Equality, Individualism, Freedom, Frontier: The Exceptionalist Narrative in Jazz
Tocqueville was an unknowing prophet of Jazz. He outlined the strengths and weaknesses of America’s politics and culture in the 1830s, and established the basis of the concept of American Exceptionalism, a concept that would apply directly to a peculiarly American music eighty years later. If democracy is anything, it is the dissonance of society and the individual, of equality and freedom. These contrasts, and the expansive promises of the mythic Western Frontier, created a specific society in America that made Jazz an unavoidable musical outcome, one that was as exceptional as the nation from which it was born.
Any sociological inquiry into any aspect of American society requires confronting the Exceptionalist discourse that surrounds the United States of America. This is the case with music as much as it is with any other area of study. Developing an American sociology of music while ignoring themes of egalitarianism, individuality, or the frontier, would suggest that the art music of America arose devoid of societal influence. This is in conflict with the Adornian perspective of the art dialectic. Bolaños describes this in The Critical Role of Art: Adorno between Utopia and Dystopia: “Far from being a means of reconciling the internal contradictions of society, art participates in the dialectical dynamism of society and culture; it realizes itself as a product of this dialectic and, as a result, mobilizes itself a counter-culture of well accepted culture or ideology. Art remains negative... it is a critique of ideology.” Art, in the form of music in this case, both influences, and is influenced by society. Jazz, as the unique American art music, both influences, and is influenced by American society. The prior portion of this sequence is the focus of this paper.
The exceptionalist narrative is easily revealed in the Jazz idiom through a stylistic analysis. This might be the most important connection between American Exceptionalism and America’s art music because it lies in the subconscious of the art form. It lies in the technique and sound-nature of Jazz as genre. It is there in the unaware fetish-character of the Jazz performer and composition. This is the covert affect of the social mind’s historical idealism. The material conditions of America, its actual historical situation, could be a better place to begin the analysis, however. America is as exceptional in this instance as it is in the prior. Where ideology might have a greater affect on the idiomatic themes of a musical style, materialism can explain why a national art music arose where and when it did. Idealism and materialism are ultimately entwined instead of divided and autonomous; both need to be to discussed in order to fully see Jazz as the musical form of American Exceptionalism. In this paper, the themes of individuality, equality, freedom, and the frontier (which I argue are the main themes in American ideology) will be applied to Jazz in both previously mentioned directions. How did this ideology aid in creating a specific social setting that made Jazz inevitable? Where do these themes appear in the style and fetishes of the Jazz idiom and its musical language?
There is no doubt that calling Jazz, “American,” is an applicable totality of description. Some argue, however, that doing this is really an oversimplification that removes the African roots of the music and gives the European nature of the music precedence. Scott Deveaux, in his essay “Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” feels the African influence needs emphasizing to balance this narrative out. He writes:
There is a sense of triumphant reversal as the music of a formerly enslaved people is designated a “rare and valuable national American treasure” by the Congress, and beamed overseas as a weapon of the Cold War. The story of jazz, therefore, has an important political dimension, one that unfolds naturally in its telling. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane provide powerful examples of black achievement and genius. Their exacting discipline cannot be easily marginalized, pace Adorno, as “mere” popular entertainment, or as the shadowy replication of European forms. The depth of tradition, reaching back in an unbroken continuum to the beginning of the century, belies attempts to portray African Americans as people without a past—hence the appeal of an ambiguous and convincing historical narrative: If the achievements that jazz represents are to be impressed on present and future generations, the story must be told, and told well... for all its pedagogical utility, though, the conventional narrative of jazz history is a simplification that begs as many questions as it answers.
Deveaux’s argument is contextually valid, but for an analysis of jazz as American Exceptionalism, he misses the point and creates a harsh dichotomy of competing interests. Jazz is exceptionally American because of the minimizing of this dichotomy (or at least the perception of minimization). If the theme of equality in America’s ideology had a structural effect on what would become America’s music, it is here that we find its greatest presence.
