Chatzikaleas Stylianos (Stelios)

5 Parou Street

17456 Athens, Greece

s.chatzikaleas@gmail.com

+30 6993038228

Dear Madam or Sir,

The current essay is an excerpt from my Jazz History (minor subject) Thesis while I
was studying at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels in Belgium at the Master of
Music Program. It was an elective course during the 1st year of study.

The main topic discussed during the lectures was the relationship between Jazz
Music and political affairs according to major chronicle events of 19th and 20th
century mainly in the U.S. A more or less typical bibliographical research was the
main method followed in order to compose the following text although a significant
number of music records needed to be analyzed which are being mentioned at the
Discography section.

In order to make this essay shorter I have just kept and modified five chapters:

1. Early Years

2. Swing Music Era

3. Bop and the Beat Generation

4. Two examples of politically active, modern jazz musicians

5. Jazz as resistance

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Early Years (end of 19th Century)
In the US, African music crossed over with one hundred years of Spanish, French
and English musical tradition before the first notes of Jazz would be heard. These
influences shaped the harmonies, melodies but of course the first jazz rhythms and
timbres came from Africa. The development of the rice industry, cotton, tobacco
and sugar in the southern states spawned the need for a huge labor force that was
housed very close to its workplace. The labor force was made up of African slaves
by whom their own musical traditions began to re-emerge, and there was the
constant stimulus of the introduction of new slaves directly from Africa. The “group
playing” element of this music that was mainly vocal began to flourish with the
drum as the main musical instrument although the plantation owners did not
always allow it. However most of them encouraged heir slaves to sing hymns or
work songs. Many owners believed that the slaves had become Christians and in
this context a significant amount of slaves were forced to sing catholic hymns
based on European harmonic and melodic elements. However when slaves sang
these religious hymns you could immediately perceived the difference. The music
on which European hymns were based differed radically from anything that could
be heard in the African music heritage. The African music system was more
flexible and complex using many quartertones, not only tones and semitones as in
European music. This "slipping" from every note had nothing to do with the
technique of European singer. The African perception of European religious music
performance became known as Spirituals and later renamed Gospel music. The
altered notes slaves were using became known as the “Blue Notes”. The plantation
owners had certain reasons to endorse the Work Songs. These hymns were a
stimulus for the work rate of the slaves as well as operating as a safety valve that
pacified the anger and indignation. For a long period of time New Orleans, as the
largest port in Louisiana was the main area of musical interest while all this cultural
mixture would occur. This does not mean that there was no music production in the
other states of the south. The first slaves arrived in 1713, when the region was still
a French territory. The French attitude toward slaves appeared to be more

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patriarchal than the practice of other European- originated masters and despite the
fact that the “Code Noir” came into effect here for the first time, the proportion of
slaves who were free were higher in Louisiana than in other southern states.
Catholicism of the French-Spanish, was much more flexible toward the slaves
compared to Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, as a defining force that allowed the
existence of a liberal spirit which helped significantly the survival of Afro- American
culture. After the civil war, and through this tolerance, liberated Afro-American from
all over the U.S. were got the right to build an elementary social plantation to thus
be able to labor while keeping the peculiarities of their own culture (the assemblies
of the functional African music in Congo Square) (Giannopoulos, 1990). In New
Orleans there were four different cultures coexisting (French, Spanish, African,
Aitini) as well as minorities of German, Italian and central -European settlers as
well as a significant number of native Americans. New Orleans, fairly newly
established, was called the City of Music. There are a number of documents
describing the local feasts as colorful musical palette full of new folk music, which
took place around New Orleans. Folk Orchestra formations would include, also
some black musicians, usually liberated slaves who had been musically educated
by European musicians. The dances at these feasts were widely known as
Quadrilles and Waltzes. In Congo Square or on the Mississippi shore where
hundreds of slaves gathered and danced to the music played by their colleagues.
In 1817 a law was passed which limited the dances only to Congo Square, as a
result dances and drum instruments were frequently prohibited, which led slaves
organize themselves into bands to play music, and those who were liberated often
played in military bands. (They had won their freedom due to their participation at
the war of 1812). A unique social phenomenon of that time in the US was that of
the Creole people. Originating from multi-ethnic parents, The Creole had been
treated differently from black slaves who came from Africa, since they were born in
the New World, under French masters, from which they inherited the language and
artistic influence of French culture with music being playing a vital role. To sing or
play the piano was evidence of a higher culture and so the young Creoles were the

