Jazz: The Unrealized American Dream

If the American Dream is defined as a quest for freedom and opportunity, jazz can be seen as a direct product of the African American community’s struggle to realize this dream. Jazz is often called a uniquely American artform, but it would be more correct to say that jazz is the story of the African American experience, shaped by the struggles and experiences of African Americans and reflecting the fundamental social forces at work in American history. The African American community has often turned to music as an outlet for storytelling or creative expression, from slave songs that told of the sorrow of bondage to spirituals that expressed hope in a better world to come. Jazz tells the story of African Americans in the early part of the 20th century, when their pursuit of the American Dream culminated in the Great Migration.

The American Dream encapsulates the freedom, hope, and light felt by the first settlers when reaching America and continues to represent American ideals as they once were. This era was one of optimism as African Americans fled to the North for new opportunities and created vibrant urban communities where physical segregation and population density promoted a sense of safety and pride. While racist attitudes prevented black musicians from participating in mainstream Eurocentric musical forms, this cultural segregation ultimately helped channel black creativity and musicality into the creation of their own style of music. Jazz music was at first demeaned by white critics but as it gained in popularity and became a commercial success, the white mainstream effectively co-opted the artform. Black musicians continued to be the source of musical innovation while being copied by white musicians or financially exploited by white music producers. While the white mainstream’s adoption of jazz as an “American” art form allowed jazz to find a wider, more diverse audience it was also a tragic situation in which many of African Americans’ contributions were belittled or simply unrecognized. Jazz expresses a people’s longing for, and belief in, the American Dream but remains an example of how that dream was not realized. The same patterns and the same unrealized dreams of equality and freedom can still be seen playing out today for African American artists in other spheres of American cultural life.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the optimism of Reconstruction had faded into the difficult reality of Jim Crow, a set of segregationist policies which trapped the majority of African Americans in the South in a sharecropping system which kept them poor. White southern landowners feared that abolishing slavery would result in a loss of economic power and therefore invested in a sharecropping system that not only ensured that African Americans would remain working for unjust compensation but also made it nearly impossible to be freed from white landowners. Sharecropping prevented African Americans from leaving the South while also denying enslaved people their own identities and histories. Many African Americans at the time did not have personal names and ended up giving each other nicknames once freed as a symbol of individuality. While slavery had been abolished, America still tolerated a climate of fear and violence against African American especially in the South where organizations like the Ku Klux Klan were active. In the North, fewer European immigrants were coming to America because of World War I which caused a significant labor shortage in industrial cities. Desperate to fill these vacancies, companies actively recruited African Americans from the South—hence, the Great Migration began. Between 1916 and 1970, an estimated 6 million African Americans left the rural South and moved to cities spanning the entire country but with focus on the North and Midwest. Some of the most active years for migration were between 1916 and 1930.¹ The Great Migration marked a passage of movement and relocation in the search of a better future. African Americans fled the south in huge numbers hoping to make a better future for themselves and their families. In the same way that European immigrants saw coming to America as offering the possibility of a better tomorrow, African Americans saw their move out of the South as giving them a similar opportunity to begin their quest to achieve American liberty.

Jim Crow laws in the South perpetuated social and cultural segregation between African and White Americans and dehumanized African Americans in all aspects of life. While the North was not free from segregation, it did not have the same types of legal restrictions on African Americans as in the South and this allowed for a more general mixing of people. The North was not ready for such a great influx of people and Black migrants had to build their own communities, many of them within white urban centers. Cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia are examples of traditionally white population centers that drew huge numbers of African American migrants and then became centers for African American culture and thought. Within these segregated communities, African Americans were able to connect and meet different African Americans who had felt the same sorrows and experienced the same evils. Living in an entirely Black community gave African Americans power and strength that had been stripped away from them during slavery. Finally, they were able to unite and build a new African American legacy in American history, which among other artistic endeavours included the creation of the first truly American music: jazz.

Early jazz reflected the optimism of the time for African Americans even in the face of continued racism and segregation. The South offered almost no opportunity for growth and change but migrating north offered the promise of a new future, an immigrant story which mirrored other similar journeys. Just as immigrants from Europe viewed their passage to America as a journey of hope for a better tomorrow, African Americans saw their departure from the South as the ticket to a bright future with “well paying jobs and the benefits of American’s civil liberties.”² Having to live separately from whites did not crush the optimism of this dream. In particular, after the deadly race riots that occurred in multiple cities in 1919, living in a large black enclave could in some ways provide a sense of security for African Americans who created what were essentially cities within cities. The segregated communities that African American communities formed in the North were often relatively affluent places where an emerging black middle class could experience greater freedom than in the larger white world. Duke Ellington describes the large black community on the South Side of Chicago in the 1920s as “a real us-for-we, we-for-us community...it was a community of men and women who were respected, people of dignity — doctors, lawyers, policy operators...everything and everybody but no junkies.” Communities like this helped to unify and empower African Americans. While African Americans who moved North were still living in a racist and segregated society, their lives looked markedly different and in general were better than they had been in the South. Families who had been sharecroppers and living at a subsistence level in isolated rural areas were now working class people in growing urban centers.

