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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
The Gospel Coaltion Award of Distinction—Arts and Culture ECPA Top Shelf Award Winner For practitioners and fans, jazz expresses the deepest meanings of life. Its rich history and its distinctive elements like improvisation and syncopation unite to create an unrepeatable and inexpressible aesthetic experience. But for others, jazz is an enigma. Might jazz be better appreciated and understood in relation to the Christian faith? In this volume, theologian and jazz pianist William Edgar argues that the music of jazz cannot be properly understood apart from the Christian gospel, which like jazz moves from deep lament to inextinguishable joy. By tracing the development of jazz, placing it within the context of the African American experience, and exploring the work of jazz musicians like Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, Edgar argues that jazz deeply resonates with the hope that is ultimately found in the good news of Jesus Christ. Grab a table. The show is about to begin.
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TO MY DEAR FRIENDSMonty and Caterina Alexander,
who personify the music described in these pages
If you’ve ever spent time around William Edgar as he perches sideways on a piano bench, you may have heard him describe himself as “a jazz musician disguised as a theologian.” Once he turns from teaching to the keys, what at first seems like self-deprecation soon becomes crystal clear: he is a master jazz theologian, and the two identities are in perfect harmony, serving the depths of our humanity with the touch of God; indeed, jazz music is from the soul, of the soul, and for the soul.
We experience life in parallels: the formal and the dynamic, unity and diversity, form and freedom, the one and the many, and on and on. Great thinkers throughout history have wrestled with these parallels, asking, “Which one prevails in our reality?” From God’s limitless perspective, two realities can fulfill, harmonize, and dance with each other because they are creations of the unlimited Being, namely, God himself.
Musically, these dimensions can be expressed in terms of classical (formal) and jazz (dynamic). In the larger Western context, the expression developed on the formal side, while in the African American context, the expression was birthed from the dynamic side. Representing much more than a musical form, jazz emerged from a facet of life marked by improvisation within a theme. Taking this into the classroom of life, the classical dimension provides useful parameters for doing theology, while the jazz approach empowers us with wisdom to live out that theology in the rapidly shifting context of life.
Then there’s the blues, jazz’s country cousin who paints mental pictures of reality, not merely concepts. Ol’ Cousin Blues slides up from the Mississippi Delta to help us not just understand but to feel life it as it evokes real memories from our experiences. The blues parallels the stormy relationship between God and his covenant people. When sung from a man’s perspective, the blues is usually about a wayward woman—his significant other. What better illustration is there between God and his unfaithful people? The divine blues theme is the song of Hosea, a brother whose wife violated her marriage covenant in every conceivable way, leading to prostitution and slavery. Despite her ways, Hosea redeemed her because of his passionate love for her. God expresses his passionate redeeming love in the blues refrain:
How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?
How can I treat you like Admah?
How can I make you like Zeboyim?
My heart is changed within me;
all my compassion is aroused.
I will not carry out my fierce anger,
nor will I devastate Ephraim again. (Hos 11:8-9 NIV)
When sung from a woman’s perspective, the blues is usually about her lover, who is unfaithful and cruel, an excellent picture of how idols treat people. She longs for true love but only finds heartbreak, and only God can satisfy her deepest longing, making promises beyond the imagination, and keeping them all . . . such is the song of God.
God’s ever-refreshing mercies expose in brilliant, high-fidelity surround sound the multilayered jazz dimension of the hope of the gospel of Christ. It’s the cultural offering borne of the eternal surprising us in the temporal, and it’s a lyrical prayer to a God who was resisted in all other places of life. It’s the syncopation of eternity dancing on the soil of the temporal, and it’s the return of the soul dynamic to the one who created it. The author writes that he hopes this book will “persuade the reader that the music cannot be properly understood without some familiarity with the Christian message. This does not mean one must be a theologian to grasp the message. But it will help to know the basics of creation, the fall into sin, and the redemption of all things by the grace of God. These basic tenets find their way into jazz.” From where we sit, it takes a peculiarly gifted person to coax that message out of the horn, to tickle it out of the keys, to slap it out of the bass, and beat it out of the drum. It takes a jazz musician disguised as a theologian.
