The white reception of Jazz in America

African American Review, Spring, 2004 by Maureen Anderson

It came almost like a start of terror, like a sudden awakening, this shattering storm of rhythm, these tone elements never previously combined and now let loose upon us all at once. (Darius Milhaud)

From 1917 to 1930, white America was forced to realize that a new form of music, jazz, rising on radio waves and appearing in clubs worldwide, was here to stay. At the same time, articles analyzing, judging, appraising, and condemning jazz flooded into publication. Titles such as "Unspeakable Jazz Must Go" (see McMahon), "Students in Arms Against Jazz," "Why 'Jazz' Sends Us Back to the Jungle," and "The Jazz Problem" (see Wilson) appeared in mainstream publications and revealed the political and racial endeavors of hostile white critics. By asserting in 1925 that jazz "is a release of all suppressed emotions at once" (Rogers 30), J. A. Rogers created a description that whites would expand on in order to label jazz in Harlem culture as primitive and evil. Jazz served in several ways as a precursor to fifties' be-bop and rock-'n'-roll, eighties' pop, and nineties' rap. Principal among them is that jazz critics, like critics of these later musical forms, were often diabolical in their attacks on the music. Motivated by political and racial concerns, many jazz critics during the Harlem Renaissance publicized their dislike of jazz music in order to express their dislike of African Americans.

In striving to analyze and to understand the concepts of jazz music white critics often hid behind black stereotypes in order to explain the increased fascination the world had with jazz. Some, in utter contempt, wrote that jazz plagiarized and then mutilated the works of classical, white composers. Still other critics maintained that jazz was dangerous, unhealthy, or, even worse, a form of bayou voodoo. In an attempt to understand jazz, many publications resorted to asking professionals why Europeans liked jazz, since jazz was acclaimed in Europe as a form of musical liberation. Magazines turned to composers, doctors, educators, and even the black populace to explain jazz. Stunningly, what remains consistent in the reports on jazz is not the ultimate dislike of the music, but the political and social dislike of the black population. In sum, the articles on jazz that appeared in mainstream magazines between 1917 and 1930 reveal the racial prejudice that white jazz critics had against African Americans. As magazines first began to recognize jazz, between 1917 and 1920, critics' principal aim appeared innocently enough to be asking what, exactly, jazz was. Yet, delving deeper into the language of early articles, one soon discovers that the explanations of jazz are also the signs of aggression by white critics against the recently emancipated black man. Popular publications such as Literary Digest and Current Opinion linked jazz immediately to slavery and Africa and, shortly thereafter, disqualified any claim jazz might have to being a serious musical genre. For example, in the Literary Digest article "The Appeal of Primitive Jazz" (1917), the critic begins by analyzing the word jazz but finishes with an outright racial manifesto against the black man. (1) Jazz, the article begins, is "a strange word, an adjective descriptive of a band" (26), but the article then goes on to explain what sort of "band" might be called a "jazz":

   The groups that play for dancing,
   when colored, seem infected with the
   virus that they try to instill as a stimulus
   in others. They shake and jump
   and writhe in ways to suggest a return
   of the medieval jumping mania. The
   word, according to Walter Kingsley,
   famous in the ranks of vaudeville, is
   variously spelled jas, jass, jaz, jazz, and
   jascz; and is African in origin.

The switch from Africa to slavery is a short leap for this writer, since shortly after asserting the word's African origin, the article links the word to slavery:

   In old plantation days, when slaves
   were having one of their rare holidays
   and the fun languished, some West-Coast
   African would cry out, "Jaz her
   up," and this would be the cue for fast
   and furious fun. No doubt the witchdoctors
   and medicine-men on the
   Kongo used the same term at those
   jungle "parties" when tomtoms
   throbbed and the sturdy warriors gave
   their pep an added kick with rich
   brews of Yohimbin bark. (28)

The distinction between jazz and African tribal music disappears in this critique. Accordingly, black American men and women and Africans become interchangeable as the article reduces the black jazz musicians to "witch-doctors and medicine-men."

The author, instead of meditating on how jazz, slavery, and Africa are interlinked, jumps immediately to linking Africa to the music itself. Describing the music, the article says that jazz "is the delirium tremens of syncopation. It is strict rhythm without melody. To-day the jazz bands take popular tunes and rag them to death to make jazz." After establishing that this African-originated music is "delirium" and "without melody," the article is able to cast the jazz player as a "contemporary savage" (26) rather than any kind of serious musician. Consider, for example, how the following passage casually drops the word savages in place of the word musicians: "The music of contemporary savages taunts us with a lost art of rhythm. Modern sophistication has inhibited many native instincts" (26; italics mine). Not content simply to label the jazz musician as a "savage," the author, in the second sentence above, designates the musician as a person without "modern sophistication," which would have "inhibited" his/her "native" or black "instincts."