris CarterFord: 43).

Giving his name as Louis Armstrong was humorwith many meanings within meanings. On one levelit was humorous that the police did not recognizeeither Dizzy for who he was, but obviouslyrecognized Ella for a famous vocalist. Dizzy wasquite famous, and recognizable even to non-jazzfans. It was also an inside joke to pass himselfoff as Armstrong, whom most people would recognizeat the time. Additionally, it was both a claim tobe related in jazz to Louis, but also to show thattheir earlier feud had ended in a close andenduring friendship. Indeed, on hearing of LouisArmstrong’s death Gillespie said “No him. No me,”neatly summing up the history of jazz humor aswell as jazz trumpet.

Laughin’ Louie

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There are a number of jokes on the record“Laughin’ Louie”. The rst joke is the fact thatfiArmstrong always referred to himself as “Lewis”.He joked that white folks always pronounced hisname as “Louie”. In fact, on one poster his nameis wrongly spelled “Lewis”, obviously followinghis own pronunciation. So, it is not a far stretchto see the title as Armstrong laughing at thosewho think they are superior but cannot evenpronounce his name correctly.

What else is Louis laughing at? Well, he islaughing at the fact that he and his Vipersrecorded “Laughin’ Louie” while high on marijuana.In 1931 Armstrong was high much of the time and“viper” was a slang expression for a pothead(Bergreen 1997: 332, 360). The fact that he coulduse the expression for his band and even for histune, “Song of the Vipers”, was merely another in-joke on Satchmo’s part at the expense of politesociety. Additionally, too many people’samazement, Armstrong liked the Guy Lombardo bigband sound. In 1931, Armstrong was fronting a“sweet” big band, one that featured whiningsaxophones as well as strict adherence to playingthe melody the way it was written. At the sametime, the band was reminiscent of Paul Whiteman’sin including “hot” players. The mixture ofArmstrong’s melodic, but hot, trumpet over thesweet sound of the band is often funny. WhetherSatchmo intended it to be humorous or not isarguable, but it has its unique charm and humor,in any case. It does contrast an overly up-tightstyle of music with a looser and even moresophisticated one.

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Of course, the joke could just as well be onthe hipster that put down Guy Lombardo’s music.Armstrong, along with other jazz musicians, is aninnate fusionist. They merge all sorts of musicinto jazz, adapting it to the idiom. Throughouthis life, Armstrong atly stated that he likedflLombardo’s music. It is there in his music, justas Puccini’s arias are there. The New Orleanstradition is a Creole one that delights in mixingcategories in a rich gumbo. It is also clear thatin this period Armstrong was reveling in blackculture and eager to share it with his audience.

He included a great deal of inside jokes in hisversions of popular songs. For example, hisversion of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Old Rocking Chair”contains this response to Jack Teagarden’s vocalstatement that he is going to tan Louis’s hide:“My hide’s already tanned, Father!” Furthermore,Teagarden was white, a white trombonist who wasslightly older than Armstrong and had earlyrecognized his genius. The two had been closefriends since the 1920s and cooperated in mockingracial stereotypes. The sly reference tomiscegenation, a taboo subject in mixed company,slid by the censors. Armstrong gave whiteaudiences a peak at Black entertainment byperforming vaudeville routines featuring a stockcharacter, the corrupt Black Preacher, and manyversions have been recorded. He referred often tohis love for New Orleans food, early poverty, anddetails of black life. He turned them all intogentle jokes so that he could get on with his ownlove for life and over his own pain.

The recording “Laughin’ Louie” is lled withfiArmstrong’s famous nonsense words, stammering, and

32


bar after bar of laughter. Again, one asks whatthe joke is. Armstrong is Brer Rabbit, againlaughing at those who seek to best him. Armstrongwas able to survive during the Depression when themarket for “race records”, those records aimedprimarily at a black audience, had ended. He didso by following in the footsteps of other blackperformers, using race humor to his advantage.There is a long history of Africans and AfricanAmericans using humor to overcome hardships and tosubvert ideas that endanger their survival. Theuse of humor, of course, offers a deniability ofmalice. The phrase “only kidding” was one thatArmstrong often used. The article “AfricanAmerican Humor” in Alleen Pace Nilsen and Don L.F.Nilsen’s Encyclopedia of the 20th Century AmericanHumor (2000) offers numerous examples of thispractice. The article, for instance, notes thesimilarity between West African humor and AfricanAmerican humor, noting the following commoncharacteristics, characteristics already mentionedas prominent in Armstrong’s stage style.

In West Africa, the original home of more thanfifty per cent of American slaves, sociologistshave found cultures with many of the samecharacteristics that African Americans rely on fortheir humor: extensive wordplay and punning,signifying (verbal put downs), the mocking of anenemy’s relatives, the chanting and singing ofridicule verses, bent-knee dancing, an admirationfor the trickster, and aggressive joking thatdemands verbal quickness and wit (Nilsen andNilsen 2000: 14). Salamone (1990), Keil (1979,1992), and Crouch (2000), among others, have alsonoted similarities in the use of humor among

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Africans and African Americans, and in particularamong African American and African musicians.Nilsen and Nilsen (2000) also note the popularityof black minstrelsy in the black community of thenineteenth century. Performers who mocked the oldracial stereotypes by exaggerating them to theirlogical absurdities were also popular in the blackcommunity. Only later did white audiences becomefamiliar with Moms Mabley and Pigmeat Markham, notto mention Redd Foxx. Armstrong used similarmaterial in his own performances at a time whenwhite audiences were familiar only with the comedyof Bert Williams, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, andSteppin Fetchit.

Throughout his life, Armstrong collected jokes,copying them from joke books, newspapers,magazines, and friends. His archives at Queen’sCollege are replete with his joke collection andjokes found in letters to friends. Many of thesejokes refer to his color. For example, he refersto seeing Bojangles in the early 1920s. When thelights went out, Bojangles quipped, “Now thetheater is my color.” To Jon Hendricks’s lyrics toDave Brubeck’s music for “In His Image God MadeMan”, Armstrong remarks, “Can God be black likeme? My God!” It is a not-so-funny, funny moment.Satchmo delivers the line absolutely perfectly,reminding the listener of his version of FatsWaller’s “Black and Blue”.

Two of the jokes he saw t to copy provide afiglimpse into his humor. In a letter, Satchmo tellsthe one about the y who walks on a mirror andflsays, “Well, that’s another way to look at it.” Healso relates the story about the drunk and theugly man. The drunk calls a man ugly in response

34


to the man’s taunt that he is drunk. The ugly mansays, “Well, you are still drunk.” The drunk hasthe last word and says, “Yeah, but in the morningyou’ll still be ugly!” 6

Armstrong was always looking for another way tolook at things in his music. He was aware thatthose who could not get past the color of aperson’s skin would still be ugly in the morning—

6 This is usually attributed to Winston Churchill (butnote the further attribution to WC Fields!):

(Fromhttp://www.winstonchurchill.org/support/the-

churchill-centre/publications/chartwell-bulletin/2011/31-jan/1052-drunk-and-ugly-the-rumor-mill):

The notion of him stumbling home drunk and wet, whichI notice carries no attribution, is the invention of afevered mind. It is a bowdlerization of an encounterbetween Churchill and a fellow Member of Parliament,related to me by the late Ronald Golding, the bodyguardpresent on that occasion:

Bessie Braddock MP: “Winston, you are drunk, andwhat’s more you are disgustingly drunk.”

WSC: “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more,you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall besober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”

This world famous encounter occurred late one nightin 1946, as Churchill was leaving the House of Commons.Lady Soames, who said her father was always gallant toladies, doubted the story, but Mr. Golding explainedthat WSC was not drunk, just tired and unsteady, whichperhaps caused him to fire the full arsenal.

Only later did I learn that he was probably relyingon his photographic memory for this riposte: In the1934 movie “It’s a Gift”, W.C. Fields’s character, whentold he is drunk, responds, “Yeah, and you’re crazy.But I’ll be sober tomorrow and you’ll be crazy the restof your life.”

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it would be their own problem. He would go on withhis life and laugh at what he could not change,for the most part. The haunting lines ofHendricks’s lyric, “In His Image God Made Man”,and Waller’s “Black and Blue”, reveal the pain outof which the humor emerged.

The Importance of HumorBoskin (1986, 1997) and Burma (1946) note the

function of humor in the subversion of ethnicstereotypes and as a means for carrying on verbalattacks on racism. There is little doubt thatArmstrong used humor in such a manner, as manyother African American comedians have done. Thathe was so adept at doing so through music is notsurprising when placed in the African context. TheAfrican musicians Fela and Peter King, as well asthe Gold Coasters, have brought that traditioninto the modern world in Africa (Salamone 1990).It is a tradition also linked to calypso and otherAfrican-derived music (Manning 1983)—in short, itis a fundamental part of black humor and one thatArmstrong employed throughout his career.Armstrong also tapped into another strong Africantradition of humor, that of the trickster.Trickster, of course, appears in many traditions.The Navaho, for example, have many Coyote storiesin which Coyote is the trickster. The Greeks hadHermes, from which we get the term for exegesis orexplanation, “hermeneutics”. However, it is the

So the Bessie Braddock encounter was really Churchillediting W.C. Fields.

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African Trickster who is most apropos tounderstanding Armstrong’s humor.

In West African religions, the trickster isoften a sacred character. Among the Yoruba ofNigeria, for instance, Eshu is a trickster whofrequently disturbs the peace. He generally upsetsthe established order of things. However, theYoruba view this upset as a good thing. Upsettingthe established order keeps people on their toesand open to new ideas. Indeed, Trickster is themessenger of the gods and his disturbances are atdivine behest, for they open the way to bettercommunication through getting rid of obstacles andclearing away confusion. Eshu opens the path tonew possibilities, and the Yoruba revere him asboth a transformer and healer. African religionteaches that the fundamental order, which God hasestablished, has as an integral part the paradoxof constant change and subsequent renewal.Folktales have incorporated this concept throughhaving a small but crafty animal use its cunningto defeat more powerful animals that seek todestroy it. Brer Rabbit incorporatescharacteristics of many folk tricksters, includingAnansi the spider from Ghana, Ajapa the Yorubatortoise, and Sungura, a hare from the central andeast African tradition (Ammons and White-Pak 1994,Pelton 1980, Smith 1994, and Hyde 1998.) It is nottoo far a stretch to note that Armstrongincorporated both folk and sacred functions in hisart, just as other African musicians have longdone (Salamone 1990). In fact, the Yoruba novelistSoyinka (1976) sees the genius of African artistslying in their use of mythic elements such as thetrickster stories. Indeed, it is Trickster who is

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the very archetype of the artist, a position withwhich Hyde (1998) agrees. He also views thetrickster as the archetypal form of the artist.After all, Trickster represents the power of theimagination. Though trickster culture reveals justhow powerful the imagination, and by extension theartist, is in reshaping culture itself. Armstrongin a broader context.

Louis Armstrong was the rst great soloist infijazz, with apologies to the outstanding SidneyBechet, and turned jazz into a predominantlysoloist’s art (Collier 1983: 160). Of course, hisgreat sense of melodic form played a major role inhis success, for arguably no jazz musician hasever constructed more perfectly structured melodicsolos. But it is equally doubtful whether thatsense of melody alone would have proved sufficientto usher in a new era of jazz. In addition toreworking melodies, Armstrong increased the feelfor cross-rhythms in jazz. His improvisations ranthe full gamut of the African characteristics injazz: pitch, timbre, falsetto leaps, melissmaticvocalizations, terminal vibratos, and, above all,adaptations of African cross-rhythms. As MilesDavis, an innovator in his own right, put it:There is nothing done today on trumpet that doesnot owe a debt of gratitude to something Armstrongdid rst.fi 7 Without denying Armstrong’s personalcharisma, it is essential to ask what therelationship between his art and the times was.Why did jazz change from a group art to7 This generally known by jazz fans: “You can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played” (Miles Davis http://www.satchmo.com/louisarmstrong/quotes.html).

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essentially a solo art form just when it did? Whenjazz began, somewhere around the turn of thecentury, it did so in reaction to the impositionof Jim Crow laws in New Orleans, a town that hadbeen relatively open racially and had followedunprecedented social and cultural intercoursebetween the races. Jim Crow not only tended tosegregate black and white, it also forcedconservative Creoles into contact with those poor“street” blacks whom they had looked down upon(Jones 1967). The group improvisation of early NewOrleans jazz can be viewed as a means for statingthe need for racial unity among African Americansat a time of great sociocultural threat. Withoutstretching the point too much, it was music ofsolidarity in which each performer supported theothers while staying out of their way.

Armstrong, moreover, tended to take atrickster’s stance to American pop material. Hetended to undermine it through seeming to embraceit. Armstrong reworked the material, putting hisown variations on the theme, frequentlytransforming banal ditties into works of beauty.His music illustrates the entire approach-withdrawal dialectic of jazz. It exempli es thefiambivalent position of African Americans withinAmerican culture, for whenever Armstrong playedanything, that piece was no longer ever heard inquite the same way again. He managed to forcepeople to look at the familiar in a new fashion,the way that he as an African American looked atit. Balliett (1994: 73) notes that Armstrong wasnot a servile person.

Armstrong on stage was the same as Armstrongoff stage—a tough, primitive, funny genius, full

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of high jinx and body jokes. He was also his ownkind of racial activist: angrily quitting a StateDepartment tour when Governor Faubus obstructedschool integration in Arkansas. He made itpossible for other soloists to tell their ownstories, thereby increasing the value of theindividual tale in a democratic society. WithoutArmstrong’s rhythmic lesson, moreover, it isdifficult to envision the emergence of the bigband in jazz. Before his innovations, big bandstended to clunk along. They tended to applyEuropean music’s syncopation to jazz. Since jazzswing is not the result of syncopation asunderstood in European music, to jazz lovers theresults tended to sound dreadful. Armstrong freedthe soloist from the ground beat and moved jazztoward a more African approach to rhythm; namely,cross-rhythms, the presence of a number of rhythmsthat “cross” each other while not, ideally,getting in one another’s way. True jazz swing islight, not ponderous, and it occurs on the on, orup- beat.

Reflections on the TricksterThe fool appears to share the trickster’s role

as boundary-crosser, or as Karl Kerenyi put it,“the enemy of boundaries” (185). For the fool, as forthe trickster, boundaries are not so muchnonexistent as arbitrary (new or differentboundaries can be created at will), and the comicplay of his folly lies in his refusal to accept orrecognize what seems self-evident to those whogovern boundaries. In his negotiations with bothsides of an arbitrary boundary, the fool enactsMercurius’s role as the “magical ‘go-between’”

40


(Nicholl 47), mediating between celestial andmaterial, and thus comes closest to the keyfunction of the trickster.

The difference is that the fool is playing,albeit playing “seriously” in the sense of totalabsorption in the role—“The contrast between playand seriousness is always fluid”, says JohanHuizinga in Homo Ludens (1944), but play is notserious in the sense that it intends to produceresults in the world beyond the game: “[i]t israther a stepping-out of ‘real’ life into atemporary sphere of activity with a dispositionall of its own” (8). The jester who baits theking, the fool crowned as “Lord of Misrule”,observes strictly demarcated guidelines thatconfine their comic play to its own sphere,contained within the status quo. As anotherscholar of fools and clowns, Enid Welsford, hassaid, “There is nothing essentially immoral orblasphemous or rebellious about clownage. On thecontrary, it may easily act as a socialpreservative by providing a corrective to thepretentious vanity of officialdom, a safety-valvefor unruliness” (321). The fool, fundamentally,belongs to the world of orthodoxy, his comic playacting as a lubricant of the status quo. (HelenLock, ‘Transformations of the Trickster’ (2002) 18Southern Cross Review, available online athttp://www.southerncrossreview.org/18/trickster.htm). As Jung also points out, the trickster’schaotic, accident-prone unconsciousness is notmerely destructive, he is also creator and artist,miraculously salvaging order from mess anddisaster, as Helen Lock has noted recently,following the work of Lewis Hyde.

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In all this, “Trickster is the mythicembodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence,doubleness and duplicity, contradiction andparadox”, and can thus be seen as the archetypalboundary crosser, although here Hyde notes that“there are also cases in which Trickster creates aboundary, or brings to the surface a distinctionpreviously hidden from sight” (Preposteroustrickster: myth, news, the law and John MarsdenMarcus O’Donnell 282-305 Media Arts and Law Review8, 2003): the fool, then, appears to share thetrickster’s role as boundary-crosser, or as KarlKerenyi puts it, “the enemy of boundaries” (185). Forthe fool, as for the trickster, boundaries are notso much nonexistent as arbitrary (new or differentboundaries can be created at will), and the comicplay of his folly lies in his refusal to accept orrecognize what seems self-evident to those whogovern boundaries. In his negotiations with bothsides of an arbitrary boundary, the fool enactsMercurius’s role as the “magical ‘go-between’”(Nicholl 47), mediating between celestial andmaterial, and thus comes closest to the keyfunction of the trickster. The difference is thatthe fool is playing, albeit playing “seriously” inthe sense of total absorption in the role—“Thecontrast between play and seriousness is alwaysfluid,” says Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens (1944),but play is not serious in the sense that itintends to produce results in the world beyond thegame; “[i]t is rather a stepping-out of ‘real’life into a temporary sphere of activity with adisposition all of its own” (8). The jester whobaits the king, the fool crowned as “Lord ofMisrule,” observe strictly demarcated guidelines

42


that confine their comic play to its own sphere,contained within the status quo. As anotherscholar of fools and clowns, Enid Welsford, hassaid, “There is nothing essentially immoral orblasphemous or rebellious about clownage. On thecontrary, it may easily act as a socialpreservative by providing a corrective to thepretentious vanity of officialdom, a safety-valvefor unruliness” (321). “The fool, fundamentally,belongs to the world of orthodoxy, his comic playacting as a lubricant of the status quo.”8

ReflectionsThe Eshu trickster from the Yoruba of Nigeria

is a character who disturbs the peace byquestioning norms and calling his people to beattentive skeptics of order. He also employs acrafty and cunning wit in the face of the morepowerful, preserving his and others’ freedom whereit might potentially be curtailed. The Yoruba alsoparallel their trickster to the artist,celebrating his imaginative capacities andmalleable skills. In all of these respects, LouisArmstrong may be regarded as a quintessentialtrickster, part of a long legacy passed fromAfrica and through slave-holding and segregatedAmerica.

