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Mlk jr. on jazz: the soundtrack of civil rights.

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In a 1964 essay, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. explains the importance of jazz music and its role in the story of civil rights.

SFCM is honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by taking a closer look at one of his essays that lives large in the world of jazz.

By Mark Taylor

“Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties.” 

Those words by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. can be found at the beginning of his essay for the inauguration of the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964. It might be one of Dr. King’s lesser known speeches, but today remains one of the most profound essays about jazz and its role in civil rights.

Often called America’s one true art form, in his own words Dr. King also acknowledges jazz as a powerful tool in the story of civil rights, writing in 1964, “Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.” That same year Dr. King played an essential role in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and appeared on the cover of Time magazine as “Man of the Year.” 

Though written decades ago, it’s a speech that SFCM’s Jason Hainsworth shares with his students every year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Hainsworth said, “I think it's an important statement from one of the world's most important figures of all time. I never had a teacher share this information with me so when I discovered it I thought ‘Wow, how come nobody ever talks about this?’”

Hainsworth is the executive director of the Roots, Jazz, and American Music program and associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at SFCM, which just announced the opening of applications for the Emerging Black Composers Project and a new fellowship with the San Francisco Ballet to support Black musicians. 

In the essay, Dr. King remarks on how long before modern scholars wrote of racial identity, jazz musicians were already approaching the topic through music. 

Hainsworth has plenty of examples. “Charles Mingus' piece entitled Fables of Faubus , John Coltrane's Alabama , and Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddamn …These were pieces that spoke to racism during the times in which these musicians were living. They also speak to the incredible spirit and force Black musicians have been able to create art under intense racial unrest and hatred.” 

The speech also notes how jazz music brings people together, not only through struggle, but also joy and community. “Everybody has the Blues, Everybody longs for meaning,” writes Dr. King. 

For Hainsworth those words can be interpreted to mean that music is universal and feeling and connecting to sound and lyrics is something most if not all people do. “You don’t have to be an intellectual or well-studied to feel the emotional and musical impact behind the Blues. The same for jazz. All you have to do is listen and let the sound of it take you on the journey,” he added. 

In the political climate of today, Dr. King’s Berlin Jazz Festival essay can be a reminder of the impact that music has on people’s lives. While a speech or protest may come and go, music lives on. 

“As musicians we can’t forget that real progress and change isn't quick and easy,” said Hainsworth. “Most times, in fact, it's dirty, slow, sometimes anger-fueled and that speaks to the experience resilience of Black people in America and the music which is borne from these experiences.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Address for the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival:

God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.

This is triumphant music.

Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.

Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.

And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.

In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.

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A Brief History of Jazz

September 22, 2022

“Jazz is messy,” historian Ted Gioia told NPR after the release of the third edition of his book, The History of Jazz . “The trends are complex and often go back and forth in surprising ways. Even in the midst of writing a history of jazz, I wanted to make sure people knew that fitting this thing into a historical progression could mislead them.”  

Any attempt to describe the history of jazz in a linear format is misleading because jazz didn’t—and doesn’t—happen that way. A style of music known for its improvisation and spirit, it was born in New Orleans, but took on life in countless new directions. Free jazz, cool jazz, bebop, post-bop, and electro swing: all of these and more have rich, tangled roots that defy delineation—and definition. Here is a sampling of those roots from geographical and musical perspectives, and a glimpse at a few of the jazz musicians who championed the genre.  

Geographical and Cultural Origins  

Though the history of jazz music is complicated and often debated, the one point historians reliably agree on is the geography of jazz origins . Jazz started as a uniquely American sound, forged in the melting pot of cultures in the south, particularly in New Orleans. The port city was a blend of Creole culture and African traditions, peppered with European influences.  

These cultural influences and musical traditions informed the new style of music originally known as “jass.” Developed by the African American community, the nascent music genre caught on and spread, picked up by musicians of other ethnicities and locales. Los Angeles, Denver, Baltimore, New York City, and even mining towns in Colorado became hubs of jazz music. By the Roaring Twenties, jazz was the sound of the decade, and its popularity blossomed throughout the US and overseas.  

Musical Origins  

While the genre blends the styles of many musical traditions, two key styles of music influenced early jazz : blues and ragtime. The more informal style of blues music and the syncopated rhythms of ragtime meshed together in jazz, along with various other historical influences. The field hollers and work songs of African slaves in the US, the hymns and gospels of the American south, and New Orleans’ popular brass bands all contributed to the development of jazz.  

Influential Jazz Composers and Musicians  

In the early years of jazz and as it grew into more specific styles like swing and orchestral jazz, jazz composers and musicians played monumental roles in jazz history. Here are just a few of these legendary figures.  

• Louis Armstrong , a world-renowned jazz trumpeter and vocalist who popularized swing.  
• Fletcher Henderson , an arranger, bandleader, and pianist who pioneered big band jazz.  
• Duke Ellington , a jazz pianist and master composer who brought innovation, flavor, and emotional depth to jazz.  
• Charles Parker, Jr., a.k.a. “Bird” or “Yardbird,” a saxophonist, bandleader, and composer who led the development of bebop.  
• Count Basie , a jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer who popularized big band and orchestral jazz.  

These artists’ influences are still felt in jazz today, even as the genre continues to evolve and grow. “The worst thing that could happen,” says Ted Gioia, “is for jazz to end up like the symphony orchestra, where you go to a concert and almost everything they play is 100 years old … History must always be tempered with an understanding of how we use these songs and sounds to revitalize the music ecosystem we currently live in.”  

If you would like to honor the history of jazz and participate in its persistence in the modern world, you can further explore the genre in our jazz programs at Levine! Levine’s Jazz Program provides students of all instruments, ages, and levels with opportunities to develop their musical skills and explore the art of jazz through ensembles, group classes, and private lessons.  

Join us for regular jam sessions, master classes, and performances devoted to appreciating and understanding this most vibrant artform. Whether you are a traditionally trained student who is curious about the world of jazz or you are an experienced jazz musician looking to expand your skills, Levine is the place to take your skills to the next level.  

Here at Levine Music, our core values—excellence and opportunity—infuse everything we do. Learn more about our program areas and upcoming performances, and donate today to help us bring lifelong joy and inspiration through music!  

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Why MLK Believed Jazz Was the Perfect Soundtrack for Civil Rights

Jazz, King declared, was the ability to take the “hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.”

“God has wrought many things out of oppression,” begins Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay occasioned by the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival. “He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy.”

There were names like Miles Davis, Sonny Stitt, and Roland Kirk on the bill. The 1964 festival was the first of the series, and it stood as a celebration of the genre, a recognition of the global impact of jazz. And now a big name was lending his support to the music: civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

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In an earlier visit to Berlin, King had talked about the freedom movement’s work throughout the American South, and how he believed that “the Negro is called to be the conscience of our nation.” Nowhere was that call clearer than in jazz. Although King did not attend the festival in person (as scholars later confirmed ), his address appeared in the program. There, in that divided city, King, a man who was fighting so hard against the divisions in his own country, was making the connections between the music and the movement.

It was beautiful music, no doubt about it. It was joyful, contemplative, and moving. But it was also a powerful tool in the fight for civil rights. It was music whose greatest stars were Black, and in a country filled with oppression of Black people, that was revolutionary. By the time King gave his speech, the connections between jazz and activism were only getting stronger, both at home and globally. The question isn’t so much why King would speak about the music, but how much of a role jazz played in Black liberation.

There are too many moments, too many painful scars, to name: Emmett Till. The Little Rock Nine. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Too many names and dates and times and places that all amounted to an understanding shared by so many Black Americans: we are not safe. Any of those could have been the one hurt too many that pushed the music into the activist world. Jazz was the perfect artform for the struggle, as just the act of performing, of seeing these powerful Black men and women commanding stages and demanding to be seen as artists was itself “a rebellious political act,” as the scholar Ingrid Monson points out in the Black Music Research Journal . Jazz was changing. While the big band era was a popular and successful one, by the 1940s, younger musicians were looking for a bolder way to assert themselves musically, and bebop was just the thing.

In a 1962 essay about the birth of bop, Amiri Baraka wrote that “the musicians who played it were loudly outspoken about who they thought they were. ‘If you don’t like it, don’t listen’ was the attitude.” This was exactly the kind of self-assertion that earned them a range of reactions—from distaste to outright violence—in so many aspects of American life. But there on stage there was freedom. Without a doubt, it was a powerful image: Black artists commanding the attention of a roomfull of active listeners.

But image isn’t action. Jazz music took a decidedly more political tone, and the players a more active role in the struggle for civil rights. The music was not only providing a soundtrack for liberation, the musicians were becoming more visible in the fight, some in ways they’d never planned.

In April 1956, Nat “King” Cole took the stage in Birmingham, Alabama. After scoring a number of hits with his jazz trio, Cole had transitioned to his more pop-oriented solo work, which cemented him firmly as a crossover artist—a crooner with mass appeal. These were songs that would go on to become Christmas and wedding staples. They were romantic, upbeat, and emotional. What they certainly weren’t was controversial. But in the segregated South, Cole’s visibility and appeal made him a target for racists. They saw in his act, in his integrated band, and in his popularity “ an even more insidious threat than strutting rhythm and blues singers ,” as the music scholar Mark Burford explained. About three songs into his performance, Cole was attacked on stage.

Maybe, earlier in the decade, more people would have rallied around Cole. But the Black press at the time saw Cole’s playing for a segregated audience as tantamount to an endorsement of the practice. The Amsterdam News wrote that Cole had “agreed to humiliate himself and his race and sell his talents under Jim Crow conditions.” The NAACP’s executive secretary pointed to the incident as a prime example that “organized bigotry makes no distinction between those who do not actively challenge racial discrimination and those who do.” He urged Cole to join them in fighting the conditions that led to the attack.

There were no more sidelines. Jazz musicians, like any other American, had the duty to speak to the world around them, and to oppose the brutal conditions for Black Americans. After the Birmingham attack, Cole told reporters : “I can’t come in here on a one-night-stand and overpower the law. […] But I can help to ease the tension by gaining respect of both races all over the country.” And, in the early 60s, Cole announced his fundraising efforts on behalf of several civil rights organizations.

Jazz also found itself on the global stage well before King’s Berlin remarks. That image of American cool, of smoky jazz clubs and late night music, was an easily exportable one—and a way to promote the idea of just how much America loved and respected its Black citizens. Something that would change the conversation from Black churches being bombed; or Black children being attacked for trying to attend school; or the fact that all our Cold War adversaries had to do to reveal the U.S.’s limited view of freedom was to show pictures of attacks on Black protestors.

The U.S. needed a makeover, to present the nation on a world stage as open and accepting, and who better than jazz musicians? The music was popular, the players even more so. With a push from New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, in 1956, President Eisenhower launched the Jazz Ambassadors program through the State Department, with the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie as its first Ambassador.

But this move exposed the exact attitudes the program was designed to cover. Louisiana senator Allen J. Ellender said: “To send such jazz as Mr. Gillespie, I can assure you that instead of doing good it will do harm, and the people will really believe we are barbarians.” The White Citizens Council of Alabama, which was, unsurprisingly, the same group behind the attack on Cole, agreed, calling the music a “plot to mongrelize America.”

Before he was to leave on his tour of several Middle Eastern and Eastern European countries, Washington officials asked Gillespie to come in to be briefed, to make sure he knew what to say when asked about American racism. He refused, saying , “I’ve got three hundred years of briefing. I know what they’ve done to us. If they ask me any questions, I’m gonna answer them as honestly as I can.” This wasn’t about making excuses for America, he said, or about letting himself be used as a prop in an America-produced stage play for race relations. This was about the music for him, and, yes, in some ways, about the image.

That image of Black artists on a world stage was important both to his work and to the genre as a whole. When Gillespie returned from the tour, he praised the program, and advocated for its expansion. The program did continue, adding names like Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

Armstrong, who participated beginning in 1960, was actually asked to lend his talents to the program in 1957 but refused because of the treatment Black people were getting at home : “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said. His was an interesting case because Armstrong was, to put it lightly, a complicated figure in Black America at the time. In a 2006 interview , Amiri Baraka recalled what he, and other detractors, thought of Armstrong and his act at the time: “We confused what we perceived as the social demeanor in that context of lynching. And we thought that Louis was submitting to that. […] When it was possible for Louis to speak, he spoke.”

Armstrong wasn’t alone. Pianist Thelonious Monk had never been at the forefront of the movement, stating in a 1958 interview: “My music is not a social comment on discrimination or poverty or the like.” But 1958 in America was hardly a time for silence. Those in opposition to equality certainly weren’t staying silent. That year a bomb plot was thwarted at a Baptist church in Birmingham (this was the second bomb placed at the church in less than two years), and across the South desegregation orders were being ignored—violently so. The battle for rights were coming toward the willing and unwilling activist alike.

This might have been why a political agnostic like Monk performed at a 1963 civil rights benefit for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As Monson noted, this was a move that fit well into the long history of jazz musicians performing for explicitly activist causes. In the past, musicians had performed at benefits for the Scottsboro boys, the Freedom Rides, the NAACP, and, later, the lunch-counter sit-ins. Monk would be part of a tradition that included musicians like Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, and Clark Terry, musicians who were contributing their talents to the fight.

It’s not surprising to find themes of liberation, anger, and resistance in the music. “Jazz speaks for life,” King said in his address, and there are a host of examples of jazz doing just that, speaking not just to American life but to Black American life, to the pain and joy contained in that. “My only sin is in my skin,” Louis Armstrong sang in “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” (Fats Waller’s 1929 composition, with lyrics by Harry Brooks and Andy Razaf). There’s a 1965 performance of the song that Armstrong made ache with its era, or maybe less than its era and more with lived experience. It’s what King described in his address as musicians “affirm[ing] that which was stirring within their souls.” Even today, the song has a quiet resonance in a country that still stumbles and falls when it comes to equality.

It’s the type of resonance felt in the Abel Meeropol’s composition “Strange Fruit.” The song, whose most well-known version was performed by Billie Holiday, is a painful meditation on the country’s violent legacy of lynching. Music couldn’t ignore that violence, and many other pieces spoke directly to it: John Coltrane’s “Alabama” (1963) was a tribute to the four girls killed in a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church; Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” (1959) was an indictment of Arkansas’ pro-segregation governor Orval Faubus; and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” (1964) was written in response to both the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing. “How,” Simone said in an interview , “can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”

Because the struggle for civil rights was also a fight simply to be seen and valued, there were songs celebrating the beauty of blackness, like Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue” (1959, with lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr.); Duke Ellington’s 1963 album My People ; and Nina Simone and lyricist Weldon Irvine’s “To Be Young Gifted and Black” (1969). There was even music imagining a different, freer, less Earth-bound existence, like the Afro-futuristic Sun Ra, whose Space is the Place (both an album and a soundtrack for a film of the same name) made Black liberation the stuff of the cosmos. Jazz music, King declared, was the ability to take the “hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.” Jazz was recording its time, and giving strength to those fighting for a better world.

Music was even used to advance and support political campaigns, either directly, like how Dizzy Gillespie’s reworked the lyrics to “Salt Peanuts” in 1964. The resulting piece, called “Vote Dizzy,” served as a campaign song for his presidential run. His platform included renaming the White House the Blues House, and putting musicians like Peggy Lee and Miles Davis into cabinet positions. While it was a satirical campaign, Gillespie donated the money he raised to civil rights organizations.

There was also the Parker-Coltrane Political Action Committee, established by Congressman John Conyers in 1981, which aimed to elect progressive Black politicians in Southern states. The PAC’s board included jazz musicians Nancy Wilson, Johnny Hartman, and Joe Williams. When asked about the PAC’s choice of names, Conyers answered , “politics is everybody’s business, including people who dig great jazz.”

Jazz was another tool for activism. Everything from the compositions that left no question about their politics, like Sonny Rollins’ 1958 “Freedom Suite,” to the album covers like Max Roach’s We Insist!, which mirrored a lunch counter sit-in, showed that these artists were as much a part of the fight as anyone. Jazz was a powerful part of the civil rights movement, and King’s presence in the festival only strengthened the bonds.

“Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music,” King noted. The music spoke to Black life, but also to a human condition, a need to be seen, to be heard, to have your life matter. And indeed, even King’s own life would be eulogized by jazz, in pieces by Duke Ellington and Nina Simone. King noted that everyone needed love, happiness, and faith. Jazz, he wrote, “is a stepping stone towards all of these.”