There is no universal equality in a nation that has within it legally instituted slavery. There can still exist a relative equality between those outside of that state of servitude, however, and it was the value of that equality within the American democracy that lead to the abolition of slavery and its influence on music towards the rise of jazz. Tocqueville, resuming his prophetic role decades before the Emancipation Proclamation, hints at the qualities of democratic people that lead them to favor free institutions. He writes in volume two, part four, chapter one of Democracy in America, entitled Equality Naturally Gives Men the Taste for Free Institutions:
Equality, which renders men independent of one another, makes them contract the habit and taste of following their will alone in their particular actions. This entire independence, which they enjoy continually vis-à-vis their equals and in the practice of private life, disposes them to consider all authority with the eye of malcontent and soon suggests to them the idea and love of political freedom. Men who live in these times therefore advance on a natural slope directing them toward free institutions.
In the years following Tocqueville’s visit, American society followed his suggested trajectory. Post-abolition America is the beginning of the culture of equality that led to the creation of jazz. James Lincoln Collier writes in the opening chapter of Jazz: the American Theme Song, entitled The Inevitability of Jazz in America, “the United States housed a black subculture, constituting at that time about ten percent of the American people… these people had developed for their own use a musical system that had proven attractive to white Americans.” Collier points specifically to the city of New Orleans as the breeding ground of this music. What factors made it form here first? He explains that “music and dance were a regular part of the social life of New Orleans; and because blacks and whites there lived in closer physical contrast than they did in many other places, they were thoroughly aware of each other’s music.” An exceptional ideology of equality led America from slavery to a state of racial interaction that resulted in a music that personified this same ideology.
Equality, which renders men independent of one another, makes them contract the habit and taste of following their will alone in their particular actions. This entire independence, which they enjoy continually vis-à-vis their equals and in the practice of private life, disposes them to consider all authority with the eye of malcontent and soon suggests to them the idea and love of political freedom. Men who live in these times therefore advance on a natural slope directing them toward free institutions.
In the years following Tocqueville’s visit, American society followed his suggested trajectory. Post-abolition America is the beginning of the culture of equality that led to the creation of jazz. James Lincoln Collier writes in the opening chapter of Jazz: the American Theme Song, entitled The Inevitability of Jazz in America, “the United States housed a black subculture, constituting at that time about ten percent of the American people… these people had developed for their own use a musical system that had proven attractive to white Americans.” Collier points specifically to the city of New Orleans as the breeding ground of this music. What factors made it form here first? He explains that “music and dance were a regular part of the social life of New Orleans; and because blacks and whites there lived in closer physical contrast than they did in many other places, they were thoroughly aware of each other’s music.” An exceptional ideology of equality led America from slavery to a state of racial interaction that resulted in a music that personified this same ideology.
Collier mentions how blacks and whites were “thoroughly aware of each other’s music.” This “awareness” indicates the unnecessary dichotomy of “African,” and “European” in the critique of jazz as American Exceptionalism. Jazz music is American (and exceptionally so); it combines elements of both continents (Europe and Africa) into a new dynamism. Europe’s influence can be seen in instrumentation; the main solo instruments of jazz are the European saxophone and trumpet. Western harmony is essential to jazz; it is, like most other Western musical styles, a constant cycle of dominant to tonic resolution. The basic harmonic block of the “jazz standard” (ii7-V7-I) is tertian harmony direct from the Major Scale (which is the basis of Western tonality). Africa lends its own influence in the form of rhythm and polyrhythm. This in its simplest form is “swing,” or a playing of two eighth notes with a feel of three. Africa is heard in the blues structures of jazz, its utilization of altered scales (such as the Blues Scale) and the improvised solos of microtonal voice-like phrasings. Jazz has other idiomatic characteristics; but remove one of these, and Jazz ceases to exist. These elements of jazz are present because of American Exceptionalism in the form of the exceptional ideology of equality in the first modern democracy.
Egalitarianism exists side by side with individualism within the Exceptionalist doctrine. These two concepts exist side by side within jazz as well. Where egalitarianism provided the social structure that allowed jazz to form from pre-jazz American music, individualism had its affect later on in jazz’s existence. This aspect (individualism) of American Exceptionalism is evident in the rise of the solo in jazz. Collier points out the importance of the solo in the second chapter of Jazz: the American Theme Song:
In the minds of most people, at the heart of jazz is the improvised solo. Critical attention is almost invariably devoted to the analysis of solos by the great jazz musicians. Discussions of ensemble work are rare indeed in jazz literature. So much is the improvised solo seen as the essence of the music that listeners feel cheated when they discover that a solo is not the sudden outpouring of an open heart but has been memorized and repeated night after night, or even written out and played from sheet music.