In a broader context, Armstrong’s tricksterrole can be tied to the jazz musical genre that heso transformed. Both were subject to—and responded

8 Helen Lock, “Transformations of the Trickster” (2002)18 Southern Cross Review, available online athttp://www.southerncrossreview.org/18/trickster.htm.

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to—unavoidable social realities, expressing painand anger in reaction to a debilitating racism.Both also employed secret musical codes, employingprotective masks that gave space to individualfreedom and collective empowerment. Furthermore,both recognized humor as the license thatpermitted their liberationist expressions ofthinly veiled social commentary. Jazz, likeArmstrong, offered a language, the subtleties ofwhich spoke to the in-crowd (the “hip”) and aboutthe outsiders (the “squares”). Invariably, itwould privately mock either or both.

I mentioned Louis Armstrong’s use of thetrickster image in his rendition of “Laughin’Louie”. Firstly, the “squares” are outed in thetitle itself, which parodies the commonmisinterpretation of his name in mainstreamculture and mocks the one-dimensional stereotypewith which he was regarded (and sometimesdismissed). From Armstrong’s point-of-view, thetitle’s humor might also allude to his habitualpot-smoking habits, this further underscored bythe name of his accompanying band, the Vipers, aslang term for marijuana. The song’s musicfluctuates throughout, between the “hot” sound“hip” critics encouraged from Armstrong, and the“sweet” sounds he always had such affection for,but for which he was criticized as compromising tomainstream tastes. Here, the trickster celebrateshis own creative choices (laughing for himself),and satirically dismisses the imposing judgment ofhis critics (laughing at them). This is achievedthrough the humorous method of incongruity, theshock of the juxtaposed styles surprising

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listeners into recognition and appreciation whileappealing to many different audiences.

In considering audiences we must take note ofthe fact that Gillespie, as Armstrong before him,addressed multiple audiences. Indeed he was also amember of multiple audiences. As an AfricanAmerican southern musician he was always aware ofhis membership in Afro-American culture, hisacculturation into the dominant white culture, hisbeing a leading founder of bop, his maleness andmany other memberships. His intelligence shonethrough as he played with these identities in hisperformances, juggling one against others as themood moved him. Things were rarely, if ever, thisor that; as Robert Farris Thompson (1964) has notedabout Creole culture, they were this and that,too. (See also Roger D. Abrahams, Nick Spitzer,John F. Szwed and Robert Farris Thompson. Bluesfor New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s CreoleSoul. Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2006).

Diz was a master of mixing things together thatoften did not go together. He took risks othershesitated in taking. But he made you love him ashe did so by turning his critique into a humorouscomment or making it so seemingly outrageous thathe couldn’t really be serious. Except that, ofcourse, he was. There was also a love for thatwhich was human. At the height of the civil rightsmovement, I saw Dizzy drinking with a southernsoldier who thought he was complimenting Diz, butwas actually condescending to him. I sat at thebar expecting Diz to explode. Instead, he acceptedthe proffered drink, listened to the youngsoldier, and then made some off-handed remark that

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had the soldier laughing. The two walked off armin arm.

To me this incident is illustrative of Dizzy’sbeing able to occupy a number of cultures andidentities simultaneously. He often understoodexactly where others were coming from and foundways to be diplomatic while getting his pointacross. As with Armstrong, he found a way to livehis life the way he wanted while also finding away to criticize people in ways they firstlistened too because they were humorous. Nosurprise, then, that they both were superb JazzAmbassadors, representing America, yes, but alsothe need for greater equality and democracy inAmerica. They understood that while they had adual heritage, that heritage was an overlappingone and could not be neatly segregated as othersbelieved. They were this and that, too. Culturesand boundaries are crossed, the mark of thequintessential Trickster.

ConclusionAs professor Neil Leonard writes in his book

Jazz: Myth and Religion:

For all true believers jazz answered needs thattraditional faith did not address. While the musichad different meanings for different followers—black, white, male female, young, old, rich orpoor, in various psychological states and socialsituations—for all devotees it provided some formof ecstasy or catharsis transcending thelimitations, dreariness and desperation ofordinary existence. As earthy blues, exaltedanthem, or something in between, jazz couldenergize the most jaded will. Jazz is an active

46


agent, a powerful force whose ecstasies, whethersubtly insinuated or supplied in lighteningilluminations, altered personality and society.Through cajolery, charm, warmth, surprise, shockor outrage it could brush aside the mostentrenched tradition, the most oppressive custom,and inspire subversive social behavior. (Leonard,Neil. Jazz: Myth and Religion. Oxford UniversityPress, 1987. pp. 1-2)

Leonard concludes:

Consider how the jazzy music of the Twenties wenthand in hand with the upheavals in manners andmorals of that time, how bop was the cry ofstreet-wise young rebels in the Forties, and howthe “New thing” of the Sixties was closely alliedto the “Black Power” impulse of the day. Clearlyjazz is more than a passive flower, a gloriouscultural ornament affirming humanity; it is also apowerful social force which has cut broadly anddeeply, its prophets, rituals and myths touchingnot only individual souls but large groupsbringing intimations of magic and the sacred to anera whose enormous changes have depletedconventional faiths.

In the hands of those who were more than meremasters, who possessed that certain somethingbeyond mere excellence, call it charisma blendedwith a twinkle or personality—whatever one wishesto dub it, those trickster figures broughtabsolute joy to those whose lives they touched.When they entered a room, all eyes turned to them.They have the power to transform theirsurroundings. I felt that magic with the Bori

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doctor in the bush of northern Nigeria and I feltit in Armstrong’s presence and in Dizzy’s as well.

These men were transformative figures, beyondcategory in Duke Ellington’s expression. Theyperformed their alchemy not on bass physicalmaterials but rather they transformed artisticones, taking music they found and turning it intohigh art. They took the everyday and turned itinto something else. Leonard calls it religious.Charlie Parker when asked what his religion wassaid simply, “Jazz.” Indeed, there is a Church ofSt. John Coltrane in San Francisco on FillmoreStreet (Church of St. John Coltrane AfricanOrthodox Church (http://www.coltranechurch.org/).The music at the services there must be absolutelygreat!

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Arendt, H. (1955 & 1970) Men in Dark Times, London:Jonathan Cape

Badejo, Deidre. “The Yoruba and Afro-AmericanTrickster: A Contextual Comparison.” PresenceAfricaine 147 (1988): 3-17.

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Bayless, M. (1996) Parody in the Middle Ages: The LatinTradition, Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press

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Besmer, Fremont E. Horses, Musicians & GodsThe Hausa Cult of Possession-Trance (1983)Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group,Incorporated, Sept.

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IN Catherine Coles and Beverly Mack, EDS. HausaWomen in the Twentieth Century. Madison: TheUniversity of Wisconsin Press, pp. 207-220.

Echerd, Nicole (1991) The Hausa bori possessioncult in the Ader region of Niger: Its origins andpresent-day Function. IN I. M. Lewis, Ahmed Al-Safi, and Sayyid Hurreiz, Women’s Medicine: TheZar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, pp. 64-80.

Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. 1511.Trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson. Princeton, NJ:Princeton UP, 1941.

Erlmann, Veit (1982) Trance and Music. Ethno-musicology 26, 1: 49-58.

Faulkingham, Ralph N. (1975) The Sprits andTheir Cousins: Some Aspects of Belief, Ritual, andSocial Organization in a Rural Hausa Village inNiger. Research Report Number 15. Department ofAnthropology. University of Massachusetts,Amherst. October.

Ferguson, N. (2001) The Cash Nexus: Money and Powerin the Modern World 1700 – 2000, Harmondsworth: AllenLane The Penguin Press.

Foster, R. (1994) Paddy and Mr Punch, London:Verso

Francis, L. (2001) The Values Debate- A Voice from thePupils, London: Woburn Press

Francis, L. Astley, J and Robbins, M. (2001)The Fourth R for the Third Millennium: Education in Religion andValues for the Global Future, Leamington spa: Lindisfarne

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: ATheory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: OUP,1988.

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Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. 1940. New York:Mentor, 1969.

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Howard, P.J and Howard, J. M. (2000) The Big FiveQuickstart: An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model of Personalityfor Human Resource Professionals athttp://www.centacs.com/quik-pt1.htm

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Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth,and Art. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998.

Hynes, W. J. (1993) ‘Inconclusive Conclusions:Tricksters: Metaplayers and Revellers’ in Hynes,W. J. and Doty, W. G. Mythical Trickster Figures,Tuscaloosa & London: University of Alabama Press,202-19.

Jackson, R. (1997) Religious education: Aninterpretative Approach, London: Hodder andStoughton

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Salamone, Frank A. The Culture of Jazz: Jazz asCritical Culture; Lanham: University Press ofAmerica, 2008.

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Ugorji, Okechukwu K. The Adventures of Torti: Tales fromWest Africa. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1991.

Vizenor, Gerald. Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. St.Paul: Truck P, 1978

Vizenor, Gerald. The Heirship Chronicles.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.

Welsford, E. (1935) The Fool: His Social and LiteraryHistory, London: Faber and Faber.

Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History.1935. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966.

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CHAPTER THREEJAZZ IN ROCHESTER

IN THE CONTEXT OF THE WIDER SCENE

The founders of the Umbria Jazz Festival arefond of citing a New York Times article of a fewyears ago stating that Umbria had developed a newtype of jazz, Jazz Italian style. The founderspoint out that this is nothing new, for some ofthe early founders of jazz were Italian Americanslike Nick LaRocca and Joe Venuti. They could haveadded Eddie Lang and many others who played withthe best African American musicians of the day. Ibroached this point some years ago with Gap(Gaspare) Mangione, the elder of the MangioneBrothers. Chuck is the younger brother. Gap agreedthat there is a difference in “Italian” jazz. Itis, he stated, a subgenre of jazz, somethinggenerally more melodic.

Jazz in Rochester, NY, developed within thelarger framework of jazz in the United States.Within that larger scene, Italians played asignificant role, along with, of course, AfricanAmericans, and people of many other cultures. Thefact that there are subgenres of jazz is evidenceof the very democratic nature of the music itself.It is able to assimilate different elements andstyles from different ethnic groups, socialclasses, and religions and yet maintain itsidentity in the midst of change. The ever-evolvingart that is jazz is capable of fusing variouselements into the whole while respecting theuniqueness of each group that contributes to the

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mix. Enrico Rava, an outstanding Italian jazztrumpet player, notes that you can generally tellan Italian musician from a German, but both areplaying jazz. It is part of the democratic geniusof jazz that it is able to live up to the motto ofthe United States, E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many,One).

Early JazzThe traditional story of jazz tends to follow a

trajectory leading from West Africa via the WestIndies to New Orleans. En route, AfricanAmericans, usually enslaved, merged Africanrhythms with European harmonies. Et voilà, jazzwas born! The only role for any whites in thistale is that of exploiters who stole the creationof blacks, watered it down, commercialized it andprofited from this ersatz creation.

Recent scholarship, however, has questionedthis overly simplistic view of the development ofthe art form. Certainly, there is no doubt thatAfrican Americans were, and have remained, itsoutstanding practitioners. However, there is alsolittle doubt that others have also contributed toits creation and development. Kevin Whitehead(2000), for example, argues for a more complexunderstanding of the evolution of the art form. Indiscussing the international flavor of jazz,Whitehead notes a couple who took the boat to NewOrleans and had a son who grew up to be OriginalDixieland Jazz Band cornetist Nick LaRocca. Allthose Italians in old New Orleans were one reasonopera was in the air, helping inspire LouisArmstrong’s dramatic high-note endings.

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Nick LaRocca, Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti weremajor contributors to the development of earlyjazz. In reviewing “The Creation of Jazz: Music,Race, and Culture in Urban America”, Joyner notesthat there has been a marked increase in interestin the sociocultural aspects of jazz history.Paretti has noted major social themes related tojazz

The main social themes are already well knowntopics in jazz studies: (1) jazz was a majorvehicle for African American achievement andsocial recognition; (2) it also served as avehicle for cultural liberation of young whitemusicians; (3) it was nurtured by urbanization anddisseminated by the black Diaspora as well as massmedia technology; and (4) gender roles have beenas integral as racial roles to the character ofjazz. (Paretti 1994:4). Point 3 is important tounderstanding the involvement of Italian Americansin jazz.

As Joyner comments, Paretti observes thatwhites in New Orleans were not attempting toimitate black musicians. They were convinced thatwhites had invented jazz. He notes the members ofthe white band the New Orleans Rhythm Kings didnot agree with this. Paretti does hold that manyItalians found a release in jazz and musicians,such as Louis Prima, revered black culture.

Dominick James (Nick) LaRocca was a leader andtrumpet player of the Original Dixieland JazzBand, or, as the band originally spelled it, JassBand. The ODJB was from New Orleans and recordedthe first jazz record in 1917, “Livery StableBlues”, when Freddy Keppard refused to do so. Farfrom being a watered down joke, the ODJB paved the

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way for other groups to spread the jazz gospel.Louis Armstrong praised LaRocca, naming his as apioneer of jazz.

In addition to Nick LaRocca, there were manyother New Orleans Italian American musicians. LeonRappolo, also of the ODJB, recorded with JellyRoll Morton, the self-proclaimed creator of jazz.Indeed, New Orleans had a long tradition of “mixedbands”. In pre-segregation New Orleans, forexample, Jack Laine had three African Americans,two Italian Americans, two Mexicans, an IrishAmerican, a Filipino and a German. The point isthat many different groups, including ItalianAmericans, had some part in the gumbo that becamejazz.

Quite soon, certainly by 1917 when the ODJBwent to New York, jazz spread to many other areasof the country. Italian American musicians werequick to join the ranks of the new music. Amongthe more innovative of these musicians were EddieLang (Salvatore Massaro) and Joe Venuti fromPhiladelphia. Lang, who like so many musicians hada father who was a musician, learned to playguitar from his own father. Lang became known asthe Father of Jazz guitar, performing with many ofthe leading jazz artists of his time. He and JoeVenuti, a violinist, often teamed up.

Lang, however, was the more innovative andinfluential of the two. His work became thepattern for future jazz guitarists. I became awareof Lang, whose work I had known marginally, wheninterviewing a young guitarist, Larry Luger, whois an American of German and Italian ancestry.Luger urged me to listen carefully to Lang, whostill inspires and awes young guitarists. Lang

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became the first famous jazz guitarist, playingwith the likes of Bix Beiderbecke, The Mound CityBlue Blowers, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, PaulWhiteman, and others.

Venuti’s career was a long one; he firstrecorded with Eddie Lang in 1927. Along the way,Venuti established himself as an importantmusician as well as a practical joker. He loved toentertain, following a long tradition of Italianmusicianship, and continued to be active in musicuntil his death in 1978. His last recording waswith Joe Romano: it highlights his humor as wellas his ability. On “Angelina”, Venuti and Romanodecide to sing, but in a Yiddish accent. However,before and after the humorous vocal, Venutidisplays a beautiful tone and deep respect for themelody.

In The Treasured Traditions of Louisiana Music(www.louisianafolklife.org), Ben Sandmel pointsout the Creole nature of New Orleans music ingeneral. It is a place where traditions areblended into ever-changing new combinations.Sandmel notes that immigrants have always broughttheir music to Louisiana and blended it with whatwas already there. Among these traditions, hesays, was “Italian music, and its fascinatinginteraction with jazz and rhythm & blues”.

Certainly, Italians and Italian American in NewOrleans and other centers of early jazz played asignificant role in the creation and spread ofearly jazz. Certainly, the earliest of the greatmusicians and audiences may have been black.However, many Italians were living in the back oftown neighborhoods, as Armstrong himself notes.Italians and Jews joined these musicians in

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playing, because in the earliest days of jazz noone knew the music was jazz. There was a longhistory of white and black playing together in NewOrleans.

Moreover, unlike blues, jazz is not a folkmusic. It has had a strong European component fromits earliest day. Its originators could and didread music; many Creoles and Italian musicianswere trained in European classical music. Thosewho were self-trained generally learned to readmusic, and read it well. Louis Armstrong, forexample, eventually read music quite well, andspoke of his love for Italian opera and JewishRussian lullabies. To hone his reading abilitieshe played in a pit band in Chicago during the dayand received ovations for his solos on Europeanmasterpieces, including Italian compositions (cfLouis Armstrong, In His Own Words, 2001).

Enrico Rava On January 15, 2004, I interviewed Enrico Rava,

an Italian trumpet player, who was in New York aspart of the promotion for the Umbria JazzFestival. I decided to test my ideas regardingItalian jazz on him. I asked him whether therewere any differences between Italian jazz andother forms of jazz. He had obviously givenserious thought to the question on his own, for heresponded very quickly and with great clarity. Inessence, he stated that jazz is jazz; it is aunity.