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Why Jazz Still Matters

Jazz: it has been called both cool and hot, earthy and avant-garde, intellectual and primitive. It is improvisational music touted for the freedom it permits its players, but in its heyday was largely composed and tightly arranged. It tells a story about race in America: not only because African American musicians were so central in its creation and African American audiences so important in their creative responses to it, but because whites played such a dominant role in its dissemination through records and performance venues and its ownership as intellectual and artistic property. But is jazz a relic of the past, or does it continue to have meaning and influence for today’s artists and audiences? And while it may still be present , does it still matter ?

Gerald Early , a Fellow of the American Academy since 1997, is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and Editor of The Common Reader at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports (2011), One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture (rev. ed., 2004), and This is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s (2003).

Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard University. She is the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (2007), The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (2000), and Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996).

I’d rather play something that you can learn and like that you don’t know. I don’t want people to know what I am.

 – Miles Davis, 1985 1

Perhaps, like Miles Davis, jazz itself is a mystique wrapped in an enigma, an essential or inescapable unknowingness that makes this music attractive for its audience. But if jazz is partly – through its challenging demands as a musical form, through the various changes through which it has sustained itself over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and through its aspirations to both embody and transform modernity – a music of clear and revealed intentions, it remains an art that many, even many of its devotees, do not fully understand. Even the word “jazz” itself is wrapped in mystery. How did the music come to be called this and what does this word mean? Jazz bassist Bill Crow points out that some have thought the word comes the French verb jaser , or to chatter. Others say that the word “arose from corruptions of the abbreviations of the first names of early musicians: ‘Charles’ (Chas.) or ‘James’ (Jas).” Some have thought it came from the slang word for semen or that it came from “jazzing,” a slang word for fornication. 2 Anthropologist Alan Merriam notes that there are also Hausa and Arabic words that may be related to the term: jaiza , the rumbling of distant drums, and jazb , allurement or attraction. 3

One of the reasons that the early music in New Orleans and after was so disapproved of by the bourgeoisie was because of the association with sex. The same reaction would occur roughly thirty-five or so years later with the advent of rock and roll, another rebellious form of music with a name associated with sex. Because jazz in its early days before World War I was performed in brothels, as well as at picnics and parades, an association with sex and the erotic is not surprising. As Gerald Early observed about Miles Davis, the black male body came to define a kind of black male existentialism functioning as “a symbol of engagement and detachment, of punishing discipline and plush pleasure that operated cooperatively, not in conflict, if rightly understood.” Furthermore, this new kind of sexuality, first associated with jazz and the margins, became, over time, idealized in mainstream culture. 4

Many jazz musicians never liked the word “jazz,” among the most notable being Duke Ellington, drummer Max Roach, saxophonist Rashaan Roland Kirk, composer Muhal Richard Abrams, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and Miles Davis, who said to his interlocutor in 1985: “You know I don’t like the word jazz, right? You’ve heard that? I hope that’s one of the things you’ve heard.” 5  Many African American musicians viewed the word as a music industry label created by whites that demeaned, stereotyped, and limited them artistically. Bill Crow ends his meditation on the word jazz by noting: “As we enter the 1990s the sexual connotation of the word has almost completely faded away. ‘Jazz’ is now used to identify musical forms, as well as a style of Broadway theater dancing, a patented exercise regimen, a toilet water, a basketball team, a brand of computer software.” 6 Within this metamorphosis lies a tale.

J azz improvisation celebrates the heroic genius improviser, but, as musicians know, that brilliance often depends on the collective magic of the right band: individuals who compliment, anticipate, inspire, and upset each other into a communal whole greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, two of the most influential heroes in jazz – Miles Davis and John Coltrane – are known by the brilliance of their quartets and quintets, which became the most revered models of group interplay. These collective musical relationships became generalized into idealized concepts of community that pervade our contemporary understanding of jazz. For Wynton Marsalis, the jazz ensemble is democracy in action: participatory, inclusive, challenging, competitive, and collective. 7 For the interracial musical scene of the forties and fifties, jazz improvisation was often viewed as the ultimate integrated music, crossing the color line and social categories with aplomb. 8 For others, black musicians created idealized and woke communities of color, which inspired the development of progressive black social and spiritual movements. Freedom links the musical aesthetics of jazz and its sociopolitical ambitions: associated with improvisation and desperately needed for racial justice and inclusion. For some, the political and cultural associations of jazz are primary, indeed, above the music itself, which can make jazz seem like a branch of social theory. Ralph Ellison criticized this tendency by wryly critiquing Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Blues People by noting that “the tremendous burden of sociology which Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues.” 9 For others, the music must be addressed to the exclusion of the social and cultural. Music theorists are more comfortable on this terrain, but the most interesting recent work on jazz has emphasized the sound of the music, the embodied experience of listening and performing as the link between the musical and the social. 10

Jazz is a complex, highly blended, sometimes contradictory music and, indeed, since its inception, it has been hotly debated exactly what forms or styles constitute this music. Is it music theory or a technique that is applied to music? Is it one music or several loosely grouped forms of music that deal with improvisation? Its roots are African and European, classical and popular, dance music and art music. It has been called both cool and hot, earthy and avant-garde, intellectual and primitive. It has been influenced by Latin American and Afro-Cuban music, by Middle Eastern, Indian, and other forms of Asian music, by African music, and by varieties of religious music including gospel and the Protestant hymnal. Jazz also has roots in the American popular song (which makes up a good deal of its repertoire), the blues, hokum and circus music, marching band music, and popular dance music. It is known for being improvised and touted for the freedom it permits its players, but jazz in its heyday of swing was largely composed and tightly arranged; although many jazz players have soloed, relatively few, as might be expected, were exceptional, memorial, or highly influential soloists. In any case, why did so-called free music generated on the spot by the player become more highly valued by jazz players and audiences than notated music that, by its very nature, is presumed to have a greater range of expressiveness? Improvised music goes back to Western classical composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, who were superb improvisers, but has also existed elsewhere around the world for millennia. What makes jazz improvisation different? Singers made jazz popular, but the music is mostly instrumental, and the great instrumentalists are considered its most important innovators. Because most of the great singers were women – from Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee to Cassandra Wilson and Dianne Reeves – male bias on the part of both the musicians themselves and of critics (most of whom were and are male) likely skewed our sense of this music. 11

Jazz has always sought a popular audience with varying success but, since its earliest days, it has been a music that is often performed by musicians for musicians. This has made many listeners impatient with it, feeling that if one needs practically a degree in music theory to appreciate it, its practitioners should not expect untrained or casual audiences to be bothered with it. But on the other hand, its technical pretensions have made jazz a kind of status music with some audiences.

Early sound technology such as phonograph records and radio spread jazz around the world, and the speed with which it spread frightened many people in its early days, especially because the music in its inception appealed so powerfully to the young. Jazz emerged in the twentieth century, the Age of Music, when people not only heard more music than ever before but consumed it more voraciously than ever before in human history, largely attracted to music for its emotional and psychological effects. Jazz became the first, though not the last, popular music to be trapped by its intellectual pretensions, on the one hand, and its anti-intellectual appeal, on the other. Jazz has been condemned and promoted by various political ideologies and governments: Nazis called it “Nigger-Juden” music; 12 the Soviets thought of it as music of the workers and the dispossessed, on the one hand, and a sensationalized, bourgeois art, on the other; in the United States, it was once considered low-class, dance hall music, on the one hand, and the music of democracy, the Only Original American Music, on the other. So powerful was the presence of jazz when it first emerged that it is the only music that has a social epoch named in its honor: the Jazz Age (1920s).

Jazz is, of course, about race in America not only because African American musicians were so central in its creation and African American audiences so important in their creative responses to it, but because whites played such a dominant role in its dissemination through records and performance venues and its ownership as intellectual and artistic property. (Whites also played jazz music from its earliest days and always constituted a major portion of its audience. Whites, both in the United States and in Europe, were leading critical interpreters of and writers about jazz as well.) 13 It is a music that has always attracted intellectuals and artists, and thus the music’s influence can be felt far from the bandstand or the dance floor or the recording studio. Jazz has spawned an influential, international lifestyle, an attitude toward life – the hot, the hip, and the cool – that is secular, obsessed with youth, fixated on the marginalized, and detached yet passionately self-centered, and that has attached itself to other forms of popular music, like rock and hip hop, as jazz has become, for many young music lovers, passé. This attitude of the cool and the hip has influenced literature, including the production of the so-called jazz novel and jazz poetry, as well as art, speech, dress, and antibourgeois habits of indulgence such as using illegal drugs like marijuana and heroin. Even interracial sex, considered rebellious by some and deviant by others, was associated with the demi-monde of jazz.

Every dimension of jazz outlined above is the subject of academic and critical study in a variety of fields including English, history, American studies, musicology, African American studies, studies of the Americas, and culture studies. Indeed, jazz studies as an interdisciplinary field of research and pedagogy formally exists and has its own journal, Jazz Perspectives . What is this all about, anyway? And why should those with no interest in jazz care about any of this?

This issue of Dædalus gathers noted writers, artists, and scholars to explore the validity of three basic contentions about the “life” and “death” of jazz, which is, without question, the “deepest,” most technically difficult “popular music” ever created: 14   first, that jazz was never simply a form of music or a congeries of musical styles, but was in fact a larger modernist artistic movement both in the United States and internationally that was a rebellious response against and, contrarily, a powerfully evocative intensification of the new mass consumer culture that signified twentieth-century urban life; second, that jazz’s transformation from dance to art music, which occurred during and immediately after World War II , was one of the profoundly cataclysmic changes to occur in American popular culture that both reflected and affected larger social (race and gender), political (liberal reformism), and cultural (the impulse for liberation versus technical elitism) shifts that were swirling in the United States at the time; third, that jazz was, to a great extent, a pluralistic music during the years of its greatest popularity in the United States and that it has since become a vibrantly global art form, not only in Europe and Asia, but also in Panama, South Africa, and Ghana. Whether its future lies as a high-culture, transnational, privileged form of taste and practice or in a new synthesis joining jazz artistry with global hip hop and the popular is an open question. In either case, jazz today is a form of cosmopolitanism. But perhaps that was always what it was striving to be. As New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff put it: “There is no American popular music so well miscegenated as jazz.” 15

Whatever jazz today has lost in the size of its audience as compared with forms of popular music with bigger market shares, it has gained in the high esteem in which it is held in the business and art worlds as a sophisticated artistic expression (it is frequently used as mood music in upscale business establishments, in museums and galleries, and in commercials promoting upscale products) and in the institutionalization it has experienced as a formal course of study at many colleges and universities. Indeed, if it were not for colleges, universities, and high school jazz bands, and institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center and SF Jazz, it is quite possible that few young people in the United States would be playing or hearing jazz today.

As Ingrid Monson wrote, “The art music known variously as jazz, swing, bebop, America’s classical music, and creative music has been associated first and foremost with freedom. Freedom of expression, human freedom, freedom of thought, and the freedom that results from an ongoing pursuit of racial justice.” One has only to read, for instance, historian Michael H. Kater’s Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (1992) or author Josef Skvorecky’s extraordinary novella The Bass Saxophone (1977) to know how profoundly true Monson’s observation is – that jazz was a beacon, an act, a trope of freedom, an expression against repression that inspired many people around the world. But if jazz was, at one point in its history, about freeing oneself from artificial and arbitrary constraints in both popular and classical music, about freeing society from its restrictions and repressions, then, for many of its fans and practitioners, it has now become about preserving and conserving a tradition, an ideology, a set of standards, a form of practice. Today, jazz is an art that can satisfy the compulsions of the liberationist and the conservative, of those who seek change and of those who prefer stasis. 16

Is jazz still a relevant form of artistic expression, still a significant force in the world of popular music or the world of art music? In other words, is jazz so insufficiently hip that its pretensions and its conceit no longer matter as either a theory or a practice? Has it become, in many respects, like mainline Protestantism, a theory and a practice prized by its followers because of its limited and slowly declining appeal and its glorious history as something that once did matter? Is jazz simply a music trapped in the memory of itself, technically exhausted and imaginatively hampered, shadowed and sabotaged by its pop and R & B commercial doppelgänger, smooth jazz? Fifty or one hundred years from now will more accessible and commercial jazzers like saxophonist Kenny G and trumpeter Chris Botti be more remembered than trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and pianist Brad Mehldau? To be sure, for many of its fans and followers, jazz has gone from being an anti-establishment to an establishment art form, something that may have drained the art form of its purpose and its emotional correlatives. If jazz has acquired a new power, a new appeal, then what precisely is it and what is the relationship of this new power, this new appeal, to the power and appeal that jazz once had when it was the dominant music of the United States? Has jazz transcended the marketplace or is it a music that deserves to be protected from the desecrations of the market as we try to protect classical music? Protectionism, when it comes to the arts, has usually been a lost cause. Jazz’s advocates and supporters say that jazz is more popular, more listened to than ever despite its low market ratings, and this may be true: it certainly shows up in unexpected places such as, for instance, two unrelated Tom Cruise movies, 1996’s Jerry Maguire (which features a long sequence with an avant-garde Charles Mingus tune) and 2004’s Collateral (which features a trumpeter playing Bitches Brew – style Miles Davis jazz). And there continues to be art-house films about jazz, such as Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead (2016) about Miles Davis, Robert Budreau’s Born to Be Blue (2016) about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, and Cynthia Mort’s Nina (2016) about jazz/folk singer Nina Simone.

There is no question that jazz is still present in the culture, but the larger question is: does jazz still matter ? We think it does in ways that are rather astonishing in their implications. Jazz artists like Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington and avant hip hop artists like Kendrick Lamar may forge a new synthesis of jazz, the avant-garde, and the popular that rivets new audiences or may provide a radically new relationship between art and the popular. The Black Lives Matter movement has inspired a florescence of socially engaged artistic expression in jazz (Terence Blanchard’s Breathless ), popular music (Beyoncé’s Lemonade ), and hip hop (Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly ) that models itself on the artistic vision of jazz. We suggest that jazz improvisation remains a compelling metaphor for interrelationship, group creativity, and freedom that is both aesthetic and social. Improvisation transforms, one-ups, reinterprets, and synthesizes evolving human experience and its sonic signatures regardless of their classical, popular, or cultural origins. The most innovative popular musicians are returning to its acoustic power, representing the screams of Aunt Hester, as Fred Moten has put it, with the unconventional timbres and tones of haunting jazz. 17 Understanding what has happened to jazz can tell us a great deal about the nature and influence of popular music as both a national and international art form.

This issue of Dædalus explores both the legacies of jazz and its futures from the perspectives of artists and academics engaged in multiple fields of study. The interdisciplinarity of the contributors emphasizes the fact that jazz, as stated above, was never only a music but rather was a music that served as a muse for an arts movement, enchanting and bewitching other creative artists to make and to critically examine their art: from novelists like Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Jack Kerouac, and John Clellon Holmes to poets like Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsburg, and Michael Harper to painters like Romare Bearden and Jackson Pollock to dancers like Fred Astaire, Agnes de Mille, Norma Miller, and Savion Glover and to hip hop and spoken-word artists like the Roots, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé. The essays in this issue critically examine the achievements of jazz as an artistic movement through historical case studies, engagement with contemporary jazz innovations, and projections of the art form’s future. A mixture of historical reckoning and utopian possibility bracket the ever-changing character of jazz now.

This issue hopes to begin to answer for readers: What made and continues to make jazz different from other forms of music? Why did jazz happen? How did jazz, as popular music, gain and lose its popularity or, put another way, how did it lose its status as a music for the ordinary or casual musical palette? How did jazz’s close association with the repertoire of the Broadway musical, a song form that itself ceased to dominate popular music with the rise of rock and roll, affect its reception and reputation and its future? How did and how do musicians in other countries change jazz and how much did that change affect how Americans performed it? How have the changes that affect the selling of music affected jazz? Did jazz transcend social constructions of race or did it reinscribe them? How did jazz generate criticism of itself? Who constructs the official history of a form of popular music like jazz? Can music without words, as most jazz is, contain any specific political meaning? Can a music fade away and not fade away at the same time?

In moving toward answering these questions, the issue’s authors weave together a narrative about jazz then and now to approach an understanding of why, in its many ways and forms, jazz still matters .