Jazz, as American art music situated in modernity, minus the solo, ceases to exist in any form worthy of critical analysis. The improvised solo is the essence of jazz.
There are specific historical bases for a marked rise in individualism within America and subsequently within America’s music. An analysis of the first recordings of jazz music indicates the absence of the solo. The first quarter of the 20th century yielded only an ensemble form of early jazz. Collier designates this as a function of European or white influence, “the Victorian nineteenth century was the great age of the massive ensemble… it was the time of the large marching band,” and describes the occasional solo in music as “the spice in the stew,” whereas “the meat and potatoes was the ensemble; the larger, the better.” What changed? Again, Collier answers:
What happened, I think, was that by the middle of the decade, the new spirit of modernism, with its crying-up of freedom, emotionalism, and expressiveness, had escaped bohemian and artistic circles and was rushing into the mainstream. The call was no longer for community, but for individualism.
He continues:
It is all here: the call for freedom of spirit, the virtues of primitivism, belief in living spontaneously. Jazz, and by implication all of art, was to arise from the individual expression of feeling. Indeed, Ornette Coleman has said flatly that in jazz “the essential quality is the right to be an individual”—in essence, to do what you want to do.”
The individualistic aspect of American Exceptionalism has its root, as we have seen in Tocequville’s comments, in democracy. Jazz was initially purely equal and democratic in its ensemble structure, but gave rise to the individualism of the soloist; we see this in the popularity of Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet. The zenith of individualism in jazz corresponds to America’s transition into modernity. Collier juxtaposes the numbers of Thoreau’s Walden (“the quintessential call for individualism’) sold upon its initial release in the 19th century to its acceptance into the canon as “required reading for anybody with intellectual pretensions” in the 20th century. Facts like this indicate that individualism was a strong ideology throughout American society; it was correspondingly strong within America’s music.
Individualism is not the only Exceptionalist theme that relates to jazz as soloist’s music. Frederick Jackson Turner argued the effect of the frontier on American ideology; this theme finds its musical counterpart in jazz. Albert Murray, in the introduction to Ken Burn’s documentary Jazz, describes it this way: “When you see a jazz musician playing, you’re lookin’ at… at pioneer, you’re lookin’ at an explorer, you’re lookin’ at an experimenter, you’re lookin’ at a scientist. You’re looking at all those things because it’s the creative process incarnate.” “Pioneer,” “explorer,” “experimenter,” and “scientist” are all descriptive of people on the edge of knowledge, adventuring into the unknown… the frontier. It is often considered by the jazz aficionado that there is risk involved in a player’s presence on stage and that he does not in fact know what music will come from the instrument next. Collier lends his insight to this idea:
It is startling how frequently jazz writers speak of an improvising soloist’s “risk” or “accepting challenges,” as if he were climbing a mountain in a blizzard. We have wanted to our jazz soloists as Hemingway heroes, and we have waved as banners alcoholism and drug addiction as proof that they were tormented geniuses—as if the suffering itself certified their genius. Beiderbecke’s remark, quoted by Jimmy McPartland above, is instructive: “That’s one of the things I like about jazz, kid. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” By 1925, not knowing what was going to happen next had a great appeal for young Americans escaping the well-ordered life of the Victorians. And the jazz solo seemed the embodiment of that idea.
The nature of the frontier (the risk, the unknown, the need for innovation and self-reliance in order to survive and conquer), which Turner argues was the primary force in shaping America’s ideology, permeates America’s music as well.
Freedom, which I consider the pre-occupying meta-narrative within American Exceptionalism, exists within jazz as well. Freedom allowed jazz to form. During the rise of jazz, and the subsequent Jazz Age, the nation’s views of freedom created some specific social structures that allowed this music to take hold. “Feminism was an integral part of the new spirit of jazz,” writes Collier. Because jazz was ultimately a dance music, the new found freedoms of women created an excited group that was now able to do these dances (Collier 2001). The United States of America as a capitalism economy created a freedom of industry that allowed for a productive entertainment industry to reproduce and spread this music (Collier 2001). Economy also created a spirit of technological innovation that gave America the phonograph and other listening tools (Collier 2001). Freedom as an ideology of Exceptionalism provided one of the strongest catalysts for jazz popularity.