However, he went on, there are certaincharacteristics found in jazz played by Italiansor Italian Americans. Among these characteristics,he believed, were the depth of emotion and singing

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quality of the music. There is a strong melodicelement in the music of those sharing an Italianheritage, coming, Rava believes, from exposure tooperatic arias and Neapolitan music. He concludesthat in general the way Italians play jazz isdifferent from the way others do. He spoke aboutthe Mangione brothers as examples, among manyothers, of what he was meant. Even when he playedatonal and free jazz, he was fond of searching forthe melodic elements buried in these forms.

Not surprisingly, he names Louis Armstrong, BixBeiderbecke and Miles Davis as his majorinfluences—all known for their melodic play andtechnique. It was after he met Miles that hebought his first trumpet. He had been listening toBix, whose picture was on his wall from when hewas ten years old. Rava was eighteen when Milescame to his hometown and befriended him—within twoyears, Rava had left home.

It is interesting that although Rava is amodern player, influenced by Dizzy Gillespie andClifford Brown, he states that he still listens toLouis Armstrong every day. It reminds one of MilesDavis’s statement that there is nothing played onthe trumpet that Armstrong did not play first.Dizzy also said it simply, “No him, no me.” Ravasaid that Armstrong’s music was “one of the tenthings that makes life worth living. The beauty ofhis playing is one of life’s blessings”. “Evenwhen Italy was in what we might call a primitivestate,” Rava said, “people knew Armstrong andrelated to his music because of its beauty.” Rava,who for many years was known as a “free” player,said he would choose beauty over style any day. Heeven ventured that today’s jazz is less

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interesting than that of the past because therewere so many geniuses in the past, including theunderrated Pete LaRocca of the Original DixielandJazz Band. He was one of many Italian musicianswho contributed to the overall mosaic of jazz,borrowing and adding to its complexity.

Some Italians in Jazz HistoryThe list of Italians in jazz history is a long

one. Simply listing the major figures isintimidating. There have been many formidablecreative Italian artists in jazz. A brief listgives the idea of their significance. Among themany great figures in jazz are these ItalianAmericans, Sam Noto, Flip Phillips, BuckyPizzarelli, Charlie Ventura, Armando Anthony(Chick) Corea, Buddy de Franco, Carl Fontana,Buddy Greco, Johnny Guarnieri, Nick LaRocca, EddieLang, Henry Mancini, Chuck Mangione, Gap Mangione,Joe Marsalis, Pat Martino, Joe Morello, VidoMusso, Sammy Nestico, Sal Nistico, Al Dimeola.,Joe Lavano, Joe Romano, and Louis Prima.

This brief sample provides some idea of therole that Italian Americans have played in jazz.Although many different styles of jazz arerepresented—from early New Orleans to avant-garde—there are found the characteristics that Ravanoted in our interview, namely, a singing qualityin the playing and a love for melody. Almostinevitably, when given a choice of notes to playin their improvisations, these musicians tend tochoose the “pretty” note. It is an interestingcharacteristic, one that Gap Mangione also notedin our interview (July 5, 1989). He stated, “Therewas a thriving, informal, let’s-play-together kind

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of scene going.” He noted a number of players fromthe western New York area who went on to fame: “Ican remember people like Sam Noto, Larry Cavelli,Don Menza, coming from Buffalo—Sal Nistico fromSyracuse—Roy McCurdy, and Ron Carter, and SteveGadd and Joe Romano and great players here. Therewas a conglomeration of great players around thatI remember.”

I noticed the melodic characteristic, whichMangione mentions, on June 28, 2005 whileattending a jazz performance in White Plains, NewYork. The Jazz Forum All Stars were playing. Ledby Mark Morganelli, the All Stars comprise fourItalian American musicians. Each is a seasonedveteran of the New York metropolitan area jazzscene. Each has impressive jazz credentials andhas performed with famous musicians. The settingwas an outdoor courtyard with fountains. Theweather was humid and warm.

The musicians, dressed in neat casuals,responded to every bit of applause and even bodylanguage of members of the audience. There was abit of conversation, gracious response to requestsand no show of petulance at being interrupted. Itwas a professional-friendly wooing of those whocame to spend some time. This wooing extended tothe repertoire.

Most of the material came from the GreatAmerican Songbook, familiar pop songs. Bossa Novaalso made up its share of the choices. Inaddition, there was a Miles Davis tribute and somejazz standards. Morganelli made sure he explainedthe jazz standards, providing a biography, forexample of Clifford Brown, his early death in anautomobile accident at 26, and his influence to

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the present. All this was done without anycondescension to those in the audience who havelimited, if any, knowledge of jazz and with an eyeto winning over youngsters in the audience.

Consciously, I took note of just how often themusicians chose the “pretty” note when given achoice and constructed new beautiful melodies ontop of the originals. Jay Azzolina, for example, aguitarist who has played with Chuck Mangione,Harvie S, Spyro Gyra, John Pattituci, Pat Methany,and others, constantly surprised the audience withfully developed counter melodies on top offamiliar tunes such as “The Girl from Ipanema”, or“All the Things You Are”. Rick Petrone, a bassistwho has played with Marian McPartland, Buddy Rich,Chet Baker, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Band, MelTorme, and others, not only kept the rhythm butalso supplied melodic, coherent, and supportivesolos. Joe Coscello, the drummer, has played withZoot Simms, John Bunch, Gene Bertoncini, BarryMiles, Jack Wilkins, Don Elliott, Sal Salvadore,Marian McPartland, Benny Goodman, Joe Venuti, RedNorvo, Milt Hinton, Peggy Lee and Tony Bennett,among others. Joe’s noted brush work was ondisplay. He kept out of the way of soloists, addedto the ensemble, and when given the opportunitysoloed tastefully. The entire experience was oneof immersing oneself into the familiar, withsurprises popping up, and the beautiful.

The concert summed up the Italian American jazzethos. Morganelli’s group wooed the audience,communicating it while watching their responses towhat it did. There was a conscious effort tocreate something beautiful while moving into newavenues, creating new melodies or interesting

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rhythmic patterns. The familiar was used to leadpeople to the unfamiliar. There appeared to be aconscious effort to delve into the inner workingsof the melody to find hidden elements there. Therewas a clear connection between melody and harmony.Rather than limiting creativity, this approachseemed to unleash it, finding outlets forformidable technique in the service of “singing”the song. Rather than a string of notes orsqueals, there is an attempt to add to the beautyand truth of the tune.

Louis PrimaIn many ways, Louis Prima was the

quintessential Italian musician of his time. Hewas outgoing, funny, and wanted to win hisaudience over. His nickname was “The ItalianSatchmo”, and Prima acknowledged his debt to LouisArmstrong. Like Armstrong, he had to facecriticism because of his popularity andwillingness to entertain as well as play jazz. Hisbig band’s motto was “Play Pretty for the People”.

Prima was able to play “serious” jazz becausehe entertained the public. His career extendedover more than forty years. He managed to keep theessence of swing and Dixie while changing with thetimes. Like Armstrong, he enjoyed the music of GuyLombardo, a taste most jazz fans found incredible.He was, in fact, Lombardo’s protégé. This opennesshelped perpetuate his career. Prima began to bringsome hints of Rock music into his playing, withthe help of the underrated Sam Buttera. The use ofvaudeville routines, along with Keely Smith, forexample, also seduced an audience that might nototherwise go to hear a jazz musician.

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It needs to be remembered that Prima, likeArmstrong and many jazz musicians was from NewOrleans. Prima left New Orleans to open at theFamous Door in New York City. Moreover, Prima wasone of many New Orleans Italian American musicianswho throughout their careers continued to performand hang out with black musicians. Additionally,these musicians openly admitted their debt toblack musicians. Often, Prima and others wereadvocates of racial equality.

Even though the 1900s was hardly a time ofenlightened racial attitude and the South was avery unlikely place for racial progress, it was,nonetheless, in New Orleans that, at the turn ofthe century, a symbolic racial epoch was created.Here, within the confines of “making music”,whites and blacks for the first time came toappreciate one another’s talent, creative output,and individual personality traits.

This epoch did not, of course, foster a largermovement toward racial understanding and legalequality. However, it did, albeit on a limitedbasis, give whites an opportunity to observeracial discrimination from the “black’sperspective”. Because white musicians emulatedblack musicians, they followed them to the clubsor private parties where they might be performing.Here they would see how blacks would be engaged toentertain the white guests, but forbidden tomingle, drink, or eat with them; allowed toperform what was derisively called “bawdyhousemusic”, but prohibited from letting a whitemusician join them onstage (Bourland: The Journalof Ethnic Studies 16:1: 53).

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Prima was, interestingly, a favorite with blackaudiences. Many people, including promoters,believed him to be black because of his skincolor. Prima also used many black performers inhis group and performed at the Apollo and otherblack venues. His openness cost him jobs asbigoted New York promoters refused to hire him,ostensibly because they thought he was AfricanAmerican. Nonetheless, Prima continued to defy thesegregationist policies of the country as GaryBourland notes (The Journal of Ethnic Studies16:1).

Prima tended to ignore restrictions that got inthe way of his performance. He performed withTeddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton, and Art Tatum wasPrima’s opening act at the Famous Door in 1937.Prima was the only white bandleader in the 1930sand 1940s who performed at the leading blacktheaters of the day, the Howard in Washington andthe Apollo in New York. Prima was not only steepedin the tradition of New Orleans greats, but was afine entertainer as well.

These efforts were noted by no less thanEleanor Roosevelt. As Bourland notes:

By 1941, the First Lady had become a vocaladvocate of ripping down the walls of segregation,arguing that the prevalence of tuberculosis andrising crime were attributable not just to lack ofeducation and to physical differences, but are duein large part to the basic fact of segregationwhich we have set up in this country and whichwarps and twists the lives not only of our Negropopulation, but sometimes of foreign born or evenreligious groups (Bourland).

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Times change, and although Prima continued towork for integration in his way, that way waslooked down on in the 1960s. Prima did not signCivil Rights statements, as did Marlon Brando, forexample. He did not march in parades. He didcontinue to protest segregation in Las Vegas andresist efforts to get him to stop socializing withperformers such as Cab Calloway. What did notchange with Prima was his desire to please hisaudience and incorporate elements of music thatwould enable him to do so.

Rochester, NY, in the Broader ContextFrom the earliest days of the twentieth

century, Rochester had a lively music scene.Italians there had a love for music, and everyfestivity had its own music. The typical two-daywedding feasts required live musicians to keep thedancing and party going. In common with Italianselsewhere, many of Rochester’s Italians wereattracted to jazz, and as jazz became a popularmusic, performed it well. There was great pride inItalians who succeeded in any field of endeavor,and I recall how Louis Prima drew large crowds inRochester. Entire families went to see the man whowould “play pretty for the people”.

Rochester was on various entertainmentcircuits. In the 1950s, for example, it was on theBirdland circuit. My father took me to see CharlieVentura at a club when I was just a bit too youngto meet the then legal age of 18 for entry.Charlie came over and sat with us at the bar. Hefound a way to communicate with a working man theintricacies of music, while winking at me. He saidhe often worked into his performance any request,

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even if it was just for a bar or two. This desireto impress the audience, while not unique toItalians, is part of the general culture,certainly of the culture of performance.

The 1950s were particularly rich times. As oneparticipant, Noal Cohen puts it:

Since the Eastman School of Music was located inRochester, the local scene was substantiallyenriched by many talented Eastman studentsinterested in jazz, even though no jazz studiesprogram existed then. Nonetheless, I can wellremember jam sessions held in the tiny Eastmanpractice rooms with a dozen or so musicians packedin so tightly that there was barely enough air tobreathe!

Thus the local scene, which already boastedsuch budding stars as the Mangione Brothers,bassist Frank Pullara, drummer Roy McCurdy,saxophonists Pee Wee Ellis, Benny Salzano and JoeRomano and others, was enhanced and fertilized byEastman students including bassist Ron Carter,pianists Wolf Knittel and Paul Tardif,saxophonists Larry Combs and Al Regni, andtrumpeter Waymon Reed. John Eckert, another finetrumpet player, was also part of this scenealthough, like myself, he was a student at theUniversity of Rochester rather than at Eastman(Noal Cohen’s Jazz History Website,http://www.attictoys.com/jazz/index.html).

There is still a family-like feeling among manyof the musicians who came up in Rochester. Notethe number of Italians, but not only Italians, whocame up together and who had contact with theMangione Brothers, Chuck and Gap. I wrote in a

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review of Gap’s “Stolen Moments” CD: “A number ofworld-class musicians have come from Rochester,NY, and nearby towns. Many have passed through theMangione sphere of influence. Many record with oneor both brothers from time to time. Each brotherloves to teach and promote fellow musicians… Thisfamily-like feeling is felt on ‘Stolen Moments’.The musicians are familiar with each other’swork”.

However, as Cohen demonstrates on his excellentwebsite, this closeness did not mean that theywere insular or isolated. Many great people camethrough town. A number of them, in fact, foundthemselves accepting invitations to Mama and PapaMangione’s table for a spaghetti dinner. Cohenpresents a number of tables showing advertisedjazz concerts in Rochester.

Frequently, the famous musicians invited localplayers to join them on the stand. Oscar Petersondid so in a famous jam session, as did DizzyGillespie on numerous occasions. Cohen has apicture on his site of Peterson’s jam in whichlocal musicians joined his trio in performance.His caption reads, “Oscar Peterson with some youngRochester musicians at a jam session held at TheUniversity of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 1957. Leftto right: Noal Cohen, drums; Chuck Mangione,trumpet; Ron Carter, bass; Waymon Reed, trumpet;Benny Salzano, tenor saxophone; Oscar Peterson,piano” (Cohenhttp://www.attictoys.com/jazz/OPJam.html).

Gap Mangione shared a memory with me:

…about the time when I was still young enough, Ihad a driver’s license but didn’t have a car. I

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had a girlfriend who did have a car. It was alittle Renault with a 5-speed transmission. Ofcourse, at the time, those were very unusual. Ihad such a great time driving it that we tried tofind reasons to go and drive somewhere. We heardthere was a group playing over near Geneva. Genevais a few miles south-east of Rochester, and it waskind of outside Geneva. Geneva is a small enoughtown, outside of Geneva is really the boondocks;this is the night before New Year’s Eve about1958, I think. So we drove down to the place wherethis jazz group was supposed to be playing.Getting there was like small roads with ruts oneither side. And finally, at the end of one road,there was a house, a large house that had theusual beer signs in the window. We went in andthere was a fairly large, long bar and there werethese people who were obviously workers. None ofthem were in suits, to put it delicately. And theywere there for their after-work beer. And in theback, at the end of this bar was some room wherethey would normally serve sandwiches at noon timefor people who might come by. And there was a bandplaying there, and I could see people dancing, butI couldn’t believe the music I was hearing. So wewent into the back room, and it was Philly JoeJones, Paul Chambers, Sonny Clark, and CannonballAdderley. On an off-night in December, there weremaybe 30 or 40 people back there, some of themwere dancing; that’s how I met CannonballAdderley, That night he asked my brother and me toplay, and we did. I’m sure that you remember thereason we got the Jazz Brothers on record wasbecause we were on the “Cannonball AdderleyPresents” series on Riverside. About a year and ahalf later, we were playing in a club and I got aphone call there in the club from Cannonballasking if we’d be interested in recording forRiverside.

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At that time, jazz musicians were, by andlarge, very eager to recruit youngsters into theprofession. It was a time when jazz still appearedto be able to hold some of its own against therock ‘n’ roll incursion. Italians made up asignificant proportion of the overall musiciansnationally. Rochester contributed many of itslocal players to that mix.

ConclusionScholarship in jazz history tends to be drawn

along racial lines, with most historians inagreement that jazz was invented, nurtured, anddefined by Afro-Americans, but assimilated andperhaps compromised in its creative integrity bywhites. Such generally accepted equations overlookthe integral ethnic role played by hundreds ofItalian Americans who, during the first decades ofthis century, gave to jazz their own voice and,together with blacks of New Orleans, helped toexport a raw, fresh and vital musical movement tothe world. In retrospect, it should be no surprisethat the Italian Americans of New Orleans played asubstantive role in the formation of Americanjazz, even if one were to make a cursory study andlook at demographics alone. In 1910, there weremore Italian Americans in New Orleans than in anyother city in the United States (Gary Bourland,The Journal of Ethnic Studies 16:1: 52).

There has been a somewhat mild attempt toacknowledge the contributions of non-AfricanAmericans to the development of jazz. Bourland’ssignificant article on Italian Americans in jazzis part of a larger body of work. The most

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comprehensive overall study is that of Richard M.Sudhalter’s “Lost Chords: White Musicians andtheir Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945”. The book,by his admission, is a “vast and sprawlingchronicle”. One of its prescient conclusions isthat “white musicians have been an integral forcein jazz from its earliest days” (1999:744).Sudhalter argues cogently that in the early daysof jazz there were important differences betweenthe playing of black and white musicians based onsocial and cultural characteristics. The moresimilar the backgrounds of musicians, the morealike the styles and vice-versa. He cites AmiriBaraka’s “Blues People” (1963:153) on this point.I would like to carry Sudhalter’s point a bitfarther. I believe that at least some of thedifferences may exist into the present, at leastin subtle ways.

Certainly, Italian Americans were, and havecontinued to be, “an integral force in jazz”. Theyhave particular playing characteristics andpreferences that have continued into the present.As Rava and Gap Mangione have noted, there is analmost inherent love for melody and harmony amongItalian and Italian American musicians. Rava notedthat even when playing atonal avant-garde music,other musicians in the group teased him aboutsomehow finding a melodic line to play during hissolos. He joked that some of his fellow musiciansthought that he must be CIA because of hispenchant for melody.