• 1 Richard Cook, “Miles Davis: ‘Coltrane was a Very Greedy Man. Bird was, Too. He was a Big Hog’–A Classic Interview from the Vaults,” The Guardian , November 6, 2012, [ LINK ].
• 2 Bill Crow, Jazz Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 19.
• 3 Alan Merriam and Fradley Garner, “Jazz – The Word,” Ethnomusicology 12 (3) (1968): 382.
• 4 Gerald Early, Miles Davis and American Culture (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001), 7, 16.
• 5 Cook, “Miles Davis.”
• 6 Crow, Jazz Anecdotes , 21–22. Most recently jazz has been lauded as a business strategy or as a model for group creativity and collaboration. Greg Satell, “How Jazz Can Transform Business,” Forbes , October 25, 2013, [ LINK ]. See also Adrian Cho, The Jazz Process: Collaboration, Innovation, and Agility (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2010); Penelope Tobin, The Jazz of Business: Leadership in a New Groove (United Kingdom: Dodgem, 2012); Frank J. Barrett, Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012); and Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2007). See also Stephen Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2016) for an exploration of jazz’s implications as a creative art that can explain scientific theory.
• 7 Let Freedom Swing: Conversations between Sandra Day O’Connor and Wynton Marsalis on Jazz and Democracy , DVD , pr. Robe Imbriano (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010).
• 8 Gene Lees, Cats of Any Color : Jazz Black and White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• 9 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1964), 249.
• 10 Vijay Iyer, “Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and without Bodies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies , vol. 1, ed. George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 74–90; and Georgina Born, “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology, and Creativity,” Twentieth-Century Music 2 (1) (2005): 7–36.
• 11 Few jazz listeners are aware of the achievements of the most important female instrumentalists and composers: Mary Lou Williams, Melba Liston, Carla Bley, Maria Schneider, Geri Allen, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Nicole Mitchell.
• 12 It should go without saying that Nazism intensified the racist inclinations of conservative German music and art critics and the N -word was frequently used. See Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19. But in American literary criticism, for instance, think how common the phrase “Nigger Jim” was in discussing the slave character from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . (The character’s name was simply Jim.) Critics ranging from T. S. Eliot to Ernest Hemingway used the expression. Indeed, despite how much he deplored the characterization, even Ralph Ellison used it. See Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 50, 58. This is only to point out how much the N -word, far from being just a lower-class obscenity, penetrated the reaches of high culture. This realization only underscores the impact of the word on the Western world and how powerful its stigmatizing reach. It is important to recognize this.
• 13 For an interesting discussion of race and jazz among contemporary jazz critics, see Yuval Taylor and Will Friedwald, eds., The Future of Jazz (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2002), 23–41.
• 14 James Lincoln Collier, in his biography Benny Goodman and the Swing Era , referred to the music of his youth, swing, the most popular form that jazz ever took, as “better–more sophisticated, more genuinely musical–than virtually any popular music before or since.” James Lincoln Collier, Benny Goodman and the Swing Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5. In his book, Why Classical Music Still Matters , Lawrence Kramer makes a point of saying that he was not aiming for his audience to “appreciate” classical music. As he writes, it is not his purpose to persuade his readers that “if people would only absorb some technical information, follow the instructions of an expert, and listen for some formal routines, they could come to understand this music and discover that it is not only ‘great’ but also good for them.” Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 4. It is not our purpose here to do so either, although a certain amount of music appreciation is unavoidable in some of these essays because the writers love the music and inevitably wish for others to recognize its virtues as well as its importance. (Of course, Kramer, inadvertently, winds up doing his share of “music appreciation” outreach in his book.) But “music appreciation” is not a goal because it is, as Kramer notes, “condescending and authoritarian.” Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters , 4. It bears all the earmarks of middlebrow school lessons and the quest for bourgeois respectability. And it is, in the end, not persuasive because it diminishes the art it is trying to promote. The true goal here with these essays is to remind readers that the culture we have and the society we live in owe a great many of its admirable aspects to the monumental achievement of jazz as both a music and an art movement. Langston Hughes, in responding to the question of why he was not a member of the Communist Party, defended the need for the artist to be independent and for art to be free of political coercion from the state. He said memorably, “I wouldn’t give up jazz for a world revolution.” Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 122. In some vital ways, the essays in this volume, as is this introduction, are arguing that jazz itself was a world revolution.
• 15 Taylor and Friedwald, eds., The Future of Jazz , 23.
• 16 Jazz critic and novelist Albert Murray often scoffed at the notion that jazz represented freedom, saying that Ellington, for instance, was not interested in musicians being free but playing his music in the way he wanted it played. This, he asserted, was true for any bandleader. In Ian Carr’s Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music , the pianist talks about how difficult it was to write music for his 1970s American quartet of saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Paul Motian. “That group was the hardest group in the world to write for. I had to write in everybody’s attitudes and still write what I heard, and still play what I wanted to hear.” So, in jazz, as in all music, neither the players nor the composer are truly free to do whatever they want. Each is constrained by the other. Ian Carr, Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 80. Murray’s comments were made at a consultants’ meeting for the Ken Burns’s documentary Jazz and at a conference on Ralph Ellison at New York University, both of which Gerald Early attended.
• 17 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 19, 22, 32.

on Miles Davis, Vince Lombardi, & the crisis of masculinity in mid-century America

Dædalus explores why jazz still matters.

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Music Interviews

Re-revising 'the history of jazz'.

Natalie Weiner

Alice Coltrane, widow of jazz great John Coltrane, playing the piano in her California home, in front of a portrait of her late husband. Despite having practiced music since a very early age, Alice Coltrane's work only somewhat recently began to be recognized. J.Emilio Flores/Corbis via Getty Images hide caption

Alice Coltrane, widow of jazz great John Coltrane, playing the piano in her California home, in front of a portrait of her late husband. Despite having practiced music since a very early age, Alice Coltrane's work only somewhat recently began to be recognized.

For most contemporary music consumers, listening to jazz is a historical exercise. Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue is, at the time of writing, still No. 3 on Billboard's Jazz Albums chart 61 years after it was released, much to the chagrin of the artists making music in the same tradition today.

Ted Gioia, whose third edition of The History of Jazz was released in March, won't tell you to avoid Kind Of Blue . The esteemed music writer and historian has as much reverence for the classics as anyone, as is evidenced by the effusive, electric way he writes about them: "Is it going too far to see this Davis unit as the most impressive working combo in the history of modern jazz?" Gioia writes of Kind Of Blue 's sextet, before a detailed description of each player's contributions.

But Gioia won't let you stop with jazz's highlight reel, captivating as it might be. His own version can be found in the 15 pages of recommended tracks at the back of the book, updated with this latest edition to reflect the past decade in jazz. Insisting on jazz's current vibrancy was one of the primary reasons Gioia wanted to revisit the book, originally published in 1997 and last revised in 2011. "I've always felt that the best way to look at music history is in the way that embraces its vibrancy and accordance for people living right now," he says.

The History of Jazz is an ambitious survey of the genre that was almost immediately recognized by critics from Terry Teachout to Greg Tate as among the most authoritative and thorough books of its kind. Since it was first published, Gioia's History has sold more than 100,000 copies to an audience that ranges from jazz history students to newcomers to the genre to aficionados; as a result, his impact on shaping jazz's narrative and canon can't be overstated.

Gioia spoke with NPR about what he's learned about jazz in the 24 years since he first published his exhaustive history, what's surprised him about the music's development, and what he thinks will never change.

Natalie Weiner, NPR Music: What is your process for writing a book like The History of Jazz ?

Ted Gioia: The first rule I have is: you must control the narrative or it will control you. Before I write anything in a historical survey, I have to have a crystal clear idea in my head of what the structure is and where all the pieces are going to fit. If you start with just the empirical evidence, you'll never get from there to the finished book. I had to start with big picture questions: What is this music all about? What have been the profound changes in it? How has it impacted people's lives, and society and culture? When I start with the big questions, then I can structure it and bring in all those characters and songs. But that structure should be hidden from the reader. It should feel natural and obvious.

How do you start revising a book that covers such a vast topic? Did you have a specific idea of what you were going to add, or were you planning broader edits?

Whenever I do a revised edition, I go through the whole book and say, "Can I make this sentence better? Do we know more facts about this subject?" But a number of things were happening in the jazz world that really needed to be added. All of them were in embryonic form in earlier editions, but they're clearly more important now.

First of all, the expansion of jazz globally. It's always been the case to some degree, but right now the vibrancy and excitement of jazz scenes all around the world is remarkable. They've become very self-sufficient. I have some experience with England, for example, because I lived there for two years when I was younger, so I know what jazz musicians in England are like — or at least, I thought I did. When I was living in England, the jazz musicians were always very focused on what was happening in America. When I talk to jazz musicians in England now, they're so focused on the excitement of their local scene that they don't even need to worry about what's happening in New York.

Also, the growing role of women in jazz is one of the most significant trends we're seeing. It's a dramatic change from when I was coming up, and this requires me to not only pay attention to what's happening right now with women in jazz, but to look back at the history of the music and see what the antecedents were that prepared us for this shift. I had to make changes [to that effect] at several junctures in the book.

I saw a third trend that I thought was absolutely critical: Jazz seems to be returning to a dialogue with popular culture, to a degree that I had hardly believed possible when I wrote the previous edition of the History of Jazz . Look at all the popular musicians who have embraced jazz: David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar. Everywhere you look in the popular music scene, there's this dialogue, and to me that's tremendously exciting. Some of it might seem superficial, like with these Hollywood movies about jazz. I know jazz people make fun of Whiplash and La La Land , but with the Miles Davis movie, the Chet Baker movie, the Ma Rainey movie, Soul — everywhere you look in pop culture, jazz is used as a touchstone for excellence. We, as jazz musicians and jazz people, should be proud of that.

With jazz's re-engagement with popular culture, are there any noxious narratives about the music that you see being perpetuated?

Probably the thing that irritated me most was this idea that jazz was dead. But actually, as I dig into the music day after day and week after week, I see the exact opposite. My sense is that things are changing and evolving, and that there are new artists and things happening all the time. In revising a history of jazz, I want to do justice to that. The funny thing is, as I was working on the revised edition, more and more people started seeing this. All of a sudden, the same magazine that had written an article called "Jazz Is Dead" five years ago now comes with an article saying, "Jazz Is Coming Back."

I also wanted to deal with a myth about jazz that I've heard often. There's a view that the new generation of jazz musicians are all cold and lifeless — students who have learned to play jazz in a college classroom, and because they didn't pay their dues the way the old-timers did, their music falls short in some undefinable way. I don't think that's fair. The more I looked into this, the more it became clear to me that jazz musicians are getting jobs at universities and grants, but that's not changing how they play at all. They've adapted very little to the bureaucracy and strictures of academia and institutionalization, and they deserve credit for this.

In many ways, I think classical music is loosening up because of the entry of jazz into these institutions — the rest of the music ecosystem is adapting to jazz, the same way these pop stars are adapting to jazz. Jazz is a catalyst; it's a change agent.

There was a part about that in the book that I was surprised hadn't really changed from the first edition. You addressed that concern about conservatories, and even the risks that come from trying to document a history: "The only danger, and a very real one, is that our respect for the past comes to blind us to the demands of the future ... all agendas become suspect, and even the concept of a history of the music, with the sort of stately chronological unfolding that we associate with such narratives, is not beyond debate." How do those sorts of ideas inform your approach to creating a history like this one?

As a historian of jazz, it's tempting to buy into this model of the music progressing in an eternal Hegelian motion towards progress and greater and greater things. It's an easy way to write a book on the history of music, to say, "Each generation takes what the previous generation did and pushes it two steps forward." But that narrative doesn't do justice to the real life activities of jazz musicians. Jazz music is messy; the trends are complex and often go back and forth in surprising ways. Even in the midst of writing a history of jazz, I wanted to make sure people knew that fitting this thing into a historical progression could mislead them.

It also could have a negative effect on the music. If I form a student jazz band, and I view our job as to play the masterpieces of the past, I will teach those musicians in a very different way than if I believe I am teaching them to play music of the present moment.

Wynton Marsalis, performing during Jazz At Lincoln Center's 30th Anniversary Gala on April 18, 2018 in New York. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Jazz At Lincoln hide caption

Wynton Marsalis, performing during Jazz At Lincoln Center's 30th Anniversary Gala on April 18, 2018 in New York.

That kind of begs the question of how you think the institutionalization of jazz — epitomized in some ways by how Wynton Marsalis has developed Jazz At Lincoln Center — and some of those institutions' insistence on the creation of a canon has impacted the music.

I view myself as a defender of Wynton Marsalis. He's attacked a lot, but often he's attacked for things that are beyond his control. He arrived on the scene at a moment when the jazz world wanted to dig into its history, wanted institutional support, wanted respect. He helped us do that. He deserves praise for that. On the other hand, if the only role of an institution in jazz is a historical one, turning it into a museum piece would do more harm than good. I tend to think that Wynton understands these tradeoffs, and that overall his impact is mostly positive on the art form.

The worst thing that could happen is for jazz to end up like the symphony orchestra, where you go to a concert and almost everything they play is 100 years old. I view it as part of my mission to deal with the history of the music in a way that prevents that from happening. My respect for the history must always be tempered with an understanding of how we use these songs and sounds to revitalize the music ecosystem we currently live in.

Returning to your point about the expanding role of women in jazz, as you went through your revision, was there a little bit of realizing, "Hey, maybe I missed something here"?

To some degree, I was sensitive to this issue even in the early stages of writing the book in the 1990s. But clearly, there was a need to dig deeper and to broaden what I did both for historical accuracy and also to understand the traditions and experiences that set a platform for what women are doing in the current day in jazz. To give one example, in the previous editions of the book I talk about John Coltrane but I don't talk about Alice Coltrane. In this edition, I was given the opportunity to do that. Part of the validation for this is that Alice Coltrane is having an influence now to a degree she didn't have 20 years ago. Part of it is Ted's getting wiser about how to write the history of the music, but the needs of the present day also change how we look at the past.

Is there anything that you cut?

There's very little that I cut — occasionally I would read a sentence I didn't like. It's rare for me to remove somebody from the history of the music. Mostly, I'm trying to expand my coverage rather than narrow it. That said, if the book becomes too bulky, it's no longer readable. If I ever do a fourth edition, I might set myself a rule not to expand it any longer. I don't want this to be a reference book that people just put on the shelf, I want them to be able to read it from cover to cover.

I mean, it took me a while to read it, but it was really easy to read — I was surprised by that.

The biggest challenge in writing a book of this sort is taking a complex historical situation involving thousands of musicians and recordings, and having it read smoothly like a story. My goal has always been to achieve that. Anything I can do to make the experience of jazz and music in general fun and exciting is a high priority for me. That may seem frivolous to some people, for a music historian. But to me, it should always be part of the equation.

As I get older, my attitude towards music and my vocation as a music writer has gotten stranger. I've become more mystical, more spiritual, more metaphysical. This presents a challenge to me, because I want to be a thorough, scholarly writer. I'm constantly battling with my instinctive feel that the music is magical, and needing to present this in a way that's analytical and suitable for a university press. Much of the battle in my advanced years is to rein in my own mystical tendencies and anchor myself in empirical reality. But still, anyone who reads my books will understand that for me, music is a strange and wonderful experience.

One of the most important things I did in my life was writing a book called Healing Songs , where I looked at whether music can enhance our health and well-being. I started that book with no predetermined notion of whether that was true, and the more I researched it the more I found that music is capable of doing things beyond our ability to explain them; as a music writer, that's sobering — but it needs to inform my practice.

The only time that I felt a little befuddled as I was reading was when I came to where it seemed jazz-funk and jazz-R&B fusion would fit. How do you go about determining what to include and exclude?

That's a fair criticism. Most of my books have been broad surveys. Every time, I realize that some people are going to get a whole section or chapter, some people are going to get just a paragraph, some in a sentence or part of a sentence, and some will be eliminated entirely from the narrative. I take that responsibility seriously, and work hard to do what is fair. But I can't promise that what I do is flawless, or that other people wouldn't have different priorities. When people come to me and say, "You left out such-and-such artist," I usually just nod my head, because I know more than anyone what I've left out.

Now, probably more than in 1997 when the first edition was published, it feels like the word "jazz" is increasingly fraught. As you were revising this, did you have any reservations about continuing to use it? Is it still a useful term?

I know people who dislike the word jazz because they feel it casts a negative light on the music. Frankly, I'm mystified. Even at the start, the word "jazz" was applied to the music with a positive intention. The first uses of the word jazz, more than 100 years ago, were in the context of describing something exciting, different, out of the norm, invigorating, exhilarating ... and people used it to describe the things in their life that were most transformative. It made sense to apply it to this music. I don't believe it's ever been applied negatively, and to those who want to abandon it, I caution them that it will be taken up by other people who will not respect it the way we do.

