CHARLES MINGUS, a bass virtuoso, a band leader, an explosively original composer and a Negro, came off the bandstand one night a few weeks ago at a club on New York's lower East Side. As he passed the bar, a Negro considerably darker than Mingus said to him scornfully, "Man, you're not black enough to play the blues."
The fact that Mingus himself bristles with pride in being Negro and the fact that he has often claimed that only Negroes can play authentic jazz had not impressed his critic. The incident, however, represents a diminishing phenomenon in contemporary jazz. There are, to be sure, musicians and listeners who continue to insist that jazz will always be a specifically Negro language, but they appear to be proportionately fewer than they were ten and fifteen years ago. Trumpeter-leader Miles Davis speaks for the majority when he points out, "I don't care if a man has green hair and purple skin. All I care about is whether he can play."
Although musicians are increasingly being judged by their peers on musical ability without regard to skin color, it is also true that both whites and Negroes in jazz remain conscious of the fact that practically every major innovator in the music has been Negro. In the past, however, this predominance of black originality was often ascribed to a quasi-mystical, innate Negro superiority in jazz—an American adaptation of the concept of negritude. Now, more and more players explain Negro pace-setting in the music by environmental factors. "After all," says cornetist Nat Adderley, "I heard different music in church than whites did and we had different records on the jukeboxes in our neighborhood. It figures then that we'd have a head start—that is, those of us with musical capacity."
Elaborating on this viewpoint, Cecil Taylor, an avant-garde pianist and composer, speaks of jazz as part of what Ralph Ellison has called "the Negro American style." The music, Taylor emphasizes, comes out of a way of life and a way of looking at life. "Jazz," he adds by way of illustration, "is not only the way Billie Holiday sang but the way she'd pronounce certain words. It's the way certain people walk. It's the way Duke Ellington pats his foot when he's playing. Sure, it comes out of the experience of the Negro in America—the way he feels, the way he brings those feelings into music."
As more white players have become familiar with that Negro subculture, a growing percentage of black jazzmen have conceded that whites have a place in the music. Dizzy Gillespie, while asserting that Negro predominance in jazz will not end until the society is really and thoroughly integrated, does admit the presence now of white jazzmen of substance. "We're not the only ones who swing, baby," he emphasizes.
"Back in the I920's," Duke Ellington said recently, "I tried to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing `Negro music.' Then we'd have had something to hang onto and we wouldn't have been caught up in the semantic nonsense about what jazz is. By now, however, the music is so integrated that you can't tell one part from the other, so far as color is concerned."
WHILE, therefore, there have not yet been towering white innovators, the young white apprentice today is considerably less likely to have as distinctively "white" a sound as did Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer in the 1920's. For years, Negro musicians insisted they could tell from a recording whether a player was white or Negro. Some still say they can. But others are no longer so sure. One Negro held on to his conviction that he could always tell the difference until he heard a white trumpeter a few months ago in a primarily Negro unit. "For the first time," he admitted, "there was no way for me to distinguish by color—without looking."
Among the jazz avant-garde particularly, color difference is becoming less and less conspicuous. In the older traditions, there continue to be styles which Negroes have monopolized—the kind of earthy, urban blues singing represented by Ray Charles and B. B. King; the fiercely driving tenor saxophone-organ sound and beat common to local clubs in Negro neighborhoods; and the fading, quasi-gospel "soul" jazz which grew up in the middle and late 1950's to counter the then popular but lukewarm, predominantly white "west coast jazz."
The avant-garde experimenters in what is loosely termed the "new thing" integrate, however, with comparative ease. Here too the innovators are Negro—alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, pianist Cecil Taylor, composer George Russell, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, among them. But increasingly there are white sidemen who win the full respect of most of their black contemporaries—bassists Charlie Haden and Steve Swallow, pianist Paul Bley and trombonist Roswell Rudd.
A spur to interracial unity among the avant-garde is the unprecedentedly bleak economic situation for the newer players. Never before in jazz history has it been so difficult for non-established performers to get a chance to work in public; and there is a resultant feeling of communality—with some exceptions—among all colors in the avant-garde as against the apathetic outside world. When the New York experimental jazz community decided to hold its own four-day "October Revolution in Jazz" at an obscure West Side night club this past fall, the program was fully integrated, as was the audience. And a new Jazz Composers Guild, a nascent co-operative involving some of the same musicians, is also unselfconsciously integrated. Despairing of any help from the traditional middlemen in jazz, these musicians are uniting to find their own place to play, teach and record their own albums which they will then sell by mail.
Seeing the music become more integrated, some observers have taken this as a sign that jazz is no longer grounded in protest. Actually, explicit protest was rare in jazz until the past twenty years. Some blues lyrics did indeed speak of prejudice or of class anger (like Bessie Smith's Poor Man's Blues and the later, more sophisticated Deep South Suite of Duke Ellington); but there was relatively little programmatic protest in jazz. The particular "cry" of jazz—that thrust of rhythm and "dues-paying" sound endemic to all the best jazz from the music's beginnings—was regarded by some writers as being in itself protest. And so it was, but it was seldom protest on a wholly conscious level. In the 1940's, however, a major change took place, first in the language of jazz and then in the attitudes of jazz musicians. Such Negro innovators as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk considerably expanded and complicated the jazz idiom. As the music became more challenging, its practitioners (the early "hoppers") had less and less patience with the old-time function of the jazzman as provider of background music for dancing, talking, drinking and courting. He demanded that he be listened to with respect and full attention; and when that respect was not forthcoming, he often literally turned his back on the audience and blew into the wall.