I do not wish to imply that all melodic musicis at root Italian, nor that all Italian musiciansat all times evince a love for melody in theirperformances. It would be an overgeneralization to

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say that a love for melody marks Italian andItalian American jazz musicians, or that a lovefor entertaining the audience is found in everysuch musician, but it would not be far from thetruth. Those musicians who are not associated withmelodic innovations, or who are somewhat shy onstage, are few, and even they can surprise.Briefly, I would mention Lennie Tristano and ChickCorea. Critics often cited Tristano’s reluctanceto play full-blooded tunes. His music wasconsidered rather abstract and cold. However,there were exceptions that hint at greater depths.

Tristano recorded a significant work in 1949that is now recognized as an early, if not thefirst, example of “free jazz”. The two sides were“Intuition” and “Digression”. There was noreference to time, tonality, or melody. Note thatthese experimental works were the result ofTristano’s obsession with feeling and sincerity.Tristano became a major influence on CharlesMingus, who studied with him, as did Sal Mosca,Phil Woods, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. Note theregard for feeling and sincerity in his music. Therecordings reflect a quiet beauty.

Corea is easier to tie into the tradition. Hisstraight-ahead jazz performances and his classicalones demonstrate his clear mastery of melody.However, his Elektric Band may present problems tothose who have a different view of melody fromCorea. Corea has a very fresh outlook on music andthe nature of esthetics. He envisions melodies inmany aspects of life and is often inspired by thewealth of beauty he finds in the world around him.He said: “The actual act of composing music issimilar to the act of painting or writing a poem

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[in that] you summarize life […] You see a nicesunset; you’re the one who’s mocking it up becauseyou notice that it’s beautiful. It’s you that’simbuing it with beauty. And your next step wouldbe a poem or a dance step or a melody”(http://www.imageandmusic.co.uk/corea.htm). Thus,even the often-shattering sound of his electronicmusic is meant to convey beauty, and Corea oftensurprises by breaking up his electric performanceswith very subtle melodies that are deeply moving.He even does some shy entertaining by a suddenwidening of his grey eyes as he tossed his head upin mock surprise, adding an Italian shrug to theaudience.

Ronald Morris notes, “The Sicilian approach totheir peasant music offers five strongsimilarities to black music, sociologically if notclearly musically”. Morris points to casinos whereboth blacks and Italians were in frequentattendance, black and Italian “itinerantmusicians”, parades, brass bands, and funerals,which were popular events with both groups, andfinally a shared vision of what music represented:Sicilians were much like black people in seeingmusic as a highly personalized affair, areflection of an individual’s feelings, althoughborn of a collective experience” (1980, p.840).These structural similarities supplementedcultural and emotional ones, leading to Italiancontributions to America’s greatest indigenous artform, jazz.

It is important to note that Chuck and GapMangione are Sicilians whose Sicilian father andmother invited numerous African American musiciansto the home, including Sara Vaughan, Dizzy

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Gillespie, Jon Hendricks, and Cannonball Adderley,among others. Moreover, the rescue of an infantAfrican-American child who was unable to breatheled to the family store’s protection during theriots of the 1960s. In fact, Chuck sometimes had abad rap from some white musicians because heplayed “too black”.

Unfortunately, the contribution of Italianmusicians to jazz as well as that of other whitemusicians is suffering under a Jim Crow mentality.As Terry Teachout (1995:50) writes, “Race-consciousness—on the part of individuals andinstitutions alike—is now a powerful force in theworld of jazz, one whose effects have only justbegun to come clear”. There has been aconcentrated effort to deny any significantcontribution by other than African Americans tojazz. Without denying their major contribution tothe establishment and development of the music, itis important for historical accuracy toacknowledge the role of others in its development.Teachout cites the more accurate position held byDuke Ellington, a man familiar with racism.

As for Duke Ellington, the man who composedBlack, Brown, and Beige he also told aninterviewer in 1945:

Twenty years ago, when jazz was finding anaudience, it may have had more of a Negrocharacter. The Negro element is still important.However, jazz has become a part of America. Thereare as many white musicians playing it as Negro…Weare all working along more or less the same lines.We learn from each other. Jazz is American now.American is the big word.

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Five decades later, cultural politicians forwhom the word “American” has validity only when itlies on the far side of a hyphen are underminingthis spirit. That jazz, the ultimate culturalmelting pot, and arguably America’s most importantcontribution to the fine arts, should have fallenvictim to such divisive thinking is an especiallytelling index of the unhappy state of our cultureat the end of the twentieth century (Teachout1995: 53).

It is unfortunate that those who indulge in“ethnic cheerleading” do not understand thatethnicity is a double-edged sword, one thatdivides as well as unites. The glory of Americahas been its eventual and persistent ability tounite and to live up to its motto, “Out of Many,One”. The true history of culture of jazzreaffirms that unity. Those who argue otherwise dothe music and the country a disservice.

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CHAPTER FOURAFRICA AS A METAPHOR OF AUTHENTICITY IN JAZZ

“When Chano Pozo came from Cuba that brought itall together”.

Dizzy Gillespie

In 1903, W.E.B. Dubois articulated a theme thatinheres in the very essence of African Americanculture, namely, “the dual heritage of the blackman in America”. That heritage, African andEuropean, is at root one of dual identity and acause of a recurring crisis of identity, as DuBoiswent on to note. In a very real sense, the historyof jazz has provided a dynamic model of the ever-changing tenor of that heritage as well as arunning commentary on it. It has done so throughthe use of tropes of identity.

Tropes encapsulate a culture’s essence.Whatever a culture may be, however it viewsitself, it expresses that self-perception inselect images packed with powerful meanings. Jazzis no exception. It, too, has its own culturalmodes of expression, its personal symbols andmetaphors that encapsulate and convey identity.Moreover, the best of these tropes arc flexibleand allow for the expression of changing conceptsof self-identity.

“Africa” has been precisely that type ofvehicle within jazz. It has served as a touchstonefor gauging the state of the art as well as theself-image of its performers. Throughout jazzhistory, the concept of “Africa” has served as anindex of authenticity. The less “African” and more

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“European” a performance, for example, the lesslikely jazz musicians are to find it acceptable.Conversely, the more authentic, even flawed, aperformance, the more it is perceived to beapproaching an African essence or “soul”. Jazzmusicians have been careful and correct inindicating that their music is not a result ofinability or corruption in performance, but,rather, of choice. Two musical cultures consistingof related, but differing codes, have beencaptured in the contrastive metaphors “African”and “European”. These terms have not, of course,remained static over time.

Tracing the manner in which these contrastiveterms have changed in meaning in the course ofjazz’s history provides an intriguing insight intoboth the genesis and change of jazz style and itscultural relationship to the increasingconsciousness of its performers. Insight into thatdialectical relationship, moreover, promises tolead to increasing understanding of the manner inwhich artists reinterpret cultural vehicles inorder to convey their own personal visions ofreality to fellow community members.

Three periods of jazz history serve as examplesof the power of the “Africa/European” contrast aswell as its derived tropes: the early years, thebop “revolution”, and the period of BlackNationalism. Each period has had a major impact onthe music. Each resulted from change in themeaning of being black in America. Moreover, eachconveyed that meaning through the music while, inturn, receiving clarification and validation ofblack identity through that same music.Significantly, and interestingly, the first two

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movements left clear and relatively unproblematicimpressions on the music and its culture. Thethird began as perhaps the clearest and mostambiguous musical movement in terms of its overallmusical and cultural significance. Perhaps it isso difficult to assess simply because it is soradically different in its fundamental premises.It tries to abolish the binary opposition between“Africa/Europe” that is essential to theproduction of jazz itself and to the souls ofthose “black folks” who created this Creole music(Szwed, in press).

For example, improvisation alone does notdistinguish jazz from so-called “classical” music.Although improvisation is essential to jazz, onlya relative handful of its practitioners have beenimprovisational geniuses: though many others havebeen competent in its execution, some have beenuninspired imitators. What does distinguish jazzfrom all other music, even to the point of oftenbeing overlooked, are its African elements.Collier (1978: 5) discusses some of these traits:

In jazz, timbre is highly personal, and varies notonly from player to player but from moment tomoment in a given passage for expressive purposes,just as European players swell or diminish a noteto add feeling. In jazz, pitch is flexible to aconsiderable degree, and in fact in some types ofjazz certain notes are invariable and deliberatelyplayed “out of tune” by European standards.European music, at least in its standard form, isbuilt on the distinction between major and minormodes. The blues, a major building block in jazz,is neither major nor minor; it exists in adifferent mode altogether. In jazz, the ground

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beat is deliberately avoided in the melody andmust be established by some sort of separaterhythm section.

In addition to the African elements of pitch,timber, and cross-rhythms, there is the socialelement of jazz. Jazz is a music that thrives oncontact between performer and audience. No matterhow much an artist protests, few if any jazzperformers actually sound better in studiorecordings as opposed to “live” jazz performances.Indeed, most jazz musicians will entreat theaudience to come closer in order to have themparticipate in a mutual act of creativity.9

These African elements have become so much apart of jazz that aside from discussions of “bluenote” and rhythm, they tend to be overlooked.There has been no major innovation in jazz thathas not been inspired and accompanied by rhythmicchanges, inevitably in an African direction.Included in that category is the jazz triplet,which Jellyroll Morton used to term “the Spanishtinge”.10

9 Art Blakey’s comment is representative of theprevailing view in jazz: “I admit the band was sloppyat times, but I’d like to have heard somebody out swingus. Anyway, you oughtn’t get too perfect in jazz itgets artificial. You’ve got no room.”10 Marsalis (1986) and Gillespie (1979) are only two ofmany practicing jazz musicians who have insisted on thepriority of rhythm in effecting meaningful stylisticchanges in jazz. There are many technical reasons forrhythm’s central role in jazz style. However, in thispaper I am focusing on its symbolic significance.Simply put, as jazz moves toward more harmonic

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The Early YearsIn common with most western music, jazz is

comprised structurally of melody, harmony, andrhythm. Somewhat simplistically, it has beencommon to assign its harmony to Europe, rhythm toAfrica, and to leave its melody somewhat up forgrabs. Although there is some truth in thisstereotype, it excludes rather more than itincludes. It is much more productive to leave thematter open to investigation even if the reality,or our ability to approximate it, proves lessamenable to easy categorization than the myth itreplaces (see Mensah 1983; Blacking 1983; Ladzekpoand Ladzekpo 1983).

And jazz, in common with every other culture,has its own myths, both internal and external;that is, myths its members generate to encapsulateand explain reality as well as myths outsidershave imposed upon it. Although both myths servepurposes, each type requires hermeneuticalexplication in order to yield deeper, rather thanmere surface meanings.11 Jazz, itself grew up outof the myth of Africa prevailing at the turn ofthe century. Many authors have waxed eloquent onthe ways in which “Africa” has been used toprovide the western world with its images. Hammond

complexity it must reassert its rhythmic ties toAfrica.11 Sidron argues cogently that the cultural history ofjazz is the history of black/white relations in thiscountry. Furthermore, he calls for further studiesexploring this theme. This work is, therefore, abelated response to his call, in the true spirit ofjazz.

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and Jablow (1977), for example, provide a usefulintroduction to the topic. Coetzee (1987:19)remarks:

For centuries, in fact, it has been the fate ofAfrica to be employed by the west as a kind ofimage bank from which emblems—sometimes ofsavagery, brutality, and hopelessness, sometimesof innocence, simplicity and good nature—sometimes... can be drawn at will. Mudimbe presents thebest and most sophisticated treatment of thistheme, the Western invention of Africa. His calmphilosophical treatment exposes the processthrough which “Africa” came to be invented and theconsequences for Africa and the west of itsinvention.

Whatever the “prehistory” of jazz may havebeen, jazz itself begins with the consequences ofthe imposition of Jim Crow laws in New Orleans andthe subsequent cultural clash between blackCreoles and other blacks in New Orleans. Until theapplication of these laws, late in the nineteenthcentury, white and black musicians routinelyperformed together.

The European/African tension, therefore, sovital to jazz itself, is not something simplyimposed from outside. Neither is it something thatexists between jazz and an outside culture, nor isit ever settled once and for all. The meaning ofthe key terms, “African” and “European”, keepchanging and are constantly renegotiated—even ineach performance. Rather, it is a theme within itsvery core, a contradiction, or opposition, presentin its own inception, a phenomenon not rare incolonial and post-colonial Africa itself (Mudimbe

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1988). Within that dichotomy, “Africa” has come torepresent total freedom, however freedom has cometo be defined within America at any given time.Jazz’s origin myth neatly emphasizes thatconnection. Presumably, Buddy Bolden one daysimply picked up his cornet and began playingwhatever he felt like, louder and higher thananyone else. Promptly, he became crowned as “King”Buddy Bolden. Eventually, he went insane from thefast-paced life his adulation thrust upon him.Unfortunately, no records exist of King Buddy,only embroidered memories. Certainly, his life hasbecome a model for popular understanding of thejazz hero. The fact that there may have been noBuddy Bolden, or that there were a number ofcornetists called Buddy Bolden will do nothing todispel belief in the literal truth of the story.The symbolic truth, however, is even moreimportant.

Creoles had sought to separate themselves fromtheir fellow blacks, identifying themselves asblack Europeans. Those Creoles who were musicallyinclined tended to perform European music inwhatever “dignified” settings they could,including concert halls. Their subsequentbitterness and alienation is therefore bestunderstood in terms of their sense of betrayalwhen New Orleans, a city they had felt to besomehow above race consciousness and open toadvancement through cultural evolution, joined therest of the South in imposing segregation based onrace, rather than culture.

“Bolden”, whoever he may have been, came torepresent something different in music, somethingtransitional between black folk music and European

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refrains. No matter how different, however, henever lost his identity, that identity that hadits roots in Africa. I find it significant that inthe legend he goes insane, for the strain ofmaintaining this marginal, ambiguous identityproves to be too much. It also places his musicsquarely in the Levi-Straussian category of thesacred.

From its inception, then, “Africa” hasrepresented freedom within the jazz community.That freedom, of course, has been variouslyinterpreted throughout the course of jazz’shistory precisely in terms Sidron (1981) hasoutlined; namely, within the context ofblack/white relationships. In the early days, thatfreedom was represented in the legendary figure ofthe free-living, loud, Buddy Bolden, driven insaneby the failure of the world to recognize hisgenius. That genius was a “primitive” one,inherent, unteachable. And so the myth grew up ofjazz being played without any rules, except thoseof a performer’s own making, based on his ownfeelings. Presumably, it was an innate part of thejungle rhythms lurking, or resting, within everyblack. Needless to say, black musicians themselvesoften promulgated the myth, sometimes in anunsuccessful effort to keep Whites from initiatingtheir music.12

12 Collier provides a clear exposition of this topic. Itis interesting to note how little attention jazzcritics and scholars have paid to the influence ofBlack Creoles in shaping jazz. Certainly, anyone whoheard Louis Armstrong in performance should have beenaware of their influence, for he mentioned itfrequently. Jelly Roll Morton, Barney Bigard, and

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The reality, predictably, was much different.Jones (1967), Taylor (1982), Collier (1978),Gridley (1978), Szwed (in press), and many othershave tried to clarify the processes that led inthe United States to jazz and in other areas toanalogous Creole music. In the United States, asJones (1967) has most eloquently argued, blackCreoles in New Orleans represented a well-trained,European cadre of musicians, culturallyidentifying themselves with white Europeans. Thesemen had a clear understanding of the “proper”methods of performing European music and tended tobe trained in that performance. As Taylor (1982)and Collier (1978) have argued, black musicianshave always had an internal battle over theappropriate balance between African and Europeanelements in the music. Those elements did not comefrom outside the community but from Blackadvocates of one strain or the other. The truegeniuses of the genre were those rare stylists whocombined both stylistic elements in their stylesin unique combinations.13

Sidney Bechet spoke frequently of their “French” rootsand Duke Ellington reportedly employed Bechet andBigard to get that New Orleans Creole feeling in themusic. Bechet eventually moved to France to get closerto his roots. The French concept of the évoluéeobviously preceded and transcended its African empire.13 Collier 1978 (69) provides a brief discussion of theBolden legend. He cites Samuel B. Charters as statingthat there were many musicians named Buddy Bolden inearly New Orleans jazz. One was still playing in 1908,a year after Buddy Bolden’s presumed tragic death.Marquis, however, maintains that there was, in fact, anhistorical Buddy Bolden and offers impressive

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Whites, even those who loved and admired jazz,often missed this point and, consequently,misunderstood its very structured nature. NewOrleans jazz, for example, featured groupimprovisation. Such improvisation, however, waspossible only because certain rather rigid rulesoperated. Among these rules was the fact that eachof the melody instruments (cornet, or trumpet,clarinet, and trombone) stayed out of oneanother’s way. The cornet or trumpet played themelody. The trombone provided bass harmony, andthe clarinet supplied ornamentation, weaving itsway between the brass instruments. Much like the“ideal” African village, it was an example offreedom within regulated limits, not surprisinglylike a Bach Two- or Three-Part Invention.

Unrestrained freedom, in imitation of whiteperceptions of black African freedom, came to befound in the Chicago school of jazz. There, whitemusicians misunderstood what New Orleans musicianswere really doing. For them, group improvisationmeant that every melody instrument played themelody. Certainly, their misunderstanding proved a“happy accident”, for it is problematic whether itreally was part of the mainstream or merely aninteresting example of “specific evolution”. Itwould be interesting to explore related culturaldevelopments, such as the art world’s “discovery”and misunderstanding of African art. Thesemisunderstandings proved equally fortuitous forwestern art as Picasso and Braque amplydemonstrated. The 1920’s infatuation with “Harlem”and other black centers was often an infatuation

documentation to support his case.