To that point, though, do you think there's a way in which the term has become so broad — even within the expansion of the music, and how it describes so many different sounds — that it becomes meaningless?

It's always hard describing things that are vibrant, alive and evolving. Something that's dead and never changes is easy to define. The fact that it's hard to define jazz and people will debate its meaning is a positive thing. The London scene has music that some might argue isn't jazz — but the fact that that argument is taking place is the healthiest thing you can imagine. Same thing in the 1940s when people were saying Charlie Parker wasn't jazz. That was great for the music. The day may come when people no longer argue about jazz and they're all in agreement; I fear that day, because it will mean that we're a fossil.

Do you feel like there's been a substantive shift in the way you look at documenting history, in your approach, since you published the first edition?

Absolutely. My process as a historian has changed dramatically since the '90s. I'm more interested now in how music changes the life of the listener than I was before. Previously, I had been fascinated with the performer. Nowadays I'm very concerned with what music is like for a listener or student or community or other stakeholders. My writing style has changed, and I'd like to think it has gotten freer and fresher. It's still going to be more of a historical survey than Ted Tellin' Tales, but my whole approach to writing about music has become livelier. Finally, my faith in music as a source of enchantment and catalyst for change in human life has grown dramatically since I did that first edition. That informs everything I do.

If I could truly understand what created something as amazing as Kind of Blue , or Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives, or made Buddy Bolden decide to start playing jazz, if I could really get to the heart of that and put it in a bottle, people would want to buy that right now. If instead I can make my history book that bottle, that would be my dream.

Natalie Weiner is a freelance writer living in Dallas. Her work has appeared in the New York Times , Washington Post , Billboard and Pitchfork .

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Martin Luther King Jr. Explains the Importance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Festival (1964)

in History , Music | October 21st, 2019 6 Comments

Mar­tin Luther King Jr.’s dream of full inclu­sion for Black Amer­i­cans still seems painful­ly unre­al fifty years after his death. By most sig­nif­i­cant mea­sures, the U.S. has regressed. De fac­to hous­ing and school seg­re­ga­tion are entrenched (and wors­en­ing since the 60s and 70s in many cities); vot­ing rights erode one court rul­ing at a time; the racial wealth gap has widened sig­nif­i­cant­ly; and open dis­plays of racist hate and vio­lence grow more wor­ri­some by the day.

Yet the move­ment was not only about win­ning polit­i­cal vic­to­ries, though these were sure­ly the con­crete basis for its vision of lib­er­a­tion. It was also very much a cul­tur­al strug­gle. Black artists felt forced by cir­cum­stances to choose whether they would keep enter­tain­ing all-white audi­ences and pre­tend­ing all was well. “There were no more side­lines,” writes Ashawn­ta Jack­son at JSTOR Dai­ly . This was cer­tain­ly the case for that most Amer­i­can of art forms, jazz. “Jazz musi­cians, like any oth­er Amer­i­can, had the duty to speak to the world around them, and to oppose the bru­tal con­di­tions for Black Amer­i­cans.”

Many of those musi­cians could not stay silent after the mur­der of Emmett Till , the 16th Street Bap­tist Church bomb­ing in Birm­ing­ham , and a string of oth­er high­ly pub­li­cized and hor­rif­ic attacks. Jazz was chang­ing. As Amiri Bara­ka wrote in a 1962 essay, “the musi­cians who played it were loud­ly out­spo­ken about who they thought they were. ‘If you don’t like it, don’t lis­ten’ was the atti­tude.” That atti­tude came to define post-Civ­il Rights Black Amer­i­can cul­ture, a defi­ant turn away from appeas­ing white audi­ences and ignor­ing racism.

As jazz musi­cians embraced the move­ment, so the move­ment embraced jazz. While King him­self is usu­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the gospel singers he loved, he had a deep respect for jazz as a form that spoke of “some new hope or sense of tri­umph.” Jazz, wrote King in his open­ing address for the 1964 Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val , “is tri­umphant music…. When life itself offers no order and mean­ing, the musi­cian cre­ates an order and mean­ing from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instru­ment. It is no won­der that so much of the search for iden­ti­ty among Amer­i­can Negroes was cham­pi­oned by Jazz musi­cians.”

Jazz not only gave order to chaot­ic, “com­pli­cat­ed urban exis­tence,” it also pro­vid­ed crit­i­cal emo­tion­al sup­port for the Move­ment.

Much of the pow­er of our Free­dom Move­ment in the Unit­ed States has come from this music. It has strength­ened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich har­monies when spir­its were down.

King’s take on jazz par­al­leled his artic­u­la­tions of the move­men­t’s goals—he always under­stood that the par­tic­u­lar strug­gles of Black Amer­i­cans had spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal roots, and required spe­cif­ic polit­i­cal reme­dies. But ulti­mate­ly, he believed that every­one should be treat­ed with dig­ni­ty and respect, and have access to the same oppor­tu­ni­ties and the same pro­tec­tions under the law.

Jazz is export­ed to the world. For in the par­tic­u­lar strug­gle of the Negro in Amer­i­ca there is some­thing akin to the uni­ver­sal strug­gle of mod­ern man. Every­body has the Blues. Every­body longs for mean­ing. Every­body needs to love and be loved. Every­body needs to clap hands and be hap­py. Every­body longs for faith.

Jazz music, said King, “is a step­ping stone towards all of these.” Wrought “out of oppres­sion,” it is music, he said, that “speaks for life,” even in the midst of what could seem like death and defeat. Read King’s full address at WCLK 91.9 . And at the top of the post, hear the speech read by San Fran­cis­co Bay Area artists for a 2012 cel­e­bra­tion on King’s birth­day.

The 1964 Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val (poster above) was the first in the illus­tri­ous annu­al event. See many oth­er stun­ning posters from the series here .

via JSTOR Dai­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s Hand­writ­ten Syl­labus & Final Exam for the Phi­los­o­phy Course He Taught at More­house Col­lege (1962)

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

In the 1920s Amer­i­ca, Jazz Music Was Con­sid­ered Harm­ful to Human Health, the Cause of “Neuras­the­nia,” “Per­pet­u­al­ly Jerk­ing Jaws” & More

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (6) |

Related posts:

Comments (6), 6 comments so far.

Hi, I just read the arti­cle about how jazz was able to ease the bur­den and and the dis­com­fort black Amer­i­can were endur­ing dur­ing the seg­re­ga­tion peri­od in Amer­i­ca and how Mar­tin Luther King jnr sup­port­ed the Idea, I would like to know about Jazz Please help me with books and Jazz CD such as the likes of Miles Davis, Duke Elling­ton, Dizzy Gille­spy and many more, Please help.

King’s words are indeed bril­liant, the best such suc­cinct a sum­ma­tion as I’ve seen about the nature of the music. But this is not the text of a speech. He was not in Berlin at that time. King wrote these words as a pref­ace, fore­word, intro­duc­tion or what­ev­er to the pro­gram book for the first Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val, and that is where they were first pub­lished.

Please find a used copy of the Pen­guin Guide to Jazz and dip in. There are about 8 edi­tions, if I remem­ber cor­rect­ly. It’s a great resource.

Then look for playlists on your favourite stream­ing ser­vice, or join Jazz Vinyl Lovers on FB (Ken Micalle­f’s group) for more help and learn­ing. Best of luck!

Here are some sug­ges­tions, with a few more names. These are discs with some of the great­est music of each musi­cian and / or a good entry point into their musis. Louis Arm­strong: Por­trait of the Artist as a young man (3‑CD set); Bil­lie Hol­i­day with Lester Young: A Musi­cal Romance; Duke Elling­ton: Nev­er no lament (3‑CD set); Char­lie Park­er: Best of the com­plete Savoy and Dial stu­i­do record­ings; Dizzy Gille­spie Sure ‘Nuff; Miles Davis: Kind of Blue; Thelo­nious Monk: Thelo­nious Monk trio (Pres­tige); Bill Evans: Por­trait in Jazz; Charles Min­gus: Min­gus Ah Um; John Coltrane: Coltrane plays the blues (Atlantic); Ornette Cole­man: The Change of the Cen­tu­ry (Atlantic); Hen­ry Thread­g­ill: Just the Facts and Pass the Buck­et

There´S SO MUCH MORE, of course, but thse would make a great start!

Some books: Ted Gioia: The His­to­ry of Jazz; Mar­tin Williams: The Jazz Tra­di­tion; and from a more mil­i­tant black point of view: Leroy Jones (Amari Bara­ka): Blues Peo­ple

Good luck!!And a lit­tle sug­ges­tion: if you don’t like some­thing, leave it for a bit, and try it again lat­er!!

In my reply to Mand­la Zwane’s appeal for help I made a care­less mis­take. The title of a famou Dizzy Gille­spie piece, whichi is also the title of the CD I rec­om­mend­ed, is a play on words; it’s not Sure Nuff, but Shaw Nuff, ded­i­cat­ed to Bil­ly Shaw, a pro­mot­er who orga­nized Gille­spie’s and Park­er’s vis­it to the West Coast in (I think) 1946.

I’m curi­ous to know if Dr. Mar­tin Luther King Jr. met jazz musi­cian “Cat” Ander­son while he was in Greenville, SC. about a year before Dr. MLK Jr. was mur­dered or if he knew “Cat” Ander­son at all, as I have read much about Dr. MLK Jr.’s love for jazz music. “Cat” Ander­son the jazz musi­cian died April 29, 1981. My nick­name (from Cather­ine) is “Cat” Ander­son. I was born April 30th, 1981. Dr. MLK Jr. vis­it­ed and spoke in Greenville, SC in the 1960’s (can’t remem­ber the year), but the day was April 30th.

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by John Edward Hasse and Bob Blumenthal ​The original article, published as a part of the Smithsonian Folkways Magazine, can be found  here . 

The challenge of talking about music is compounded when the subject is jazz, a word of clouded origins whose meaning reflects an evolution of astounding rapidity and imposing diversity unlikely to change as we enter jazz’s second century.

Louis Armstrong, 1960.  Photograph by Herman Leonard. Herman Leonard Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

The term was originally applied to the music developed in New Orleans around the beginning of the twentieth century. Initially a product of the city’s African American community, it was quickly picked up by several of the city’s young white musicians as well. Within a mere two decades, as many of these early practitioners left home to perform throughout the United States and around the world, jazz became an international phenomenon. The earliest examples of the style, like those of the related blues, were never documented on sound recordings; but once jazz musicians did begin to record, the music expanded its audience rapidly and attracted practitioners and influences from all classes, cultures, and parts of the world.

In the ensuing decades, jazz has experienced moments of dominance, when it was accepted as popular music and produced universally recognized stars; recognition as an art form worthy of serious analysis and the highest cultural honors; and periods of marginalization, wherein even its most accomplished figures earned respect primarily from peers and enthusiasts. Through all of these shifts, the techniques and vocabulary of jazz have continued to influence other forms of both popular and “serious” music. Often acclaimed as America’s greatest art form, jazz has become accepted as a living expression of the nation’s history and culture, still youthful, difficult to define and impossible to contain, a music of beauty, sensitivity, and brilliance that has produced (and been produced by) an extraordinary progression of talented artists.

Jazz is a fluid form of expression, a quality that led critic Whitney Balliett to characterize the music in an oft-quoted phrase as “the sound of surprise.” Several characteristics contribute to jazz’s surprising nature.

A primary factor is the rhythmic energy of jazz, which incorporates both the motion of dance and the inflections of speech. The syncopations and irregular accents of early jazz styles had a visceral effect on listeners and remain central to the music’s appeal. While sometimes oversimplified as a wholesale shift in accent or emphasis— from beats one and three in a four-beat measure to beats two and four— the evolution of jazz rhythm has incorporated more complex subdivisions and superimpositions on the basic beat, while also assimilating the rhythms of other musics and cultures.

Ella Fitzgerald in 1949. Photograph by Herman Leonard. Herman Leonard Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. 

This rhythmic freedom feeds the spirit of improvisation at the heart of jazz. Unlike European classical music, which gives primacy of place to the composer, jazz is performer-oriented, with musicians generally allowed the freedom to improvise solos and even ensemble passages on the spot. While a musical score defines a classical piece, jazz’s improvisatory nature requires that it be defined by specific performances. Some performers evolve set-pieces, as a comparison of Art Tatum’s various recordings of “Willow, Weep for Me” will illustrate; but many jazz musicians pride themselves on creating a unique solo each time they play a tune, as Charlie Parker did in his numerous recordings of “Ornithology.” Even the written portion of a jazz performance can evolve, as was the case with “Mood Indigo” and other classics that Duke Ellington revisited over the decades of his career.

Inevitably, different performers interpret the same source material in different ways. A classic song such as “Summertime” will sound different when sung by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan, and when played by Stan Getz, Miles Davis and Gil Evans, John Coltrane, and the Modern Jazz Quartet. The difference goes beyond improvisation and relates to another foundation of jazz surprise—the personal sound of each musician. The young Miles Davis, one of jazz’s supremely personal voices, was chastised by his trumpet teacher Elwood Buchanan for trying to sound like Harry James. “You got enough talent to be your own trumpet man” was Buchanan’s message, though such individuality derives from serious attention to one’s sound, tone, attack, and phrasing, as well as an appreciation of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic options (Davis and Troupe 1989, 32). As Davis put it later in his career, “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” Yet sounding like yourself is the ultimate goal, and those jazz musicians who sound most like themselves, to the point that they can be identified after only a few notes, tend to have the greatest impact on other musicians.

As jazz has evolved, it has counterpoised surprise and familiarity, spontaneity and structure, soloist and ensemble, tradition and innovation. The rhythmic élan, improvisatory aesthetic, and quest for personal expression at the heart of the music have created performances in which seemingly opposing qualities are fused into aesthetically successful and often immortal wholes.

THE COURSE OF JAZZ Jazz did not appear in a vacuum. Some of its elements can be traced to other cultures—its rhythmic accentuations and call-and-response patterns to Africa, its instrumentation and harmonies to Europe—but the synthesis is entirely American, rooted specifically in the earlier African American blues and ragtime styles.

Charlie Parker in 1949. Photograph by Herman Leonard. Herman Leonard Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

The earliest jazz was not written down but rather passed on aurally among the musicians of New Orleans. This great seaport near the mouth of the Mississippi River was a bouillabaisse of African American, Anglo American, French, German, Italian, Mexican, Caribbean, and American Indian musical influences. Unlike some other U.S. cities, New Orleans had neighborhoods in which families from different ethnic backgrounds lived cheek by jowl, a circumstance that provided exceptional opportunities for musical exchange and is reflected in the music’s vitality. It explains how African Americans such as Buddy Bolden, Creoles of color such as Ferdinand Lamothe (known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton), and Caucasians such as the Italian American Nick LaRocca would all play roles in the early development of jazz. Jazz began as a solo piano music in the city’s “sporting houses”; a small-combo music played for dancers in ballrooms; and a marching band music performed at funerals, parades, and other public events. As riverboats took New Orleans music north, and as the wanderlust of Morton and other early performers brought them to both coasts, jazz became more than a local phenomenon, a process that accelerated greatly once LaRocca’s Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded in New York in 1917. Around this same time, changing working conditions in New Orleans brought about a mass exodus of the city’s musical community, launching a creative diaspora that took jazz and many of its most talented practitioners to the rest of the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia.

The imposition of Prohibition in the 1920s, and the prevalence of jazz in the speakeasies that followed in Prohibition’s wake, quickly turned jazz into both a musical and cultural phenomenon, to the point that author F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the era the “Jazz Age.” The music identified with this period was initially an ensemble art, with little room for individual solos beyond occasional two-bar and four-bar breaks. This soon changed, thanks in large part to the examples of clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet and cornetist/trumpeter Louis Armstrong, whose abilities to create entire choruses of improvisation were publicly recognized (especially in Armstrong’s case) by increasing activity in recording studios. The works by Morton, jazz’s first great composer, contained similar rhythmic and melodic elements and were also widely heard through recordings. Reviewing his career a decade later, Morton would claim that he was the music’s inventor.

At the same time, the growing popularity of dance orchestras led to the incorporation of jazz techniques by larger ensembles. By the end of the 1920s, a looser, more free-flowing and sophisticated style of dance music had begun to evolve into what in a few years would be called “swing.” Given the racial segregation prevalent in American society, there was less visible interaction among white and black musicians than had occurred in New Orleans, and prominent white bandleaders were quick to add white jazz soloists to their ranks, as was the case when “King of Jazz” Paul Whiteman featured cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and trombonist Jack Teagarden. The primary influence on orchestral development, however, came from African American band leaders Fletcher Henderson, who standardized ensemble instrumentation and arranging style, and Duke Ellington, who was particularly attuned to the individual sounds of his musicians and the startling tone colors that they could create in combination. The featured soloists with these bands—Armstrong and tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins with Henderson, alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges with Ellington—also became the prevailing model for others who played the same instrument. It did not take long for the black and white bands to begin playing the same pieces, often in the same arrangements.

