FREE ESSAY ON UNDERSTANDING JAZZ

UNDERSTANDING JAZZ

Understanding Jazz
A mellow vibration lingers throughout a smoke-filled room, as eloquent music escapes the
callused fingers of relaxed musicians. The tempo speeds up and grows into a fusion of
spontaneous and uneven chords, exploding with rhythmic soul and life. The sound of jazz
embraces the room.
Jazz is primarily a dazzling, spellbinding, introspective beauty. The musician and the
listener find they can derive meaning from the music. The music exists first, and its
meaning is defined later. When a jazz musician is improvising, he is spontaneously
composing, and at that moment his music is completely subjective. He must imagine the
future in his music. He cannot transcend the subjectivity of the improvisation because it
is created while it is being played. Every performance is new, giving it a fresh and
exciting twist. Life cascades from the music, giving it emotion. The audience can feel
the depression of the blues, the hype of swing, the funk of bebop and hard bop, and the
dazzle of numerous instruments. The coolness of jazz invades and captures the mind with
brilliant originality. Jazz is the future of itself. What that means is that within each
improvisation there the entire body of black music --- ancient to the present --- is at
work. Jazz exists only in the present, because it is like Heraclitus' river --- it can
never be played exactly the same way twice. If jazz has any purpose, it is a way to
discover, to create, and to define a missing part within human beings of what it means to
be human. In this sense, jazz could be called an existential art. Jazz musicians create
their essence by playing jazz, as Eric Dolphy claimed: 
I'll never leave jazz. I've put too much of myself into jazz
already, and I'm still trying to dig in deeper. Besides, in
what other field could I get so complete a scope to
self-expression? To me, jazz is like part of living, like
walking down the street and reacting to what you see and
hear. And whatever I do react to, I can say immediately in
my music. The other thing that keeps me in jazz is that jazz
continues to move on. There are so many possibilities for
growth inside jazz because it changes as you change
(Dolphy, liner notes, Far Cry, December 21, 1960). 
The subjective quality to jazz is explored most successfully in Jean-Paul Sartre's
Nausea. Sartre describes how Roquentin first feels when he hears the old Pathe jazz
record, played with a sapphire needle. He describes the notes as living as ephemerons,
and then dying before the listener. It is almost sacrificial: 
For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody,
only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an
inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them
without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for
themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a
sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to
hold them between my fingers only as a raffish languishing
sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it. I know
few impressions stronger or more harsh (Sartre, 21). 
After Roquentin heard the jazz record, there is silence and he realizes in the
existential event which has just taken place that the Nausea has disappeared. He says:
When the voice would heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish
(22). What he feels at that moment is the connection between his own humanity and the
music on the jazz record. When she sings, he understands all at once, in what Charlie
Parker called an epiphany, that existence and the ability to make choices is very brief,
and then dies. The second time he hears the record, he only hears it for a moment, and
the feeling returns: 
Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am
ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an
exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They
come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer
in rhythm. All right! Naturally I'd like to suffer that way, in
rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity, with an arid
purity (174). 
The suffering Sartre describes is eliminated by the jazz, the act of listening to the
jazz on the old record. Roquentin only learns that he is human, and his primary duty is
to feel, when he listens to the Pathe jazz record. The emotions emerge from what he
hears. The depths of voice which give the music character, and the consistent changing
harmonies. The listener can then taste the sensations of jazz while connecting with the
tranquility of life. Endlessly, jazz notes end their brief period of improvisation. The
only thing that retains their life is the recording. Jazz only truly exists while it is
being played, and any recording of it is a kind of representation of that. Such a
performance of jazz, like the record, can have the same effects on a person. James
Baldwin, in his short story Sonny's Blues, tells the story of a jazz drummer named Sonny
who is in conflict with his square brother, who is the narrator of the story and a math
teacher at a New York City high school. He does not understand Sonny, who has recently
been arrested for selling and using heroin. Sonny's brother knows nothing about jazz, who
Charlie Parker was, or what kind of music it is. He is the outside audience, with no
competence whatsoever. At the end of the story, he accompanies Sonny to a club where
Sonny will be playing with a band. Another musician, named Creole, begins the set.
Sonny's brother experience Sartre's suffering in rhythm, and realizes at that specific
moment, the way Sonny is creating his essence by playing jazz: 
He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me,
myself, and the music tightened and deepened,
apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us
what the blues were all about. They were not about
anything new. He and his boys up there were keeping it
new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in
order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale
of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we
may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There
isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all
this darkness (Baldwin, 50). 
A soft, pulsating beat creeps through the dimly lit room, as harmonious chords melt from
the stiff fingers of the calm bass player. The tempo slows down to a tranquil pace and
descends to the quiet dreams of the audience. The narrator is suddenly touched by the
same force of jazz that touched Roquentin. Another element to the narrator's experience
that is closely linked to the Sartrean sense of the meaning of the jazz record is
freedom: I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had
yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I
understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would
never be free until we did (51). Sonny speaks through jazz and his brother derives
meaning from it. In these two examples the semiotic qualities of jazz are not only
theoretical, they have visible effects on human lives.
Bibliography
REFERENCES
Benston, Kimberly. Late Coltrane: A Re-Membering of Orpheus.
Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994. 
Briggs, Charles L. Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano
Verbal Art. 
Dyer, Geoff. But Beautiful: a Book about Jazz. New York:
North Point Press / Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1996. 
Feinstein, Sascha and Komunyakaa, Yusef, eds. The Jazz Poetry
Anthology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1991. ---. The Second Set. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1996. 
Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to
the United States. New York: Oxford University Press,1995. 
Hawkes, Terrence. Structuralism & Semiotics. London Routledge, 1992. 
Hentoff, Nat. Jazz Is. New York: Limelight Editions, 1992. 
Jazz and Jazzism. The Times-Picayune (New Orleans) 20 June
1918, reprinted in African-American Review 29 (1995): 231-232. 
Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: The Negro Experience in White
America and the Music that Developed from it. New York:
Morrow Quill, 1963. ---. Black Music. New York: Apollo,
1968. 
Kernfeld, Barry, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. New
York: St.Martin's Press, 1995. 
Maultsby, Portia K. The Evolution of African American Music.
African-American Review 29 (1995): 183. 
Perlman, Alan M. and Daniel Greenblatt. Miles Davis Meets Noam 
Chomsky: Some Observations on Jazz Improvisation and Language Structure. The Sign in
Music and Literature. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981. 
Piaget, Jean. Structuralism. London: Routledge, 1971. 
Piazza, Tom, ed. Setting the Tempo: Fifty Years of Great Jazz
Liner Notes. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. 
Rinzler, Paul. Preliminary Thoughts on Analyzing Musical
Interaction Among Jazz Performers. Annual Review of Jazz
Studies 4 (1995): 153-160. 
Sawyer, R. Keith. The Semiotics of Improvisation: The Pragmatics of Musical and Verbal
Performance. Semiotica 108 3/4 (1996): 269-306. 
Softing, Anne. Carnival and Black American Music as Counterculture in The Bluest Eye and
Jazz. American Studies 27.2 (1997): 81-102