Clarion call: Toward Jazz and the Black Arts Movement

Clarion call:Toward Jazz and the Black Arts Movement Bobby Broom (bio) As African Americans, we should realize and celebrate the wonderful gift of jazz music that we have shared with the world. The art form was born despite the unimaginably wretched conditions that we have endured as Americans. In many ways, it is a musical representation of our collective journey. Over numerous generations, it adapted through a variety of influences, locations, social conditions, and circumstances, while continually absorbing cultural material and repurposing it musically to meet our needs. Jazz, played from our unique perspective, was and is an expression of our full existence as human beings. With the imprints of the African American experience and the Black aesthetic, jazz shares the lifeblood of the 1960s and '70s Black Arts Movement and helped to give it its musical voice. The idea or term Black aesthetic has been "used to describe works of art, literature, poetry, music, and theater, that centralize black life and culture."1 Central to Black American music in all its forms and periods are certain essential characteristics that identify and differentiate it. The blues-strain, rhythmic fluidity and syncopation, and improvisation have remained apparent, in varying degrees and forms, in every iteration of our music. The blues-strain is thought to have begun after Africans' displacement and subjection to forced labor and other atrocities. It began as native melodies, in spontaneous vocalizations rendered by singular or collective utterances through moans and hums, set to meet despair or unrest. These melodies assimilated to singing, shouts, claps, and stomps that encouraged work, play, worship, and communion. With each development, adaptation, and evolution of our music, African Americans maintained and built upon these core elements, adding instruments and integrating or adapting song-types and forms to meet a variety of situations. The blues-strain was the seed from which all subsequent musical styles were developed by the African Americans enslaved in the colonies. The Negro spiritual was the earliest and most lasting of these styles and occurred as the result of the Africans' conversion to the religion of the European colonizers. Through their assimilation and adoption of the Christian hymns, the Africans who were enslaved integrated their native blues-strain with the original hymnal selections and rural folk-hymns, altering them to their liking.2 It is believed that the spirituals, encouraged by the religious zeal of the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, were coming into existence by at least the late 1700s. The first published collection of them was Slave Songs of the United States in 1867. Not only were the hymns' melodies reconfigured, but so were the words and/or their meanings.3 For people who were enslaved, salvation had much more than just religious meaning. According to writings by Frederick Douglass and others, Canaan was understood by people who were enslaved as code for Canada, Egypt-land meant the South, and the river Jordan could have referred to the Mississippi or any other river that needed to be crossed in order to reach freedom.4 "Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains."5 Therefore, if we consider the often intended double meaning, along with the harsh conditions under which these songs came into existence and were being sung, we can interpret them not only as the first musical creation of the American Black aesthetic, but also their first songs of disapproval, protest, and rebellion. Before jazz came of age at the turn of the twentieth century, prototype versions were likely heard for the first time nationally during touring minstrel [End Page 8] shows. Popular from the mid-1800s, this early form of American entertainment was based on derogatory depictions of Black people and their culture, created and portrayed by white "actors" in blackface. These self-contained, traveling productions, advertised as offering authentically "Negro" spectacles, included scenes that were caricatures of African American interaction and performances of the ragtime, popular music, and early blues of the day. The minstrel show was significant for several reasons. For the first time, it introduced African American culture, specifically music and dance, to rural white audiences as entertainment. This was certainly...

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