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with its image of those centers rather than theirrealities, or at least the reality experienced bytheir residents.

SwingCertainly, Armstrong’s revolution in jazz

rhythm falls into that tradition. So revolutionarywas Armstrong’s playing that the jazz trumpetinnovator Miles Davis has stated that there isnothing done today on the trumpet that does notowe a debt of gratitude to something Armstrong didfirst. Certainly, Armstrong was the first greatsoloist in jazz and turned jazz into apredominantly soloist’s art (Collier 1983:160). Ofcourse, his great sense of melodic form played amajor role in his success, for arguably no jazzmusician since has ever constructed more perfectlystructured melodic solos. But it is doubtfulwhether that sense of melody alone would haveproved sufficient to have ushered in a new era ofjazz.

What Armstrong did was to increase the feel forcross-rhythms in jazz while literally rewritingmelodic lines. It is simply wrong to assert thathe merely played the melodies as written,inserting perhaps a few ornamentations here andthere. Moreover, his improvisations were notsimply melodic, they ran the full gamut of Africancharacteristics: pitch, timber, falsetto leaps,melissmatic vocalizations, terminal vibratos, and,above all, adaptations of African cross-rhythms.

Without neglecting the personal factor, theconsideration of Armstrong as one of jazz’s trueimprovisational geniuses, it is essential toinvestigate the relationship between his art and

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the times. Why, in other words, did jazz changefrom a group art to essentially a solo art formwhen it did? When jazz began, somewhere around theturn of the century, it did so in reaction to theimposition of Jim Crow laws in New Orleans, a townthat had been relatively open racially and hadallowed unprecedented intercourse, social andotherwise, between the races. Jim Crow not onlytended to segregate black and white, it alsoforced conservative Creoles into contact with thepoor “street” blacks whom they looked down upon(Jones 1967). The group improvisations of earlyNew Orleans jazz can be viewed, in a verysignificant sense, as a means for stating the needfor racial unity among blacks at a time of greatsociocultural threat. Without stretching the pointtoo much, it was music of solidarity in which eachperformer supported the others while staying outof their way.

But much had changed in America between theturn of the century and the early twenties.Although it was still a segregated society, WorldWar I had allowed at least a glimpse of newopportunities. Too much has been made of the closeof Storyville in New Orleans as the cause of thespread of jazz “up the Mississippi”. The close ofthe notorious red light district by the U.S. Navywas more symbolic than substantial in signifyingthe movement of jazz from the Crescent City. Moresignificant, in fact, in the migration of jazz wasthe movement of many blacks to the north as aresult of economic opportunities consequent onU.S. entry into World War I.

Armstrong’s migration certainly fits thatmodel. He was sent for by his mentor, Papa Joe

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“King” Oliver and, for a time, continued to servehis apprenticeship with Oliver until it becameapparent that his talent could not be contained asa second trumpet, even to Oliver. His abandonmentof the cornet for the trumpet is an eloquentsymbol of the changes in the music. Just as theearlier New Orleans style was primarily anensemble one, Armstrong’s music was primarily asoloist’s music. It signaled at least thepossibility of the emergence of individual blacksfrom the group and is consonant with the writingof DuBois, Langston Hughes, and the HarlemRenaissance, the stirring of independence inAfrica, Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line and otherpost-war assertions of Black Pride.

It is merely wrong to treat Armstrong as asimple man who had no understanding of racialproblems in the U.S. and whose music merelyreiterated the myth of the “Happy Negro”.Armstrong, in fact, had deep feelings regardingsegregation and did take action on a number ofoccasions but, in general, his actions tended tobe less dramatic than those of younger musicians.He had been born in a different time and tendedlike Duke Ellington to let his music talk for him.Certainly, at least in the twenties, it did justthat (see Salamone 1989 for a discussion of thesubversive nature of Armstrong’s humor and themanner in which he used it to present an African-American perspective on American reality).

It was clear that he was his own man. His soloswere commentaries that expressed the meaning ofpop material to an African American. Armstrongreworked the material, making his own variationson the theme, thereby in his way making works of

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beauty from often banal melodies as Mozart did,for example with, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”.Indeed, Armstrong’s music illustrates the entireapproach-withdrawal dialectic of jazz. His use of“pop” material only served to emphasize theambivalent position of Blacks within Americanculture, for when Armstrong played anything—evenlater in life when he was presumably past hiscreative peak— that piece was no longer ever heardin quite the same way again. He managed to forcepeople to look at the familiar in a new way, theway that he as a black person looked at it.Perhaps, even more importantly the emergence ofthe jazz soloist made it possible for others tosing their songs and, thereby, present their viewsmore forcefully.

Without denigrating the contributions of otherearly pioneers like Jelly Roll Morton or SidneyBechet, without Armstrong it is difficult toimagine the emergence of the Swing Band. Beforehis innovations, technically the freeing of thesolo from the ground beat and moving towards amore African approach to rhythm, big bands tendedto clunk along, at best applying Europeanunderstanding of syncopation to jazz. Since jazz’sswing is not the result of syncopation, the resultwas usually rather pathetic, when not merelyoutright hilarious. It is often stated thatArmstrong learned a great deal from his stint withFletcher Henderson’s band. He certainly did, butit is equally certain that Henderson applied whathe learned from Armstrong to get the big band toswing and virtually all other big band arrangersapplied his lessons to their work.

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Throughout the big band period the lessons ofArmstrong and Henderson were applied, modified andextended by others, like Duke Ellington, CountBasie, and Art Tatum. However, these lessons soonentered the public domain and were assimilated bywhite musicians as earlier innovations had been.Inevitably, it was these white musicians whoreaped the popular rewards while the AfricanAmerican creators often fell victim to Jim Crowlaws.

That tension caused the music to change. Blackmusicians were outspokenly aware that their musichad been stolen from them. Benny Goodman becamethe “King of Swing” playing Fletcher Henderson’sarrangements. No one really blamed Goodman: heknew the music’s history and gave credit to hissources. Goodman did as much as anyone could tointegrate the music in the 1930s. But that couldnot really compensate an artist for beingneglected. Imitation may be the sincerest form offlattery but it is a poor substitute for fame andfortune.

Thus, black musicians worked at perfectingstyles that were uniquely their own. No other bandcould imitate the swing of the Basie band. Noother band could be mistaken for Ellington’s. Hissophisticated use of harmonies and tone colors,inspired by French impressionistic music andpainting was unique in jazz. Black soloists rarelyhad equals among white musicians.

Those musicians who were indeed originals, likeBunny Berrigan or Bix Beiderbecke, foundthemselves imitating their own African myth, onestressing outrageous living, unreliability andself-centeredness as prerequisites for creativity.

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It was but one more version of the myth of the“Noble Savage”, documented by Hammond and Jablow(1977), and enshrined in turn-of-the centurynovels like She, by H. Rider Haggard, and PresterJohn, by John Buchan. Eventually, then, out of theanger and pride of black musicians, out of a needto be credited with their own self-expression camea new type of jazz, Bop. Bop was a logicaldevelopment of swing, but one that reflected theexperience of blacks raised in the Depression whomatured during World War II. These young men hadseen the creative power of their music, seenothers receive acclaim for it, and knew their ownvalue—a value World War II was making eminentlyclear. Bop did not grow up to exclude whites (BobRedcross, personal communication). Rather, itexcluded the incompetent. It was music of fun inwhich the element of playing was stressed.

To those like Dizzy Gillespie, that playfulnesstook on rhythmic forms. It is just merely wrong toconcentrate on the harmonic aspects of Bop andstate that before Parker, Gillespie and the otherBop pioneers there were no harmonic improvisationsin jazz. A simple listening to Coleman Hawkins’s“Body and Soul”, or any Art Tatum performancewould upset such a contention. However, withoutignoring the different harmonic conceptions ofmodern performers, for those who were involved inthe creation of the new music it was the rhythmthat was different (Gitler 1985:5).

Bop and Beyond: the Myth of AfricaWhen I asked Dizzy Gillespie how important

Africa was for jazz, he removed the trumpet

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mouthpiece from his lips: “Very important. WhenChano Pozo came from Cuba, it all came together.”

Chano Pozo was an Afro-Cuban drummer raised inthe Yoruba tradition, who came to play with DizzyGillespie in the United States in 1947. His workwas of great interest to musicians, for along withother Afro-Cuban and African drummers he provideda symbol of Africa. His “romantic” death at thehands of someone who shot him in a dispute overnarcotics money further seems to have enhanced hisimage. The fact that he was a Santeria who had runoff with initiation money and died a year to theday later added an additional African tinge to thestory (see Gillespie 1979:347-48).

Throughout the post-war era, Africa’s aura grewamong jazz musicians. Certainly, the independencemovement added to Africa’s mystique and thelinkage of Black Liberation with it was onlynatural. Islam became common among musicians longbefore it spread to other segments of the AfricanAmerican community. Armstrong’s trip to Ghana wasmerely the most noticeable of many trips by jazzmusicians to the continent. Africa increasinglybecame a metaphor of authenticity, of trueidentity within the black musical community.

The central question to be addressed in thisfinal section is why the one movement that openlyembraced Africa as a symbol of Black Power is theone that has been least popular both within themusical community and with its fans.

Certainly, images of Africa have long been partof jazz history. As I have argued, the contrastbetween “Africa” and “Europe” has provideddialectic of development for jazz itself. Africanelements have always formed part of the musical

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composition of jazz, and “jungle” images, forbetter or worse, have been used, willingly or not,by Ellington and others. Many musicians havebecome Muslims in a belief that Islam is a moreauthentic African religion than Christianity and,thus, more appropriate for an African American.

In the 1960s, however, Black Nationalism becamemore openly dominant in jazz than it had ever beenbefore, in conformity with the self-consciousassertion of the right of Blacks to control theirown destiny, including their own identity. AsAmerica in general entered the confrontationalpolitics of the late sixties, themes of identity—youth, gays, women, and blacks—became morepronounced. Initially, these assertions ofidentity tended to be separatist and exclusionary.The movement illustrated a very interestingcontrast between black and white images of Africain jazz. White musicians choose to be part ofblack culture; they are, however, free to move inand out of it at will. They are, therefore, alwayson trial by black musicians and are aware of theirprobationary status. They tend to be both moreromantic and fanatic about the mystique of Africathan Black musicians who are more likely to usethe concept as a tool—even as a weapon—in order toobtain their objectives.

There were a number of manifestations of themovement to Africanize jazz. In some way, jazz wasto be made “free”. Indeed, even before the BlackPower movement itself had jelled Ornette Colemanhad come on the scene in 1959 and, after aninitial burst of enthusiasm, met with outrighthostility. Within a few short years, however, manyof his basic ideas were being followed.

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But the harmony was another matter. Here,freedom was king. The chord changes were ignored,and the player was really free to introduce whatoften appeared to be foreign elements, some ofthem simple cries and grunts. Coleman’s playing ingeneral tends to stay within a very limitedharmonic compass (Collier 1978:467). Freedombecame associated with what many musiciansconsidered a step back in music history, a returnto simpler harmony, presumably closer to Africanroots. The soloist became freer to concentrate onmelodic statements, or thematic development.Coleman often speaks somewhat mystically ofdevelopment of emotions or feelings. It isinteresting to note that his metrical work, incontrast with his theme of freedom, is very rigid.Almost all his work is in the thirty-two barpopular song structure.

However, even those who are harmonically veryastute moved in the 1960s to a simpler harmonicbase. In this respect, the movement to modes canbe interpreted as a movement to be “free”. Upuntil this period, the dominant movement in musicwas toward increasing complexity, exemplified inthe triumph of bop and early post-bop. There wasthe dominance of the blazingly fast John Coltraneon saxophone, who played every possible note inevery possible chord change in his later 1950s“sheets of sound” period. Although he could playcreatively in this style until his untimely deathin 1966, he virtually abandoned post-bop andbecame increasingly involved in the free jazzmovement.

That movement was interested in giving theindividual as complete a freedom as possible in

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order to allow nothing to get between his messageand the audience. That quest for freedom, part ofthe broader political and artistic movement of thesixties, led to a return to modal and other typesof playing that stressed melodic and thematicdevelopment without binding the performers tostrict adherence to set or altered chordprogressions. Just as “black” was being proclaimedbeautiful in defiance of the dominant esthetics ofthe past, so, too, were new sounds being exploredfor their potential beauty, even if, or, perhaps,especially if “experts” had termed them ugly.Towards that end the turn to modes is quitelogical.

Modes are scales presumably modeled on Greekmusic used in the Middle Ages for choral music.They were generally abandoned as the New Musiccame to dominate European practice, and as harmonybecame more and better understood in practice andtheory. The fact that modal music was associatedwith vocal music is, I think, a major factor inits emergence during a period of time when BlackNationalism was being vocal. I believe the pun wasintentional. The soloist was to be freer to sing asong (vocalize) and to deliver a message (to bevocal).14

The move was also seen by many to be a returnto one’s roots; that is, Africa. There were manyother currents in the jazz styles of the periodthat reflected this .concern. In retrospect it is14 Kofsky 1983, original 1970, is still the best work onthe meaning of the music to the Black Power movement aswell as to the internal workings of the music itself.It is a powerful and clear Marxist statement of therole of art in a revolution.

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clear that they all were related in an attempt to“get back to Africa”, the source of authenticidentity. The path taken in “Free” jazz eventuallywas through harmonic simplification coupled withrhythmic sophistication. The purpose was ‘to tiechanges in the music to changes in society. Inother words superfluous westernizations were to bestripped out of the music in order to leave itmore “purely African”.

Leaving aside the irony of returning to pseudo-Greek modes created to write church music, such asGregorian chant, it is also problematic whetherAfrican-music is, in fact, as limited harmonicallyas many musicians have tended to assume. Thepurpose, however, of “free” jazz was to changeone’s perspective on the music through freeing thesoloist from slavery to harmonic chord changes andforcing him to view new possibilities in themusic. The soloist was free to solo on a line aslong as he wanted without having to change to newchords and thereby tell his story without“western” constraints. All sounds were createdequal in this “free” music. There were nodominants, no tonics—only freedom.

It is in this sense only that one can talkabout the emergence of an “eastern” influence injazz at this period. That influence never rivaledan African one and was part of the Third Worldideology put forward by Archie Shepp and otherswho were Black Nationalists within the profession.Shepp noted that all oppressed people were peopleof color and his brothers. Certainly, very fewmusicians were wearing Indian clothing at thistime but many, even in the mainstream, woredashikis. Coltrane’s albums and individual

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compositions were replete with African referencesas were many others not so committed to freedom inthe music, or who did not define it in the sameway. Certainly, the new music did offer newperspectives and many of its accomplishments haveentered mainstream jazz. It did, in fact, oftenimitate its conception of early New Orleans

One avant-garde musician stated that one of hisgoals was to attain that type of groupimprovisation common in early New Orleans music(Kaeef Ruzaden, personal communication). Ofcourse, group improvisation was possible in thatstyle because of its close adherence to harmonictheory. In contrast, the music was limitedharmonically and featured repetition and explicitmessages. Although its major figures included manywho were harmonically sophisticated, such as JohnColtrane, many of its adherents were not aware ofthe harmonic requirements of modes or of theirrestrictions. Indeed, it is useful to realize thatmany harmonically sophisticated jazz musicianswere rather ambivalent about “free” jazz. EvenJohn Coltrane and Eric Dolphy drifted in and outof the movement and recorded tonal music untiltheir deaths. In fact, the only truly creative“free” musicians, with the possible exception ofOrnette Colman, were those who were alreadyharmonically adept, such as Don Cherry, BillEvans, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner,Pharaoh Sander, and their ilk. Most of thesemusicians eventually returned to tonal music, fornot only could white musicians play free, but manyconservatory-trained black and white musicianswere also rather old hat in conservatory music.Many also pointed out that freedom in jazz is

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found within the tension of its constraints.Drummer Elvin Jones has eloquently expressed thisposition in interviews with Frank Kofsky (1977 and1978): “I wasn’t thinking anything about style. Itwas just a reaction to what was going on. However,a style just seems to develop and I just reactedto whatever I heard; that’s my style, I suppose”(1978:82).

From his interview with Jones, Kofsky reachessome rather insightful conclusions regardingrevolutions in general and the revolution of“free” jazz in particular. Two of these insightsare relevant to the major premise of this paper.Therefore, I shall quote at some length:

...revolutions do not annihilate tradition so muchas they do recast and record its most valuableelements in ways that revitalize the traditionitself (1977:11). I would deduce that the only wayto proceed further along the path that Jones hadalready begun exploring, one that led towards therecreation of African polyrhythms, would havenecessitated the abandonment of certainfundamental conventions that heretofore hadprevailed in jazz—in particular, the principlesthat all musicians acknowledge a common measure-line and that a single predetermined meter (orrarely-meters) be sustained unaltered throughoutthe performance, regardless of how much rhythmicdisplacement has been created within that meter—and might also have required the presence ofadditional percussionists, perhaps playing indifferent and even variable meters within theColtrane ensemble (1977:29).

Such a movement would have led to the end ofjazz (Kofsky 1977:30) and Jones resisted it,

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leaving Coltrane and even, more or less, “free”jazz, often playing much more conventional styles.It is important to note that the myth of Africanroots if taken too literally, as Coltrane isasserted in Kofsky’s article to have done, cankill the culture itself, as it would have done tojazz. The tension of European and African elementsis required for jazz to exist, for the trope ofjazz is about just that: a culture that is neither“this” nor “that”, but somehow “this and that”. InLevi-Strauss’s terms it belongs to an anomalouscategory and is somehow sacred. This binaryopposition between polar forces is essential tothe survival of the form. As jazz performers movein one direction, it is necessary that there be acompensatory movement in another direction inorder to maintain the tensional integrity of themusic.