It takes a humble master-teacher such as William Edgar.
This book is a labor of love. I have spent years reflecting on the meaning of jazz. I want to thank some of the many who have helped through the gestation and up to the birth of these pages. My editors at InterVarsity Press represent the gold standard. I am especially indebted to my publishing supervisor and friend, David McNutt. He has guided me through each stage of the process with dedication. Many of the ideas have been tested through him, and through friends who were willing to have a look at them and render their honest critiques. Special thanks are also due to Jeffrey Monk for creating the indexes.
I also want to thank my employer, Westminster Theological Seminary, for believing in the project, and giving me the time to develop it. I particularly want to thank my wife, Barbara, for her patient care throughout.
Strength and dignity are her clothing,
and she laughs at the time to come.
She opens her mouth with wisdom,
and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. (Prov 31:25-26)
Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.
It has been my privilege to grow up with jazz, to study it, and to perform it. I am not a headliner, but I’m a decent amateur. Once, at a fundraising concert in New York City, I had the privilege of being in a quartet with the great John Patitucci on bass, an extraordinary saxophone player, Joe Salzano, and the irrepressible vocalist Ruth Naomi Floyd.1 After listening to the recording, my friend Monty Alexander said, “Wow, you kept up with big guys.” That’s as high a compliment as I’ve ever received, and from one of the greatest pianists on the planet.
Not everyone can be an aficionado. But it is my conviction that jazz is one of the most enjoyable and meaningful kinds of music there is. My friend Ted Turnau recounts how he “fell in love” with jazz: “When I listened to that music, my heart soared. The guitar solos, the piano solos, the harmonies, the bass lines, the rhythms—all of it seemed full of a shimmering, transcendent joy that I had a hard time defining.”2 One of my hopes is that after reading this book, more readers will become listeners and be convinced at least to give it a chance.
This music comes from the African American experience. Jazz is America’s original music. Born out of slavery, it was nurtured in the invisible and visible churches where spirituals were generated, in the cotton fields with their inhuman working conditions, in the night spots across the country, and in funeral processions where dirges were followed by jubilation. Much of it has great depth, often the tragic sounds of suffering, but also of great jubilation. Because of its compelling beauty it has become popular all over the world. Thus, a style of music generated in relatively obscure circumstances has made it to stages all around the globe.
It became extraordinarily popular in the 1920s. At least one novelist who attempted a depiction of jazz did so by describing the period, or the era, which produced it. F. Scott Fitzgerald eloquently wrote of the “jazz age” in a manner that led many people to think he had invented the word. He had not. Jazz had been around before World War I, but what he did was manage to capture the spirit of the decade between the end of the war and the stock market crash of 1929. Somehow the word jazz was one appropriate metaphor for that time.3
Jazz is a great treasure of human civilization, and it appeals to people across cultural and religious differences. And yet I believe that it owes a great deal to a Christian worldview, which is deeply embedded in its origins and ongoing history. My claim is not made in order to justify liking the music, even less vindicating it as somehow acceptable for all believers. Rather, I want to advocate for this extraordinary music that is deeply informed by Christian convictions. In my view, jazz is best understood in light of the gospel. Both the sorrow and the joy found in jazz resonate with the deep pain and the incredible hope that stand at the heart of the Christian faith.
WHAT IS JAZZ?
The locals in New Orleans called it a “funeral with music.” That’s because the more popular label “the jazz funeral” doesn’t tell the whole story. The term jazz did not even appear in print until 1919, although it was likely used orally before then.4 Jazz music was often heard in these New Orleans funeral processions, but originally they included more than jazz—there was European “classical” music, African ritual sounds, the church’s spiritual songs, and much more. Typically the parade was led by a soldier holding a sword, then a few ministers, followed by the coffin, with pall-bearers, then a brass band, and finally family and friends.5
Figure I.1. The New Orleans “jazz funeral” moves participants from mourning to joy.
