As in “Recitatif” and Beloved, Morrison manifests her intention not to essentialize black identity in Jazz. Crafting Jazz with jazz sensibility, Morrison
deliberately delineates the formation of black identity through the employment of jazz, a kind of music that does not belong exclusively to blacks. In this section, I would like to briefly review relevant research on the history of jazz, in an attempt to make sense the link between Morrison’s non-essentialized attitude toward black identity and the employment of jazz in Jazz.
Though widely acknowledged as a black product, jazz has been dramatically Europeanized since the day it came into being. As James Lincoln Collier argues in Jazz: the American Theme Song, jazz does not “arise from some generalized ‘black culture’ or ‘black experience,’” but evolves instead from the musical practices of the Creole (201). In other words, the development of jazz is inseparable from racial and cultural mixture, which can trace back to the period of Spanish rule in the 1700s and 1800s when the Creole became the dominant group in New Orleans (Gridley 33).
Unlike southern black laborers, the Creole were well-educated and middle-class people who, despite the African influence in religious practices, language, and folkways, viewed themselves as the inheritors of European tradition (Collier, Jazz 201). With part African and part French ancestry, the Creole inherited influences from both cultures in their musical practices. As connoisseurs of music and art, the Creole constantly engaged in musical activities and dances, which helped provide an
environment for jazz to thrive.
Actually, as a seaport and a center of commerce, New Orleans maintained a cosmopolitan party atmosphere with its numerous taverns and dance halls. Jazz thrived in this party atmosphere, as the demand for fresh material urged musicians to experiment on “odd assortments of approaches and material” (Gridley 37). Indeed, jazz on the threshold was designed not so much for listening as for dancing. With the
increasing popularity of dancing, the evolution of dances led to the evolution of jazz.
Jazz bands constantly reinvented themselves, experimenting on new jazz rhythms that can evoke positive interaction with the audience. If the dancers were impressed by jazz rhythms, they would take part in the improvisations of jazz to quicken the tempo or vary the rhythm at will. Intended for dancing and performing, jazz is “not what you play, but how you play it” (Gridley 33). Collier notes that, unlike European music, perfect jazz can count on one or two notes. Consequently, to the jazz players the nitty-gritty is “not which notes or chords are played, but how they are played”
(Making 6).
The performativity of jazz can be attributed to the minstrel show, which Collier describes as “the most important vehicle” for black music in the nineteenth century (Making 31). In the1840s, the minstrel show came in the form of popular art with white performers wearing blackface, whose topic centered on black life on the plantation (Yanow xxvi). During the Civil War, the minstrel show was then used as propaganda for the humanist cause of the North (Collier, Making 31). In 1855, black minstrelsy came into existence. Black performers “blacked up” to present the
“authentic” picture of black life, featuring “the clichéd humor, rampant racism, and use of outrageous stereotypes” (Yanow xxvi). As the music grew more creative in black shows than in white ones, the black minstrelsy boosted the popularity of new songs and thus offered singers, dancers, and musicians an opportunity to work in show business (Collier, Making 31). As Scott Yanow notes, “[b]y the early 1900s some jazz musicians were employed in minstrel shows along with pioneering blues singers” (Yanow xxvi). Later on, jazz was above being a foil to minstrel music. What is noteworthy, though, is the performance-oriented nature of jazz inherited from minstrel music. Just as the minstrel show allows both white performers and black performers to “blacken up” and to play out the black story, jazz also welcomes the
performers and the audience of any race to improvise the performance.
The charm of jazz lies not only in its performativity but also in its hybridity.
André Hodeir argues against the “original purity” of jazz, proposing that “jazz has never been a ‘pure’ music” (46). He does not see the European elements in jazz as white-influenced decadence, but rather, as a necessary “borrowing in order to evolve”
(45). In Hodeir’s opinion, the European elements contributed to provide jazz with melodic originality:
These elements, all of Anglo-Saxon or French origin—hymns, songs, and later, popular dances and military marches—gave jazz some of its
principal characteristics: its tonal system, its form, the four-beat measure, the four-bar unit of construction, a certain kind of syncopation, and so forth. (40)
European elements in jazz, represented by the Creole, endowed jazz with basic principles. Nevertheless, jazz is more than a fusion of both European and African music. The encountering of both cultures generates the unique features of jazz. Take the rhythmic pulse of jazz, one of the unique features of jazz, for example. The rhythmic pulse of jazz, as Collier points out, is “not some modification of African or European time schedules but something quite different from, and a good deal less rigid than, either” (Making 6). Indeed, as a racially and culturally mixed milieu, New Orleans makes excellent jazz. Stressing the participation of various ethnic groups in the making of jazz, Collier claims that by 1900 New Orleans had been too racially and culturally mixed to ascribe jazz only to the Creole or the black, borrowing Raeburn’s words: “with mixed-blood Creoles teamed with blacks and whites [in jazz bands], not to mention Latin Americans like Martin Araham, who was known as ‘Chink,’ any attempt to assign racial connotations to style would be relative, at best” (qtd. in Collier, Jazz 199-200). Derived from a melting pot, jazz not only manifests the hybrid
experience of the white and the black but, more significantly, welcomes different ethnic groups to make and remake it. To cite Raeburn again, “In New Orleans nothing is pure” (qtd. in Collier, Jazz 200). It is through the process of hybridization that jazz continues to evolve.