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first blacks that could read music within the New Orleans' melting pot. Creole
musicians were familiar with the European music tradition, they have
acknowledged well-known repertoire from Arias of French operetta to light-music
songs. Creole musicians were often spoiled and bourgeois. They never improvised
and had an elevated view of European music. On the other side black people of
New Orleans had their own music tradition that had largely survived, cultivated by
urban culture. Unlike the Creoles, they brought the tradition of plantation calls,
hollers, work songs and church hymns. The descendants of whom had all those
internal influences (from the community) and external influence (from the urban
environment) and on the other hand had no difficulty in becoming professional
musicians, unlike the white and Creole who considered the profession of this
"inferior music" socially unacceptable. This process lasted throughout the duration
of the 19th century and created the osmotic conditions for the subsequent
appearance of a new music called Jazz. Towards the end of the 19th century
several events occurred which were important for the course of the later definition
of jazz music. Firstly, the Blues changed character, becoming more instrumental
than vocal. Secondly, after the Spanish-American war in 1898 a lot of second-
hand shops appeared in New Orleans filled with musical instruments that the army
sold after its dissolution. Afro-American people could therefore find drums,
trumpets, clarinets and trombones at very low prices. Thirdly, in a 1897 law on "the
protection of morals", prostitution and related centers were limited in the Storyville
district. This had two consequences for the beginning of jazz: a) Black musicians in
New Orleans could easily find work and b) Black musicians with the Afro-American
music heritage came into contact with the Creoles and shared musical traditions,
experiences, audience. In its original form, three instruments played the jazz -and
especially the melodic section of this new music –: trombone, clarinet and trumpet.
The soloist interprets the main melody of a well-known song and then improvises
slightly free over its harmonic sequence forming a new arrangement of the song.
Although there was a standard way of organizing and interpreting jazz, a wide
variety of atypical musical expressions existed due to the great personalities of the

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era: King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, ODJB (Original Dixieland Jazz
Band).

Swing (Beginning of 20th century)

Swing is therefore linked to the implementation of F. Roosevelt's policies. The
most immediate impact of Roosevelt's politics on Jazz came from the left, by
supporters of the New Deal but also from a democratic popular culture by the
Communist Party, which adopted Jazz music from 1935 onwards. The contribution
of the left was not only discovering young music talents, although no one else has
shown such interest in black bluesmen of the South. What the left did was to pull
out black music off the ghettos, mobilizing this strange combination of radical Jews
and wealthy liberal Wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), to the New York City
establishment (Hobsbawm, 2001). The left and particularly New York’s radical left-
wing thinkers, popularized swing music throughout the country. Audience simply
stumbled into the new sound and enjoyed its new vibe. Jazz Orchestras and Big
Bands were fast growing, touring across the U.S. on behalf of their own profit,
financial rehabilitation of their musicians and of course the profit of record label
industry. It was that time indeed that bands began to transform into orchestras
while record sales were rising along with their own popularity, largely thanks to the
new fashion of the “juke-box”, which in 1940 almost absorbed half of the
production of record industry. Sales soared up to 130 million in 1941 from 10
million, at the time of major crisis (Hobsbawm, 2001). It is quite difficult to say
whether politics influenced the ideology of musicians although there was a shift of
black artists to the democratic party of Roosevelt. Politics was not an issue that
widely concerned people for whom music was a way of life. (The black
intellectuals on the other hand, were highly politicized and touched by the passion
of communists in favor of racial integration and promotion of black music). There
were of course jazz musicians performing at the Camp Unity, a camp of the
Communist Party, which had developed some radical left ideas. Although what
most musicians declared that time was the encouragement of interracial sexual