Indeed, there was a great irony in the pose ofgreat seriousness on the part of many of theavant-garde’s leading lights, for it seriouslycontrasted with the usual African attitude towardmusic, and was a throwback to the Europeanheritage of Black Creole music performance.Indeed, the hushed concert halls .and raptattention these performers demanded, at least intheir rhetoric, smack more of the ideal Europeanconcert hall than of any African clearings I havevisited. Radano (1976:77) clearly sums up themeaning of the jazz avant-garde and theirrelationship with the jazz community of musiciansand fans:

...these angry critics and musicians claimed tocarry the torch for the new black society. They

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declared themselves dedicated to restoring“blackness” to jazz, to toppling the powerstructure of clubs and record companies, and tobringing to the black population a music that theyconsidered rightfully its own... what they failedto recognize—or refused to admit—was the elitistcharacter of avant-garde jazz. By nature, avant-garde jazz is not music for the masses—black orwhite... Musical norms operate like all othersocial norms—they change slowly... The realculprit was jazz itself. While the avant-gardemusicians identified with jazz and the jazzcommunity, they themselves remained a separatecommunity... the members of the jazz avant-gardewere ‘cultivated’ musicians trapped in a‘vernacular’ milieu.

ConclusionsRhythm, harmony, and melody alone cannot

explain tonal western music. Therefore, an a fortioriresort to any single aspect of this trinity in anattempt to explain jazz is too narrow to providemore than a glimpse of what jazz means. Even studyof the interaction of these musical elements, afar more promising, but also less pursued researchavenue, is insufficient to reveal the richsemiotic Implications of jazz. For jazz is nottotally a tonal western music. Nor is it comprisedmerely of rhythm, harmony, and melody. It has arich stock of other elements, replenishedthroughout its history, that its practitionerslabel “African”. Moreover, one simply misses thepoint through confusing a structure with themessage that that structure conveys.

In one very real and important sense jazzitself is the message. Its own meaning, to its

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practitioners and fans, changes over time as itssocial location alters and as the meaning of its“African/European” opposition varies. However, thesituation is further complicated because each jazzmusician and performance is meant to be creative,to generate meaning. Over and over, in one form orother, the principle is laid down that eachmusician must tell a story. Moreover, that storymust be personal: one must live the story themusic tells. In a truly essential way the mediumis the message. Technique, for example, theability to run chord changes accurately, to playfast or slow and still swing, is admired, but onlya naïve listener admires it for its own sake. Itmust be used in the service of conveying a story.Charlie Parker, for example, is said to haveadvised aspiring saxophone players to first learneverything about their horns and then to forget itall when playing. Technique, in other words, isonly a tool in allowing one’s true inner self tobe expressed: it is not admirable in and ofitself. A knowledgeable insider sums up theposition well when speaking about the early daysof the bop revolution: “I never heard anyone playas fast as Bird. But it wasn’t just speed. He hadideas no one else had” (Bob Redcross, personalcommunication).

Endeavoring to understanding the meaning ofjazz, therefore, involves one in a series ofexercises requiring the examination of multiplereferents and cross-referents, of matchingindividual biographies to broader movements,specific variations to broader themes, and theever-retreating just out of reach essence of themetaphor that is jazz itself, for to understand

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jazz is to understand the tertium quid that it is;namely, a symbol and encapsulation of Americaitself.

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CHAPTER FIVETHE CULTURE OF JAZZ

AND JAZZ AS CRITICAL CULTUREWho knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak

for you? Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Neil Leonard states, “For all true believersjazz answered needs that traditional faith did notaddress. While the music had different meaningsfor different followers—black, white, male female,young, old, rich or poor, in various psychologicalstates and social situations--for all devotees itprovided some form of ecstasy or catharsistranscending the limitations, dreariness anddesperation of ordinary existence”.

Moreover, he continues:

As earthy blues, exalted anthem, or something inbetween, jazz could energize the most jaded will.Jazz is an active agent, a powerful force whoseecstasies, whether subtly insinuated or suppliedin lightening illuminations, altered personalityand society. Through cajolery, charm, warmth,surprise, shock or outrage it could brush asidethe most entrenched tradition, the most oppressivecustom, and inspire subversive social behavior.Consider how the jazzy music of the Twenties wenthand in hand with the upheavals in manners andmorals of that time, how bop was the cry ofstreet-wise young rebels in the Forties, and howthe “New thing” of the Sixties was closely alliedto the “Black Power” impulse of the day. Clearlyjazz is more than a passive flower, a gloriouscultural ornament affirming humanity, it is also a

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powerful social force which has cut broadly anddeeply, its prophets, rituals and myths touchingnot only individual souls but large groupsbringing intimations of magic and the sacred to anera whose enormous changes have depletedconventional faiths.

It is this power of jazz to propel socialchange and energize its acolytes, its touch of thesacred, which I wish to develop in this work.

Pratt (1990:7) notes that popular music ingeneral has expressive and instrumental politicalfunctions. He quotes John Coltrane, a major jazzinfluence, as stating that a person’s soundreveals his personality, the way he thinks andinterprets the world (Sidran 1981:14). Prattnotes, correctly, that in performance thatinterpretation may change. Indeed, jazzperformance is one in which fellow musicians andthe audience sway the musician, providing at timesnew insights and facets on reality. This

openness in jazz is one of its hallmarks andoften jazz musicians cite it as a sacredcharacteristic.

In conformity with the sacred nature of jazzrole reversal and rituals of rebellion are commonmodes of behavior and communication. Armstrong’sdemonstration of the power of music and humor tosubvert pompous platitudes regarding theestablished order of things provides an entrée tothe theoretical relationship between music andhumor and the uses to which an accomplished artistmay put that relationship. This scared Tricksterquality was an integral part of Louis Armstrong’spersona, one that he was well aware of and usedwith consummate skill to comment on and subvert

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mainstream conception of reality. An example ofthis power of subversion explodes from hisrecording of Laughin’ Louie.

Laughin’ LouieThere are a number of jokes on the record

“Laughin’ Louie”. The first joke is the fact thatArmstrong always referred to himself as “Louis”.He joked that white folks always pronounced hisname as “Louie”. In fact, on one poster his nameis wrongly spelled “Lewis”, obviously followinghis own pronunciation. So it is not a far stretchto see the title as Armstrong laughing at thosewho think they are superior but cannot evenpronounce his name correctly.

What else is Louis laughing at? Well, he islaughing at the fact that he and his Vipersrecorded “Laughin’ Louie” while high on marijuana.In 1931 Armstrong was high much of the time and“viper” was a slang expression for a pothead(Bergreen 1997: 332, 360). The fact that he coulduse the expression for his band and even for histune, “Song of the Vipers” was but another in-jokeon Satchmo’s part at the expense of politesociety.

Additionally, to many people’s amazement,Armstrong liked the Guy Lombardo big band sound.In 1931, Armstrong was fronting a “sweet” bigband, one that featured whining saxophones as wellas strict adherence to playing the melody the wayit was written. At the same time, the band wasreminiscent of Paul Whiteman’s in including “hot”players. The mixture of Armstrong’s melodic buthot trumpet over the sweet sound of his trumpet isoften funny. Whether Satchmo intended it to be

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humorous or not is arguable but it has its uniquecharm and humor in any case. It does contrast anoverly up-tight style of music with a looser andeven more sophisticated one. It also contrasts amistaken notion of a “correct” way to play jazzthat fits all musicians with his own, catholic,tastes.

Of course, the joke could just as well be onthe hipsters who put down Guy Lombardo’s music.Armstrong, along with other jazz musicians, is aninnate fusionist. They merge all sorts of musicinto jazz, adapting it to the idiom. Throughouthis life, Armstrong atly stated that he likedflLombardo’s music. It is there in his music, justas Puccini’s arias are there.

The New Orleans tradition is a Creole one thatdelights in mixing categories in a rich gumbo. Itis also clear that in this period Armstrong wasreveling in Black Culture and eager to share itwith his audience. He included a great deal ofinside jokes in his versions of popular songs. Forexample, his version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “OldRocking Chair” contains this response to JackTeagarden’s vocal statement that he is going totan Louis’s hide, “My hide’s already tanned,Father!” Furthermore, Teagarden was white, a whitetrombonist who was slightly older than Armstrongand had early recognized his genius. The two hadbeen close friends since the 1920s and cooperatedin mocking racial stereotypes. The sly referenceto miscegenation, a taboo subject in mixedcompany, slid by the censors.

Armstrong gave white audiences a peak at blackentertainment by performing vaudeville routinesfeaturing a stock character, the corrupt black

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preacher, and many versions have been recorded. Hereferred often to his love for New Orleans food,early poverty, and details of black life. Heturned them all into gentle jokes so that he couldget on with his own love for life and over his ownpain. Moreover, Armstrong mocked received opinionabout the dangers of pot smoking through his viperjokes. Many in his audience did not know that“viper” was a nickname for pot and its users.“Laughin’ Louie” is filled with Armstrong’s famousnonsense words, stammering, and bar after bar oflaughter. Again, one asks what the joke is.

Armstrong is Brer Rabbit, again laughing atthose who seek to best him. Armstrong was able tosurvive during the Depression when the market for“race records”, those records aimed primarily at ablack audience, had ended. He did so by followingin the footsteps of other black performers, usingrace humor to his advantage.

There is a long history of Africans and AfricanAmericans using humor to overcome hardships and tosubvert ideas that endanger their survival. Theuse of humor, of course, offers a deniability ofmalice. The phrase “only kidding” was one thatArmstrong often used. The article “African-American Humor” in Aileen Pace Nilsen and Don L.F.Nilsen’s Encyclopedia of 20th Century AmericanHumor (2000) offers numerous examples of thispractice.

In West Africa, the original home of more than50 per cent of American slaves, anthropologistshave found cultures with many of the samecharacteristics that African Americans rely on fortheir humor: extensive wordplay and punning,signifying (verbal put downs), the mocking of an

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enemy’s relatives, the chanting and singing ofridicule verses, bent-knee dancing, an admirationfor the Trickster, and aggressive joking thatdemands verbal quickness and wit (Nilsen andNilsen 2000: 14). Salamone (1990), Keil (1979,1992), and Crouch (2000), among others, have alsonoted similarities in the use of humor amongAfricans and African-Americans, and moreparticularly they have noted this similarity amongAfrican Americans and African musicians.

Dizzy Gillespie—Crazy like a FoxDizzy Gillespie, for example, continued the

trickster tradition in jazz. Dizzy, born JohnBirks Gillespie in 1917 was given his nicknameearly in his career. The bandleader Teddy Hillgave him the nickname because of his crazy anticson stage. For example, Dizzy used to come torehearsals dressed in a hat, gloves, and overcoat,which he kept on throughout the rehearsal nomatter the temperature. However, Hill alwaysadded, “Diz crazy? Diz was crazy like a fox.” Heclaimed, quite rightly, that Diz was a stableperson, “the most stable of us all.” Hill, as mostjazz musicians, thought quite highly of Diz. Hegave him his first recorded solo and featured himat Minton’s Playhouse, one of the fabled“birthplaces” of be-bop.

It is important to note that Dizzy’s humor wasnot common among his fellow modernists. In fact,as he later acknowledged, it was related to thetype of humor that Louis Armstrong used because hewas such a great showman. Many modern musicians,who acted “cool”, turning their backs on theiraudiences and failing to acknowledge applause or

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announce tunes, put down Armstrong as an “UncleTom” whose antics kept jazz in the show businesscategory. They want jazz to be considered high artin a league with classical music and separate fromentertainment. Diz, who was a close friend ofArmstrong’s, used humor to draw people to the newjazz. Even though both Diz and Satch recordedparodies of the other’s music, their uncannyability to reproduce it showed they had listenedclosely to it. Indeed, material in the LouisArmstrong archives shows that his taste in musicincluded not only opera, classics, pop tunes, butthe most modern of jazz recordings. His recordedcomments while listening with musician friends,shows his ability to critique the musicianship ofperformers. He rated Gillespie quite highly on allaccounts.

Just as Armstrong used humor to bring hissuperb music to audiences that had not heard hismusic before, so, too, did Gillespie. Audiencesfound humor, correctly, in the twists and turns ofbop tunes and extended lines. If humor is built onsurprise, then bop was an appropriate vehicle forhumor. Charlie Parker is often caught onrecordings, laughing out loud, especially when heand Diz played together and finished each other’sphrases, as friends finish one another’s jokes.Diz’s dress was another humorous sales techniquefor bop. His infamous bop glasses, string ties,and, above all, his beret gave bop a sartorialidentity, which all except squares found humorous.There was a trickster humor about bop, which manymissed, although many sensed its subversivenature, questioning the status quo and seeking toreplace old, unjust verities with new equitable

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ones. Bop was the musical language of the post-warAfrican American but its roots went deeper thanthat. Try as some of its adherents did to deny thefact, it partook of the humor of the Africantrickster, just as Satchmo did and Gillespie cameto admit he did as well.

The Trickster and the DizThe Trickster myth is found in clearly

recognizable form among both aboriginal tribes andmodern societies. We encounter it among theancient Greeks, the Chinese, the Japanese, and inthe Semitic world as well. Many of the Trickster’straits were perpetuated in the figure of themediæval jester, and have survived right up to thepresent day in the Punch-and-Judy plays and in theclown. Although repeatedly combined with othermyths and frequently drastically reorganized andreinterpreted, its basic plot seems always to havesucceeded in reasserting itself (Radin 1955: ix).

We have a fundamental figure here, which isboth general and specific. There appears a generalneed for the trickster, but a need clothed inspecific features of a culture. The trickster canbe creator and destroyer, one who gives and onewho takes, one who tricks and is tricked. Thetrickster inspires awe and affection at the sametime. Seemingly, the trickster is one who givesinto primal impulses without thinking. But I wouldargue that he is sly as a fox, which does, atleast at times, clearly see the results of hisbehavior but who can get away with much because ofhis humor.

I have argued that powerful, sacred Africanfigures require humor so that the audience can

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approach them (Salamone 1995: 3-7; Salamone 1976:208-210). The informality prevalent in Americanjazz allows the royalty to temper the awe inherentin their status in order to permit youngsters toapproach them. I suggest that much the samepractice can be found in Nigeria. For example, Iworked with a traditional priest who was one ofthe more powerful “doctors” in Nigeria. However,in order to encourage clients rather thandiscourage them, he cloaked his power beneath apersona of humor. This humorous presentation drewpeople to him whom he might otherwise havefrightened away (Salamone 1976). Similarly, giantssuch as Count Basie and Duke Ellington have usedhumor in their presentations. Basie’s “Pop Goesthe Weasel” insert in “April in Paris” andEllington’s humorous raps in his introductions andin his retelling of fairy tales frequently warmedup the crowds.

Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong shared anability to draw people to themselves. Doing soenabled them to work their music for the good ofthe people while being open to furtherinnovations. Although the Bori was an Africantrickster, I have not gone on a diversion here.

I am explicitly suggesting that Gillespie andArmstrong, among others, are in that sametradition. They clearly used humor to draw peopleto them. They would do almost anything to make theaudience receptive to their message, for theirmusic did indeed have a message. For Gillespie andArmstrong before him that music was, in fact,“spiritual”. I once asked Dizzy about why he saidit was spiritual. “Makes the other fellow soundgood,” he replied with his usual arch wit.

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Additionally, there is an African traditionwhich holds that the musician has a sacred duty tostand up to oppression and speak the truth topower. In that task, Gillespie followed a longtradition of African musicians. It is no accident,I think, that the Yoruba musician Fela Anakulapi-Kuti studied and worked with Gillespie early inhis career. Even Fela’s claim to be the BlackPresident has traces of Gillespie’s half-humorousPresidential candidacy. Fela combined variousaspects of African-based music into his style.Interestingly, its foundation was the jazz ofGillespie and Charlie Parker, which he heard as ayoung man and which he used to create somethingdifferent for Nigerian music, something he deemedwould be revolutionary. He put on a mask of theTrickster to perform. Mocking those whom he deemedhad betrayed Africa, the colonialists and theirAfrican collaborators.

The Humor of SubversionDizzy would often open his performances by

saying he would like to introduce the band. Bandmembers would then turn to one another and shakehands, giving their names to each other, smilingand nodding. The routine, which I saw repeatedmany times, never got stale. Diz would sometimesstand aside and raise his eyebrows bemusedly atthe audience. Eventually, he would get tointroduce the musicians in the band, for Diz was afair man who gave each person his due.

I remember one night in the winter of 1957-58when he arrived in the middle of a blizzard toperform in Rochester, NY. He was late, somethingunusual for him. The audience, however, waited for

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him, knowing that somehow he’d make it through thestorm. In those days, Diz traveled by car alongthe Birdland Circuit and he was coming in fromDetroit. As the band scrambled to take off theirheavy, snow-laden coats and assemble theirinstruments, Diz began to play solo trumpet.

The audience laughed as they recognized acurrent hit, “Tequila”, by the Champs. Theystopped laughing when they realized Diz had bestedthem again because he was playing it straight. Hetook the novelty tune and re-imagined it as alovely then torrid Latin tune. One by one the bandmembers joined in as they assembled theirinstruments.

After ten minutes or so, Diz then began hisspiel. He apologized for being late: “I wasplaying a benefit for the Ku Klux Klan at theWhite Citizens’ Hall in Montgomery Alabama.” Asthe crowd broke up, he launched into “Manteca”(Grease) with his then new opening chant, “I’llnever go back to Georgia. No, I’ll never go backto Georgia.” Again, as the crowd and it was acrowd despite the snow, roared with laughter, helaunched into a brilliant high-note solo, completewith all the pyrotechnics of which he was capablein his prime.

