Blog #5

            Right outside of my bedroom, in the hallway of my parent’s home, is a framed black and white photo of a young Miles Davis, sitting alone in a recording studio with his trumpet. The image always reminded me of a modern reinvention of The Thinker. And that was jazz to me. The heady and cool Miles Davis. You can tell that he’s got something on his mind, but he won’t ever explain it to you. No, you’ve got to listen to his music and try to figure out what he’s thinking. Growing up jazz always seemed like an unrelatable fringe subgenre of music led by these enigmatic personas such as Miles Davis. But after taking this course I can see now how naive that perspective of jazz was.

            For half a century, jazz wasn’t fringe at all. It feels strange to say, but jazz was American pop music. Jazz was dance music. Jazz was mainstream entertainment. It was a reinvention of classic music into something hip, modern, and most importantly alive. From the 20s through the 40s jazz was the backdrop of American night life. People weren’t sitting around snapping their fingers to it, they were crowding around the radio or lining up outside of clubs, excited to dance to the latest sounds. The jazz I knew, the cool jazz of Miles Davis, didn't come around until much later. It came once the musicians really started thinking and becoming self-aware of what they were doing. The jazz I was used to came once the musicians made a conscious choice to create art instead of entertainment.

            And by nature the persona of the artist needs to be more enigmatic than that of the entertainer. Especially with the context of black jazz musicians attempting to succeed in a racially heated society, the two personas diverge by necessity. In the early years of jazz, the black entertainer needed to fit a nonthreatening, Uncle Tom type of role. On stage they needed to laugh and grin and put their, often white audience and employers, at ease. Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and other great jazz musicians of the day were savvy businessmen and knew that in order to keep their jobs as entertainers they needed to play into certain stereotypes and project a docile image of themselves. It’s smart. Could you imagine someone like Miles Davis, clearly smart as hell and with all the attitude that he carries with him, coming up on stage in a segregated Chicago nightclub in the 1920s? I doubt he’d be allowed to finish his set before the gangster club owners decided to “take care of him”.

            But in the 1950s and the 60s, society allows him to act the way he does. Sure racial tensions were still high, but the civil rights movement was in full swing, and attention was being drawn to racial issues. This was a transitional period in American history, and the attitude that Miles Davis projected was representative of where America was heading. A proud, talented, and smart black man, clearly disgusted with the discrimination of his people; this persona attracted people towards his music and provided a lens through which to view his artistic message. But after reading through his autobiography and learning about the history of jazz, Miles’s persona doesn’t seem nearly so enigmatic to me as it once did. He was a product of the jazz movement. His art, his identity, his livelihood, and his politics all becoming so intertwined that the only way to protect his ego was to become guarded, stern, and aloof. It’s hard to define jazz because it has evolved and changed so much over the 20^th century, but it seems clear that the musicians who pushed the movement forward didn’t just play jazz, they lived it.

Blog #4

Thelonious Monk perhaps epitomizes the stereotype of the jazz savant. He’s odd and appears obsessive to the observer. He sees the world differently than most, and that unique perspective comes through in his compositions, which are dominated by dissonance and unconventional harmonies. However, looking at the community he was raised in, it almost seems inevitable that he is the way he is.

In his biography on Thelonious Monk, Robin Kelley describes the San Juan Hill community in which Monk was raised. It’s a community dominated by racial tensions and contradictions. It was a small community of tenement buildings for working class families and every block was dominated by a specific ethnic group. As Monk described it, “you go in the next block and you’re in another country” (Kelley, 19). And every ethnic group was protective of their territory and ready and willing to use violence to defend their sub community. Within area, small race riots were expected weekly, and residents of the community were known to store “piles of bottles and bricks ripped from dilapidated chimneys” to retaliate with when conflicts arose (Kelley, 17). But at the same time that these sometimes fatally violent conflicts were frequently occurring, the San Juan Hill area still functioned as a community, albeit a highly dysfunctional one. Residents of the community remember that the majority of the merchants were Italians. So, when you needed to purchase something, you needed to go down one of the Italian blocks to the store. The Italians wouldn’t allow blacks to walk on the sidewalks in their neighborhood, so the black customers would shamefully walk along the street. At the store, the Italians would give you anything you needed in an “empty wooden box”. As one resident remembers, “they’re always glad to give you a box because they know you have a coal stove and you need the wood to start the fire.” However, after you get the box, “you break [it up]” and “run like mad down the street… [hitting] anybody you can” with the sticks (Kelley, 18). This is the kind of racial conflict-based contradiction embodied in the San Juan Hill community that is almost comedic in its excessive nature. In this example, the blacks and the Italians work together and are helpful towards each other in certain interactions, but before that interaction begins and after it is over, they revert back to racial discrimination and violence that seems based more on the community’s attitude and not on any personal disagreements. Growing up in a community like this, it only seems natural that Monk would express himself through highly unconventional harmonies in his music.

In Monk’s situation, I believe his music is a direct product of his abnormal upbringing. However, the opposite could also be true: an abnormal community can be the direct product of art and music. This seems to be the case in Leimert Park in Los Angeles. This is a community, of predominantly African Americans, located within the heart of LA. The surrounding areas are impoverished and dominated by gang violence, but Leimert Park is an oasis of art, music, and nonviolent expression. In Leimert Park, the residents came together, out of a mutual respect and admiration for the arts, and formed a true community. But Leimert park is very different than San Juan Hill. While Leimert park resonates with the idea that we can love and accept one another regardless of the differences between us, the San Juan Hill mentality is to focus on every difference between people and create conflicts because of that. But as different as these two communities are, music is still at the center of them. Monk was, and still is, a highly influential musician, and it seems unlikely that the jazz roots of the Leimert Park community could have been planted without the influence of Monk’s music, and it seems even more unlikely that Monk could have the same musical voice without his upbringing in San Juan Hill.