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contact. According to David Stowe an Ideology of Swing was established within
the black musicians that expressed the respect of the cherished American ideals
of freedom, democracy, tolerance and equality. The ideology was anti-racist or
adopted the belief that Music has no color (Stowe, 1994). The ideology behind
Swing makes its appearance at the modern era with the film Swing Kids (1993)
that takes place in Nazi Germany. The Swing Kids refuse to enlist in Hitler's army
while throughout the film Hitler’s salute "Hail Hitler" which represented Hitler
regime, is being replaced by "Hail Swing" salute. In anyways Swing music not only
has acquired such a large music audience but also dancers. Swing Dancing or
Lindy Hop is dynamically impressive and massively energetic to men and women
of the time. The remarkable point of swing rhythm is that tends melodies being
played slightly before the beat pulse, creating a sense of light caper. Benny
Goodman’s The King of Swing or the all time favorite It don't mean a thing by
Duke Ellington, are two significant musical and dancing examples. The period of
the great success of Swing abruptly extinguished in 1946-47. The number of fans
fell sharply, leading to financial ruin large orchestras, which were always
expensive, but their cost has risen up too much in the years of uninterrupted
expansion and inflation of the Second World War. In the winter of 1946-47
Goodman, Woody Herman, Benny Carter and many others split apart their
orchestras. Big Band music will never be recovering. Within the ruins of the
financial aid only a monumental name remained upright while even the most
famous Count Basie limited his band into a small jazz ensemble. That was Duke
Ellington who anyway was active before the Swing Era, continued his large

orchestra highlighting his name amongst the brightest figures of 20th century
American music (Hobsbawm, 2001).

Bop and Beat Generation

The musical evolutionism of the early 1940s is inconceivable without the political
upheavals of the 1930s, which gave Afro-American artists increased confidence,
while at the same time bringing them closer to the apparently insurmountable

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barriers which stood between them and equality. The bebop revolution was
political as much as musical. The savage hostility to ‘Uncle Tom’ inspired
musicians, which for the first time split the community of jazz players into bitterly
feuding sections, the passionate insistence on inventing a music so difficult that
‘they’—the whites who always cash in on black achievement—will ‘not be able to
steal it’, even the personal peculiarities of the new players, cannot be explained in
musical terms alone. They stood for a certain attitude of the black artist and
intellectual in his own world and that of the whites, whose slang name, ofays—
from the pig latin for ‘foe’—sufficiently indicates the tension between the races.
Theirs would be a music as good as the whites’, even in terms of art-music, but
based on black foundations. But they also expressed the resentment and
insecurity of blacks who had tried the old recipe for equality— emigration to the
northern cities—and who found that the farther it took them from the world of
Uncle Tom, the farther off did the world look in which there would be neither
whites nor blacks but only American citizens. Moreover, they were isolated even
within the black world. They had raised themselves by their talents and
achievements above the level of the ordinary laborers from whom they had
sprung, or they hoped to do so as artists and intellectuals: but they found
themselves shut out not only from the white world but even by the black middle
class, that puny body of white-collar and professional workers which hid its
consciousness of impotence behind the attempt to construct a feeble caricature of
white petty- bourgeois respectability. It is small wonder that their social behavior
was anarchic and bohemian; their music also almost was a multiple gesture of
defiance. Oddly enough—thanks mainly to the whites, the black middle class
failed to recognize them— the achievements of the jazz revolutionaries were
speedily recognized. White commercial men, even on the watch for the cash
value of novelty, turned ‘bop’ into a slogan. Young white intellectuals and
bohemians, recognizing a malaise and unspecified rebelliousness akin to their
own, made modern jazz into the music of the ‘beat generation’, the American
equivalent of the Continental Existentialists. Musical schools and institutions,