I reminded Diz of this performance thirty yearslater when he was performing at Elizabeth SetonCollege. He remembered it with a smile andrepeated the opening of his solo for me vocally.It was then that he talked about humor and thespirituality of music, among many other topics.Diz took his role as a teacher/musician seriously,reminding me of Chaucer’s scholar “Gladly would helearn and gladly teach”.

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There was another routine he had when doing“Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac”, his version of “SwingLow, Sweet Chariot”. The song is not only anAmerican spiritual, but according to thesaxophonist Archie Shepp also comes from anAfrican religious song. Diz began his version witha Yoruba chant from Chano Pozo, a Cuban Santeria.The chant often drew befuddled laughs from theaudience, and Diz played it up big. For him, humorand spirituality were not polar opposites butcomplementary principles. Humor was a means ofleading people to the spiritual.

As he told me, “When Chano Pozo came, the musicall came together.” Again, once Diz finished hischanting, also setting the cross-rhythms of histempo, he started the song, in the midst of whichhe took a brilliant solo. When the tenor saxplayer James Moody was present, there would be twobrilliant solos. Then the piece would end withDizzy’s tag line, “Old Cadillacs never die. Thefinance company just tows them away!”

The examples could continue. Just what was thisonce wild bad boy of jazz getting at? What did hisgreat dancing in front of his band mean? Hismugging with his frog-like cheeks? His tilted bellon his horn? His African robes later in life? Hispointedly supercilious vocabulary? His outrageoustwists and turns, with his deeply serious playingon frivolous tunes and his humor on serious ones.What was he telling the audience? And just whichaudience was he addressing?

The following vignette displays most of thecharacteristics I have discussed.

One night in Texas in the mid-1950s (Kliment1988:75-76), the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald was

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sitting backstage eating a sandwich and watchingthe band members playing dice, a group thatincluded renowned trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.Fitzgerald was terrified by the sudden arrival oflocal law officials, who arrested the entire groupfor gambling. The officers, upset because thegroup was performing in an all-white theater, tookthem to the police station where they were bookedand jailed—Fitzgerald still in her ball gown.During the booking process, an officer askedGillespie for his name. He replied, “LouisArmstrong.”

And that is what the officer wrote down.Several hours later, after the band’s whitemanager paid the $50 bail, an arresting officerasked Ella Fitzgerald for her autograph. The nextday, local papers reported that she was the best-dressed prisoner the jail ever held (Iris CarterFord: 43).

The subversive quality which and Dizexemplified, the indistinguishability of thesacred and profane, the refusal to take acceptedinterpretations of reality at face value, thesubstitution of new realities for old are oftenfound in literature based on jazz culture.

Jazz in LiteratureIn African-American Satire: The Sacredly

Profane Novel, Darryl Dickson-Carr writes ofWallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring:

Infants of the Spring, then, asks us to reconcilewhat is normally considered an oxymoron, at leastin the United States: an individualistic groupconsciousness… What… Thurman… demands, however, is

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actually a precursor to the conundra that RalphEllison would propose in his widely acclaimedInvisible Man Raymond argues that principlesupheld by masses of African Americans are theultimate linchpins to African Americans’ culturaland political progress, not unlike the narrator ofInvisible Man, who argues that African Americans“were to affirm the principle on which the countrywas built”, despite the reality of staunch,violent opposition, lest the nation, and thereforeAfrican Americans, be lost forever. It isprecisely this fear of total loss, of an AfricanAmerican community swallowed up because it wastesits energies on frivolities instead of a fight forprinciples that drives Infants of the Spring’ssatire (Dickson-Carr 2001: 56-57). This satirical glance is common to jazz and

literature based on jazz. Jazz is music of freedomand, as such, opposed to that which hindersfreedom. Thus, it is the supporter of all thatpromotes freedom, although just what constitutesthat freedom is open to debate. Indeed, sometimesit appears that everything is open to debate inthe jazz world.

Although the origins of jazz as an essentiallyAfrican American music are not seriously in doubt,the exclusivity of it as something only AfricanAmericans can perform is in doubt. I have writtenabout it earlier (Salamone 1990). Indeed, I findthe fact that some “white” players can sound asblack as “black” players a significant culturalphenomenon and will return to it in theconclusion. Jürgen E. Grandt has similar thoughts.

In 1951, James Baldwin wrote that “... it isonly in his music ... that the Negro of America

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has been able to tell his story” (24). But thatsame year, British jazz critic Leonard Featherpublished in the pages of Down Beat magazine ablindfold test with jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge.Throughout his distinguished career, Eldridge hadrepeatedly expressed his firm belief that whiteand black jazz musicians had distinctly differentstyles and that he could easily distinguishbetween them. When Feather took him at his wordand administered the test, the results weresomewhat astonishing: The musician, nicknamed“Little Jazz” by his peers, was eithernoncommittal or wrong much more often than he wasright (Feather, Book 47). Listening to BillyTaylor’s recording of, ironically, “All Ears”, theseventh of ten selections, Eldridge’s irritationmounted. “I liked the pianist. Couldn’t tell whowas colored and who was white. They could beEskimos for all I know,” he admitted, and had toconcede defeat in the end (Feather, “Little Jazz”12). (1) Eldridge’s blindfold test again raisesthe old yet still provocative question: Can whitefolks play the blues? If indeed the end product ofa jazz performance transcends what W.E.B. Du Boiscalled “the problem of the color-line” (v)—canjazz itself still provide a useful criticalframework for the study of black American culturalexpressions? To be sure, music, instrumental musicat least, is a much more abstract art form thanliterature, but the contemporary critic stillfaces the same dilemma that confronted RoyEldridge: the apparent paradox that jazz music isat once a distinctly black American art form aswell as a cultural hybrid. Jazz, indeed, inliterature has taken on this hybrid, multicultural

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aspect. It is both “a distinctly black Americanart form as well as a cultural hybrid.”

The point is that jazz is a Creole art form,which combines elements of seeming opposites,making reality a matter of “this” and “that too”.Like American society and culture which it mirrorsand shapes, jazz derives its power from itscombination of opposites, which it combines intosome new thing. That new thing appears to changeconstantly before our eyes, making any absoluteunderstanding of reality but a tentative guess.Everything can be other than it is.

Such a perspective is a metaphor of Americanculture itself. It, too, is always in the processof becoming, rarely taking time to “be”. Even themost banal themes can be transformed into thingsof exquisite beauty and at the most unexpectedtimes. In the midst of despair, hope explodes intoconsciousness. America and jazz have grown uptogether and each expresses the fact that ourseeming differences must be reconciled in acreative tension of harmony that can producesomething far more beautiful and productive thantheir individual elements or else fall into brokenfragments far inferior to those from which theycame.

In literature, jazz has represented freedom.For those detractors of the music, it representedlicense and a return to the primitive with allthat such a designation implied: namely, sexuallicense, indeed license of all types. For itsliterary supporters, Fitzgerald, Carl Van Vechten,and John Dos Passos, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen,Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, RichardWright, and Jean Toomer as well as James, Baldwin,

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Jack Kerouac and Toni Morrison, the music is aforce against fascism and other systems opposingfreedom. It is a movement for racial integrationand social justice. To emphasize their jazz rootsthese writers used jazz accents and rhythms intheir writings.

Multiple and Overlapping Realities and AudiencesThe Eshu trickster from the Yoruba of Nigeria

is a character who disturbs the peace byquestioning norms and calling his people to beattentive skeptics of order. He also employs acrafty and cunning wit in the face of the morepowerful, preserving his and others’ freedom whereit might potentially be curtailed. The Yoruba alsoparallel their trickster to the artist,celebrating his imaginative capacities andmalleable skills. In all of these respects, LouisArmstrong may be regarded as a quintessentialtrickster, part of a long legacy passed fromAfrica and through slave-holding and segregatedAmerica.

In a broader context, Armstrong’s tricksterrole can be tied to the jazz musical genre that heso transformed. Both were subject to—and respondedto—unavoidable social realities, expressing painand anger in reaction to a debilitating racism.Both also employed secret musical codes, employingprotective masks that gave space to individualfreedom and collective empowerment. Furthermore,both recognized humor as the license thatpermitted their liberationist expressions ofthinly veiled social commentary. Jazz, likeArmstrong, offered a language, the subtleties ofwhich spoke to the in-crowd (the “hip”) and about

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the outsiders (the “squares”). Invariably, itwould privately mock either or both.

Louis Armstrong used the Trickster image in hisrendition of “Laughin’ Louie”. First, the“squares” are outed in the title itself, whichparodies the common misinterpretation of his namein mainstream culture and mocks the one-dimensional stereotype with which he was regarded(and sometimes dismissed). From Armstrong’s point-of-view, the title’s humor might also allude tohis habitual pot-smoking habits, this furtherunderscored by the name of his accompanying band,the Vipers, a slang term for marijuana. The song’smusic fluctuates throughout, between the “hot”sound “hip” critics encouraged from Armstrong, andthe “sweet” sounds he always had such affectionfor, but for which he was criticized ascompromising to mainstream tastes. Here, thetrickster celebrates his own creative choices(laughing for himself), and satirically dismissesthe imposing judgment of his critics (laughing atthem). This is achieved through the humorousmethod of incongruity, the shock of the juxtaposedstyles surprising listeners into recognition andappreciation while appealing to many differentaudiences.

In considering audiences we must take note ofthe fact that Gillespie, as Armstrong before him,addressed multiple audiences. Indeed he was also amember of multiple audiences. As an AfricanAmerican southern musician he was always aware ofhis membership in Afro-American culture, hisacculturation into the dominant white culture, hisbeing a leading founder of bop, his maleness andmany other memberships. His intelligence shone

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through as he played with these identities in hisperformances, juggling one against the other asthe mood took him. Things were rarely, if ever,this OR that; as Robert Farris Thompson (1964) hasnoted about Creole culture; they were this ANDthat, too (see also Roger D. Abrahams, NickSpitzer, John F. Szwed and Robert Farris Thompson.Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’sCreole Soul. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2006). Diz was a master ofmixing things together that often did not gotogether. He took risks others hesitated intaking. But he made you love him as he did so byturning his critique into a humorous comment ormaking it so seemingly outrageous that he couldn’treally be serious. Except that, of course, he was.There was also a love for that which was human. Atthe height of the civil rights movement, I sawDizzy drinking with a southern soldier who thoughthe was complimenting Diz, but was condescending tohim. I sat at the bar expecting Diz to explode.Instead, he accepted the proffered drink, listenedto the young soldier, and then made some off-handed remark that had the soldier laughing. Thetwo walked off arm in arm. To me this incident isillustrative of Dizzy’s being able to occupy anumber of cultures and identities simultaneously.He often understood exactly where others werecoming from and found ways to be diplomatic whilegetting his point across. As with Armstrong, hefound a way to live his life the way he wantedwhile also finding a way to criticize people inways they first listened too because they werehumorous. No surprise, then, that they both weresuperb jazz ambassadors, representing America,

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yes, but also the need for greater equality anddemocracy in America. They understood that whilethey had a dual heritage, that heritage was anoverlapping one and could not be neatly segregatedas others believed. They were this AND that, too.

Ellington epitomized the blurring of categoriesin his music. It was hard to tell where one genreended and another began. In so doing, he continuedan African tradition and elevated his music to therealm of the sacred.

The SacredFor Ellington, then, the sacred and spiritual

appears to refer to that which promotes love andin the process provokes a sense of awe. Certainly,the quality of being life-affirming and inclusiveis part of Ellington’s conception of the sacred.Additionally, however, Ellington is aware of thepower of ambiguity and humor in presenting hisspiritual message. He is careful to allow dramaticpacing and juxtaposition of seeming opposites totell his tale. As he stated, “A good playwrightcan say what he wants to say without saying it.”It was a lesson he had learned early.

For example, the short 1929 movie Black and TanFantasy has a nice little story. The movie openswith Ellington and Artie Whetsol, one of histrumpet players, rehearsing. They need money andFredi Washington, one of the Cotton Club dancers,informs Ellington and Whetsol that she is goingback to work to help save Ellington’s piano. Ofcourse, Washington is in danger of dying butperforms anyway.

The movie features an authentic Cotton Clubsetting in which there is a brief but rather

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complete floor show, featuring the famous CottonClub Dancers. Fredi Washington dances, and thenshe collapses. After a spiritual, Black and TanFantasy is played. In sum, the movie isprogrammatic imitating a Cotton Club performance.This was a pattern that Ellington followed formuch of his life.

What is often overlooked, however, is themanner in which Ellington dares to intersperse thesacred and the profane. There are not only echoesof spirituals or “church music” in hiscompositions. There are also outright spiritualsused just before dancing that would offend manytraditionally religious people. Moreover, thatdancing takes place to a suite that has often beenconsidered more religious in nature than secular.Ellington was blurring the distinction between twospheres that many other performers preferred tokeep distinct, the sacred and the profane. By sodoing he was placing his music in a category thathe came to term “beyond category”. He was alsodeeply involved in the realm that anthropologistsrecognize as that of the ambiguous and dangerous.

Steed (1993: 3) notes this Ellingtoncharacteristic of avoiding categories. “Althoughhe still personifies jazz for millions of people,Ellington did not even like to use the word unlessit was defined simply as freedom of expression.”Steed cites Dance (1970) who wrote:

Duke Ellington never ceases to voice hisdisapproval of categories, which he views as acurb on an artist’s right to freedom ofexpression. He always wants to be free to do what

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he feels moved to do, and not what someone feelshe should do.

There is no doubt that Ellington felt that thismixing of categories had meaning beyond the musicitself, that it was somehow sacred. He viewed hismusic as a vocation and as a means for breakinghimself and other African Americans out of rigidcategories, as his interview with Zunser (1930)makes absolutely clear. Ellington frequentlyexplicitly noted his belief that music was avocation, a sacred calling. At the Second SacredConcert, for example, he labeled himself “God’smessenger boy”, a phrase repeated in the albumnotes (Steed 1993: 6).

Steed (1993) includes this important passagefrom Stanley Dance’s eulogy:

Duke knew the good news was Love, of God and hisfellow men. He proclaimed the message in hisSacred Concerts, grateful for an opportunity toacknowledge something of which he stood in awe, apower he considered above his human limitations.

For Ellington, attempts to capture that loveand awe in his music, a love he viewed astranscending artificial differences andencompassing all life, were attempts at graspingthe sacred. It is as if Ellington were saying thatGod has no limits. Limitations are human.Therefore, attempts to affirm life and love shouldalso know no artificial limits.

Steed (1993:8) puts this issue in a slightlydifferent, more musicological manner. AtEllington’s funeral, a recording by Johnny Hodgesof “Heaven” from the Second Sacred Concert was

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played. Steed notes the construction of the melodyand some of its notable internal contrasts. Oneobservation is relevant in ascertaining andunderstanding Ellington’s conception of thesacred. “Ellington’s favored tri-tone is heardthree times, perversely ascending as if he weredetermined to make what was once called the‘devil’s interval’ angelic”. This desire to forcepeople to reconsider their stereotypicalcategorizations was a long-time project withEllington that led logically to the SacredConcerts.

This characteristic of blurring distinctions ofasserting that what some think evil is a path tothe good often irritated those who heldtraditional values. As Leonard (1962:21) notes,one of the major opponents of jazz included theguardians of traditional morality. Jazz violatedthe clear-cut values of this group throughblurring indisputable distinctions and promotingambiguity. Armstrong and Gillespie did so throughtheir humor while Ellington subverted acceptedreality through his embrace of the sacred, whichdiffered from more traditional notions.

Discussion In common with most western music, jazz

structurally comprises melody, harmony, andrhythm. Somewhat simplistically, it has beencommon to assign its harmony to Europe, rhythm toAfrica, and to leave its melody somewhat up forgrabs. Although there is some truth in thisstereotype, it excludes rather more than itincludes.

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And jazz, in common with every other culture,has its own values, traditions, norms, history,and attitudes. It certainly has its own myths,both internal and external, as well; that is,myths its members generate to encapsulate andexplain reality as well as myths outsiders haveimposed upon it. Although both myths servepurposes, each type requires hermeneuticalexplication in order to yield deeper, rather thanmere surface meanings.

Jazz, itself grew up out of the myth of Africaprevailing at the turn of the last century. Manyauthors have waxed eloquent on the ways in which“Africa” has been used to provide the westernworld with its images. Hammond and Jablow (1977),for example, provide a useful introduction to thetopic. Coetzee (1987:19) remarks:

For centuries, in fact, it has been the fate ofAfrica to be employed by the west as a kind ofimage bank from which emblems—sometimes ofsavagery, brutality, and hopelessness, sometimesof innocence, simplicity and good nature—sometimes... can be drawn at will. Mudimbe presents thebest and most sophisticated treatment of thistheme, the western invention of Africa. His calmphilosophical treatment exposes the processthrough which “Africa” came to be invented and theconsequences for Africa and the West of itsinvention.

Whatever the “prehistory” of jazz may havebeen, jazz itself begins with the consequences ofthe imposition of Jim Crow laws in New Orleans andthe subsequent cultural clash between blackCreoles and other blacks in New Orleans. Until the

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application of these laws, late in the nineteenthcentury, white and black musicians routinelyperformed together.

In 1903, W.E.B. Dubois articulated a theme thatinheres in the very essence of African-Americanculture; namely, “the dual heritage of the blackman in America”. That heritage, African andEuropean, is at root one of dual identity and acause of a recurring crisis of identity, as DuBoiswent on to note. In a very real sense, the historyof jazz has provided a dynamic model of the ever-changing terms of that heritage as well as arunning commentary on it. It has done so throughthe use of tropes of identity.

