Misconceptions in Linking Free Jazz with the Civil Rights Movement
Abstract
Evidence is presented that shows music journalists engaging in illusory correlations, confirmation bias, non-representative sampling, misattribution, meaning making, and the effects of trait anger on music perception. The article attempts to untangle confusions surrounding links between politics and the origins of jazz styles by examining one outstanding case and by identifying common oversights in jazz history writing. Journalists and some musicians have mistaken their own impressions of jazz styles for the intentions of the artists and then either directly asserted or accidentally implied that there was a cause-and-effect relationship between politics and the origination of certain jazz styles when political movements were not necessarily responsible for a given style of jazz. The avant-garde jazz recordings and performances of a very few musicians were partly inspired by anger over the civil rights struggles of the late 1950s and 1960s. In their accounts of the origins of its development, however, certain journalists and historians have erred in their broad linking of the free jazz movement with those struggles. Journalists and historians have misrepresented such giants as John Coltrane and Albert Ayler who pointedly disavowed Black anger as a motive for their music and their technical innovations.
... Baskerville (1994), on the other hand, argues that free jazz, often using the term 'the New Black Music'-which he states was used by the musicians themselves-is connected to the Black Power Movement in that the musicians wanted to rebel against the Caucasian establishment by creating a radically new music style that they can call their own. According to Gridley (2007), this general attitude is also reinforced by authors Brian Harker and Todd Jenkins. Giddins and DeVeaux (2009) state that some people saw the connection and referred to free jazz simply as 'black music' for the same reason Baskerville (1994) argues that connects Ascension with the Black Power Movement in that the chaos reflects African American frustration during this period. ...
... Conversely, Gridley (2007) argues that such a connection between free jazz and politics is entirely non-existent. He argues that the Civil Rights Movement and the free jazz movement emerging during the same period were entirely coincidental. ...
... He argues that the Civil Rights Movement and the free jazz movement emerging during the same period were entirely coincidental. Gridley (2007) also argues that the reason free jazz developed its defining characteristics had to do with an inner desire of the musicians to explore new sounds and techniques and that some free jazz musicians could not improvise in a way that outlined a chord progression. He mentions Mingus and saxophonist Archie Shepp as exceptions due to both being politically outspoken; however, he notes that the former did not practice free jazz and that such exceptions could not be accountable for other avant-garde musicians. ...
... Typical of these conventional narratives is the "veneration of great men and their achievements" (Hall and Burke, 2022, p. 337), which elevates the typically gendered concepts associated with the "jazzman" to that of prime canonical importance (Early and Monson, 2019;Johansen, 2023;Rustin and Tucker, 2008;Whyton, 2010). For instance, Tony Whyton (2010) identifies myths underpinning the jazz canon consisting of clear tropes 5 that permeate nearly all mainstream general jazz history texts, evident in the tendency to replicate hegemonic perspectives (DeVeaux, 1991(DeVeaux, , 1997(DeVeaux, , 2002Gioia, 2011;Gridley, 1992Gridley, , 2000Gridley, , 2007Giddins and DeVeaux, 2009;Shipton, 2007;Tirro, 1993) and an adherence to a particular chronological construction of a historical jazz narrative (Stow and Haydn, 2012). While a chronological model remains valuable for sociocultural contextualisation of certain events, we argue that in the teaching and learning of jazz, conventions of chronology delimits the application of critical thinking that is associated with research-led tertiary studies by overemphasising a particular sequence of historical events (Boeyink, 2022;McMullen, 2021) and therefore can be problematic in regards to inclusion. ...
The teaching of jazz history in tertiary institutions has historically focussed on the “great men” of jazz (Whyton, 2010), with jazz historiography giving scant recognition to female-identifying musicians (Rustin and Tucker, 2008). The historicising of certain individuals and their music is fundamental to understanding jazz, yet it silences female and gender non-binary voices, overshadowing the roles they played in the evolution of the genre. This study aims to deepen our understanding of the experience of students engaging with jazz history in the 21st century. Halberstam and Halberstam’s (2005) theory of queer time and disruption serves as the primary framework for analysing shifts in teaching and learning perceptions concerning hegemonic and male-dominated narratives in jazz history. To understand the experiences and perspectives of those directly involved in jazz history pedagogy this research draws on an education-focused, polyethnographic approach utilising data derived from self-selected student research topics, student surveys, and teacher interviews. Our findings highlight both the shifting discourse within tertiary education, teaching experiences and the interwoven attitudes of students, reflecting on how these dialogues came to impact and shape the other. The study provides implications for how jazz education may continue to evolve in both attitude and enlightened access in the education of jazz learners. The objective of this paper’s outcomes is to inform the translation of more diversified narratives in tertiary jazz pedagogy and music education more broadly.
