All that was jazz

Monday, March 01, 2010
By Gibran Ashraf
Karachi
The United States of America has made generous use of jazz music as a means in its larger diplomatic set up, even using it as a public relations tool during the peak of the Civil Rights movements. However, this music form has seen dwindling returns over the recent decades. In this regard, Dr Clarence Lusane, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations in the School of International Service at the American University and an expert on Minority Rights gave a lecture on the history of Jazz at the Second Floor on Sunday afternoon.
The hour long lecture traced the beginning of jazz in the US and its development, growth, use as an international affairs tool and finally to its demise. Despite being a political science professor, along with being an activist his knowledge on jazz seemed to be quite extensive.
Starting off from the late 1800’s when the first jazz band began, back in 1895, with the first jazz group, Buddy Bolden in New Orleans which was a blues group ñ the base of all jazz. In fact, according to Dr Lusane, the birth of jazz came from the interaction of many different nationalities. New Orleans is a port city. Back in the 1800’s it was one of the main ports that served as a transit for ships going to Latin America and also bringing goods from all over the world, especially slaves to the States from Africa and other goods from England. This international community nestling in this port town according to the professor gave birth to jazz.
Over the years, while the Mecca for jazz moved all around, the greats of jazz all initially came out of New Orleans including Jelly Roll Mortan and Luis Armstrong. As the music grew and more people from around the US got interested into the music, a lot of influences started to merge in.
However, with productions being done by the African American community, the music did not find support, and was even publicly debased and forced the utilisation of media to condemn it. (As pointed out by one of the members of the audience) one of the first ever talkies was in fact about jazz music. However, all this propaganda ever did was to spike the interest of people into this form of music.
The technological advancements with the gramophones and radios did wonders for jazz as it added a whole new dimension of accessibility to jazz. The First World War saw American combat contingents, with conscripted blacks serving across Europe leaving the seeds of jazz in Paris, Berlin, London where after the war jazz bars started to spring up. So much so was the influence of jazz in Europe that the Nazi party even started their own campaign against the jazz groups in Germany.
However, the popularity of jazz was universal, with the first ever jazz group to be recorded being white, the Dixie Land Jazz Band in 1917. This format of jazz was soon to face its own challenges when during the Second World War, larger groups of jazz broke down due to conscription into the allied forces. The music continued to evolve and in the 1950’s, jazz further developed to include ‘cool jazz’ and ‘hard jazz’.
The 1960’s was one of the peak periods for jazz with players like Billie Holiday, Luis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker who made all the headlines. Their music took a meaningful turn when they decided to link their music to the civil rights movements and the freedom movements all around the world. Songs like Africa, Liberia and Dahomey Song started to make the charts. Recognizing the appeal of jazz music, the ‘Voice of America’ show started to have a daily one hour broadcast in which only jazz music was played. At its peak this show alone garnered over 100 million listeners.
In 1955, the State Department of US started a Jazz Ambassador programme where jazz groups were sent all around the world to represent a more musical, politically integrative picture of the United States. The first of these ambassadors landed in Pakistan with the Dizzy Gillespie performing in 1956.
Therefore, around the world jazz started to take a good hold. With South Korea one of the places where jazz became extremely popular, while Japan took longer to let in foreign influences in to their society. In South Africa, jazz was seen part of the freedom movement as it was performed mainly by African Americans and found players and listeners hard to come by.Jazz, however has found its fortunes dwindle over the past two decades.
Dr Luasane said that only two per cent of all music sold in the US is jazz and a good part of that music is copy righted to the 60’s. “The current best seller in the name of jazz is Norah Jones”, he said. However, the significance of jazz being a diplomatic tool has not reduced with Obama having three jazz concerts at the White House in his maiden year in office.
Dr Lusane also revealed that the birth of the popular rap music has its base in Jazz with much of early rap in the 1960’s was done to jazz beats. The difference being that jazz was a counter to the socio-politico-economical trends while hip hop, rock and rap were more an expression of mainstream trends.
The small audience appreciated the informative lecture and some in the crowd even drew similarities of some aspects of jazz to the eastern classical music with the jugalbandi. Jazz being where each musician is in conversation with his fellow artists whereas in jugalbandi each artiste tries to outperform his colleague in a friendly competition.