As they processed toward the cemetery, which was on the edge of town, the music was slow and mournful. Frequent tunes included Hark from the Tomb or We’re a Marching to the Grave. Then, when the body was interred, the band would light up with a joyful sound. They might play When the Saints or the slightly irreverent Didn’t He Ramble.6 The great pianist and pioneer of jazz Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton once explained, “Rejoice at the death and cry at the birth: New Orleans sticks close to the Scriptures.”7
Defining jazz is not as simple as it may seem. When asked to offer his definition, Louis Armstrong, the extraordinary New Orleans trumpet player, famously quipped (perhaps unkindly), “Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.”8 We can take comfort in the “agnosticism” of certain scholars. In a thoughtful article, venerable musicologists Alan P. Merriam and Fradley H. Garner sought to identify the exact source for this word. After exploring the most likely origins, including peoples’ names, foreign transliterations, different cities, and salacious connotations, they came to the following conclusion: “We suggest the need for linguistic and philological research although we are not at all sure that the origin of jazz, the word, can ever be found.”9 That may be true for the word, but still, most people recognize the music.
It should be noted that a number of jazz musicians don’t like the term. The outstanding jazz composer and orchestra leader Duke Ellington famously objected to it because he felt it pigeonholed the music into a predictable genre, and also because to him it had racial overtones. He is supposed to have said, “In the end there are only two kinds of music, good and the other kind.”
Whatever the precise etymology of the word, any definition of jazz must account for its historical context. The French jazz advocate and critic Hugues Panassié defined jazz as “music created by Black people from the United States, taking its origins from the religious and secular music of Black Americans.”10 Our definition and articulation of jazz will need to take this historical context into account for it cannot be understood without it. And yet jazz is more than its history.
YOU BLOWS WHO YOU IS
As a genre, jazz resists definition, and yet there are identifiable aspects to jazz. Panassié argued that jazz included three essential ingredients: swing, the application of Black vocal technique to instruments, and melodic and harmonic qualities from the blues.11 The best jazz preserves the personal style of a musician while yet participating in these conventions. When I listen to jazz, I can usually tell within a few measures who is playing, just from the distinctive style a musician brings to the instrument. Louis Armstrong once commented, “What we play is life.” And he added, about the trumpet, “You blows who you is.”12
Let’s look at five characteristics of this music.
(1) Jazz has simple but significant formal qualities. A few technical considerations are in order here. Jazz was rarely notated, at first. Nevertheless, we can try to transcribe it with notes and measures. In the standard Western way of putting things onto a score, the basic rhythmic unit is the measure. Most music, whether jazz or not, comprises a certain number of measures. Measures typically contain either three or four beats. Often the standard jazz piece has the format AABA. Each of these comprises eight measures, totaling thirty-two. The beginning is called the “head.” The B section is the “bridge,” which has contrasting material from the three A sections. It may help to think of a standard song, such as I Got Rhythm by George Gershwin: This song has three A sections, two at the beginning and one at the end. The B section comes between the first two As and the last one: A, A, B, A. The A section (“I got rhythm . . .”) uses the standard chord progression C-A-D-G (in the key of C). “I Got Rhythm” is typically in Bb (thus, Bb-G-C-F). This progression is found in thousands of pieces, both jazz and classical. Then comes the contrasting B section (“Old man trouble . . .”), known as the bridge. In this song, the progression is another standard pattern known as the cycle of fifths (E-A-D-G in the key of C, or D-G-C-F in the “Rhythm” key of Bb). The pattern of this particular song is so common that musicians call it “rhythm changes” meaning the chords and the measures that characterize this song are found in many others (a change is a jazz term for a chord of harmony).
