Jazz and Justice. Gerald Horne
that Africans were “natural musicians,” which facilitated the popularity of “Blind Tom, the Slave Pianist” and his rival “Blind Boone” of St. Louis,41 should also be considered in contemplating the rise of this new music.
New art forms are often pilloried, not least because they are misunderstood, but jazz carries the added burden of being billed as one of the few art forms developed in North America and done so primarily by African Americans, who had been pilloried because of their earlier slave status and adamant refusal to accept supinely a slaveholders’ republic.42 This contributed to an “anti-jazz” movement, preceded by “anti-ragtime” fervor. This hostility made it easier to rationalize the gross exploitation of these musicians, since, as it was said, they were seen as “mere” Negroes, playing “Negro music.”43 In 1927 Pope Pius XI spoke of the “discordant cacophony, arrhythmic howls and wild cries” of the new music. (It is likely he was not speaking ex cathedra.)44 Dialectically, however, the difficult conditions under which this innovative music was produced helped to create conditions for the improvisation that was part of its essence. In a 1999 interview, the famed trumpeter Clark Terry recalled that because of the “derogatory things that would happen to you, the negative things, the pitfalls … you’d go crazy” absent improvisation. So the musicians would play games and engage in pranks. “I’d practice left-handed,” he said. “I’d practice upside down” and “if there’s something that seems to be synonymous with jazz,” he continued, “it’s good comedy,” which also involved improvising. He experimented with different tonguing and buzzing with his horn, with this dedicated experimentation under-girding the high art thereby created.45 In similar fashion, the versatile instrumentalist Eric Dolphy started experimenting with the bass clarinet in order to distinguish himself from musicians he saw as less talented but receiving more opportunities than himself, so he wanted to do something different.46 “Do something different” is another definition of the music called jazz.
Generally concurring, in a 2007 interview, the critic Nat Hentoff argued that these musicians he lionized “took risks all the time. That’s what improvisation is all about. If they were black, they took risks whenever they traveled down South”47—or, as in the case of Buck Clayton, perambulated in Shanghai. This well prepared them for taking musical risks, enhancing their art.
Unfortunately, some of these musicians were taking risks without traveling southward. In 1981, the trombonist Vic Dickenson, born in Xenia, Ohio, in 1906, recalled that “across the street from our house was a [forest] and the Ku Klux Klan used to meet there. They’d stand in a circle in their robes in that wood and burn their crosses and that upset me all during my childhood.”48 The bassist Milt Hinton had a similar experience. Born in 1910 in the heart of darkness that was Vicksburg, Mississippi, his grandmother, he recalled, was a “slave” of “Jefferson Davis’s father,” speaking of the leader of the so-called Confederate States of America that rebelled in 1861 in order to perpetuate enslavement of Africans.49 It is difficult to imagine a more horrid racist pedigree, a point ratified in 1988 when Hinton recalled chillingly, “One of the clearest memories of my childhood in Vicksburg is the lynching I saw when I was seven or eight…. There was a bonfire and fifty or sixty men were drinking out of whiskey jugs, dancing, cursing and looking up towards a tree over their heads. And in this big tree I saw a figure shaped like a person hanging from a long wire cable attached to a branch … he was covered with blood.” Yet the murderers “kept shooting their guns up at the dangling body” as a “couple of men [were] dragging over a gasoline drum and putting it under the hanging body. Then someone else threw a torch at the can and the place lit up like it was daytime…. I’ll never forget that blaze,” he said morosely, “and watching that body shrivel up like a piece of bacon while the crowd cheered.”50 The question for our purposes is: to what extent did such experiences shape the passion and bathos of the music?
In sum, an unwelcome accompanist of this music as it was birthed was the kind of violence—and threats thereof—that Dickenson and Hinton witnessed in their youth. It was in 1900 in New Orleans that, in light of racial unrest, a local editor called boldly for the “FINAL SOLUTION” of the Negro Question, adding ominously, “Race war means extermination.”51 Assuredly, this outrage impelled exile abroad where this music could flourish, just as it impelled an adroit improvisation necessary for survival in such adverse conditions.
For the musician Billy Harper, born in 1943, this state of affairs was unsurprising. Speaking in 1971, he said, “‘Since most people [sic] have been taught to hate and fear the black man and in this country this music represents one of the strongest parts of his culture,’”52 it was hardly shocking that these Negro artists became frequent targets of delirious bile. Yet, as Ellis Marsalis, born in 1934, observed in 1971, the fact that these artists created a unique cultural form did not save them from bigotry, but it may have enhanced it. This pianist and patriarch of what has been seen as the First Family of the music, said then that “the only advantage the black musician has is that music being first a talent and then a craft, the establishment is forced to deal with him in a manner that they are not forced to deal with him when they are hiring garbage men,”53 which was simply infuriating to adversaries of the Negro.
Inexorably, this pattern of iniquity created an ecosystem that influenced those who might have thought they were on the side of the angels. According to the well-regarded historian and critic Lewis Porter, “The racism in our society makes it all too easy for white authors to take a condescending attitude to the jazz they write about.”54 In this vein, the historian and musician Ingrid Monson has referred contemptuously to “what I term the ‘white resentment narrative,’” for example, those who feel that melanin-deficient musicians and writers have not received their due, because of “Crow Jim”—i.e. a “Jim Crow” visited upon Euro-Americans, i.e. a kind of inverted oppression allegedly perpetrated by African Americans.55
Thus, because of the ingrained racism of the society in which the music was born, allied with the objective exploitation of musicians generating wealth, all this combined to create a culture inimical to the health and well-being of the artists. An early pioneer of the music was James Reese Europe, born in 1880, whom Eubie Blake, pianist extraordinaire, purportedly called the real “’King of Jazz’” and not the aptly named pretender, Paul Whiteman.56 Tragically, Europe was stabbed to death by a drummer during the First World War, this after being gassed and hospitalized on the battlefields of Europe.57 A few years later, horn player Leo “Snub” Mosley, born in 1905, was slated to perform in Texas. As he recalled, “They advertised us on the front page of the newspaper: ‘FAMOUS NIGGER BAND HERE TONIGHT,’” which was a prelude to another occasion when the notorious terrorists, the Ku Klux Klan, planned to tar and feather him and his bandmates, “just because we were playing for the white people.” This planned act of terror may have been inspired by white competitors, since “there was some white opposition too from the biggest white band around there, the Jimmy Joy band that played hotels in Dallas and the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City.”58
During the Second World War, the drummer Philly Joe Jones was hired as a trolley operator, one of eight Negro men given such a position in Philadelphia (one of the themes of this book is how so many of these musicians found it difficult to make a living pursuing their art and often had to find other means of support). Reporting for work the first day, he found that white strikers had shut down the entire intercity transport system in protest of this desegregated hiring. The racism was so intense that an armed military guard was placed on every streetcar so that Blacks would not attack white operators travelling through Black neighborhoods and vice versa. “I remember this hateful chapter of my teenage years,” said the musician, Benny Golson. “It was terrible.”59
Again, the question to consider is, inter alia, what was the impact of such horror on musicians? Did it give their artistry a certain fury and anger? Did it impel them to protest, for example, unionizing and protesting generally?
It was also during the war, whose bloodiness may have inspired the like-minded on both sides of the Atlantic, that the saxophonist Charlie Parker, born in 1920, and his fellow musician Oscar Pettiford, born in 1922, were attacked by a soldier in a New York City subway,