... One could argue that the relentless pursuit of Modernist innovation in jazz music led to an explosion of different styles sharing this aesthetic. Free jazz, along with avant-garde styles in general, has often been linked to political and social movements such as the civil rights movement (see Gridley, 2007). From a jazz historical perspective, our results should be interpreted as being consistent with many such motivations for the observed stylistic change. ...
The present study examines both gradual and rapid changes occurring in 20th-century jazz harmonic practice. A newly-assembled corpus of 1,086 jazz compositions was used to test the idea that jazz music exhibits a mid-century decline in traditionally “tonal” chord usage. Evidence was found for slow, incremental changes in zeroth-order chord quality distributions, consistent with gradual, unconscious changes in harmonic usage. Typical tonal chord-to-chord transitions became less common between the 1920s and the 1960s, consistent with the hypothesis of tonal decline. Finally, use of root motion of an ascending perfect fourth dropped suddenly in the 1950s, suggesting that chord-to-chord transitions might be more susceptible to rapid change than chord frequency. Possible constraints on stylistic evolution are discussed.
... A start toward investigating this avenue was found in the thirteenth and fourteenth studies. In the thirteenth study (Gridley & Hoff, 2007), using the same response form from the previous studies (Appendix A), 205 listeners indicated their perceptions of emotion in a recording of the same 1958 Newport Jazz Festival performance by John Coltrane that had evoked Don Gold's " angry young tenor " remark. They also completed the Multidimensional Anger Inventory (Siegel, 1985). ...
Knowing that the jazz improviser creates his own material while performing, some jazz listeners assume that the improvisations can reveal the musician's emotions. To evaluate this assumption, fifteen studies were conducted. These studies focused on the possible perception of anger upon hearing the improvisations of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. The instigation for the studies was that, during the early part of Coltrane's recording career, one journalist had written that Coltrane was an "angry young tenor," and another journalist had referred to "the rage in his playing," both of which were the opposite of the performer's stated intentions. Diversity of responses in the data was substantial, and it was found that the widely cited anger perceptions of those two journalists fall within a very small minority view. Nine out of 10 jazz journalists who were contemporaries of those two journalists did not perceive anger, and anger was perceived by only one of 23 jazz musicians. Anger was perceived by only 18% of 355 non-musician listeners. When 492 listeners completed questionnaires assessing their temperaments and heard a recording of the same performance that had elicited the journalist's "angry young tenor" remark, it was found that those who scored above the mean in their own trait anger were twice as likely to perceive anger in the music as those who scored below the mean. This suggests that jazz improvisation may serve as the stimulus for a projective test, as an inkblot has traditionally been employed. The implications of published perceptions of emotion were demonstrated by two additional studies with a total of 143 listeners. They showed that perception of anger in the music was significantly more likely for listeners who were exposed to the journalist's perception of anger before hearing the music. It was concluded that the critical question is not whether wordless jazz improvisation evokes emotions—it certainly does. The questions to ask are whether it conveys emotion and whether it does that reliably. The answers are that the particular emotion evoked in the listener is not necessarily the same emotion felt by the jazz improviser, and the emotion evoked is not the same for every listener. These findings refute the belief of listeners who remain convinced that they can detect a given player's feelings in his music, and they suggest a biasing effect of journalists' remarks which might do a disservice to the creative product of the jazz musician. The studies demonstrate how listener responses are refracted
Feedback analysis has been a useful tool for ethnographers to get deeper into the contours of how expressive culture is meaningful for those involved in its production. This paper looks at how feedback analysis might work in the case of improvisation, where the cultural text generated is born of contingency, spontaneity, and ephemerality. I interview a group of musicians who participated in a performance of John Coltrane’s landmark work Ascension, a piece that has come to occupy a unique position in the canon of experimental jazz. In examining the performance (and its recording) as text, our interviews yield a plethora of readings that align with structural and poststructural modes of interpretation. In this case, feedback interviews function to elaborate understandings of the performed and interpreted text, but also illuminate the "extra-textual" dimensions of expressive culture that often remain deemphasized and hidden.
This bibliography compiles articles of interest in jazz music scholarship that were published in 2007 or 2008 and appeared in journals not specifically dedicated to jazz study.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.