Big bands proliferated in the years before World War II, their popularity spurred by the remote radio broadcasts that brought the sounds of Ellington and others to listeners across the country. Concurrently, “territory” bands arose in various regions, serving as training grounds for young musicians and laboratories for new ideas. Thus the “Jazz Age” gave way to the “Swing Era,” as clarinetist Benny Goodman launched a national jitterbug craze via classic Henderson arrangements, and the band that pianist Count Basie led out of Kansas City introduced a more flowing beat and a renewed emphasis on the blues. Each of these bands in turn featured players who became role models for others: trumpeter Harry James and drummer Gene Krupa with Goodman and trumpeter Buck Clayton and tenor saxophonist Lester Young with Basie among them. When Goodman featured African American artists Teddy Wilson (piano) and Lionel Hampton (vibes) in his live appearances, he also began a push for racial equality. Lionel Hampton stated in 1994 that the Benny Goodman Quartet opened the door for Jackie Robinson to come into major league baseball. “The integration of musicians started a lot of things happening” (Blumenthal 2007, 62-63).

The dominance of big bands through much of the 1930s should not diminish the ongoing importance of smaller groups, which operated in a variety of styles. The multitalented pianist, composer, and vocalist Thomas “Fats” Waller and his Rhythm (as his sextet was known) featured humorous takes on Tin Pan Alley material. A series of small-band recordings under the leadership of Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday, and Lionel Hampton featured many of the era’s leading orchestral musicians in more informal settings that allowed for greater solo space. In Europe, the Quintette du Hot Club de France, featuring the virtuosity of guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli, created a string-centered jazz sound and gave the first indication that one need not be an American to have influence on the music’s international development. With the growth of radio, the appearance of jazz stars such as Armstrong in motion pictures, and the temporary expatriation at the end of the 1930s of such American stars as Hawkins and the composer and multi-instrumentalist Benny Carter, the sense that jazz was becoming the musical Esperanto of the era only intensified.

Thelonious Monk in 1960. Photograph by Herman Leonard. Herman Leonard Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

World War II brought upheavals to jazz, and all else. Musicians were drafted, gas rationing and new entertainment taxes made it more difficult for bands to sustain tours, and a contractual dispute between their union and the record companies kept most musicians out of the studios. Unable to sustain themselves financially, most of the big bands dissolved, ceding their popularity to vocalists (who could record during the ban, albeit with only choral accompaniment) such as Frank Sinatra, and to the small-group dance music called “rhythm & blues” that was gaining popularity among younger African Americans. At the same time, a more angular and asymmetrical style of jazz improvisation emerged that came to be known as “bebop.”

Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, the leading exponents of the new style, created rhythmically complex, harmonically rich virtuosic improvisations, and displayed an affinity in phrasing rapid-fire bebop melodies that has rarely been matched. Kenny Clarke, the first of the great modern drummers, moved the timekeeping role from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, and used the kick and snare drums for accent and rhythmic stimulus. Pianist Thelonious Monk, whose playing style was more spare and idiosyncratic, initially had a greater impact through his angular compositions, which to this day remain the jazz works most widely performed after those of Duke Ellington.

Bebop’s growth in the years immediately following World War II as both a musical and cultural phenomenon (the latter expressed through the emulation of Gillespie’s goatee and horn-rimmed glasses) paralleled a change in the way in which jazz was presented. With dance halls and ballrooms in decline, the music found a new home in nightclubs and concert halls, where the emphasis was on listening rather than dancing. As often occurs when such transformations take place, more traditional musicians took offense. Bandleader Cab Calloway disparaged bebop as “Chinese music,” while guitarist Eddie Condon, referring to a musical interval indicative of the new style, emphasized that he and his colleagues did not flat their fifths, they drank them.

Yet it did not take long before bebop had generated stylistic variations of its own. The big band that Gillespie formed in 1946 would soon feature Cuban percussion virtuoso Chano Pozo and plant the seeds of merging jazz and Afro-Cuban music, a blend that was also encouraged on the Latin side by the jazz-oriented ensembles of Machito and Tito Puente. In 1948, trumpeter Miles Davis organized a nine-piece band that included French horn and tuba, incorporated counterpoint and subtle ensemble colors, and gave great latitude to the arranger; as this style, quickly identified as “cool jazz,” attracted adherents based in Los Angeles including Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, and Shelly Manne, it also became known as “West Coast jazz.” By the early 1950s, Davis was moving in another direction, placing greater emphasis on the blues tradition and a more intense emotional expression. This “hard bop” style, defined in the studio recordings of Davis and tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the touring quintet co-led by drummer Max Roach and trumpeter Clifford Brown, was seen as the East Coast response to cool jazz; and when drummer Art Blakey and pianist Horace Silver introduced elements of spirituals and gospel music, hard bop earned another name, “soul jazz.” All the while, musicians were expanding compositional possibilities in a variety of ways, from the use of fugues and other classical techniques in the music pianist John Lewis created for the Modern Jazz Quartet to the introduction of “open” forms and a return to collective improvisation in the works of bassist Charles Mingus.

These simultaneous developments indicate how difficult it had become to pigeonhole jazz into specific time or stylistic periods. By the end of the 1950s, the emergence of other new ideas would only compound the challenge. The use of musical modes based on scales rather than sequences of chords as the basis of improvisation, an approach first championed by composer and theoretician George Russell, made an immediate impact after Miles Davis applied it over the course of his 1959 album Kind of Blue. Another landmark album of the period, Time Out by the quartet of pianist Dave Brubeck, expanded jazz’s rhythmic horizons beyond the standard 4/4 swing and waltz tempos to such then-exotic time signatures as 5/4 and 9/8. Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman eliminated harmonic progression altogether in the music of his quartet, spawning the notion of “free jazz.” Pianist Cecil Taylor took the concept of freedom even further, as song forms, fixed rhythms, and the hierarchy of soloist and accompanist were abandoned in his kinetic creations. Many of these developments were reflected in the music of tenor and soprano saxophonist John Coltrane, whose evolution during the decade before his premature death in 1967 added a personal sense of quest for spirituality and self-improvement to a music now known, for lack of a more precise metaphor, as “the new thing.”

Miles Davis in 1991. Photograph by Herman Leonard. Herman Leonard Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

These developments had been greatly encouraged by related strides in technology. Of particular importance was the introduction of the long-playing record in 1948, an innovation that quickly replaced the 78 rpm record (containing only three or four minutes of music per side) with the 33 1/3 rpm, twenty-minutes-per-side disc. LPs made it possible to document extended compositions as well as longer solos and jam sessions more indicative of the live jazz experience. While the advances in international travel made it easier for musicians to visit cities in Western Europe and Japan, where the popularity of jazz was rising, the worldwide short-wave radio broadcasts of the Voice of America took the music across closed political borders, leading many who lived in repressive societies to view jazz as the sound-image of freedom. All of this activity brought new influences to bear on jazz, from both other countries and American popular culture. Beginning in the 1960s, the pace of cross-cultural synthesis quickened; jazz incorporated Brazilian bossa nova, Indian raga, Eastern European klezmer, and other ethnic styles. The universal popularity of rock music also led musicians such as the vibraphonist Gary Burton and those in the orbit of perpetual innovator Miles Davis to employ more electric guitars and keyboards, and to make rhythmic adjustments that would lead to a style known initially as “jazz-rock” and then more generally as “fusion.” Others, especially the African American musicians who formed the cooperative Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) in Chicago and the Black Artists Group (BAG) in St. Louis, added innovative compositional forms, unusual instruments and ensembles, and a multidisciplinary theatricality to the techniques of free jazz. By 1980, when fusion and free developments had created a “postmodern” surge that diminished the visibility and standing of more swing- and blues-oriented styles, a combination of rejuvenated expatriates such as tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, belatedly celebrated veterans including pianist Tommy Flanagan, and a new generation of technically proficient and historically focused “young lions” led by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis redirected attention to the music’s rich history, while also expanding the influence of a jazz education movement that began with isolated summer band camps and college courses in the 1950s.

The sum of these developments is a music as eloquent and influential as any created in the last century. We are long past the point at which one had to be American-born to become an influence on jazz development, as illustrated by the careers of Japanese pianist/composer Toshiko Akiyoshi, Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, British saxophonist Evan Parker, Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson, and Austrian keyboardist/composer Joe Zawinul, among many others. At the same time, jazz has left its mark on both other styles of music (classical, country, pop, rhythm & blues, rock) and other art forms (cinema, dance, fiction, painting, photography, poetry), not to mention vernacular speech. Once assailed as noisy, discordant, and an assault on moral values, jazz is now taught in high schools and colleges, where it is played by hundreds of thousands of young musicians and studied by a growing rank of scholars. The Smithsonian Institution, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and other major cultural institutions have established important and influential jazz programs, and the National Endowment for the Arts has honored more than one hundred musicians with the coveted title of NEA Jazz Master and a monetary award. Once disparaged and shunned, jazz is now central to America’s cultural heritage.

Sources Cited

Blumenthal, Bob. 2007. Jazz: An Introduction to the History and Legends Behind America's Music . New York: Collins.

Davis, Miles, and Quincy Troupe. 1989. Miles: The Autobiography . New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Jazz and the Freedom Movement

In the speech he gave before the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., employed the refrain, “Now is the time.” Was he inspired by Charlie Parker’s, “Now’s the Time,” the bop classic that Parker recorded in 1945? Bebop's urgency had implications stretching beyond music, and many found among the leading figures in modern jazz the embodiment of a new African American consciousness. As evidenced by his introductory remarks prepared for the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964, King loved the music and had a profound appreciation of jazz's cultural significance.

In September 1964, as the guest of Mayor Willy Brandt, King spent two days in (West) Berlin.  During the whirlwind visit, he gave a sermon to a crowd of 20,000, visited the Berlin Wall, and attended a memorial concert for President Kennedy.  It's also long been reported that he gave the keynote address to the inaugural Berlin Jazz Festival, but in recent years that’s been disputed by Bruce Jackson and Professor David Demsey of William Patterson University.  Whether spoken or merely written for the festival's program, King offers genuine insight about the role that jazz musicians played as they “championed” the search for identity among African Americans. “Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of ‘racial identity’ as a problem for a multi-racial world," wrote King, "musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls."  (Read the complete text below.)

Duke Ellington composed "King Fit the Battle of Alabam," for his 1963 musical, My People . It was staged in Chicago for the Century of Negro Progress Exhibition that celebrated the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Alas, it never got to Broadway, but some of the music was later incorporated into the Sacred Concerts. "King Fit the Battle..." celebrates Martin, lunch counter sit-ins, freedom riders, and satirizes the notorious Birmingham, Alabama, Sheriff Bull Connors. While he was in Chicago, Ellington met King in a meeting that was arranged by Marian Logan, who was the only female member of the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As Marian Bruce, she had sung on Clark Terry's album, Duke With a Difference , and had performed in New York cabarets. She was the wife of Dr. Arthur Logan, a friend and physician to Ellington and Billy Strayhorn whose practice was commemorated in their tune, "Upper Manhattan Medical Group."

One senses that Dr. King would have understood what Stanley Crouch meant in his 2009 Daily News column lamenting the absence of jazz in the public rituals of the Obama administration. "Jazz predicted the civil rights movement more than any other art in America...Jazz was always an art, but because of the race of its creators, it was always more than music. Once the whites who played it and the listeners who loved it began to balk at the limitations imposed by segregation, jazz became a futuristic social force in which one was finally judged purely on the basis of one's individual ability." Or, as King famously put it, "Judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Speaking of Birmingham, here's the John Coltrane Quartet playing "Alabama" on Ralph J. Gleason's public television series, Jazz Casual . Coltrane composed the elegy in commemoration of the four girls murdered in the fire-bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on September 15, 1963. Trane first recorded the piece on November 18; this was taped on December 7, 1963.

Here's the text of Dr. King's dedication to the Berlin Jazz Festival.

"God has brought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create - and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.

“Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.

“Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.

“It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of "racial identity" as a problem for a multi-racial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.

“Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr On The Importance Of Jazz

On the importance of jazz.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Opening Address to the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival:

God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.

This is triumphant music.

Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.

Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.

And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.

In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the importance of jazz

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the importance of jazz Opening Address to the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival:

God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.

This is triumphant music.

Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.

Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.

And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.

In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.

Oslo, Norway, Oct. 14, 1964, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famed “I Have A Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on August 28, 1963

Civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King speaking from pulpit at mass meeting about principles of non-violence before leading assembly to ride newly integrated busses after successful boycott.

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Freedom music: how jazz and gospel provided a soundtrack for Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream

On the third Monday of each January, Americans honor Martin Luther King, Jr., a leader who championed civil rights and racial equality. Born on Jan. 15, 1929, he remains an inspiring figure to this day, his influence enduring long after his tragic death at 39.

Dr. King always acknowledged the importance of jazz and gospel music in developing an exchange of ideas between different cultures. Through the power of music, his legacy has resonated as we come together to celebrate his birth and commemorate his dedication toward improving our nation for generations yet to come.

Gospel was a musical birthright for Dr. King. His mother, Alberta King, was choir director at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and his wife, Coretta Scott, had a love of music that set the foundation for their relationship. The artistry of Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and others uplifted him with their heartfelt, soulful sounds. In time, his appreciation for jazz grew, too — as viewed through the lens of "triumphant music," it provided an added layer to Dr. King's pursuit of social change.

“God has wrought many things out of oppression,” he famously said in a speech to open the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival. “He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create — and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations. Jazz speaks for life. The blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.”

Dr. King was a firm believer in the power of music, which had been demonstrated the previous year at his March on Washington. That event brought together some of America’s most beloved performers, including Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers and most notably, Mahalia Jackson.

Embodying African American gospel music’s call-and-response structure, Jackson famously called out to Dr. King during his oration: “Tell them about the dream!” In that moment of raw inspiration, he transitioned from speaking broadly of inequality into presenting an iconic vision — “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This captivating declaration would forever be remembered in history as the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Among the many musical tributes to Dr. King is one that incorporates the full text of this iconic oration: “Soldiers (I Have a Dream),” from Christian McBride’s The Movement Revisited, which Mack Avenue Records has just issued on vinyl . The actor Wendell Pierce reads Dr. King’s words in this piece, against a backdrop of a marching snare drum and slowly building crescendo.

An assassin’s bullet silenced Dr. King on April 4, 1968. In the wake of his death, Stevie Wonder, then a teenager, also grieved. He channeled his emotion into activism and led a 15-year movement that helped make MLK Day a national holiday. His 1981 hit single, “Happy Birthday,” helped establish Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday in 1983.

Dr. King’s dream of a more just and equitable world is still one to strive toward today. Music brings us together as a society, unifying us in shared messages of love, resilience and justice. As we commemorate the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., let us continue to amplify his words by honoring his teachings — coming together and celebrating our shared humanity, recognizing the power of music to bridge differences and bring about positive social change.

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Remarks by the President at White House Jazz Festival

7:31 P.M. EDT

PRESIDENT:  Good evening, everybody!  Welcome to the White House!  Good-looking crowd.  For five years, International Jazz Day’s main event has been celebrated around the world, from Istanbul, to Osaka, to Paris.  So we couldn’t be prouder that, this year, jazz comes back home to America.  (Applause.)  I want to thank UNESCO, its Director General Irina Bokova, and the Thelonious Monk Institute for helping us to put on this unbelievable event.  (Applause)  I also want to thank someone who has been a great friend to me and Michelle -- UNESCO ambassador, legendary jazz musician, and all-around cool cat, Herbie Hancock.  (Applause.)  And our emcee for the evening, who some people has a pretty good voice, Morgan Freeman.  (Applause.)

In 1964, Dizzy Gillespie ran for President -- this is a true story -- and he said, “When I am elected President of the United States, my first executive order will be to change the name of the White House to the Blues House.”  (Laughter.)  So tonight, we’re going to do right by Dizzy.  We are turning this place into the Blues House.  (Applause.)  And before anybody calls this executive overreach -- (laughter) -- or some sort of power-grab, I want to clarify that I did not issue a new executive order.  I just invited all my favorite jazz musicians to play in my backyard, which is one of the great perks of the job.