While many black communities remained on the shabby outskirts of mainstream society, other African American neighbourhoods existed as vibrant and affluent urban centers, notably Harlem. “Harlem [was and is] situated in the heart of Manhattan” and its physical centrality created a sense of inclusiveness and the possibility of equality.³ While Harlem was a Black community, residents who might have been unsophisticated sharecroppers in the South “soon... became New Yorkers.”⁴ African Americans had been a rural community and now they were increasingly an urban one, with urban tastes and a new found sense of empowerment and possibility. This community provided the right audience for jazz, a musical form which spoke to their sense of freedom and pride in music which was distinctly African American. In this way, jazz was the product of social and demographic changes happening within the African American community and a direct result of this community’s urbanization. While today segregation is seen as an unmitigated evil, for African Americans in the early 20th century, separation from the white mainstream gave space for the development of a strong and positive cultural identity and pride. Migrating North gave hope to African Americans and a way to reinvent themselves and make a new beginning even though they continued to live in separate, segregated communities.

In addition to physical segregation, African Americans were culturally segregated and excluded from mainstream culture. This exclusion forced black musicians to create genres where they could be free to express themselves and at the turn of the century, this expression took the form of jazz. Racial prejudice meant that African Americans were not seen as capable of participating in sophisticated pursuits like the fine arts. In addition, the vast majority of African Americans did not have access to the education or resources required to participate in the European art forms which defined what mainstream white America saw as culture, i.e. opera, classical music, literature. The majority of African Americans were illiterate and few African Americans could read musical notation. However, unlike classical music, operas, or literature, jazz was accessible to people even if they did not know how to read music or how to play a symphonic instrument. A.J.A Rogers commented on performance at the turn of the century explaining “Often wholly illiterate these (musicians) knew nothing about written music or composition but with minds like cameras they would … ‘whip the ivories’ to marvellous chords and hidden racy meanings evoking the intense delight of their hearers.”⁵ Jazz centered around the idea of giving a voice to the experiences one had been through and claiming autonomy over their history. African Americans had previously been denied access into mainstream media and therefore were forging their own path in society through the exploration of jazz. Unlike music that was being composed in Europe and exported to America, jazz was being created in America by Americans and was evolving from slave work songs, traditional religious Black folk tunes, and ragtime. While white American musicians were focused on mastering European forms and expressing themselves within genres that were already recognized and respectable, African American musicians were forced to find new avenues for their creativity. They did this by drawing on what was already a rich tradition of black music and creating something that was new and spoke to the new condition of their community: free people with hope for a prosperous future. Excluded from white mainstream culture, African Americans were forced to create something for themselves and as jazz brought forth a new aesthetic it drew attention not only from appreciative African American audiences but piqued the interest of white Americans and people across the globe. At the same time that America was emerging as a political and economic power, jazz was contributing to America’s emergence as a cultural power as well.

The Great Migration was not just a physical uprooting for African American people, it was also an emotional rite of passage in which African Americans experienced new feelings of confidence, pride, and joy. For many African Americans, Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s represented a completely new and vibrant vision of what the African American community could achieve and it proved to be a place where black talent and excellence were celebrated. The Harlem Renaissance was literally a rebirth for the African American people and while there were other vibrant African American communities across the country, Harlem held a special place in the African American imagination. African Americans in Harlem sought to reclaim control over their narrative as Harlem enjoyed “a time when freedom began to feel free.”⁶ Leading black thinkers and artists came to Harlem from all over the country including Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, and Alain Locke. These and other leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance created plays, novels, poetry, music, and visual art which “protested vocally against racism and expressed identity on his or her own terms.”⁷ The optimism of African American migrants to the North and their vision of an African American culture which was both free and proud was reflected in the earliest examples of jazz music. Spirituals had been born out of the pain of enslavement and attempted to answer questions such as: “What happens to an enslaved person when she dies? What does it mean if her life has been so denigrated on earth? What ‘miracles of God are needed to get free?”⁸ In contrast, jazz was about building proudly on a long tradition of African American music while also expressing individuality, freedom, and joy.

