What Is Jazz? · Thursday February 8, 2007
As part of an on-going photographic project I’ve been asking people ‘what is jazz?’. I’m producing a series of interview portraits located here, using this space as an improvised studio:
It’s a complicated subject, but uncertainty and hesitancy in addressing it should not, I think, prevent or obscure it from being done. I’ve found it tends to be addressed in subjective terms, closely associated with personal enjoyment. ‘Jazz’ then becomes a favourable label, attributed to what you like. Arguments are then inevitable, even heated ones, because you have a situation where people are debating their likes and dislikes, their musical identity and personal passion. Underlying this is a love and appreciation for ‘jazz’, with a similar dynamic to enthusiasm for a football team. It’s an important, maybe even a consuming part of your life, and you thus have strong feelings about it: ‘I love jazz, I love this music’, gets mixed and blended and thrown into a debate which is, actually, somewhat more objective. Not objective in the definitive sense that 4 + 4 = 8, but objective in the sense that some of the parameters and qualities can roughly be agreed on or at least identified: sociological and musicological, rather than personal. I say more objective, not wholly objective, because there’s an inbuilt subjective component, but in the same way we agree subjectively that grass is green we can also consider what jazz is and arrive at a reasonably coherent understanding.
I don’t accept that ‘jazz is anything’, and ‘anything can be jazz’, although this is frequently how this subject is construed. Anything does go is the prevailing culture and you thus see funk, samba, and just about anything at festivals and radio stations. But historically, semantically, and musically, this is of course nonsense: jazz is something, as opposed to something else, and it’s therefore legitimate to reflect on what this is.
To emphasise then: the question needs separating from what you like. It’s two different things. I like the culture of jazz, I like jazz music, and I dislike some of the so-called fusion/whatever that is currently popular. I don’t think it’s jazz. However although that’s how I (don’t) define it, some of it I do like. Two different things. Similarly there’s some work that is undoubtedly jazz, maybe even from a so-called jazz great, and I don’t like it. I’m not obsessing over the label, not defending the music or the label in any way and certainly not in relation to what I like. But I am emphasising some parameters by which this can be pursued, and thereby raising the quality of a possible discussion and how this is different from mere subjective arguing.
A common response to this question is to cite Louis Armstrong’s famous remark, “if you have to ask what it is that’s not it” or “you haven’t got it”. This means two things. Firstly, it suggests you are seeking ‘it’, a jazz experience, and doing so in inappropriate cerebral terms. You don’t get ‘it’ by thinking about it. This is undoubtedly true in the sense that music is substantially an emotional response, a feeling, that you neither ‘get’ nor ‘understand’ by thinking about it and trying to define it. No doubt, it’s sometimes necessary to say this to over-intellectual people trying to pin jazz down like a collection of dead butterflies. But it’s equally necessary to respond to this remark by clarifying that no, I’m not ‘seeking’ it. I’m just trying to roughly identify what it is, as opposed to what it isn’t, as a genre not an ‘experience’ – a perfectly adult and intelligent pursuit. This illustrates a further problem, which is that for some music or jazz lovers they thinking about this coherently is not what interests them or what they do; I’ve found that engaging with such people gets you entangled with pointless subjectivity where they defend their own anti-thinking standpoint. Peace, love, etc to such people but I’m pursuing something different and it is legitimate.
There’s undoubtedly a hedonistic, Dionysiac, even drug-addled aspect to jazz culture similar to the psychology of shamanism, which is inimicable to definition: you deliberately get out of your head using the time-honoured method of music, preferably with alcohol/chemical assistance. You seek, enjoy, and then eulogise the pleasures of abandonment. This is certainly not unique to jazz; rock n’ roll culture is also spattered with dysfunctional cases and deaths. Kurt Cobain is a recent example, and Pete Doherty’s Mum is worried. Jazz has its own strain of this, interestingly less prevalent in its contemporary fusion practitioners, but evident in the past years of some of the greats like Stan Tracey and Billie Holliday. If you ask what that is, no you don’t get it: and I don’t want it. Even when drug-free, jazz is fun but not that much fun; it’s not worth making into a shamanic quasi-religion. As with religion it can be critically evalauted, and as with religion you find adherents who say no, no, it can’t.
As James Poling said:
The very fabric of jazz, say most critics and jazzmen, is feeling, spontaneous feeling. This is what makes it unique. But current experimentation in modern jazz indicates a growing awareness on the part of jazzmen that if jazz is to develop – in a developing world – it can and must make use of the total human being, and not merely of his feelings. Also that the range of feeling and mood open to jazz does not have to be limited to the happy and the high – which, if they don’t exist when a cat is headed to the stand, must be stimulated artificially (James Poling, World Of Jazz 1962: 160).
So yes, jazz is a wonderfully expressive musical form where, as the poet ee cummings once said “feeling comes first” and human beings being what they are, drugs inevitably get implicated with this. But to pursue that aspect without any thinking fails to recognise “the total human being”.
It’s not worth a thing if it ain’t got swing, and if swing ain’t got any thinking behind it it’s maybe an unbalanced aesthetic.
Wikipedia provides a concise and useful synopsis as it often does, but it’s inconsistent. While acknowledging some definition is possible, it simultanously documents everything that has been or is called jazz as jazz, thereby maintaining the muddle.
Anyway, they provide a useful quotation:
According to Krin Gabbard “jazz is a construct” or category that, while artificial, still is useful to designate “a number of musics with enough in common to be part of a coherent tradition”. Travis Jackson also defines jazz in a broader way by stating that it is music that includes qualities such as “ ‘swinging’, improvising, group interaction, developing an ‘individual voice’, and being ‘open’ to different musical possibilities. Where to draw the boundaries of “jazz” is the subject of debate among music critics, scholars, and fans. A debate the musicians themselves very rarely bother to enter Here
Finally, Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox: Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History which begins thus and provides a few ideas in relation to this question ‘what is jazz’, and how people answer it:
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.