Jazz stopped being popular with black audiences in the 1950s, in 1959 to quote the Grammy-winning jazz musician Nicholas Payton. Other than the continued presence of smooth jazz in most of our lives and for jazz in hip-hop, despite the number of black jazz musicians, jazz has become almost insignificant in popular black culture.
No one dances the jazz dances of before. Jazz is listened to as if it’s chamber music (chamber jazz in a genre). However, once upon a time it used to move crowds and make men and women hysteric. Some say that jazz stopped being popular because commercially concerned whites were also deciding what it should be. That’s certainly a big reason why, as it is for the current state of R&B and hip-hop. However, jazz might have stopped being relevant because of the ethnocentric civilization that came after World War II, the books, the gestures, the mentalities, the dress, the ambitions, etc. In came new Ethos and a community to match. Many musicians tried to cater to the new Ethos, such as Miles Davis and his album On The Corner, but it was over. Ever since, jazz has been a cult thing.
The origins of jazz are lost. The first recorded album of jazz was by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and all-white band. The jazz band that was supposed to have invented jazz never recorded anything. Is jazz music quite simply the product of life in a city with a carnival? As the Athenian theatre of the antiquities came out of Dionysian festivities (ancestor of carnival), Indian drama the product of dances associated with fertility cult ceremonies, french court ballet from carnival masquerades, African masks and dances from rituals and ceremonies, it might be the case that years of New Orleans carnival but also of musical practice and of education led to a musical drama played by a band named jazz and danced to by crowds. Early jazz, such as Papa Celestin’s song “Marie Laveau,” is full of characters and their stories sung in the tragicomic first person like carnivals and many songs are in the societies that French colonialism gave birth to, such as Trinidad and Haiti. Like in a Trinidadian carnival, Jelly Roll Morton, one of the first jazz musicians, played in character. Jelly Roll was supposed to mean a woman’s private part and it matches names like “fighting sparrow” in Trinidadian carnival.
Carnival lead to entire aesthetics in Europe as jazz did in black culture. Rabelais, Moliere and a whole bunch of great writers who today civilize Europeans found their aesthetics in carnivals. There is even carnival in Shakespeare. In black culture, the black writer who most famously wrote jazz poems was Langston Hughes. However, reading a Hughes poem is not like listening to a jazz song or a swing song from before 1959. His poems have a jazz-like rhythm but not jazz culture like content. He is simply treating the subject the reality of jazz. To quote Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he is participating in the call and response that is the discussion about the humanity in black life. The following is his poem “Jazzonia.”
Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.
Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
Were Eve’s eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?
Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!
In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,” in which she uses the word ‘jazz,’ is the same case.
THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Those poems are very similar to the general ethnocentrism that still dominates black culture and whose only real competitor for significance is black ghetto-centric culture as heard in Trap or Drill music.
There is an inherent elegance to jazz. It seems to be an elegant way of laughing about the world and being nonchalant about spending one’s time. Jazz music has become much less relevant to black life and so has humor-filled elegance, except for in the subculture of a lot of young black women. Would the elegant cool of young black women, who seem to be able to laugh about the characters that surround them, be the secret to reviving jazz? It might be the case. However, if jazz is made popular again, this young male will be the first on that dance floor.
Emmanuel Adolf Alzuphar is a music and culture critic. He grew up in Haiti. He attended George Washington University. His Twitter handle is @alzuphar. He also writes songs.