I don’t need to tell this crowd the story of jazz.  From humble origins as the music of the black working class -- largely invisible to the mainstream -- it went on to become America’s most significant artistic contribution to the world.  Jazz took shape in that most American of cities, New Orleans, where the rich blend of Spanish, and French, and Creole, and other influences sparked an innovative new sound.  By the early 20th century, you could walk down the street of the infamous Storyville district and -- maybe as you tried to stay out of trouble -- hear the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver and, of course, Louis Armstrong. 

Over the years, the sound traveled and changed -- hot jazz, swing, bebop, Latin, fusion, and experiments that defied labels.  But its essence has always remained the same.

Most jazz lovers probably remember the first time this music got into our bones.  Maybe it was Miles teaching us to make room for silence, to hear life in the notes that he didn’t play.  Or how Herbie could hang our hearts on a suspended chord.  Or how Billie’s voice, shimmering and shattered, seemed to bend time itself.  

For me, that happened as a child, when my father, who I barely knew, came to visit me for about a month.  And in the few weeks that I spent with him, one of the things that he did was take me to my first jazz concert -- to see Dave Brubeck in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1971.  And I didn't realize at the time that it had, but the world that that concert opened up for a 10-year-old boy was spectacular.  And I was hooked. 

Many have said that they've been hooked as well.  And perhaps more than any other form of art, jazz is driven by an unmistakably American spirit -- it is, in so many ways, the story of our nation’s progress.  Born out of the struggle of African Americans yearning for freedom.  Forged in a crucible of cultures -- a product of the diversity that would forever define our nation’s greatness.  Rooted in a common language from which to depart to places unknown.  It's both “the ultimate in rugged individualism” -- to get out on stage with nothing but your instrument and improvise, spontaneously create; and the truest expression of community -- the unspoken bond of musicians who take that leap of faith together. There is something fearless and true about jazz.  This is truth-telling music.

Jazz is perhaps the most honest reflection of who we are as a nation.  Because after all, has there ever been any greater improvisation than America itself?  We do it in our own way.  We move forward even when the road ahead is uncertain, stubbornly insistent that we’ll get to somewhere better, and confident that we’ve got all the right notes up our sleeve. 

And that’s what's attracted a global audience to this music.  It speaks to something universal about our humanity -- the restlessness that stirs in every soul, the desire to create with no boundaries.

“Jazz is a good barometer of freedom,” Duke Ellington once said.  No wonder it has such an outsized imprint on the DNA of global music.  It has spread like wildfire across the world, from Africa to Asia.  And jazz blended with the bossa nova of Brazil or the tango of Argentina -- which, from here on out, I will endeavor to appreciate as a listener and observer, rather than as a dancer.  (Laughter and applause.)  It can be heard on the Scottish bagpipe, on the Indian sitar.  It opened up new exchanges with classical music, and with Eastern music -- and it can make the oldest folk songs sound new. 

Jazz.  It’s always been where people come together, across seemingly unbridgeable divides.  And here at home, before schools and sports, it was jazz that desegregated -- because for so many players, the only thing that mattered was the music. 

The same was true around the world.  I was recently in Cuba, the first American President to make that trip in 88 years.  (Applause.)  And in Havana, you can hear the beautiful sounds of Afro-Cuban jazz, and that unlikely marriage of cultures that, a century later, still captivates us.  We hope this music will lead to new avenues for dialogue, and new collaborations across borders.  And if we can keep faith with that spirit, there’s no doubt that jazz will live on for generations to come. 

So let me stop talking.  We’ve got an all-star lineup of artists from around the country and around the world.  Is everybody ready?  (Applause.)  Let’s do this thing.  Jazz at the Blues House.  (Applause.)

                                                          END                                                            7:40 P.M. EDT

Martin Luther King On Jazz

The words of Martin Luther King are always worthy to reflect upon. We are forever grateful for his courage and perseverance. Even his words on jazz are still prescient and moving. He gave this short speech listed below at the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival . This year, the jazz festival is celebrating 50 years and will be held from October 30th – November 2nd. It’s now one of Europe’s oldest jazz festivals. Back in 1964, the festival kicked off with acts such as, Coleman Hawkins, The Miles Davis Quintet, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and The Dave Brubeck Quartet. You can see a full list of bands from 1964 to present by clicking here . Since then, more than 5100 artists and more than 1200 bands have performed at the festival.

Here are MLK’s remarks from 1964.

“God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create, and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.

This is triumphant music.

Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument. It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.

And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.

In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”

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Martin Luther King at the Berlin Jazz Fest in 1964

Update: To celebrate Martin Luther King day we’ve decided to republish this article first published in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of MLK on the 4th of April 1968. The article re-publishes Dr King’s speech at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964. Given the current state of global affairs, his words are just as relevant today as they were in 1964.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the tragic assassination of Martin Luther King. In 1964 Dr King was asked to give the opening speech at a new Jazz Festival in Berlin called the “Berliner Jazztage”. This festival later became known as ‘JazzFest Berlin” or as it’s known in English, the Berlin Jazz Festival. At the time of Dr King’s speech Berlin was a city divided by a wall separating east and west. Now in 2018, our society is again divided however, this time it’s not east and west but right and left. Unfortunately once again talk of wall building has raised its ugly head. Unlike Berlin, these walls are designed to keep people out – not to keep people in, as was the case with the DDR.

50 years on Dr Kings message is more relevant than ever.

On this day, our dream would be to see Dr Kings Dream that  “..our children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” will come to pass within our lifetime.

Below is the text of Mr Kings speech given at the 1964 edition Berlin Jazz Festival.

“God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create-and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.” “Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.” “Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.” “It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.” “In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”

The “Berliner Jazztage” was founded in 1964 in West Berlin by the Berliner Festspiele. Venues where concerts took place included among others: Berliner Philharmonie, Haus der Kulturen derTWelt, Volksbühne, Haus der Berliner Festspiele and the Jazzclubs Quasimodo and A-Trane.

The festival’s artistic concept has long been “to document, support, and validate trends in jazz, and to mirror the diversity of creative musical activity.” Diversity and social comment has always played a roll in the programming of the festival. In his last year as the festivals Artistic Director, Richard Williams stated in his forward to the festival that “In 2017,  Jazzfest Berlin will demonstrate that this music, while retaining its precious African American core, welcomes all those, whatever their origins, who respond to a spirit that celebrates the right to be different, to challenge orthodoxies and to find ways of working with others.”

The 1964 edition of the Berlin Jazz Festival included performances by Miles Davis Quintet, George Russell Sextet, Coleman Hawkins – Harry Edison Swing All-stars and the Dave Brubeck Quartet to name just a few.

Below is the poster from the 1st edition on the festival where Dr King gave his speech.

Coleman Hawkins Dave Brubeck Harry Sweets Edison Martin Luther King Miles Davis

Last modified: January 22, 2019

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Jazz has been evolving for over a century, and in the process, it’s become a unique sound that few other musicians can replicate. The music we listen to today-whether in pop, rock, or alternative-can be traced back to jazz. It shapes our music from the very beginning because it predates so many modern-day styles. 

The History of Jazz

Jazz is a subgenre of American music that started as ragtime but evolved into something much more. Jazz was born in the rural south, played by African Americans who were segregated from most other types of music at the time. The style is most popularly recognized for improvisation – taking the typical form of a song and changing it with an individual musician’s interpretation. 

The birth of jazz can be traced back to New Orleans at the beginning of the 19th century, where many different cultures blended to create what we think of today as jazz. This included African rhythms, marching beats, and European musical traditions.

The New Orleans jazz scene was the birthplace of many popular jazz standards like “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong. It was also home to musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, whose work partially inspired big band swing music that came after it. Back then, you didn’t need to have musical education and notes were highly improvised – today, you can find Jazz trumpet sheet music online. Eventually, this type of music found its way into recording studios where Tin Pan Alley producers would record pop songs with jazz elements in them. By the 1930s, artists were mostly creating their own compositions instead of improvising on chord changes in someone else’s song.

Ragtime vs Jazz

There are some similarities between ragtime and early jazz -both styles used syncopation in their compositions- but they are very different musically. Ragtime is primarily piano-based and has more of a “one gone, two gone” form whereas Jazz was primarily performed using brass instruments and drums.

Ragtime also tended to sound almost robotic because the same melody would be repeated several times (or perhaps even with slight variations). Jazz musicians preferred to blend melodies and improvise on the spot, making every performance unique from the last .

The Birth of Swing

Swing music was created by jazz musicians as they branched off into big bands – which used woodwinds instead of just brass, giving it a lighter sound than earlier jazz. The addition of saxophones gave swing its own unique identity as well as allowed for improvisation between different sections. This new sound was first called “swing” by audiences who enjoyed the upbeat tunes.

Big band swing music is characterized by its four beats to the measure; the emphasis is on the first beat, then it falls on the second and third beats, before finally emphasizing the fourth beat. These rhythms are typically accented by using instruments like drums, horns, or guitars. Swing music typically had a faster tempo than jazz – meaning more notes were played in a shorter amount of time. It was also highly inspired by African American dance styles . As a result, it’s often seen being performed by jazz bands in addition to the classic big band line-up.

The Birth of Bebop

Bebop was a style of jazz developed in the early 1940s that became a precursor to modern jazz and West Coast Jazz. It was a departure from earlier forms of jazz that typically used songs written in the Tin Pan Alley style.

There are many different theories as to what “bop” actually stands for – it could mean “beyond category” or simply be an onomatopoeia for the sound of the music itself. As time went on, it started being used to refer specifically to this type of jazz.

Bebop was first played by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who were two of the most well-known musicians that performed it. They felt that big band swing had become outdated, so they created a new sound where the emphasis wasn’t on danceable rhythms but instead on melodic content. They wanted to keep the upbeat tempo but change the style of songwriting to something more complex. As a result, many bebop songs are characterized by dissonant chords and long sequences of notes that may even seem atonal – this type of sound was not typical in earlier jazz styles.

Types of Jazz

There are many different types of jazz – some influenced by other genres like rock and roll and blues, and others by other kinds of music from around the world. For example:

• Cool Jazz is a style of jazz distinguished by its relaxed tempos that were popular in the late 1940s. These songs are typically slower than other jazz styles, which allow for improvisation and a more relaxed atmosphere.
• Fusion is a style of jazz with elements from other genres like rock, funk, hip-hop, and even soul music in some cases. It became popular during the 1970s when it was used to describe popular jazz songs with rock instrumentation.
• Electro is a more modern form of fusion that uses electronic sounds in live performances of genres like funk and soul. It became popular during the 1980s.
• Avant-garde is an experimental style originally created by John Coltrane that isn’t confined to a specific set of chords or rhythms. Its improvisation is similar to free jazz and it typically has “mistakes” that give the sound more character.
• Modal Jazz is characterized by its use of modes (or scales) instead of standard chords like major and minor. It was pioneered by Miles Davis during the 1950s, though it became more popular during the 1960s.

The Influence on Modern Music

Modern pop, rock, and alternative genres can all be traced back to jazz. Many popular recording artists have at least some influence from jazz-whether it’s through improvisation, song structures, or even instruments.

Though jazz is a unique and eclectic genre on its own, it has evolved over the years to become a foundation for some of today’s most popular music . For example, blues, soul, and funk all found their roots in jazz and the improvisation used by these styles of music can be traced back to jazz’s early days.

Jazz shapes our music from the very beginning because it predates so many modern-day styles-including pop, rock, or alternative. These types of music may not seem to have anything in common with jazz at first glance, but they can all be traced back to its influence. This uniqueness of jazz is what makes it so great-it’s not confined to one set of chords or rhythm, but instead built around improvisation and creative expression. It has allowed for more creative types of music to emerge – an escape from the conservative rules that typically define other genres.

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96 Jazz Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best jazz topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on jazz, 💡 most interesting jazz topics to write about, ❓ jazz research questions.

