# Jazz and its non-Western origins



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I wish to emphasize that jazz is non-Western in origin, not only in a geographic sense, but in the African musical elements which constitute both jazz and blues; and that by gradually removing the "African" elements, jazz went too far in the Westerly direction, away from Africa.

My position is in contrast to Western players like Bill Evans, Ellington, and others who aided in the "de-bluesing" of jazz, and who sought to emphasize, consciously or not, the Western, non-African elements of jazz.

"...There's never been a time in the history of jazz music when it was entirely free of classical influence. New Orleans was loaded with classical influence. Joplin influenced the early jazz pianists, and he was influenced by Brahms. Stride pianists (like Art Tatum) were familiar with classical piano. Ellington studied Debussy, Bennie Goodman was in touch with all kinds of classical stuff, Charlie Parker studied Stravinsky. Grofé was originally a jazz guy. And so on."

While these points are valid, I think this historical view is biased.

Just in case this is not clear, here are the basic "African" elements which blues and jazz are founded on, and which jazz has gravitated away from during its 100-year assimilation by the West:

1. Harmonic factors: Use of the pentatonic and blues scales, rather than our 7-note diatonic leading-tone scale. Blues and jazz use a flat-seventh (derived from the minor pentatonic) rather than a natural or sharped "leading tone" seventh, on all chord types (I-IV-V).

The "major seventh" chord was not introduced into jazz until later, identical to a standard Westernized version of the I and IV chord. Basically, this amounts to a gradual removal of the blues elements in jazz, which transformed it into a harmonically complex "jazz chamber music."

2. Rhythmic factors: Jazz is based on an African, non-Western division of the main pulse beat. This is called a "shuffle" in Blues, and is used in jazz. Our Western notation system cannot properly convey this, and instead arrangers will notate in 4/4 and specify "shuffle feel." This jazz rhythm is not a "feel," it is a division of the main pulse into three rather than two.

To explain further, the main pulse of a blues or jazz song divides the measure into 4 parts, exemplified by the "walking" bass, which plays in 1-2-3-4. However, there are accents which are divisions of 3 which cannot be notated properly in 4/4, because our time signature system does not allow for "3" values to be placed in the bottom number of the time signature. Everything goes in multiples of two: Whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, and so on. To get a "three" value, we must place a "dot" after the note. You can't put a "dotted" note in the bottom of a time signature.

Notating 3 divisions as "triplets" is too cluttering. The only truly accurate way to notate this shuffle is to use a "compound" time signature, 12/8. This is counter-intuitive, because the main bass-pulse (with the bass drum) is on 1-4-7-10. It's counter-intuitive to count to 12 in this manner, because the main pulse is still felt as 1-2-3-4.

"Compound" rhythms allow the beat to be subdivided into 2 or 3 parts (factors of 12). African drummers "played" with this ambiguity, creating complex interplay, which Steve Reich studied closely.

New cross-cultural elements took this even further, to assimilate jazz rhythms into their existing cultural norms. Bossa Nova, for example, transformed the African-derived 3-division of black jazz into an evenly-divided 4/4, common in South America.


----------



## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Very interesting. You ever read Alan Lomax book, *The Land Where Blues Began*? In this he mentions "the black adaptation of European instruments to an African-European orchestral style."

You're right about the origins of jazz. Jazz was allied closely to the blues until it became more affluent and "the jazzmen lost contact with the masses of blacks who worked in the stockyards, steel mills, and cotton fields and lived in slums." This was where jazz and the blues parted company and it was at a time when jazz was maybe not so influenced by classical music, back when Ma Rainey was singing _Don't Fish in my Sea_...


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Kieran;bt1814 said:


> Very interesting. You ever read Alan Lomax book, *The Land Where Blues Began*? In this he mentions "the black adaptation of European instruments to an African-European orchestral style."
> 
> You're right about the origins of jazz. Jazz was allied closely to the blues until it became more affluent and "the jazzmen lost contact with the masses of blacks who worked in the stockyards, steel mills, and cotton fields and lived in slums." This was where jazz and the blues parted company and it was at a time when jazz was maybe not so influenced by classical music, back when Ma Rainey was singing _Don't Fish in my Sea_...


Yes, I'm a "Lomaxian" when it comes to blues and jazz.

However, there are new writers emerging who are "re-writing" blues and jazz history, and say that Lomax represents a racist over-emphasis of blues and black musicians. I disagree, of course.