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Universities, softened up by the propaganda of the 1930s, were prepared to
recognize an important addition to Native American culture even when it came
from an unexpected and ‘unrespectable’ source. The American Government itself,
aware of the propagandist value of jazz as a cultural export, sent Dizzy Gillespie
abroad as a cultural ambassador just like—indeed earlier then— Louis Armstrong.
From 1949–50 on, modern jazz has been no more an art of outlaws than cubism
in the 1930s. Perhaps the shift from the ‘bebop’ to the ‘cool’ styles of modern jazz
about this period reflects this greater acceptance. It certainly helped to make the
‘cool’ period since 1949 one in which jazz has made more persistent and massive
efforts than ever before the fuse with orthodox art music, though the artistic
results of this hybridization were generally mediocre, in terms of the achievements
of art-music. It also, paradoxically, helped to turn modern jazz, whose founders
were without exception black players of plebeian origin, into a music favored
particularly by a host of young white players, notably in California (hence the
name ‘West Coast School’). However, in the later fifties ‘cool’ jazz was in turn
replaced by a yet more consciously musico-Nationalist revolt of the black players,
who favored a return to the blues, blew ‘hot’ (or ‘hard’ as the phrase went),
advertised their connections with gospel-song, and sometimes chose themes
reflecting their hankering for Africanism. (Hobsbawm, 1959) Beat writers were not
musicians and Bebop jazz musicians were not recognized for their literary merit.
However, there was an obvious and undisputable link between these two cultural
streams, as Jazz Musicians during the Beat Generation were real sources of
inspiration for the poets and writers. The Beat Generation started officially in the
50’s when Jack Kerouac wanted to describe his circle of friends to the writer John
Clellon Holmes. At that time, Bebop was already big in the U.S. and especially in
the New York clubs, and that’s exactly where Kerouac, Ginsberg and the other
Beat writers were hanging out, soaking up every note of the epic solos to
transcribe them into words. Both parties had a lot in common, starting with the
fact that they were at odds with their predecessors. Bop jazzmen because they
left the conventional Big Bands for smaller ensembles and more room for

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improvisation, and Beat writers because they started a new literary movement,
breaking all the previously established rules. They also shared an interest for drug
use and rejection of mainstream worldview. I wouldn’t say that it worked both
ways though as the Beats inspired from the long improvisations on jazzmen to
write from the top of their head, but the opposite wouldn’t be true. And even
though they were all friends and respected each other’s work, the inspiration was
mainly going from music to writing. Well first of all, it’s really hard to find one poem
or book of the Beat Generation without a reference to jazz music or artists:
Smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold- water flats floating across the tops
of cities contemplating jazz (Allen Ginsberg, Howl and other poems, 1956). But
it’s more than that. It’s the writing exercise that reminds us of Bebop jazz music.
The rhythm and length of the verses are similar to the musicians’ solos, the
endless verses, without periods that make us think of the long saxophone phrases
where the artist only pauses half a second to take his breath. So, the musicians
that represent best the Beat Generation, or we could also say, the ones that had
the most influence on the writers were:
a) Charlie Parker. The saxophonist Charles Parker Jr. AKA “Bird” had a short
life, and died at the age of 34, but he still had time to write the jazz history,
being one of the precursors of Bebop, as well as the literature history, being
one of the main influencers of the Beats. He was really respected as he was not
only a master musician, but also an uncompromising artist and an intellectual,
rather than an entertainer.
b) Dizzy Gillespie. I guess he is (maybe with Miles Davis) the incarnation of Bop
Jazz in a trumpet, and a reference for Kerouac, Holmes, Ginsberg or others.
c) Max Roach: Percussionist and drummer, he’s also a pioneer of Bebop, friend
and partner of Parker and influencer of the Beat writers.
d) Thelonious Monk who better than Monk can embody the piano in the Beat
Generation? As Ginsberg said in 1968: “Kerouac learned his line directly from
Charlie Parker, and Gillespie, and Monk. He was listening in ’43 to “Night in
Tunisia” and all the Bird-flight-noted things which he then adapted to prose line.”

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Two, Modern Jazz politicized Musicians

Charles Mingus (Bassist, Composer)

Up until May 1959, no jazz composition recorded by Charles Mingus had been as
controversial or as politically charged as Fables of Faubus. The song, first
recorded on Mingus Ah Um Album (Columbia Records, 1959), was meant to be a
condemnation of Arkansas governor Orval Faubus. In 1957 Faubus had ordered
the state's National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High
School by nine African- American teenagers. Along with Sonny Rollins' Freedom
Suite in 1958, Mingus' composition courageously raised the ante among jazz
artists, insisting they become creative agitators for change rather than just
concerned bystanders. Contrary to most fans' impressions, Mingus wasn't a
political protester. He was first and foremost a composer who was vocal from the
bandstand about all things unfair and unjust—from noisy ice in glasses to Jim
Crow.

