Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I

The African Undercurrent in Twentieth-Century Jazz Culture

Gerhard Kubik

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781626746596
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

A CHOICE 2018 Outstanding Academic Title In Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I, renowned scholar Gerhard Kubik takes the reader across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas and then back in pursuit of the music we call jazz. This first volume explores the term itself and how jazz has been defined and redefined. It also celebrates the phenomena of jazz performance and uncovers hidden gems of jazz history. The volume offers insights gathered during Kubik's extensive field work and based on in-depth interviews with jazz musicians around the Atlantic world. Languages, world views, beliefs, experiences, attitudes, and commodities all play a role. Kubik reveals what is most important--the expertise of individual musical innovators on both sides of the Atlantic, and hidden relationships in their thoughts.Besides the common African origins of much vocabulary and structure, all the expressions of jazz in Africa share transatlantic family relationships. Within that framework, musicians are creating and re-creating jazz in never-ending contacts and exchanges. The first of two volumes, Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I examines this transatlantic history, sociolinguistics, musicology, and the biographical study of personalities in jazz during the twentieth century. This volume traces the African and African American influences on the creation of the jazz sound and traces specific African traditions as they transform into American jazz. Kubik seeks to describe the constant mixing of sources and traditions, so he includes influences of European music in both volumes. These works will become essential and indelible parts of jazz history.

PART B

Retention, Resilience, and Reinvention of African Instrumental Techniques in the United States

Writing on the social history of the Zimbabwe “marimba,” a type of xylophone first constructed at Kwanongoma College in Bulawayo during the 1960s, Claire Jones (2012) has shown how validation can influence the fate of an invention. In Zimbabwe and elsewhere in south-central Africa, the highest ratings today are assigned to a certain technology. If the cherished technology is present in a musical performance, the event is pre-rated favorably—regardless of the performers’ actual competence. If technological expectations such as a specific sound amplification, stage lighting, etc., are not met, the group on stage will not even be recognized as musicians.

Claire Jones quotes from a conversation that her acquaintance, Nicholas Manomano (then teaching “marimba” at Prince Edward School), had with the manager of a local hotel in June 2000. When he told the manager what kind of instrumentation his group of performers would use, the answer was “no, we want real music.” Asked what he meant by that, the man was explicit: “Real music, like with amplifiers and electric guitars” (51–52).

The matter comes down to a proposition that any other manifestation should be disqualified and considered below what “real music” entails. Many different forms of musical practice in Zimbabwe would then fall outside the category of “real music.” The “marimba” is in any case quickly dismissed as “schoolboy stuff” in street conversations, and some other music is only referred to under specific labels such as “church choirs,” “school choirs,” or by the adjective “traditional.” All these genres seem to rank below “real music,” without a chance of ever reaching mass popularity. In fact, they are often denied dissemination by the media because “no one is keen on that stuff.” Zimbabwe’s best-known popular musicians in the early twenty-first century, Thomas Mapfumo and Oliver Mtukudzi, are aware of this dictatorship of values, and they have been living up to the standards imposed, in order to be successful, even as Thomas Mapfumo included the mbira dza vadzimu in his shows, and Oliver Mtukudzi—in an experiment a few years ago—included several Kwanongoma “marimba” (see picture in Jones 2012: 32).

Lower-ranking genres in south-central Africa today include the once-popular music for acoustic solo guitar. At least this kind of music, however, is described politely as a “precursor” to the “real music” or as “an earlier stage” of it, or simply as “a style of the 1950s.” The same is said about jazz, if it is played unplugged, thereby depriving audiences of the electric bass guitar’s vibrations in their chests. It is then classed as “American music of the past,” even if the ensemble introduces new compositions and shows brilliant experimentation with form and tonality.

Social Interaction

There is good reason for assuming that declamatory validations of this kind are not just a phenomenon of our times, although the mass media, the internet, and manufacturing industries contribute to their preeminence. They are a pan-human legacy that has affected musical production in the past as it does in the present. In a time journey back into the 1940s and beyond, there would be no sign of “real music, like with amplifiers and electric guitars”—and yet there would be music, and there were ratings. During the era of bebop, as it emerged at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, the saxophone as an instrument enjoyed high status, higher than the clarinet, which had come to be associated with swing à la Benny Goodman, unacceptable in those avant-garde circles. Such validation guaranteed that an alto or tenor saxophonist at the door would probably be admitted for a jam session, after a brief test of his performance skills. Later, the instrumental panel of what was acceptable in jazz was further widened with John Coltrane’s use of the soprano saxophone in ways that were different from earlier usages (cf. My Favorite Things, CD, Atlantic 1361, 1961).

How did domineering value systems influence behavior in New World social environments? What was the situation in these places a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago? To what extent would tightly knit New World communities with their religious beliefs exert pressure on individuals?—These are some of the questions to keep in mind in the comparative study of culture contact and its effects on the use of musical instruments.

