4. Resultados y discusi´ on
4.1.2. Agregados con carga positiva
The third process I wish to engage as part of my methodological lens is appropriation and transformation of received and newly introduced musical materials. Jazz emerged as a distinct musical genre (even if it did not yet possess that name), during the first two decades of the twentieth century. It was not a genre that grew in an evolutionary manner out of a single precursor but,
historians suggest, was a product of the admixture of ragtime, spirituals and the blues (and their antecedents, field hollers and work songs), and popular (dance) music, among other bits and pieces.356 In its earliest incarnations jazz was
African American music and its capacity to absorb influences from a plethora of sources appears to be a characteristic of all of the genres that fall under that rubric. Brian Ward makes the case:
As black poet, journalist and jazz critic Frank Marshall Davis once explained, “Both culturally and ideologically we are a goulash of Europeans, Africans, and American Indians – with African dominant”. As Davis was well aware, African-‐ American music has always been characterized by its willingness and seemingly endless capacity to fuse many varied, often apparently incompatible, influences
rather critiques that privilege individual improvisational virtuosity ahead of other aspects of music making.
354 Ingrid Monson, Saying Something, 134-‐192; Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, chapters 13 (‘Give
and Take: The Collective Conversation and Musical Journey’) and 14 (‘When The Music’s Happening And When It’s Not: Evaluating Group Performances’); Robert Hodson, Interaction, improvisation and interplay in jazz, 22.
355 Geoff Dwyer, But Beautiful (New York: North Point Press, 1996), 199.
356 Schuller, Early Jazz, 63-‐87. Other bits and pieces might include minstrelsy and vaudeville –
both contributors to early blues, and the ‘Spanish tinge’ that Jelly Roll Morton claimed was a vital ingredient in jazz.
into a succession of styles which have reflected and articulated the changing circumstances, consciousness and aspirations of black Americans; black Americans who have themselves been differentiated by class, gender and geography, and doubly defined by their immanent American, as well as more distant African, heritages.357
For the purposes of this thesis, there are two values I wish to draw out from Ward’s claims. First, the capacity of African American musicians – and in particular those who made the earliest jazz – to ‘fuse many varied, often apparently incompatible, influences’ into what settled into identifiable formations, albeit evolving ones. These formations include jazz. The second point I draw from Ward is that these musical fusions reflected and articulated ‘the changing circumstances, consciousness and aspirations’ of those who made them. I will elaborate the first point, and then use the second point to
contextualise my claims about musical fusions and transformations within the broader purposes of this thesis.
As discussed earlier (under ‘Jazz as process’), Olly Wilson identified two African American musical traditions, the second of which – characterised by ‘a greater interaction and interpenetration of African and Euro-‐American
elements’ – is exemplified by jazz.358 Drawing from Eileen Southern, Wilson
suggests this second tradition of African American musical practice originated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and began with idiosyncratic or ‘peculiar’ performances of Euro-‐American music that in effect transformed the repertoire being interpreted into something qualitatively different.359 In
Wilson’s view, ‘The process of cultural transformation became the salient characteristic of this tradition.’360 Further, ‘It was precisely that transformation
which made the music unique, and as a consequence, highly desired by whites’ who in earlier periods were the ‘owners’ or employers of the musicians, and in
357 Ward, Just my soul responding, 11. 358 Wilson, ‘Black Music as an Art Form’, 10. 359 Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 63-‐126. 360 Ibid. (my emphasis)
later periods were numbered among the paying consumers of such transformative music.’361
The musical materials adopted for transformation included not only repertoire and particular styles, but also instruments and instrumental techniques. Jazz drummer Art Blakey said, ‘When we heard the Caucasians playing their instruments, we took the instruments and went somewhere else… This is our contribution to the world, though they want to ignore it and are always trying to connect it to someone else. It couldn’t come from anyone but us.’362 James Stewart reinforces Blakey’s claim about the cultural provenance of
these transformative practices, suggesting, ‘[Blacks] had to impose on borrowed instruments an aesthetic convention that we obviously possessed even before we acquired [those instruments].’363 William Schafer suggests New Orleans
brass bands were the source of instruments, instrumental techniques, and basic repertoire for early jazz musicians.364 However, it was not the fact that early jazz
musicians made use of these musical resources that assured their place in posterity, but their idiosyncratic reshaping of the sounds and roles of instruments, instrumental techniques and repertoire.365
Olly Wilson illustrates this principle with an analysis of a (1959) Miles Davis recording of ‘On Green Dolphin Street’. He concludes by stating that, ‘The
361 While these transformations made the music of African Americans desirable to some listeners
of European descent, to others such transformations made the music incomprehensible. See Morton Marks, ‘Uncovering ritual structures in contemporary America’, in Religious movements in contemporary America, ed. Irving Zaretsky and Mark Leone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1974), 60-‐129.
362 Art Blakey, quoted in Ingrid Monson, ‘Art Blakey’s African Diaspora’, in The African Diaspora: A musical perspective, ed. Ingrid Monson (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 346. Blakey, born in 1919, was not one of the African Americans who ‘took the instruments and went somewhere else.’ Here, Blakey uses ‘we’ for political (and perhaps poetic) resonance. See also Stewart, ’Introduction to the Black Aesthetic’, 86.