• Jazz and Hip Hop: Similarities and Differences Both hip hop and jazz are closely linked and for that matter there are a number of similarities they share prompting some individuals to pronounce that hip hop is ‘the jazz of young individuals in […]
• History of Jazz Music Due to the unification of different states, America enjoys a diverse culture, which is the basis for the growth of jazz in the world.
• Chick Corea’s “Spain” Jazz Song In addition to this, the song involves a careful composition of chords and notes typical of the American music. This song is a perfect example of an American song considering the lyrical dynamics and he […]
• Louis Armstrong’s and Bix Beiderbecke’s Jazz Music When examining the reason behind Armstrong’s worldwide popularity in comparison to the relative obscurity of Beiderbecke, it is immediately obvious that the main reason behind this was due to the fact that Armstrong was willing […]
• Jazz Dance and Its Techniques The modern and ballet dance styles can be also applied to jazz, as the kind of popular dance styles involves a wide range of dance elements.
• Jazz Concert After listening to a soul jazz performance, the writer finds that there was calmness at first in the mind of the writer as he kept on listening to the initial beats while trying to connect […]
• Jazz Musician Miles Davis: His Life and Music In his 50 years of career in jazz, he played the trumpet in a lyrical and melodic style and made his sound more intimate and personal.
• Jazz Solo’s Rhythmic, Melodic & Harmonic Analysis To be more specific, the sound of brushes sets the tone and the pace for the song, whereas the mallets create a recognizable pattern.
• Specifics of Jazz Music Analysis This essay gives the most distinct characteristics and elements of Jazz that distinguish it from other forms of art, in addition to the differences between Jazz and the other musical arts.
• “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” Jazz Song I would like to discuss this piece of music from the point of view of the analysis according to the books, and then I plan to talk about my personal feelings of the songs. It […]
• Jazz Social Dance and Impact on American Culture Jazz is one of the common music genres that define the culture and racial history of the United States. Additionally, the nature of jazz dance was a new opportunity for African Americans to describe the […]
• The Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s Artistic Journey The Preservation Hall Jazz Band gave this audience a taste of both the old and the new by the time they waved farewell.
• Jazz Music in New Orleans and Its Early Roots The 1870s represented the culmination of a century of music production in the city. The aim of this paper is to examine the early roots of jazz music in New Orleans.
• “The Great Gatsby”: The American Dream in the Jazz Age The Jazz Age is a period in the history of the United States of America from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression due to the remarkable popularity of […]
• Jazz Musicians as an Alternative Personality In times of the development of the blues, there was a problem related to the sexual issue. One may assume that the personality of a professional sportsman is connected with my past activities and scrupulousness.
• Charles Bolden’s Influence on Jazz Music He cemented his reputation by using the knowledge of his cornet to put fans into a trance and get them dancing into a frenzy. Bolden was also motivated by the music that was performed in […]
• Jazz Music: Characteristics of an F7 Chord The additional seventh to the main triad in this chord is the E flat, which is the highest note in the F7 chord.
• “Newport Jazz 2021”: The Art Event The event is named “Newport Jazz 2021,” and the team decided to attend a special jazz festival’s program he jazz gallery all-stars, which is expected to be played on Sunday, the first of August.
• The Jazz Concert Analysis For example, after the return of African Americans from the First World War, the pride for these soldiers changed the perception of their identity, resulting in the mass migration from the southern to northern states.
• Timeless Art of Jazz Music According to Brennan, in the first half of the twentieth-century jazz was considered to be the interaction between African-American and European musical traditions, an opposition of low and high music.
• Jazz’in Restaurant: Business Plan Jazz’In Restaurant located at Panama City, FL, which has experienced significant growth in recent years and has a large number of visitors to its beachside.
• Jazz Music: Methodological Issues It is the application and understanding of socio-cultural issues and methodologies that are crucial to understanding the evolution and development of arts in general, and jazz in particular.
• Jazz and Activism Relationships In the given article, the author attempted to analyze the musical-theoretical and cultural foundations of jazz from the 1960s to the 20th century in the socio-cultural aspect, establishing the relationship between socio-political events and the […]
• Review of Jazz Concert At the end of the concert, Avishai switches instruments with the pianist, taking his place, while the pianist picks up the contrabass.
• Ella Fitzgerald, the Jazz Singer First and foremost, she became famous because of her talent being able to sing jazz songs naturally without effort as she had a voice with a wide vocal range about nearly 3 octaves and a […]
• Jazz Studio Masterclass: Teaching Observation Gross demonstrated how it is possible to combine the intervals to achieve a certain melodic pattern and noted that, in this case, the success depends on the finger technique and on the ability to ‘feel’ […]
• Stan Kenton: Musical Journey and Contribution of a Jazz Legend The band was called The Wall of Sound, a phrase that was used to describe the sound of Kenton’s music at the time, loud with a driving swing.
• A Jazz Legend: Stan Kenton Stan Kenton was one of the innovators in the history of music. He attempted to synthesize the style of jazz and rock music to vocal instrumentalization.
• Jazz Heritage Overview and Analysis Named after the town of Orleans in France, New Orleans lived through the rule of the French and the Spaniards before becoming a rightful subject of the United States.
• George Gershwin’s Life and Jazz Music This is a masterpiece work of all the times especially the forte-piano and philharmonic orchestra version by Ferde Grofe in 1942.
• Jazz Concert Review: With Jazz Music and Its History Analysis The concert that I have attended recently was the jazz concert with the participation of Diane Reeves, the four-time Grammy winner with a brilliant voice and excellent feeling of rhythm.
• Nat King Cole’s Life and Impact on Jazz Music Nat King Cole is considered one of the greatest Jazz musicians in the 20th century. As A result of that, the band’s name became the “King Cole Trio”.
• Copland’s and Birmel’s Jazz Compositions Aaron Copland was one of the American composers whose creativity was strongly influenced by jazz at the beginning of the 20th century.
• Miles Davis, the Prominent American Jazz Composer Though critics might argue his best work was earlier in his career, his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, St Louis Walk Hall of Fame and Down Beat’s Jazz Hall of Fame […]
• Jazz History Since 1946: The Combinability of Polyrhythms and Improvisation Jazz was considered to be devoid of the ability to cooperate with the public and involve the majority of the listeners.
• Avant-Garde as a Movement in Jazz Music The release of Ornette Colemans album, Free jazz: A Collective Improvision, in the mid-1950s gave the movement the name free jazz, and the name has been used since then.
• Bruce Williams and “New Jazz Age” One of the latest in a cadre of the artist to epitomize the “new jazz age,” is young Grammy-nominated, alto saxophonist – Bruce Williams.
• A Campus Radio Station WNCU 90.7 FM Jazz: Idea, Mission, History The idea of a campus radio station was first envisioned in 1986 by Donald Baker,who eventually became the first general manager of this public radio station, and Dr.
• Jazz History: The Birth of the Bebop Jazz Era The musicians paid particular attention to the music, concentrated on the authentic qualities of jazz music and most of the technical aspects that concerned the music.
• Music: Jazz History Since 1946 – The Change of Jazz Music to Art The Bop made both the musicians and the audiences differentiate jazz as more of art. Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition of Jazz in the 1940s.
• Jazz Music Development Since 1945 The history of jazz includes many outstanding performers who made a significant contribution to the development of this music style and influenced its promotion among the audience.
• Jazz Music Concert and Theatrical Performance I was listening to the bands and could not stop moving as I felt as if the music was the beat of my heart.
• Calvin Jones Big Band Jazz Festival The most interesting feature of the show was the participation of bands from three different colleges the University of the District of Columbia Jazz Ensemble, the Howard University Jazz Ensemble, and the University of Maryland […]
• Jazz and Hip Hop Concerts in Comparison Two pieces in the second performance, In Germany Before the War and Mysterious Barricades, were well performed during the concert. There was a deejay on the deck and background dancers to back up the performance […]
• Duke Ellington: Quotes by a Jazz Legend It is known that love was much of an inspiration for Duke, and a lot of his songs are devoted to it.
• Gender Disparity: Women in Jazz In America of the 1920a and 1930s, women were active contributors in the field of arts. Since there were both male and female jazz performers, it may seem that the way of women to jazz […]
• Artists in Jazz Music and Dance Development The core areas in this study will include; the presentation, the ensemble, the musical instruments, and the memories of the events.
• Dubai Jazz Festival Press Release James Blunt, who will be in Dubai for the third time, will perform on the first day of the festival together with Christina Perri.
• Jazz and the Movie “Mo’ Better Blues” Jazz is one of the most complex music genres as it is closely tied to a number of aspects of the human society.
• Ballet and Jazz Dance: Styles Description The form and line used in ballet dance underline the stage performance and make sure that the main and secondary performers each have their place. The forms and rhythm in jazz dance reflect the people’s […]
• Jazz Music Popularization in Chinese Culture Despite being created in the United States, Jazz music is preferred in many regions of the world where it has captured the attention of creative musicians.
• Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal and Zero in On Two of the most innovative dance groups in the present-day world of dancing, Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal and Zero in On are well worth being considered as peculiar specimens of the way dance can […]
• Disco, Rock, Jazz and Popular Music: Comparison With the support of God, the songs encourage the audience to believe in the power of God to overcome the unfortunate events.
• Louis Armstrong’s Contribution to Jazz Music The new kind of music he created had more rhythm and this made his style to be compared to the Broadway style of Jazz that was famous at that time.
• Jazz Musicians: Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington Ellington has changed the role of the bass, tenor, and baritone in a big band. It reveals Ellington’s significance for people and his contribution to the music.
• Jazz Live Music Concert in Catalina Jazz Club The performers in the concert were Michael Gulezian, Benjamin Verdery, and Billy Dean as a special guest. Across the concert, I learnt the importance of mixture of form, rhythm, harmony, tempo, and melody to create […]
• Bossa Nova’ and Smooth Jazz’ Music Comparison Thus, the word samba mirrors a series of masterpieces that signifies-in addition to the classic Brazilian music, rhythm and dance- the object of poetry.
• Arab American Literature Analysis: Diana Abu-Jaber The effect of a mosaic society is that the cultures of the groups in that society tend to fade with practices that are more acceptable across the board remaining firm as the only ways the […]
• Arab Diaspora in the USA in the Novels of Diana Abu-Jaber “Arabian Jazz” and “Crescent” The dominance and identity of the different races in the American society can be attributed to the time of their arrival in America and their numbers as well thus giving them a strong position in […]
• How Does Jazz the Music and Its Story Reflect the American Experience? The mission of Jazz in America is to integrate the teaching and learning of jazz story into every public institution in the country.
• West Coast Jazz: History and Evolution This essay seeks to analyze the development of West Coast jazz as well as to evaluate the appropriateness of the names allotted to this genre of music.
• Revisiting New Jazz Music Concert Nevertheless, because of a new and imaginative way to interpret the compositions known by millions of people for quite a while, the concert left a huge impact on me and changed my perception of the […]
• American Art and 1920 Jazz Age In the height of the industrial revolution in America, the America craft movement which began as a response to the industrial revolution was one of the major developments taking place.
• Jazz concert review The audience was very impressed by the idea as they were able to enjoy some of the popular pieces of music from other genres. It was interesting to see the diversification in the pieces of […]
• Jazz Music in American Culture The origin of jazz is associated with black communities in the United States whose culture influenced the musical elements of the genre.
• What jazz is and what jazz is not As a result, due to the spreading of jazz music in different regions of the world, variety of elements were fused together resulting to existence of different genres of jazz such as the Latin jazz […]
• Jazz Anecdotes: Pops Foster and Chief Blue Cloud He was a dictator in the band. To keep the music interesting musicians must be creative in their entertainment.
• Chicago: the Jazz Era of the Blazing Gun In spite of the fact that the book is referred to the class of the typical who-done-it story, a detective novel, the genre of the book is not that easy to define.
• Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong: Jazz Music Louis Armstrong is described to be the man best known around the would as the founding father of Jazz while on the other hand, Dizzy Gillespie is reputed to have music that is a major […]
• Jazz Bio on Jazz musician Miles Davis In 1944, after his high school education, he traveled to New York where he was to pursue his dream without the influence of his parents; however he had gone to the state to study music […]
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When jazz was dangerous.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

“Robinson’s Band Plays Anything,” F. Bildestein, 1890. From the cover of the New Orleans newspaper the Mascot  (November 15, 1890).

Musical forms have the life cycle of carnivorous beasts: clumsy in infancy, terrifying in adolescence, fearsome in maturity, fangless in old age, and pitiful in senescence, before the inevitable silent death. Their life spans tend to be longer than ours, so it can be difficult to recall that some of the more geriatric genres were once vital and fierce. But even Baroque music had a caddish streak—“a most dangerous reef,” in the words of a prominent seventeenth-century German rector, “along which many a young soul, as if called by Sirens … falls into dissoluteness”—and polka, in the 1840s, was a venal Bohemian menace (in 1844, the  Illustrated London News  wrote that polka “needs only to be seen once to be avoided forever!”). Jazz, now well advanced into its second century, had an especially violent youth. It was more than merely dangerous—it was homicidal.

Jazz, to be precise, was never extraordinarily ferocious. “Jass” was. The soft sibilant turned heavy at around the same time—a century ago—that the music crossed over in the national consciousness, rumbling north on steamboats up the Mississippi and on the northbound Illinois Central to Chicago, then to New York and California, where it swiftly gained popularity, social acceptance, critical esteem. To do so, it had to leave New Orleans, its native home, behind. This was understandable, given the treatment it had received.

The Times-Picayune , the official record of the city’s white establishment, felt obliged to register its revulsion in an exuberantly racist editorial published during the summer of 1918, entitled “Jass and Jassism.” The music was a “vice,” like the “dime novel” and “the grease-dripping doughnut,” the manifestation “of a low streak in man’s tastes that has not yet come out in civilization’s wash. Indeed, one might go farther, and say that jass music is the indecent story syncopated and counter-pointed.” Jass, that is to say, was sex rendered as music.

Of course, you didn’t need the syncopation or the counterpoint to figure this out. The lyrics of some of the most popular songs put it frankly, numbers like “The Whore’s Gone Crazy,” “Funky Butt,” “The Naked Dance,” and “Cocaine Blues,” which Jelly Roll Morton remembered going like this:

I want a gal that works in the white folks’ yard, A pretty gal that works in the white folks’ yard, Do you see that fly crawling up the wall, She’s going up there to get her ashes hauled. I got a woman lives right back of the jail, She got a sign on her window—Pussy For Sale.

The music was free, uncensorable, ecstatic—qualities opposite to the way young African Americans in New Orleans were expected to comport themselves in public, at least by the readers of the Times-Picayune . Such brazenness was alarming. The only solution, the editors concluded, was to choke the young music in its very cradle. The infanticide would be “a point of civic honor,” for “its musical value is nil, and its possibilities of harm are great.”

For the moment, the anti-jassists appeared to have triumphed. By 1918, Jelly Roll Morton had moved to San Francisco; Buddy Bolden, the founding king of New Orleans jazz, had by then already spent a decade at the state insane asylum in Jackson, a hundred miles away; his successor King Oliver, who had worked as a butler to an uptown family while pioneering the new music, had fled to Chicago, where he was followed by many of his former bandmates; one of them, his eighteen-year-old student Louis Armstrong, left town the same year on a steamboat orchestra heading up the Mississippi. The previous year, the prostitution palaces of Storyville, reliable venues for early jazz musicians, had been outlawed, and the outbreak of the Spanish flu emptied the honky-tonks, country clubs, and dance halls. Those musicians who remained found work as painters, longshoremen, or manual laborers. Kid Ory was a carpenter. The bandleader Bab Frank ran restaurants. Alphonse Picou, composer of “High Society,” was a tinsmith.

Many of the musicians lived in a neighborhood so rough it was known as the Battlefield. The streets were unpaved, strewn with broken glass, nails, oyster shells. The children, invariably, went barefoot. “But we were young, healthy and tough as old hell,” Louis Armstrong wrote in his memoir  Satchmo , “so a little thing like lockjaw did not stay with us a long time.” Once, as a young child, while playing in one of the abandoned, ramshackle buildings that served as jungle gyms for the neighborhood children, Armstrong was laid out by a slate tile that had fallen from the roof.

It knocked me out cold and shocked me so bad I got lockjaw. When I was taken home Mama Lucy and Mayann worked frantically boiling up herbs and roots which they applied to my head. Then they gave me a glass of Pluto Water, put me to bed and sweated me out good all night long. The next morning I was on my way to school just as though nothing had happened.

But it was in these same streets that Armstrong, like so many musicians of his generation, heard the new sound—in the second-line parades returning from the cemeteries; in the jangled tunes that junk collectors played on tinhorns; and from the ballyhoo wagons that carried bands through the streets, advertising boxing matches and dances and dueling with other wagons in “cutting contests” when they encountered each other, until the losing band was forced to retreat in shame. The windows to the honky-tonks and dance halls were left open to the street, so even a barefoote urchin could freely listen. If anything, the street audience was given priority: before a band went on stage, it was the custom for them to set up on the sidewalk and perform a free set for those walking by.

A good way to chart the music’s standing in New Orleans during this transitional period is through the story of the Axman, a madman who began hacking people to death in March 1918. The killer’s motivation was murky at first. Most of his victims were Italian grocers and their wives, which may have had something to do with the fact that grocers lived in apartments attached to their stores and were thus easily accessible to a prowler. But the maniac also killed other innocent people, and by summer the randomness of the slaughters, paired with their brutality, had plunged the city into a state of panic. Dozens of suspected Axmen were arrested—most of them black—and released without charge; men fell asleep in chairs propped against their front doors, cradling loaded shotguns.

The hysteria only subsided with the emergence of the Spanish flu, a far deadlier and more conniving serial killer. When the flu subsided in spring 1919, however, the Axman returned in full gore, slaughtering a grocer, his wife, and their infant child. Within a week, he sent a letter to the Times-Picayune , making a startling admission: “I am very fond of jazz music.”

Swearing “by all the devils in the nether regions,” the Axman announced that he would fly over New Orleans the following Tuesday night and murder anyone who wasn’t listening to jazz. That there was a self-evident affinity between jazz fandom and ax killing was understood, the killings a logical manifestation of the music that the Times-Picayune had described as an “atrocity.” But the city’s response to the letter indicated that attitudes were changing. That Tuesday night, there was no fear, only euphoria. Jazz music could be heard all over the city, not just in the Battleground but in the Garden District and from the millionaires’ mansions on St. Charles Avenue. True to his word, the Axman spared the entire citizenry the ax.

Near the end of his life, Louis Armstrong liked to say that jazz dissolved racial boundaries—that, for at least the space of a song, even white bigots were romanced out of their hatred. “These same society people may go around the corner and lynch a Negro,” he told  Ebony in 1961. “But while they’re listening to our music, they don’t think about trouble.” It was trouble, though, that had given the music its life. When a music loses its danger, it succumbs to nostalgia, imitation, and charm, qualities of diminishing potency. It would take later generations to reinvigorate the form and, at least for a time, make it dangerous again. Miles Davis even scared himself; in his memoir, he wrote about what it was like when he first played with Coltrane: “Man, the shit we were playing in a short time was scary, so scary that I used to pinch myself to see if I was really there.” He understood what all great artists—including the Axman himself, an artist of the serial murder—understand, that anything truly new, in Jelly Roll Morton’s phrase, puts a fear into the heart.

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How your brain knows if a sound is music or speech

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New research digs into how our brains try to tell the difference between music and speech.

Researchers mapped out this process through a series of experiments—yielding insights that offer a potential means to optimize therapeutic programs that use music to regain the ability to speak in addressing aphasia . This language disorder afflicts more than 1 in 300 Americans each year, including Wendy Williams and Bruce Willis.

“Although music and speech are different in many ways, ranging from pitch to timbre to sound texture, our results show that the auditory system uses strikingly simple acoustic parameters to distinguish music and speech,” says Andrew Chang, a postdoctoral fellow in New York University’s psychology department and the lead author of the paper in the journal PLOS Biology .

“Overall, slower and steady sound clips of mere noise sound more like music while the faster and irregular clips sound more like speech.”

Scientists gauge the rate of signals by precise units of measurement: Hertz (Hz). A larger number of Hz means a greater number of occurrences (or cycles) per second than a lower number. For instance, people typically walk at a pace of 1.5 to 2 steps per second, which is 1.5-2 Hz. The beat of Stevie Wonder’s 1972 hit Superstition is approximately 1.6 Hz, while Anna Karina’s 1967 smash Roller Girl clocks in at 2 Hz. Speech, in contrast, is typically two to three times faster than that at 4-5 Hz.

It has been well documented that a song’s volume, or loudness, over time—what’s known as “amplitude modulation”—is relatively steady at 1-2 Hz. By contrast, the amplitude modulation of speech is typically 4-5 Hz, meaning its volume changes frequently.

Despite the ubiquity and familiarity of music and speech, scientists previously lacked clear understanding of how we effortlessly and automatically identify a sound as one or the other.

To better understand this process in their study, Chang and colleagues conducted a series of four experiments in which more than 300 participants listened to a series of audio segments of synthesized music-like and speech-like noise of various amplitude modulation speeds and regularity.