The other form that typically characterizes jazz is the blues. Here, the standard pattern is twelve measures, not thirty-two. And the structure is a bit different. It is an A (four measures), a B (four measures), and finally a C (four measures). For musicians, the standard changes (harmonies) are I (the tonic), IV (the subdominant), finally V (the dominant), and back to I (tonic again). For convenience, let’s take the key of C. The tonic is the C chord, the subdominant is the F chord and the dominant is the G chord. The blues can be played in any key, and the chord patterns represent the same sequences.
Knowing about these patterns explains why musicians who have never met or played together can so seamlessly perform with one another and be on the same page. Jazz also makes extensive use of the “blues scale,” which uses a good many flatted thirds, flatted fifths, and sevenths, often bending them the way a guitarist can do. Melodies are expressive, using leaps into falsetto and grace notes.13
(2) Importantly, jazz music is improvised. This term needs unpacking. Many people, when they first hear this term, imagine a musician taking off into unchartered territory, playing what he feels like, with few rules to guide him. This view is quite erroneous. It is true that jazz allows for considerable freedom, but it always takes place within a form. The form may vary, but it is usually a set number of harmonies (musicians call them “changes”) over a particular rhythm. The best musicians tell a story, using those changes as a guide. In a group of musicians, improvisation is like conversation. Much as in the use of language and gestures in an animated discussion, there are thousands of ways of articulating the chords, playing with their basic nature, using falsetto and bending the notes, or creating countermelodies or even substitute chords to enhance the story. You can get the idea from a great rendition of C Jam Blues, a Duke Ellington piece, played by the wonderful pianist Oscar Peterson and his trio.14 After a long solo piano blues, the trio kicks in, never too far from the simple pattern of the blues with occasional chord substitutions. The bass joins in and then things build and build, with Oscar’s unique licks, interspersed with well-chosen call-and-responses, and finally back to the “head” (the tune, which is a single note in the key of C). Words can hardly describe the intensity, the interplay between the musicians, the creative blues patterns. But it is jazz.
Jazz is primarily derived from a way of singing born in the African American context, wherein the notes are stretched and bent to express passion. Jazz is closely tied not only to the blues, with its passionate use of perfusion and stretched notes but to the dance, and hence possesses what has become called “swing,” a special kind of rhythm not found in quite the same way in other music.
(3) Jazz is not a single style, frozen in time. Jazz evolved from various kinds of folk music, together with more structured compositions, such as ragtime, and the composite became a truly unique art form. This synthesis occurred in the early years of the twentieth century. It is in fact one of the “miracles” of the history of music. From the barrel houses and churches to the concert stage, jazz moved from local expressions to become a world-renowned genre. It varies from disparate performances to sophisticated compositions, and even masterpieces. Jazz, with all its variety, has become a universally recognized family.
(4) Importantly, jazz is a music of protest. If we take stock of the blues, the spirituals, and many other forerunners to jazz, we see that they carry a spirit of protest. Spirituals are “sorrow songs,” as W. E. B. Du Bois called them.15 The blues carry an undertone of trouble and sadness, but they are also songs of defiance at the dehumanizing conditions of slavery, the struggles under Jim Crow legislation following emancipation, and the injustices that Black communities continue to face. The extraordinary Frederick Douglass, who poignantly described the life of a slave, wrote this about the effect of spirituals on his understanding:
They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.16
This phrase “every tone a testimony” is telling.17 Douglass calls these sounds a testimony to the horrors of slavery, but he also acknowledges them as prayers, and so he considers them ultimately hopeful. Good jazz should lead the listener from the tribulations of suffering into great joy. Not every piece contains this full narrative, but the whole body of jazz does. As the psalmist proclaimed, “You have turned my mourning into dancing” (Ps 30:11).