----------



## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Yeah, I heard of Lomax being called many things, a kind of white cultural colonialist who robbed from Black culture and gloried in it. I think regardless of his colour, he brought the likes of Son House and others to our attention. I still have his original recording of Son House singing Death Letter, circa 1932, if memory serves. A lot of these men and women wouldn't have been heard of, if not for Lomax and his field trips. He writes very eloquently about it too.

I don't know how the revisionists can say there's an 'over-emphasis of blues and black musicians.' Maybe they been listening to too much Nordic jazz and don't go back any further in history than Dave Brubeck?


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I'll PM you with reply.


----------



## Guest (May 3, 2013)

You say, "jazz went too far in the Westerly direction"

How can music "go too far" in any direction?


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

MacLeod;bt1818 said:


> You say, "jazz went too far in the Westerly direction"
> 
> How can music "go too far" in any direction?


It can go 'too far' if it begins to lose its African and blues origins, and becomes too concerned with harmonic progression, as exemplified the direction jazz took in the 1950s when it began to be used in movies and TV soundtracks, as with Henry Mancini. I like Mancini, but here we begin to see jazz being 'appropriated' by the establishment (mostly white back then), and the subsequent backlash by Elvin Jones and Miles Davis to reclaim and re-Africanize it.


----------



## Guest (Jul 25, 2015)

I don't think jazz has much to do with Africa at all. As though American blacks weren't astute enough to have developed their own concepts which were firmly western-based. The changes they introduced may have had some distant relation to African music but I seriously doubt that they particularly cared. But I think the changes American blacks brought in were their own and were wholly or very nearly divorced from any African tradition.

An example are black church harmonies. Where did they come from--Africa? No. Nothing like that in Africa. The harmonies are obviously a modification of the western notion of harmony even though nothing like it exists in Europe but it is clearly the antecedent. So where did American blacks get those harmonies? They made them up. They took the western harmonies they heard and did them the way they wanted them to sound and Africa be damned.

I don't know that blues had much to do with the formation of jazz or how much blues had to do with Africa. You look up the histories of jazz and you read about W. C. Handy encountering an unnamed bluesman in Tutwiler, Mississippi playing guitar with a knife-edge in 1909 and from this came his epiphany to fashion jazz from blues. First, this story implicitly admits that jazz had an independent genesis from blues but even more importantly, while Handy is credited with publishing the earliest blues, HE DID NOT.

The first published blues was by a white man in 1912 named Hart Ancker Wand--"Dallas Blues." It preceded anything published by Handy. Moreover, Handy's pieces weren't real blues but jazzy pieces flavored with blues (What blues bands have ever redone "St. Louis Blues" compared to how many jazz bands have covered it?). Wand's piece, however, is a true 12-bar blues. Wand said that the title of his piece was inspired by a workman (race unknown by me) in his father's employ who, upon hearing it, stated the melody gave him the blues for his beloved Dallas. Wand's father died in 1909 so the he had written the piece at least that early--the same year that Handy heard real blues for the first time!!! Moreover, it would mean the convention of naming anything "[XXX] Blues" came from a white man.

Maybe somebody could post some true African music untainted by European musical notions that sounds like jazz but I won't hold my breath because without the European musical notions jazz would not exist. Handy played classics and he stated that the New Orleans Creoles he hired to play for him were all classically trained.

The transition from bop to cool jazz is often characterized as the emphasis being put on Europe and taken off Africa but Miles Davis more or less invented cool jazz. I mean, geesh, just about everything the Modern Jazz Quartet did was cool jazz. Then hard bop came along to put that emphasis back on Africa but this is not an accurate characterization. Hard bop was developed to put emphasis back on the American black influence as opposed to the African influence.

And let's not sweep under the rug the fact that some of the black bandleaders were nothing but racists who were actively trying to kick white musicians out of the jazz scene and they hotly criticized Miles for using guys like Bill Evans and Gerry Mulligan. So already the jazz scene was being skewed by people unwilling to admit that whites were involved in jazz as early as we can trace it back (e.g. Papa Jack Laine and Stalebread Lacoume who was performing in Storyville--the virtual birthplace of New Orleans jazz--in the 1890s).

I would agree that jazz cannot go too far from the black influence without it becoming a bastardized, white-washed caricature of itself but that's not to say it has to be true to its blues and African roots because I frankly question that jazz has any such roots.


----------