Freedom also had its influence on the sound of jazz. As the 20th century progressed into its second half, America saw a rise in the value of freedom. The 1960s produced riots and protests about race relations, women, and war. As a response to this focus on freedom, jazz gave birth to a subgenre called Free Jazz. The connection is direct. Free jazz is essentially the musical form of the dissonance that exists between equality and freedom. It is the musical form of democratic society. Ornette Coleman, one of many proponents of this music, embraced the term “free jazz” with the release of his album Free Jazz: a Collective Improvisation by his double quartet in 1960. This music focuses on group improvisation; the ensemble creates a music based upon the free improvisations of the individuals within the group. It is democracy as music, for sure. It is as dissonant and hard to grasp as the concept of a democratic society itself. The idea that equality and freedom can exist in equal parts is a paradox of American Exceptionalism. Free Jazz is the musical form of this paradox.
Separating each of these concepts (freedom, equality, individualism, and frontier) is a tool of analysis. The reality is that the interaction and combination of these create the Exceptionalist discourse as a whole. Just the same, these ideas are not exceptional to America: the dynamic created by their relationship and the specific material conditions of America, is exceptional. Seymour Martin Lipset considers American Exceptionalism to be a “double-edged sword.” This comment indicates the intrinsic dialectic of this discussion, but Jazz as American Exceptionalism has more than one edge as well. Howard Levy comments on this in his essay The Search for Identity in American Music, 1890-1920. He writes:
I would like to summarize the question of American Exceptionalism by touching upon some of the aesthetic issues running throughout. The separation of art and vernacular music had been a chief obstacle amidst the search for musical identity. The imperious old elitism of Horatio Parker that looked down on such musics as jazz and ragtime is now quite archaic. But an anti-elite elitism remains virulent.
For him, to consider jazz as American Exceptionalism is to “oppose its fusion with art music and, in effect, to circumscribe it and ghettoize it.” Certainly, as the Exceptionalist discourse in the political and social sense has lead many outside of the nation to question the rationale of American action, it has brought into discussion questions of jazz’s right to be pedestaled within America’s musical culture. Adorno commented in harsher terms on the nature of jazz elitism; he questioned the music more severely than any musicologist or social theorist yet. He wrote in Perennial Fashion—Jazz:
The aim of jazz of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. “Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,” the eunuch- like sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, “and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.”
He saw nothing positive about jazz, nothing exceptional. Instead of a frontier hero, there is a fraternity of eunuchs. No doubt this opinion is held by others, not only about jazz, but about America as a nation. But Jazz, through all these examples, and for good or bad, becomes the musical form of American Exceptionalism.
In the 1830s, Tocqueville wrote about the exceptional characteristics of democracy in America. He discussed concepts such as freedom, egalitarianism and individualism. He wrote about what these ideologies did to American society and polity, and in what way America was different than any other nation. American Exceptionalism is not the impossible and irrelevant question of “good” or “bad,” but a lens to view the issues and nature of a specific society. If that lens is used to look at music in a critical sense and see what arises within it because of those ideologies, then the only result could be jazz. Equality gave jazz the solid ground to grow on through the adaptation in equal measures of African and European music. Freedom created an audience for it and an improvisatory swinging style. Individualism and the frontier gave rise to jazz as a soloist’s music of modernity. These combinations of ideology as American Exceptionalism direct different outcomes in various spheres, but within music they made jazz unavoidable.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W., Richard D. Leppert, and Susan H. Gillespie. "Perennial Fashion - Jazz." Essays on Music. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California, 2002. Print.
Bolanos, Paolo A. "The Critical Role of Art: Adorno between Utopia and Dystopia." Kritike 1.1 (2007): 25- 31. Print.
Collier, James Lincoln. Jazz: The American Theme Song. Oxford UP, 1995. Print.
Deveaux, Scott. "Constructing the Jazz Tradition." Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 416-24. Print.
Jazz. Dir. Ken Burns. By Ken Burns. 2001. DVD.
Levy, Alan H. "The Search for Identity in American Music, 1890-1920." American Music 2.2 (1984): 70-81. JSTOR. Web. 07 June 2010.
Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: a Double-edged Sword. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Print.
Tocqueville, Alexis De, Harvey C. Mansfield, and Delba Winthrop. Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000. Print.