(5) Jazz can be very deep, even probing. Some jazz critics fault the music for its simplicity. There is, to be sure, simple, unchallenging jazz. But the best of it is rich in rhythmic complexity, instrumentation, variations on a theme, and melodic profundity. Some pieces are deceptively simple. Take, for example, Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo (1930). The instrumentation is unique: a trumpet, a trombone, and a clarinet. And, unusually, the clarinet is playing the low register and the trombone the melody. Scholars have suggested this unique voicing produces a “phantom” harmonic presence, making it sound as though there were a fourth player at the microphone.18
Many artists are masters at driving their music toward more and more intensity. I will never forget a performance by Jay “Hootie” McShann of “Swingin’ the Blues” at the Montauban Jazz Festival back in 1983. It must have lasted twenty minutes or longer. It kept building and building until we all thought we would burst. When it did not seem possible to add to the passion if one more chorus were introduced, introduced it was, with even greater intensity. We were swept away.
But jazz can also be quiet and profound. Once, in a jazz band where I was the pianist, we were at a rehearsal. We were practicing the New Orleans classic “Some of These Days.” After we finished there was a moment of respectful silence; we were all deeply moved. Then someone said: “Mozart!” We all nodded and smiled. This is difficult to describe in words, but we felt it had melodic invention and simple chord progression as in some of Mozart’s music, albeit in a jazz idiom. There may be a parallel to this in the visual arts. Jazz drummer Elvin Jones once said, “I can see forms and shapes in my mind when I solo, just as a painter can see forms and shapes when he starts painting. And I see different colors.”19
So jazz articulates a particular aesthetic. Growing out of the “funeral with music,” jazz articulates a narrative which moves from deep misery to inextinguishable joy. Perhaps such an aesthetic could apply to all sorts of musical traditions and styles. But jazz does it in a unique way. One of them is to reflect the dance movements associated with spirituals and blues among Black people, both of which are different from the typical European styles. Many dance practices of African Americans evoke what Zora Neale Hurston calls “dynamic suggestion.” That is, as she puts it, while the White dancer attempts a complete, classical expression, “the Negro is restrained, but succeeds in gripping the beholder by forcing him to finish the action the performer suggests.”20 She is saying that Black dancing draws people in, involving them in a performance. Surely too sharp a distinction should not be made, but the element of “dynamic suggestion” is an important feature of Black music.
With this working definition and these characteristics in mind, the following considerations will be simply divided into three major sections. First, the historical background of jazz and how it emerged within the context of slavery. Second, the key feeders that led to jazz, including field hollers, work songs, spirituals, gospel, blues, and ragtime. Third, the particular features of jazz music, its contours, and especially the relationship between jazz and the Christian message. The relation between jazz and the gospel message is somewhat intangible, though it is present at many levels. Both are realistic about the dark side of life. Both tell us how to navigate some of its vicissitudes: the gospel through its practical spirituality, and jazz through its improvisation. And both express hope at some level. To borrow from some of the great spirituals, like the gospel, jazz gives you “strength to climb.”
I will make every attempt to interact with the music itself. I write as an academic, but one whose passion for jazz is nearly unbounded, perhaps second only to my passion for my faith in Christ. I hope the reader can feel this.
AESTHETICS, CULTURE, AND HISTORY
This study focuses on aesthetics. Let me try to unpack that notion. Aesthetics as a term and a category of philosophical reflection was first developed by A. G. Baumgarten in the eighteenth century, but of course the experience of aesthetics predated his term. Broadly speaking, aesthetics has to do with perception, though it is often equated with our views of art.