As Mingus told Brian Priestley (Mingus: A Critical Biography, 1984):

"I just write tunes and put political titles on them. Fables of Faubus was
different, though— I wrote that because I wanted to."

More than a year after Mingus Ah Um, Mingus recorded the Original Fables of
Faubus on Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (Candid Records, 1961),
this time with a brazen set of lyrics. The words were talk- sung by Mingus and
shouted by drummer Dannie Richmond and other band members, who function
as a Greek chorus ferociously condemning racism and racists. Why the song's
lyrics weren't recorded the first time around on Mingus Ah Um isn't clear. Most
likely the omission came at the behest of Columbia executives, who at the time
didn't want to overly inflame the label's Southern markets. When Mingus wrote

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the song in late 1957, the Little Rock standoff had been the most shocking and
dramatic episode to take place in the Civil Rights Movement. The event marked
the first time that Southern racism was exposed on network television, and the
news story unfolded slowly in September 1957. The sight of armed National
Guard soldiers preventing nine students from attending a public school and the
federal government's slow reaction was harrowing. The month-long televised
drama deeply affected jazz musicians and people throughout the country who
had heard about unjust conditions in the South but had never seen them in
action. Ultimately, the Justice Department sought and was granted an injunction
against Faubus' order, and the governor had to withdraw National Guard troops.
But the move offered little protection for the students or assurance that the
community wouldn't riot or bar them from the school. So on September 24th—20
days after the incident's start— President Eisenhower finally federalized the
Arkansas National Guard and sent the army's 101st Division to Little Rock
enforce integration and safeguard the African-American students.
Like Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit in 1939, Mingus' Fables of Faubus must be
viewed both as a masterful composition and a powerful folk expression that
helped give voice to the Civil Rights Movement. Fables of Faubus original lyrics:
Oh Lord, don't let them shoot us
Oh Lord, don't let them stab us
Oh Lord, don't let them tar and feather us
Oh Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!
Name me someone ridiculous, Dannie
[Dannie:] Governor Faubus
Why is he sick and ridiculous?
[Dannie:] He won't permit integrated schools (Mingus:
Then he's a fool) Boo! Nazi fascist supremacists/Boo Ku
Klux Klan!

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Name me a handful that's ridiculous. Dannie Richmond?
[Dannie:] Bilbo. Faubus.
[Unintelligible]. Rockefeller.
[Unintelligible]. Eisenhower. Why are they so sick and ridiculous?
[Dannie:] Two, four, six, eight
[All:] They brainwash and teach you hate!

Charlie Haden
Charlie Haden, bassist and composer launched his Liberation Music Orchestra,
galvanized by resistance to America's wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. It performed
protest songs and original numbers including Haden's rousing Song for Che and
Coleman's poignant Lonely Woman. A performance concert in Portugal in 1971 of
Song for Che, led to Haden being arrested, for dedicating the piece to African
rebels in Angola and Mozambique. The orchestra would reconvene in response to
the foreign policies of Ronald Reagan in 1982, George Bush Sr in 1989, and, in
2004, in the wake of what Haden regarded as George W Bush's theft of the
election. He appeared on “Song X,” the 1986 collaboration between Coleman and
another regular Haden colleague, guitarist Pat Metheny. The Liberation Music
Orchestra was formed in 1969. The big band’s self-titled debut, with its thematic
allusions to the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban revolution and the ’60s civil rights
struggle, featured a pair of Coleman alumni, trumpeter Don Cherry and
saxophonist Dewey Redman, as well as such notable free players as drummers
Paul Motian and Andrew Cyrille, trombonist Roswell Rudd and saxophonist Gato
Barbieri. The LMO reunited for similarly left-leaning releases in 1983, 1990 and
2005.