363 Stewart, ‘Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music’, 86.
364 William Schafer, Brass Bands and New Orleans jazz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1977), 8.
365 Chris Washburne (‘The Clave of Jazz: A Caribbean Contribution to the Rhythmic Foundation of
an African-‐American Music’, Black Music Research Journal 17/1 [Spring 1997], 65-‐66) reports that many prominent early jazz musicians – including Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong, Joe ‘King’ Oliver, Bunk Johnson – received their earliest musical training in brass bands, playing a mixture of music that included transformed European and Euro-‐American repertoire.
Miles Davis Quintet’s recording of this tune transforms it completely and places it squarely within the modern jazz tradition.’366 In this case, music was first
appropriated from another genre (a song from a film) and then adapted or transformed to meet the purposes of the musicians involved. Thus
transformation – achieved when music is qualitatively changed through the interpretation of the musicians – is central to Wilson’s understanding of the jazz tradition. Such transformations not only reveal the ‘voice’ of the musician(s) performing, but also provide means by which any musical materials (whatever their provenance) may be initiated into the jazz tradition.
It’s not just repertoire, instruments and techniques from ‘outside of’ jazz that jazz musicians transform; adaptation and change are also applied to
materials that jazz musicians inherit when they involve themselves in the genre, materials that are already accepted as part of jazz. Albert Murray illustrates this point by suggesting that Duke Ellington’s supremacy is not based on his capacity for invention but because his oeuvre ‘represents the most comprehensive
assimilation, counterstatement and elaboration of most, if not all, of the elements of blues musicianship.’367 Murray goes on to say, ‘It was not so much
what Charlie Parker did on impulse that made him the formidable soloist and influential revolutionary stylist that he was, it was what he did in response to already existing procedures.’368
Joanne Demmers, in her book Steal This Music, considers ‘transformative appropriation’ an essential ingredient to musical creativity.369 It has been central
to the practice of jazz musicians since the birth of the genre, and demonstrably present in each significant stylistic evolution the music has experienced. At times those stylistic shifts have involved the transformation of the accepted materials
366 Wilson, ‘Black Music as an Art Form’, 16.
367 Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York: McGraw-‐Hill, 1976), 126. ‘Blues musicianship’
is a somewhat slippery concept, but involves ‘stylistic code for representing the most difficult conditions, but also provides a strategy for living with and triumphing over those conditions with dignity, grace, and elegance’ (Ibid.) Whatever those codes comprised, Murray champions jazz as the music most comprehensively informed by them, and suggests it is Ellington’s transformations of them (‘counterstatement and elaboration) that is a signal feature of his art.
368 Ibid., 126-‐128. (My emphasis)
or procedures of jazz, for example the emergence of bebop. Although the song forms and procedures bebop pioneers used were inherited from their jazz forebears, I think ‘appropriated’ is still the right word: these musicians took those materials ‘for their own use’, and made something different with them. At other times significant shifts in jazz have involved the introduction of ideas or music from outside of jazz, which have been reinterpreted by jazz musicians. An example is the introduction of clave rhythms into jazz by Mario Bauza and Machito in the 1940s, or the introduction of rock instruments and rhythms to jazz during the 1960s by musicians including Larry Coryell, Gary Burton and Miles Davis.370
When this kind of appropriation and transformation occurs, the materials reinterpreted by the musicians are of course altered in some way. But so too is jazz, which in becoming the musical laboratory in which these materials are subject to metamorphosis, is itself in some way changed. The revisions to which inherited or accepted musical materials and procedures are subject, along with the accommodation and transformation of musical incursions from ‘outside of’ jazz have, together, seen jazz continue to change and evolve.
As Brian Ward suggested, the successive styles of jazz emerged as the music changed to reflect the changing lives and circumstances, consciousness and aspirations of the musicians making it. Initially that group comprised
African American musicians in the United States, but over the past century it has grown to include people from astonishingly diverse cultural backgrounds and from all over the world. While the ethnic and cultural bases of those who make jazz has grown, I argue that the appropriation and transformation that
characterised early jazz has been consistently significant in the changes that jazz has undergone and remains a vital aspect of the music.
Summary
This chapter offers a methodological lens through which to view jazz, one that privileges process as primary in understanding the music. Within that frame, the processes I have emphasised are: the development and expression of individual
370 Raul Fernandez, From Afro-‐Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz (Berkeley: University of California
voices; improvised interactivity within the jazz ensemble; and the appropriation and transformation of musical materials (both from within jazz and from outside of its borders). These three processes are interdependent; each is implicated in the action of the other two. They are also processes that I (along with the host of scholars I have cited) argue were central to jazz in its earliest forms and have remained vital to jazz even as its surface features have changed over the past century. In Part Two of this thesis I will use this lens to examine the practice of four jazz musicians and those with whom they worked. From these case studies I will propose some of the ways creativity has been enabled in jazz practice, and suggest approaches that are likely to further facilitate creative practice in jazz in years to come.