For example, in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, the word “music” had a much narrower semantic field than it has nowadays. It explicitly referred to musical notations. Written scores, i.e., sheet music, were valued highly; it was music as such, and a musician was someone who had learned to read and play from them. Anything else was “fake,” including Buddy Bolden’s variations on his cornet. (Here a look at the wordings New Orleans veterans used in talking about the city’s music can be instructive: Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya; Charters 2008, A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz.)

Selection and Reinterpretation

Culture contact triggers many reactions. Sometimes the outcome is a prolonged struggle between different value systems. Strong convictions may form in people who are certain that they represent the only conceivable world order. In the realm of art it is thereby often determined what is going to succeed and what is going to perish.

In a strict sense, of course, all value systems are merely sets of entrenched beliefs, inaccessible to argument or contrary evidence. They are “logic-tight compartments” of the mind, as Michael Shermer (2013: 71) has called the phenomenon, “modules in the brain analogous to watertight compartments in a ship.” Cultural resilience and the ensuing processes of retention and reinvention, therefore, can often be understood as expressions of resistance by people within one belief system to the claims of universality by another.

The cognitive realm is perhaps the most important one in the study of culture contact. It was opened up by Melville J. Herskovits (1941) with his descriptive terms “selection,” “reinterpretation,” and “syncretism.” How do these concepts explain the fate of African musical instruments and their playing techniques in New World cultures?

On lecture tours through Europe, Africa, and South America in the 1970s, our research and performance group observed repeatedly that people in a general audience whose musical training was Western would react in surprisingly uniform ways to our presentations of African instruments. After a lecture, some people would come up from the floor to see and touch my eight-note malimba lamellophone from southwestern Tanzania. This instrument has a “buzzer,” a chain such as was used in the colonial days by men to carry a pocket watch. It is laid out across the lamellae to vibrate like an automatic rattle. Those curious people, however—if they had not already mistaken my lamellophone for a mousetrap, as has happened many times—would inevitably remove the chain from the lamellae before trying to play.

It is precisely here that African perceptions about music diverge from those of adherents to some other musical cultures. The snail shells or bottle tops attached to the gourd resonator of a Zambezi lamellophone, the raphia vibration needles on the timbrh of the Vute of Cameroon, the membranes of a spider’s nest-covering glued onto the vibrato holes of a xylophone’s resonators, all are essential timbre-modifying and sound-amplifying devices. For people unaccustomed to their aesthetics, such devices appear to be just noise-producing, disturbing, and superfluous.

When industrial enterprises discovered a business potential in making African instruments, the first intervention was to streamline the elements of construction, thereby deviating considerably from the original designs. On xylophones and lamellophones they would not include any buzzers, but aim at a uniform, clear timbre for all notes. The sound of each note would be “pure.” The tuning would be Western, mostly diatonic.

By contrast, manufacturers in African villages used to give each note individual timbre, as if these wooden or metal notes were voices in a family or community. The sound would not be streamlined. “Everyone” would speak with his or her individual voice, the “girls” among the notes, the “boys,” the “elders,” and the “chief,” each voice represented by one lamella or one key of a xylophone. Pie-Claude Ngumu (1975/76) told me that on southern Cameroonian xylophones in his home area, the lower notes were conceptualized as males, but each of them with his “wife” (octave) in the upper part. There was also a chief or family headman among the notes to start the tuning process. Each instrument manufactured in a village was unique, identifiable by the maker’s style.

This may be surprising to hear because of prevalent stereotypes, which hold that African societies are less individual-oriented than Western ones but rigorously community-centered, with individuals defined by their social roles and functions, and only a narrow margin for personal initiative. One social psychologist, Paul Parin (1983: 153ff.), even claimed that the Dogon in Mali had a “group ego” and thereby a psychology different from that of “people in the Western world.”

The truth is that community organization and social roles within a community do not necessarily curtail individualism and personality. If musical concepts and behavior reflect social structure, as Alan Lomax has shown, based on the results of his worldwide Cantometrics Project (Lomax 1968), then there must be something wrong with singling out African cultures as “collectivistic” in contrast to the alleged “individualism” of Western societies. Ironically, Ngumu (1975/1976: 15), reflecting on the social order displayed in the tunings of southern Cameroonian xylophones, found that one note was always a “spoil-sport” (esandi)—one could say a dissident within the culture.

As to timbre, Rudi Blesh in his Shining Trumpets (1949 [1958: 20–21]) was one of the first to recognize a general tendency in African music to aim at a variety of specific sound spectra in the performance on instruments and the use of the human voice. Blesh describes these timbre concepts in the context of African American music. In a table of “African survivals” (20), he points to “vocalized instrumental tone” in jazz and other African American traditions, and within this heading to “great variety of unorthodox tone qualities” and to “hot tone.”