Jazz as resistance

Many times we meet in the field of art, the expression of protest. Art as a social
power body, which reacts or thinks and shows the current protest. Music of course

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could not be excluded from it, particularly music that is coming from the popular
and downtrodden of society. Jazz music has being both artistic expression of non-
labor classes and art resulting from the lower classes as a protest. “Jazz, is not
only ordinary music, light or severe but also a protest and rebellion music”
(Hobsbawm, 1993). This is not to say that jazz music has a particular political
identity even if is closed to the left in the Western world. So at every juncture, the
jazz protest can be identified with any political party. The mere fact that opposed
racial discrimination exemplifies. But it is certain that music can more easily
become protest from the other arts. Jazz can be used to express vehement
protest, the phenomenon is due to something that jazz has in common with Tin
Pan Allley: the secularity. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote in one of the first editorials of
the Union of British Light Music (he defended all his life with consistency and
passion in jazz): "Jazz is a new religion. It's probably a great new art that has the
advantage over the "orthodox" music. Is addressed not only in bourgeois but also
in the working class. The class distinctions do not concern». Jazz in other words is
a living manifesto secularity. The charm is not only due to the sound, but the fact
that embodied the victory of popular culture over the culture of the minority. Gave
the opportunity to people who are in the context of classical music, they would be
doomed to be silent listeners or performers, believers, to make themselves (ie to
create not just replicate) music. Jazz secularity is that it gave the opportunity to
people who would otherwise be doomed to cultural nothingness seriously claim
their participation in art.

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Bibliography

• Hobsbawm, E. (1959, 1963, 1971) Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic

Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Century.
• Calt, S. (1994) I’d rather be the devil: Skip James and the Blues, Chicago,
Illinois
• Collier, J. L. (1987) Duke Ellington, New York
• Dance, S. (1985) The world of Count Basie, New York
• Frazier, F. (1957) The Negro in the United States, New York
• Giannopoulos, K (1990) Jazz 1900-1990, Historic and Discographic Guide,
Athens
• Green, A. (1951) Show biz from Vaude to Video, New York
• Blesh, R. Janis, H. (1958) They all played Ragtime, London
• Hobsbawm, E. (2001) Uncommon People - Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz
• Hobsbawm, E (1993) The Jazz Scene
• Lomax, A. (2001) Mister Jelly Roll: The fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New
Orleans Creole and "inventor of jazz". Updated, with a new afterward by
Lawrence Gushee. Berkeley: University of California Press
• Murray, A. (1982) Stomping the Blueς, New York
• Murray, A. (1986) Good morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie
as told to Albert Murray, New York
• Perreti, B. (1994) The creation of Jazz, Music, Race and Culture in Urban
America, Illinois University press, Illinois
• Stowe, D. (1994) Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America,
Harvard University Press
• Tucker, M. (1993) The Duke Ellington Reader, Oxford
• Priestley, B. (1984) Mingus: A Critical Biography
• Ginsberg, A. (1956) Hawl and other poems

Discography:
• Bessie Smith “The essential Bessie Smith” 1997, Sony

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• Black and White Blues Collection, Free JazzTime Magazine Collection
• Count Basie, his orchestra and his Rhythm Section 1937-1943, Giants of
jazz Recordings
• Duke Ellington “Sophisticated Lady” RCA, 1940
• Duke Ellington “In a Mellotone” RCA, 1940
• Duke Ellington “Indigos” Columbia1957
• Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, Chicago, Illinois, 1926
• Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra, Chicago, Illinois, 1928
• Louis Armstrong plays W.C. Handy, Columbia 1954, Remastered in1996
• Robert Johnson “Complete Recordings”, Sony, 1990
• Skip James “Hard Time Killing Floor”, Original Recording Remastered 2003
• Son House “Original Delta Blues” 2008, Sbme Special Mkts
• Charles Mingus “Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus”, Candid
Records, 1961
• Charles Mingus “Mingus Ah Um”, Columbia 1959
• Charlie Haden and the Liberation Music Orchestra, 1969, Implulse!
• Charlie Haden/ Carla Bley and the Liberation Music Orchestra, “The ballad
of the fallen”, 1983, ECM
• Charlie Haden and the Liberation Music Orchestra, “Dream Keeper”, 1990,
Blue Note
• Charlie Haden and the Liberation Music Orchestra, “Not in our name”, 2005,
Verve
• Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny, “Beyond the Missouri Sky”, 1997, Verve

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