What makes "jazz" the revolutionary music of the 20th century, and will it be revolutionary for the 21st century?

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Fred Wei-han Ho

2. Go to the People. The music must be performed where people can enjoy it. Rather than expect the people to come to the music (an approach which depends more on marketing hype and advertisement dollars than on artistry or quality), bring the music to the people. Often, artists have very little control over how their music is distributed, promoted, and presented. In many ways, the musician and the music have left the community in which both were spawned. The parallel to "underdevelopment" is striking: A people's cultural and natural resources are drained off for the benefit of corporate plunderers and not the people. Activists, managers, cultural presenters and producers, and artists need to work together to build a community base to support the music.

3. Involve the People. Just as we need environmentally sustainable development for natural resources, we need culturally sustainable development for the arts. We need to bridge the separation between artist and audience, between professional and amateur. The essence of cultural democracy is true popular culture - culture and the arts created by and for the common people and not by and for an elite. The rationalization of corporate entertainment is to "give the people what they want." Unfortunately, the truth is really "give the people what the corporations want them to want."

4. Change the People. Ultimately, the music and culture of oppressed peoples, if it is to have value and meaning, must revolutionize the consciousness, values, aesthetics, and actions of the people. This is the music's "spiritualizing" quality: to fortify and prepare us to continue the struggle until liberation.

Notes

1. Several etymologies have been asserted for the word "jazz." The less credible ones assert an African derivation, but these words are from languages not spoken south of the Sahara and therefore were not commonly used among the West and Central African, sub-Saharan peoples enslaved and brought to the Americas. More likely, "jazz" comes from either jass or jizz, which means 'semen' (the original piano music was common to houses of prostitution). Another explanation is that "jazz" comes from the French verb - New Orleans, the birthplace of the music, was a French colonial territory - jasser, meaning 'to chatter nonsensically.' In either case, "jazz" has a pejorative context, as do many terms from the legacy of colonialism and oppression.

2. Spelled with a k, "kreolization" is a concept advanced by Dorothy Desir-Davis, to be distinguished from "creolization" of M. Herskovits, et. al., pertaining to the intermixing in the Caribbean. Kreolization refers to cultural and social cross-fertilization as a process that leads to the formation of entirely new identities and cultures, often - in the case of oppressed-oppressor relations - selectively appropriated by dominant social groups into the dominant identity and culture, but de-politicized and deracinated.

3. Musicians' various ideological/spiritual pronouncements reflect this quest and struggle.