"One of the immediate goals of our music is to stimulate thought...It makes you think about everything. You start thinking about yourself and once you get people thinking, they think of many things. They think of how to make a better mousetrap. Music can open people's minds up" --Lester Bowie
 

        When one thinks of the avant-garde one naturally thinks of the Arts.  Therefore, it’s not at all surprising to hear reformist or even revolutionary rhetoric in the context of music. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it is one that is worth investigating. I plan to show that jazz musicians, with jazz as a genre that arose out of the intermingling and mixing of a variety of musical styles, have not only been descriptive but prescriptive in shaping minds and informing the public of often radical, progressive thought. I will do this by choosing some quintessential jazz artists, situated within their own frame of time, and comparing their respective bodies of work for evidence of, or lack thereof, political or progressive ideas.
Jazz as a genre is hard to encapsulate. The very nature of artistic endeavors is one which is hard to describe succinctly. Critic Peter Townsend said of jazz that as it developed, it “becomes more difficult to issue generalized statements about the music, to speak of its ‘essence’, or of characteristics which are unrelated to time and place” (Townsend 35). This is especially true of advanced forms of art, because over time things tend to fracture and split into subsets and subgroups until such time as they barely resemble their common predecessor. Jazz itself is a music that started with mixed roots. As an American phenomenon it was first heard in the early 20th century--although its roots trace back across continents and centuries. In spite of the hardships of prejudice—or perhaps because of them—African American musicians were able to take the musical teachings of their African roots and blend them with the styles taught by European descendants in the United States.
With this amazing creation came a rash of reactionary responses with many noted scholars and critics speaking of the as-yet-unnamed playing style as savage and using regrettable epithets in naming jazz jungle music. This early version of jazz was a chance at artistic escape for many African Americans but it was, from its inception, more strongly related to entertainment than artistry. Peter Townsend writes “the self-presentation of … earlier artists enacted the stereotype of the black man as clown, and also distracted from the achievements of progressive jazz musicians” (Townsend 38). It was highly connected with vaudeville and minstrel shows that included blackface actors among other racial insensitivities. Townsend furthermore describes “the settings in which the musicians operated” as to: “the established circuits of minstrelsy, circuses, tent shows and medicine shows, the Chicago urban scene added night clubs and cabarets” and brothels (Townsend 39). From these inauspicious beginnings many said jazz would never last, that it was a passing fad. It seems as though jazz, from its inception, was infused with an inner strength of spirit that made it able to overcome and eventually decry the injustices its members faced.
Many black musicians accepted the prejudices against them and succeeded as best they could anyway. As Townsend put it: “their function as musicians, or as players of jazz, was to many of these early figures indivisible from their function as participants in a world of professional entertainment” (Townsend 41). But there was more to it than just that. By just being an inter-racially renowned artist was an incredible stride in the direction of the equal rights movement of the 60s and the weakening of racial segregation and prejudice on a global scale. Young Louis Armstrong “saw himself as an entertainer who must, by any means, please his audience” (Early 297). This doesn’t preclude him from being one of the best cornet and trumpet players of all time; he just had to work that much harder to be recognized as such. “Armstrong and Bechet were the first [jazz musicians] to have strong enough musical personalities and a high enough level of invention for their individual improvisations to be the central focus for the listener. Their examples set the achievement of improvisation as the main standard by which jazz players measured their own work” (Townsend 45). This was an amazing development as improvisation had never been a goal that so-called Classical musicians would strive for. The very paradigm of what was music was changed by the work and mastery of Louis Armstrong. This turning point changed music forever and jazz especially “is still deeply marked by the period in which conditions allowed it to generate its own musical-aesthetic values” (Townsend 61). By this time jazz had come into its own as a genre and the musicians in that genre played together and learned from one another. This self-awareness of jazz as genre was integral to the musicians who played it to start not only coalescing jazz but also to start moving in new directions as artists.
Theoretically this is all well and good, but pragmatically jazz artists such as Armstrong were incredibly popular and reached a much vaster audience than any African American musician had before. This had many effects the most obvious being that jazz musicians were getting paid which meant there would be more money for larger bands which required more jazz musicians. This self-replication created more artists which were then allowed into more clubs and the interaction between black artists and white audiences increased alongside it. Due to these factors jazz musicians were slowly able to change their own paradigm from entertainers to artists. It was “during this period jazz became a pure form of musical activity, placing an overwhelming emphasis on the art of the improvising soloist, while at the same time being relatively unconcerned about group organization and positively hostile to any entertainment function” (Townsend 37).
Because they were playing larger and better venues and because they were able to make money from record sales, jazz musicians gained more and more freedom to express themselves artistically—as well as politically. The emphasis on the soloists’ artistry became paramount in jazz which artists began to be able to more freely express themselves in and outside the context of their music.
