The Saga History of Jazz

leemcgavinjoey

Posted on October 15, 2013
I recently bought a Louis Armstrong record and on the back was this wonderful piece of writing on the origins of jazz by a man named Colin Grogan. It seemed a shame that it should only be available to those who own the record so I’m going to write this up for all to see.

“The history of Jazz is a footnote to the histories of two continents – Africa, and the Americas.

Everybody knows the story of the condemned man who was overheard to say, as he walked towards the gallows – “this will teach me a lesson”. But how many know the true story, reported in the San Francisco Press in May 1936, about two murderers who had been sentenced to death following upon a sensational crime? Part of the newspaper story was - “The condemned men listened to jazz music from a gramophone until it was time to go to the death chamber. They were accompanied to the gallows by the Catholic chaplain who had converted them to his faith during their imprisonment”.

Each jazz enthusiast may decide for himself what relevance the jazz records had in assisting the chaplain in winning for God (in the “nick” of time) two more souls. But the gravamen of the story is that by the mid-thirties the musical genre of jazz was as much a part of the daily was if life in the U.S.A. as the icebox in the kitchen. With a fair share of time left for pop, it was jazz which was the essential diet of American steam radio; and there were more heroic names from the world of jazz than there were from pop – the objective of the pop crooners being to turn teenagers (then called bobbysoxers) into swooners, jazz music being too sophisticated for the kids. Jazz in the Twenties and Thirties, was Mr. Average Adult American can’s staple musical diet.

Jazz, by this particular name, is said to have suffered a decline in the early Sixties. But a rose does smell as sweet by any other name, and who is there to doubt that enormous elements of jazz are within the musical inventions of The Beatles, The Rolling Stone, The Brian Auger Trinity, The Procul Harum, etc.?

Jazz in all its origins was African music, and African music only. It was the African musical artform which was refined into sounds we too can comprehend. Its primary origin was from the earliest African negro slaves within the United States who were able to lay their hands upon musical instruments and cause them to emit the sounds which were within their souls. Their continent had been lost to them. But the drum beats within their psyches were intact.

The sweetest flowers may grow on dungheaps. The calamitous conditions of the early American slave culture is too wellknown, and too loathsome, to bear repeating. On the banks of the Mississippi there they sat down and wept. Yes, they wept when they remembered Africa. But our Godgiven natures do not permit whole lifetimes of woe and weeping. Some few persons in the world there are whose lives consist of woe and weeping and no more.

They are called melancholics. They are confined to institutions. But for the rest of us, who weeps must also sing. And so the early African slaves sang, and clapped their hands, and raised their voices to the heavens, sometimes in lamentation, sometimes in joy. The slaves were numerous. No matter how beastlike their daily toil they were at one together in the colour of their skins. They were at one together in their common lot of having lost their Zion.

And they that carried them away required of them a song, saying, sing us one of the songs of Africa. But how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Africa, let my right hand forget her cunning. This they then believed. This they now believe. And it is within this belied that they distilled a magical artistry of their own of a far broader spectrum than jazz. Jazz, historically was to be the culminating artform of a continuum of musical invention. The pristine forms were – negro Gospel, and negro Spirituals; and thence to the same thing all over again really, only in secular form, the Blues. 

The Blues were lamentations. The Blues were dirges. The blues were not addressed to God, and not about Him. The Blues was the negro artform which described, in words and music, what their own lives were all about. Their earlier and far less sophisticated forms – Gospel and Spiritual – were what heaven was to be all about. The jazz sound, when it came into its own, was to be neither Blues nor Spirituals nor Gospel. Jazz was what they were all about – their Afro origins; their Afro psyches; their Afro internalised drum beats; their Afro aspirations.

Read more: http://leemcgavinjoey.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/the-saga-history-of-jazz/
Photo 1 from: http://dreamingattwilight.blogspot.com.br/2009/05/reworked-designs-all-that-jazz.html
Photo 2 from: http://alphamale1980.deviantart.com/art/The-Jazz-Singer-42327323