Jazz: An appreciation

Wynton Marsalis plays at the Oskar Schindler Performing Arts Center (OSPAC) Seventh Annual Jazz Festival in West Orange, N.J. in 2009. (Wikipedia Photo)

I grew up listening to jazz.

Not that my mother left me much of a choice.

She never told me to listen to this or that, she just played her jazz albums on the stereo, and I listened.

The sounds of John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Betty Carter, the Modern Jazz Quartet and so many others filled our home with bursts of energy and that reached the soul.

While I listened to and enjoyed R&B, danced to disco and played congas and bongos in my local neighborhood band, I always returned to jazz.   

My appreciation for jazz started young and only continues to grow.

I learned what I loved most – Coltrane, Miles, Sarah Vaughan and Wes Montgomery. And what I didn’t like – Avant Garde jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, an acquired taste, I’m sure.

My earliest serious writing was for my college newspaper, the Temple News as a music reviewer, covering the local jazz scene in Philadelphia. 

I was ecstatic. It’s one thing to listen to jazz on the stereo or radio, but it is not the same as seeing it performed live. The musicianship and improvisation displayed at a concert is a joyful experience. Without sounding sacrilegious, seeing jazz live is the difference from watching a great gospel choir on TV and actually going to church to hear it. Or listening to Mozart and Beethoven on the radio or going to see it performed by a classical orchestra. 

The late composer William “Billy” Taylor once called jazz America’s classical music.

“It’s simple, complex, relaxed, intense,” said Taylor, who created more than 300 compositions and received numerous honors and awards, including two Peabody awards for broadcasting and a Grammy.

“It is both a way of spontaneously composing music and a repertoire, which resulted from the musical language developed by improvising artists.”, he said.

Jazz was first compiled by musicians in African American communities in New Orleans, La. By the late 19th century, early 20th century, it became the signature dancing music in the clubs, inspiring improvisation to bring something newer and hipper every time it was played, and the music evolved.

Last month, the school board in the city where jazz began, removed a little-known 1922 rule that bans jazz music and dancing in public schools.

Officials told The Time-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate that the policy has racist origins, as its creators sought at the time to distance New Orleans schoolchildren from the African Americans who created the genre. The rule has been ignored for decades. Jazz is taught in some schools and marching bands accompanied by dance teams are a fixture of Carnival season parades.

“In this instance and in this instance only we’re glad that the policy was ignored by our students, by our schools,” board member Katherine Baudouin said. “Our schools played a major role in the development of jazz.”

The policy came to the board’s attention after Ken Ducote, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Collaborative of Charter Schools, read a book, “Chord Changes on the Chalkboard: How Public-School Teachers Shaped Jazz and the Music of New Orleans,” by Al Kennedy. Kennedy had found out about the policy while doing research.

“It’s like if Colorado passed a rule banning students from looking at the Rocky Mountains,” Ducote said.

Reports from 1922 quote a then-school board member identified as Mrs. Adolph Baumgartner as one of the early opponents of the genre.

“Jazz music and jazz dancing in schools should be stopped at once,” Baumgartner said during a March 1922 meeting. “I have seen a lot of rough dancing in school auditoriums lately.”

Kennedy said the ban was likely the school board “reacting to the fears of the day.”

“Think of it as an early version of the book ban,” he said. “It seems like they were more afraid of it being a bad influence than anything else.”

The irony is that the music some sought to ban was later used to promote America’s image abroad.

During the Cold War, some of the biggest names in jazz toured the world in the name of democracy.

Jazz masters such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie were sent abroad as part of a U.S. State Department cultural program as an instrument of global diplomacy. These jazz ambassadors performed concerts in countries such as Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and the Congo between 1954 and 1968, says jazz pianist, composer and broadcaster Julian Joseph.

April is Jazz Appreciation Month in honor of one of America’s earliest and greatest art forms.

This is a good time if any to familiarize yourself with the wonders of jazz. My personal recommendations are “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane, “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis, “Hot House Flowers” by Wynton Marsalis and almost anything by Nina Simone. But then there’s Esperanza Spalding and so many other young artists. 

If you say you don’t like jazz, I say you haven’t really given it a try.

Irv Randolph is an award-winning journalist and political commentator. The Randolph Report is a weekly newsletter on politics, culture and career and professional development relevant to African Americans. Subscribe for free and get the latest articles sent directly to your inbox.