The non-acceptance of jazz by White Americans pigeonholed African Americans artists and the artform causing jazz to be looked down upon by not only White Americans but also elite African Americans. White Americans belittled the African American experience as an inferior form of music and not accepting jazz music into mainstream culture insisting that jazz “is merely a return to the humming, hand-clapping, or tomtom beating of savages.”⁹ As jazz became more popular, white print media began to cover and discuss the new found style of music and brought it upon themselves to criticize and speculate. The white upper class saw jazz as an abomination and viewed it as a noise that made dogs “burst forth loudly and dolorously.”¹⁰ Jazz was characterized by many white Americans as “invented by demons for torture of imbeciles” neglecting to appreciate the music’s sophistication and innovativeness in celebrating our country’s youth and heterogeneity.¹¹ White Americans were not only distraught that African Americans were creating popular music but were threatened by the power of the emotion and movement being brought forth by their music. Despite the negative attitudes of the white mainstream towards jazz, jazz music had begun to draw white fans who would come to otherwise black neighbourhoods to hear black musicians. The racial mixing in “black and tan” cabarets caused “frequent and heated protests” and many Americans both black and white came to associate jazz with drinking, racial mixing, and other undesirable aspects of society.¹² In Chicago, Black church leaders discouraged their members from listening to jazz which mirrored the disapproval black “elites” had for the black migrants who had brought this new music to the city.¹³

One of the reasons that mainstream America did not initially recognize the artistry of jazz was that America was very much living in the shadow of Europe and most American institutions revered only the European tradition of classical music. This meant that upper class white Americans were encouraged to believe culture was synonymous with refinement and order; in contrast jazz was seen as “without the structure and form essential to music and poetry alike.”¹⁴ Jazz was accessible to many, spontaneous in feeling, and interactive while culture was defined as exclusive, orderly, and complex.¹⁵ Jazz appealed to a larger audience and was “frequently played in the midst of noisy, hand clapping, foot-stomping, dancing and gyrating audiences,” while truly “Cultural” music was sedate and had a clear separation of artist from audience. Certain elite parts of Black society also rejected jazz and tried to encourage “migrants (from the South) to admire, play, and listen to genteel white art music and to pursue formal musical instruction.”¹⁶ Although White Americans were searching for their national cultural identity, they rejected an identity built on inclusivity and diversity, and saw America’s mixture of cultures as a weakness rather than a strength— refusing to really consider Black music as valuable because of an “almost slavish devotion... to European ideals and standards.”¹⁷ Jazz had broken away from the Eurocentric cultural forms white America was bound to and for this it was both “praised and criticized for being almost completely out of the phase with the period’s concept of Culture.”¹⁸

When white culture finally began to accept jazz, mainstream artists and audiences walked a fine line between appropriation and appreciation. By the end of 1920’s, jazz was being recorded by white musicians and being introduced into the mainstream with a distinctly white spin on jazz. White Americans had rejected the “hot and rough” sounds of jazz that were coming from African American communities and musicians but accepted the new smoother “sweet” style that White musicians had placed on the music. As many African Americans prepared to share their music with a larger audience, they would travel to white populated cities and listen to their music. African Americans quickly discovered that jazz was “clearly unlike the white man’s popular music” and realized that the only way to promote jazz in mainstream society would be to abandon jazz’s roots and conform to the new “sweet” style of jazz created by White Americans.¹⁹ While the abandonment of traditional jazz was detrimental for African American musicians it allowed them to cross over the cultural barrier and was imperative in making jazz profitable for not only white musicians but for African American musicians as well. However, diluting jazz for the mainstream culture destroyed the raw, genuine integrity of jazz and became “a plague, profitable but profligate, that [did] more moral harm than artistic good.”²⁰ In other situations, white musicians would have learned the songs and techniques by listening to black musicians in integrated jazz clubs but they received all the recognition and made money from recordings that were not an option for black artists at the time. The same inequality could be seen on the record production side of the music business. Race Records were labels that published black music but were owned by whites and which usually shamelessly exploited black musicians. They often withheld royalties from black artists and pressured artists to relinquish the rights to their own music. This same pattern of exploitation extended throughout the commercial side of the music world where clubs, theaters and dance halls that hired black bands were often owned by white businesspeople. Some black entrepreneurs like Harry Pace tried to launch black-owned record labels and Pace’s Black Swan label was initially very successful signing prominent black artists like Ethel Water, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton. Once it became clear, however, how much demand there was for “race” music and jazz, larger white owned labels moved into the market and pushed out black enterprises: Black Swan was eventually purchased and subsumed by the white owned Paramount Records.

The 1920’s and 1930’s were a time of great change for African American communities and these changes were mirrored in the musical innovation that produced jazz. The story of the African American experience post the Great Migration -- the hope as well as the continued burden of systemic racism in America -- can be heard, felt, and discovered through jazz of the same period. While it is an artform born out of a sense of optimism and opportunity it was also shaped by the much darker forces of segregation and cultural appropriation. The story of jazz -- a story of deprivation giving birth to innovation and excellence that is followed by exploitation and appropriation -- is a story which we can see being repeated today. While there have been numerous white composers and musicians who have contributed to jazz’s development, at its heart the story of jazz is the story of African Americans fighting to have their experiences and their culture recognized and appreciated. Prominent jazz musician, Wynton Marsalis, poses the question “If we don’t understand what our constitution does, how will we understand what jazz is?” Marsalis draws a fundamental connection between jazz and our constitution. The two were built with the same principles of individual freedom and equality. Jazz builds a sense of inclusively and attracts a diverse group of people; however, ultimately, jazz is music by the people for the people.