The audio noise clips allowed only the detection of volume and speed. The participants were asked to judge whether these ambiguous noise clips, which they were told were noise-masked music or speech, sounded like.

Observing the pattern of participants sorting hundreds of noise clips as either music or speech revealed how much each speed and/or regularity feature affected their judgment between music and speech. It is the auditory version of “seeing faces in the cloud,” the scientists conclude: If there’s a certain feature in the soundwave that matches listeners’ idea of how music or speech should be, even a white noise clip can sound like music or speech. Examples of both music and speech may be downloaded from the research page .

The results showed that our auditory system uses surprisingly simple and basic acoustic parameters to distinguish music and speech: to participants, clips with slower rates (<2Hz) and more regular amplitude modulation sounded more like music, while clips with higher rates (~4Hz) and more irregular amplitude modulation sounded more like speech.

Knowing how the human brain differentiates between music and speech can potentially benefit people with auditory or language disorders such as aphasia, the authors note. Melodic intonation therapy, for instance, is a promising approach to train people with aphasia to sing what they want to say, using their intact “musical mechanisms” to bypass damaged speech mechanisms. Therefore, knowing what makes speech and music similar or distinct in the brain can help design more effective rehabilitation programs.

Additional coauthors are from NYU, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM.

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the National Institutes of Health and Leon Levy Scholarships in Neuroscience funded the work.

Source: NYU

A cappella shows why the brain splits music and speech

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Whales Have an Alphabet

Until the 1960s, it was uncertain whether whales made any sounds at all..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today, ever since the discovery that whales produce songs, scientists have been trying to find a way to decipher their lyrics. After 60 years, they may have finally done it. My colleague, Carl Zimmer, explains.

It’s Friday, May 24.

I have to say, after many years of working with you on everything from the pandemic to —

— CRISPR DNA technology, that it turns out your interests are even more varied than I had thought, and they include whales.

They do indeed.

And why? What is it about the whale that captures your imagination?

I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who is not fascinated by whales. I mean, these are mammals like us, and they’re swimming around in the water. They have brains that are much bigger than ours. They can live maybe 200 years. These are incredible animals, and animals that we still don’t really understand.

Right. Well, it is this majestic creature that brings us together today, Carl, because you have been reporting on a big breakthrough in our understanding of how it is that whales communicate. But I think in order for that breakthrough to make sense, I think we’re going to have to start with what we have known up until now about how whales interact. So tell us about that.

Well, people knew that whales and dolphins traveled together in groups, but up until the 1960s, we didn’t really know that whales actually made any sounds at all. It was actually sort of an accident that we came across it. The American military was developing sophisticated microphones to put underwater. They wanted to listen for Russian submarines.

As one does. But there was an engineer in Bermuda, and he started hearing some weird stuff.

[WHALE SOUNDS]

And he wondered maybe if he was actually listening to whales.

What made him wonder if it was whales, of all things?

Well, this sound did not sound like something geological.

It didn’t sound like some underwater landslide or something like that. This sounded like a living animal making some kind of call. It has these incredible deep tones that rise up into these strange, almost falsetto type notes.

It was incredibly loud. And so it would have to be some really big animal. And so with humpback whales swimming around Bermuda, this engineer thought, well, maybe these are humpback whales.

And so he gets in touch with a husband and wife team of whale biologists, Roger and Katy Payne, and plays these recordings to them. And they’re pretty convinced that they’re hearing whales, too. And then they go on to go out and confirm that by putting microphones in the water, chasing after groups of whales and confirming, yes, indeed, that these sounds are coming from these humpback whales.

So once these scientists confirm in their minds that these are the sounds of a whale, what happens with this discovery?

Well, Roger and Katy Payne and their colleagues are astonished that this species of whale is swimming around singing all the time for hours on end. And it’s so inspirational to them that they actually help to produce a record that they release “The Song of the Humpback Whale” in 1970.

And so this is being sold in record stores, you know, along with Jimi Hendrix and Rolling Stones. And it is a huge hit.

Yeah, it sells like two million copies.

Well, at the time, it was a huge cultural event. This record, this became almost like an anthem of the environmental movement. And it led, for whales in particular, to a lot of protections for them because now people could appreciate that whales were a lot more marvelous and mysterious than they maybe had appreciated before.

And so you have legislation, like the Marine Mammal Act. The United States just agrees just to stop killing whales. It stops its whaling industry. And so you could argue that the discovery of these whale songs in Bermuda led to at least some species of whales escaping extinction.

Well, beyond the cultural impact of this discovery, which is quite meaningful, I wonder whether scientists and marine biologists are figuring out what these whale songs are actually communicating.

So the Paynes create a whole branch of science, the study of whale songs. It turns out that pretty much every species of whale that we know of sings in some way or another. And it turns out that within a species, different groups of whales in different parts of the world may sing with a different dialect. But the big question of what these whales are singing, what do these songs mean, that remains elusive into the 21st century. And things don’t really change until scientists decide to take a new look at the problem in a new way.

And what is that new way?

So in 2020, a group of whale biologists, including Roger Payne, come together with computer scientists from MIT. Instead of humpback whales, which were the whales where whale songs are first discovered, these scientists decide to study sperm whales in the Caribbean. And humpback whales and sperm whales have very, very different songs. So if you’re used to humpback whales with their crazy high and low singing voices —

Right, those best-selling sounds.

— those are rockin’ tunes of the humpback whales, that’s not what sperm whales do. Sperm whales have a totally different way of communicating with each other. And I actually have some recordings that were provided by the scientists who have been doing this research. And so we can take a listen to some of them.

Wow, It’s like a rhythmic clicking.

These are a group of sperm whales swimming together, communicating.

So whale biologists knew already that there was some structure to this sound. Those clicks that you hear, they come in little pulses. And each of those pulses is known as a coda. And whale biologists had given names to these different codas. So, for example, they call one coda, one plus one plus three —

— which is basically click, click, click, click, click, or four plus three, where you have four clicks in a row and a pause and then three clicks in a row.

Right. And the question would seem to be, is this decipherable communication, or is this just whale gibberish?

Well, this is where the computer scientists were able to come in and to help out. The whale biologists who were listening to the codas from the sperm whales in the Caribbean, they had identified about 21 types. And then that would seem to be about it.

But then, an MIT computer science graduate student named Prajusha Sharma was given the job of listening to them again.

And what does she hear?

In a way, it’s not so much what she heard, but what she saw.

Because when scientists record whale songs, you can look at it kind of like if you’re looking at an audio of a recording of your podcast, you will see the little squiggles of your voice.

And so whale biologists would just look at that ticker of whale songs going across the screen and try to compare them. And Sharma said, I don’t like this. I just — this is not how I look at data. And so what she decided to do is she decided to kind of just visualize the data differently. And essentially, she just kind of flipped these images on their side and saw something totally new.

And what she saw was that sperm whales were singing a whole bunch of things that nobody had actually been hearing.

One thing that she discovered was that you could have a whale that was producing a coda over and over and over again, but it was actually playing with it. It was actually stretching out the coda,

[CLICKING] So to get a little bit longer and a little bit longer, a little bit longer.

And then get shorter and shorter and shorter again. They could play with their codas in a way that nobody knew before. And she also started to see that a whale might throw in an extra click at the end of a coda. So it would be repeating a coda over and over again and then boom, add an extra one right at the end. What they would call an ornamentation. So now, you have yet another signal that these whales are using.

And if we just look at what the sperm whales are capable of producing in terms of different codas, we go from just 21 types that they had found in the Caribbean before to 156. So what the scientists are saying is that what we might be looking at is what they call a sperm whale phonetic alphabet.

Yeah, that’s a pretty big deal because the only species that we know of for sure that has a phonetic alphabet —

— is us, exactly. So the reason that we can use language is because we can make a huge range of sounds by just doing little things with our mouths. A little change in our lips can change a bah to a dah. And so we are able to produce a set of phonetic sounds. And we put those sounds together to make words.

So now, we have sperm whales, which have at least 150 of these different versions of sounds that they make just by making little adjustments to the existing way that they make sounds. And so you can make a chart of their phonetic alphabet, just like you make a chart of the human phonetic alphabet.

So then, that raises the question, do they combine their phonetic alphabet into words? Do they combine their words into sentences? In other words, do sperm whales have a language of their own?

Right. Are they talking to each other, really talking to each other?

If we could really show that whales had language on par with humans, that would be like finding intelligent life on another planet.

We’ll be right back.

So, Carl, how should we think about this phonetic alphabet and whether sperm whales are actually using it to talk to each other?

The scientists on this project are really careful to say that these results do not definitively prove what these sperm whale sounds are. There are a handful of possibilities here in terms of what this study could mean. And one of them is that the whales really are using full-blown language.

What they might be talking about, we don’t know. I mean, perhaps they like to talk about their travels over hundreds and thousands of miles. Maybe they’re talking about, you know, the giant squid that they caught last night. Maybe they’re gossiping about each other.

And you have to remember, sperm whales are incredibly social animals. They have relationships that last for decades. And they live in groups that are in clans of thousands of whales. I mean, imagine the opportunities for gossip.

These are all at least imaginable now. But it’s also possible that they are communicating with each other, but in a way that isn’t language as we know it. You know, maybe these sounds that they’re producing don’t add up to sentences. There’s no verb there. There’s no noun. There’s no structure to it in terms of how we think of language.

But maybe they’re still conveying information to each other. Maybe they’re somehow giving out who they are and what group they belong to. But it’s not in the form of language that we think of.

Right. Maybe it’s more kind of caveman like as in whale to whale, look, there, food.

It’s possible. But, you know, other species have evolved in other directions. And so you have to put yourself in the place of a sperm whale. You know, so think about this. They are communicating in the water. And actually, like sending sounds through water is a completely different experience than through the air like we do.

So a sperm whale might be communicating to the whale right next to it a few yards away, but it might be communicating with whales miles away, hundreds of miles away. They’re in the dark a lot of the time, so they don’t even see the whales right next to them. So it’s just this constant sound that they’re making because they’re in this dark water.

So we might want to imagine that such a species would talk the way we do, but there are just so many reasons to expect that whatever they’re communicating might be just profoundly different, so different that it’s actually hard for us to imagine. And so we need to really, you know, let ourselves be open to lots of possibilities.

And one possibility that some scientists have raised is that maybe language is just the wrong model to think about. Maybe we need to think about music. You know, maybe this strange typewriter, clickety clack is actually not like a Morse code message, but is actually a real song. It’s a kind of music that doesn’t necessarily convey information the way conversation does, but it brings the whales together.

In humans, like, when we humans sing together in choruses, it can be a very emotional experience. It’s a socially bonding experience, but it’s not really like the specific words that we’re singing that bring us together when we’re singing. It’s sharing the music together.

But at a certain point, we stop singing in the chorus, and we start asking each other questions like, hey, what are you doing for dinner? How are you going to get home? There’s a lot of traffic on the BQE. So we are really drawn to the possibility that whales are communicating in that same kind of a mode.

We’re exchanging information. We’re seeking out each other’s well-being and emotional state. And we’re building something together.

And I think that happens because, I mean, language is so fundamental to us as human beings. I mean, it’s like every moment of our waking life depends on language. We are talking to ourselves if we’re not talking to other people.

In our sleep, we dream, and there are words in our dreams. And we’re just stewing in language. And so it’s really, really hard for us to understand how other species might have a really complex communication system with hundreds of different little units of sound that they can use and they can deploy. And to think anything other than, well, they must be talking about traffic on the BQE. Like —

— we’re very human-centric. And we have to resist that.

So what we end up having here is a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of how whales interact. And that seems worth celebrating in and of itself. But it really kind of doubles as a lesson in humility for us humans when it comes to appreciating the idea that there are lots of non-human ways in which language can exist.

That’s right. Humility is always a good idea when we’re thinking about other animals.

So what now happens in this realm of research? And how is it that these scientists, these marine biologists and these computer scientists are going to try to figure out what exactly this alphabet amounts to and how it’s being used?

So what’s going to happen now is a real sea change in gathering data from whales.

So to speak.

So these scientists are now deploying a new generation of undersea microphones. They’re using drones to follow these whales. And what they want to do is they want to be recording sounds from the ocean where these whales live 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so the hope is that instead of getting, say, a few 100 codas each year on recording, these scientists want to get several hundred million every year, maybe billions of codas every year.

And once you get that much data from whales, then you can start to do some really amazing stuff with artificial intelligence. So these scientists hope that they can use the same kind of artificial intelligence that is behind things like ChatGPT or these artificial intelligence systems that are able to take recordings of people talking and transcribing them into text. They want to use that on the whale communication.

They want to just grind through vast amounts of data, and maybe they will discover more phonetic letters in this alphabet. Who knows? Maybe they will actually find bigger structures, structures that could correspond to language.

If you go really far down this route of possibilities, the hope is that you would understand what sperm whales are saying to each other so well that you could actually create artificial sperm whale communication, and you could play it underwater. You could talk to the sperm whales. And they would talk back. They would react somehow in a way that you had predicted. If that happens, then maybe, indeed, sperm whales have something like language as we understand it.

And the only way we’re going to figure that out is if we figure out not just how they talk to themselves, but how we can perhaps talk to them, which, given everything we’ve been talking about here, Carl, is a little bit ironic because it’s pretty human-centric.

That’s right. This experiment could fail. It’s possible that sperm whales don’t do anything like language as we know it. Maybe they’re doing something that we can’t even imagine yet. But if sperm whales really are using codas in something like language, we are going to have to enter the conversation to really understand it.

Well, Carl, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you. Sorry. Can I say that again? My voice got really high all of a sudden.

A little bit like a whale’s. Ooh.

Yeah, exactly. Woot. Woot.

Thank yoooo. No. Thank you.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

We allege that Live Nation has illegally monopolized markets across the live concert industry in the United States for far too long. It is time to break it up.

On Thursday, the Justice Department sued the concert giant Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster, for violating federal antitrust laws and sought to break up the $23 billion conglomerate. During a news conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that Live Nation’s monopolistic tactics had hurt the entire industry of live events.

The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices.

In a statement, Live Nation called the lawsuit baseless and vowed to fight it in court.

A reminder — tomorrow, we’ll be sharing the latest episode of our colleagues’ new show, “The Interview.” This week on “The Interview,” Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix, about his plans to make the world’s largest streaming service even bigger.

I don’t agree with the premise that quantity and quality are somehow in conflict with each other. I think our content and our movie programming has been great, but it’s just not all for you.

Today’s episode was produced by Alex Stern, Stella Tan, Sydney Harper, and Nina Feldman. It was edited by MJ Davis, contains original music by Pat McCusker, Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, Marion Lozano, and Sophia Lanman, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

Special thanks to Project SETI for sharing their whale recordings.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Tuesday after the holiday.

• May 31, 2024   •   31:29 Guilty
• May 30, 2024   •   25:21 The Government Takes On Ticketmaster
• May 29, 2024   •   29:46 The Closing Arguments in the Trump Trial
• May 28, 2024   •   25:56 The Alitos and Their Flags
• May 24, 2024   •   25:18 Whales Have an Alphabet
• May 23, 2024   •   34:24 I.C.C. Prosecutor Requests Warrants for Israeli and Hamas Leaders
• May 22, 2024   •   23:20 Biden’s Open War on Hidden Fees
• May 21, 2024   •   24:14 The Crypto Comeback
• May 20, 2024   •   31:51 Was the 401(k) a Mistake?
• May 19, 2024   •   33:23 The Sunday Read: ‘Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify?’
• May 17, 2024   •   51:10 The Campus Protesters Explain Themselves
• May 16, 2024   •   30:47 The Make-or-Break Testimony of Michael Cohen

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Carl Zimmer

Produced by Alex Stern ,  Stella Tan ,  Sydney Harper and Nina Feldman

Edited by MJ Davis Lin

Original music by Elisheba Ittoop ,  Dan Powell ,  Marion Lozano ,  Sophia Lanman and Pat McCusker

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Ever since the discovery of whale songs almost 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to decipher the lyrics.

But sperm whales don’t produce the eerie melodies sung by humpback whales, sounds that became a sensation in the 1960s. Instead, sperm whales rattle off clicks that sound like a cross between Morse code and a creaking door. Carl Zimmer, a science reporter, explains why it’s possible that the whales are communicating in a complex language.

On today’s episode

Carl Zimmer , a science reporter for The New York Times who also writes the Origins column .

Background reading

Scientists find an “alphabet” in whale songs.

These whales still use their vocal cords. But how?

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Carl Zimmer covers news about science for The Times and writes the Origins column . More about Carl Zimmer

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