If we follow the Christian philosopher and neo-Calvinist Calvin Seerveld, we would associate aesthetics with things that bring joy. Aesthetics, he tells us, is “an irreducible ordinance God laid down for creatures to follow, a creaturely dimension with ludic structure, one way we exist characterized by nuancefulness; a window on joy.”21 Seerveld has spent a lifetime wrestling with questions about aesthetics. Among his other useful contributions is his calling into question the careless way many people associate beauty with a kind of Platonic sense of harmony, balance, and congruence. In this view, something beautiful here below is mimetic (an imitation) of a higher design. Certainly many philosophers, Christian and otherwise, have gone down this path. The pioneering Dutch scholar H. R. R. Rookmaaker, for example, diagnoses the “death of a culture” by looking at paintings that lead toward fragmentation.22 His younger friend and fellow Kuyperian philosopher, Calvin Seerveld, takes a different tack. There are two problems with beauty-as-harmony, argues Seerveld. One is that it imposes a category that might be foreign to the object in question. Is the image on an old Persian manuscript well understood if it qualifies as beautiful? The other problem is that some art is purposefully violent or ugly. For example, African tribal masks are meant to convey the threat of evil forces. They ought not be beautiful in any Platonic sense if they are to be believed.23
I find this critique helpful. At the same time, however, I don’t think that aesthetics must always reflect joy or the ludic. For example, is not Francisco Goya’s Third of May, 1808, which depicts the point-blank murder of Spanish resistance forces by Napoleon’s firing squad, aesthetically powerful and successful? Yet there is no joy in it at all. According to philosopher Bence Nanay, aesthetics is tied to the natural world. In his words, aesthetics is about “our experience of breathtaking landscapes or the pattern of shadows on the wall opposite your office.”24 For him, aesthetics is mostly affirmative and often tied to natural beauty. For me, all quality aesthetics need not be connected to nature.
In my view, aesthetics is more about values than abstract statements of what constitutes beauty. An aesthetic quality is an artful way to understand a particular narrative. To be sure, music is clearly not a philosophy text in sound. Anyone who has struggled with expressing in words what a particular piece may mean, even if that piece itself has a text, knows the difficulty of doing so. Yet, at another level, music, like other art forms, does articulate meaning, a meaning that may at least partially be translated into words. That is because it is generated by human beings. The meaning may be from many sources, including a composer’s mind or soul, a cultural context, a tradition, a worldview, or a social function.
Aesthetics is also closely related to craft. This connection was recognized in biblical times. The Old Testament dedicates considerable space to descriptions of skilled artists. Bezalel and Oholiab were specially called by the Lord to help build the tabernacle. Bezalel was endued with God’s Spirit, enabling him “with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs” (Ex 31:3-4). Similarly, Solomon hired the Gentile Hiram to craft many features of his temple. He was “full of wisdom, understanding, and skill for making any work in bronze” (1 Kings 7:14). This relation is specifically indicated for music. Over and over the Old Testament especially heralds playing an instrument “skillfully” (Ps 33:3; 1 Sam 16:16-18). The “opposite” of such playing is deemed “noise” (see Amos 5:23).
But biblical aesthetics is much more than a few skilled artists designing buildings or playing stringed instruments. Consider the artistic ways in which authors portray people and events. Matthew alternates stories of miracles with discourses. The author of Jonah uses metaphors about descending and ascending in an artistic way. He also highlights the role of plants and other living things in the drama of Jonah’s spiritual obduracy. Again, the psalms powerfully depict the heights and depths of human experience through matchless poetry. The sheer length of Job’s so-called friends’ speeches is an artistic device to show their pigheadedness. The Bible is full of aesthetic references because that is part of the warp and woof of human existence. We are aesthetic creatures. The conviction expressed in this book is that the aesthetics of jazz cannot be understood without acknowledging the reality of the biblical God who is present, often implicitly, in the life and music of Black people to give strength in time of need.
There are several questions that one might ask or observations one might make about jazz from the perspective of aesthetics.
First, very simply, does this music please? The ability to please is often mentioned in definitions of aesthetics and art. Every now and then I do encounter folks who say they do not like jazz. That’s fine, depending on their reasons. Some people just do not know the music. Others imagine it is something it is not. Still others use the dubious category of “highbrow vs. lowbrow,” or worse, the racist notion that jazz is the music of “barbaric” people. I hope the present volume at least clears away the cobwebs.
Second, aesthetics is about power. I want to argue that good jazz music has power. The ultimate source of that power, as I see it, is what we might call the jazz narrative, or the African American aesthetic, which is a movement from deep misery to inextinguishable joy. That narrative owes a great deal to the biblical gospel. I will not be suggesting that jazz is necessarily Christian music, whatever such a label might mean. Instead, I will argue that this music is in an important way explicable because of a Christian consciousness. I am well aware that there are voices besides the biblical witness that animate this music. I am also aware that a degree of secularism has made its way into Black thought. But as historian Vincent W. Lloyd argues, even in the voices of those who have turned against the Christian faith, such as James Baldwin and Malcolm X, their prophetic stance is filled with biblical cognizance.25 I find that resonance with the Christian faith deeply embedded within jazz.