As John Lewis, musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, has summarized the basic alteration of attitude: "This revolution, or whatever you want to call it, in the 1940's took place for many reasons, and not only for musical reasons. . . . For the younger musicians this was the way to react against the attitude that Negroes were supposed to entertain people. The new attitude of these young Negroes was: `Either you listen to me on the basis of what I actually do or forget it'." There were white sidemen among these Negroes, and they took their cue from the black militants.
THE "PROTEST" elements in this new jazz were also not at first programmatic. But, in addition to the stance of the players, the music itself clearly reflected a refusal to compromise for commercial considerations and more basically, a pride in being a modern jazz musician as well as in being black. Thelonious Monk, for instance, has never written a "protest" piece and in private conversation, he seldom focuses on such subjects as the civil rights struggle. His jazz, however, with its sources in Negro church music, the Harlem "stride" style of piano and Duke Ellington, vividly reflects an assertive pride of heritage. The same is true of the otherwise musically disparate Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Neither makes speeches on prejudice in their music, but their jazz speaks from a position of strength in their self-images as creators who do not have to—and will not—grin for the white man.
Meanwhile, there were other jazzmen who did incorporate specific protest themes in their jazz. Starting in the 1950's, a significant number of new originals were given the names of African countries and occasionally of African independence slogans. Domestic racial conflict also began to figure in the music of Charles Mingus (Faubus Fables, Prayer for Passive Resistance); Art Blakey (Freedom Rider) and Max Roach (We Insist: The Freedom Now Suite). The latter, recorded for the Candid label, recieved an imprimatur of effectiveness by being banned from South Africa.
Jazzmen, moreover, began to speak out on civil rights and perform for the cause. Previously, with very few exceptions, most jazz musicians avoided taking controversial stands. But by the end of the 1950's, even Louis Armstrong was publicly criticizing President Eisenhower for his slowness in enforcing school integration in the South. The usually taciturn Count Basie joined a picket line, and more and more of the younger players refused to play the South at all. For a time there was a small amount of black nationalist expression among modern jazzmen. Abbey Lincoln (Mrs. Max Roach and a compelling jazz singer) was one of the leaders of a black nationalist demonstration at the United Nations on the death of Lumumba. And Roach recorded an affectionate original, Garvey's Ghost, in tribute to Marcus Garvey, a precursor in a way of Elijah Muhammad.
There was also a brief flurry of conversion to Islam (not Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam but orthodox Mohammedanism). Some jazz players adopted Arabic names and declared they considered themselves only nominal Americans. A few still bear those names, but conversions to Islam have nearly stopped.
Anger and determination to help "the movement" do remain. Dizzy Gillespie frequently performs for fundraising events in the civil rights field as do many other jazzmen. Gillespie, moreover, conducted a Presidential campaign in 1964 which was, of course, for kicks but which also led to a Los Angeles press conference in which the candidate declared: "The real issue of civil rights is not the idea of discrimination in itself but the system that led to the discrimination. Such as the schools—the teaching in the schools. They don't teach the kids about the dignity of all men everywhere." The concept of a jazzman making this kind of a statement—let alone attracting a sizable press representation to hear it—would have seemed utterly fanciful thirty years ago.
SINCE jazz is the full expression of the man playing, it is clear that modern jazz is more grounded in protest than ever before. It is not so much such obvious works as Faubus Fables which prove this contention, but rather the changed personality of the jazzman. Gillespie's repertory contains hardly any music labeled social criticism; but his very bearing on the stand and the clarity with which he fuses vintage Negro blues and elements of African music in some of his work make his position evident. Gillespie does nothing as crude as Woody Guthrie's affixing of a sign to his guitar in the late 1930's that read "This machine fights for freedom." But Gillespie, like other modern jazz-men, does stand and play as a man who is secure in his own dignity and will not suffer that dignity to be chipped—either by a cop or by a drunken member of an audience.
The avant-garde, however, goes even farther in its stance of protest in both its music and its attempts to get that music heard. More and more of its participants, white and black, express hostility not only to discrimination but to majority American values. In conversation, many of them tend to sound like Paul Goodman and a few have begun to regard their music in a way none of the older players—even Gillespie and Miles Davis—have.
In an interview I did with him in Down Beat, Cecil Taylor told of the enormously re-energizing experience he had of working regularly for seven weeks in Denmark a couple of years ago after exceedingly long stretches of unemployment here. Taylor described the effect of being able to communicate to a highly responsive audience as a "metamorphosis." It was, he added, him "living on a different plane. I found I had so much more energy—both on and off the stand—than I had imagined. If we could do this in America, we'd be able to operate at maximum capability on all levels. We could begin to think more clearly with regard to political action, for instance. We'd be able to think in terms of what we could contribute to the community on all levels—not just the level of a musician. The artist, if he were working at what he wants to do in public, could become an engaged part of the community. And because the artist is so close to reality, he would be able—in language the community could understand—to spell out exactly what his work is about and how it relates to them. How it comes out of perhaps the same problems they're struggling with."
The new breed of jazzmen, therefore, is beginning to transcend race but is angrier than ever at blandness, societal constrictions and what Paul Goodman has termed the "compulsory mis-education" of his potential audience. Charles Mingus, for instance, talks of getting funds to play on the streets for children. And another avante-garde player agrees: "We've got to get them young before they get twisted out of the capacity to hear what we're saying."
The evolution of jazz continues; and as fascinating as that evolution is in terms of the music, equally absorbing is the way in which the jazz player is changing. The next decade of jazz should be the most unpredictable yet—for all shades of its practitioners. —Nat Hentoff
