Celebrating ‘Jazz Jamaica Stylee’

Comparable to those who invented it and their descendants who have extended its syncopated rhythms, artful harmonies, and adventurous improvisations, jazz has endured immense mockery and cultural misconceptions. Yet, it has always shown remarkable resilience in the face of such attacks.

Despite the vitriolic statement that once defaced the walls of a leading educational institution denouncing the teaching of jazz, it has persevered, even in Jamaica.

Jazz served as a grist that influenced the structure, melodies and rhythms as distinct as jump blues, rhythm and blues, Jamaican R&B, and especially ska, which is an unambiguous offshoot of jazz.

And yet, to understand jazz’s complex journey, one must acquaint oneself with the existent attitude toward its presence in the first quarter of the 20th century amid racial segregation and discrimination in American society.

In her essay Blame it on Jazz, Jasmin Darznik remarks on the attitude toward racial perspectives: “In 1925, a San Francisco woman named Anna Ellingson demanded that her teenage daughter stop ‘running wild at jazz parties’. The teenager, whose name was Dorothy, responded by shooting her, coolly pocketing [US]$45 from her mother’s purse before heading out for yet another night of jazz-fueled debauchery. At the trial, ‘jazzmania’ was put forth as a defence for the killing.”

Did people back then really believe jazz could lead a girl to murder? Darznik questions.

After the First World War, black jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, joined the great migration from New Orleans, Chicago and New York. The aftermath of the war and Prohibition gave rise to the speakeasy culture, “where jazz music accompanied drinking and dancing, and people from different genders, races, and social classes mixed freely”.

For many highly influential white Americans, such as Ann Shaw Faulkner, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, jazz was “the accompaniment of the voodoo dance, stimulating half-crazed barbarians to the vilest of deeds”.

Today, jazz has established itself as what some call American classical music or, alternatively, Black Classical Music. It reflects personal independence and communal unity, daring spontaneity and simultaneous echoes of human experiences.

TEACHING JAZZ

For those who constantly question the emphasis on teaching jazz and its relevance to Jamaican culture, jazz infused the character of Jamaican musicians as early as the beginning of the 20th century.

By the 1930s, many had migrated, making their names in Europe and America. By the 1940s, Kingston was a crucible of musical innovation. The foundation of ska, the island’s first musically commercial and cross-culturally appealing expression, is undeniably rooted in the artistic idiom of jazz.

Not to teach jazz to aspiring musicians is to reduce some of Jamaica’s most achieved musicians to less than shadows in our cultural history.

Multi-instrumentalist Bertie King, trumpeters Leslie Thompson and Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson, and pianist Yorke DeSouza, among others, are the earliest expatriates. Saxophonists Harold McNair, Wilton Gaynair, Joe Harriott, Dizzy Reece, Roy Burrowes and Sonny Gray; trumpeters of high acclaim; pianist Monty Alexander, and guitarist Ernest Ranglin, are others of a second generation who established themselves as jazz masters and helped shape the early British and European jazz movement, bringing a unique Jamaican sound and style to the genre.

They have collectively performed and recorded with legendary figures such as Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and Quincy Jones.

In the 1950s through the late ‘70s, the height of the Cold War era, America advanced the idea of cultural diplomacy. The American State Department deployed jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong to Jamaica in 1957 and Dave Brubeck, in 1959, as cultural ambassadors to encourage sentiments against communism and downplay perceptions of racial discrimination. During that period, a generation of jazz musicians representing a third stream remained in Jamaica. They included Karl Bryan, Raymond Harper, Baba Brooks, Rico Rodriquez, original Skatalites, Tommy McCook, Roland Alphonso, Johnny ‘Dizzy’ Moore, Lester Sterling, and Don Drummond. These are the innovators of ska.

Suppose the titles of many of the compositions by the Skatalites indicate how they were influenced. In that case, it seems to have been counter-productive, as songs with titles like Marcus Junior, African Blood, Fidel Castro, Lulumba, Red China, and Addis Ababa could not have been the results the State Department anticipated.

Because of jazz’s capacity to highlight and play a diplomatic role of uniting people, International Jazz Day is listed on the United Nations and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) calendars, with jazz luminary Herbie Hancock as its ambassador.

In 2015, Kingston was declared a UNESCO Creative City of Music, and, since then, Jamaica has been celebrating International Jazz Day. The Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, under the patronage of Olivia Grange, has made it obligatory that the day be celebrated annually. Grange demonstrates her commitment to exposing the multifarious nature of cultural expression by spearheading the planning of ‘Jazz Jamaica Stylee’ for International Jazz Day.

Through the ministry’s agencies and UNESCO’s support, the Jamaica Music Museum will again provide artistic direction, and the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission will supply technical production. The presence of Kingston Night Market’s art, craft, food and beverage offerings will ensure and enhance the festive scene and debunk the notion that jazz has no place being taught in our cultural institutions and-or appreciated in Jamaica.

The concert will be held at the Louise Bennett Garden Theatre in St Andrew on Wednesday. Showtime is 7 p.m.

Herbie Miller is a socio-musicologist and the director/curator of the Jamaica Music Museum. Send feedback to entertainment@gleanerjm.com.