Timbre concepts seem to rank among traits that are tenaciously resistant to acculturative changes. During the last few decades timbre has been studied repeatedly by musicologists from various scientific angles, in different musical cultures. Much of this is highly relevant to jazz research and African American music in general. Timbre research was recently summarized in a volume edited by August Schmidhofer and Stefan Jena (2011).

Jazz Instrumentation

Jazz is considered to be mostly instrumental music, though the contributions made by singers, particularly female, since the 1920s have been enormous. From Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others interpreting blues to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan, their share in jazz history has been intensively researched and appreciated (cf. Abbott and Seroff 1996; Friedwald 1992; zur Heide, 2004; Martin 1994; Santelli 1993; Spencer 1993; Titon 1977, 1993) Male vocalists have also had a significant share, with the unforgettable voices of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thomas “Fats” Waller, Cab Calloway, and others.

In its predominantly instrumental repertoire, however, jazz differs from most (though by far not all) African music in which vocal parts are essential, either as a soloist’s voice a call-and-response schema, or in interlocking polyphony. One function of the instruments in African music is to support these vocal arrangements or represent them. In many African societies it is also the text of a song that is of primary concern to audiences. The relevance of a song is often judged in terms of its literary appeal, plus its movement-inspiring instrumental support.

That does not mean, of course, that there is no concept of instrumental music in Africa. On the contrary, prominent instrumental formations have included xylophone and horn ensembles in several former king’s courts in East Africa, the entenga twelve-note drum chime played at the court of the Kabaka of Buganda (Anderson 1977, 1984), the set of nine tuned drums used to accompany masked dances of the nyau secret society among the –Marjanja of Malawi, and the Hausa and Fulɓe court music in northern Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon, to give only a few examples. But even in purely instrumental performances, words are often hidden in the instrumental renderings of songs, since most African languages are tone languages. The emphasis on instrumental performance in jazz was inherited from “orchestral ragtime,” brass band, and dancehall music in New Orleans and elsewhere at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as from piano ragtime; and yet it is possible to find analogies in some African instrumental traditions, pointing to hidden syncretism in jazz, rather than connecting early jazz band lineups and instrumental resources exclusively to Western models. Alfons M. Dauer (1985) pointed to one possible transatlantic family line leading back to the ganga/algeita (drum-and-oboe) complex in court music ensembles among the Hausa and Fulɓe in the West African savannah.

If jazz is predominantly instrumental, it is not necessarily in the European sense of the word, as for example a symphony orchestra or chamber music ensemble. There is in jazz an underlying reliance on speech-like expression. As in African musical cultures, instrumental variations in jazz can in part function as an extension of vocal articulation, in that jazz melodic-rhythmic phrases may be verbalized in the mind. Anyone intensively involved in jazz performance will have discovered by themselves that sometimes one thinks of certain phrases in colors, sometimes in short spoken sentences, or in syllables of no verbal meaning. Such associations may also occur to people in audiences who are not at all speakers of tone languages.

In Central Africa a soloist player of a board zither, a lamellophone, or a guitar produces a complex instrumental soundscape beneath his vocal line, as if he were conducting a lively conversation between his voice and the sounds emerging from the instrument. In some African languages there is no terminology to distinguish singing and the playing of an instrument. For example, in Chichewa of Malawi there is just one verb, kuyimba, meaning both vocal and instrumental sound production. Accordingly, zoimbaimba (the things that constantly sing) are musical instruments. In other African languages, however, a sharp distinction is made between vocal and instrumental production, for example, in Mbwela, Luchazi, and other languages of eastern Angola within Bantu Zone K, Group 10. The verb kwimba means to sing (by mouth), while kusika is used to express playing of an instrument. There is, however, an important difference in the semantic field of kusika and “playing” as conceptualized in European languages. Kusika in Mbwela/Lucazi is a specialist term, only used to express instrumental musical performance. In that language one cannot use the verb for “playing” (as in games), kuheha, to express action upon instruments. One does not “play” an instrument.

The human voice can be instrumentalized in many ways, for example, in the technique of overtone singing (or diphonic singing), as found in Mongolia and among the –Gogo of Tanzania and the –Xhosa of South Africa. There are many voice-disguising techniques, especially in African initiation ceremonies, and the voices of spirits may be represented by an unusual instrumental sound such as that of a bull-roarer. We have comprehensive field data on initiation, e.g., from Liberia (Stone 1982, 1988), Côte d’Ivoire (Zemp, 1971), Dahomey (Rouget 2001), and Angola (Kubik 1993a, 2002b; Tsukada 1988, 1990a). Both verbalization on the one hand and instrumentalization on the other have survived in jazz, though in somewhat different, non-ritual contexts, from Ella Fitzgerald’s scat singing to the “jungle style” of muted trumpets in Duke Ellington, to the very name that came to be associated with a new music in the early 1940s, bebop, and to Kenny Clarke’s “klook-mop” percussion.

The brass and reed sections of a 1940s swing band, such as that of the formidable Jay McShann of Kansas City, can interact in their compact, homo...