With the repeal of the “separate but equal” stance of United States schools in 1954, America took another great step towards racial equality. It was about this time that John Coltrane joined the Miles Davis Quintet and really cut his teeth towards becoming the next great jazz musician. Under the tutelage of the capricious Davis, Coltrane was allowed access to the most forward thinking musicians of the time. His free jazz and modal jazz not only showed his great abilities as a musician but also as a progressive thinker. Coltrane practically defines the avant-garde with his high-minded music that many find distasteful. This is true because Coltrane (and I don’t want to downplay his musicianship because he was a virtuosic master) chose to emphasize the abstract over the tangible in many cases. Coltrane was an idea man and played incredibly technical and conceptualized material. Lewis Porter writes “his influence extends far beyond saxophonists—he affected the whole field of jazz improvisation, influenced the ensemble sound of jazz groups, and set forth an attitude about what jazz is and what it can be” (Porter 295). And it was during his short life as a professional musician (between the 1940s and 1967 when he died) that many advances in racial equality were happening. There is no way an African American at this time could have separated themselves from the events of the 60s including the peaceful marches of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Watts riots and the gamut of other progressive movements and activities in between those extremes. Ben Ratliffe writes about John Coltrane,
“His work became unofficially annexed by the civil rights movement: its sound alone has become a metaphor for dignified perseverance. His art, nearly up to the end, was not insular, and kept signifying different things for different people of different cultures and races. His ugliest music (to a certain way of thinking) is widely suspected of possessing beauty beyond the listener’s grasp, and the reverse goes for his prettiest music—that it is more properly understood as an expression of grave seriousness” (Ratliffe x).
    Because of his breadth and musical genius, Coltrane is often ignored by plebian listeners. But he is very representative of not only his generation, but his generation as an African American jazz musician and the potential for freedom of expression included therein. His music, if his skill were ever in question by those who ‘don’t get it’, “is marked by remarkable technique, strength in all registers of the tenor and soprano saxophones, slightly sharp intonation, serene intensity, and a rapid, mobile exploration of chords, not just melody” and he “made jazz that was alternately seductive, mainstream and antagonistic” (Ratliffe xi).
Coltrane experimented with and regularly used a number of different drugs through his life—which was increasingly common during the mid-20th century. This personal freedom also opened his mind spiritually which led him to pursue and learn about many different religions. As Ratliffe puts it, “in pluralistic America, it has become hard not to hear Coltrane’s modal music—in which an improviser, freed from chordal movement, becomes free to explore—as a metaphor for a personal religious search” (Ratliffe x). Perhaps needless to say, a known drug-using black artist who doesn’t worship Christ would have been a much harder sell just thirty or forty years earlier. But Coltrane was a musical genius and so ahead of his time that his eccentricities were overlooked in order that the public could focus on his amazing work. His skill was such that “the structural innovations of jazz really did slow down precipitously after Coltrane” (Ratliffe xvi).
But time, being what it is, keeps advancing and with it so widened the boundaries or extremes of acceptable public behavior—including musical production. “The rhetoric surrounding jazz has changed a great deal since Coltrane’s time” and his music “is now seen as a philosophy of its time, associated with the 1960s” (Rafliffe xv). Although they had come a long way, Armstrong and Coltrane both shared the want to empower their people and themselves through their artistry.
As jazz was exported from the United States its range and scope became ever greater—and with the introduction of new cultural roots so also was introduced new cultural wrongs which could and would be represented and fought through jazz. Fela Anikulapo (or: He Who Holds Death in his Pouch) Kuti is one such artist whose musical style is known for its incendiary and rebellious if not revolutionary themes. Tejumola Olaniyan describes his as “sensational, rhetorically ostentatious, and politically inflaming lyrics” (Olaniyan 1). Although he is known as a radical, Fela started as a jazz and African highlife musician, influenced by a great variety of artists.
Brent Hayes Edwards wrote that Fela “loved the growling rubato of Louis Armstrong” and was “knocked out by the intensity of the…live…music. To Fela, jazz was ‘cultural information’ that helped him discover his sense of himself as a musician, (sic) he would say later that he ‘started using jazz as a stepping-stone to African music’” (Edwards 4). The fact that Fela was directly inspired by Louis Armstrong and American jazz music shows the strength of it as a cultural export. Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka “argued that Fela’s music was significant as a ‘contextual projection’ that evoked its surroundings—the suffering and striving of Lagos—as powerfully as Billie Holiday’s music evoked the American South, or an Irish folk song evoked the great famine” (Edwards 6).
The situation in 1970s Nigeria was one of struggle which Fela used to create his powerful and sprawling works which are almost all progressively political in nature. Olaniyan writes, “in this scenario: Africa is often presented as in the death-grip of cultural deracination by Westernization, with Fela the Afrocentric liberator wielding the heavy cudgel of venomous satire against the agents of Western cultural imperialism, native or foreign” (Olaniyan 3). In this way Fela not only is influenced by past jazz artists, he is able to transcend his own paradigm by shifting his sights towards defining what it is to be African in his time and place. Fela said, “I have to be very original, and must identify with Africa. Then I will have an identity” (Moore 75). In this way the progression of artistry and what can be accepted in the public sphere has changed and evolved over time and across the globe.

Works Cited:
Early, Gerald. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture. New York: Ecco Press, 1989
Edwards, Brent Hayes. Crossroads Republic. Transition: An International Review. 94-119, 2007.
Henry, Martin,. Jazz the first 100 years. Belmont, CA: Thompson/Schirmer, 2005.
Moore, Carlos. Fela, Fela: This Bitch of a Life. London: Allison and Busby, 1982.
Olaniyan, Tejumola. Arrest The Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (African Expressive Cultures). New York: Indiana UP, 2004.
Porter, Lewis. John Coltrane his life and music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 1997.
Ratliff, Ben. Coltrane The Story of a Sound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Townsend, Peter. Jazz In American Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.