Tropes encapsulate a culture’s essence.Whatever a culture may be, however it viewsitself, it expresses that self-perception inselect images packed with powerful meanings. Jazzis no exception. It, too, has its own culturalmodes of expression, its personal symbols andmetaphors that encapsulate and convey identity.Moreover, the best of these tropes are flexibleand allow for the expression of changing conceptsof self-identity.

“Africa” has been precisely that type ofvehicle within jazz. It has served as a touchstonefor gauging the state of the art as well as theself-image of its performers. Throughout jazzhistory, the concept of “Africa” has served as anindex of authenticity. The less “African” and more“European” a performance, for example, the lesslikely jazz musicians are to find it acceptable.Conversely, the more authentic, even flawed, aperformance, the more it is perceived to beapproaching an African essence, or “soul”! Jazz

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musicians have been careful and correct inindicating that their music is not a result ofinability or corruption in performance, but,rather, of choice. Two musical cultures consistingof related, but differing codes have been capturedin the contrastive metaphors “African” and“European”. These terms have not, of course,remained static over time.

Tracing the manner in which these contrastiveterms have changed in meaning in the course ofjazz’s history provides an intriguing insight intoboth the genesis and change of jazz style and itscultural relationship to the increasingconsciousness of its performers. Insight into thatdialectical relationship, moreover, promises tolead to increasing understanding of the manner inwhich artists reinterpret cultural vehicles inorder to convey their own personal visions ofreality to fellow community members.

Thus, black musicians worked at perfectingstyles that were uniquely their own. No other bandcould imitate the swing of the Basie band. Noother band could be mistaken for Ellington’s. Hissophisticated use of harmonies and tone colors,inspired by French impressionistic music andpainting, was unique In Jazz. Black soloistsrarely had equals among white musicians. Therewere, of course, white musicians who were indeedoriginals, like Bunny Berrigan or Bix Beiderbecke.Significantly, these artists found themselvesimitating their own African myth, one stressingoutrageous living, unreliability and self-centeredness as prerequisites for creativity. Itwas but one more version of the myth of the “NobleSavage”, documented by Hammond and Jablow (1977).

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It is an open question of just how much Euro-American art has been created through amisunderstanding of

Throughout the post-war era, Africa’s aura grewamong jazz musicians. Certainly, the independencemovement added to Africa’s mystique and thelinkage of Black Liberation with it was butnatural. Islam became common among musicians longbefore it spread to other segments of the AfricanAmerican community. Armstrong’s trip to Ghana wasmerely the most noticeable of many trips by jazzmusicians to the continent. Africa increasinglybecame a metaphor of authenticity, of trueidentity within the black musical community and atrope of opposition to white exploitation ofAfrican Americans.

Certainly, images of Africa have long been partof jazz history. As I have argued, the contrastbetween “Africa” and “Europe” has provideddialectic of development for jazz itself. Africanelements have always formed part of the musicalcomposition of jazz, and “jungle” images, forbetter or worse, have been used, willingly or not,by Ellington, Armstrong, and others. Manymusicians have become Muslims in a belief thatIslam is a more authentic African religion thanChristianity and, thus, more appropriate for anAfrican American.

In the 1960s, however, Black Nationalism becamemore openly dominant in jazz than it had ever beenbefore in conformity with the self-consciousassertion of the right of blacks to control theirown destiny, including their own identity. AsAmerica in general entered the confrontationalpolitics of the late sixties, themes of identity—

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youth, gays, women, American Indians and blacks—became more pronounced. Initially, theseassertions of identity tended to be separatist andexclusionary. The movement illustrated a veryinteresting contrast between Black and Whiteimages of Africa in jazz. White musicians chooseto be part of Black culture. They are, however,free to move in and out of it at will. They are,therefore, always on trial by Black musicians andare aware of their probationary status. They tendto be both more romantic and fanatic about themystique of Africa than most Black musicians whoare more likely to use the concept as a tool—evenas a weapon—in order to obtain their objectives.

There were a number of manifestations of themovement to Africanize jazz, but all of themshared the adjective “free”. In some way, jazz wasto be made “free”. Indeed, even before the BlackPower movement itself had jelled, Ornette Colemanhad come on the scene in 1959 and, after aninitial burst of enthusiasm, met with outrighthostility. Within a few short years, however, manyof his basic ideas were being followed.

In one very real and important sense jazzitself is the message. Its own meaning, to itspractitioners and fans, changes over time as itssocial location alters and as the meaning of its“African/European” opposition varies. However, thesituation is further complicated because each jazzmusician and performance is meant to be creative,to generate meaning. Over and over, in one form orother, the principle is laid down that eachmusician must tell a story. Moreover, that storymust be personal; one must live the story themusic tells. In a truly essential way the medium

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is the message. Technique, for example, theability to run chord changes accurately, to playfast or slow and still swing, is admired but onlya naïve listener admires it for its own sake. Itmust be used in the service of conveying a story.Charlie Parker, for example, is said to haveadvised aspiring saxophone players first to learneverything about their horns and then to forget itall when playing. Technique, in other words, isonly a tool in allowing one’s true inner self tobe expressed. It is not admirable in and ofitself. A knowledgeable insider sums up theposition well when speaking about the early daysof the bop revolution:

I never heard anyone play as fast as Bird. Butit wasn’t just speed. He had ideas no one else had(Bob Redcross, personal communication).

Endeavoring to understanding the meaning ofjazz, therefore, involves one in a series ofexercises requiring the examination of multiplereferents and cross-referents, of matchingindividual biographies to broader movements,specific variations to broader themes, and theever-retreating just out of reach essence of themetaphor that is jazz itself, for to understandjazz is to understand the tertium quid that it is,namely, a symbol and encapsulation of Americaitself.

ConclusionEllington’s love for things that are “beyond

category” resonates with Levi-Strauss’scategorization of anomalous mediating categoriesas dangerous and sacred (Levi-Strauss 1967, forexample). These anomalous categories, according to

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Levi-Strauss, partake of the categories which theymediate and consequently are neither fish norfowl. They are dangerous and somehow pollute. MaryDouglas (1966) has treated of these categories ofpollution, an idea Neil Leonard (1987) has appliedto jazz itself.

Leonard (1987-9-10) notes that Emile Durkheim,who influenced Douglas, indicated not only thatthere is a distinction between the sacred and theprofane but between two kinds of sacredness. Thereis sacredness “that produces social and moralorder, health, and happiness ... There is also,however, an opposite sacred force that bringsdisorder, immorality, illness, and death. Thoughradically antagonistic, these two kinds ofsacredness can be highly ambiguous because bothstem from similar supernatural sources”.Interestingly, however, these types of sacrednessappear to be highly unstable and each can resolveinto the other. The musical “purist” seeks to keepthem separate. Even in the African-Americantradition there was a desire to keep the twotraditions separate, as some opposition toEllington’s sacred concerts revealed.

There is, however, an older African traditionthat understood the unity of the sacred. Thevariations work together to provide a harmoniouswhole. Each part both stands alone and yet takeson full meaning only within the context of theentire performance. This perspective is well-illustrated in the work of the Nigerian musician,Fela Anakulapi-Kuti.

In a sense, in his performance the Nigerianartist Fela added to Gregory Bateson’s and ErvingGoffman’s concept of frames, turning frames into

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shifting things, ones that almost perpetuallytransform themselves into one another. This house-of-mirror image of shifting frames is in keepingwith the predominant perspective on Africanreligious and philosophical thought that sees itas positing an ever-changing unstable realityunder the illusory permanent reality of every-daycommon sense. This skepticism of the presentedreality and a subsequent search for underlyingstructures is well-suited to African-derivedmusical performance.

Therefore, the incorporation of all varietiesof African-derived music is not accidental orhaphazard. It serves to convey his message ofBlack Pride. His point is the unity of blackpeoples everywhere. The manner in which he conveyshis message displays the technical brilliance thatis appreciated when it is suited to the message.Thus, his shifting frames reflect African religionand philosophy. The manner in which one style ofAfrican-derived music melds into another definestheir relationship through praxis not merediscussion. The central role of jazz, a word Feladisdained as did Ellington, is demonstrated in itsbeing used as a mediating form.

Finally, the continuous transformation ofmaterial is also evocative of spiritual matters.Fittingly, the self-proclaimed Black President andChief Priest led his people to a better landthrough invoking spiritual images and enactingthem on the stage. His entire performance isritual of a high order. It is a Creole performancethat has the “that too” characteristic of all suchperformances (James Farris Thompson, personalcommunication). Thus, there was no contradiction

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in Fela’s performance. Each element was anintegral part of the overriding message andenabled the performance to move toward an end hedeemed sacred, the true emancipation of the Blackman and the instilling of pride in his mind.

What is true of Fela illuminates Ellington’smixture of styles and categories. It would bebeneficial to explore Ellington’s African rootsmore deeply and to investigate his own reading ingreater detail in relationship to his music(Hudson 1991). It is clear that Ellington’sreligion struck orthodox Christians as pantheisticand idiosyncratic (Steed 1993: pp. 19ff. andGensel 1992). His statement that he was “born in1956 at the Newport Jazz Festival Hasse” (1993:322), was often cited but never fully explored.The religious connotations are often noted but theliteral sense in which Ellington meant the termhas been missed. He believed that somehow he hadbeen literally reborn and called to a vocation.

Seen within the context of African-Americanculture Ellington’s religious beliefs andpractices make perfect sense, even those“superstitious” aspects which so bothered his moretraditionally orthodox son Mercer (MercerEllington and Dance 1978: 111). The continuitybetween the Cotton Club and the Cathedral isemphasized by Ellington’s very African Americanphilosophy and theology. His mixture of categoriesof the sacred and profane and various types ofsacredness is an affirmation of both life and thecontinuous nature of that life, transcendingstereotypical traditional categories.

Jazz culture, then, challenges mainstreamculture in a number of ways. Through indirect and

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direct subversion—humor and confrontation—itasserts a reality contrasting with acceptedpresupposed cultural reality. The presuppositionsof the accepted worldview are generally held up toquestioning, upsetting true believers. Thus,whether the sacred clown, the genial sophisticatedreligious performer, or the angryconfrontationalist challenges accepted realitythrough performance, jazz can disturbinglychallenge one’s notions of cultural reality andoften does. It subverts accepted reality throughoffering its own perspective, sometimes comic andsometimes angry, of what reality could be,prompting listeners to think of just might be abetter world.

CodaThe trickster crosses boundaries and creates a

new reality, one most people never imagine. Withjust a handful of notes in a scale they weave newvistas, adding to the work of those greatmusicians who came before them, often findinghidden beauty in what once was deemed ugly. LikeTrickster, they improvise on the spot, erectingmusical structures on existing forms. People likeSonny Rollins or his idol, Charlie Parker, createon the spot expanding the music. Like Tricksterthey see those who mocked them imitate them,copying their innovations until they becomeclichés.

Like Trickster, the great musicians never losetheir ability to surprise. I have listened to thegreats every day of my life, and am every daysurprised by their work. Enrico Rava, the Italianavant-garde trumpet player, told me that he wakes

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up and listens to Louis Armstrong, stating that healways finds something new he gain use in his ownplaying. The true Trickster is always one stepahead of the rest of us. In music, we are alwaysstriving to catch up with the great creativegeniuses.

Trickster in mythology is often either a god ora demi-god. He is an opponent of the establishedorder; for some he, or she, is a hero. For others,however, he is a dangerous villain, one whodisturbs the balance of life. One does not have tospend much time among jazz musicians to see howcreative their language is and to note the depthof their perceptions. My wife once accompanied toa jazz club where we sat with the trio membersduring the break. When we left, she stated thatshe, a rock fan, could find that high level ofdiscussion among rock musicians.

Allowing for some important exceptions, she iscorrect. The men and women are always full ofsurprises. Ella Fitzgerald, for example,forgetting her lyrics to “Mack the Knife” in alive performance improvised lyrics on the spot.She could have simply scatted over the chords. Shechose to keep going, adding the spice of humor andhumility to the performance. Sara Vaughan,creating a new melody over a song’s chords whileretaining the original lyrics, not only kept thosefans that never or rarely listen to instrumentals,but also educated them at the same time.

The marvelous Stan Getz, who never composed asong on paper, never failed to compose newmelodies each time he put his tenor sax to hislips. And what can one say of Miles Davis, whomDizzy Gillespie termed the Prince of Darkness? He

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was a man always reinventing himself, even when hestrayed from the beautiful tone and the superbnote choice that marked his greatest musicalsuccess. Ironically, when asked why he did notforget the pop-funk and electronic abstractions ofhis later period, he said that if he tried to playstraight-ahead lyric music, he would give himselfa heart attack. Like the Trickster he was, hepredicted his death. He did return to playinggorgeous music and he died soon after—of a heartattack. He gave us a sad surprise.

Surprise is synonymous with Trickster. It keepsus mere mortals alive. It keeps us on our toes andlets us vicariously feel the thrill of living onthe edge, like Charles Mingus’s Clown on histightrope. The zigs and zags of Trickster’sprogress through life captivate us. Trickster’sappetites for life often get him, or her, introuble. But just as often they lead to somethingmarvelous—like authentic jazz!BIBLIOGRAPHY

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InterviewsAnakulapi-Kuti, Fela. Personal Interview. 1989.

Lagos, Nigeria.Ryerson, Ali. 1985. Personal interview. White

Plains, NYDance, Stanley and Helen Dance. 1978. Interview

with Jay McShann. December 11, 1978. Transcript atInstitute of Jazz Studies. Rutgers University,Newark.

Ross, Mattie. 1985 and 1986. Personalinterviews. London, England.

INDEX

aesthetics.........46African iii, v, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 42, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73,

75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 89, 90

African art........54African-Americanv, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 25, 28, 89

Africa's.......58, 80arbitrariness. . .iv, varchetype.....iii, 23Armstrong 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 37, 38, 41, 55, 56, 57, 58, 66,

148

67, 68, 70, 74, 75, 78, 80

authority..........ivBateson............82be-bop..........6, 15Bird2, iv, 2, 3, 4, 6,7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,13, 87

Bird...........64, 81Birdland.......43, 70Black 37, 41, 42, 47, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 67, 70, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83

Black and Tan Fantasy..................76

Black music.....6, 16boundariesiii, iv, v, 5, 6, 8, 11, 25, 26,28, 84

Charles Mingus.....46Charlie Parker1, iii, iv, v, 1, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 29, 63, 68, 70, 81, 84, 87

clown.......4, 16, 17conformity.........iv

Cotton Club. . . .76, 83Creole20, 28, 37, 50, 53, 62, 67, 73, 75, 83

cultureiii, iv, 6, 7, 8, 15, 16, 17, 24, 27, 28

Culture. . . .36, 65, 67culturesiii, v, 5, 21,28

Diz68, 69, 70, 71, 72,75

Diz,................3Dizzy 38, 44, 47, 49, 58, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75

Dizzy Gillespieiv, 1, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15,19, 38, 44, 47, 49, 58, 68, 70, 72, 84

Du Bois............73Durkheim...........82Ella Fitzgerald 19, 84Ellington. 1, 29, 47, 56, 57, 59, 69, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83

Eshu...............74

149

CHAPTER FIVE

European. 35, 38, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57, 60, 62, 63, 79, 81

Fela1, 2, 15, 17, 23, 70, 82, 83

fool........2, 25, 26Gerry Mulligan......8Goffman............82Hawkins............58humoriv, 2, 7, 15, 17,18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 84

Humor......67, 70, 71humor. iv, 2, 17, 22, 23

improvisation iv, 11, 24

Infants of the Spring..................72

interactions......iiiinterviews.........61Italian Americans 36, 38, 45, 46

Jack Teagarden’s. . .67James Baldwin wrote 73jazziv, v, 1, 2, 4, 6,7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,16, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 29, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41,

43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84,꿤 85

Jazz2, iii, iv, v, 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 65, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 83

John Coltrane 60, 61, 65

Keil...............68Leonard 65, 73, 78, 82Levi-Strauss. . .62, 81Little Jazz........73Louis Armstrongiv, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 24, 27, 36, 37, 38, 41, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 75, 84, 89

mediating......25, 26

150

metaphor. 58, 64, 74, 80, 81

Mozart.............56music 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83

Music. .36, 37, 43, 60musicians 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73, 79, 80

mythology5, 15, 16, 84New Orleans 1, 9, 11, 20, 24, 28

Nigeria........69, 74Parkeriv, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 16

Paul Radin’s........5

performance39, 42, 43,44, 49, 52, 54, 58, 62, 63, 65, 71, 73, 76, 79, 81, 82, 83

Pete...............39religion1, 5, 15, 16, 23, 29

ritual.............83Robert Farris Thompson..................75

Rochester. 2, 35, 43, 44, 45, 70

Sacred.........76, 77Satchmo 2, 3, 11, 20, 22, 41, 66, 69, 72

saxophone 44, 60, 63, 81

spirituality. 1, 2, 18subcultures. . . .iii, vsubversive humor. . .ivSwing. .55, 56, 57, 71tenor sax..........71transcendent........1transcending. .iii, 29transformative.....29trickster iii, iv, v, 5, 7, 11, 12, 15, 16, 25, 26, 27, 69, 70, 74, 75

151

CHAPTER FIVE

Trickster1, 2, iii, 2,5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12,13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 66, 68, 69, 70, 75, 84, 85, 88, 90

trickstersiii, iv, v, 5, 6, 10, 16

Tropes.........49, 79truth to power. .2, 17Vipers.........66, 75West Africa. . . .35, 67Yoruba 2, 17, 18, 23, 27, 30

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