Generally speaking, jazz, as a fusion of European traditions and African traditions, can be ascribed to the combining influences of the Creole and the Negro.
The dividing line between the two ethnic groups, however, blurred when Creoles were forced to give up the status they had secured during the 1700s and to be classified as the Negro under the Louisiana Legislative Code in 1894 (Yanow 8). Before we examine the elements of jazz music, it is important to take note of the race of jazz musicians, which may explain why jazz is generally thought of as a black product.
Collier puts forth the main reason why music had been considered a black profession:
According to Victorian gentility, whoever in show business is considered “only a cut above a prostitute” (Collier, Making 34). Since middle class were above the
condescending engagement within show business, music had been mostly a black profession by post-Civil War times (Collier, Making 33). Music skills are never inborn, though. As Gridley argues, musical preferences for African techniques were learned rather than genetic, passed down from generation to generation (39). Contending that
“there is no ‘racial unconscious’ that is transmitted genetically” (39), Gridley yet accentuates the relation between musical skills and cultural heritage. Now that black musicians played music with the skills passed on as part of their cultural heritage, the audience might have a bee in the bonnet that music played by them sounds African.
Stressing learned skills in musical performances, Gridley proclaims that the blood actually has nothing to do with musical performances, but cultural heritage helps to hand down African-American musical styles and to generate the “illusion” that jazz is essentially “black”(39). Jazz is, eventually, a product derived from different musical
forms not defined by race.
The key features of jazz are a blend of African and European sources. In Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, Gridley examines the hybrid history of the key features in jazz, including improvisation, instrumentation, and so on. Improvisation, “the practice of spontaneously varying individual parts” (40), can be traced back to the drum ensemble of Ghana, in which the leader drummer varies his part to send signals.
Not black-exclusive, improvisation can also be found in European music, specifically in pre-twentieth-century concert music and the French and German keyboard tradition, in which singers start notes at will and musicians improvise a piece on the demand of the audience (41). Besides, in terms of the choice of instruments, percussion
instruments--such as wood block, cowbell, and drum—are of African ancestry (42).
As of the string instruments in jazz, banjo can be correlated with African tradition while guitar has a European ancestry (43). In a sense, the hybrid origin of jazz, as exemplified in the influx of European and African influences into the making of jazz, bears witness to the cross-cultural juxtaposition as a force of creativity.
As cross-cultural elements are being filtered into the birth of jazz, jazz is indeed too hybrid to be considered black-exclusive. In fact, the common conception of jazz as a quintessentially black cultural symbol may not stand to reason. In Jazz: the American Theme Song, Collier indicates three reasons that jazz failed to appeal to a large number of black audience in the 1900s (203-205). First, religious blacks viewed jazz as a “devil music” (203). Second, the black middle class, who had lived in
accordance with Victorian gentility, considered jazz musicians a cut above prostitutes.
Third, a large number of black people, trapped in Southern sharecroppers’ cabins, were too financially challenged to buy jazz records. In sum, jazz was not widely accepted by the black community because of religious, social, and economic reasons.
If we consider the low popularity of jazz among the black in the early days, it will be
problematic to see jazz as a shared cultural symbol of all blacks.
This being said, the question is: what are the possible reasons for Morrison to portray the formation of black identity through jazz music in Jazz? In a way we can take the hybridity and the performative nature of jazz into consideration. For one thing, with hybrid elements introduced by the Creole, jazz incorporates cross-cultural vivacity into black experience. For instance, the episode of the mulatto Golden Gray in Jazz implies a cross-racial romance between blacks and whites. Furthermore, Gray’s quest for his black father runs parallel with Joe’s search for identity, which metaphorically resembles an improvisational relay between performers in jazz.
Moreover, as jazz accentuates story-telling through the improvisation of notes from the audience or performers, the performance-oriented nature of jazz functions to invite whoever in the performance to jazz up a black story. In Jazz, characters take turns to tell their stories and respond to each other’s, thereby improvising a jazz performance that welcomes the reader to contribute his/her own takes of the story. Besides
appealing to the form and style of jazz music in her making of Jazz, Morrison’s employment of jazz music in her novel may also be attributed to the de-essentialized nature of jazz music. Although “jazz” may not be a shared cultural treasure of all African Americans in the novel, it could work well as an open category for contriving a new idea of blackness. As an unorthodox emblem of the black, jazz, with its hybrid implications and its performance-oriented nature, may yet manifest Morrison’s non-essentialized attitude toward black identity.