Third, there is a powerful relation between music and the soul. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once declared: “Without music life would be a mistake.” He added, “I could only believe in a God who danced.”26 In my jazz band, we like to add another phrase to this: “we could only believe in a God who knows suffering.” Many have reflected on the sacred aspect of music. Mickey Hart once said: “[Music] has many sides. It can seduce or frighten you. It can rattle your bones. It can let you see God.”27 And Mark Helprin has a particularly felicitous phrase in one of his novels: “If it weren’t for music, I would think that love is mortal.”28
Fourth, aesthetics takes note of the historical and cultural background of each genre. All music is interwoven with history and culture. This is patently the case with the music of African American people. Some critics would be uncomfortable identifying a distinctive African American aesthetic because they believe music is universal. Yet while every people group has music, there is something special about each one. In the case of jazz, the music was shaped into a discrete art form because of its creators, refusing to dignify their music or paint with the category we call art. While it most certainly is an art, we don’t want it to blend in with the romantic notion of art as sublime. This is to ignore both the root and the fruit, and the origins we briefly mentioned. The root, because it is a glorious art, but an art hammered out on the anvil of a long and troubled history. The great novelist Toni Morrison said, “Black Americans were sustained and healed and nurtured by the translation of their experience into art, above all in the music.”29 But also the fruit, which has been among the most original, moving and beautiful of any contribution to the arts. Perhaps this unlikely fruit is the reason some people do not know where to place the art of Black people. The remarkable African American poet and music critic Stanley L. Crouch (1945–2020) once quipped, “Troublesome person, that Negro—especially one with an aesthetic.”30 Obtaining a deeper knowledge of jazz will necessarily expose us to the unique contributions of African Americans. Duke Ellington, perhaps the most complete jazz artist ever, once remarked that “the foundation of the United States rests on the sweat of my people.”31 The music we call jazz cannot be divorced from the sorrows and joys of African Americans.
If this book accomplishes nothing else, it will have been worth the while if the reader becomes inspired to listen with open ears to this marvelous music. Or, if the reader needs no defense for the significance of jazz, perhaps he or she will have been exposed to a greater variety than previously acknowledged. If the book really succeeds, it will persuade the reader that the music cannot be properly understood without some familiarity with the Christian message. This does not mean one must be a theologian to grasp the message. But it will help to know the basics of creation, the fall into sin, and the redemption of all things by the grace of God. These basic tenets find their way into jazz, in the language of music, of course.
It is my conviction that if we are going to understand the deeper significance of jazz, including seminal works like Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train,” Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” or John Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme, then we need to attend to its relation to the gospel of Jesus Christ, which moves from the deep pain and sorrow of the crucifixion to the joy of the resurrection. By knowing the historical roots of jazz and by being better listeners, I believe we will hear something that is deeply embedded in jazz: a supreme love—the love of God.
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.
If the jazz aesthetic moves us from deep misery to inextinguishable joy, we will need to explore the sources of that misery. In this and the next few chapters we want to describe some of the contours of the historical context of slavery and the way music emerged from that experience. Students and scholars of the history of slavery will no doubt find this account incomplete. But its essential delineations must be stated.
EXODUS
African American music was first produced by a people in diaspora.1 The numbers are sobering and disheartening. Between 1525 and 1866, 12.5 million Africans were captured, enslaved, and shipped to the New World, including South America, the Caribbean Islands, and North America. Of those, 10.7 million survived the passage. Perhaps surprisingly, only 388,000 landed in North America.2
There is a most poignant monument in Ouidah, in the current Republic of Benin in West Africa, called La Porte du Non-retour, the “Door of No Return.” Shaped like a giant gate, it was the last place slaves would cross before being dragged onto shipboard with cruel chains. Never again would they be able to see their loved ones or their homeland. This is one of four such places along the West Coast of Africa where the slaves were put onto the atrocious ships that carried them across the sea to the New World.
It is often forgotten that the continent of Africa had been a significant place for biblical religion well before the modern period. Of course, the people of Israel found a home in Egypt, through Joseph’s enslavement, generations before they entered the Promised Land. We might also think of the Queen of Sheba and her entourage coming to sit at the feet of King Solomon (1 Kings 10:1-13). We should not forget that Jesus found refuge in Egypt along with Mary and Joseph before returning to Nazareth (Mt 2:13-23). We also may take note of people of African descent in the New Testament church, including the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40), the prophet Niger (Acts 13:1), and later the remarkable theologians among the fathers, including Tertullian (160–220) and Augustine (354–430). Even after the Arab conquests, there were strongholds of Christian faith in places such as Egypt, Algeria, and Tunisia. Yet by the time of modern slavery, Europeans had forgotten this heritage, allowing themselves to caricature Africans as “primitives” or “savages” lacking in civilization—despite the fact that Africa has always been part of the story of Christianity.
For that matter, it is crucial to remember that there has been a long and rich tradition of music-making in West Africa. It was impossible that some retentions of this history would not occur in the New World, despite attempts to cut slaves off from their roots. We do not know a great deal about the forms and practice of music in those countries from which slaves were taken, though a few accounts have come down from observers. We do know that music and dance accompanied every aspect of life, from work to warfare, to weddings and numerous other ceremonies. Olaudah Equiano, in his valuable chronicle of the life of slavery, tells us, “We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets. Thus, every great event . . . is celebrated in public dances which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasion.”3
Figure 1.1. Slaves captured in West Africa begin their long, sad journey
Slaves were captured in West Africa, sometimes the victims of bitter rivalries between African monarchs, often captured by corrupt European colonists and merchants. Many kidnappers raided tribes and traded human chattel for money, commodities, and other goods. The captives were marched in chains down to the coast and held in jails called barracoons. After sales negotiations, they were then forced on to ships which carried them to the Americas. Though it is true that sometimes slaves were captured by fellow Africans (exploitation being an equal opportunity disease), without the White man’s drive to subjugate the Black person and turn him into a labor machine, modern slavery could not have occurred.
JES’ WHERE TO GO I DID NOT KNOW
Not a great deal is known about the middle passage between Africa and the New World, but the conditions were certainly horrific.4 Slaves were stuffed into the holds of galley ships that could contain several hundred detainees. Chained together, there was barely any room to move, and conditions were putrid.
Notable for our purposes is the slaver’s assertion that the captives were kept “healthy” through song and dance.5 In reality, they were forced into these dances and encouraged to smile, which often they did to avoid harassment. Women were particularly vulnerable to abuse from the slavers. The chronicler James Barbot affirmed that “the females being apart from the males and on the quarter deck and many of them young sprightly maidens, full of jollity and good humor, afford us an abundance of recreation.”6 One does not have to try very hard at reading between the lines. A more honest testimony is from the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, who affirmed the captives were “compelled to dance by the cat” (the cat o’ nine tails, a whip).7
One of the most poignant descriptions of the harrowing conditions on the middle passage is in Eric Robert Taylor’s If We Must Die. Cruelty, torture, near-starvation, rape, and abuse made death for some preferable to life on these ships.8 Revolts were attempted, though most failed. Some succeeded, however, giving testimony to the willingness of slaves to resist, even to the point of martyrdom.9
What kind of music was heard on the evil boats of the middle passage? A certain Dr. Claxton records that aboard the slave ship The Young Hero, “They sing, but not for their amusement. To stave off melancholy that often led to revolt or suicide, the captain ordered them to sing, and they sang songs of sorrow. Their sickness, fear of being beaten, their hunger, and the memory of their country, are the usual subjects.”10
